What is communication?

This is a question I’ve been pondering—as per national mandate—in the Communication Skills course I’ve begun teaching at the State University of Zanzibar (SUZA). The course is for the 20 students who are working toward earning a one-year diploma in computer science this year. My students are part of the incoming student body at SUZA, comprising 613 students, 301 of whom are women.

It’s good to be back in the classroom, which I’m finding to be the most familiar place I’ve been in the two months I’ve been here. I have a syllabus, I make assignments, I explain things, we laugh, we ask questions, we explore—so much is the same.

But in the weeks leading up to the semester, I often felt panicky about teaching because so much seemed unfamiliar to me. Thinking about the “What is communication?” question has helped crystallize for me why that was.

At Puget Sound, communication happens very quickly, physically dispersed though the members of the campus community sometimes are (this post being a case in point). Months before the fall semester begins at Puget Sound, I can count on knowing what I am teaching, when my classes will meet, where they will be, who my students will be, and (often) what my students’ interests will be—especially if the students are ones I know from previous classes or are incoming advisees. Having that information, I can spend considerable time tailoring my courses to best match the evolving subject matter with the particular students and the physical classroom environment in which I’ll teach. Here in Zanzibar, I did not have most of this basic information until three days before classes began, a terrifying prospect for a planner like me. I’m not accustomed to teaching from a syllabus that has been written and approved by someone else, let alone the national government; however, I was grateful on the first day of class to have a few things that I didn’t need to hand-design.

I now realize how much of what feels natural to me as a teacher is dependent on everyone involved having continuous digital access. Here in Zanzibar, we have computers and Web sites and digital classroom aids, and so it seems like it should be possible to do things like send out mass informational e-mails and to have electronic course registration records; however, we don’t have reliable electricity and although there is high-speed Internet at SUZA, there is none in the homes and villages of most of the prospective students. Even e-mail addresses are rare here. There is no well-established campus e-mail domain at SUZA; faculty and staff here use free hotmail and gmail accounts, and many of my computer science students (likely the most tech-savvy students on campus) have never had the need or opportunity to get e-mail addresses until now. Without those basic communication routes, all kinds of information move slowly, from student applications to acceptance letters to student registrations to course teaching assignments to classroom assignments. Communication here does sometimes happen electronically, but it happens even more successfully face to face (as I learned when students in my class questioned whether communication can happen in e-mails because there is no real-time dialogue and because the addressee might not have Internet access).

Like much of East Africa, we at SUZA are at a liminal moment, between the oral , local culture of the past and the digital, global culture of the future. Although I never dreamed I’d be a member of a computer science department, I’m thrilled to be at this pivotal moment, as I teach English communication skills to my computer science students. Look out, world!

"Jambo" does not mean "hello."

I feel that I have (almost) truly arrived in Zanzibar now that I know how to exchange greetings like a civilized person. “Jambo,” I know now, does not mean “hello,” or at least not in any straightforward way. “Jambo” means, according to my Kiswahili/English dictionary, “1. thing 2. matter 3. affair 4. issue.” Indeed, at my first Kiswahili lesson, my tutor explained that when people use “-jambo” in a greeting in Kiswahili, it is always preceded by the negative form of the appropriate subject prefix. So, one might ask “Hujambo?” (Are you [singular] without troubles), and the correct reply—always, even if it’s not true—is “Sijambo” (“I am without troubles”). Here are some other possibilities:

Hamjambo? (Are you [plural] without troubles?)

Hatujambo. (We are without troubles.)

Watoto wako hawajambo? (Are your children without troubles?)

Hawajambo. (They are without troubles.)

Mume yako hajambo? (Is your husband without troubles?)

Hajambo. (He is without troubles.)

I list all of these possibilities to demonstrate that there is no one-size-fits-all greeting in Kiswahili, to show that there’s a lot of vocabulary to learn to get the greeting right, and to give a snippet of the kind of conversation that I have with people I know.

The more people I know in Stone Town, the longer it takes to walk through town—you can’t just say “hi” as you pass by. It is typical to go through several rounds of the –jambo exchange, with a few “Habari za. . . ?” (“How is your morning/work/family/day/etc.”) exchanges thrown in. If the person you are greeting is young and/or hip, there might also be an exchange of “Mambo vipi?” (Response: “Poa” or “Freshi”), but that’s just a different level of formality for the same kind of exchange—think the difference between “Hello” and “Hi.”

The typical greeting in town for any white person is “Jambo,” and that’s a complicated greeting, as you might imagine. It says, partly, that you’re not expected to be able to wade through the grammar necessary for a proper greeting, and partly that you’re a tourist. When I hear it, I always think of Henry Louis Gates on “Signifyin'.” In response, I always answer “Sijambo” now, and then I’ve got a new friend to greet every day.

I’m still struggling to slow down and accept the whole greeting exchange ritual. I like to walk fast, and I like to be friendly, but (as in America), I get impatient with the contentless “How-are-you-I’m-fine” exchanges when I have a destination to get to. In Stone Town, I’m learning to slow down and to pause a bit longer. The better my Kiswahili gets, the more I’m getting out of these exchanges, which can develop after a bit into “Sijambo. . . . Lakini. . .” (I am without troubles, but. . .). Then it starts to go somewhere—if the person I’m talking with is patient and if I’ve learned the vocabulary I need in order to understand what follows the “lakini.”

Today, though, I had a funny exchange in English. Zanzibaris like to practice their English, but the greetings are often strange (like, “Good morning!” at 4 PM). I think Zanzibaris have the same difficulty translating their greetings as I do. They expect every greeting to be a question that invites a reply—as “Habari za asubuhi?” (“How is your morning?”) does. So today, I had this exchange with someone walking in the opposite direction:

Him (at 2 PM): Good morning!

Me (in a hurry and also thinking I’ll bypass the time-of-day issue): Hello!

Him: Fine.

As I continued walking, I wondered, “What was that?” Was that an example of “Signifyin,'” or was it a banal communicative exchange?

Don’t even get me started on the second-most-common greeting for tourists: “Hakuna matata.”

Eid

When Ramadhan ends, there is a huge two-day celebration , called Eid, or Eid-al-fitr. On the days right before Eid, the market is absolutely packed, with everyone buying food for Eid, buying new clothes, buying toys for the children. There’s also a lot of anticipation and excitement because no one knows for sure when Eid will begin until the imams watch for the crescent moon in the night sky and confirm that, for sure, the month of Ramadhan has ended.

This year in Zanzibar, Eid began on Sunday the 22^nd, but as late as Saturday afternoon, our plans for the celebration were still up in the air, and everyone we asked said, “Well, we hope that tomorrow we will eat, but maybe it will be Monday.” The boys had Monday and Tuesday off from school for the Eid holiday, and we wanted to go out of town to explore a bit, but we also wanted to be in town for the celebration during Eid, and it was tricky to figure out when we should try to go (as it happened, we spent the night in Nungwi on Sunday night at Juli McGruder and Ahmed Kassim’s wonderful Magharibi House—more on this later—and then were able to be back in Stone Town for Eid festivities with friends on Monday).

I’m told that Eid celebrations in Zanzibar are somewhat different than in other Muslim communities. Here, there’s a tradition of special celebrations for children. Adults set up all manner of games for children in little temporary wooden fenced enclosures in public parks, and there will be netball games, disco balls, and various carnival games set up for the children, who pay a fee to enter each enclosure. There are also many street vendors selling ice cream, candy, and other treats, and let me tell you, nothing tastes as sweet as eating a treat outside in public when you’ve not been able to do that for a month!

Oscar had a party at a school friend’s house, so Brady took him, and Calvin and I went to celebrate with a colleague of mine from SUZA and his children. We chose to celebrate at Forodhani Garden’s brand-new playground. We had been eyeing this playground since we’d arrived, but although no signs say so (and the signs are in English and in Kiswahili), the playground was not open until Eid—as we learned in our first week when the boys were scolded for playing there.

Here are some pictures from the celebration, at which we paid 500 Tshillings (roughly $.40) for a half-hour of playtime. Notice the children dressed in new clothes, and the girls wearing special Eid makeup.

Glimpses of Ramadhan from the inside

As non-Muslims (and Kiswahili students, to boot), our experience of Ramadhan lacked the spiritual intensity that it has for many Zanzibaris. Perhaps oneday we will return to Zanzibar during Ramadhan, and we will have a deeper experience of the month, when we will know people here well enough to be included in the evening festivities and when we will be acclimated enough to our new environment to try fasting along with them. (We had earnest intentions of fasting for one day, but the best we managed was to eat a very light lunch most days; the not drinking water proved impossible for us as novice equatorial citizens.)

We did have several glimpses of what I find most admirable about Ramadhan, and that is the sense of community and spiritual focus. We saw that most intensely during the first few days of Ramadhan. On the first day, we were living in our first apartment, above a Muslim family with small children. At dusk, when the family and other families across the city broke their fast, there was an almost palpable hush over the building and the city outside. Everyone, it seemed, was focused—not just on the food, but on the act of breaking the fast together and being aware of the moment and its meaning. That night, we went out to the Night Market to be with other people eating after the day’s fast, and everyone was more cheerful and welcoming than we had seen on any day before that. And everywhere our greeting “Ramadhan Karim” (borrowed from President Obama’s Ramadhan address) was greeted with a smile.

Later during Ramadhan, we were treated to some samples of the delicious foods that are eaten during the nights of Ramadhan. We exchanged treats with our landlord’s family (their Ramadhan kaimati—small, syrupy donuts—for our cake donuts; their cassava in coconut milk with tuna, for our Elvis pudding). And we attended a veritable feast with students and faculty from the Zanzibar Academic Student Centre, on the occasion of a visit to Zanzibar from Lisa Ferrari and Mark Ferrari (board members at International CATALYST Fund, the NGO that helps support ZASAC). The women of ZASAC prepared about 20 different dishes, all of which were available at each of the four stations along the long men’s busati (eating mat) and at the one station of the smaller women’s busati (see the picture of us as we were helping to set up—note that everyone has taken off shoes when walking on the busati). When the air siren sounded to announce the sunset, we joined in the prayer (Brady, Mark, and the boys with the men, and Lisa and me with the women). And then ate until we were full of delicious dishes too numerous to list but including fresh tuna, cooked green bananas, several kinds of donuts, chapatti, dosa, a dish called “caroni” that is basically chili-mac, cassava in tomato sauce, boiled cassava, vermicelli, bananas with custard, and more. To drink, we had water, chai, juice, and a thin porridge called uji. We felt honored to have been included in the special event and walked home in the darkness as though we were walking on air (or we would have felt like that if we weren’t so full!).

Ramadhan for wazungu (foreigners)

Ramadhan had several tangible effects on our life in Stone Town. The most obvious one is that it altered our eating and drinking habits. It is unlawful in Stone Town to sell food or drink for immediate consumption during daylight hours during Ramadhan (or so I’ve been told—my Kiswahili is still not sophisticated enough to read official proclamations, so I may have missed something in plain sight). What that means is that you can buy fruits and vegetables and such at the market, but you can’t consume them there. Or you can buy a bottle of water (especially if it’s not chilled), but if you have one in your bag, you can’t just pull it out and take a sip when you’re outside and it’s hot.

There are some tricky pieces to this food-item-purchasing arrangement, and it was interesting to see merchants working through and trying to convey to us what the ramifications were in the purchase of, for instance, a soda. As Calvin wrote in his post on sodas, there is a pretty hefty deposit for glass soda bottles; it costs 700 Tshillings for a bottle and soda, but the bottle is 300 Tshillings-worth of that cost. Most locals bring back bottles and exchange them for new sodas at the 400-Tshilling price. Most of the year, tourists can buy a cold soda for 400 Tshillings if they want to cool off and drink it at the duka (bodega). But during Ramadhan, the cost gets complicated. When Calvin and I were doing our research for the soda post early on during Ramadhan, we kept hearing the same hemming and hawing about what the cost of the soda was and whether we could even buy it: “Well, I will sell it to you for 700, but you can’t drink it here,” or, “But I need the bottle, so I can’t sell it to you now.” So it gets more difficult and expensive to buy beverages (especially chilled and immediately drinkable ones) during Ramadhan. The same goes with restaurant food, as it’s only possible to eat during the day in restaurants connected with tourist hotels. Non-hotel food is cheaper but completely unavailable during the daytime during Ramadhan (thank goodness we have a kitchen!).

Another change during Ramadhan is that everything moves more slowly during the daytime. Businesses close early (usually somewhere between 2 and 3), and it is relatively common to see people taking naps in offices, shops, and in public parks. People are tired not only because they are not eating or drinking during the heat of the day but also because people who are fasting eat late and breakfast early and so do not sleep as much as they might normally. Even we who were not fasting slept somewhat less during Ramadhan because the streets are noisier, with sounds of adults and children celebrating the breaking of the day’s fast well into the night. Just when things start to quiet down, drummers walk around neighborhoods in the middle of the night, drumming and singing to awaken their friends and call them to celebrate and eat special Ramadhan foods with them (thanks to my friend Jen who sent me this link about a Ramadhan drummer in Brooklyn!).

For me, as a woman, Ramadhan meant being very hot most of the time. Almost no women in America dress modestly by Zanzibari standards when it is 70-90 degrees Farenheit. Ramadhan is a time of meditation and prayerfulness and turning away from temptations of all kind, and Zanzibari women by and large wear full length robes when outside the home, as well as long head scarves (during Ramadhan and, for many, at other times of year). Hands, feet, and faces are all that is visible. As a white mzungu, I stand out regardless of what I do, but when I went anywhere that I expected to meet people repeatedly (the university, the archive, the neighborhood), I wore a long skirt and long sleeves and, often, a head scarf as a sign that I’m not a tourist and that I am paying attention to local norms. I was always dripping with sweat, but many people told me they appreciated the effort: “It makes me very happy to see you dressed like this” is the exact statement I heard more than once.

On Ramadhan

The month of Ramadhan itself is officially over now, but some Muslims are fasting for an additional six days, so these entries are still timely, I hope. There is, of course, much that could be written about the meaning of Ramadhan, but I make no pretense of being an expert on Islam. What I do know something about is what it’s like to live as a non-Muslim in an Islamic community during Ramadhan, and the next few posts will offer some of my thoughts on the experience.

Several of you have asked what’s happening in our work lives, and the answer is that we’ve mostly been getting settled and haven’t yet begun work in earnest. I’ll write more on this later, but there is lots of paperwork to done to stay here as expatriates, and everything moves slowly during Ramadhan.

The boys, however, have begun school, which has been a very good thing. Their school has students from all over the world (Zanzibar, Finland, Germany, China, Italy, Korea, India, England, Australia, and the United States). English is a second or third language for almost everyone. On the playground before and after school, parents talk with their children in their home language and then switch seamlessly to English when talking with someone from another country. I hope I’ll be able to do that so fluidly from Swahili soon!

Calvin says he likes the tire swing and soccer at school. He has a friend from America there who likes to play soccer, too. Calvin says that what’s different about the school here is that they have different games in P.E., they call math “maths,” and they have French class.

Oscar says he likes the tire swing and eating school lunch here. He’s glad that the menu is designed by some eighth graders and some adults who know what kids like to eat (i.e. chicken and rice, spaghetti, pizza, French fries or “chips”). He says what’s different about school here is that he never eats school lunch at home.

Here are some pictures from school.

200,000 shillings

Now that we’ve been here a while, we’re completely used to Tanzanian money. When someone says that, say, a garbage pail costs “elfu kumi” (10,000), I no longer blink. I think the cheapest item I’ve seen here has cost ishirini (20) Tanzanian shillings (Tsh), and that was a book of matches.

While I’ve gotten over the sticker shock at all of those zeroes, I am still stunned by the discrepancies in cost between my “regular” life and life here. I recently needed to fill out a residency application, and the immigration clerk was walking me through the form and filling in the form for me. There’s a line that asks for “Particulars of means (house, property, income, etc. full details required).” I paused to think: How much is our house, property, and income worth at the current rate of exchange (roughly $1 buys 1320 Tsh)? Clearly, we’re millionaires in Tanzanian shillings. After waiting for a second, the clerk said, “It’s okay; you have enough.”

So how much is enough? To give you a sense of what life in Zanzibar costs, here is a list of what 200,000 shillings ($149.25) can buy:

• 50-70 kangas (colored cloths), depending on how well the purchaser bargains, or
  
• 20 dinners at our favorite Indian restaurant, or
  
• 133 child’s portion vegetarian Zanzibar pizzas at the night market, or
  
• 333 bottles of mineral water, or
  
• 1000 mangoes, or
  
• 800 rides on the dala-dala (bus), or
  
• 4000 photocopies, or
  
• 400 laser printed pages, or
  
• 1 overnight getaway to a tourist resort, including meals and snorkel trip, or
  
• 4% of a year’s tuition at the school where expatriate children (including ours) attend, or
  
• 1 year’s tuition at my university colleague’s private elementary school, or
  
• 1 emergency appendectomy at the good local hospital (not the free hospital), during which our friend’s wife and mother to his children died
  

How much is enough?

New Apartment!

Greetings from our new apartment! A couple of days ago, we moved into our first permanent housing since we moved out of our house in Tacoma almost a month ago. For our first few weeks in Zanzibar, we were living in a large apartment in the top floor of a building with a shop and four other apartments. To get to our apartment, we needed to go through the shop, up a ladder to another family’s apartment, through their kitchen, and up some other ladder stairs to our apartment. The family was nice and our apartment was nice, but it was hard not to have more of our own private space to retreat after and during a day of trying to navigate a new city where we don’t speak the language well.

Our new apartment, although smaller (around 800 square feet), is very private and has lots of luxuries that we’re enjoying anew, like hot showers and air conditioning. We still need to boil the water for washing dishes and we use bottled water for drinking and brushing teeth, but we feel a lot cleaner. We also appreciate our four-burner electric stove, with oven. Most families here use single kerosene burners or charcoal to cook. The family whose kitchen we needed to walk through at our old apartment cooked an amazing variety of samosas and chapattis on their charcoal burner, but, as in most places in Zanzibar, there was a lot of smoke and ash floating around. The four-burner stove here means that we can cook more complicated food more easily, and there’s less dust and smoke to make the house dirty.

The other perk at the new apartment is a rooftop veranda with a WASHING MACHINE, the first we’ve seen here in Zanzibar. We and most other people were washing our clothes by hand at the old place. After wringing clothes by hand, we found ourselves longing for late 19^th-century inventions like the washing board and the wringer. At the new apartment, we still hang our clothes out to dry, but the washing machine is pretty exciting.

Here are pictures of our new place—note the traditional carved Zanzibarian furniture, mosquito nets, and terrazzo floors!

Keeping Entertained in a Low-Tech Environment, Part II

(This post was dictated by Oscar.)

We came up with a new game, called "Bottle Basketball." We took a paper bag and cut open both ends so that you can throw the cap of a bottle through it.

We have dozens of bottles now, having gotten about a week's worth since the last entry. In my room, we also have a dresser. It doesn't have any drawers but it's a simple frame made of wooden logs meshed with thin coconut fibre ropes. The dresser works like a kind of bookshelf made out of webbing. We also have a lot of clothespins because we don't have a dryer and hang all our laundry out to dry.

To play the game, we attached the paper bag to a dresser by taking a belt and attaching it to the dresser. Then we clipped the bag onto the belt with clothespins. We took the bottle caps off all of our drumming water bottles to use as basketballs.

After we played the game for a while, we decided to improve it. We had so many bottles, we cut three in half to use for special materials for the hoop. We cut strips and clipped them on to the top of the hoop with clothespins. The strips make the basket wider and easier to score with (it was too tough before). We cut another bottle in half to make a container to store our bottlecaps. We attached a sheet to the dresser under the basket, so that the bottle caps go through the hoop and then roll back to you to be thrown again. We also made a backboard with a wall of bottles we stuck inbetween the bars on our dresser compartments. And we wove together the water bottle labels into mats, which we attached to two broom handles; that way if we miss a shot, the bottlecap bounces off the side net and rolls down into the sheet, along with all the other bottlecaps.

The basketball game still has some things that could be improved, but we have a year to do it!

If you want to try this game, here's what you need:

• empty water bottles for the backstop (we recommend at least 12, but you can use as many as you want)
• 1 sheet, about 4' x 5'
• 16 bottle labels (if you have cut-up strips of printer paper, that would work, too)
• 2 long poles (broom handles are best
• 1 paper bag (the size of a lunch bag is good, but if it's too hard to make a basket with that size basket, a grocery bag would work)
• something thin, curved, and slightly flexible to hold the rim wide open (we recommend inch-wide strips of cut-up water bottle)
• 1 belt to attach the basket
• water bottle lids for basketballs (24 is a good number)
• approximately 12 clothespins

Tools:

• scissors for cutting the bottles