Keeping Entertained in a Low-Tech Environment, Part VI: Drifting

There’s nothing like being away from home to make you miss home.  I grew up in Indiana, home of the Indy 500.  Though I did spend some quality weekends in high school babysitting for kids whose parents were at the 500, the closest I’ve ever been to the 500 was attending my brother’s kindergarten class’s Big Wheel  500.  Apparently, though, something deep in my DNA likes insane, gas guzzling, BP oil-spill-enabling car stunts.  At any rate, while thousands of Hoosiers were at the Indy 500 this Memorial Day weekend, we were at the Zanzibar Drifters competition in Pwani Mchangani.

This was unquestionably THE event of the week for a large segment of the male population of Zanzibar, aged 4-80, most of whom got to the event on public transportation, some even getting into the spirit of the competition.

Before Sunday, we had watched these drifting com-petitions on TV (the majority of my household being in the male 4-80 category). But, even on TV, it’s pretty clear that it’s well nigh a male-only event.  As it was explained by a girl who was sneaking a peek at the competition with us while desperately trying to cover up her face with her headscarf, girls who are seen at drifting events--on TV or in person--risk ostracism at school. But it definitely was the event of the week, and we were very lucky to be invited to go with a friend whose family has a house in Pwani Mchangani. 

So what is drifting?  Drifting is a competition in which a driver does donuts repeatedly in a paved inter-section, leaving a certain percentage of the tire rubber in the intersection (as evidenced by the black marks and the two tires that popped during the competition). 

At some point during each driver’s time in the spotlight, he slows down the car suspensefully, and then does something really crazy, involving a door being open, feet being thrust out a door or roof, and general feats of driving prowess (kids, don’t try this at home).

Everyone has their favorite car and driver.  Some like Skyline.

We were predisposed to like Rock Star, as he drives a Cresta (just like we do!) and his relative owns the “mix” shop where Brady and I eat lunch most days. I have to say, though, Mr. Vegas made a pretty flashy impression.

At the end of the night, there was an episode of something that—at a rodeo—would be called cowboy poker:  three guys sat at a table in the middle of the intersection, just trying to have a calm chat over Cokes, but kept being hassled by a guy doing high-speed donuts around them.  How rude!

If this sounds dangerous, don’t worry.  There was a bank of tires to protect spectators—humans and goats alike—and there was a referee and an ambulance if things got really out of hand.

And all of this fun for only 1000 Tsh per carload (about 70 cents), plus a few oranges to share with friends!  Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Happy Mother's Day!

On this Mother’s Day, I wanted to say thanks to my mom, who I’m so glad was able to visit us here this year.  Her strength and resourcefulness has helped to make me who I am, and her and Dad’s travels to Africa gave me the inkling of an idea, long ago, that I might oneday want to come here.   Here are a couple of my favorite pictures of Mom and Dad’s visit back in February, when there was still no electricity.

Mom and Dad happened to be here when we were invited to visit the village of one of my favorite students, from last semester. 

An avid snapshot photographer herself, Mom knows that it's hard to get a good picture at mealtime, especially with two kids in squirrely moods.

Playing the perennial favorite game: Who's Taller?

Finally, at the airport, a picture where everyone's looking at the camera!

But I also want to wish a happy Mother's Day to Oscar and Calvin.  This has been a pretty challenging year in lots of ways, but one aspect that’s been really wonderful—all throughout—has been getting to spend time with Oscar and Calvin and to see them rise to the occasion of getting along, and getting along happily, in a completely new environment.

They've tried new things.

They've made new friends, with people of all ages.

They've entertained themselves with very limited materials.

They've mostly gotten along with each other well, despite spending many hours together, mostly in close quarters.

I'm prejudiced, of course, but I think they're pretty good kids, and I'm proud to be their mom.

Happy Mother's Day!

Restaurants of Zanzibar: Lükmaan

(This entry dictated by Calvin.)  Lükmaan is my favorite restaurant.  It is cheap, but really good.  I think the deal with it is that it’s not a mzungu (foreigner) restaurant, but sometimes African tourists from Uganda and Kenya go there.

They have a bunch of crock pots full of food so you don’t have to wait, and they have a bread-display case that they keep their bread in.  When you go in to Lükmaan, you walk over to the guy behind the counter (sometimes Lükmaan and sometimes one of the people working there), and tell them what you want.  Then, you take the food and walk over to a table.  And if you want soda, you can get it from the refrigerator yourself.  But you can’t get tamarind juice yourself because the glasses are in the kitchen, and there’s a refrigerator with a tub of juice in it that the waiter fills.  Then when you’re finished, a waiter comes over and clears and wipes the table and asks what you ate, and he writes down the items and the prices on a sticky note and totals it up in his head.  Usually our whole family eats a meal for about 8000 Tsh (around $6.50). 

Sometimes tourists come there, but it’s not meant for tourists.  They usually come in and ask for a menu and think that the waiters will bring the food over for you like in most restaurants.  But that’s not the way it goes.

They have really nice paintings around the room that change every couple of months.  Also, they have recently updated their serving area from having a bunch of crock pots to having a long metal container.  Then, they upgraded their bread-display case.  They kept the old one but the new one is much fancier (but I like the first one more).  And they have recently started having Swiss rolls! 

Our favorite things there. . .

• Mine and Oscar’s—rice (wali), with kidney beans cooked in coconut milk (maharage).  Sometimes I have bread with it, preferably mandazi (or coconut bread, in Oscar’s case) because it is good for dipping in the bean juices.  We like getting soda or juice there.  They’re special because they have Pepsi products.  Lükmaan makes really good tamarind juice and bungo juice (bungo is related to passionfruit and usually looks sort of rotten when it’s ripe).
• Mom’s—also wali na maharage, but she also likes “spaghetti,” which is spaghetti noodles and green beans and carrots, dressed with oil and soy sauce and served cold.  And she likes pilau (rice and spices served with one boiled potato and onion, tomato, and vinegar “salad”).
• Dad’s—spinach (mchicha) cooked in coconut milk, cabbage (kabichi) also cooked in coconut milk with a few tomatoes, and Chinese rice (fried rice with green beans, carrots, and sometimes shrimp).  Actually, Daddy will eat almost everything there except for green bananas cooked with sardines (he says it’s sardines flavored with green bananas!).  That’s the only thing at Lükmaan that Daddy has ever not been able to finish.  He hasn’t ever tried the cow liver.

Commencement

my current class taking the midterm

I always get a little nostalgic at Commence-
ment time, which will be in just over a week in Tacoma.  I’ve been teaching at Puget Sound for long enough to have known several classes of students throughout their time at Puget Sound, and graduation is always bittersweet—sweet, of course, because I’m proud of our graduates and happy to see them going off into the world and begin a new phase of their lives, but sad, as well, because the students I’ve gotten to know and like won’t be around on campus anymore. This year, I’ve been thinking about the graduating class, as well as about the contrasts between the kind of education that’s possible at Puget Sound as compared with the university where I’m teaching this year on sabbatical.

Among the graduating class at Puget Sound this year are a group of 15 students that I’ve known since our Writing and Rhetoric seminar together in Fall 2006. We spent a lot of time together because the class was an advising seminar, as well as a residential seminar: We went on field trips together, we had course-related movie nights, we had a meeting at my house. Since the class ended, I’ve had advising meetings for four years with the students who went on to become English majors, and I’ve kept in touch with nearly all of the students—even this year while I’ve been abroad and last year when many of them were abroad (one preceding me here in Tanzania).  Now, as they prepare to leave Puget Sound, these students are accomplished writers, performers, athletes, travelers, and researchers, and they have accrued numerous awards collectively (including four Phi Beta Kappa memberships).  These students have benefited from the many kinds of resources that come with a Puget Sound education—a low student/faculty ratio, up-to-date and comfortable classrooms, a library with easy access to information from across the country and around the world—and those are just a few obvious parts of the infrastructure, supporting academic work alone.  Through these students’ own strengths and through the support they’ve received, I’m sure that they will go on to great things, each in his or her own way.

last week on the road to class, during the rainy season

This spring, I’m teaching a course that is roughly equivalent to the Writing and Rhetoric seminar—a communication skills course for first-year university students here in Zanzibar.  I’m sure there are some terrific students in the class, but I only know the names of a few of them.  It’s not that I’ve gotten negligent.  If anything, teaching this class has kept me on my toes pedagogically; it’s not easy to teach when there are no books and all the course content must come from lectures given in the students’ second language (thankfully, I brought an LCD projector with me to Zanzibar).  The classroom is infested with potentially disease-carrying mosquitoes and is equipped with one working electrical outlet, one small chalkboard, and no working microphones. The most challenging aspect, though, is that there are at least 284 students in the course (I have yet to see a roster, but 284 students have submitted assignments). Between the campus where they study and my office are 10 miles of heavily rutted and near-flooded road, and most students don’t have Internet access, so it’s very difficult to hold office hours or to have informal conversation.  I’m doing the very best I can to make a positive contribution to these students’ educations, but I know that their experience of college will be very different than that of the students in my Writing Rhetoric seminar of Fall 2006 (or of students in any other course at Puget Sound).  They’re certainly getting a lot less writing and speaking experience, as well as a lot less individualized feedback.

So Commencement is for me this year more than usually bittersweet.  As the Puget Sound campus heads into this season of celebratory parties and goodbyes, I have a few parting words for Abbie, Annalise, Bailey, Callie, David, Garrett, Jessy, Katie, Leana, Melissa, Miles, Rachel, Rachel, Robyn, and Wes.  I have enjoyed getting to know each of you, and I hope to continue to hear from you from time to time in your lives after Puget Sound.  I celebrate your many achievements, and I hope that you find joy and success in whatever it is that you try to accomplish.  And I hope that part of what you try to accomplish will be, in some small way, closing one or two of the many gaps between your class and my current class.  I’ll be thinking of you as you cross the stage to receive your diplomas and to commence your lives after college.

Fruits of Zanzibar

(By Calvin) In Zanzibar, we have a lot of fruits that you get in America, like bananas, watermelons, and pineapples.  But there are some fruits that they have in Zanzibar but not in America regularly: mangoes, bungos, passion fruits, custard apples, breadfruits, rambutans, and mangosteens.

My favorite is passion fruit because they’re soooo sour. You eat passion fruits by cutting them in half, taking a spoon, putting them in your mouth and sucking the fruity bits off, and either spitting the seeds out or crunching them up, or—as I like to do—eating it like yogurt and swallowing the seeds.  I also like passion fruit in juice, mixed with bungo, or watermelon, or plain.  My favorite way is making the juice plain and then mixing it with soda water.

Bungo is a lot like passion fruit except with bigger seeds.  Like passion fruit, you wait to eat it until it looks all rotten on the outside.  With passion fruit, it’s ripe when it looks wrinkly and rotten, and with bungo it looks moldy.  

To eat rambutans and mango-
steens, you cut all the way around the skin at the middle, but you don’t cut into the fruit.  Then you pull off the skin and then put the fruit in your mouth and spit out the seed after you chew off the fruit like you do with a cherry.  Once I ate 16 rambutans!  Rambutan skins look sort of like sea urchins, and if you cut the skin right you can put it on your nose like a clown's nose.  Unfortunately, they’re out of season now. 

Breadfruits were originally brought here from other countries because they’re incredibly easy to grow.  When there were slaves here, the slaveowners gave the slaves breadfruit instead of other foods because the slaves could work full time and not spend so much time growing other foods.  They don’t taste like fruits, but more like potatoes that grow on trees. You have to cook them and take the “bone” out of the middle and rinse the latex out. I like them turned into big French fries.

   

I’ll miss the fruits here when I go back to America, especially passion fruit and rambutans, which you can’t get in America.  But I’m happy we’ll be able to get apples, cherries, strawberries, and many other kinds of berries!