World Cup Fever

This past week, we had a brief brush with glory when we stood within touching distance of the solid gold World Cup trophy (or, more accurately, within touching distance of the well-watched case holding the trophy).

As soccer fans know, the 2010 World Cup will be held in South Africa this coming June and July.

This is the first time the tournament has been held on this continent of soccer (or football) fans, and the excitement is almost palpable.

Even here on Zanzibar, far in so many ways from the upcoming event, people are excited. Qualifying games for the Cup have drawn huge audiences at TVs in Stone Town squares where fans watch games together, and everyone has their favorite teams. Sadly, Tanzania will not be among the teams playing in the Cup.

But Zanzibar had a taste of the World Cup fever when the actual trophy made a stop at Forodhani Gardens this past week, as part of the trophy’s 89-city, 86-country, 134,017 kilometer tour in preparation for the event. Curious about the posters and billboards that had sprung up virtually overnight here, we were among the many who showed up at the event.

Books!

Three months after arriving in Zanzibar with my family’s full allotment of airline baggage, I have a good sense of what I should have packed. I definitely should not have brought the cotton sweaters and multiple packages of office supplies (the former because I was wrong in thinking there would be some evening when I’d want a sweater, and the latter because office supplies are plentiful here even though most people can’t afford them). And I definitely should have packed the hundreds of pounds of books that we brought in our suitcases and mailed through the one-way shipment to the U.S. Embassy that my Fulbright grant includes. Every one of these books has found or will find a good home here.

This reassessment of our packing strategy is more of reaffirmation than anything, but it’s still surprising to me how much I have appreciated books here. When I left for Zanzibar, I knew intellectually that books would be scarce here. I had read in reports from Fulbrighters in Tanzania about how faculty had worked with the limited books available for teaching and research. For that reason, Fulbright grants in Africa include a $1000 stipend for books for the Fulbrighter to use and donate as seems appropriate, as well as free one-way shipment of up to 200 pounds of educational materials to the U.S. Embassy in the host country.

The educational books on my shelves have had some adventures. Before leaving, I did some thrifty shopping for gently used books, and I was thrilled when Bedford/St. Martin’s Press agreed to donate 40 new handbooks for me to give to students at the State University of Zanzibar. I lugged these 150 pounds of books to the central post office in Tacoma and sent the books on their merry way. Six weeks later, Brady and I picked up these books in Dar es Salaam, all intact in boxes that were definitely worse for wear. We then took the books on an uneventful taxi ride through Dar es Salaam (not a given, in a city with one of the world’s highest incidents of deaths caused by motor vehicle accidents). At the port where we took the return ferry to Zanzibar, things got really interesting; taxis can only go to a parking lot that is about 600 feet from the ferry. To get to the ferry, pedestrians must wade through a sea of passengers, porters, and pickpockets (not mutually exclusive identities) and then wait in line to walk a narrow gangplank to the ferry. Brady and I got about 150 feet with our heavy boxes before a team of porters decided that the books were too heavy for us. True enough, but, as soon became apparent, the porters’ service came at a steep price. By the time we got on the ferry, we had managed to ransom the books for about $40 and get them into the cabin with us, rather than on the deck with the shipment of fish and other more water-loving cargo. In Zanzibar, the port is much the same, but on the ferry, we brushed up on some useful phrases in Kiswahili: “Thank you, but we are not tourists; we live here.” “Thank you, but we have no money.” “I am a teacher, and these are textbooks.” We managed to navigate on foot the 800 or so feet from the ferry to our apartment, albeit with a few stops and friendly repetitions of our new phrases. I don’t know the details of the journey of the books in our suitcases on the airplane, but I imagine they had an equally arduous journey from Seattle to Amsterdam to Nairobi to Zanzibar.

But having the books here makes everything worth it. Here are a few moments that have made me appreciate these books:

• Trying to buy books online and seeing that it’s nearly impossible to have books shipped to Zanzibar—in part because of shipping costs and in part because companies fear of liability for lost shipments.
• Trying to design an appropriate research assignment for my students here, using the university library collection (pictured in its entirety here), which has neither a computerized card catalog nor journal databases.
• Reading syllabi here that cite texts (classic ones, but still) no more recent than the 1980s—before the students were born.
• Talking with colleagues working on theses, using bibliographies whose books they can’t locate.
• Browsing local used bookstores that include stained, torn, and dogeared novels in many languages at prices that would be steep in U.S. bookstores, as well as used magazines of all kinds that are sold for pleasure reading even when the content is long outdated.
• Trading pleasure reading with other ex-patriates and readers of English—the most desirable books are the longest ones because they will provide the most hours of pleasure reading (I’m ruing my last-minute decision to leave War and Peace in Tacoma when my suitcase was exactly its weight over the weight limit).

Where I’ve been happiest to have books has been in teaching. As I’d been told, there are almost no classrooms here in which each student has a book. Brady is teaching math in a program where he was given the dogeared 1980s textbook for the class, from which he can write the problems on the board as have his predecessors. In my class, students circulate and photocopy a photocopy of a reading, or they read from scanned documents that I copy from my computer onto a student’s flash drive, for students to share and read at home (if they have a computer, and some do, although no one has Internet at home) or on the university computers (when there is a convergence between lab hours, free time, and power availability). Teaching in these conditions requires multiple back-up plans. I often use PowerPoint presentations to summarize key points in class (reading and hearing simultaneously helps with the language barriers), but I always need to be prepared to write on the board or have students read from shared copies of handouts. Somehow, slowly, we make progress!

Never again will I take for granted the ease and speed of “smart” classrooms or students who have their own books and, boy, am I glad I didn’t talk myself into packing fewer books. If only I could trade these cotton sweaters for my copy of War and Peace!

Spice Tour

This weekend we got out of Stone Town for a few hours and went on a “Spice Tour,” one of the most common tourist excursions in Zanzibar (a.k.a. “The Spice Island”). Like tours of orchards or wineries in Washington, this particular agricultural tour involves sightseeing, a little science, and good food.

We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, not least because we Northwesterners have been missing trees in our lives as city dwellers. On the way to the spice farm, we drove through some parts of the island that we hadn’t seen before, including the largest hill in Zanzibar, known as “Kilimanjaro.” In Tacoma, we would scarcely have blinked at this hill, but it was a surprise after seeing so much flat ground for so many weeks. Near the top of the hill, there is a famously spiralled coconut tree.

At the farm, we saw one of the many 19^th-century ruins on the island (tropical humidity and storms take their toll on buildings in short order). Even more exciting, we saw a top-notch public elementary school; Brady and I envied the desks, as they’re far nicer than any of the desks at the schools where we teach.

On the agricultural part of the tour, we learned from our guide Salum about the botany of many of the spices we use here in Zanzibar and at home: cinnamon, cloves, cardamom (the “big three”), turmeric, ginger, vanilla, black pepper, lemon grass, curry, nutmeg, and mace, as well as one that was new to us and that is called lipstick plant. We also saw and tasted bananas, pineapple, jack fruit, star fruit, pomelo, green coconut, and oranges. Along the way, we watched someone climb up to get the green coconuts from the top of the tree and were given hats and other accessories woven out of palm leaves. The climax of the tour was eating a Zanzibar lunch of green bananas and kingfish in tomato sauce, fresh tuna and cooked cassava, potatoes in tomato and lipstick plant sauce, pilau (a rice dish), and a relish of raw red onions and tomatoes in vinegar. Yum!

For more pictures, follow this link.

Keeping Entertained in a Low-Tech Environment, Part III

One of the benefits of being in Zanzibar with few toys and little recreational space is that our family has experienced a literacy renaissance. Our kids have been avid readers for several years now, but they have both taken recently to writing for pleasure, especially poems and PowerPoint presentations on topics of interest (robots and Egyptian gods and goddesses have been especially popular). Here are a couple of poems Oscar wrote this afternoon before he started his homework. The illustrated poem is one that Calvin wrote at school (for which, a proud mama might note, he received the Most Creative award).

I Wondered. . .

In the middle of school

I thought it’d be cool

If they ran cars on molasses

That were immune to crashes.

Or fantastic false teeth

Sharp enough for the toughest beef.

Could these things be possible, I wondered. . .

“Wake up!” my teacher thundered.

Digging a Hole

Oh, the things you can find in a hole:

You could find a bent-up tool,

Or a million-year-old scroll.

You could find a dirty grub,

Or a pharoah’s old bathtub.

You could find a chest of gold,

Or some cheese covered in mold.

Oh, the things you can find in a hole!

(But don’t try living in one like a mole.)

Halloween in Zanzibar

Today is Halloween, but there are no candles flickering in our jack-o-lantern, and we aren’t concerned that we forgot to get candy for the trick-or-treaters. Instead, it was a pretty uneventful day. My feeling of Halloween nostalgia has hit me somewhat unexpectedly. In thinking about holidays we’d miss this year, I didn’t think of Halloween, but this has been the first year in I don’t know how long that we haven’t carved a pumpkin, dressed up, celebrated with friends, or (more importantly) helped Oscar and Calvin to do these things.

Halloween is about spookiness in the U.S., but it is a pretty tongue-in-cheek, commercial spookiness. Here, there’s a little more seriousness about the supernatural, and to the few people who have asked us whether we celebrate Halloween, we’ve been hard pressed to explain: “Yes, it’s about ghosts and people dress up like scary things and decorate their houses with scary things, but we don’t really believe in it” (which seems strange for the inordinate amount of time and energy we put into the holiday). “Yes, we do cut up pumpkins and put them out and they rot, but they look really pretty and it’s fun to do and they’re not food pumpkins like the pumpkins here.” It’s just hard to translate on an island where there have been real-life highly publicized cases of albinos being killed for use in medicines, where people have been killed in recent memory under suspicion of being “Popobawa” (a Zanzibari version of a vampire), and where entire schools have been closed because of epidemics of “shetani” (ghosts) invading girls’ bodies. The supernatural is no laughing matter here, either for the people who believe, or for the people who are concerned about the effects on the living. And no one here would waste a whole pumpkin on a decoration.

So it’s been a pretty subdued Halloween this year. Today, while Brady and I were puttering around and doing weekend cleaning projects, the boys got inventive and created their own very small haunted house with some boxes. Boo!

What time is it?

I’m not a person known for having a fantastic sense of time. I usually get where I need to be, pretty much when I need to be there, but keeping track of time is something that requires my conscious effort.

In Zanzibar, I’m learning about time all over again. I’m not just talking about “Swahili time” (although I have on several occasions arrived punctually for public events, only to find that the event in question wouldn’t actually start until 40 minutes later). I’m talking about the fact that the day in Kiswahili officially is marked at sunrise (at around 6 AM, year round) and ends at sunset (at around 6 PM). So a meeting that might begin at, say, “8 AM” would be said here to begin “saa mbili asubuhi” (or at 2 in the morning).

Most of the time, when people are speaking in English, they give the English time, and in Kiswahili, Kiswahili time, so even though there is potential for constant confusion, we’ve only had one mishap with time since we’ve been here. Clocks here are mostly in English time, but it’s smart when looking at an unfamiliar clock to keep in mind the rough time you think it is—if the clock is off by 6 hours, it’s in Kiswahili time; if it’s way off, then it’s probably broken.

But every once in a while, I’m really confused, like today. This afternoon, before I made my usual Sunday afternoon/morning Skype call to my parents (on East Coast time, 7 hours behind us), I logged on to Facebook and noticed that a friend’s status reported that he was looking forward to an extra hour of sleep. A moment of panic—I hadn’t even thought about the time changing. What time is it? Do we spring forward or fall back? What season is it?

As it turns out, my Facebook friend is in London, where the time shift happens a week earlier than in the U.S. But in the process of thinking about this, I figured out why the math never works out for the time difference between Zanzibar (Greenwich Mean Time +3) and Tacoma (Greenwich Mean Time – 8), which should be 11 hours but has been only 10 when I’ve compared notes. Daylight savings time!! Zanzibar doesn’t change time, there being little point so close to the equator.

So although I’m miffed at the Brits today for disrupting my feeling of continuity with GMT, I’m excited about next week, when the math will be more predictable. What time is it? Look at your watch; if speaking in Kiswahili, subtract 6; if speaking on Skype, subtract 8 or 11 (next week). And be punctual, whatever that means.

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!).