Left, Right, Left

The rains came to our village last night. And it seemed the entire earth cooled under our feet for a few short hours in the early morning. The sun slept in until noon behind an overcast sky and it felt like a huge breath of fresh air. The morning marked two weeks in Africa, and, even walking the path to our full classroom of squirrelly seven year olds, we felt the calm in the cooled air.

We walk the town now with steadier feet. Remembering the turns through the houses on the path home, even at night when the village is in complete moonless darkness. We know the friendly parts of town that always greet us and the kids running up to shake our hands. We know the silent parts of town that simply watch us with serious eyes as we pass. We know the patch of sandy path where the drunks and the gamblers hoot and holler and laugh as we pass, some of them approaching us stumbling and leering but harmless. We pass easily through the narrow market on the way to town, brimming with the hot smell of rotting vegetables and sunning piles of fish and gaurded by the vendors who turn over their produce in their hands over and over to shoo away the hovering cloud of flies all day long. We no longer wake up or cover our mouths at the smell of burning plastic when it wafts  into our window or through our classroom multiple times a day. I even had my first cup of black instant coffee ever - and I drank it like it was the finest champagne I’d ever had. Yeah, I’d say we are getting along nicely --school kids on our arms and friends who come around, all of us together sipping slowly on our lives.

The dogs here all appear to be the same breed, a small, skinny version of a short-haired Shepard of some kind and keeping them as pets is not a usual practice here - dogs make most locals quite nervous. The few restaurants in town sell most of the same stuff - meat kebobs, chicken on the bone, fish soup (broth with a whole fish limply draped into it) and beans and rice. All drinks come in the glass bottle with a napkin to wipe off the lip and they leave you with the bottle cap to keep the flies from falling into your drink. The nights outside are cool, breezy and balmy and we seize them for all their worth with a walk to town, a Tanzanian beer at a dim local thatch hut restaurant under hanging gas lamps or a nice long languid sit out on the front porch watching the massive mango trees shimmy in the dark. After the crucifying sun and hard work with the children during the days, we are reborn at night, swinging through the hours slowly and carelessly before turning in early for an bedtime date with our new fan. Life is so slow and yet so full, exploratory and hot here, it hardly feels like we have time or energy for anything else, even each other. Life, love, work, romance, its all simpler here and the people do it all with casuality and enormous presence. Your family members are partners in getting through life as pleasantly and graciously as possible. Your job or your daily work, just the price you pay for a cool evening of doing nothing in the cool sand in front of your house. Your lovers, vendors in obtaining the things you require and your wives, business partners in survival and what pleasantries you can create in the meantime. The culture allows for the fact that surviving is hard enough with its low expectations and casual turn of phrase. There are of course hierarchies, distinct differences between the cement houses and mut huts, teaching jobs and selling hard boiled eggs out on the heat through the windows of dala dalas, families who speak purposeful English full of effort and send their kids to school with a few different outfits instead of just one and families who don’t send their kids to school at all. School costs money, just like anything else, and cash is king, only granting you entry into the community court when its hot in the palm of your hand.

In this world, your relationship with others morph as your image of yourself and your life do- as in a convex mirror at the circus. Suddenly you aren’t who you thought you were. Your motivations get all garbled like internet automated security codes that only slightly resemble the letters you usually know. The people in your life take on new meanings, new masks, new roles on the stage of your journey even as they stand in front of you. And the questions you normally ask of yourself start asking questions of you. So, like the people in our small village, I try not to get too far out ahead of my sandals on a sandy road. Live the days, Savor the nights and cherish the early morning rains in between.