To this end, (whether or not they realize it) it is customary for Peace Corps volunteer bloggers to post packing lists of things so that new Peace Corps invitees to those countries can get an idea of what might be useful in country. The common items on the lists are ridiculously intricate but eminently useful Western inventions like Leathermans and USB keys.

It is also often claimed that moving home to America after a two year experience is just as or more mind-bending as moving into your host country. This is nearly true. Last week was the third year “anniversary” from the date that our training group landed in Tanzania and 9 months since I boarded the plane to finally leave Tanzania. Leaving your PC site is a bittersweet stretch–it involve a lot of hard goodbyes and American life may still seem quite distant. In retrospect, my bag was not necessarily packed with things that would make me happy today. Here are some things that I wish I had brought with me from Tanzania now that I am sitting in the United States with time behind me:

• Favorite dog-eared local language (especially Swahili) dictionary(s) – There are few great Swahili dictionaries. One of the best is Baba Malaika’s Friendly Swahili Dictionary (refreshed in 2008, published for 20+ years). Unfortunately it is hard to find internationally. Forget quick-cheap Amazon purchase–It sells on ebay and used book sites for almost a hundred dollars. You may want this for a variety of reasons: 1) nostalgia for quirky sayings and proverbs–you probably know exactly where they are in that book. 2)  You may want to volunteer your translation skills. 3) you may want to communicate warmly with Host Country Nationals and just can’t remember that word.
• Peace Corps Cookbook - charming locally bound book that was oft-consulted in country. Good for your bookshelf’s character or an old favorite recipe still fondly remembered but only in the terms of you friendly jiko (brazier stove). It will give you a chance to rework the recipe for a grill.
• GSM SIM card with Phone numbers (you can read these with T-Mobile or AT&T phones) – Your phone is full of people and memories–its like your social network account for country except you can throw it away or have the sum of those connections lifted from your pocket if you are careless of that fact. (Granted, now it seems like so many of my Host Country friends now have Facebook too?). You will probably want to phone at least one friend or counterpart when you get home. But you probably also want to gift your phone to a worthy friend before you go. There is a good compromise: bring the chip home scotch taped to something rigid that you won’t lose. You can’t use the phone number in the US but with international telecommunications, having the numbers makes it easy to call anyway. T-Mobile outlets sells $20 locked phones which come bundled with some respectable amount of call time and can read these SIM cards.
• “Cultural Artifacts” – This one is personal. For me I wish I would have brought home: My three-legged stool and my cursed-ugly carved statue. Check wood items for termites. I did find travel-friendly versions of mortar & pestle, weathered hand-carved spoons for friends, unique Kanga garments that carry stories of special times or events. Election/political party oriented Kanga’s are excellent story-imbued carry-homes. I had a handkerchief from a wedding that had warm sayings painted in Swahili on it that I hadn’t thought twice about in country but was quite thankful I had packed.
• Picture of you at work. Don’t forget to have a picture of yourself in action at your site. Both of these last two can be key for “third goal” activities back on red-white-and-blue soil to help you bring the whole world that you left behind back home.

Above all, recall that as soon as you land in the impersonal US airport, anything you got in country is of a infinitely higher personal value than any Western items you carried into country. It is very easy here to go on Amazon and pick up a new backpack or even a laptop. As impossible to fathom as it may be, you can also probably drink most water after getting on the plane, so that closely held Nalgene need not be so anymore.

Related articles and links

• Congress approves Peace Corps, Sept. 22, 1961 (politico.com)
• Kevin Quigley: The Third Goal Is Our First Goal (huffingtonpost.com)
• Recently Returned RPCV mentoring (rpcvmentoring.org)

Tropical computer maintenance: Frog hibernates in PS/2 nook.

SO last week was my first year anniversary in country. I am thrilled and contented. As my friend Kristen pointed out on her blog, this is now home in most senses. I don’t worry overmuch of schedulelessness, further appreciate relationships within a community.

I have spent more time here living in one place than I have ever anywhere else with exception for my parents/childhood home. It is funny, living in one place for a year: through college I am able to remember things by the orientation of my living quarters because it was roughly a couple of semesters only but now I feel as if I am compressing more memories into the cognitive space than it can hold. Thankfully, my home-stay and training, which now feels a years off (it is) is in its own unique space. I looked back at pictures and it helps me remember the conditions for most Tanzanians.

The truth of most of my existence in the past 9 months has been very different. I am very privileged in my corner of arid Tanzania. I am in a community of some fifty teachers of teachers (“Tutors”) with most modern amenities (taps, electricity, couches, TVs, often computers). They are well educated, keep up with me and often lead me in many ways, not just cultural. There are three other academies of various sorts in my small town with similarly well educated folks.

Last week one of my counterparts (that is Peace Corps parlance for “resourceful friend”), Allan, gave me a few lessons on electric circuits. Though computer maintenance isn’t too wild from a Western perspective, he is pretty much as quick as I am at it by now. I have picked up a bit of soldering for swapping out blown capacitors and such. For the last several terms we have offered a class on that for a few student teachers to run labs at their schools using pretty solid Cisco-donated materials.

This term, we are both excited to start a Computer/ICT club with computer design lessons & competitions, typing competitions, and English competitions. Through an education grant from the US ambassador here, we will reward 1gb USB flash drives for our best participants. It was just announced this morning in a mix of Swahili and English to our 800 new, smartly dressed student teachers filling the great hall. I have high hopes. My friends at other Teachers Colleges have tried to pull off clubs in the past but had issues detaching the dull classroom Office-suite routines from the more creative pursuits.

Woo, what a hike! So I finally achieved my goal of circumnavigating my mountains on August 23, 2008. I cannot, unfortunately go into exactly where my mountains out on the wild wild web such as we are (gov’t regulations) but as you can see they’re collectively not too shabby. One of the better peaks is 6300ft high and this route took about 13 hours and was 32kilometers (about 20mi). On other occasions, with other parties, I’d hiked to the “Escarpment”, the Kwambdianga peak, and Kiboriani village but I’d always simply retraced my steps to go home. Going into this expedition, my team and I weren’t quite sure a loop was remotely possible to do in a day or even what it looked like. At the end of that day, as the equatorial sun set on us we realized it was but not this day.

First perhaps a bit of introduction to the sections of my mountains:

TTC (Tanzanian Teachers College): My Home and my place of work.

Tigo Tower: the smallish mountain I can see from my house with a prominent cell phone tower. On the 2 September we had our first rain since April and I took a lunch break to walk my bike up to see the freshly dust-free skies and get soaked by the rare dry season precipitation.

Kikombo: a tiny valley hamlet, short walk from the city, with three livestock-related academies. Monkeys often scamper across the paths stealing bananas from the professors’ lush gardens even in the dry season.

Escarpment: A series of three large rock faces which are visible from most places in the city. The first time I climbed it I saw a troupe of baboons on the bare rocks and had to turn back instead of finishing the climb. On the way up you pass through Kikombo and on the way down you can get milk from the livestock college cows pastured on the uncharacteristically green grass of the valley. They’re tested and quarantined for TB every week so you could likely even drink without pasteurizing.

Kwamdianga: A peak deep in the mountain. Below the peak are hundreds of springs where some thousand mountainside farmers have constructed shared irrigation channels and terraced plots which host the most productive evergreen farms in the otherwise thoroughly semi-arid district.

Kwamdianga Mine: An spent copper mine about two and a half hours from my house (uphill). The mountainsides near this mine have been devastated by people cutting down the old-growth trees for charcoal making.

Kiboriani: a fantastically beautiful little village overlooking the rest of my region and the nearest paved highway beyond the mountains.

Anglican Mission: Alternative sides of this compound’s small mountain are visible on the ultimate horizon from both Kwamdianga peak and Kiboriani on our path. Before this expedition, only a rumor and glints of aluminum roof tiles from two very different directions.

 
 

Alternative View of the city from Kwambdianga Peak, June 2008.

We set out at about 7:45am, a bit late. I haven’t had much success with the early rise hike. We reached Kikombo village, host of an gov’t livestock college, nestled in a cradle of mountains but still connected to my city, at 8:15am. After greeting a nice family coming back from town and asking the college guard if our goal was actually possible (all in Kiswahili, of course), we took the inviolate Morning “Tea” break with digestive biscuits and water on a rock near a quaint, massive German-style house of a faculty member. The guard said gave some unspecific but generally positive affirmations to my questions, a bit faster than I could parse: I was placated, it was possible enough.

About an hour into the hike there was a fork that I remembered from my last journey. Worst case, I wanted to make a small loop by going directly to the rumored Anglican Mission. We passed a series of mamas (and separately, strings of 8 year olds) who had left Kiboriani, carrying large sacks of unmilled, dried field corn down for machining above their heads, at sunrise (6:15am). Although Mamas on the previous journey had alluded that this little fork turned to the Mission, the new Mamas contradicted this story so after some minor extraneous traversal and extrication we resigned to continue on the well worn path to Kiboriani village, still far in our future.

Later in our journey, at perhaps 10:30am, was one of the major plumbing intakes for the city, a beautiful little dammed and siphoned rivulet, muddy but, as ever, a now unfamiliar shade of green four months without rain. Further on, we left our footpath and met with the mountain-straddling road to Kiboriani from town. We speculated on the road’s gas mileage for a vehicle equip to handle the incline and debris and settled on 1:1 or less (I checked later in the village: a truck passes on it but once a month). We took this diversion to break out our trail meal: homemade dense white bread and a respectable block of cheese. No reason to preserve it, we had tea and snacks to look forward to once we reached the village.

From our Excursion Peak.

As we rounded one of the road’s ridges we came upon another footpath shortcut. It struck up for a nearly direct ascent. We also got our first look back at town and could fully appreciate the progress. Mountains overlooking huge landmarks are so much fun. After a long climb we came within sight of the road again. I offered a chance to blaze some new tracks: it had looked like we were reaching the top but a new peak was visible. I remembered that this was one of the last peaks before the village. From here we could see the escarpment, the city, and the outskirts of Kiboriani village.

We thought it might be a good idea to take a shortcut back through the trees, they couldn’t be very thick. The trees and green brush turned out to be essentially a jungle high in our semi-arid land complete with swingable vines, fierce ants and long game tunnels which lead only into thorn thickets full of said fierce ants. At one point I, err, had ants crawling up and down and biting every inch of me. Special measures were necessary to remove them. And for the first time, I saw the utility of a bush knife on hikes. We eventually did find a shortcut, though a less ambitious route and got back onto the road about two hours later. Since we had seen our goal from the peak the rest of this leg was less eventful, just a matter of closing the distance.

I doubt there is a way to balance both the hopeful uncertain energy that a new hiking route offers and this knowledge of exactly where you’re going, how long it will take. It is a bit disappointing: by the end of the day it would make quite a bit of tension for us. We started coming onto fields of peas, sweet potatoes and saw a trademark sign for the primary school. Finally we reached the village.

Unexpected Desert-Jungle; Entering Kiboriani Village

So at 3pm we had our tea and mandazi (sugarless donuts). We took a short walk up to see the primary school where I’d made a friend on another occasion and we would get the rare opportunity to look out northward on the greater Dodoma region. We realized it was already past lunch so we also had some beans and stiff porridge (ugali). Amazing what hiking-induced calorie vacuum does for food, tastes like nothing else.

By 4pm, two hours (and change) before dusk, with a hardy meal in our stomachs, we felt ready for anything. We could see the sun reflecting off the Mission’s tin roof on the ultimate horizon. With leading questions, I have noticed Tanzanians often cheerfully verify fantastic feats if you let yourself ask them. It is, after all, what you wanted to hear. We asked three different villagers whether we could make it back to town the roundabout way, before dark. We are pretty sure the first one was indirectly a “negative” but undeterred, the other two happily confirmed our biased queries. Utawahi, ninyi ni kijana! “You will be early, you are youthful,” the elders assured. Fuzzy distance maths itched in the back of my head. I recalled the return from Kwamdianga being almost 3 hours itself and they said we were 2 hours away from that. But I let them itch, in the goal of milimanic circumnavigation: Onward into the valley!

Pine trees & Mwalimu (teacher) Samwell; Primary school fades into the distance as we pass through hundreds of fields.

We could no longer see the tin roof of the mission. “Follow the road until you see the way of the cows, then turn left and follow that,” But how will we know the way of the cows? That soon became obvious. It turns out large herds of cows make tens of parallel channels that look like no other vehicle. “Where is the mission?” 15 more minutes. “Where is the mission?” 15 more minutes.

Large plumes of smoke form on the horizon towards the city. Later we’d find out that, for the first time since 2001, hunters had started fires on the Escarpment mountain which we’d just passed that morning. This is a common, if sad, practice in Tanzania to make catching game easy: we saw it every night on the horizon during training in Morogoro region. My district is different though, when you burn that mountainside you inadvertently dry up hundreds of primary tributaries to the city’s quite limited water supply. (The water table for well water is 120m deep in some parts of my district). Oops. In any case, maybe it was for the best we didn’t trace our steps back and walk straight into the flames! That fire raged all through the night sweeping the entire mountain like a redwood forest that hadn’t had its brush burnt in many years.

Cow herding path, Deserted workhut, a tired acacia tree, and a giant smoke plume.

 
 

At 5:45pm we finally reached the mission, an unfinished American Anglican (Episcopal) church mission it turned out. It was indeed the same place I’d seen from both Kiboriani and from Kwambdianga! We met some groundskeepers cooking supper. They offered us seats but we had 1 hour of daylight to do a 3 hour hike back to town. We noted wryly that the mission seemed not to have considered water in its siting: to get it the groundskeepers had to hike 25 minutes uphill with the water from the nearest spring. We met one mama fetching it on our way down.

Construction started in 2001 and is still unfinished. Times up: Dusk.

At this point we were mildly frantic about our lateness but I realized that I was finally looping into a place I knew when we got to a flat valley next to Kiboriani peak. Soon we had climbed down to the fantastic channel system of irrigation that is Kwambdianga “village”. There are some hundred springs that flow from the mountains around this valley and some thousand villagers stay to farm its ardent walls with bamboo, taro root, carrots, cabbage, sugar cane, bananas and pretty much anything you can’t easily do in the rest of the district. My friend Aron couldn’t help but stop and chat with the farmers for about 25 minutes, and he eventually had to run to catch back up to us. I was still a little disoriented: at some point we’d taken a different path from the one I was used to but a kind middle aged farming couple out in their field cutting crops assured us that there was only one road to town and we were on it.

From Kwamdianga Mine, June 2008; Fire on the far mountainside, August 2008.

Finally, just as the sun was shedding its final rays at 6:45pm, we crested the mountain near the “hut”. We also had cell signal again and could see the cell tower above my house. We sent a quick text to check in, can’t be too careful and continued across the ridge. The first emanations of the raging fire were visible, albeit at a deep angle.

Stumbling down one ridge and along the next, we could soon see the city and its lights. Generally I stick at home at night, I don’t really have any business up on a mountain. This was quite an unexpected opportunity, I only wish I’d had a better steadying-tool handy. The two thirty second exposures I chanced, hastily braced against a tree, didn’t turn into much. At one point a man, mumbling crazily with a stream of donkeys passed us. Then another, kinder fellow showed us and assured us that we’d end up in town if we continued. In our last valley, the trail mysterious evaporated into the night and the huge dry riverbeds. The cell tower was our beacon. We started hearing televisions and saw some houses above the bluffs. We ended up on a new side of town but ultimately made it to my house and completed the circle.

By the way, aren’t 3D maps amazing? Great viz technique.