Kipande ya Harusi ya Watanzania (ya Wachristo)

• 9am: Hair Salon
• 10am: Ceremony (Kanisani)
• 12am: Women’s Ceremony “Kitchen Party”
• (Lunch served)
• Random photos
• Rest until evening
• 7pm: Reception
• Total: 12 hrs.

Bride’s ride

Church Service

Energetic Choir

Videography

I Do (Nakubali)

Car Parade

Tanzanian Dry September

Discjockey

Bride and Groom, Bright decorations

Food

“Kitchen Party” for the mamas to exchange mama gifts.

Reception with Energetic MC

Table of Honor with a comprehensive selection of drinks.

Dazzling colored kitamba dresses

More Gifts

Dancing

Large organizing crew. (I didn’t gain 20 lbs: full pockets)

Bonus: Where’s Waldo, our videographer, my counterpart Allan ;)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From our Excursion Peak.

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

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

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

Unexpected Desert-Jungle; Entering Kiboriani Village

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where there is No Doctor (Swahili)

 The typical approach to AIDS in the last twenty years has been a frustrating complex. For years it the world was holding its breath and waiting for it to erupt across the globe. It did not. When I accepted my invitation to go to Tanzania I was not sure what to think about the disease. As we were leaving the US, one trainee offered tales of preventative successes during our collective, frenetic rush around the globe as we got to know the 40 people we’d spend the next two months with. She explained the dynamics of community theater and how it has been used to fight AIDS in East Africa. Another trainee wondered at the profoundly low chance to transfer the disease listed on Wikipedia. For a long period this was most of what I’d heard about it. We were quite busy with adjusting to the facets of culture on the surface.  

The entry on ineffective homeopathy in WtiND Swahili.

Eventually we had a section in our Pre-Service Training Swahili language text about UKIMWI (AIDS) and spent a week in PowerPoint presentations with somewhat different perspective on facts than we’d heard online. Like the false wives-tale cures that resembles their symptoms, they were biased for hyperbole instead of attempting to root to the core issue. All Peace Corps volunteers have been through college and most of the individuals in group of teachers had been through quite good ones–a constructively critical bunch. Over and over, my colleagues noted peripheral issues in the approach of PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and Peace Corps. Things like:

“why isn’t more focus being placed on malaria which kills very many people and can be prevented”,

the naïve “how is farming related to AIDS”,

How come teachers are some of the most affected?

or “why don’t we give free condoms”.

The presentations were so surface-oriented. The disease transmission were worst-case without qualifications. There were no references. They didn’t provide much for us to get our teeth into so we could really feel out the issues. Most of us were going into science, math or computers teaching, with degrees & backgrounds in Engineering, Physics and Biology practically all of us had read and used scientific papers. Little of the training required these skills and they went unutilized rightly but in this corner they would have inspired us. I asked why we couldn’t read some substantive research on the subject of AIDS and prevention. It was not yet time.

In the unending summer before I left for Tanzania, I had read a review in the New York Review of Books on AIDS. It sounded pretty solid but it was one entry in a vacuum of knowledge. I emailed my friend serving in Peace Corps Lesotho but didn’t hear anything back. I placed an order for the book and though I didn’t crack the cover before I departed, I felt that at some point I might be inspired to tap it. Even as we arrived at the AIDS section of training I couldn’t find the time. Training is intense and I read slowly. Finally, as I travelled across half the country to my Peace Corps PEPFAR conference concerning AIDS in February, I started reading.

The book “The Invisible Cure” (2006) begins with anecdotes about the Biologist author’s ill-fated quest for an AIDS vaccine back in 1993 which began in Uganda. She walks through essentially the same culture which we have been living through. Generators burn out and hundreds of cell samples are ruined, boxes containing critical research supplies shipped from America are lost in a closet next door to her house for six months, and refrigerator prices rise 200% because she is white. Still she is piqued. The taxi driver who delivers her to her research hospital is informed enough about AIDS that she wonders if he had read papers on the disease. Others in the community too. Ugandan radio programs discusses the evolution and difficulties of creating a vaccination. In about 1990 the AIDS epidemic was taking a downward turn in Uganda and taking a devastatingly upward one elsewhere all along the East coast of Africa. The UN promotes a report which credits condoms, a single false lead which probably has widely mislead aid until very recently.

Every bit of the book seems to be well researched. With twenty years of data around the world in publications it is surprising that few other observers had drawn together so many points. Perhaps it is Epstein’s personal touch in cultural brooking and willingness to follow through with footwork that made it possible. From 1993 until 2006 she travels around Sub-Saharan Africa–South African miners from Mozambique, Tanzanians in Kagera region, Zambia, Zimbabwe, farmers in Kenya–each with a different perspective on AIDS, few so united against AIDS as Uganda in the 1990s. She meets peoples divided over AIDS by globalization, inadvertent stigmatism spawned by existing campaigns, corruption, funding, religion, government lies and tragically flawed research.

At my PEPFAR conference I was about a third of the way into the book. I found myself disappointed: I wasn’t yet far enough to rework her deft analysis within the imperfect framework created by our government. In the face of such a detailed analysis I was even more let down when the weak statistics from the same powerpoint slides showed up again. The trouble with a complicated thesis with non-obvious supporting data is it is not simple to express. Epstein suggests that a combination of women rights, traditional support networks, and partner reduction (”zero grazing”) were in large part responsible for the Ugandan drop. ABCs is a popular way to promote AIDS “behavior change”: Abstinence (A) and condoms (C) were both overemphasized by their respective camps at the expense of faithfulness. The Be Faithfulness (B) message was a casualty of over cautiousness by white policymakers concerning the stereotyped African image.

Voodoo? (WtiND Swahili)

So again, for so many years, the world waited for a global outbreak. The reason it did not come is that Africa is culturally, sexually different. Epstein strongly argues that because of weak economies and different cultural background many (not all) young men and women pursue multiple concurrent relationships. Note this does not mean more partners in a lifetime, just that instead of it being a scandal to have more than one boyfriend or girlfriend it is tolerated on either sides as long as transactional signals are lovingly affected. It is not best compared with prostitution but does obviously run counter to Western (and Eastern) norms. The reality of multiple partners in both genders creates a natural environment for HIV and AIDS to spread based on its somewhat unique epidemiology. In this environment all of the individuals are connected in a network of concurrent long-term sexual relationships.  

A single HIV encounter is highly unlikely to precipitate the disease but the connection to all the other routine husband-and-wife and extended girlfriend-boyfriend interactions approach certain transmission to all parties without reliable condom use within most pairs. Studies cited show HIV spreads at much higher rates, perhaps 1000% greater than average, during the first months because the immune system is yet to respond. This is perhaps a side note if you don’t notice this multiple concurrent relationship wrinkle. 

Answers to our HIV questions from training were laid out with scientific thrift. Giving away free condoms makes people utterly devalue them. Concurrent relationships are at the heart of the disease in Africa. As biased PCVs we need to stay away from going the liberal, condom advocacy path to balance the perceived faith-based PEPFAR abstinence campaigns, all missing the resonance of teaching faithfulness. Rote teaching young students even more statistics and transmission details that they can already impressively rattle off is ineffective. Life skills lessons are important but still don’t inherently get at the root cure. When multiple concurrent relationships are status-quo they need to be explicitly addressed with explanation of their dangers. We can’t keep ignoring what has not worked for twenty years. Even HIV tests are relatively impotent when the first months, when it is still undetectable, are the most crucial in the spread and male-circumcision has its own problems, also addressed.

(Photo attrib)

The dawa we need to introduce is a focus on faithfulness to a few partners. The valorous abstinence and the phallic shaped condom are powerful symbols, like those roots, but distract us from the real, root cure.

Today, Uganda is trying to return to its strategy as it has strayed since 2000 toward focusing on abstinence with devastatingly few successes. Malaria is now being dealt with by the recently renewed PEPFAR (and related projects). Also notable: Very recently, researchers discovered a non-dominant but significant genetic problem that arose for Malaria resistance hundreds of years ago which accounts for approximately 11% of the total HIV infected population.

Dirt and Worms (CC photo attrib)

The night-shift doctor cheerfully informed me on Thursday that once again I have contracted Ascaris Doctorchickenscratchisuniversal otherwise known as Roundworm. I first heard of the details underlying intestinal worms from the Bio/Micro/Zoology course students at Uni and remember being disgusted and amused by their complexity of assault on the human physiology.
 

Identification involves a swab from a “marble sized” waste globule secured in a sturdy receptacle resembling a match box, stained for contrast. The eviction involves three days and six pink chew pills, all in all not so bad. The second day of treatment seems to include a fever and generally crazy immune response as to be expected from leaches being poisoned from their firm stations, with their able counter-immuno manipulations of my body disabled. All week previous I slept 2-4 hours more than normal, generally interfering with my frantic pre-semester sysadminning duties with my Solaris systems but thankfully not with my rigorous hiking regime I’ll cover later. I suspect they’d been around for at least four weeks prior while they slowly built in strength and energy draining capabilities to their doom.
 

I swear I’ve been taking every possible precaution: bleaching fruits with edible skins, peeling tomatoes, filtering & boiling water for ten whole minutes, all for naught. Well, there was that one bunch of Concorde grapes… Still, I was mildly amused when the US had the recent outbreak of food-skin-borne bacteria, all in a days work in The Rest of the World.
 

Health Positives:

• Doctor bill + medication: less than $3, uninsured cost; 35 minutes after work.
• haven’t had more than a few hours of flu in almost a year, maybe the standard-PC-issue flu shot works?
• Having real energy to spearhead projects again after weeks of none is like a longer-term adrenalin shot.