Snack Foods of Stone Town

(This post dictated by Calvin) In Stone Town, there are many different snack foods that kids buy with their own money, including Chama, Ringos, Nice, Milk & Malt, Glucose, and Sweet & Salt.  They cost 200 T Shillings, or around 14 cents a package. You buy them at little general stores called dukas.  There’s one next door to us that’s run by a teenager.  This is a picture of our friend who owns the duka where we usually go to to buy water and snacks.  You can also buy expensive locally made snacks at my favorite restaurant, Radha Foodhouse (see the picture of their case here).  They cost 2000 T shillings, or around $1.40, but they’re bigger than the others, so they’re not really so expensive—and they’re better.

I recommend Chama, Sweet & Salt, and Nice.  Chama is like little grits balls with flavoring.  Ringos is the same.  All the others are various kinds of cookies.  Nice is my favorite and is a coconut-flavored cookie. 

Dreams and Nightmares

Calvin is a pretty self-reflective kid (well, usually).  He’s been thinking a lot in the past day, and he helped crystallize for me some of what I’ve been thinking about the meaning of this year.

Yesterday at school, his teacher asked him to help out with teaching other kids how to use PowerPoint, and then later asked him to referee a soccer game.  These both are pretty big jobs, and Calvin took to his new responsibilities thoughtfully (or at least he did in his retelling).  He said to me, “It was hard to get my work done and to help other people do theirs!” and “It was hard to be fair at the soccer game, when I really wanted my team to win!” (the kids’ school is divided into two “houses”: Mamba and Simba, and anytime the kids play a game, those are the two teams).  But even though it was hard, Calvin really enjoyed it, and as the boys were getting ready for bed, Calvin was full of questions for me about what you have to do to become a teacher and whether there are jobs for people that combine his different interests (wildlife science teacher? aquatic biology teacher?).  He’s really thinking about how his experiences here might lead him to his life’s work.

This morning when I asked Calvin how he’d slept, he said he’d had some terrible dreams—not like the monster nightmares he sometimes has, but bad dreams about real things.  He’d dreamed that when we got back to America, all of our friends and relatives (including our dogsitter and our dog) had thought it was such a good idea to live abroad that they’d moved abroad for a year or more!  Oh no!  And then he’d fallen back asleep and had another dream, that when we got back to America, there was no electricity!  Oh no!

Those are Calvin’s dreams and nightmares, but he’s clearly working through some of the same things as we all are.  Thanks to all of you for reading the blog and keeping us connected with home.  We hope to make good use of this year—and that the elements of home that we’re missing most will be there when we return!

Obamamania

Today, in honor of the first anniversary of President Obama’s inauguration, I’m posting about Obamamania.  Probably half of the time when I say I’m from America, people here respond with one word: “Obama!” There are Obama kangas (colorful traditional fabric), there are Obama wallets, there are Obama bumper stickers, there is even a line of Obama clothing.  I’ve missed tons of pictures of Obama ephemera when I haven’t had my camera handy and/or haven’t been able to photograph discreetly, but here are a few.

Although Americans are not universally loved here and although I have heard concerns voiced about the corrupting influence of American culture on young Muslims, Obama is loved—because he’s black, because his father was African, because he is familiar with Muslim culture.  To many Africans, Obama is the home town boy who made it big, and regardless of what he does during the remainder of his presidency, the very fact of who he is has endeared him and America to many Africans.

A very special offer--for you!

Happy Revolution Day (Jan. 12)! This year we're celebrating our usual holidays in new ways and are discovering some new ones, as well.

We have a very special holiday offer for you!! Oscar and Calvin have started designing these crazy cards in Microsoft Word, and we thought it might be fun if they actually sent them.

Their card-designing started with a series of very traditional (and amazing) holiday cards designed using Microsoft Word shape art, and they've transformed into a couple of series of other cards--even if they don't design more, we have enough to last for a whole year now.

So send me your e-mail address and your preference for one or more of the following periodic card services if you would like to participate in our special offer (I'm their mom, of course, but I think the cards are pretty cool).

1. Oscar's holiday card series (on holidays, as appropriate)
2. Calvin's ancient civilization card series (on about the 15th of the month)
3. Oscar's curio cards (on about the 15th of the month)
4. Calvin's monster cards (on about the 30th of the month)
5. Oscar's video game-inspired cards (on about the 30th of the month).

Hope you'll take advantage of this very special offer!  To participate, e-mail me at my junk-mail address, jnchristoph@hotmail.com (I can't find a way to put my e-mail up here securely, and I'm being cautious about receiving spam--not from you, of course! In general, the hotmail address isn't one I check a lot.)

Literacy, Part I?

For me, one of the most exciting events of our stay in Zanzibar has been the visit on Saturday to a little school in the countryside, where a colleague of mine will be running a family literacy project, funded by his successful grant proposal to the International Reading Association.

 

The project is designed to give kids a solid start toward lifelong literacy by encouraging them and their families to read for fun. That’s challenge enough in the United States, where there are plenty of books and most adults can read well.  Here, where there are so few books and where fewer parents can read, it’s a daunting task, indeed.

 

But the project is terrific.  It will provide books to kids and it will help teachers and parents to develop low- and no-cost learning opportunities (things like making books out of cardboard and writing down stories—the kinds of things my kids have been playing with since we’ve been in Zanzibar). And low-cost is definitely important; the kids who showed up to school for the information meeting (on a Saturday, no less) were interested and excited, but neither they nor the school had writing utensils for them to fill out paperwork. So we scraped together pens from purses and bags and managed to get the job done. 

I was pleasantly surprised pleased to see my tax dollars at work there, as well.  Although the school was by no means luxurious, the well-tended teaching aids in the resource room at the school were funded by USAID (notice the beautiful hand-made supply checkout list on the blackboard behind the USAID-stamped chair).

I had a fantastic time—not least of which because I was able to talk and listen successfully in Kiswahili for almost 5 hours.  I’m so excited about participating in this project, in whatever way I can, and I hope to write more soon about my work there and about my own developing research on adult basic literacy.

Hamna umeme. (There is no Electricity.)

I’d hoped to write about the electricity situation when it was all just a distant memory. Unfortunately, the entire island of Unguja (the biggest island in the Zanzibar archipelago) has been without power since December 10, and it looks like we’ll be without electricity for some time now (the latest word on the street is until mid- to late-March).

Official and unofficial reports of when electricity will return have changed from day to day, and there are rampant rumors about what caused the power outage in the first place and who is to blame. Sometimes we hear power will return in two weeks, sometimes we hear that the U.S. government is building a new electrical line to the island, and sometimes we hear that one European government or other has sent huge generators to power the island (this last one is my favorite—I imagine huge, benevolent Godzilla-sized generators coming in to the port of Stone Town to save the day). It helps to be amused by the reports because finding accurate news is difficult.  There are no English newspapers on Zanzibar—the only place where this is a big news story—and even people who are fluent in both English and Kiswahili seem in the dark about what’s really going on.  As best I can tell, though, we have no power because there are not redundant electrical systems here; if one thing goes wrong with the island’s power supply, chances are the whole island will lose power—much like the old-style Christmas lights would short out entirely if one bulb was out.

So we wait.  In the mean time, the blackout is taking its toll on the island, where the use of electrical appliances is relatively recent but has become pretty widespread within the past 30 years:

• air pollution and continued deforestation from the increased use of traditional charcoal for cooking
• noise and air pollution from the gasoline generators that the lucky few have (our apartment building has a small generator for charging batteries and for a couple of hours’ worth of lights/fans, and almost no one has power 24-hours/day)
• fuel shortages
• higher gas prices (at about $4/gallon and rising)
• higher consumer good costs (because of the higher cost of transportation and production)
• business distress (if you’re eking out a living sewing piecework on a sewing machine or are baking birthday cakes in an electric oven, then there’s no money for a generator, which means no money to run the business)
• water shortages (people who don’t have generators no longer have power to pump  running water in their homes)
• higher prices for water, both bottled and at public spigots
• setbacks in education (schools are considering closing because there is no water—the boys’ school has a generator and won’t close, the university currently has a generator running 9-5, and Brady’s evening tutoring program will likely stay open if we can find money for a generator for lights) 
• higher risk of sanitation problems with the water shortages
• higher malaria rates (people are getting lax about sleeping under mosquito nets and keeping screens on windows when those layers of protection mean less fresh air to make sleeping conditions in the tropical summer more comfortable)
• higher risk for heat exhaustion

We have six more months planned here: Can we make it if we are able to keep powering up computers to work, if we can manage to sleep in the heat, and if we have an escape plan if the public health situation worsens?  Or do we give up? Alternatives we’ve considered are to try to go to mainland Tanzania (where there is power) or to go home and forego our plans for research, more traveling, and the World Cup (we have tickets!). 

In thinking through options, we realized that we’re not going to get a chance to be in East Africa again for a long time, and we have a lot invested here—in Zanzibar, specifically.  We like our neighbors, the boys like their school, we have fulfilling jobs and research to do here, and Zanzibar is a pretty safe place to be by East African standards. And cheesy though the Fulbright goal of achieving “mutual understanding” is, the attempted airline bombing last month reminds us of the importance of Americans living and getting along with people in Muslim societies. So, we’re sticking it out.  But if you have a spare Godzilla-sized generator (or better yet, a Mothra-sized solar generator), I know a place that could use it.

Our new kitchen cabinet