This blog post won’t take a whole lot of time; I am saving my writing energy to be able to write about our annual sports weekend and my upcoming safari (I leave Friday at 6:00 AM).
This was the first Thanksgiving I’ve ever missed in my life, and it turned out to not be a big deal. The whole family piled into a room and talked to me on skype for about an hour and although the picture was frozen on the Madison end, I could hear everyone perfectly and it ended up being pretty fun. Initially I was mad that I’d be missing the Packers-Lions game because I thought it would be a challenge, but again the Packers made short work of their opponent. Also, Ndamukong Suh is an idiot. A talented idiot, but an idiot nonetheless.
The American teachers (there are 8 in all, 6 of us who live on campus) decided we better put something together to commemorate the landing of ships on Plymouth Rock, so we decided to have a Thanksgiving potluck on the Sunday following Thanksgiving. In Tanzania, it is nearly impossible to get a turkey, but incredibly possible to purchase a chicken. In Tanzania, you have to improvise sometimes. Theron cooked up beer-can chicken on the grill. Shelby made a chess pie, essentially a pecan pie without the pecans. Minh made a yam dish (obviously not terribly tough to find in Tanzania). I made a green bean casserole with green beans I picked and cleaned from the student garden, a couple of cans of cream of mushroom soup from the Highway store and crunchy wonton noodles and cassava crisps instead of the French’s crispy onion strings. Blasphemy, I know…but it actually ended up tasting awesome. And the rule was, if you weren’t from America, you had to bring beer or liquor/wine. Countries present at Tanzagiving included Peru, New Zealand, South Africa, The Netherlands, Great Britain and Tanzania.
Also purchased at Highway groceries: A fan. Believe it or not, I had been sleeping without one this entire time, unless Ste was gone on an outdoor pursuits trip or wherever and I would take his. I finally broke down and got one. What had been stopping me before was the price. Fans here are very expensive because they are imported—they usually run about $40. For a fan! When I was in the Highway superstore, I noticed there was a small-ish fan out of the box with a sticker for 26,500 shillings ($15) on it. Upon further inspection, the sticker was for a giant container of ghee. I brought it up and had it rung up; the lady behind the counter gave me a “no way this fan is $15” face. But she let it go, and off I went, proud owner of the most discounted air-dispersing device in all of Tanzania. Plus—Shirley, one of the younger teachers, told me she wants to buy the fan from me when I leave. Score!
Anyway, the first inaugural Tanzagiving was a great time, and for basically everyone non-American in the joint, it was their very first Thanksgiving celebration. We had a fun time trying to explain the significance of the event to them, some of us taking the traditional “Pilgrims and Indians worked together and survived the very first winter” route, while some of us took the Howard Zinn “The Pilgrims basically ran through the Native Americans land and supplies like termites” route.
One last note of interest: There’s a book called Exile by Jakob Ejersbo that recently got translated to English, but for the last three years or so, it has been atop the bestseller list in Denmark. It is a dark, funny, nihilistic coming of age story that takes place in Moshi, and at least half of the action takes place at the International School of Moshi. Jakob Ejersbo himself was a student at ISM in the late 70s, and again in ’83-’85. I had a long chat with our head of campus Keiron White on the topic because Keiron has been in his position for just about 30 years. He said that as he paged through it, that though the names had been changed, he knew exactly who each character was based upon. I’m closing in on the halfway mark in the book, and it’s very interesting in that he constantly mentions the student dorms by my house, the assemblies we still have every other Monday morning, and taking trips up and down Lema Road, among plenty of other things I see just about every day.
The popularity of Exile has caused a strange phenomenon at ISM. Every now and then, you’ll be walking around campus and see a few young blonde backpackers walking around in awe of the place. That’s because they are Danish, and are trying to take their own self-guided Exile tours. It has become a hot topic for the administration because theoretically ISM is private property. Also, the book, while not blatantly hating ISM, is certainly not very complimentary. Thus, they are currently figuring out how best to handle this big influx of Mzungu, and it’s pretty interesting. There was also a book written about ISM in the 70s called The Foot of the Volcano, and apparently it’s really quite negative about ISM, and really poorly written. I guess I’ll have to write a book on this place.
More to come...
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