Alone

November 16, 2011. The wind blows in gusts. Tiny florescent lamps, the ones we have in our frightening laundry room at home, hang from trees and cast small eerie glows around the dark yard. One of the plastic chairs is turned, resting on the small white table. Gravel surrounds, and i walk tenderly on the sharp rocks to reach a tranquil place. A cicada sounds in the blush next to me, others tap in the manicured lawn. The small tent above me shakes, creaking, and I wonder if it fell.
I don't have anyone to talk to, to be silent with. I have drawn into myself more, and find it's hard to be alone too. I wish I could cry, to release something caught in my throat, my nose, my chest, cry to someone. Lives here are smashed together for hours a day, meals taken communally, bunk beds shared between strangers and friends. Our days and talk focus on our placements, our frustrations with the Tanzanian government, gossip about other volunteers, food at home. Nothing is ever told. No personalities discerned. I wonder what people are like back home, in real life, Simran says to me. We piece together stories and histories from passing comments, from articles of clothing and bags bought at the local market.
I've been told that I search for connection, but I have little idea about how to achieve. I transform myself to fit other people's perceptions of who I should be.
In essence, I act.
And even with hours of self-reflection, nights spent in chapels, kneeled at the wooden altar, and walk around a serene and familiar New England pond, I still can't rest within myself. I can't just Be.
Rain starts to fall, tapping out rhythms on the tent's plastic, and humming out the cicadas. I sing notes to myself, and they for into Amazing Grace, on their own, I feel. I sing all the verses I know, the occasional dog cry joining, and I sit and shiver in the African night.

Long, the parade

November 14th, 2011. Sarah had a breakdown. We think it's physiological, causing her to scream in pain for hours on end, starting yesterday morning in the middle of brunch as we talked over toast and cold eggs. A few volunteers took her to the hospital, and nurses who speak little English ask her, are you pregnant? Are you in labor? You have a Urinary Tract Infection. (The general diagnosis for white women, who are seen as promiscuous.) Your appendix may have burst. You have gastritis. She screamed, of knives in her stomach, shrill sounds following Simran, Natasha, and Aryian down the street, echoing outside the building to a man selling water across the lane. She doesn't eat, cries in her room alone, emerging this evening in dirty sweatpants and straggled hairs sticking up at odd angles, face chapped. Her roommate, Madison Miami, is on a rampage against the staff, especially Baba who takes off his glasses and lays them gingerly on the plastic table, rubbing his wrinkled temples, confused how to proceed. Madison struts around the tiled floors in tinght red shorts and a baggy trendy tshirt, reminding me of a TRex conquering Pangaea. We talk, those sitting, watching, at the dinner tables, of night leading up to this, of blackouts and boy-crazed obsessions, of the danger in being taken to hospital in Nairobi, of the missed Mafia game played with Phase Ten cards.
Before coming here for three months, Sarah had never left the state of North Carolina. She rarely speaks at meals, dragging Claire instead to pour over short texts wishing her a good morning beautiful, sent by a local, your face make me smile, I want see you tonite. I worry about her, but there is a part of me that if not saw it coming, is at least not surprised.
I have not felt drama, nor had a crush, in months. I read books, edit essays, sit in internet cafes and watch people pull wheelbarrows full of fruit and corn. I talk to my children, photograph them and watch videos of singing recorded in early morning as the brisk air still lies heavily on the valleys of Kilimanjaro. I read in my bed, on the porches surrounding the house, on the couches looking onto clothes lines and vegetable gardens.
We are the same age, and I see in her a reflection of myself months ago. Lydie says to me, we always see in others our own insecurities, impose on them our faults, strengths too.
Lydie says I'm too conventional, too boring, afraid to be different.
I wonder if she's right. I dwell on those statements, questioning myself.
Maybe not in my clothing, my political affiliations, my music choices. My differences come out in writing, I think, in paintings, the the way I talk with my hands, my continent-shaped birthmark on my calf, my inclination towards listening and silence.
My slightly turned out ears, my skin that bruised like a peach. My high and then low laugh, always loud, the way I pat my cheeks when I get excited. The way I sit in chairs, my observations on those that hum around me.

Elaborating

November 13th, 2011. We alternate between coffee lounges and local restaurants, between placement and home base, stalls full of cloth and some full of cereal. Last night we played a game where one person writes a sentence on a piece of paper, another draws a picture depicting the sentence, and a third writes a sentence describing the picture, and so forth. A sort of pictionary telephone, we laughed at the mistakes made, signals crossed. Phrases of our time here, I love you more than banana soup, mzungus hunters and local stalkers found their ways into our childlike game. The evening was short, dark, illuminated only by floresent lights and bowls of unsalted popcorn, but more invigorating than any bar or nightspot. We waited the hour and a half for a YouTube video to load, laughed at lacking artistic ability, and listened to Jeff, a master storyteller and twenty something teacher from Colorado, talk of haunting men in white outfits terrorizing his suburban neighborhood. 
I skyped with my mom today, (hi mom!), and though I loved being able to share my experiences, and see her face, I closed the conversation with mixed feelings. Seeing a dog on a plush bed, a house heated and with electricity and wallpaper and computers is foreign to me. I live now in a third world country where fifty dollars can fund an education for a year, where a meal is less than a dollar and cigerettes are sold individually. I live in a world where one of the most respected jobs is taxi driving, where women carry shopping carts and bushels of bananas and buckets of murky water on their heads. And I know that when I return home, I will be enveloped back into the comforters and dances and cocktail Christmas parties. I'm excited to go home, part of me aches to go back to what I know and love, but I wonder if I will ever be comfortable in the ignorant extravagance with which I grew up.  

Skyping is bittersweet

Friday, November 11, 2011. Another week has flown, marked only by a jar of dark honey gone. I finished War and Peace yesterday, will start Anna Karenina today. I practiced yoga on the back balcony, waves of burnt garbage only occasionally soiling my concentration on breathing, the feel of my stomach rising and falling beneath my hand. Our roommate, Zoe, from Cyprus, leaves tomorrow, and I feel as if I have yet to know her. Romances have budded between volunteers, new ones are coming, some going, but I keep little interest. I look forward to the occasional yogurt in the morning, mixed with cereal, a delicacy in this porridge filled world. I walk down roads with a scarf wrapped around my hair, trying to cool from the heat that comes into every corner. I sit alone now, on a couch outside, listening to the hum of Swahili from the cleaning ladies perched on buckets in the shade of pillars. Little to report, except the progress of my children. They run up in the gravel path every morning, chanting, "TEACHA TEACHA TEACHA," surrounding me on all sides, little arms covering my dusty skirt, fingers surrounding my hands, smiles covering all. "Go to class, go to class," I say, feebly, my hands pulled in three directions, fought over for area, and fingers, and attention. I write their homework, play games, watch endless graduation rehearsals, sit with Tesia and Melisa Benedict on my lap, as they high five my palm and Diana and Ester play with my hair. They aren't just African Children, the media cliche created by commercials of wide-eyed boys and girls, indistinguishable from what we think children from Africa should be. I say to Alex, who visited my placement for the second time today, it's like they're little people, and she says, I know, it's scary. Why am I surprised? I walked into Bridge for the first time, a sea of black faces and toes and cream plans, and I will leave, seeing raceless classes, individual features, Hilda's beaded hair, Irene Melisa's scars from her burn, Samir's furrowed brow, Bridget's flat forehead and light blue backpack. Kids from other rooms, Proxetta's snub nose and tiny braids, Nikolas' pout and Hagai's wide gapped smile, Faraja's green wellies, Sebra's dimpled chin and pointed ears. Moses's love for playing ball, big Gilbert's pronunciation of stone. 

Portraits of men hang on the walls, crooked

To describe Moshi in three words: dirty, dusty, patterned. November 8th, 2011. Sitting in Union cafe on an open terrace, floor painted burgundy, cream walls and grey green chairs create a decidedly European feel. The city roars around us, cars twisting around the dirty corner, but the whites of Moshi find a haven in the clean and crisp spring air. A storm is coming, the clouds covering the sun, cooling the dogs and men that lie under trees beside the roads. I get more than my coffee fix here. I can watch the colors of the kangas and batiks twisting on the voluptuous women carrying shoes and fruit and the children running barefoot, adroitly avoiding daladalas and pikipikis, some with uniforms still from school. A table of blonde Sweeds with braided hair and tanned forearms sit a table away, Australians with fitted tshirts leave a tip on another near. We start to feel drops of rain. The metal roof pounded this morning, dimming all words and blurring floors. Strings of laundry drip and sway in rain, and the whole country feels blessed. Centipedes find residence and sanctuary under our tables, scurrying over Allison's feet. She drops a plate and it crashes in little plastic pieces over the ground as I wash my dish and make toast. She seems embarrassed, trying to explain the mishap. She self-consiously enters and exits vehicles, and sits with her legs crossed and arms folded, covering her body. She stares out the window pensively, as if begging someone to ask her what she's thinking about. She rarely speaks. 
One room in the building across from the cafe has no curtains and windows open. A lavender ribbon is tied to the thin bars, and it lifts with each sea-like gust of wind. The cill is brown, residue of dust from the street. 

Taste the Mountain

November 7th, 2011. Jenna and Monica went to the hospital today, to visit the child they are sponsoring to undergo skin graphs needed due to a severe burn years ago. They walked in the halls, the air smelling like rotting flesh. Jenna, a licensed nurse, offered her assistance to a struggling woman working at the hospital. I have to see three patients, she said, so go ahead, could you please change this girl's dressings. The little girl had fallen on a fire, and was offering from third degree burns all over her body, on her face, legs, arms, and vaginal area. Her mother could not pay for the clean dressings, so the patient's gauze was removed, and then she was washed, her burns scraped at and cleaned, with a bar of soap. Her mother can't pay for pain killers, so instead of being given morphine or put into an induced coma, as in the US, the child stays without anesthesia, cortisone, or proper treatment.
The story made me sick to my stomach, but after living here for a month and a half, I am not surprised. There are hundreds of children here, many of whom are not getting the proper nutrition and medical care,  and most of whom do not practice, or cannot afford, basic hygiene. What am I to do? I can't fix them all, I can't help everyone. I get accustomed to the wispy arms and bony fingers, the rotting and missing teeth and the tattered clothes. Everything is dirty here, the ceilings are highways for lizards suctioning and scurrying over the white space, and ants crawl over the plastic tablecloths. I forget the taste of chocolate, the feeling of a shower with power more than a faucet, the silk of a new dress worn one night for pictures and a dance. 

We wish for real fans

Peace, at last. November 2nd, 2011. The days don't fly by, nor do they crawl. They lope, a steady pace through school and the quiet afternoons, filled with coffee and cards and light. I visited Alex's placement yesterday. A low-funded government school for people with disabilities, it lies a fifteen minute walk from our house down a dirt path partly shrouded in quiet shadow. We walk though a small cluster of houses, of fields of dead corn, along a muddy stream winding its way across yards and under roots of overgrown trees. Dominicki comes running up to us first, shakes my hand with a "goodmorninguh," brown eyes almost golden in the early morning. He is thirty-five, and can sometimes recognize the number six. He shakes my hand again and again, laughing all the while with teeth missing and the other ones rotting, and we laugh together, at eight in the morning, and he smiles and smiles, neither of us knowing why, and I say, nice to meet you. Gina lako ni Grace. He laughs, and we walk toward two nuns standing in front if a beige and turquoise building. Alex and Rianna introduce me to the head of school and the cook. How are your children, how is your mother? Nzuri, nzuri, always. I meet Patricki, drool marking trains down his green uniform sweater. "Ni ni ni ni ni nininini ni ni," he says. I am told that he cannot for words, and since he is also thirty-something, we assume he never will. I meet Shamzi, the seven year old epileptic with a behavioral problem and teeth that stick at 110 degree angles, shown often in both smiles and sullen moments. Prosper is malnourished, receiving one meal a day, at school, unless his neighbors decide to be generous. He stares at me silently throughout the day, a smile playing at his lips as he wraps his graceful and lithe fingers around pencils or a cup of chai. Peter, pronounced Peetah, has ADD, yet remains in a class with Lu, short for Lukresia, a woman with Down's and a shaved head. Some in the class will never speak, or learn how to add, while others have disorders that in the US, would be kept under control with medication. Godi has Epilepsy, but is otherwise a healthy teen. When we have music time, he shakes an improvised tambourine of soda bottle caps to the discordant beat of Old McDonald. We dance together, or Shaky Shaky, in a circle, Lu and Peter cracking sticks on the bottom of cadmean water buckets, Samsoni, son of the cook, on my hip and sleeping on my shoulder as fourteen students make as much noise as they can in the small classroom. 
In my class today, we colored masks I made a few days ago, in celebration of Halloween. I tied twenty seven crayoned plates to heads, taught the song, "Skidamarinkydinkydink," corrected homework, and watched between fits of laughter as Brianson gyrated to traditional music. I sat with Tesia and Melisa  Benidict as they held my hands, highfiving my dirty palms again and again. I gave candy, pipi, after porridge, and took away sticks from little boys that they scoured the dark ground to find. I acted the story of the Three Little Pigs, substituting the wolf for a lion. I traced my hand on the blackboard with Brian, a boy with a tiny nose and long eyelashes, and Fides, and we read sentences for the first time. 
I have not thought about my body, my looks, my outfits, my friend circles. I don't criticize myself, and I don't look in the mirror or put on makeup. I think of simple things, of dinner, of dirt roads, of characters in a novel that live far from my situation. I think of clotheslines, of white sheets hanging in the afternoon sun, of colorful patterns in a window, of mangos in a pyramid on the side of a dusty street. I think of burning garbage, of lizards, of the man that hangs a leg of cow in the butchers shop down the lane. 

Save Sandy Salmon

And the world spins madly on. October 26, 2011. I write homework in each child's tattered notebooks, and recognize their handwriting. Each backpack has a significance to me now, many imported from Korea, some new, most old and worn, passed down from sister to brother to brother. I correct the painstaking answers, penciled in dark marks, work erased to leave a clear number, surrounded by rubber marks, the traces of effort. I write the next letter in the alphabet twenty-eight times, and redraw hundreds of lines down pages. I rejoice in their successes, in the sounding of words, the one hundreds on a quiz taken today. I also feel their embarrassment in walking up sheepishly to the opaque chalkboard, avoiding eye contact, not knowing now to write "eight". (This proves to be the most difficult number to spell.) Fedisiana failed the quiz today, a 2 out of 16, and cried before she handed in her paper. Sarah finished within thirty seconds, check mark after each. Queen finished shortly after. She is one of the brightest, but so eager to be first that she rushes though, accidentally writing 17 instead of 71. Samir, cunning and difficult yet somehow most endearing, with a closed mouth smile and shining eyes, held up his hand quietly, and I collected his perfect paper. Irene Melissa, built like an underdeveloped mother with different sweaters every day, asked my approval. I said, good, very good, bending down over the sturdy and worn knee high wooden desks. Eustance, Ester, Robine, all the top of their class. The girls grab my hand when I help them with answers, the boys hide their smiles. Aika placed all the struggling students in the last three tables, so they would not be tempted to cheat. Yet cheat they did, pretending to grab for the shared eraser while scouring the paper next to them for hope of help. Turning their colored plastic chairs away from the two teachers, they whisper. Aika scolds them in Swahili. Diana, one of the worst culprits, is moved to work at the teacher desk. She is Western looking in her facial features, with caramel skin and long limbs she doesn't know how to carry. Gilbert, Bashir, and Denis look at me with saucer eyes, seeing only blanks on the photocopied workbook page. All friends, they are the bottom of the class and follow Brian and Samir's rule on the playground. Denis is the darkest in the class, tall, and bound to be handsome. He is soft-spoken and reserved and carries a darkblue cloth satchel instead of a backpack. Gilbert is thin, with a small mouth and big eyes. He sits in the back of the class, in front of the fruits and vegetables and the "wild animals" poster. Bashir, out of class my first two weeks at placement, wears orange Halloween socks and hunches, his drawn face and mooning eyes looking at the ground. He picks at spots of grass alone when the children go out to play. 
I can see myself in this age still, can understand their sorrow at being left out of the swinging, the urge to be the top of the class, the crushes on boys sitting across the room. I can see it all, from my view four feet higher. I can feel the blush across my cheeks when they fall off swing sets, the pinky swears and the singing of nursery rhymes and the love for my teacher. The quickening of the heart before taking up the chalk at the board. The pride at finishing a drawing, and having someone praise you for it. 
I can't understand their words, but in many ways, I don't need to. I wish I knew more Swahili, if just to be able to catch their passing comments, funny and silly and insightful, I imagine, but most importantly, to be able to impart even a little of the love and hope I hold for all of them.