Chapter Seven

I’ve been thinking about my Nana a lot lately. It made me cry last night how much I miss her. We were at evening prayer in the sitting room (yes, we are obliged to pray before and after tea and meals, and a half hour reading of the “word of god” at night after dinner. I’m undercover as a non-practicing but baptized Christian for the sake of reducing friction with my homestay ‘mama’) and I have nothing to do but sit quietly and think, because the whole session is in Kiswahili, when all of a sudden I’m thinking about her and the tears start rolling down my face. Embarrassing, yes, but it had been building in mind all day and had finally come to the boiling point here in the quiet of my mind at this, the first real opportunity I’d had for the quiet reflection my heart had been craving all day.
First, because a couple of my friends have asked, I’m going to interject that the reason I came to Africa a month and a half before the volunteer program I’m now working in began was to do some preliminary, primary research for my Master’s thesis, which will be starting in the fall. Because I’m in a separate M.A. program I still need to apply for schools to get accepted to do my Ph.D., which means that I need to do everything I can to set myself off from the pack, including writing a thesis based on real ‘primary’ source research, which means documents actually written by the subjects of the history.
I went to Moçambique to find documents in the national historical archives, if they existed, written by the earliest Portuguese colonists of East Africa. It turned out there was nothing there that was not in the national archives in Lisbon, and I’ve told you a bit about the drama I’ve had getting those home. In the end, the experience of dealing with the bureaucracy and finding something I want, even if I could have found it somewhere else more easily, combined with the fact that I got to get culturally familiar with the country I’ll be writing my thesis on, made the trip worth it academically. And of course, from a purely experiential perspective it was awesome just to see a new and different place.
Now I’m in Mateves, Tanzania, a village in Arusha Province, whose capital, Arusha town, is the biggest city in the north and the center of tourism for Mount Kilimanjaro. I’m here with an organization, OneHeartSource, which is building a mid-sized compound in Mateves that currently supports a small orphanage, a little corn field (‘maize’ in local parlance) and the offices from which they administer the volunteer program.
The volunteers, in addition to mentoring and tutoring the orphans, do manual labor to expand the site (currently focused on a permanent structure for a chicken coop and a pair of five-a-side soccer fields which will be the first facility in a growing community center/clinic complex), teach AIDS/HIV and sex education in local elementary and secondary schools, and live in homestays around the village with families, who get compensated for the cost and inconvenience of hosting us and also benefit from the educational interactions and the individual generosity of the volunteers.
Sunday night, we stayed in Arusha after going on a day-hike to a truly spectacular waterfall. At dinner with a few of the other volunteers the topic of crazy family members came up and, of course, my beloved, departed grandmother was one of the subjects. In the course of describing her I talked about how politically passionate she had been, how she knew Cesar Chavez and how, for a certain memorable period of my mother’s life, she had used to wear intra-uterine contraceptive devices as earrings specifically so that whenever someone asked her about her ‘interesting’ jewelry, she could strike up a conversation about family planning and a woman’s right to control her own reproductive process.
The next morning, we got back to work in Mateves planning our lessons for that afternoon and I ran across a question from our ‘Swali box’ (‘Question box’) that had caught my eye when we’d first translated them. “If you’ve been hiding a condom for a long time, when you use it, will it break?”
Now, there are, of course, all sorts of innocent explanations for the motivation of this question. ‘Hiding’ may have just meant saving; it might have meant hiding from friends to avoid getting teased; it might have meant hiding it from parents in order to hide from them the fact that their child is sexually active or thinking about becoming so. But it also opens up the possibility that the child is afraid of being caught buying new ones, which are subsidized by the government and temptingly cheap, less than eight American cents for a three-pack, because of cultural mores against contraception. Now, regardless of why the child would be hiding them, if I ever knew my Nana, and I like to think I did, the necessity of ensuring that this child had safe access to contraception (even though it’s a sixth grade class, there are older kids in there too because of the state of education in Tanzania) would have rang in her head like an alarm bell.
Partly because of her, and partly just because I’m my grandmother’s grandson and, as I like to think of it, ‘they’ raised me right, I wanted to offer to talk to any of the kids after class who were feeling nervous about buying or getting condoms. I was vetoed by my teaching partners and by the section coordinator who was worried about the repercussions for OHS if word got out to parents that we were giving out condoms in school (which is not precisely what I proposed, I must say). Frankly, I was pretty disappointed in that policy. I’m perfectly willing to take full individual responsibility for it and to do whatever it would take for OHS to maintain the opportunity for plausible deniability, and I think it shows a lack of the courage of our convictions to pass the buck on such an issue.
Anyways, with one thing and another, and arguing, although deferentially, if you can imagine me being deferential, for the importance of it, I had a pretty introspective day during which thoughts about my ideals chased thoughts of my need to learn to bend in high wind, which chased thoughts of my Nana around and around my brain. The whole thing makes me teary eyed again just thinking about how we failed to do what I think she would have wanted us to do, but at the same time, I know she would have wanted me to go with the flow and how proud of me she would have been just for trying and for everything else I’m doing here and for how far I’m coming in my pursuit of my career and everything.
OK. It’s late, I’m gonna break up again if I write about it any longer, and I need to get up early tomorrow if I’m gonna get a run (yes, Ma, I’m running in the mornings regularly here), so good night, strong values and passionate dreams to you all.
I love you Nana.

3/8/10