My life has been a long, strange journey and I have struggled to find my place in the world. I can say with confidence I’m the only man in history who’s been in the Peace Corps, the Army, the NSA, and an insane asylum. And if there is another man who can say that, if he isn’t an Eagle Scout, I am. My favorite book is the autobiography of a game warden in Africa in the 1930s called Hunter. Ever since I read it, I wanted to have a similar life of adventure.
In the spring of 2007, I graduated college as a squeaky-clean ex-Mormon. I like to say I went from a Latter-day Saint to a Latter-day Ain’t. I had wanted to join the military in 2003, but a full college scholarship to study chemical engineering and the Iraq War convinced me otherwise. My brother joined the Army in 2006, so the military was off the table after that, as I did not want to stress out my parents more.
Since I’ve always been interested in travel and foreign languages, I decided a stint in the Peace Corps was the best option. Yes, the Peace Corps: Fighting Fire with Marshmallows since 1961. It was a great experience. Among other things, I learned Swahili, survived malaria, and climbed Mt Kilimanjaro. My main role was to teach math at an all-boys high school in a little village called Kibosho. The name in the local Chagga language means ‘Kibo view’. Kibo is local name for the main peak of Kilimanjaro. A famous Swahili proverb is milimia haikutani, lakini binadamu, hukutana (mountains don’t meet but people do).
What I was particularly proud of was the fact that after a year of teaching, the pass rate for my students on the national math exam hit the highest level in 12 years. After seeing the relative lack of science books in Swahili, I wrote my own and published it locally. I also distributed an electronic version for free.
The wildest experience I had there was the time I learned the meaning of the word msukule. An msukule is a person who is put under a spell by an mchawi (witchdoctor). The spell forces the victims to wake up at night and work in the mchawi’s field for a few hours before returning home with no memory of the event. When someone seems tired for no reason, local lore says the person might be an msukule.
As for the wildlife there, I had some interesting encounters. There’s a kind of flying termite the locals call kumbikumbi. They gather in great swarms, and you scoop them up, fry, and eat them. There’s also a creature called a kicheche, which is like a weasel. It often breaks into chicken coops to steal eggs. My neighbor had a persistent problem with one until he used a syringe to inject poison into some eggs and left the coop open. The creature took one egg and never returned. And of course, there was the time I stepped on a nest of siafu, a kind of aggressive ant that tends to eat everything in their path when on the march, though they are not particularly dangerous to people.
When I was living with a host family during the initial training phase and they found out I had never slaughtered a chicken, they told me to buy one at the market. Upon my return, they handed me a knife and told me to make dinner, so I did. My host brother helped me pluck it, but I did bloodiest part.
Tanzania is generally a safe country, but like all places, it has crime. The difference is that over there, mob justice is common. Tanzanians get very angry about crime, especially theft. Thieves who are caught red-handed in public are often beaten or stoned to death on the spot. This means that it is one of the few places in the world where criminals run *toward* the police to save themselves. Once, a Norwegian visitor to the orphanage in my village was beaten and robbed in broad daylight. The villagers captured the bandit and beat him til he laid on the ground, apparently unconscious. I did my best to calm the mob while the orphanage director called the police. When they came, the bandit immediately got up and into the police car.
From time to time, all the Peace Corps volunteers in my area gathered for a holiday. One Thanksgiving featured a special guest, a turkey named Mr. Delicious by his keeper. That guy spent a month feeding the turkey garlic in the hope some of the flavor linger in the meat. It was a touching moment when we all said goodbye to Mr. Delicious and thanked him for his sacrifice as he went on to his glorious destiny.
Malaria was awful and I couldn’t get to a hospital because it was the monsoon season, and the roads were impassable. When word of my illness spread, many people came to visit, bring food, and wish me well. It made up for all the times when I did not feel quite so welcome there. Another heart-warming moment was when the kids at the local orphanage would run out to hug me. That always made me feel like I was not a waste of flesh. I taught English to the orphans and made a website for the place to help with fundraising.
Never drank a drop of alcohol til I was 21, and I only started because my favorite restaurant (Long John Silver’s) burned down on my 21st birthday. When I saw the charred ruins, I figured I might as well try it and see what the big deal is. As luck would have it, that night a very drunk and lost college student banged on my door that night. I gave him shelter figuring he’d freeze if I turned him away. He pissed himself and had to leave in the morning with his pissed soaked clothes. You’d think that would have turned me off from drinking entirely and you’d be wrong.
The standard Peace Corps joke is that everyone who goes to Asia comes back a philosopher, everyone who goes to South America comes back a revolutionary, and everyone who goes to Africa comes back a drunk. It’s funny because it’s true, at least for me. Most tribes in Tanzania have their own brew, which is called pombe in Swahili. In my area, it was called mbege in the local language and it was made from millet and/or bananas. I tried it and it was OK. Methanol poisoning is a risk with any homemade brew, so I can’t say I recommend it.
No comments:
Post a Comment