COS. The sacred acronym of the Peace Corps Volunteer. Close Of Service. The End. It's been a topic that I've tried to avoid thinking about; it was always too far away to tease myself with. But suddenly it seems right around the corner. It's 4 months away, which is a hefty chunk of time, but everywhere I look something reminds me of the finish line.....
-This week is the beginning of my last term of teaching. It's a mixed blessing to have COS on my mind; on the one hand I really want to sink my teeth into teaching and help my students as much as possible before they sit for their national exams, but at the same time it's hard to be distracted by "the end" when I'm just at the beginning of a term.
-I'm reminded of leaving whenever I buy anything long lasting. "Don't buy that giant bottle of honey! That lasts 10 months! Most of it will go to waste!"
-I just wrote a request to leave 2 weeks earlier than expected, so that I can leave before Ramadan starts. The "official" wheels of my departure are starting to turn....
-The Big Dipper is up in the night sky. One of the things I really enjoy about living near the equator is that the constellations cycle throughout the year. The Big Dipper disappears for about 6 months. It's coming into view for the third time since I've been in Tanzania, which means I've been here for a while!
-The first patters of the rainy season are falling. This is another turning-of-the-year marker that I notice, reminding me that I'm entering my second and last season of heavy rains on Pemba.
-My mom and brother's visit is over. This means no more visits from people in America to look forward to. Another aspect of my experience completed.
-My friends around town often ask how much more time I have left. Only recently they began exclaiming "Oh! 4 months? That's not very long at all!" I can't seem to escape the reminders....
-I'm starting to get wedding invitations for dates just after I return to the US. How am I supposed to ignore my excitement for my friends?? Can't help but daydream about travel plans and celebrations....
-When I walk around may house I start making lists of my possessions. "Take that back to the US, give this to a friend, sell that, sell this, throw that away......"
It's still a long way to go, but I can't help it! Thoughts of leaving are invading my brain! I'm trying to stay focused on today and this week. I still have a lot of work to do. Returning to the US always felt like a far off dream; today it's a reality. Exciting!
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Family Visit!
Sheesh! Back in November I told myself I was going to go on a blogging spree..... and now it's March.
There's good inclination to post something now; my mom and my brother just came for their visit! My mom arrived at Kilimanjaro's airport and we spent a week on the mainland before going collect Neale on Zanzibar. It was really everything I hoped it would be.
I invited my brother Neale to contribute something to the blog; he's written some very vivid impressions. My mom has also given me a poem that she wrote while we were high in the Usambara Mountains, overlooking miles of savannah. I hope you enjoy! And there are some pictures at the end for you to see something more of our travels
From Neale:
Some impressions
After 40 hours of travel:
Despite my fears, Dave finds me easily in the tiny airport. He is a new color – somehow the sun has made him more earthy. We find Mom near the bathroom. We are all together, an improbable meeting, surprising and happy.
Dave furnishes me with a coconut from which to drink.
Stonetown, the heat:
The equatorial sun is intense. To say it beats down isn’t quite right though; it lays upon you, it has weight. The shafts of it stack against the alley walls like atomized bars of gold.
Bread:
Juanito calls the blocky bread gold bars or gold bricks, I can’t remember which. They lie in stacks on the wooden sill outside the soot-stained cavern of the bakery, as if they have been unearthed. Or in the glass cases of vendors in Stonetown, a horde bought for 300 shillings.
Home:
The homes are built of brick, cinder or rough-hewn stone, the as-yet-unused in ramping piles by the road. The mortar naked in the walls, shaded by rusting corrugated roofs. These side-by-side with mud huts capped in thatching. These brown walls, these long stems and fronds, they’re beautiful. The twisting branches that stand as frame, the mud and stone that compact around the square space, the thatching brown and dry, they are beautiful, organic, part of the land.
The West:
The mud-walled hut is the epitome of poverty in the Western mind.
Going on:
The sublimely adult. Doing, day after day, what is necessary, to eat, to care for one’s children. Laughter and welcome, warmth in the heart. Enforced simplicity. Making the best of this fraught life.
In this frame, aid work seems the reverse of the paternalistic paradigm – more like children coming home to aid their parents.
Mother:
On the road by the harbor we saw a chicken without a beak. How did she lose it, or had she ever had one? Around her a brood of tiny chicks peeping. She raised her head and eyed us as we passed. Then she went back to eating in the roadside weeds with her hardened lips.
Help:
Dave told me that if the young men could find good work they would almost certainly stay on Pemba. He also said that if they had a good education system and good health care, he thought no aid would be required.
I remember to pay attention:
Banana leaves that sound like rain in the night breeze. A rooster that crows the chorus to a sea shanty. Great bats that fly like night birds from the trees; they have the faces of foxes, feed only on fruit. Beach sand as fine as flour. Coconut meat as white and rubbery as squid. The scratch of a grass broom on the stoop like the scrabble of a chicken. A cell tower that seems to fall and fall as clouds race over it. The song of the prayer call, subjected to pop-song autotune by the loud speaker. Fishing boats of rough-hewn planks, tree trunk for spar, iron rivets gone to rust, yellowing cotton in the chinks – they ought to sink but glide elegant on their way, triangular sails the color of parchment and trimmed full.
What is real? :
Life here seems earthy, quotidian, real. The filling of baskets with fruit, the sorting of beans. The steadiness of the calls to prayer. Ancillary concerns seem rarely heeded or mulled. Something simple as meeting is an event. Now we eat, now we drink, now walk, now laugh.
A sense of the surreal still hangs on. My other lives hover about my head, at the corners of my vision, disregarded ghosts, tiny and insubstantial.
Where is my home:
Finally, we say goodbye. Dave bequeaths us to the system of air travel. After several take-offs and landings, Mom and I part in Addis Ababa. I sleep nervously, eat a bowl of noodles, board my next flight at 1 AM.
I doze, flying at a speed only possible in dreams, through dark and cold. -80 degrees outside the window. We are higher than the Himalaya.
The day dawns and sets at an alarming rate – we are traveling against the sun. I have lost any feeling for what time it ought to be. When we bank I see China’s snow-dusted peaks and brown valleys, winter-bare.
We touch down in Beijing. The sun glowers like molten iron. Airplanes disappear in the smog just after take-off. What nightmare of cityscapes am I traveling through?
Another late flight. At last I see the lights of Incheon beside the dark western sea. A final chirp of the wheels on the tarmac. The airport ghostly at this hour. I shiver at the taxi stand.
I wake in my hotel in the morning and look out the window at the frozen river. Below me, muddy yards, refuse, metal roofs, grey cement walls. An old woman sweeps her step with a bamboo broom. I imagine it must sound much like the scratching of a chicken in dry leaves under a banana tree.
From my mom, Robyn:
Mile high in the Usambara mountains, staying on a ridgetop overlooking the northern Tanzanian plains, several hours spent watching the changing light and shadows ... a poem arises:
The sweetness of red dirt
Rising
Swelling with the updraft
A child herding calves
In the late afternoon sun,
The shadows shift
With the shading clouds
And angles define
With the setting day
How Earth and Sky reflect
Shadows stretch long
Revealing
What a painter knows
That colors are a continuum
And the horizon
Joins the whole
There's good inclination to post something now; my mom and my brother just came for their visit! My mom arrived at Kilimanjaro's airport and we spent a week on the mainland before going collect Neale on Zanzibar. It was really everything I hoped it would be.
I invited my brother Neale to contribute something to the blog; he's written some very vivid impressions. My mom has also given me a poem that she wrote while we were high in the Usambara Mountains, overlooking miles of savannah. I hope you enjoy! And there are some pictures at the end for you to see something more of our travels
From Neale:
Some impressions
After 40 hours of travel:
Despite my fears, Dave finds me easily in the tiny airport. He is a new color – somehow the sun has made him more earthy. We find Mom near the bathroom. We are all together, an improbable meeting, surprising and happy.
Dave furnishes me with a coconut from which to drink.
Stonetown, the heat:
The equatorial sun is intense. To say it beats down isn’t quite right though; it lays upon you, it has weight. The shafts of it stack against the alley walls like atomized bars of gold.
Bread:
Juanito calls the blocky bread gold bars or gold bricks, I can’t remember which. They lie in stacks on the wooden sill outside the soot-stained cavern of the bakery, as if they have been unearthed. Or in the glass cases of vendors in Stonetown, a horde bought for 300 shillings.
Home:
The homes are built of brick, cinder or rough-hewn stone, the as-yet-unused in ramping piles by the road. The mortar naked in the walls, shaded by rusting corrugated roofs. These side-by-side with mud huts capped in thatching. These brown walls, these long stems and fronds, they’re beautiful. The twisting branches that stand as frame, the mud and stone that compact around the square space, the thatching brown and dry, they are beautiful, organic, part of the land.
The West:
The mud-walled hut is the epitome of poverty in the Western mind.
Going on:
The sublimely adult. Doing, day after day, what is necessary, to eat, to care for one’s children. Laughter and welcome, warmth in the heart. Enforced simplicity. Making the best of this fraught life.
In this frame, aid work seems the reverse of the paternalistic paradigm – more like children coming home to aid their parents.
Mother:
On the road by the harbor we saw a chicken without a beak. How did she lose it, or had she ever had one? Around her a brood of tiny chicks peeping. She raised her head and eyed us as we passed. Then she went back to eating in the roadside weeds with her hardened lips.
Help:
Dave told me that if the young men could find good work they would almost certainly stay on Pemba. He also said that if they had a good education system and good health care, he thought no aid would be required.
I remember to pay attention:
Banana leaves that sound like rain in the night breeze. A rooster that crows the chorus to a sea shanty. Great bats that fly like night birds from the trees; they have the faces of foxes, feed only on fruit. Beach sand as fine as flour. Coconut meat as white and rubbery as squid. The scratch of a grass broom on the stoop like the scrabble of a chicken. A cell tower that seems to fall and fall as clouds race over it. The song of the prayer call, subjected to pop-song autotune by the loud speaker. Fishing boats of rough-hewn planks, tree trunk for spar, iron rivets gone to rust, yellowing cotton in the chinks – they ought to sink but glide elegant on their way, triangular sails the color of parchment and trimmed full.
What is real? :
Life here seems earthy, quotidian, real. The filling of baskets with fruit, the sorting of beans. The steadiness of the calls to prayer. Ancillary concerns seem rarely heeded or mulled. Something simple as meeting is an event. Now we eat, now we drink, now walk, now laugh.
A sense of the surreal still hangs on. My other lives hover about my head, at the corners of my vision, disregarded ghosts, tiny and insubstantial.
Where is my home:
Finally, we say goodbye. Dave bequeaths us to the system of air travel. After several take-offs and landings, Mom and I part in Addis Ababa. I sleep nervously, eat a bowl of noodles, board my next flight at 1 AM.
I doze, flying at a speed only possible in dreams, through dark and cold. -80 degrees outside the window. We are higher than the Himalaya.
The day dawns and sets at an alarming rate – we are traveling against the sun. I have lost any feeling for what time it ought to be. When we bank I see China’s snow-dusted peaks and brown valleys, winter-bare.
We touch down in Beijing. The sun glowers like molten iron. Airplanes disappear in the smog just after take-off. What nightmare of cityscapes am I traveling through?
Another late flight. At last I see the lights of Incheon beside the dark western sea. A final chirp of the wheels on the tarmac. The airport ghostly at this hour. I shiver at the taxi stand.
I wake in my hotel in the morning and look out the window at the frozen river. Below me, muddy yards, refuse, metal roofs, grey cement walls. An old woman sweeps her step with a bamboo broom. I imagine it must sound much like the scratching of a chicken in dry leaves under a banana tree.
From my mom, Robyn:
Mile high in the Usambara mountains, staying on a ridgetop overlooking the northern Tanzanian plains, several hours spent watching the changing light and shadows ... a poem arises:
The Sweetness of Red
Dirt
Rising
Swelling with the updraft
A child herding calves
In the late afternoon sun,
The shadows shift
With the shading clouds
And angles define
With the setting day
How Earth and Sky reflect
Shadows stretch long
Revealing
What a painter knows
That colors are a continuum
And the horizon
Joins the whole
 |
| Mango juice with mom in Moshi |
 |
| Kilimanjaro at dawn from our hotel room |
 |
| Mom and I went to a lodge in the Usambara Mountains, close to Kenya. The mountains rise suddenly out of the savannah. On the top right you can see one of the lodge's rooms, looking out over a one mile drop down to the plains. |
 |
| The view from our tent's terrace. Nice way to wake up in the morning. =) |
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| Collecting Neale! Stop #1 outside the airport: coconut water, my new favorite remedy for all traveling aches and pains. |
 |
| A street vendor preparing dafu: young coconut with water and soft meat inside. |
 |
| Together! |
 |
| Sauti Za Busara (Sounds of Wisdom), the annual African music festival in Stonetown |
 |
| Out for a bike ride on Pemba! |
 |
| Neale checks out a dhow (wooden fishing boat) at low tide. |
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| More dafu! I love the look on Neale's face - the dafu meat is delicious.... |
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