Things That Took My Breath Away This Weekend

- wheezing my way up a mountain (while my guide hopped from rock to rock without breaking a sweat).
- walking along red dirt roads, past sun-dappled coffee farms and bleating herds of goats (all the while having a serious T.I.A.* moment).
- watching eight-year-old girls carry enormous bags of rice.
On their heads.
Uphill.
Wait, no: UPMOUNTAIN.
- being attacked by fire ants in the jungle (literally, ants in my pants).
- wading through a stream, wondering about the possibility of schistosomiasis.
- standing at the bottom of a pounding waterfall, on the side of a mountain, in a place I've dreamed about for most of my life, feeling honored to be alive.
- attending a celebration that, in short, was the traditional Maasai equivalent of a dance party.
- drinking extremely potent locally brewed beer made from fermented bananas and wheat. Enough said.
- being proposed to by a sixty-year-old Maasai man.
- being accidentally spit on by the same overly enthusiastic, mostly toothless Maasai man.
- being told by a group of children that my "face shines like candlelight."


God I love this place.



*T.I.A. = this is Africa. A saying reserved only for the most awe-inspiring, heart-wrenching, visually arresting, quintessentially African moments.

So this one time, I ate bugs.

My nine year-old host sister burst through the door, a flurry of flying skirt and swinging shoelaces, tumbling over my backpack, vaulting over the coffee table, and shouting (in the loudest voice I've heard her use since I've been here), "MAMA! The kumbi-kumbi!"



"Ai-ya!" A moment before, my mama had been crouched over a pot of boiling water, watching the swirling grains of rice with a glazed-over look in her eyes. But now with a single hand-clap she was up, wiping her hands on her skirt and handing my sister a stainless steel bowl. "Loveness, go! Hurry!"



My sister Loveness (nine years old, sixty-five pounds of pure charisma, and known by everyone as Love or Love-oo) pulled me up from the couch on her way out the door, and we sprinted out of the dormitory and across the breezeway, coming to a screeching halt at the edge of the soccer field. It was about 7 in the evening, slightly after sunset on this side of the world, when the last light dances its way past the banana trees -- and apparently just when the kumbi-kumbi start to come out.



"Wait, Love, what's kumbi-kumbi?"



A silly question, apparently: "These!"



And then I saw them -- a mass of insects with bodies the size of quarters and wings like transparent dollar-bills, floating lazily under the flourescent porch-light, flitting in and out of the darkness that lay just beyond the cement. They reminded me of oversized mayflies, similar to the ones I had seen every summer along the Mississippi River. They had the same lethargic, light-seeking habits, the same miniscule lifespan, the same night-time activities -- but they were about three or four times bigger than any bug I'd seen in the U.S. And now Love was scooping them up one by one, snatching them by a wing or a leg and tossing them in the bowl, where they spiraled and struggled in the half-inch of water.



"Wait, but why are we catching them?"



Another silly question, apparently: "To eat them, of course!"



A dumbfounded pause. "...are we going to cook them first?"



"We can fry them if you want to, but we don't have to. Joshua, show her!" Love, by this point, had about twenty kumbi-kumbi struggling to escape between the gaps in her fingers, and was in no position to show me anything.



My thirteen year-old brother was dangling a kumbi-kumbi by his ear, listening to the hum of its wings as he pinched it between his thumb and index finger. Within seconds he had discarded the wings and popped the body in his mouth, proudly explaining, "My Baba showed me how to do that."



Another astounded pause.



It took a few moments for me to adjust to the process -- not because kumbi-kumbi are hard to catch (they're not), but because the process of catching them also involves throwing them in a pot of water and leaving them to drown. Even as a mostly reformed vegetarian, even with oversized mayflies, this was hard to watch. There was also the more practical matter of avoiding all of the other insects lurking in the soil beneath our feet -- most importantly, the multitudes of swarming, bright red ants, which would occasionally latch onto the toes of unsuspecting humans. The females, my brother explained, are harmless; the males, however, are fearless and vicious, armed with bulldog-ish jaws that snap onto anything that moves.

"See! They're not even afraid!" Joshua said as he pointed a mud-encrusted index finger into one ant's path. Like a miniature pit bull, it charged and locked on, latching its jaws onto a pad of flesh and just hanging there, dangling.

Within an hour, our little bowl swirled with about one hundred kumbi-kumbi, all squirming and sopping wet. We presented them to my mama (who profusely hugged and thanked us), and watched them tumble into a big pot.

After being fried and salted, the kumbi-kumbi were presented to us on a platter, with wings still intact, and the whole family waited for me to take the first bite. And so I did -- choosing a particularly small, one-winged specimen. Within a few moments, I was picking larger, juicer kumbi, and by the end of the meal I had eaten twenty or thirty.

When trying a new food, it's natural to try to make parallels to other culinary experiences, but with kumbi-kumbi this is a bit of a challenge. Was it good? Yes. Would I eat it again? Sure. Would I make it in the United States? Probably not. If pressed to describe it, though, I'd say that it had the texture of a salty rice krispie kernel, with a soggy moist inside (and maybe a bit of shrimp-like outer shell).

My brother Joshua had other ideas: "See! It tastes just like chicken!"

From the Swali Box

For the past week I've been teaching at an HIV/AIDS day camp, working with a classroom of about 44 students, most of whom are only a few years younger than me and have had essentially no sex education at all. One of our most treasured classrom rituals is the daily reading of the "Swali Box," which is a time for answering the students' anonymous questions (swali, in Kiswahili, means "question"). Here's the best of the best:

- If a woman who is HIV positive has sex with a dog, can the dog get HIV/AIDS?
- Why is your skin white? Why is my skin black?
- What's a lesbian?
- Have you ever had sex? If so, what does it feel like?
- Why do women want to be equal to men? Don't they know they're physically weaker?
- I'm in love with a boy, but he doesn't love me back. What should I do?
- What are the biological effects of being in love?
- I just have a comment: the correct name for a mother's first breastmilk is colostrum.

Weeks One, Two, and Three: The Hyper-Abbreviated, No-Time-To-Breathe, Wow-It's-Hard-To-Find-Internet-Here...Re-Cap

Week one consisted mostly of being propositioned, pointed at, and proposed to everywhere I went. (Within a few days, I had a five-foot Rastafarian who identified me on the street as "his fiancee." Never mind the fact that the only words I had ever exchanged with him were hapana (no) and "I know where I'm going; leave me alone.") When I wasn't being made painfully aware of how white my skin is, I was spending most of my time at the Global Service Corps office in Arusha-town, taking a crash course in Swahili and delving deeper into the cultural issues that surround HIV/AIDS in Africa. (Most specifically, the fact that it's common cultural practice to have concurrent sexual relationships -- that is, to have only two or three sexual partners in a lifetime, but to have them all at the same time. If one person in the triangle contracts HIV, everyone in the triangle contracts HIV, which explains why the disease has spread more quickly in Africa than on any other continent.)

Week Two came, and I moved to Tengeru -- an agriculturally-oriented suburb of Arusha that is too beautiful for words. I lived in a house with no running water or toilet, so my bathroom essentially consisted of a few plastic buckets and a porcelain hole in the ground (really not as bad as it sounds.) My host mama Sylvia was one of the sweetest women I've ever met, and we got along splendidly, aside from the fact that I could never eat enough to satisfy her. I ate well beyond my stomach capacity and yet, no matter how much my belly felt ready to burst, she would end every meal by proclaiming, "Jammy. You have let me down. You have eaten only three platefuls of ugali!" Kind of an eating disorder in reverse.

Week Three is here, and now I'm back in Arusha, living with a new family for the next month and preparing for my role as an HIV/AIDS educator at a school called Themi. I'm within a couple minutes of the fastest internet cafe in town (which feels like a five-star luxury hotel at this point), and I'm living at the Arusha International School, surrounded by about 1,000 kids between the ages of 3 and 16 (which feels like just about the closest thing to heaven that I've experienced so far on earth.)

And now I only have 2 minutes left of internet time, so as usual I'm not going to be able to say everything I wanted to say. It's a predictably African predicament, but one that I've come to embrace. Suffice it to say -- I love love love it here, more than words can say.

p.s. I've turned down all marriage proposals so far.

Things I Get Excited About in Tanzania

cheese in any form
toilets you can sit on
faucets connected to running water
electricity that works
cappuccinos
views of Mount Kilimanjaro on a clear day
twenty minutes on the internet

Things Tanzanian Women Balance on Their Heads

bananas
baskets of bananas
buckets of bananas
plates of bananas
mystery plastic bags (probably filled with bananas)
ENTIRE SUITCASES (full of bananas?)

What IS this thing?

In one day, one hour, fifteen minutes, and forty-eight seconds -- after a lifetime of dreaming, several years of begging, and at least a few months of planning -- I'll be on a plane bound for East Africa. The first two decades of my life have been centered in the same ten-mile radius, but soon I'll be spending nine weeks learning, loving, and growing in a place I've dreamed about since childhood. Specifically, Tanzania. Specifically, a place that's about 8,379 miles away.

For anyone who knows me at all, one thing is obvious: this is the most exciting thing, maybe ever. For real, this is on the same excitement level as the day I got a kitten for Christmas. And that’s saying something. I mean, I love kittens. I wept like a child that Christmas. Admittedly, I was also like, eight years old at the time, so weeping was not outside the realm of acceptable activities. Plus my dog had just died a couple months before. Look, it was just a very cathartic experience, okay? IT’S HEALTHY TO CRY SOMETIMES.

The point is, I’ve wanted to go to Africa for a really long time. And I may or may not cry on a regular basis. But I digress.

these kittens : level of improbable adorableness :: Jaime : level of excitement about going to Tanzania

I’ve heard that you can’t be certain that something has happened unless it’s been documented on the internet, so from this day onward, I declare this blog to be my proof. Who knows — maybe one day, I'll show it to my grandchildren. Indeed, instead of inviting them over to my cat-infested house to sit through hours of looking at photo albums of those nine weeks I spent in Arusha, I’ll just send them a link to my blog.

Which they’ll be able to view via iPhone.

Which will actually just be a microchip implanted in their bodies upon birth.

And they'll all be born half-robot.

I really do hate technology.

But at the same time, I can't shake the feeling that this experience is going to be transformative -- that these nine weeks in Africa are going to profoundly affect the trajectory of my life. There are going to be scary moments, probably; homesick moments, definitely; embarrassing moments, undoubtedly. But I'm also bound to have experiences that are powerful and rich, experiences that not only strike at the heart of Tanzanian culture, but that help me view the human condition through a wider, more sensitive lens. Plus I'll probably have some interesting experiences with bathrooms. And I can't help but think that all of that is worth documenting.

But no, seriously you guys, I’m not a crybaby.