kps - on a journey

DAY #54-56: One week left

2011-07-27T12:40:00.004+03:00

With one week left here in Tanzania, Kaetlyn and I have begun the pre-packing process. It is really hard to believe that at this time next week we’ll be air-bound for home. We’re flying into Dubai, United Arab Emirates at 2 a.m. on August 1^st, and I just got a Middle East and Northern Africa security email about Ramadan, which begins on August 1^st. The email reads, “While there is no history of an escalation of attacks by Islamist extremists during Ramadan, heightened security measures should be anticipated in the vicinity of Western diplomatic missions, foreign banks, marketplaces and public buildings as a precautionary measure.” The email says that along with tougher security measures, most stores and public buildings will be closed in observation of Ramadan and advises against eating in public to respect those who are fasting. I’m not worried; I just think it’s neat to acknowledge how seriously Ramadan is practiced in this region considering how ignorant we typically are about this kind of thing in the U.S. Maybe Christmas is comparable in its impact on both public and private daily life, but that’s sadly become more of a commercial than religious holiday in the States. I really admire the discipline and devotion it takes to be a Muslim, with the praying five times a day and fasting for the month of Ramadan and such.

On the wild ferry ride back from Zanzibar yesterday we ran into a young woman who was getting ready to head back to the U.S. in two days after living in Tanzania for two years. She was in the Peace Corps working on health projects relating to HIV/AIDS here. She told us that the first two months were the toughest for her, but now the last thing she wanted to do was go home. For our parents out there who might be reading this right now, don’t worry we are counting down the days to see you. But one day it will probably be a little harder to pull us—well, at least to pull me—away from a place like this. While it’s been an exciting two months (pregnant with adventures and looong bus rides), I think we’re all about ready to go home.

Good times at the orphanage

When we've been playing with the kids at the orphanage last week and swimming with the dolphins yesterday then standing on the bow of the ferry like Rose and Jack today, it occurred to me that I might want to have more of these experiences instead of going to Geneva for my junior year abroad. I can’t help but think how conversant in Swahili I will be by then after completing all of the Swahili levels that the Five College Language Center offers vs. cramming in one year of French and living in Europe for a semester or a year. The United Nations Environmental Program headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya takes interns.

Until then, I think I’ll just bask in the thought of all the potential opportunities that I have to choose from. And go out for dinner at Addis in Dar one final time tonight :)

DAY #53: A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner

2011-07-24T20:30:00.020+03:00

It was quite an interesting transit day today, but what day isn’t? We went to a rooftop restaurant after bargaining all morning with sellers who probably aren’t used to tourists who say things like, “Lakini tulinunua kitu kama hiki katika Mwenge kwa nusu” (“but we bought something like this in Mwenge for half”). Women are the toughest to crack.

Rooftop restaurant

After lunch at this quaint rooftop restaurant (where I had a “vegetable burger Almini style” or something) we checked out of our lovely hotel and made it through all the taxi and sunglasses attackers to our ferry an hour ahead of time. The ticket checker manning the gate to the entry ramp let the three of us take the Seabus ferry, scheduled to leave a half hour before our Kilimanjaro ferry. The Seabus we soon found out for ourselves is the second fastest ferry that makes this two to three hour trip. We stood at the bow holding on for dear life as the smallish ferry crashed through these huge whitecaps, while the entire cabin of the thing was packed with people upchucking. Kaetlyn tried to go back inside to sit down but couldn’t take the sound and smell of everyone puking.

A fun-filled ride

Standing up at the bow was fun though. There was only a three foot railing that we were standing up on, and I kept waiting for someone to tell us to get down. But I haven’t really gotten in trouble for anything here yet…except for stretching in the center of the cricket field at the university. But that’s another story.

DAY #52: Swimming with dolphins

2011-07-23T20:41:00.007+03:00

We didn't have a spare hand to take photos, but this is exactly what it looked like underwater

(www.redmonkeylodge.com/photo-gallery)

After driving two hours south of Stone Town to Kizimkazi, we were rushed out of our van, over to a rack of snorkeling gear, and into a motorboat within seconds. Before we could even pronounce the Swahili word for “dolphin,” we were bouncing several feet off the wooden beams in the boat as the choppy waves thrashed us about. Next thing we knew, our captain (a young boy who worked these dolphin tours when he didn’t have school) was telling us to prepare: “prepare yourselves now. Prepare for dolphins.” We kind of looked around at each other confused and hesitantly began to pull on our flippers and masks while grabbing onto the side of the fishing boat for dear life as we continued to down over the waves and crash down on the other side. But by then we were apparently too late.

Dolphin tour headquarters

It only took us a couple of minutes to realize that by “chasing the dolphins,” the description really meant “chasing the dolphins.” We plunged through some more waves in hot pursuit of the Flippers out there, and good Lord were they out there. Over the next ten stops we made to ever so gracefully leap out of the boat to swim with schools of dolphins, we progressively got better and bolder about throwing ourselves overboard and swimming as fast as we could toward the dolphins. Our legs and arms are covered with bruises now from all the jumping in and out, but as Kaetlyn says, “That’s what it takes to be a pro dolphin swimmer!”

"Pro dolphin swimmer"

When I say dolphins, I’m talking 10-20 dolphins per stop. We saw one do a cinematic leap out of the water in a perfect arch, but they were all apparently hunting when we were out today so they weren’t as playful as usual (even though I can’t imagine it being possible for this to be any cooler).

There was one moment when I looked down and saw about ten dolphins underneath me within my reach, but just as I was about to touch one I heard something over head. I looked up, at that point having swallowed about a gallon of the Indian Ocean in my excitement, and there was a mamma dolphin and her baby swimming side by side, right over my head.

I’m coming back here for a real dive someday—this is why I’m Scuba certified! I would probably never resurface, though...

Today we also went to Jozani National Park for a brief tour through the mangrove swamp and with some endangered Colobus monkeys.

Extremely endangered Colobus monkey

DAY #51: Successful return to Zanzibar

2011-07-22T15:46:00.014+03:00

Our beautiful hotel

We woke up at 5 a.m. this morning to take the ferry to Zanzibar, and now for the past three to four hours we’ve been shopping around at the markets. We are lunch at Archipelago, where I had some Thai curried vegetables, and we settled safely in at the Garden Lodge. I am always surprised—pleasantly surprised—that we always seem to get where we are going. And this weekend it is just us three girls exploring this magical island of Zanzibar solo.

Exploring the streets of Stone Town, Zanzibar

So far so good. We only had a bit of trouble when we got off the ferry due to the incessant in-your-face taxi drivers and “tour guides” (many of questionable legitimacy). This one guy followed us from the ferry, to a kiosk where we stopped to ask for directions (where we were forced to reveal the name of our hotel to our little friend and asked the sellers to get him to stop following us), and then to our hotel. But our concierge got rid of him for us, and we have not had any other relentless-entrepreneur problems since.

Bargaining in Stone Town market

Stone Town, the west coast of the island, is beautiful and convenient but is unfortunately also teeming with tourists. So while it gets a little annoying that we’re constantly surrounded by obnoxious tourists (like ourselves), it’s not bad that we stick out a little less. But then in the market, like when we were bargaining for spices and coffee and such today, we’ve got a major advantage over those other silly Wazungu kwa sababu tunasema Kiswahili. One spice seller even shooed us away after we negotiated for some decent prices when a Mzungu family came up. We couldn’t help but overhear him charge them three times too much.

Making friends at the market (we returned the next day to talk to our favorite seller, but when he started asking us if we had boyfriends it was time to go)

Tomorrow we’re going on a boat tour to go snorkeling with dolphins, then to Jozani forest to see some endangered colobus monkeys. Just another day in paradise.

DAY #44: Jesus and giraffes

2011-07-15T23:38:00.028+03:00

Twiga!

I guess I must have passed some test, because when we were walking back to the Zebra Hotel last night, Botlhe asked me if I went to church. I love it when people ask me that here because I get to brag about my loverly mother being a minister. So she invited me to the Bible study and church she’s been going to here by the university. But then she stopped in the middle of the street when I hesitated after she asked me if I was “born again.” I tried to explain that in the Presbyterian Church we talk about having Jesus in our lives in a slightly different way than that, but that I would love to come to her Bible study and church service.

On the bus, my stalker also asked me if I knew Jesus. And even though as a PK I have always been encouraged to explore and develop my own smorgasbord of various spiritual beliefs, I do not feel the least bit insincere when I assure people here that yes, I do have Jesus in my life. Maybe it’s in no small part due to me trying to come to terms with how tough life is for so many people here and my attempts to reconcile how easy I have it with how hard others have it. Or maybe I’ve been reading too much of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov or Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. Or maybe here I’ve been subconsciously reaching for some light as a way to cope with all of these relentless realizations that what I’ve learned is actually true concerning the environment, development, and socio-economic inequality in this region of Africa.

Or maybe it is people like Elizabeth (from Uganda) with her strong, unwavering, full-hearted conviction. She addresses everyone with “my friend,” “my sister,”’ or “my dear.” When she says with such certainty and elegance, “We will be all right because God will help us,” I cannot help but believe her. Today on our safari through Tarangire National Park when our bus handyman seemed to be avoiding getting out where the lions were lurking to fix the broken spring (understandable I guess), Elizabeth assured us, “We will make it safely to the end of this trip because God it with us.”

Our class waiting for the bus to be fixed in the Tarangire

Maybe I just appreciate how sincerely Christianity, or religion in general, is done here compared to how it is in the states (not to bring up that Westboro Baptist Church again…).

Elephants under a baobab tree in the Tarangire

DAY #43: Wade in the water

2011-07-14T19:19:00.035+03:00

Our class at the water diverting unit

At one of the stops we made today at a water diverting unit in Moshi by some rice fields and sugarcane plantations, our professor posed a water rights dilemma for us to solve. The local people who live in the town surrounding the plantations are supposed to have a certain amount of water by law. However, when the dam and water diverting unit were built in the 1980s, people downstream no longer received enough water (if they even did to begin with). So they tried to knock down the water diverting structure with tractors.

The challenge for the government is now to ensure that the people living along the river are getting enough water while the dam is providing water for the irrigation of the rice fields. What is comes down to though is who has the deepest pockets. In the end those who can pay the most get the water.

We saw the same thing when we visited the water treatment plant in Tanga. If there is a water shortage, priority goes to the military, cement factories, and bars first because they can pay. Why bars? Our prof. jokingly replied, “Not because Tanzanians like to drink.” Apparently bars pay the highest taxes to the government.

Now for the fun part of today:

Putting on the waders

Two of us eagerly volunteered to pull on some waders and jump in the river to make the velocity and depth measurements. It was like SES Pond Profile goes to Africa! Botlhe and I even convinced some workers in a mokoro, a small wooden canoe, to give us a ride back across the river.

Riding across the river in a mokoro

When we were returning back to the Zebra Hotel this evening (for yet another combined lunch-dinner at 5 p.m.), we drove several other guys back from the plantation to Moshi. It seems like we are always picking up random people and giving them rides. These were some young men from a water management master’s program in Ubungo who helped us take some hydraulics measurements in the river today. I was jammed into our bus seat next to two of the guys we picked up there. One of the guys creepishly took video footage of me at the water diverter (he got a pan of the whole group then zoomed in on me) and then photos of me on his phone on the bus. Then I saw him looking at the video footage and photos on his phone when he thought I was looking away. To keep him distracted so he wouldn’t ask for my number or for my hand in marriage (which are usual requests that we’re all kind of getting tired of at this point…), I asked him what he thought the biggest challenges were for the dam situation here. And that’s when everything came full circle, from water rights that we discussed at the Amani Reserve, to water justice that we discussed at the Pangani diverter, and now to climate change. He said due to the recent climactic changes in this area, the river was irregularly flooding and drying up, consequently putting more stress on the locals who are already strapped for water. I was probably way too excited just to have this affirmation of my SES baby (climate change and human rights)—and in sub-Saharan Africa of all places where climate change is having the hardest impact! Definitely way too excited…

Multi-Eastern-cultural restuarant

Well no entry is complete without a food description (with all the eating out and talk of food we do, it might be somewhat surprising to hear that we’ve still all lost at least ten pounds since we got here). For our 5 p.m. lunch-dinner Sara and I went out with the two Botlhes (both from Botswana), Maggie (Kenya), Kudzai (Zimbabwe), and Thaboo (Lesotho). We found this really eclectic multi-Eastern-cultural restaurant with a hefty 26-page menu that included 291 Japanese, Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, and fast food (i.e. U.S.-American) dishes. We ordered a bunch of random starters, entrées, and desserts that we didn’t have any idea of what they were (neither did our waiter), such as papadum, spicy and hot soup, Hawaiian salad, and marble cake, which was new to our Lesotho friend. I got Pakistani-Indian Dahl Mahkni that was served over a flame and was very fascinating to everyone. After everyone passed around their plates for us all to sample, everyone passed around their smartphones to friend Sara and I on Facebook. It is nights like tonight that remind me that we all speak the same language.

DAY #42: Zebra Hotel and big conversations

2011-07-13T20:25:00.001+03:00

Waiting for the bus at the Zebra Hotel

We’re here in Moshi staying at the Zebra Hotel with fairly decent rooms and good breakfast options (fruit, bread, juice, and chai, which I have been drinking copious amounts of in honor of this one person I know who drinks tea religiously). We’ll be staying here for the rest of our trip until Saturday, though I believe we’re doing a day trip later this week to Arusha to another national park. Good, I’ve still got to see some twiga (“giraffe”). Today we went to some rice fields and sugarcane plantations then to another water supply place.

It was a long seven hours from Tanga to Moshi, but at least we finally got to get up close to Mount Kilimanjaro. We drove to the base of it, but we couldn’t see the actual peak of the mountain because of the mist at that time of day. I have a feeling that I will definitely be returning there one day to make that climb, though.

Sara sizing up Mt. Kilimanjaro from the base

Drinking my Kilimanjaro water at its base

Once we got back to our hotel at our usual lunch-dinner time (5 p.m.), Sara and I set out to find a good non-Mzungu restaurant, unlike our hotel’s. When we were aimlessly making our way down a busy street while dodging motorcycles, bicycles, taxis, and bajajes left and right, this red-headed Illinois guy stopped to ask me if I really went to Smith College (as I proudly sported my Smith shirt today). Andrew was staying here in Moshi with a Kenyan dude, Octavius, so we asked them if they knew where we could get some good non-Mzungu food. They walked us around town and brought us to this authentic Tanzanian restaurant, but there was basically only meat. Nonetheless, the restaurant owner proudly explained to us that this one Mzungu lived in Tanzania for three years and wrote a book in which he listed this restaurant as #1. But then Octavius kindly brought us to an Indian place that was completely vegetarian where we had one of the most fulfilling meals we’ve had in a while. (I had curried vegetables with naan, and Sara had a chick pea dish with a vegetable paneer starter.)

Octavius and Andrew joined us for dinner, which was even more memorable than the food, believe it or not. They had just driven from Nairobi, Kenya today, and within the next couple of months they will travel around Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda doing mission work for a Church of Christ. Andrew is in IT, and he is working on creating computer programs to translate the Bible into the many tribal languages (of which Tanzania has 120). He and his fiancé, who has never been to Africa before, are planning to move here or to Italy to start a family and continue this work.

Afterward Sara and I talked about whether translating the Bible into these tribal languages was really the best use of resources or the most effective way to help people here, especially since I don’t think there are many tribal languages that are written to begin with. Also, Swahili serves as a lingua franca between people of different mother tongues anyway, and these languages are being passed onto new generations less and less. Thinking back to a couple articles from my anthropology class last semester (how many times have I said that this summer?), I think there is potentially positive work that missionaries, both Christian and Islamic missionaries alike, can do in this part of the world. For instance, clean water, hospitals, schools, computers, cell phones, etc.

Octavius is from Nairobi originally, but he commutes to Moshi for his work through the university in Nairobi. He told me about a class he took at the university that consisted of students from thirty different African countries. He said they had a lot of culturally rich discussions, like he was able to hear students from South Sudan talk about the better life they hoped to have as an independent nation, students from Rwanda and Burundi talk about the ethnic conflict between the Hutus and Tutsis, and students from the Democratic Republic of Congo talk about the tribal conflicts that exist among the 700 ethnic groups there.

I asked Octavius if it seemed like from engaging in conversations with these other students that most of the wars in African countries were due to ethnic conflicts. Then we had a neat conversation about this, covering recourse, religious, ethnic, and minority-majority conflicts. In the midst of our conversation I got this feeling that this was right where I was supposed to be. These are the challenges in our world that fascinate me and beckon to me the most. I think in my Politics and the Global Environment course and research assistantship this coming year I will be right in my element, as climate change further exacerbates these already burning social and political and economic turmoil.

The other night after our bus broke down and we got the opportunity to walk for nearly three hours under the stars all the way back through Amani Nature Reserve, Daniel from Swaziland asked me the question I always get: “why Africa?” My jumbled answer was basically a list of all the ways us Wazungu have screwed up, starting with colonialism and leading up through the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs. As I heard at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen two years ago, the Global North has a debt to pay to the Global South. I tried to explain to him, as humbly, unpretentiously, and sincerely as I could, that I’m interested in Africa because I want to help actors like the Breton Woods Institutions or the UN actually do more good than bad.

DAY #40: Amani (“Peace”) Nature Reserve

2011-07-11T14:01:00.073+03:00

One of the many breakdowns, but somehow this guy always manages to fix it

This was probably my favorite day of the trip. We took our trusty bus up to the Amani Nature Reserve (which broke down about every five minutes) and talked to some conservation managers about the importance of involving the locals in protecting the forest. The rangers said that the community was a key part of their sustainable management plan.

One of the ways they involve the people who live in the reserve is by encouraging income-generating activities as alternatives to cutting down trees or putting too much pressure on the forest’s resources. Butterfly farms, for example, actually are pretty popular and profitable, as there is a big market for them in Europe and in the U.S. The conservation managers said these farms also help to empower women since women are the ones in charge of raising and selling the pupa from these farms. Those living in the reserve can also sell milk, spices, and fruits, such as this one fruit that contains a nut that is processed into edible oil then sold internationally.

Community inside of the reserve

Furthermore, the rangers give the community 20% of the reserve’s annual revenue to be put toward schools, bridges, etc. However, we weren’t able to get out of the rangers just how they arrived at this amount and whether the locals were satisfied with it. One of the rangers kind of skirted around the question: “People will always ask for more money…but they have much better lives compared with other communities.” (The locals here live in red mud houses with straw or iron-sheets for roofs.)

I’m having thoughts back to that fated day in Mrs. Parnell’s sixth grade science class when I first learned of ozone layer depletion, climate change, and deforestation. That day she gave us one of her usual infamous assignments, to come up with a solution to save the rain forest. My group believed we had come up with it, too: just get rid of the roads leading into the forests.

Heading up the mountain to the Armani Reserve

It’s ironic that now as we teeter precariously on the edge of a mountain on one of those very roads I was lobbying to destroy, I find myself wishing for a little bit better of a road. I also find myself agreeing with Sara as she grows more and more leery of our twenty-seater bus, and she says, “Now I understand the purpose of four-wheel drive vehicles, like our safari Land Rover.”

Instead of prohibiting people from using the forests entirely, it makes more sense and is most effective to teach people to co-exist with forests sustainably. Show people the inherent benefits of preserving the earth.

After surviving yet another life-threatening bus ride…

After a long day of driving on the bus (five hours to the reserve, then four hours back to Tanga) and ten miles of walking when our bus broke down (for longer than usual), we finally made it back to our hotel around 11 p.m. During one of the many times we were waiting for our bus to get fixed, I had a fun talk about marriage, women empowerment, and the disintegration of the family with Elizabeth (Uganda) and Maggie (Kenya).

At the top of the reserve with our new friends from Botswana and Kenya

Then during the three-hour walk back down the mountain of the Amani Reserve, we had some interesting conversations with the other master’s students. I pathetically tried to justify to Daniel (Swaziland) why I was a vegetarian-vegan and to answer his question about the good and bad I had learned about Tanzania so far.

Night hike

When I brought up the topic of climate change, I was surprised when he said it was still a controversial issue debated in Africa. Even with the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicting that Africa would be one of the hardest places hit (which has unfortunately proved true with all of the irregular rainfall and drought, higher than usual temperatures, etc.) one would think that Africa would be at least ahead of the U.S. in getting people’s heads around the concept. Or maybe Africa is similar to the U.S. in that climate change has become more about the politics instead of the science. Perhaps even if—or because—people do recognize the influx of natural disasters and extreme weather lately, they consequently realize how $hard$ it would be to solve such a problem. So out come the deniers and conspirators?

DAY #39: Reverse culture shock?

2011-07-10T21:00:00.001+03:00

We spent our first night of this week-long adventure (with this engineering water management master’s class at UDSM) in Tanga. All of us ladies get to stay in a pretty nice hotel tonight, while the guys are stuck at this other place (which our professor hinted to us was not nearly as nice, after the guys got off the bus there). Where we are staying is making Sara and I feel a bit of reverse culture shock. I don’t know why we were so worried about this trip (maybe because we didn’t even know which cities we were going to let alone how we were getting to them?), but everything is so far so good. (Just as I wrote that last sentence the power in our hotel went out, but I hear the generator kicking on so hakuna shida!)

I thought I was over this whole material comfort thing, but I had almost forgotten how luxurious it feels to wash my hands with soap and running water as many times as I want, to walk around barefoot on a clean tiled floor, to lie back on a real spring mattress without ants crawling around between the sheets. This is the life, and you know it pains me to indulge in this luxury without being overwhelmed with guilt. Did I mention there was a six-level fan? But as a very wise person said about one of my last blog entries, “don't let yourself feel guilty forever, unless that guilt moves you to action.”

While I get satisfaction from roughing it and finding my edge, I would only be kidding myself if I pretended being spoiled like this did not feel nice about now. This situation reminds me of an analogous conversation that I had with my dad after going out on a friend’s fancy motorboat. I was telling my dad that even though it was a lot of fun, I still preferred kayaking. I felt conflicted because riding on the pontoon-like motorboat was so fast and easy compared to kayaking, yet at the same time no gas-powered toy could ever compete with the elegant simplicity of my tried and true Flexible Lemon or my dad’s Prozac Banana (the sophisticated names we gave our beloved yellow kayaks that we used to take out religiously in oceans, springs, and swamps when we lived in Florida). Kayaking vs. motor-boating, bucket baths vs. showers—it’s like the difference between sleeping in a quinzee in the snow and sleeping beside a woodstove in a cabin during winter camping. They actually are really hard to compare, especially for people like my dad and I.

My dad, who seems to feel similar qualms about enjoying “civilization,” has always helped me reconcile these different experiences by simply acknowledging them as just that: different experiences. There is no reason to feel guilty for enjoying a boat with an engine instead of a skirt at times, just as there is no reason to feel conflicted about enjoying a shower with running water instead of buckets at times. Simply take what you can from each of the situations and keep trekking.

But anyway, enough about my guilty pleasure of turning up the fan all the way up to level six. I think this is going to be a fun trip. There are eleven guys and eight gals along—how’s that for challenging gender inequality in the fields of engineering and environmental science? Plus there are only two people in the group who are from Tanzania. This engineering water management master’s class has students from Uganda (Elizabeth), Botswana (Botlhe), Zimbabwe (Kudzai), Kenya (Maggie), Malawi, Swaziland, Lesotho, Congo, and Burundi. Sara and I feel like we get to be honorary members of the African League of Nations for the week.

Stay tuned for more updates on the past week. My laptop is completely dead, so I'm still using Kaetlyn's. Thanks again for that, rafiki yangu!

DAY #38: Leaving for at-least-we-have-a-vague-idea-where

2011-07-09T22:24:00.000+03:00

I have Bongo Flava music stuck in my head from all the bussing and Daladala-ing we’ve been doing this week. It feels like we’ve been on the bus for most of the past several days. Today was no exception: Ema was nice enough to bring us to the National Museum this afternoon, and it was about half an hour farther away that we rode yesterday with Mariam to the tailor’s shop, which was actually a lot of fun. And did we ever give him some service.

Tomorrow Sara and I are leaving for our week-long water and environmental management trip, and today I finally got a couple of details out of the professor who is taking us. Now we not only know when we’re leaving, but we know when we’re coming back and that we should bring shoes, clothes, and money (really?). We are going by bus with a class of twenty university students, and we’ll be staying in some “simple hotels” along the way, as this professor described them (which is part of Kaetlyn’s rationale for not going). When I asked him which cities we were traveling to, he sounded as if he did not quite understand: “cities?” Then he paused and with uncertainty replied, “Maybe Arusha,Tanga…then he faded out.”

Well even if trips in the States are generally planned down to every last minute and involve permission slips, itineraries, and tedious documentation through which you sign your life away, I am not too worried. I will just bring my journal and half a dozen books (my back wishes I was exaggerating), and I’ll be perfectly content :)

By the way, for anyone who might have been concerned that I was lost somewhere in Africa over the past week, I apologize for being a little bit behind on my posting lately. After we renewed our internet package and got one of our adapters/converters to work, we had some power outages (which don’t faze us anymore) and now my laptop charger has completely stopped working. So thank you Kaetlyn for letting me borrow your computer to ramble to the world about what’s happenin’ with us here. (I know how bummed she is that Sara and I will be gone for the whole week since now she’ll have our single internet stick and functioning adapter all to herself!)

When we get back we will have only two more weeks left here. Crazy. That’ll leave us with one more weekend excursion: Zanzibar again! Didn’t we just get here yesterday?

DAY #37: Leaving for who-knows-where

2011-07-08T10:21:00.003+03:00

This morning Eric called Kaetlyn to Skype and she had a dream just before I was leaving for my run. She dreamed she was helping me sneak out for my run, and Mama came out and was like, “No, no, no, not safe.” And she also caught Kaetlyn in the kitchen eating a loaf of bread. Not sure what that is supposed to reveal about our subconscious desires here, but some wholesome bread does sound good…

This morning we’re meeting up with Mariam, one of my Swahili teachers at Smith this past year. She’s taking us to one of her designer friends who is going to tailor the nine kangas and kitenges we’ve bargained for here into dresses, skirts, etc.

After two days of waiting in line (for two hours each day) at the Vodacom store in Mlimani City, we finally got our internet fixed for our last month here. Our adapters/converters are still only temperamentally and temporarily working when they want to, but somehow we will survive (right, Kaetlyn and Sara?). Sara and I are leaving for our week-long trip this weekend anyway, so I won’t be posting any updates until July 18th. And in typical Tanzanian fashion, we don’t know where or how we’ll be going, what we’ll be doing, or where we’ll be staying. The only detail we were able to squeeze out of the engineering professor who invited us to come along with his class is that we’re leaving from the College of Engineering at 11 a.m., and we’ll be learning about water and environmental management in different cities around Tanzania. Sounds good to me.

Later that night…since if I’m not writing about animals, I’m writing about food

Kaetlyn before dinner: “I just want me a big honkin’ piece of meat.”

Kaetlyn after dinner: “I’m full, cold, tired, and pregnant. I’m going to have food baby twins, ya’ll.”

Sara: “I’m the Octomom here.”

We had one of the friendliest waiters tonight at Coral Ridge Spur Steak Ranch and Salad Bar. Sure he brought Kaetlyn key lime pie instead of cheesecake and Sara Irish coffee instead of a Kailua, but he also brought out a free cup of ice cream and he let me take as many vegetables as I wanted from the salad bar for my side dish.
Our waiter asked us to take a photo with him when we finished our very American dinner (Kaetlyn got a steak fillet, Sara got a hamburger, and I got a veggie burger, not to mention the calamari and garlic bread starters). There was a big board of photos of about a hundred other customers, so Kaetlyn thinks we should go back to see if we made the wall, and to eat at the Mexican restaurant in the same shopping center. I’m going to keep pushing for us to go to more African, or at least Eastern or Middle-Eastern restaurants, though!

DAY #36: Saba-Saba

2011-07-07T20:38:00.013+03:00

Add trying to pay twice for the same bus ride to our list of embarrassing public transport oopses. The winner is still the time we thought our tour guide was getting off the bus at a certain stop, so all six of us frantically jumped off, only to discover that our tour guide was merely switching seats.

Entrance to Saba-Saba

The Dar es Salaam International Trade Fair, more commonly known as the holiday Saba-Saba (for the date “seven-seven,” July 7), was crazy crowded. The buses there were packed, getting there, too, as people had work and school off for the occasion. The Julius Nyrere Fairgrounds were about as big as the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, except with about ten times too many people. Ema tried to get us in this one building to see the animals (apparently there were lions), so we waited for fifteen minutes in a huge mass of people until a security guard with a big gun announced that everyone needed to step back so the doors could open for the people crammed inside to exit. It was what I imagine being hurled around in a mosh-pit would feel like. It was hot, people were pushing and shoving impatiently, children were pressing up behind us reaching out curiously to touch our backs and hair, and we were being crammed up against the doors, potted palms, and masses of people.

The least crowded moment I could take out my camera

When the guard ordered us to step back, the only thing we needed to understand of his Kiswahili was “kufa” (“to die”). Then we pushed and were pushed violently back by a stampede of older women, men, mothers, and little children. Any sense of personal space remaining at that point was completely eradicated.

When we finally broke through the crowds to the exit

Nonetheless, we were still glad that we got the experience of Saba-Saba. People were selling all sorts of things that I would never expect to see at the Minnesota State Fair—mattresses, big buckets, bed frames, couches, chickens, tables, clothes, what else could you possibly need?

DAY #35: Fast kids

2011-07-06T12:18:00.001+03:00

I’m sitting by the track with my book (what’s new), and there are a couple hundred elementary school kids playing some games around the track. I think they’ve been here since I saw them this morning after my run at 7:30 a.m. And these kids deserve a Runner’s World front cover—they are my new running inspiration. All decked out in their red shorts or skirts and green, navy blue, white, and yellow school uniform tops, these little kids are tearing up the track. Their teacher split them up into relay teams called Kilimanjaro, Kenya, Mlimani, and some other cities around Tanzania.

They don’t even know it, but these barefoot chillen have the best running form I’ve ever seen. They are all skin and bone, and they just sail around the track with such smooth and fluid turn-over and machine-like efficiency that they make it look easy. These crazy kids could kick anyone’s butt at any college track meet I’ve ever been to. Hey, I’d teach them English any day if they could teach me to run that fast. I guess this part of the world really is where some of the best runners in the world come from.

To gather everyone up, the teachers have the kids count to ten in English at the top of their lungs. From where I’m sitting it sounds like the teachers speak to the kids and the kids speak to each other in half-English, half -Swahili.

After staring in awe at the 4x100 meter relays, which I timed, the next event appeared to be hurdles. The hurdles are made of wooden stakes with PVC pipes lying across them about two feet off of the ground, but each kid leaps about four feet into the air when flying over them.

DAY #34: Ashamed

2011-07-05T21:45:00.003+03:00

The Colosseum Hotel

This evening we went to the Colosseum for Kaetlyn to get her hair cut. The six-story Greco-Roman hotel/gym/resort/salon/restaurant stuck out quite a bit in Oyster Bay (a town in northern Dar). Kaetlyn thought it would be cool to be able to say she got her hair cut in Tanzania and to come home with a new look, all while saving some money in the process. However, it’d be tough to top Sara’s bravery in getting a head full of braids, which took four hours.

After Kaetlyn’s two-hour styling, we decided to just stay for dinner since Kaetlyn and Sara were practically drooling over the “Awesome Burger” page of the menu (they had a specifically vegan dish, as well, so I wasn’t too hard to persuade). The restaurant was basically American fine dining for the price of a Panera’s sandwich. The Colosseum was a pretty cosmopolitan place, with hair-stylists from Vietnam and Botswana, waiters from Tanzania, and guests from the U.K., U.S., and who knows where else. So I guess there weren’t only Wazungu, but all the prices were in USD (last week Tanzanian shilling exchange rate for a U.S. dollar went from 1500 to 1600 TSH, so TSH are worth even less now while the USD is climbing). Bottom line, this was an ostentatious, touristy resort—the kind of venue I usually try to avoid.

So the point of this post: When I was reading The Brothers Karamazov while Kaetlyn was getting several inches of her hair cut off polepole (“sloooowly”), I got a couple of texts from my running rafiki, Japhet. He was telling me about how his legs were hurting and he felt really cold. He kept asking me, “What do I do, sis?” It sounded like he could have malaria, which is apparently about as common here as the flu in the U.S. Ema said he gets it every now and then, and when he had it last week he was telling us about how his head felt heavy and hot, but the rest of his body was freezing. Our on-site director couldn’t come on our Arusha trip because she had a malaria spell last week, as well. One of my Swahili teachers here thought she might have it now, too.

Japhet walking us through his neighborhood

But my running buddy Japhet is in a different and more difficult situation. His parents live in Arusha (which took us the 10-12 hour bus ride from Dar two weeks ago), but he lives here by the university because he attends secondary school in Dar. He lives with a couple of other young guys his age, but he’s basically all by himself here. Yesterday he met Sara and I at the track (and brought us cookies) and took us through this little hidden neighborhood to his house.

He lives in a seemingly half-finished and pretty eroded concrete structure without any sort of plumbing or closable door. The only sign of electricity was one tiny light above his desk, which was stacked high with papers and books. There is an opening in the concrete for a door and several small bedrooms along a dirt hallway. Jahpet lives in one room. There is a bathroom behind a small wooden door, and a metal bucket by the front of the house for cooking. That is Japhet’s house.

The entrance to Japhet's house

I don’t know how or when he eats, or how he’s been taking care of himself here alone. I’m probably underestimating the role of his community and neighbors in his life, but I don’t know how he does it and always manages a smile at 6 a.m. every day on the track for our runs.

After I texted him the only advice I could think of (to drink lots of water and get plenty of sleep), I ate a three-course dinner at a candle-lit table with two spoons, two knives, and two forks at the Colosseum Hotel.

I feel so ashamed.

DAY #33: Fourth of July American dinner attempt

2011-07-04T14:21:00.000+03:00

Me clearly trying to help cooking burgers

As a small thank-you to our host family and with the Fourth of July in mind, last night Kaetlyn, Sara, Richard, and I attempted to cook a typical U.S. dinner for Mama, Ema, and our dad, Rahel (the other two dadas went back to live with their grandma). After hearing of Richard and the others’ spaghetti flop for their family (their mama left a half-chewed piece of beef on the side of her plate and opted for rice instead), we decided to try out hamburgers and French fries on our family. We made hamburgers, French fries, fruit salad (my lone contribution), and rice (as a backup). Mama said, “nzuri” (“good”) eight or nine times (right…). Then when we asked Rahel if she liked it, as we were all watching her since this was the first time we had ever seen one of our dadas eat in front of us. Sara saw Mama whisper to Rahel say, yes, she did. We got out of there as soon as we could, since she was clearly wincing and taking as little of bites as she could.

Emmanuel to the rescue

Since Kaetlyn ruined the rice (it would’ve been me if it wasn’t her), Ema was in the kitchen the whole time making it even though we insisted that he not help us (we would have burned the place down without him there, though). So, we didn’t get to see his reaction to our meal. Maybe we’ll try out a different American meal again later this month.

Oh well, it’s the thought that counts, right? We might go out for Lebanese or Ethiopian tonight to celebrate our Fourth.

DAY #32: Sleeping in and La Quiero a Morir

2011-07-03T13:12:00.002+03:00

For the first time all month we were finally able to sleep in this weekend. This morning we woke up to Mama’s favorite DVD of Christian music videos blaring loudly from the living room. Kaetlyn said one afternoon the dadas had the volume of that music turned up so loud that she could hear it from down the street (and we live on the fourth floor of an apartment complex). The music videos are actually pretty entertaining: the dance moves—subdued swaying and arm gestures—are unfailingly the exact same in every song, the lyrics themselves are easy to pick up new Swahili words from, and the cinematography—green screens galore (mountains, rivers, waterfalls)—is priceless.

When the fam. is not watching those catchy Jesus worship vids, Emmanuel is either watching one of his many action DVDs he bought in a bootleg collection from the market (last night we watched Robo-Cop and Xmen 2), or he is watching his favorite TV show (La Quiero a Morir). It’s an Espanol telenovela (“Love Her to Death”). And it is quite a soap opera, let me tell you. The dialogue is dubbed over with these really hokey English voiceovers. So when we’re not all sitting around the living room over dinner watching Predator or some other violent alien movie, we’re watching Christian music videos or Spanish soap operas. The host family of the other three in our group watches Animal Planet every night, and it seems like Big Brother Africa is pretty popular around Tanzania, too.

Andrea and Crissy are on their way to the airport right now since they are only doing the one-month version of this program. But Crissy’s off to Uganda Andrea’s off to Kenya, both to work at orphanages. Then Andrea’s family is flying there so they can all go on a safari together (hint hint, Mom!). It’s weird to think the remaining four of us will be driving to the airport four weeks from today. I wouldn’t say I’ve been too homesick, but some of the things I took for granted at home are beginning to weigh a little heavier.

For better or for worse, it seems a person can get used to living under nearly any material conditions. For example, taking bucket baths, eating mainly rice two times a day, manually filling up the toilet to flush, stepping on roaches in the dark at night, having only a liter of water to drink every day, having power outages every week, wearing the same clothes for weeks at a time, surviving with excruciatingly slow and limited internet, sleeping with ants in your bed, or standing in the aisle of a crammed bus for hours without a seat or handle bar to grab onto during the moments when the bus driver decides to make his own off-road lane to pass traffic. Those are just some of the things that I can honestly and ungrudgingly say we have gotten accustomed to here. And we are all constantly reminded that so many people have it much worse.

Unlike my roommates here, I have not had many cravings for American food (as I write this, Kaetlyn is eating a Twix). Sure I miss fresh veggies and my daily granola, but, as Kaetlyn and Sara are probably tired of hearing me say, I have been getting along just fine with all the fresh fruits and Tanzanian rice dishes.

Nonetheless, as a little halfway evaluation, the following are the top three things each of us misses most about home.

Kaetlyn:

Family and boyfriend
Food
Cat

Sara:

Phone calls home
Easy caffeine access
Running water

Katie:

Best friend and family
Waking up/going to sleep in own bed
All you can drink H₂O

When we all go home, I’ll be sure to post a similar entry about the top three things we miss about life here in Tanzania then, because I’m sure there will be plenty!

Kaetlyn modeling the latest kanga fashion, another significant piece of pop culture here

DAY #31: “Personal personal” realizations (as Isabel calls them ;)

2011-07-02T18:30:00.001+03:00

I wouldn’t necessarily say that I feel like I’m becoming more of an adult here in Tanzania (I don’t think I’ll ever officially grow up, if I can help it), but in subtle ways I feel like I have been doing some growing. I’ve started thinking more seriously (i.e. more realistically and practically perhaps) about the kind of life I want to lead after I graduate from Smith. There are several factors along with being Tanzania that have inspired these thoughts, such as my faculty research assistantship this coming year with a professor who specializes in climate change’s impact on migration in northern Africa, or my attempts to establish potential future research connections here bearing in mind my junior year abroad or the Fulbright. I have also been contemplating what it would be like to work for the Peace Corps, USAID, or the Foreign Service and what kind of lifestyle those careers would give me.

But besides all of the brainy stuff, I have been doing some growing of the heart, too. Some faith seeking. When a woman the age of your great-grandmother who looks like she’s been living on the street for her whole life approaches you begging for money, or when you know a single mother who works twelve hours a day/six days a week and doesn’t have a stove or running water, something inside of you wonders what keeps them going. Something inside of you wonders what they live for every day. Something inside of you wonders what makes their lives worth living.

Now my mom is the one with the most experience and wisdom in this area, but something inside of me is beginning to really understand what Ubuntu means, what the Beatles preached, and what Rent is about. Something inside of me grows more and more grateful every day that I have a loving a family and friends to come home to in the U.S. Something inside of me is beginning to realize that no matter what I end up doing with my life in this world, as long as I have love in my life everything will be ok, everything will be worth it.

It’s a tough world out there.

Translated by Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee,

Ubuntu: “I am what I am because of who we all are.”

All you need is love

DAY #28: Mzungu

2011-06-29T18:30:00.001+03:00

Last night Kaetlyn, Sara, and I went out to dinner at Zuane, an Italian restaurant. It was quite an intersection of different cultures. Not only was there the typical Italian food and décor (pasta, pizza, pics of popes) and Tanzanian waiters, but there was also a live band playing a variety of U.S.-American classics, from jazz to the Beatles. And as at Addis in Dar, the place was packed with Wazungu ("mzungu," pl. "wazungu," is a street Swahili term for a European or white person, and it's usually not meant to be derogatory).

Entrance of Zuane

As the three of us waited by the entrance for our bajaj driver, we obnoxiously greeted every Mzungu who came in with Swahili, “mambo…habari za jioni?” just to knock them off guard a bit. So I guess you could say we’ve gotten used to the title. However, today at lunch I realized that hearing people talk about you as “Mzungu” feels very different from having someone address you as “Mzungu.” I was passing through the lunch line this afternoon when this girl came up behind me and said something that sounded like, “Mzungu, move.” It does not feel good being identified solely by your skin. It’s like being reduced to a color. I know that this girl didn’t mean anything by it, especially since now that I think about it she might have actually said, “Mzungu, beans?” since that’s what I was eating, and I did hear her laughing about the English word for beans a moment before (even though I used the Swahili word, “maharage,” when I ordered). Sijui!

After moments like the one I had today, or like the one when our Swahili class schedule overlapped with one of the university’s sociology classes, and with my reading The Help last week, I’m starting to think more about how it feels being the minority. How it might have felt growing up black in the south, or Jewish in Nazi Germany, or Muslim in the U.S., or Palestinian in Israel, or Tutsi in Rwanda, or gay in Topeka. (With the news of New York’s recent vote to allow same-sex marriage, Kaetlyn, Sara, and I have been talking about the Snyder v. Phelps case. Now we’re gawking disgustedly over the Phelps family’s Wikipedia page. Those people literally hate everyone.)

The light of my day: an eleven-year-old girl told me at he Daladala stop that someday she was going to be the president of Tanzania. I asked her, “kwa nini? Unataka kubadilisha?” (“Why? Do you want to make change?”) And she didn’t miss a beat: “Change the world? Yes, and you will help me.” So it looks like the future is in good hands, yes?

The reason I was hanging out at the bus stop and got the chance to speak some Swahili with a handful of elementary school kids today was because I arrived half an hour early to meet Mariam. (Mariam was my Swahili conversation teacher at Smith this past year, as she was in the U.S. for the year as a Fullbright Scholar.) It feels like just yesterday we were in class and I was telling her about how I would be staying at her home university for the summer, and she was telling me about how she was going to show me around, have me over to meet her family, etc.. And now I am actually here!

Before we walked into her house, I told her this felt like a test. Just as she taught me in class, when I entered her house I greeted her aunts and mom with the respectful greeting for elders, “shikamoo.” To this they all laughed and responded with the slang, “mambo” and “schwari”—they were so funny. At one point over the next three hours Mariam and I were talking, her mom and her aunts heard me say someone was “chizi” (“crazy”), and they started listing off four or five other words for “crazy” in Swahili and in their tribal language. They were all really nice and welcoming, and they seemed pleased that I was trying to speak Swahili. (Mariam is the one to thank for that! :)

DAY #27: Nyoka and library success

2011-06-28T16:30:00.002+03:00

Univeristy of Dar es Salaam campus

It seems every day I have another animal-related story to tell. For lunch today I got my usual (mango, watermelon, and avocado), and I found a good tree to listen to podcasts and eat under. When I was in the midst of compiling a list of “20 Productive Things to Do While Here,” this guy suddenly came up behind me and informed me that I might want to find another tree to sit under, because there was a “nyoka mkubwa” (“big snake”) in the one behind me.

At first I assumed he was just messing with me, so I smiled and laughed, continuing our conversation in Swahili. But he persisted, “You can’t sit here—it is dangerous.” I looked around noticing that several others were getting up to move, and it occurred to me that this kind of “messing around with the foreigner” joke would probably only happen in the U.S. So I reluctantly relocated, thinking about how silly I must’ve looked with my headphones in and my nose caught in my journal while a deadly snake was handing out behind me.

In other news, I had some library success today. Libraries have always served as my home away from home, so it’s about time I learned how to use the one right here on campus. It’s just my luck that the mall and the library are the two most high-security places I’ve been to have so far. For instance, at the Mlimani City mall there are several armed security guards who stand at each end of the parking lot to open and close the gate whenever cars drive through. There are also armed guards at the entrances of stores who check your bags in before you are allowed to enter, and then cross-check your receipt with your purchased items before you are allowed to leave. We’re talking just your typical Target or CVS stores. That’s really the only place I’ve seen police here, and only the middle- and upper-class people use conventional “stores.” Nearly everyone else goes to the local markets where you can bargain and chat with sellers. I am beginning to prefer markets over stores, too.

As for the tight library security, you have to check your bag in and they shelve it in a back room until you leave. Then you have to show your student ID when going through the next guarded doorway. But checking out books is still a mystery to me. When I finally found the check-out office, the man behind the glass window spent about five minutes stamping my books with three different stamps each, writing down each barcode in a big notebook, and then scanning my student ID into the computer. (Of course when I walked out of the library, the alarm still went off on me.) Let’s just say it’s probably a good thing that I fought the impulse to check out books by the dozen, as I usually do at home or at Smith (just ask Isabel). As it was, the students waiting behind me were acting like it was excessive for me to check out three books, but oh well.

Here’s what I get to add to my reading list now:

Educating for Peace: A Feminist Perspective, Brigit Brock-Utne
Africa: Perspectives on Peace and Development, Emmanuel Hanson
The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky

Anyway, this library was not nearly as cozy as the one at Smith (and didn’t have many books published past the turn of the millennium), but I guess it would be pretty hard to match up to the good ole Neilson. Regardless, I’m spoiled rotten at that school of mine. I think I’m homesick from Smith, even though you’d think no student in the right mind would miss school halfway through summer break.

DAY #24-26: Ngorongoro Conservation Area Safari

2011-06-27T21:00:00.001+03:00

King of the jungle

As I write this in my journal, we’re about ten feet away from the king of the jungle licking his paws like he’s about to enjoy us for lunch.

Every time we pass another herd of wildebeest or zebra, I keep waiting for excitement of taking a hundred pictures of them to get old. But it never gets old. Every time we get within arm’s distance of the zebras (literally within arm’s reach, as Richard demonstrated), it only gets better. We got a quick glance of an elephant when we first entered the park, but we didn’t see another until the end of our safari. So the two elephants served as good bookends to our expedition.

Tembo

No monkey business

At around 7 a.m. we left our hotel after a delectable breakfast of toast, fruit, and millet porridge for me (and eggs, sausage, and bacon for the carnivores). Then the six of us loaded into our Land Rover for the day with our tour guide Ali, and we didn’t return until 7 p.m. Within the six hours that we were at Ngorongoro we saw at least twenty-four different kinds of animals. The only animals we wanted to see but didn’t get to: giraffes, rhinos, and cheetahs. My top faves were the zebras, elephants, lions, and baboon-like monkeys with the ridiculously ugly rear ends. We saw literally hundreds of wildebeests and zebras though, which was pretty incredible.

Sassy zebras

Camels, cows, wildebeests, bush monkeys, donkeys, chicken-like-things, goats, dogs, baboons, lions (six), elephants (two), zebras (hundreds), crown cranes, buffalo, hippos, hartebeests, Thompson gazelles, ostriches, hyenas, warthogs, a civet, an eagle, buzzards, and storks. (And yes, obviously I had fun learning the Swahili names for practically every animal on Noah's Ark that we saw today.)

Storks, zebras, wildebeests, buffalos

Me & our trusty Land Rover (that only broke down twice!)

I started off the safari feeling kind of touristy and superficial, especially with my Africa pants and safari shirt. I felt a little bit ashamed at how fascinated I was by the Maasai people leading their cows and goats along the side of the road in Arusha and through Ngorongoro Park. We all probably gawked at them—in their red plaid robes and beaded necklaces and bare feet—as if they were animals themselves.

When our Land Rover got a flat tire right before we reached the Ngorongoro Crater, we finally got our opportunity to talk with a group of six Maasai kids and a teenager our age. Several of the kids had white deigns painted on their foreheads, which the lady who pulled over to help us explained was a sign that they were on their way to an important part of their coming of age ceremony to be circumcised. One of the boys wore a string of blue beads around his forehead, meaning that he had just finished that part of his initiation.

Our new friends

It seemed like after exchanging basic Swahili greetings and asking each of the boys his name and age, the cultural gap gradually widened. We had heard about how one step of the process of becoming a Maasai warrior requires each young man to kill a lion, so Crissy kind of incredulously asked the 23-year old in the group if he had killed a lion with his bare hands. He smiled modestly nodding, then gesturing to his staff he said, “Yes, with this right here.” That’s about the moment we stepped back and became somewhat intimidated by how different our worlds seemed and it grew harder instead of easier to try to make connections.

Two of the Wamaasai boys we met

Keep trying we did, though: even though a strong smell of cattle washed over us as we stepped closer to the boys, we tried to break the ice by asking them what they usually did on days like today. They looked over behind them at some of their friends herding cows and goats. Then a couple of filler questions followed: we asked where they lived, and they pointed to a little village of thatched mud huts behind us. We asked them if they saw a lot of tourists passing through on safari, and they nodded.

We were somewhat relieved when another group of Wazungu pulled over to help us with our flat tire. Out stepped a woman and her husband who had been living in Dodoma, the administrative capital of Tanzania, for two years with their two children. The woman was working on HIV/AIDS education projects around Tanzania, and her husband, who was originally an IT specialist, had moved here with her, since she had been commuting from Cleveland for a while. He now is working on small dam projects to provide water for communities that they could maintain self-sufficiently.

Their driver had the most intriguing story to me, though. From his accent it was clear he was an Aussie, and he had been living in Tanzania for fifteen years. He lived among the Wamaasai for a while and learned Kimaasai and Kiswahili. He was a spitting image of my dad. When he approached the six of us attempting to befriend the Wamaasai boys, he playfully stepped up on the ledge of the cliff we were standing in front of occasionally leaning on the older one’s shoulder to help keep his balance, and he jumped into a conversation with the kids. Obviously more comfortable than us, he joked and laughed with them. His sandals were as worn as Jesus’ probably would have been. He had tousled graying blonde hair and sun-leathered skin. He had the exact same build and strong but gentle look in his eyes as my dad.

Our vehicle was fixed and ready to head into the Crater in no time, thanks to the cool Wazungu who stopped to help us. The rest of our safari felt like a mixture of The Lion King, Baraka, National Geographic, Animal Planet, and Discovery Channel. It was unreal. At the end of our day as we drove back up the crater and the Ngorongoro Crater got smaller and smaller behind us, it felt like being here became more and more of a dream.

The long and winding road

DAY #22: Popo

2011-06-23T22:32:00.002+03:00

I think any good day for me begins with a good run. Nonetheless, my day actually started around 4 a.m. in not the most pleasant of ways. I was having a dream about this one person when all of the sudden I was jerked awake by this—

BREAKING NEWS: Literally just as I was writing that last line, Kaetlyn walked into our room, looked up at the ceiling, then looked at me and said, “Katie, I think I know what that thing was you heard this morning.”

But first more about my 4 a.m. wake-up call. I was jerked awake by this loud buzzing noise. Since the torrential downpour yesterday, we’ve had parades across our room of ants, mosquitoes, “African killer bees” (as Kaetlyn so fondly refers to them), and all sorts of different wadudu (“bugs”) we have never seen before. But when I heard this loud buzzing sound, it seemed like it was coming from an animal much bigger than your typical wasp, especially when it proceeded to rustle around in what sounded like plastic bags for the next hour. At first I was annoyed, but then I started to get kind of scared by its berserk flying around the room, and I was apparently the only one awoken by it, and it was pitch dark.

I secured my mosquito net around the edges, double and triple-checking to ensure it was completely tucked in deeply under every corner of my foam mattress. Then I whipped my sheet up over my head and assumed fetal position as far away from the sides of the net as possible so it couldn’t nip me through the holes or something. Then I accepted there was nothing else I could do but turn up my iPod to drown out the deafening buzzing and rustling sounds.

Two hours later I lay wide awake, still in fetal position, plotting the quickest escape from my bed to my running shoes. I ripped off my mosquito net and darted for the door while spraying a big cloud of bug spray all around myself on the way. Whatever that thing was, at least I was out of there unscathed, alas my two roommates might be in for a rude awakening.

I went on a beautiful seven-mile run on a route that I finally am satisfied with distance-wise. When I got home, I briskly surveyed our room, only half-wanting to figure out what the heck that animal was last night. Sara said I was just going crazy because her and Kaetlyn did not hear it. Kaetlyn later admitted she thought the plastic-bag-rustling was just me heading out for my run. To me it sounded like a giant rodent tearing open all the bags of chips and candy that I reprimanded my roommates for buying the other day. (Later after investigating the unharmed bags around our room, Kaetlyn pointed out that it could have been its flapping wings making those sounds.)

As I already mentioned, it was not until this afternoon that we finally solved the mystery. There above the window, next to our door, and about six feet off the ground was a…POPO (“bat”).

POPO.

I immediately jumped in bed and threw my mosquito net back over me and started spewing out everything the doctor at the travel clinic told me about rabies. None of us got the series of rabies vaccinations since they were so expensive, and we were told that we probably wouldn’t need to worry about rabies in the big city of Dar.

Today was the first time I have ever felt a twinge of fear here. (And then for the second time later tonight during our crazy off-road bajaj ride home…) My travel clinic doctor in Northampton told me that if I were to be bitten and get rabies here without the vaccine, I would have to get to the hospital in Nairobi, Kenya as soon as possible because the rabies treatment shots are very rare. She also told me about how her daughter was in South America a little while ago, and when was outside eating lunch one day, a bat flew out of nowhere and bit her. She had to be rushed to a hospital, but even worse, she had to end her trip early—and that was with getting the rabies vaccine ahead of time.

Anyway, while we were slightly freaking out, we yelled out to our three dadas, “Popo! Popo!” and they came running to the rescue with a broom and whacked that bat down. The popo (“bat”) fell off the wall and, having been violently awoken from its slumber, it started angrily flapping around. It got stuck in one of Sara’s shirts on the floor, and the dadas scooped up the shirt with their broom and tried to kill it on the balcony. After a couple of seconds it took off and flew out the window. Nothing to it.

Next we texted the other three in our group, who live about a mile away from us, to brag that we now had a better animal story than theirs (they had a giant mutant rat scurrying around their room at 3 a.m. one morning earlier this week).

Well. In other news, for the second half of our Swahili class today we went out to lunch and had some traditional Tanzanian food. A couple people tried nyati (“buffalo”) and swala (“gazelle”), and I had my usual favorite roasted ndizi (“banana”).

Now it’s time for us to pack because we have an early departure at 6:30 a.m. tomorrow for an eight-hour Dar Express bus ride to Arusha. We’ll be spending the weekend at the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, so my next entry on Monday will hopefully be jam-packed with photos of zebras, lions, and cheetahs, oh my! But first, we’re off to Addis in Dar for our third Ethiopian dinner there.

Sara & Kaetlyn enjoying their Honey Wine (and me with my water) at Addis in Dar

DAY #21: Hakuna matata?

2011-06-22T18:30:00.007+03:00

I never thought that my biggest cultural faux pas here would be punctuality. On Monday I had arranged to meet with one of the directors of an environmental integration program at the College of Engineering at 3 p.m. But since I got out of class at 2 p.m. and I was thinking the meeting was at 2:30 p.m., I figured arriving at 2:15 p.m. would be all right. Let’s just say I had two good hours of reading that afternoon. I wasn’t in any hurry, so hakuna matata (people here say that all the time, and I think it might be finally slipping into my philosophy of life).

Now I am standing in the hallway, writing this in my journal, a couple doors down from an environmental policy professor’s office stalling so I’m not too early. I left the house ten minutes ago (7:40 a.m.) thinking it would take me at least half an hour to find this building, which is about how long it still takes me to find everything. The director who connected me with this professor said she would meet me at 8 a.m., but that I should come later around 8:30 a.m. or 9 a.m. to give her time for coffee or whatever.

So of course I would be the one to struggle with the bizarre concept of intentionally arriving late. Why would I be late when I could be early? People here don’t wear watches that they can glance down at impatiently in the middle of conversations, or have clocks conspicuously hanging in nearly as many places as we do in the U.S. After lunch when we experienced our first torrential downpour here, I was the only person running across campus trying to make it back to class on time. People beckoned to me to join them under an umbrella at a newspaper stand, then laughed and shook their heads when I said no thanks and kept on running through the rain like the crazy Mzungu I am. When I finally made it back—completely soaked— to the restaurant where Andrea and I have been taking our personalized advanced Swahili class, our teacher was outside huddled around a table under an umbrella with the other Swahili teacher waiting for the rain to stop before they went back to class. Half an hour later our teacher joined us, then said we were done for the day. In the U.S. people trek through, and are expected to trek through, hell or high water when it comes to being on time. But here, not to oversimplify or anything, hakuna matata (lit. “there are no worries”).

Just as I was writing that last bit, the professor I was meeting with arrived. Needless to say, I profusely apologized for coming so early and thanked her for meeting with me. Here’s the current status of my “internship” (or lack thereof…):

Most of the environmental policy courses are finished for the semester. (Just my luck.)
I can sit in on the last month of these three classes that interest me:

Strategies for Environmental Assessment
Risk Assessment and Management
**Globalization and Resource Management** (!)

There is a long process to get permission to go along on this professor’s climate change data-collecting research trips, so I won’t be able to do that this time. Nonetheless, the engineering director’s offer still stands to bring Sara and me along with his class on a week-long environmental management trip across Tanzania! Hamna shida and hakuna matata indeed.
In conclusion: the internship piece of my program here is not panning out exactly how I expected (i.e. it doesn’t like I will be able to do any hands-on work to help a professor or graduate with research or to work for an environmental government agency or NGO). However, I think it will be fascinating to sit in on some environmental policy and management classes here at the University of Dar es Salaam. I don’t feel like that’s too bad of a compromise at all. I think I’ll still be able to achieve my goal of gaining some new perspective on issues like climate change and globalization by learning about these issues in a Tanzanian classroom. And UDSM is pretty cosmopolitan, as it is such a renowned university that people come to study here from all over Africa. So, I can’t wait to see what comes out of the class’s questions and discussions and all that other learning stuff that I’m crazy about.

No more arriving early!

DAYS #19 & 20: Typical day

2011-06-22T07:11:00.002+03:00

After being preoccupied with sorting out my internship, doing a bunch of pleasure reading (most recently The Help), and catching up on some email/Facebook correspondence (thanks to you know who you are), it’s probably time to bring my blog up to date. Kaetlyn tells me that I’ve acquired quite the readership thanks to her wonderfully supportive mom, Mrs. Miller. So now the pressure’s on for me to crank out words of some worth!

We are now about three weeks in, and I must admit it’s kind of comforting to have somewhat of a routine here. I wake up a little before 6 in the morning, go for a sunrise run around campus, take a bucket bath, and eat a peanut butter/ndizi/yai sandwich (yep, even in Africa I still manage to make my weird meal combos, but I’m not going to torture you by revealing what that means in English). I go to Kiswahili class all morning then have meetings in attempt to set up my internship all afternoon. By 4 or 5 p.m., I’m usually pretty worn out, so sometimes I splurge on embe, papai, nanasi, and parachichi (“mango, papaya, pineapple, and avocado”) and enjoy the rest of the evening reading or writing under a tree in the sun (or in the lightly misting rain, like today). Then I go home and do some homework, take a Daladala somewhere to explore the city, or spend some time with the host fam. We either eat around 7:30 or 8 p.m. after Mama gets home, or we go out to dinner (our favorite place so far being Addis in Dar, the Ethiopian restaurant I keep raving about). I’m still resisting the temptation to get too acclimated here though, because I don’t want to sit back so much that I miss anything.

However, nothing too unusual has happened over the past two days (apart from being attacked by crows and monkeys on my morning runs), giving us a moment to catch our breath and prepare for our next big adventure: this weekend’s safari through the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA). I just read that in the NCA wildebeest and zebra usually migrate north in June, so we might see them moving across the plains in search of food—no big deal!

Random pic today: Us @ Mwenge after shopping enjoying some goo-ood mahindi (roasted corn). People buy it off the side of the road and just casually walk around eating it all the time.

DAY #18: Orphanage

2011-06-20T03:16:00.000+03:00

Cute kids at the orphanage

After my nice cool run, we went on a sweltering hot walk to an orphanage near Mwenge. I thought I was getting used to the heat and humidity here (cue Isabel), but I don’t know how living in the sun all day doesn’t make people living on the streets and selling in the markets totally exhausted. We bought some Frisbees, soccer balls, and a pink basketball (Crissy’s wonderfully feminist idea), along with a hundred suckers for all the adorable kids—definitely our best purchase here so far. The watoto (“kids”) were such a joy play with, and they kept asking if we would be coming back kesho (“tomorrow”).

Most of the children were very bright: they spoke English better than we spoke Swahili (which might not be saying much, though), they were learning to write at school, they knew some English songs along with their Swahili songs, and they were pretty savvy with our digital cameras. Rukia, a thirteen-year-old girl who quickly befriended me, taught me a couple of songs and hand-games, and she was very nice about my Swahili. She asked me if she could come back to the U.S. with me, and I would have adopted her in a heartbeat. Several of the older girls also asked us if we could “send” them to the United States.

I asked one child if she liked it at the orphanage, and she said she did, so the conditions must not be too terrible. Several of the little ones had wet pants, and the small indoor living area evidently smelled pretty bad. However, Ema said there are about twenty orphanages in Dar es Salaam, so at least these kids have somewhere to go. And for the three hours we were there, the staff at the orphanage gave the children cookies and a few of them water bottles. Ema, our host brother who patiently brought us there and then to Mwenge to do some shopping afterward, said the orphanage keeps children until they are twenty. Even though many go to school while they are there, their education usually isn’t enough to get them jobs.

Rukia teaching me Kiswahili songs (left), two kids reading Sara's Kiswahili book (middle), and some girls braiding Andrea's hair (right)

We are definitely adding this orphanage to our list of Places to Return To.

DAY #17: Bagamoyo

2011-06-19T03:38:00.000+03:00

Streets of Bagamoyo

We just got home from our daytrip to Bagamoyo, which is about two hours north of Dar es Salaam and straight across the shore from Zanzibar. Bagamoyo was the first city in Tanzania, and it was established to serve as an ivory and slave trade center in the 1880s. It seems like it serves as somewhat of a historical Mecca for Africans today, which occurred to me when I realized this was one of the first tourist hot-spots that we’ve been to where Wazungu were in the minority of visitors. (It’s kind of funny how the six of us turn up our noses when we see other Wazungu around, like at the Ethiopian restaurant where we went last night for the second time for food that was kizuri kabisa [“totally good”].)

Nonetheless, while the mosque ruins and slave-holding posts and missionary settlements were interesting, I learned more from the conversations we had in the Daladala following those visits. Our tour guides for the day, Aaron, Polcarp, and Robert, were really smart and fun to spend time with (even when the Daladala sputtered for about ten minutes then ran out of gas halfway home).

At one of the slave-trader hotels there was a little museum with rusty chains that held the slaves, beads from their jewelry, maps of who colonized what and when, etc. One of the placards caught my eyes with its heading, “Impacts of Ivory and Slave Trade.” The placard then proceeded to describe what it deemed to be the negative and positive impacts of the ivory and slave trade. Upon my first reading my eyes just skimmed through the two paragraphs, then I was about to go on the next display since I was kind of put off by the conventional touristy appeal. But I had a double take when I realized the first paragraph was slightly longer than the second—the first paragraph being the one about the so-called “positive impacts” of the ivory and slave trade. I never really considered any impact of slavery as “positive” (I guess besides the fact that the entire foundation of the U.S. was built by slaves). But the thing that struck me was that of all places, I was reading of the so-called “positive impacts” in the very heart of East Africa where the slaves were taken from.

Positive and negative impacts of ivory and slave trade

I asked one of my fellow social justice radicals, Crissy, if she thought this sign was not slightly disturbing. She was just as shocked as I was, if not more. Not two seconds after we piled back into our personal Daladala to head to our next historical destination, Crissy was already asking our tour guides pointblank, “We saw a sign in there that listed a bunch of positive impacts of the slave trade, like it spread Kiswahili and Islam and helped development…but do you all really believe that shit?” We all scooted to the edge of our seats to hear our taken aback tour guides’ responses.

The parts that I was able to make out made me begin to question if Africans here knew how horribly black people were treated—and continue to be treated—in the United States. Crissy went on to ask who wrote the material in these museums, the government? We were both thinking the same thing: intentional European disinformation campaign? Surely Tanzanians did not think there were more positive than negative impacts of the slave trade, did they? Another girl in our group raised the uneasy point, what if that’s why people were so unbelievably welcoming to us here in Tanzania—because they were not aware how cruel white colonists really were to Africans after cramming them into ships and dragging them across the ocean? What if the British and German propaganda about how they were colonizing Tanzania in order to “help the savages” actually continues to shape the way Tanzanians regard us today? Maybe Franz Fanon needs to publish a post-Cold War update. It is bewildering.

But doesn’t that all sounds incredible unlikely? I just can’t understand:

Why Tanzanian hospitality for us Wazungu is so undeservedly unwavering
Why Tanzania’s first slave-trading establishment would have a museum that argued there were more positive impacts than negative impacts of the slave trade
Why Tanzanians would defend those as positive impacts when Wazungu continued to exploit them through disguised slave-trade mechanisms (i.e. World Bank and IMF structural-adjustment policies, forced liberalization, and even some recent microfinance schemes, described by Elyachar [2002] as “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”). (By the way, I don’t know how I would make sense of any of this if I had not gained such a strong foundation in my Globalization and Transnationalism in Africa anthropology course that I took last semester.)

And besides, if the slave trade had such positive impacts,

Why was I able to pay $1.67 for a lunch of rice, greens, beans, and a bottled water at a restaurant today, yet we passed so many hungry, homeless people on the streets?
Why do we step on cockroaches on the way to the bathroom that doesn’t have running water and that we share with eight people?
Why I am able to go home in the U.S. to my own room and bathroom in a three-story townhouse with four people, four bedrooms, four bathrooms, AC, running water, uninterrupted electricity, and five+ schools in the ten-mile radius? Not to mention Wi-Fi, more phones and computers than people, a washing machine, etc.
Why did Mama Bukuku work from 7am until 10pm last night, but she doesn’t have an oven, fridge, spare light bulbs, a desk, a computer, or real mattresses (we sleep on foam pads)?

Our bedroom, one of two in a house with 8 people currently

In Isabel’s Political Thinking class she read an article (Fraser 1995) explaining that socioeconomic injustice is rooted in political economics. This kind of injustice includes exploitation (having one’s labor appropriated for others), economic marginalization (being limited to low-income work), and deprivation (being denied adequate material standard of living). Anyway, I am just trying to make sense of all this. This is probably the worst socioeconomic injustice I have ever personally seen in my life.

Also, my above questions only begin to touch on the most obvious of material and economic disparities. Such deeply-rooted colonialism and neo-liberalism has more insidious effects than the above inequities seen on the surface. Debt as empowerment (Elyachar again), psychological oppression, natural resource exploitation, environment degradation…

I just finished The Dry Stump about the history of HIV/AIDS in Tanzania, and now I’m reading The Tree Where Man Was Born by Peter Matthiessen. In the Introduction to this 1972 historical and poetic account of East Africa, Jane Goodall writes of the “emotions that Africa can evoke in the traveler—frustration, anger, and sadness; excitement and fear; wonder and tranquility.” Today is one of those days where I feel more frustration, anger, and sadness—and confusion—than anything.

DAY #16: Twenty very uncomfortable minutes

2011-06-18T07:07:00.000+03:00

Today after “class” (our teachers took is to Mwenge for the day to practice our Kiswahili with the wauzaji), we had a bit of an overlapping schedule conflict in the classroom the beginning Swahili class has been using every day for the past two weeks. When we finished lunch (nanasi na chungwa for me :) and returned to that classroom to debrief about our day at the market, there were about thirty students gathering for their Friday afternoon sociology class. Us six Wazungu quietly sat in the front row, and we didn’t have to speak a word of Swahili to pick up on the racial tension that was building around us. The following twenty minutes were the most uncomfortable twenty minutes I have experienced here yet.

Our two Tanzanian teachers were trying to explain to the thirty students that we were scheduled to have this classroom every day at this time, and the thirty students were trying to explain to us that they were scheduled to have this classroom every Friday at this time. From the front row all we could do was try to make as much small-talk and as many sincerely apologetic faces as we could to the students in the row behind us. Finally someone arrived with the Master Schedule, and we ended up getting the room.

We would have gladly given up the room because 1) there were only six of us and thirty of them, 2) this was their university; we were just using the facilities, and 3) we were the Wazungu. We kind of felt like we were in the 1960s in the U.S. except with reversed roles. It definitely was not fair that we were the ones who got the room. I was really embarrassed.

DAY #15: The funeral next door and leopard precautions

2011-06-16T16:28:00.001+03:00

View of funeral from my window

I am currently sitting in our room, and since our windows are permanently always open—open enough for birds to fly in which happened this morning—I can hear every word of the funeral going on four stories below me right now. Funerals are clearly huge events here. Emmanuel, our host bro, just told me that this funeral has been going on for one week so far. It is for a doctor who worked at the university hospital who had the right side of his face paralyzed or something.

Last night when his body arrived here from Ghana, we suddenly heard these loud cries coming from their apartment across the lawn. Dozens of people were gathered in the parking garage area below their apartment, and we heard them wailing for the next hour. This morning we woke up to about a hundred lawn chairs all spread out around the garage. Now there are cars parked all around the street and hundreds of people surrounding a big stage (yep, all in the garage) giving speeches. It kind of reminds me of a big block party: people who knew the doctor or his family just stop by and pull up a chair or take a seat in the lawn for however long they want to. One of the things we learned in my Kiswahili class here is that a big part of Tanzanian culture is community. Here your neighbors are your family. From all the singing and guitar-playing below, it now sounds like more of a celebration about this man’s life.

This morning I got up to run a few minutes earlier than usual so it was still pretty dark, and Mama Bukuku caught me on the way out. As our host mother for these two months she always worries about us three girls, so I usually try to quickly slip out in the morning to avoid this very kind of talk. Apparently there is a leopard that has been spotted around campus this week. (Though some people here say there have been alleged leopard sightings and even lion sightings over the past year.) Mama Bukuku, like any good mama, tried to convince me not to go, but I assured her that I would be very careful of the leopard. How I intended to be careful of said leopard I had no idea, especially considering that they are provoked by their prey running past them.

Needless to say, fortunately I was not mauled by a leopard this morning, though that would be a unique way to go. Instead I had a nice run at the track (since I decided to avoid the open fields where my leopard-sense told me a chui might be lurking). And the best part was I found a new running rafiki who didn’t even ask me for my number, where I lived, or if I’d marry him (promising signs). I’ve seen this guy out running every morning, and he does all sorts of drills up and down the stadium and runs at a pretty quick pace, so I’ve been curious about him for a while. So this morning he came up behind me on the track and we paced each other for a couple of 7-minute miles around the track, while I tried to carry out a Kiswahili conversation (ha!). Let’s just say it wasn’t the most successful of my attempts so far. But he did say to me, “haba na haba hujaza kibaba” (a Swahili proverb I learned last year: “little by little the whole thing is filled”)—little by little I will learn this language. Before I left I said to him, “Labda tutaonana kesho?” (“Maybe we will see each other tomorrow?”) And he said something about helping, talking, and waiting, so I guess I now have a running buddy.

DAY #14: Two weeks in

2011-06-15T18:26:00.000+03:00

We left the United States two weeks ago from this day—kind of hard to believe. Every now and then, like this afternoon as I was walking home on this lovely path I just discovered from the College of Engineering, a little rush of joy randomly washes over me. Then it dawns on me, oh my gosh, I am really here. How the heck did I pull this one off?

I’ll never forget Mr. Johnson’s advice for us at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen a year and a half ago: “Do not get acclimated.” To me that means,

Stay alert and conscious of how great of an opportunity this is.
Do not sit back and let the experience wash over you.
Stay on your feet and relentlessly push yourself and your comfort zone.

Nonetheless, at the same time it is probably wise to also remember to take some time for myself to reflect and recharge, or else burnout will be inevitable. That’s why my morning runs are so important to me.

Anyway, that’s about all I’ve got today. Since it’s not too hard to be inspired here, I think I’ll be productive and get a jumpstart on the “Fullbright train” application. My internship officially begins tomorrow I guess (since the meeting I was supposed to have with a professor this afternoon must have gotten lost in translation…). All in stride, all in stride.

DAY #13: Culture clash and beginning of internships

2011-06-14T20:40:00.000+03:00

I just had one of my first head-on cultural disagreements. If anything, the clash challenged me to think further about how I feel about cultural and ethical universalism vs. cultural and ethical relativism. The prompt for my Swahili homework last night was the following:

In Kiswahili:

Baada ya kupigwa Bomu la Atomiki watu duniani walikufa na na kubaki watu kumi ambao walihitaji chakula, maji na nyumba. Lakini vyakula, maji na nyumba ni kwa watu sita tu. Chagua watu sita ambao watabaki duniani na eleza sababu kwa kila mtu.

In English:

After an atomic bomb drops, everybody in the world dies except for ten people who need food, water, and shelter. But there is enough food, water, and shelter for only six people. Choose six people (out of the ten listed) who will who will survive in the world and explain why you chose each person.

One of the people I chose to save was an Olympic runner who also happened to be gay, according to the description. I explained to my teacher in Swahili that my rationale of why I chose to save this person was that the runner would likely have physical strength and endurance that he could potentially use to help him and the others survive. Then my teacher said to me, “I don’t know how it is in your culture, but here homosexuals don’t do anything; they are lazy. They are like women.” I should have embraced this uncomfortable conflict of views as an opportunity to explore farther. Before I came to Tanzania, I was aware that homosexuality was still largely stigmatized in many African countries. I could have said that in my “culture,” whatever that’s supposed to mean, sexual preference or orientation does not determine what a person can do or how much s/he can contribute to society. But I just bit my tongue and dodged the bullet. Next time I will have to push my comfort zone and try to be more open to where other people are coming from.

We are going to visit our internship locations today after class. Two people will be interning at a hospital, and two of us will be doing research in the engineering college, where I’m going to be working on some environmental policy and management. One of the directors of the engineering college who has been connecting us with people here is taking his class on a one-week trip across Tanzania to do a hands-on study on how different cities manage water and the environment. And he invited me to come. I think yesterday might have been our final pumzika (“resting”) day, because now it’s time to get to work :)

DAY #12: Spice Island Tour

2011-06-13T22:29:00.000+03:00

Spice Island tour

The Spice Island tour that our group had yesterday in Zanzibar was absolutely wonderful. We decided that was the most fun we’ve had here so far. The tour started out with a walkthrough of this beautiful foresty area where they grow dozens of different kinds of spices. Our tour guide stopped every couple of minutes to let us smell the leaves or berries of each plant and try to guess which spice, fruit, nut, etc. it was. My favorite scents were cinnamon and lemongrass.

For each plant he told us what its medicinal properties were and how to prepare it. I felt like I should have been taking Mark Plotkin-esque notes. It was truly amazing to hear about all of the healing recipes to help with absolutely anything you could think of—high blood pressure, pain, headaches, shyness, obesity, and the flu. It hit me about twenty minutes into the three-hour tour that I could easily imagine myself working here one day as a “shaman’s apprentice.”

My future job?

Of course seeing one of the guys who worked there scaling a hundred-foot-tall coconut tree to cut us each down a coconut wasn’t much of a deterrent ;) Then he gave us a tea-tasting (lemongrass tea and ginger tea) and fruit sampling (mango, ugly fruit, orange, banana, and, ohhhh passion fruit—soo good). It was so much fun (and good Kiswahili practice). Yeah, I could definitely see myself there. Maybe for a year after college or when I need to escape from diplomacy for a little while or something. I’ll be back.

Waiting for the ferry on Zanizbar Island

Going to Zanzibar was like going to a different country (which it originally was). It had the whole relaxing island atmosphere to it, but it also had a strong undercurrent of rich cultural history. Mainland Tanzania, or at least what I’ve sensed in Dar es Salaam, has more of the hustle and bustle of a big city. For instance, our host mama leaves for work every morning before 7 or 8am, and doesn’t get home every night until 7:30pm at the earliest. She’s also a single mother of a teenage boy and has been the host mother of thirty other international students over the past five years. Daily life felt much more laid back in Zanzibar, though that’s just me judging from a tourist’s eyes having only spent two days there. But still, there is something kind of magical about Zanzibar Island. Several of us are going to try to return again to explore more on our own next month.

Sunset as we pulled into Dar on the ferry

In my Swahili session this morning my teacher asked Andrea and I to write some quick dialogues between a muuzaji and mnunuzi (“seller and buyer”) at the market. I suddenly vividly recalled the late nights I spent writing dialogues just like this one as I was cramming for my one-on-one mentored Swahili class at Smith every week. And it hit me this morning how unreal it was that I was now able to effortlessly crank out a market dialogue in a couple minutes since I’d been having market dialogues nearly every day for the past twelve days. The taxi bargaining and directions giving and introductory conversations that I used to drag through in those cumbersome Swahili textbooks are so dang applicable to everyday life here, it’s awesome. Time to get back to class.

DAY #10: Watching the sun set over Zanzibar

2011-06-12T04:01:00.000+03:00

Last night after spending the afternoon and evening out in Posta, complete with a Botanical Garden visit and delicious Ethiopian dinner, we got home around 10:30pm. Since the light in the bathroom—the one bathroom Mama, Emmanuel, all three dadas, and us three share—has been out, we took out the bulb in our room and replaced it so we wouldn’t have to take bucket baths in the dark, and we’d be gone for the weekend so we didn’t need the light in our room anyway. Then we packed in the dark of our room for the weekend excursion to the island of Zanzibar. You have no idea how much fun it was to wake up at 4:45am the next morning to leave for the ferry (wah wah…).

Nonetheless, the three-hour ferry ride was very relaxing and beautiful. After we arrived and checked in at customs, we piled into a van and headed off to our picturesque hotel, Garden Lodge. Right now I’m watching the sun set from the hotel’s terribly romantic rooftop restaurant area and enjoying some solitude, as I am the only one up here having discovered the secret stained-glass stairway myself. To the six of us still-adapting-Americans, this place might as well be a five-star hotel: running water, a shower, a flushing toilet (that you don’t even have to fill up the tank by hand to flush), real mattresses on the beds, a ceiling fan, and lights. I mean I’ve been just fine adjusting to life without these luxuries, but I think the others really appreciate a little break of luxury.

Since docking here this afternoon, we’ve gotten a tour of an Anglican church, of the holding chambers where slaves were kept before being traded (that was somewhat emotionally jarring), the sultan’s old government building and residence turned museum, and the market. I bargained for a dozen spices, teas, and coffees; a Swahili CD; an Obama kanga; a kanga with maneno ya mapenzi; a Tanzania soccer jersey; and possibly a couple of presents for friends and fam.

One of my favorite things to do in Tanzania so far is going to the market to browse through different kangas in search of the perfect Swahili saying printed on the bottom. I have a good time trying to translate all of the different sayings with the muuzaji. I’m think I’m getting better at my bargaining skills, too, if I do say so myself.

I had roasted green bananas with spinach for lunch—one of my favorite meals here that our dadas make for us nearly every night. Some people in my group complain about how the dadas prepare the same, plain food every night. Well, I couldn’t be happier with it. I love all of the rice and fruit and vegetables and the creative dishes with tomato sauce, bananas, etc.

Zanzibar is 90% Muslim (2% Christian), and right next to our hotel is a mosque (probably right next to everything is a mosque here). So now I’m listening to their call to prayer in one ear, while I’m listening to Death Cab for Cutie in the other (it’s the first time I’ve listened to my iPod since I’ve gotten here—I just needed a little escape that’s all, I promise!). Quite a mix.

We’re going out for dinner in about half an hour, so I better go get my Malerone and prepare to head out. Today I think we’re all feeling pretty burned out with the 4:30am wakeup call and all, so I can’t help but wish it were bedtime now even though it is so so wonderful here on Zanzibar Island.

DAY #8: “Welcome and thank you for sharing our poverty”

2011-06-09T23:02:00.001+03:00

I just ate some pretty tasty cafeteria food. First I had wali na mbaazi (“rice and peas”), then there is this buffet table where they have a bunch of different fruit that they peel and cut up for you. Today I had fresh embe (“mango”) and the best nanasi (“pineapple”) ever. Tomorrow I’m going to try papai (“papaya”) and a citrus fruit that is supposedly an orange plus a lemon.

After lunch I accidentally told my mwalimu wa Kiswahili (“Swahili teacher”) that instead of “nanasi” (“pineapple”) I ate “nyasi” (“grass” or “weeds”). Woops. I know I’m a vegetarian and I’m weird, but I’m not that weird of a vegetarian. Add that to the list of embarrassing Swahili mistakes I’ve made before…like the time during my first semester Swahili oral exam when my teacher asked how I got to Georgia, and I said, “kwa ng’ombe” instead of “ndege.” By cow, by plane, what’s the difference?

After that slip, my teacher here gave me a pretty neat essay prompt: If you had a lot of money, how would you help orphans and HIV/AIDS victims?

During the last hour of our class today—Andrea, Mwalimu Asia, and I have been meeting for our little advanced class at Hill Park Restaurant—three men sat down at the table beside ours. They were pretty sassy, saying things like, “there are three of us and three of you, so what do you say?” (Stay tuned for my list of Tanzanian pickup lines coming soon.) But one of the men said something that I wasn’t exactly sure how to react to. Everybody has been telling the six of us, “Karibu, karibu sana” (“welcome, you’re very welcome to Tanzania”), but this man added on, “Welcome and thank you for sharing our poverty.”

Another frequent occurrence that happens to us at least once a day: people watching us and saying to each other or to our faces, “wazungu, wazungu” (“white people, white people”). According to my new Swahili textbook, a “mzungu” is a European. We have been told that is it not meant to be a derogatory term, but you could say the same thing about people in the states calling people “black” or “African Americans.” Race is a social construct, thank you Intro. to Cultural Anthropology (I’m starting to realize that I might secretly want to be an anthropologist).

Here it is tempting to say that we are starting to understand what it feels like for minorities in the U.S.; however, our Swahili teacher said that Tanzanians view guests as blessings. While Americans view guests as terrorists. So, all the eyes watching us and hands of little children reaching out to touch us on the street (which happened to me for the second time yesterday) are probably far more positive than the glares and obscenities that white people in the U.S. inflict upon people of color, Hispanics, people who are gay, Muslims, etc..

DAY #7: Slacking on the journal entries

2011-06-09T08:15:00.000+03:00

Now that we have internet it has become much more of a challenge to commit myself to writing extensively with great detail in here every day. Alas, I knew my three-page-a-night streak wouldn’t last long. But who says I can’t condense to one or two pages a day?

Today we went to the Village Museum, or the makumbusho. It was definitely the coolest “museum” I’ve ever been to before. It was all located outside, and about ten historical Tanzanian houses were constructed specifically for the museum by present-day members of various tribes. (Fun fact: Tanzania has about 120 different tribes, or ethnic groups.) So the huts were about as authentic as they get.

I don’t know what I think about a custom of this one tribe, though, that requires the woman to carry her husband on her back to the bathroom if he has to go at night. Also, when a cow dies, the Wamaasai cover a wall of their house with its dung, in remembrance of it. Hunter, if you’re reading this right now, I would just like to let you know that I’ll expect you to do that for me when I die. TSM.

DAY #5: Siku moja ya darasa la Kiswahili (“day one of Swahili class”)

2011-06-06T22:28:00.001+03:00

The reason I am journaling during class is because it turns out the whole “there are three different levels of Swahili classes that you will test into upon arrival” thing does not mean exactly what I thought it meant. The six of us Americans in our KEI group are in one class together, and there is only one other person, Andrea, who has prior experience with Swahili. She and I might have our own Swahili teacher and class tomorrow, or we might do our own thing. But for today, I have just been reviewing my Swahili textbooks and half-listening to the maamkio (“greetings”) introductory lesson. Not a bad setup I suppose, as long as I get some Kiswahili challenge in my daily diet.

Everyone in our group is becoming exponentially P-Oed at KEI’s organizing capacity, or lack thereof. The schedule is meaningless and we’re not even a week in yet, our on-site director Mama Kayaa is just now returning after her trip to Scandinavia, none of the other director-step-in types or her secretary knows what is going on when or where or with whom, and we have been left to basically figure things out on our own. Invigorating and kind of unsettling.

Nonetheless, while I usually am of the disposition to be uptight about these sorts of logistics, there are four reasons why I am not freaking out like the others in our group right now:

It is somewhat exciting figuring things out on our own.
Maybe this is just how things work in Tanzania.
I don’t want to be the conceited, pretentious U.S.-American who complains about the Daladalas not running on a time schedule, so to speak.
I am trying to take things in stride since it is such an incredible opportunity just to be here in Tanzania.

On another note, after four days of dragging my feet (no pun intended) and sitting on my lazy butt (well, not exactly), I finally went for a run here. One loverly running morning down and 55 more to come! Napenda kukimbia sana. What better way to explore Dar es Salaam?

“Bwana mungu, nashangaa kabisa” (the Swahili hymn to the exact same tune of “How Great Thou Art”)

2011-06-06T05:30:00.000+03:00

CUTE watoto

People typically complain to my mom if her church services go merely two minutes over one hour. At “Jesus Village” however, we were there 45 minutes late, plus today was a condensed version of both services combined into one, and we still managed to get in three straight hours of praise time. Not to mention the one-hour long followed by the one-hour meet and greet afterward. And there wasn’t even a clock in the whole church.

Mama Bukuku explained to us how she usually likes to devote her entire Sunday to praising God, so she prefers goes to the first service (9am-12pm) and the second one (1-4pm). And I thought my whole life I had it bad as a PK. The service was pretty exciting, nonetheless. There was a brass band that would randomly trumpet out some notes throughout the sermon as a little talk show sound effect or something. There were a group of Dar University students who sang some neat songs, too. So the music was great, except for the part where Mama and Kaetlyn got up to join the dance line, so I had no choice but to follow clapping and dancing around the church two looong times.

Mch. Mgenja na Uongozi healed three people this morning, too. Hey, I guess anything is possible, and it was kind of intriguing witnessing a real-live exorcism. I feel like I should write an ethnography on it, as if I were an anthropologist.

A little boy asking me when I'd be back

Nevertheless, my favorite part of the day at church was the children. They were so precious; as soon as Kaetlyn took out her camera the kids repeatedly started chanting for us to take one more picture, “Moja! Moja!” (“One! One!”). They were so proud to be able to say, “hi” and “bye” to us—almost as proud as we were to be able to say, “mambo” and “jina lako nani?” (“what is your name?”) to them. You’ve really got to be on your feet to keep up in conversations with these watoto wazuri (“beautiful children!”).

Center of Mwenge market

You also need to be alert when walking through Mwenge with every muuzaji welcoming you into his shop. Thank goodness we had Emmanuel along to help us bargain today. Nonetheless, by the end of our shopping evening, I had these wuzaji figured out. I bargained down the price for (SPOIL ALERT: vague descriptions of present may follow) four postcards, three wooden carvings, and two paintings. And I had a bunch of fun trying to translate the maneno (sayings) printed on every kanga in sight (I’m still trying to find the perfect Swahili saying on one for me).

When we returned home, we hung out with Ema for several hours over a dinner of pilau, kabeji na nyanya, na mbaazi, and we talked about a few of my favorite things (e.g. education, IMF and World Bank, Libya, the U.S.’s flaws, etc.).

Well it’s bedtime since it’s a 6am running morning for me tomorrow! Finally :)

DAY #4: Tunaenda kanisani leo asubuhi ("We’re going to church this morning")

2011-06-05T17:52:00.000+03:00

This way to Jesus Village

This morning Kaetlyn and I are getting dressed up to go with Mama Bukuku to go to Jesus Village, where her Pentecostal church is. I woke up at 7am, untucked the corner of my mosquito net, and dragged myself out of bed. After taking a refreshingly cool bucket bath, I put on my blue and green dress (that Isabel chose out for me at REI ;) and now here I sit waiting on Kaetlyn to finish straightening her hair so we can go eat chakula cha asubuhi (breakfast). And I must say, for her first time leaving the country and her first time begin away from her parents for longer than two weeks, she is doing truly phenomenally.

There are several things that have been weighing pretty heavy on me regarding the huge, mind-numbing disparities between us and our Tanzanian friends and host family here:

Last night Mama Bukuku went to find a kanga to show us that was in her room, a room that she shares with her 17-year old son Emmanuel and the dadas (lit. “sisters,” but the three who live with us are Mama’s nieces who she employs to help clean, cook, get water, etc.). But Mama came back from her room saying she couldn’t find it because it was too dark.

Later on as I was squinting to write this hour-long journal entry from my bed, I glanced up at the single light bulb dangling by the door in our room, and it struck me that Mama Bukuku gave us one of the only three light bulbs in the house. She didn’t even have a light in her room, but she made sure us Americans did. How does that make feel? Sick to my stomach. I will talk to Emmanuel about us buying some bulbs for them tomorrow.

We read in a Tanzanian guidebook last night that it costs 90,000 shilingi (60 USD) a year for secondary school fees. That is nearly as much as I spent on the three paintings I bargained for yesterday. Not to mention all of the transportation fees (Daladala, bus, ferry, bajaj, and taxi) that we had going to the Kipepeo beach yesterday (where Emmanuel said he had never been, which made me feel even more guilty).
WATER. I never before realized how many pitchers of water it took to fill up the tank of a toilet just to flush it. I guess I’ve always took flushing the toilet for granted in the U.S. Sure I’ve given presentations on how climate change is exacerbating the water crisis and places like here are hit the hardest, and I’ve accordingly tried to make “changes in my lifestyle” or whatever by taking five-minute showers, stigmatizing plastic water bottle users, and carrying my stainless steel “Go Green” bottle everywhere I go. However, here we don’t have the privilege of having running water to take a shower with (hence bucket baths), or clean water to brush our teeth with (hence buying sealed bottled water). There is a bigger problem here that is going to require more than shorter showers to fix.

Just a typical morning

DAY #3: “Far Out”

2011-06-05T07:33:00.000+03:00

Ehh, bwana ndiyo! Did we ever have a long, adventurous day today. It all began with a little miscommunication: the other half of our group initially planned to meet us—Kaetlyn, Sara, and I—this morning so we could all go the beach together.

However, as if by a fated turn of events, the other group left without us. So we decided to make it all by ourselves and have our own little adventure. And we did, thanks to Kiswahili kidogo of mine, some extremely friendly Tanzanians, five modes of transportation, and a bit of luck. Ok, maybe A LOT of luck.

The first mode of transport was a Daladala that we took from our homestay katika chuo kikuu to Mwenge. We all crammed into the van, and there happened to be two nice young men, whose feet I was sitting at, who said they appreciated my (pathetic) attempts at kuzungumza na Kiswahili. I talked with them about what we were doing here, where we were trying to go today, and the Peace Corps (which it took me twenty “sema tena tafadhali’s” and “sielewei’s” to decipher from what sounded like “miss-cops” to me). When we arrived at Mwenge, one of the guys walked with us to the right bus that would take us to Posta.

On that bus ride I tried to strike up some conversation with a couple of ladies squeezed into the seats next to us, but they were too shy to say much. So after we go off at Posta, we fortunately stumbled into this well-dressed young man who basically swept us off of our feet. He walked with us from Posta, toured us through the City Center, insisted on paying for our ferry tickets and riding with us across, and bargained for a bajaj to take us to Sea Breeze Resort. I tried to tell him in Swahili, “No thank you, you really don’t have to do that, we can figure it out from here, you probably have to get to work don’t you?” But all he said to that was, “Far out!” I practiced some Kiswahili with him, and we even got to talking about his business consulting work and microfinance. I had to restrain myself from busting out into talk about the IMF and World Bank and their structural-adjustment policies that screwed over this part of the world.

While the two guys from the Daladala badgered me for my Facebook, Skype, or email info., this guy politely just gave us his business card and innocently asked if we’d email him the photo we took with him. Nonetheless, at the same time I can’t help but thinking of Piot’s stories about some Africans innovatively doing whatever they can to get a passport to get to the U.S. So, what if he were to us the photo of us as evidence of his connection with his “kinship” in the U.S.?

Probably not likely, but that Globalization and Transnationalism in Africa anthropology course is really the bedrock to my understanding of so much of my experience here so far. Because of Piot, Ferguson, Elyachar, and particularly Professor Melly, I have a rich foundation to dig for the answers to questions like,

Why was our taxi (all six of us crammed into the back of one taxi—yeah, there aren’t any traffic laws here) for the final seven kilometers (4 or 5 miles) stuck in traffic for one hour?
What kind of a world do we live in that the average U.S.-American uses more water in a ten-minute shower than the average person in a developing country gets in an entire day?
Why is there a huge pile of garbage under that bridge that a komodo dragon is sloshing around in?

By the way, those two Daladala guys got a good laugh out of the fact that a mzungu does not have internet here. It’s one thing to “just say no” to evade guys in English, but in Swahili rejecting guys is a whole other art.

As soon as we turned off of the paved road and onto a muddy path in our bajaj, I got excited. Even though the beach was somewhat set up to cater to tourists with beach chairs under straw tiki huts, getting out of the city and into the country was a beautiful change. This was a bit of the “essentialized Africa” that Piot was talking about in Remotely Global: baby goats hiding under chairs; Rastafarians smoking ganja on the beach; and getting rice, spinach, and beans cooked in a big pot over a little fire in a 6x6-square-foot hut (it was one of the best meals I’ve had here yet).

Our new Rasta friends showed us around the seaside and brought us to their store, where they proceeded to jip us BiG time (our host family had a good laugh out of that one). One of us bought a bracelet for two times too much, a kanga three times too expensive, and a painting four times too pricey, according to Mama and the usual prices of these things here. And I was proud for bargaining this one painting down from 50,000 shillings to 34,000 (Mama Bukuku said it shouldn’t have been more than 20,000). Oh well, at least we stimulated somebody’s business today.

Needless to say, Mama Bukuku or Emmanuel is coming with us shopping next time, for sure. We might go to Mwenge tomorrow after church—yep, one adventure after another ;)

DAY #2: Successful first full-day here

2011-06-04T08:47:00.000+03:00

Who just successfully conversed with our taxi driver and told him the way home in Kiswahili? That’s. Right. Kiswahili accomplishment nomba moja :) Today after orientation, none of the instructors/acting-directors/us knows who/what/where was going where/doing what. Not only was it time for us to get used to “Africa time,” but for us to get used to Africa organization—or lack thereof ;) —apparently. But it’s all good—Tanzanians are so friendly here and happy to go pretty far out of their way to help us out.

However, this evening was a bit of an adjustment for me as a college student/young adult, not to mention the whole being in a developing country in a big city part. There is this one guy from the U.S. who has been studying here for one year now, and he insisted on taking the six of us new Knowledge Exchange Institute (KEI) students out for happy hour and then to a club. (Not my thing at all.) But (luckily) the three of us housing together managed to skip the clubbing part, since we had not yet talked with our host mama about what her expectations were for us regarding what time we needed to be back by.

Which brings me to the final part of our adventure today: the three of us roommates, Sara, Kaetlyn, and I, riding solo from Mwenge City home. And it has never felt so awesome knowing Kiswahili kidogo before. I miss my Kiswahili teachers—they would be so proud!

More of these fun stories soon, I’m sure. Well, I think I am in pretty good shape. One of my roommates almost called her mom this morning and asked for a plane ticket home, while Sara lost her Malarone and just called home in a bit of a panic. Meanwhile, I am my Dad’s girl: squashing thumb-sized roaches left and right in our room, managing bucket-baths, and speaking Swahili to taxi drivers, bajuj drivers (three-wheeled scooter thing), UDSM staff, and host-family members at whatever chance I get. And tomorrow I am going to run.

Time for night #2 under a mosquito net :)

Assumptions we discovered were actually cultural constructions:

Towels used for drying off after bathing.
Lines in supermarkets, stores, n.k. (“etc.” in Kiswahili).
The expression “going out for dinner” (lost in translation—oops).

DAY #1: Arrival at in Dar es Salaam

2011-06-03T05:22:00.000+03:00

Kaetlyn, Emmanuel, and I in our nyumba away from nyumba

Kaetlyn and I arrived in Dar es Salaam around 3:30pm, got our luggage by 4:30pm. We made it safely through Dar traffic and finally to our host family’s house by 5:30pm. Emmanuel (or “Ema”) is an only child and he and his mom (who we call Mama Bukuku) live together with a helper (who they call “dada,” or “sister”). They live in an apartment on the University of Dar es Salaam campus, where I’ll be going to a Swahili culture and language class for the next month.

I was not too alarmed to find fairly sparse and basic furnishings or even a cockroach and lizard scampering around our room. However, I was quickly snatched out of my “honeymoon phase” of cultural integration when Mama mentioned that today they didn’t get any water. Now I’m familiar with rolling electricity blackouts, but only having running water every now and then? Just as the adrenaline was at its peak this evening and I was greeting my new family with “habari gani’s” and Swahili thank-you’s and compliments, I realized that yes, this might be a little challenging for me. But hey, nothing I can’t handle. I really think this is going to be an amazing learning experience.

After we got here, Mama offered Kaetlyn and I a fairly huge dinner: rice, peas, chicken (Mama said that KEI neglected to tell her I’m a vegetarian…greaaat), fried eggs (I ate my first egg in years and even said I would eat them anytime to make up for my vegetarian inconvenience), potatoes, bananas, juice, and bottled water (so much for the boiling water idea).

I will leave the running and showing questions for tomorrow. Time to get some sleep during my first night under a mosquito-net in Tanzania.

Leg #4: From Dubai to Dar es Salaam (5 hours)

2011-06-02T20:46:00.000+03:00

The Dubai airport looks exactly like a huge shopping mall—there are kiosks selling coffee, perfume, and quit-smoking-now advice, and there are stores with half a dozen checkout counters. The atmosphere of this airport is much quieter and kind of eerier than nay in the U.S. that I’ve been to before.

I’m starting to hear some people speaking Kiswahili around me, and I am finally getting excited. This is really happening. I am hot, tired, jet-lagged, and hungry, but that’s all part of the adventure. And besides, I love flying and being left to my own devices to occupy myself. I never get bored—there is always something productive I could be doing (which is basically the subtitle of the story of my life). Flying is like solitary confinement, except for the hundreds of people packed together and screaming babies. But I think it’s kind of fun. (Is it weird that I would probably enjoy solitary confinement?)

Leg #3: From New York to Dubai (12 hours)

2011-06-01T21:46:00.000+03:00

The following are two of my favorite things the lady sitting next to Katelyn and I said. She was on her way to the island Mauritius to spend time with her 90-year-old mother.

1. “Developing countries are different from Western countries because people really live; there isn’t as much rushing and stress,”

2. “Traveling is like Pringles chips—you can’t just have one.”

As we land it strikes me that this place really is a desert. The Dubai airport is a cylindrical building. The roads look similar to those in the U.S., but the sand is obviously different as it is everywhere. I think the whole “I’m-going-to-Africa” thing is starting to sink in at last. It’s still pretty surreal, though.

Anxieties and hopes

2011-06-01T16:48:00.000+03:00

ANXIETIES:

· Summer cross-country training

o Run enough (mileage, time)

o Working out/lifting

o Managing heat, humidity, storms

o Finding a good, safe, place and time to run

o Staying injury-free (without having foam roller, ice, or yoga classes)

· Striking balance between being a member of my host family and their community, and being an independent college student exploring Dar by Daladala.

o Figuring out my role over the next two months

· Finding time and space to be an introvert and recharge

· Missing someone

· Giving up being a vegan, but trying to remain a vegetarian without offending people or being an American-inconvenience

· Disease, dehydration, bacteria, heat stress, and other potential inconveniences

· Communicating the right amount with friends and family back home

HOPES:

· Improving Swahili proficiency

· Making new friends

· Improving running endurance and strength

· Gaining some valuable experience in my environmental policy internship

· Kuzungumza and bargaining with sellers at markets

· Buying some good presents for friends and fam.

· Capturing some great pics.

· Bringing back stories and new perspective

· Applying what I’ve learned in my anthropology and Africa-related classes

· Meeting up with my Swahili teacher’s family, Hannah, etc.

· Developing my world-view

Leg #2: From Jacksonville to New York City (2 hours)

2011-06-01T16:01:00.000+03:00

So far so good: today marks the first “point of no return.” After walking through the doors of this airplane I realized there was no going back now—this is it. Sorry, I keep chanting these mantras to myself in attempt to make this trip seem more real! I’m guessing—and hoping—that after I get off our final plane to Dar es Salaam it will all finally sink in and hit me that I am really going to East Africa for the next two months.

It has been unreal enough as it is being in Jacksonville Beach for three days with Susan and Marty. I forgot how much I missed them and the ocean. Then last night I finally got to meet Kaetlyn and her family, and we all woke up and left for JAX at 4am. This is Kaetlyn’s first time flying without her parents, and she hasn’t flown in three years, so I’m just glad I can be here for her. And if we run into any problems over the next 26 hours of transit, we can work through them together. I have flown so many times, especially lately, that I would probably be ashamed if I calculated my carbon footprint at this point….

Well, I probably should try to get some sleep at some point over the next 26 hours of my JacksonvilleàNew York CityàDubaiàDar es Salaam airplane journey today, considering I am going on about two or three hours of sleep right now as it is. Even though Kaetlyn was nice enough to let me sleep on her bed last night, it was a typical restless anxious night for me (i.e. waking up every half-hour or so panicking that I had not been asleep at all). Not to mention this other thing I have on my mind.

I’ll write more from my ten-hour flight next to Dubai.

Leg #1: En route to Jacksonville, FL (4 hours)

2011-05-29T18:08:00.000+03:00

I finished packing at 1:30am, which I am pretty proud of considering I did not seriously start until yesterday afternoon. I managed to fit everything into my new REI Flash 65 backpack and my old, ripped Adidas duffle bag. Ideally I will be able to finish at least one or two books during transit to Jacksonville before I leave for Tanzania on Wednesday so I can lighten up my load a bit more.

Right now I am reading one of the four Africa-related books that Bari and Tom gave me, My Maasai Life, by Robin Wiszowaty. The following are some expectations and feelings that Robin had that I can relate to about my trip:

Worries about bridging the cultural gap.
“As a woman—and particularly as a young, unmarried woman—I would be expected to assume a very specific role in the family and in the community as a whole” (49).
“I found the social world in Nkoyet-naiborr was much more structured than average American life. There was an elaborate system of customs and rituals, maintain a regimented social dynamic (51).
“As an outsider I wasn’t sure how I fit into this system…I tried to remain unafraid to make mistakes” (52).

COP16 & Climate Justice

2011-01-03T20:57:00.000+03:00

While I was not able to attend this year's UN Climate Change Conference, I found ways to incorporate it into my studies within several of my other classes at Smith College, especially International Politics. I just uploaded my International Politics essay on Scribd about justice, order, and security at the 2010 UN Climate Change Conference, COP16.

Thesis: Bolivia rejected the final Cancún Agreements, being the only one out of 193 countries to do so. Bolivia’s rationale for opposing this final agreement was staked on claims of climate justice, which is often sacrificed in the name of the international order. Bolivia’s refusal to compromise is a very important case of the decisive prioritization of human rights over international order.
The COP16 & Climate Justice

Advice for the COP16

2010-11-14T06:56:00.000+03:00

Here is my advice to delegates going to the UN Climate Change Conference COP16 in Cancun, Mexico later this month. (Use arrow keys to navigate through presentation, or freely navigate around with your mouse and scroll-wheel for zooming. It is best in fullscreen!)

Advice for the COP16 on Prezi

Hope

2010-01-17T01:13:00.000+03:00

SES to COP15: The Journey in Photographs

"Now that the travels of the SESEF student delegation are officially over, I feel it is the ideal time to recap the events which have come to pass. The photographs [here] tell much more of our adventures than I could ever share through use of words alone. ..." (Beth Schultz)

While many of us have been waiting for the smoke to clear and to catch our breathes before launching into our post-COP15 community outreach projects, life has other plans in mind...

Last week I presented about Climate Justice at SES's Population Conference, attended Reed Aronow's Bike MN 350 II planning, and was invited by my church's Earth Angels Apostles Group to give my climate justice presentation for the Adult Education class on February 21 and for the Earth Day service sermon. I was also invited to join the Will Steger Foundation from February 15-17 to present at the University of North Dakota School of Engineering’s celebration of National Engineers Week. (In other worlds, speaking of college, I officially finished applying to Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Reed, Hampshire, St. Olaf, and Swarthmore!)

__________________________________

Many have asked me if I left the Conference hopeless, since it was officially declared a failure by most of the world, but I realized afterward that I had ignored a major part of my experience up until now. The first thing I say to people is always how exhilarating it was to be there with so many powerful world leaders; however, I don’t think this Conference was about them. The COP15 was not about political power; it was about people power. Even while the politicians couldn’t bring a legally-binding agreement back to their countries, every one of the 45,000 people who were there brought something back to their communities. And this makes me hopeful. People power is just as important, if not more so, than political power. Therefore through new eyes, this Conference was not a failure, but a success.

More to come soon!

Onwards,

--kps

Expedition Copenhagen In Three Words

2009-12-25T21:43:00.000+03:00

Expedition Copenhagen Will Steger Foundation delegates wrap up the UN climate negotiations In three words. (The SESEF delegation makes an appearance at 50 seconds.)

Music provided with permission by May Erlewine.

It is good to be home. God Jul! (Merry Christmas)

--Katie Paulson-Smith

Day 15 & 16: Last Weekend

2009-12-21T00:56:00.000+03:00

Maja's dog, Nelson (named after Nelson Mandela!)

Check out Maja's incredible photography at her website here.

(I just figured out where the apostrophe key is on this European keyboard. I've been using ´ or ` but now I can use ')

Today marks the end of one journey, but the beginning of another. Maja and I just spent the past hour talking about the contrast between American and Swedish family, politics, education, etc., which is always fun. But now it is 11pm, and I am beginning to realize that it is my last night here in Landskrona, Sweden. Tomorrow we board the train for the Copenhagen airport at 7am, and I will be returning home in Minneapolis at 5pm, while it will be 2am here in my jet-lag Swedish time :\ We have been making Jul (Christmas) candy all evening, and her aunt, cousin, and brother all came over for dinner. We lit the fourth advent candle tonight, too. Is Christmas really in 5 days ö

I have been proudly singing this traditional Swedish Christmas song around the house lately:

Goder morgon, Goder morgon

Både herre och fru

Vi önskar eder alla en fröjdefull jul.

(Good morning, good morning

Both ladies and gentlemen

We wish you all a peaceful Merry Christmas.)

But anyway, here is a my more-extensive-than-intended field study reflection of this trip:

COP15 Field Study Reflection

This is it, the end of a great adventure, yet the start of another. Time to go home....

Day 13 & 14: Chugga chugga choo choo

2009-12-18T21:35:00.000+03:00

I can`t count on my fingers how many hours we have spent on the train especially over the past couple of days. From being crammed into the boarding area with 30 other people, carrying suitcases, backpacks, coats, and babies, to being delayed for nearly an hour because of snowstorms and a certain Mr. President-- now we know what it feels like be subject to the Law of the Train. Now we know what it feels like in that other world, where your fate is influenced by the elements and the external world. Now we know what it feels like to have our lives suddenly hijacked by the hand of public transportation`s clock. And I`ve got to tell you, for each of the times when it is inconvenient and stressful, there is a time when having the reins taken out of your hands is actually quite liberating and relaxing.

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But anyway, President Obama came and left, and we didn`t get so much as a glimpse of him. At least we can say that we were at the same meeting as he was, and we were there to solve the same problem. Nonetheless, I`m afraid that President Obama is not as powerful as the world was hoping, as he did not bring the ultimate solution to climate change along with him. The speech is still worth watching:

Most notable lines:

Ladies and gentlemen, there is no time to waste. America's made our choice. We have chartered our course. We have made our commitments. We will do what we say. Now I believe it's the time for the nations and the people of the world to come together behind a common purpose. We are ready to get this done today. But there has to be movement on all sides to recognize that it is better for us to act than to talk. It's better for us to choose action over inaction, the future over the past and with courage and faith I believe we can meet our responsibilities to our people and the future of our planet. Thank you very much.

Oh President Obama, why can`t you just be the king of the world?

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Today at Klimaforum, a Navajo woman on a panel speaking about climate justice summed up the problem of the United States very well.

Americans are told three lies about solving climate change:

We can buy our way out of climate change.
We do not have to change our lifestyle.
We have no other solutions to climate change except for nuclear energy and "clean coal."

She wisely pointed out that no one in the U.S. talks about consumption. She also said that 89% of all uranium in the U.S. is located in indigenous communities and that Native Americans should not have to be "economically dependent upon (their) own cultural destruction."

Naomi Klein also spoke on this panel, and I have got to get to know her better. She was even on the Rachel Maddow show one month ago, as if she already wasn`t great enough. Here is some footage of her at Klimaforum on December 11, one week ago: Fate of Planet Rests on Mass Movement for Climate Justice

Enough said. After that talk about post-COP15 mobilization, I attended

a Hare Krishna Mantrameditation session :) Check out music here.

No one in our delegation can believe today was our last official day in Copenhagen.

Nevertheless, I`m looking forward to coming home on Monday for a white Christmas with the fam!

Day 12: Final Day in the Bella Center

2009-12-17T10:06:00.000+03:00

Today if we hadn`t all woken up an hour earlier and left for Copenhagen an hour earlier, we would have been stuck outside of teh Bella Center, along with an angry mob of violent protestors trying to knock down the security fence. One the way out at noon, we heard sirens and saw hellicopters and were pushed into line by dozens of police officers. Not to mention waiting in the the long lines with merciless wind and snow, or walking the long mile that we usually took by metro, which was shut down probably to deter people from reaching the Conference center.

The police said with calm smiles that there was just a little demonstration, but they had everything under control; however, the Will Steger Foundation delegates said that there were a couple of thousand protestors shoving into cops starting riots, with blood and teargas involved.

This video and hourly play-by-play here at the Huffington Post.

"The United Nations Climate Change Conference (Cop15) turned ugly today whenpolice officers beat back hundreds of demonstrators, including a group of 50to 100 delegates that were trying to meet with the protesters" (Hamm, The Mulch: Peaceful Protests Turn Violent in Copenhagen). Here is more about the Reclaim Power action that took place from inside the Bella Center today: "...Reclaim Power, was in part a protest against the unfair terms under which Western countries are negotiating -- with no plans for long-term climate aid finance for developing nations, and with meager carbon cuts. But it was also a protest against a new regime of access, under which the UN has restricted the number of NGO representatives permitted inside negotiations over the next few days, as heads of state arrive."

At first I thought the restrictions to NGOs violated free speech and civil society`s right of participation and that the restrictions to NGOs reflected how indigenous peoples were dismissed in these negotiations; however, upon consideration I realized that these demonstrators are harming their own cause because they are only hampering the negotiation process further.

Even though we did not get the pleasant opportunity to take part in these perhaps too-theatrical demonstrations of sorts, our delegation still had an eventful day. This morning when the Swedish delegates and Beth Schultz and I finally amde it into the Conference, we picked up the daily program and began our day with a free breakfast from the U.S. Center. Then I attended a presentation by a panel of experts from U.S. NGOs, (including USC, WWF, BGA, NWF, and PCGCC) who discussed the status of U.S. climate change legislation. While we were next planning to hear Senator John Kerry discuss the role of a global deal in advancing U.S. legislation, we unfortunately had to elave because the other half of our delegation could not make it in, since the Bella Center was suddenly closed to all other NGOs who had been waiting outside for hours. Nonetheless, from the following excerpt it is clear that Sen. Kerry gave an exceptional speech:

If Dick Cheney can argue that even a 1% chance of a terrorist attack is 100%
justification for preemptive action—then surely, when scientists tell us that
climate change is nearly a 100% certainty, we ought to be able to stand
together, all of us, and join in an all out effort to combat a mortal threat to
the life of this planet.

Next we went to Klimaforum to present with the Will Steger Foundation (WSF) about the role of youth in the Midwest. There was a full house with nearly a hundred people in the audience and a huge amount of positive energy in the room. Arctic Explorer Will Steger introduced the event, then several of the WSF delegates talked about what they have been doing in Copenhagen. Then half of our SESEF delegation spoke about SES, YEA! MN, and COP15, and people were very impressed, to say the least. :) Representative Kate Knuth spoke next about policy and the political dynamics in the Midwest regarding climate change legislation. So sandwiched in between Will and Kate, I think we shined with a pretty bright light (pictures and video coming soon). Afterward we networked up about a dozen contacts, and Ashley and I were invited to go to Colombia to teach indigenous children!

The train ride home was a disaster. The conductor said over the intercom, "due to bomb threats earlier this evening in Copenhagen, this train will not go any farther."

That`s all for today, folks.

Day 11: Julbaord

2009-12-16T01:24:00.000+03:00

Julia being crazy, as usual ;)

We began our day in Landskrona, Sweden at the school of the students who are hosting us, where we shared a Julbaord, or a Christmas smorgasbord/table of low-carbon impact foods, some more traditional than others. My group made a soup with locally-grown vegetables, while others brought in organic meatballs (?) and “little sausages.”

And we were on the front page of their newspaper:

Then for eight of us at a time, it was off to the Conference. On Thursday they are imposing a new quota and allowing only 1,000 yellow-taggers (i.e. NGOs) in, out of 20,000. But while a 5% chance may seem slim, on Friday they are permitting only 90 out of 20,000 people from NGOs into the Conference, so tomorrow could very well be the last time we step foot into the Bella Center (at least for this COP). After the morning session of the Conference tomorrow, I am presenting at Klimaforum with the Will Steger Foundation, so there is still plenty that we can participate in outside of the official talking in Copenhagen.

In the three hours that I had there today, I attended a presentation in the U.S. Center, held by our Environmental Protection Agency about sustainable communities. Gina McCarthy, Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation, and Katie Thompson from the EPA discussed the investments in smart growth and energy efficiency that the U.S. has made toward sustainable development. With a piece of comprehensive Federal environmental legislation lacking in our country, I could not help but see the hollowness of some of the EPA administrators’ rhetoric. While the new Partnership for Sustainable Communities sounds like a good idea to bring separate environmental departments together for once, the fact remains: in the United States, people are developing land three times faster than the population is growing. Ms. McCarthy grew a little standoffish when I interviewed her about how the negotiations would affect U.S. policy and what President Obama would bring to the table since we still lacked strong legislation back home, and she couldn’t hide that we still have a long way to go. (See Interview Inventory-- coming soon)

The rainy snow today did not much help my cold, or whatever ailment it is that I am developing, but I think I can hold out for at least another day or two. And besides, there is rumor that President Obama may actually be coming not Friday, but tomorrow.

Day 10: Al Gore

2009-12-15T00:42:00.000+03:00

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1. For only being at the Conference for 5 hours today, and having to wait outside for the first hour, today was a pretty amazing day. Our day began, like I said, outside in 0° C weather, and of course this was the day I decided to wear a skirt. The line stretched on for a mile, and seemed to consist of all of the lines that we had waited in on this trip combined. But throughout the hour-long wait, we spoke to an extremely interesting woman, Lisa Beal, the director of Environment and Construction Policy at Interstate Natural Gas Association of America. This was her twelfth COP; she had been attending since Kyoto. (Interview Inventory coming soon)

2. When we finally made it through security, Tara and I scurried off to a side event about “renewing the face of the earth,” in which faith-based approaches to climate justice were discussed by a panel representing the World Council of Churches and Caritas Internationalis.

The dialogue’s purpose was to bring ethical principles and voices of faith to the climate change negotiations and examine various faith-based perspectives on policies and action promoting climate justice. An interesting concept that Joy Kennedy, a member of WCC Working Group on Climate Change, brought up was that we must replace our “theology of dominance,” with a “theology of humility” for sustainability, and we must recover who we are as human beings. One man remarked from the audience that we must redefine “rich” to mean a positive relationship with Earth. Also, the president of Caritas Europa, Fr. Erny Gillen, stressed that we share “the human condition” with all other people on this planet, and thus “we are responsible for our brothers and sisters, here and elsewhere, today and tomorrow.”

3. The third and final happening of my day at the Conference was the most thrilling, but since a picture is worth a thousand words…

The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme under the Arctic Council issued a new report synthesizing the latest scientific findings on the Greenland Ice Sheet, “The Greenland Ice Sheet in a Changing Climate”. The report is a preliminary product under the Arctic Council project “Climate Change and the Cryosphere: Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic” (SWIPA) and has been produced by some of the world’s leading experts and synthesizes peer‐reviewed scientific material up until the spring of 2009. It was presented by the Arctic Council Chair, Danish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Per Stig Møller, and the lead author, Professor Dorthe Dahl‐ Jensen, at the UNFCCC COP15 side‐event “Melting Snow and Ice, a Call for Action” on December 14, 2009 at the Bella Center. (See more)

Three conclusions:

1. The Greenland Ice Sheet is losing ice mass and the glaciers are discharging more ice. The Jakobshavn Isbræ has retreated 15 kilometres in the past 8 years.

2. Recent projections of global sea level rise, including contributions from the Greenland Ice Sheet and other land‐based ice and thermal expansion of the oceans, indicate that a global sea level rise of around 1 m may occur within this century. Scientists suggest that beyond a certain point the Ice Sheet may enter an ‘irreversible’ destabilization leading to complete melting.

3. Climate change could bring new business opportunities to Greenland, but also hamper traditional subsistence activities.

Stay tuned for more Gore (he`s speaking at the Conference again tomorrow, so maybe we can reschedule our lunch date?)

Days 8 & 9: Exploring Sweden

2009-12-13T22:02:00.000+03:00

This weekend, we got the opportunity to explore Sweden and immerse ourselsves deeper into Swedish culture. On Saturday, Julia and I in spent our last day together. We slept in until noon, then went to Helsenborg to shop for Christmas presents! (Yes Hunter, I found a little something for you, too...) I have no idea how much I actually spent in U.S. $, so you might want to check my account back home. As I observed passersby I asked myself, would I be able to distinguish the Swedes from U.S.-Americans if they were all mixed in together here? Probably not. Half of the mall`s stores were American, and the other half still played Christmas music in English. But somehow I managed to find a few presents that were uniquely Swedish.

When we got back to Landskrona, I changed homestays (I get a 2-for-1 deal out of this trip!), so now I live with Maja and her wonderful family. Last night Julia, Maja, one of their friends, and I all hung out together. I carried out my first full Swedish conversation, and then when we were finished laughing about that, I pulled out my Bertie Bot`s Every Flavor jelly beans (from Harry Potter) and forced everyone to try them. That was hilarious. I had forgotten how disgusting those were (from the sausage-, to vomit-, to grass-flavored jelly beans). Then Julia made me laugh for a good hour or two when she asked me, "Katie, can you teach me some really cool American things to say?" So I taught them the stupidest features of American pop culture that could think of, like "yo-mamma" jokes, "sup home dawg" phrases, and other slang that I go to extremes to avoid. I actually surprised myself at how much I knew. (**Feel free to comment on this entry with any other hallmarks of U.S. culture that you can think of.)

We spent the day in Lund today, Sunday, and it snowed for the first time. There are Christmas drinks and cookies and music and candles everywhere, which further add to the sentimentalness of the season. This is hardest time of year to be away from family, especially with a white Christmas and Christmas traditions and family waiting for me back in Minnesota.

In Lund we ate lunch at a falafel restuarant, received a tour of a beautiful Lutheran cathedral, Domkyrkan, listened to a Santa Lucia performace in the town square, and shopped around some.

Tomorrow it is back to the Conference, for the biggest, most critical week. Out of all of the hundreds of big whigs coming, everyone that I talk to here says they are most looking forward to President Obama coming (Friday). For once, I am proud to be an American.

Day 7: Green Architecture for the Future

2009-12-12T10:48:00.000+03:00

I'm doing very well here :) I am starting to burnout a little, but we took the day off today and went to Helsenborg, Humlebæk, and Louisiana to visit this innovative green architecture museum, Green Architecture for the Future.

The Conference will be just starting to heat up next week, with all of the critical leaders coming (i.e. President Obama!). I wish I could go hear Desmond Tutu on Sunday, but I’m not allowed to since there are supposed to be violent demonstrations around the area (people adding pressure to the negotiations because they want to see more serious actions and results in a legally binding, international, climate agreement.) I am terribly disappointed about not being able to go hear him, though :(

But anyway, if you really must hear the negatives, I am 3 days behind on blogging, I am exhausted, our SES delegation is starting to split into 2 groups and conflict is spreading, I have had absolutely no time to run, there is no piano here, and I can't wait to come home for a white Christmas!

Now for the positives: Julia (my current host), Maya (my host as of tomorrow), Louise (one of their friends), and I all went out to dinner for the best Chinese food I have ever had in my life. (It was kind of humorous to see Chinese people speaking Swedish.) The food for me, the inconvenient vegan, has been just fine. There are these followers of the "Supreme Master," who give out free stuff every day outside of the Conference. One day they gave us these terribly RANDOM free books about dogs to promote vegetarianism (?) outside of the Conference every day, and they gave me a delectable veggie sandwich with fake ham, tomatoes, and cucumbers on rye bread a couple of days ago. My host family has made me soup several times, and they have 4 or 5 different flavors of jam and jelly in their fridge that I have on my toast every morning. Not to mention, I am a delegate to the most important meeting, with most important leaders, trying to solve the most important problem in the world right now.

Tomorrow I get to sleep in, and we're going shopping (for Christmas presents!). Last night I had a sleepover with one of my best friends in the delegation as of this week, Tara, and we stayed up until 1am Skyping to a YEA! MN gathering in Minneapolis.

My mom asked me if I felt safe here, and I do. I feel brave, too. Every day this week I walked to the bus stop and rode the bus to the train station by myself! (That's one of my proudest accomplishments yet, up there with asking Wangari Maathai a question in front of the hundreds surrounding her.)

Like I said, I am doing very well here, but I still can't wait to come home for Christmas.

Day 6: International Human Rights Day

2009-12-11T08:38:00.000+03:00

Today, the fourth day of the Conference, was International Human Rights Day, and a critical time in the Conference to consider the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).

1. We started out our day today in downtown Copenhagen near Tivoli Gardens, where we explored Hopenhagen Central and Klimaforum. It was awesome to see instead of parking lots, hundreds of "biking lots." Unfortunately, the only attraction at Hopenhagen was the huge globe and cute kids, since the booths did not open until noon. But Klimaforum was pretty neat.
Klimaforum is "the global civil society counterpart of the official UN conference in the Bella Center.” Not only did I find handfuls of awesome stickers, but I had discussions with people about nuclear energy, spirituality and the environment, the impact of a 7-meter rise of sea level, and climate justice.

2. After exploring Copenhagen for several hours, we returned for the Young and Future Leaders Day at the Conference, where we were greeted by a mob of youth holding an action (see Tara’s entry).

3. Following some blogging and practice Skyping (for Skype to SES and YEA! MN Winter Gathering tonight), I attended a side event about recognizing and protecting human rights within the Copenhagen agreement. The following is what I learned:

a. It is important to discuss climate change in regards to human rights. Human rights are the heart of climate change, as compared to the science, economics, and politics of climate change, which are the head.

b. Climate change is a human rights issue because it threatens:

i. The right to life, physical integrity, and security
ii. The right to means of subsidence
iii. The right to water
iv. The right to property and use of traditional lands
v. The right to health
vi. The right to freedom from discrimination
vii. The right of women
viii. The right of culture
ix. The right to participate

c. Human rights make moral imperatives into legal obligations:

i. Increased emphasis on adaptation
ii. Stronger mitigation goals
iii. Reinforces validity of principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and “polluter pays” principle
iv. Holds individuals responsible through calculations of per-capita emissions

d. An international climate change agreement must include:

i. All parties recognitions of human impact on environment
ii. Obligations to uphold human rights
iii. Citizens’ guaranteed participation in climate decisions
iv. Help to those who are especially vulnerable
v. Help to those who are already suffering from climate change

e. The question is what international legal regime do we place on the crime of climate change? How is a victim compensated for a human rights violation as severe as climate change? As I began to inquire about these complications, I started to wonder whether climate change was just another excuse for humans to blame each other about something

Nonetheless, human rights must not be ignored or dismissed in the COP-15 negotiations, because they truly are heart of cliamte change. According to the human impact report on the human cost of cliamte change published by the Global Humanitarian Forum:

Estimates of Suffering due to Climate Change Today:

Deaths - over 300,000 per year
Severely Affected - over 300 million people
Living at Extreme Risk - 500 million people
Climate Displaced People - over 20 million
Economic Losses - over US 100 billion dollar

Estimates of Suffering Tomorrow (in 20 years time)

Deaths - approximately 500,000 per year
Severely Affected: approximately 650 million people
Climate Displaced People – more than 75 million
Economic Losses – over US 300 billion dollars

Day 5: Full day

2009-12-10T02:12:00.000+03:00

Today was only the third day of the Conference, and it was full of breaking news and personal enlightenment.

1. Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP)

a. Issues relating to join implementation the clean development mechanism (CDM) were discussed. The juiciest thing I got out of this huge meeting was that India announced that it did not want to change the existing legislation of the Kyoto Protocol or Bali Action Plan, which state that it is a developing country and therefore does not have to comply with the amount of CO_s developed countries must cut. Then the worst case scenario happened: China stood up and said it agreed with India.

2. Taking action at home—EPA Administrator, Ms. Lisa Jackson, highlighting administration’s domestic efforts

a. I got stuck in the overflow room, so I unfortunately did not get to see Ms. Jackson as up close and personal as hoped, but it was all rhetoric anyway. The only solid piece of information she gave was the EPA’s conclusion that “greenhouse gases threaten public health and the environment, and science overwhelmingly shows greenhouse gas concentrations at unprecedented levels due to human activity.”

3. Indigenous peoples’ assessment of the climate change negotiations and discussed strategies beyond Copenhagen

a. Patricia Cochran, an Inupiaq and director of the Alaska Native Science Commission, emphasized that we must combine traditional knowledge with scientific knowledge. For instance, an online searchable database of indigenous knowledge has just been developed, while dogsled teams are better than snowmobiles, since dogs tell you when the ice is too thin and dangerous. We need to find the balance between the teachings of our elders and those of modern technology.

b. Sarimin Boengkih, Director of the Kanak Development Agency in New Caledonia, said that we belong to the land. We don’t own the land. The land gives people identity and species that we live from every day. Boengkih posed the question, what can we do about climate change anday what we know and cultivate….Teach people to live with the land. We need to know how to live in harmony with the land.”

c. John Henriksen, a Saami of Norway and human rights legal expert, discussed the place of human rights, or lack thereof, in the COP-15 negotiations and agreement. Negotiators say that this Conference is strictly about cutting CO₂ emissions and has nothing to do with human rights. Henriksen said, “Human rights should be an integral part of any climate response: the right to life, adequate housing, food, an adequate standard of health.”

d. Joji Carino, Tebtebba Foundation (http://www.tebtebba.org/) & Coordinator of the IIFB Working Group on Indicators, stressed the importance of having an ecosystems approach as framework for an indigenous-sensitive climate change solution. She noted that REDD has a narrow focus on carbon and does not capture the complexity of the forest ecosystem. We need an ecosystem-based approach connected to the indigenous people, because they are the most impacted and historically most experienced with adaptive management, from diversity to balance.

4. U.S. youth meeting

a. Discussed various youth actions, like the walk-in on at Marriot on Climate Skeptics’ Americans for Prosperity meeting tonight (see Tara’s entry).

b. Discussed tomorrow’s Young and Future Leaders Day and meeting with U.S. delegates

c. Desicussed recent controversies and how to respond

i. Climategate= “We didn’t live through a decade of the Bush administration to get stuck in this again. I’m from a generation that is done having that debate. The science is settled. We’re pushing for a strong, global climate agreement.”

ii. The leaked Danish Text= It is a weak and dangerous text of low-ambition, and according to the Guardian, it is understood to:

• Force developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement;

• Divide poor countries further by creating a new category of developing countries called "the most vulnerable";

• Weaken the UN's role in handling climate finance;

• Not allow poor countries to emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon per person by 2050, while allowing rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes.

We want a new legal outcome or an amended Kyoto. We support Tuvalu, which is a new contact group that supports Less Developed Countries (LDCs) and vulnerable, low-lying countries. (China and India have concerns about Tuvalu rivaling the Kyoto Protocol, but it is really a new out come looking for discussion in an open forum instead of behind closed doors, where LDCs and indigenous people are left out of the dialogue.)

5. The Declaration of the Mother Earth—rights and climate change

Several natives from Bolivia adorned in traditional dress began with a prayer over the Earth. They emphasized that “climate change effects show that a normative legal system has not developed at an international level to protect the rights of all natural beings, including the planet itself.”

This was a refreshing way to end such a complex day...International Human Rights Day tomorrow!

Day 4: My Life is Complete

2009-12-09T01:05:00.000+03:00

Check out the Interview Inventory—coming soon!

1. When we first walked in today, I interviewed the German NGO for National Disaster Reduction, and I interviewed a Climate Debt Agent from MS Actionaid (aka the people in red).

2. Tara and I attended a Student Climate Research Campaign presentation about NASA GLOBE, a worldwide hands-on education program that promotes the teaching and learning of science, enhances environmental literacy and stewardship, and promotes scientific discovery. Afterward I interviewed Dr. Donna Charlevoix from the GLOBE program, about climate change and education and made a good contact. I have never realized I was so passionate about education before.

3. Hierarchical Status at this Conference is indicated by the color of your badge. A yellow stripe indicates non-governmental organizations (NGOs—that’s us), a lime green stripe indicates intergovernmental, a light blue stripe indicates United Nations observers, an orange stripe indicates the press, but a pink stripe indicates importance: party government. On the way to the YOUNGO booth, Tara and I were stopped by a pink stripe: Ms. Fatou Diaw from Senegal, President of the Organization of African Business Women. She said that there were not enough women at this Conference, and women were not invited to participate in the carbon market, even though they were most affected by climate change.

4. A group of us listened to the Youth Climate Ambassadors’ (UNICEF-sponsored delegates) be interviewed, and I asked the 15-year old, Xam Maumoon, boy from the Maldives about his personal story. Seven other kids from at-risk countries shared their experiences of climate change impacts and solutions at home.

5. Tara and I participated in the YOUNGO “bed-in” action. In honor of the 29^th anniversary of John Lennon’s assassination, youth from around the world joined together in “bed-in” dressed in pajamas and holding pillows and toothbrushes and sang “Give Peace a Chance,” with new lyrics like “give you a chance” and “cut greenhouse gas.” I am so glad that instead of filming, Tara, Deon, and Jessica forced me to participate in this action for once. When upwards of fifty press people gathered around us with cameras and microphones, it became an empowering action.

6. On my way to register for a youth high-level briefing, a cloaked figure in maroon and goldenrod caught my eye. After following behind in hot pursuit for several minutes, I finally found the confidence to walk up and interview the Tibetan monk, Lotsan Tanzen, from Tibet Third Pole.

7. I attended a Green Belt Movement presentation half-expecting it to be a pre-recorded movie or something, about the one and only Wangari Maathai’s work in the Green Belt movement. But oh my gosh, was I pleasantly mistaken. I MET WANGARI MAATHAI—Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and my hero!!!! This was the most incredible moment of my life. I dropped dead right now, I would be perfectly content. My life is complete. After listening to her speak, my adrenaline surging through my body and my face flushed with disbelief, I approached her and fought through a mob of people and said, “I just wanted to shake your hand.” Then I told her how empowering and inspiring she was and that she was my hero. And I handed her my business card, and she smiled and nodded, staring straight into my soul.

I am so fortunate to be here. Thank you.

Ubuntu-- I am who I am because of who we are.

Day 3: First Day of COP-15

2009-12-08T02:54:00.000+03:00

My conclusion of today: I will be returning to a United Nations Conference. (Current career interest-- I think I've come full circle now.) The rich diversity and hopeful ambition and purposeful goal of nearly all the world's peoples coming together to solve the same problem is empowering and intoxicating, to say the least. Life is definitely happening to me, and it is only day #1.

(It is 1:30 am here, [and the birds are already chirping??] so I apologize if there are mistakes...there is just so much to contemplate from today.)

The events of today:

1. You never know who you are going to run into on the train. This morning (12/7/09), on the train ride over to Copenhagen for the first day of the U.N. Convention on Climate Change COP-15, Alex Sheker just happened to be seated beside three ministers of the environment from the Democratic Republic of Congo. We then proceeded to discuss with the ministers what they were fighting for in these negotiations, including funding, technology, building capacity, and reducing poverty (see SES delegation blog for my article on the interview).

2. We walked into the Balla Center and it was overwhelmingly exhilarating. We finally ran into the Will Steger Foundation and spoke with them for a few minutes and said hello to Will himself later that afternoon. In the midst of our conversation, all of the sudden a young woman from a Youth Non-Governmental Organization (YOUNGO) ran up to us and invited us to the Children's Climate Conference occurring at that very moment, when we had basically just walked in the door. So Mr. Johnson.com shooed us on our way, and off we went, to event #1.
The young people speaking on the panel were extremely articulate and inspiration speakers. We have an interview with them tomorrow morning, actually.

3. I recorded the flash dance on my camcorder:

4. The Climate Justice Perspective meeting hosted by the Third World Network was disappointingly bland. I'm not sure what I expected, maybe a little more radical Martin Luther King, Jr. action and a little less protocol politics?
One provocative statement that was made by a Hispanic representative argued against the common saying, "climate change does not discriminate." He instead said, "climate change does discriminate." Look at the low-lying coastal areas where the sea level is expected to rise, as compared to inland U.S. But even so, does climate change discriminate, or do people?

5. Deon and I meandered around (in a daze) interviewing random exhibitors at the hundreds of side events and ended up with about a hundred pounds of literature (so much for the whole environmental theme of the conference) and half a dozen interviews. I am currently working on compiling an audio interview inventory that people can access from our blog.

6. The final event of the day Deon and I attended was called Plan B for Climate Stabilization, which was a discussion given by Janet Larsen, director of Research, Earth Policy Institute. She spoke about Plan B 4.0, success stories from around the world, and a call for rapid and comprehensive mobilization. "Cutting CO2 emissions 80% by 2020 will take a worldwide mobilization at wartime speed," she said, attracting my attention for the first time ever with a war metaphor. Her concluding statement was that we don't need new technology; we need leadership and will power.

Day 2: Meeting the Mayor and Castle

2009-12-07T00:56:00.000+03:00

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Sleep has never felt so wonderful. 15 hours is exactly what Ineeded. Today we met with the Mayor of Landskrona who gave us books, pins, cookies, and a welcoming speech. Then we all went out for lunch together. There are 12 of us including our 2 teachers, from the School of Environmental Studies in the U.S. and 10 of them from Lund and Landskrona, Sweden. After lunch, we received a tour of the castle, or Citadel, which was surrounded by a moat and was haunted by different ghosts.

The stories about prisoners who had been kept there over the years were interesting. In 1918 Landskrona became the only Swedish prison for female "vagrants," and we got to walk through the rooms that many of the prostitues ended up in inside the Citadel. One woman was held there who took in children to take care of them, but ended up not making as much money as she wanted, since she could only house so many. So, she started off killing children to make more money. She was held in the Citadel, and we stood in the room where she hanged herself.

After the tour of the castle, we took the train to the Bella Center to pick up our free bus and train passes for commuting to and from Copenhagen for the COP-15. Tomorrow is the first day of the Conference, and we are all anxious with excitement.

Onwards,
--Katie PS.

Day 1: Travelling to Landskrona, Sweden

2009-12-07T00:45:00.000+03:00

Saturday, December 5, 2009

After 15 hours of travelling through airports, from Minnesota to Amsterdam to Copenhagen, and commuting to and from the COP-15 Conference center to retreive our official accreditation passes at the Bella Center, which took us 6 trains (with all of luggage dragging behind us, fighting through killer sliding doors of elevators and trains)-- we finally made it. And even after just the first 2 days, it was definitely worth it.

I am staying with the best host family in the world. Julia is extremely funny and warm and smart and enjoyable, and she reminds me of my brother Hunter, so much ;) I feel like the luckiest person on earth right now. Julia and her mom even bought me these dairy-free products that I did not even know existed, like cream cheese and butter-- without milk or eggs. And Julia`s mom gave up her room for me with an amazingly comfotable bed, which I slept in for 15 horus last night, since I had gone 29 hours without sleep.

We have been laughing and talking about everything from their yellow "banana car," to their love of President Obama, to the poridge they leave out for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, to the decline of religion in Sweden, to American and Swedish stereotypes and accents...''

A couple of ongoing jokes from language misunderstandings that we`ve had so far:

When my host family first picked me up from the airport, they asked, "Do you know everyone in the United States?" and of course they meant from the U.S. delegation, but we laughed and laughed about how popular I must be to know everyone in the U.S.
When Julia`s friend and I were talking about running track and field, she was describing her first track meet and said that she was trying to keep up with 2 other fast and experienced girls, so she got really tired and "ran into the wall." When I asked her if she got hurt, she burst out laughing and explained that she was only trying to use an expression.

I can already tell this is going to be a great trip :)

Let the adventure begin,
--Katie PS.