what goes up must come down. that includes emotions.

After two and a half years of emails and conversations I’ve finally met Jann, the namesake of Bibi Jann’s school. For the last week, Jann Mitchell and her Husband Eric have been in town. We’ve had long conversations about the school, cleared up some misunderstandings inherent to an email-based relationship, and talked about the future of the school. On Tuesday we went to Mbagala together. Jann had big news to deliver.

Nearly everyone I know who’s met the Tanzanian founder of Bibi Jann’s, Fatuma, has described her by saying some variation of “there’s just something special about her.” Part of her reputation is based on her actions; up until two years ago she’d never owned a bed but operated a collective of 30 grandmothers raising their AIDS-orphaned grandchildren, as well as supported three orphans herself, and founded a school for local children that had nowhere else to go. But I believe the reason she’s thought of as otherworldly is because despite of her extreme hardship and unbending concern for others she’s one of the most pleasant people I’ve ever met. I don’t know how to succinctly describe it other than to say it’s like she’s a holy person. Look at a reaction for yourself- this is my friend Carli’s face about three minutes after talking to Fatuma for the first time:

admiration

Fatuma is too modest to tell me herself, but her son, Dickson, has told me several times that Fatuma’s dream is to visit the United States, just one time, before she dies. She was close two years ago. Some American film-makers created a documentary about Bibi Jann’s. Part of the documentary captured several African-American grandmothers visiting Tanzania, and the documentary folks planned to fly several Tanzanian women to the US. Plans to bring over the Tanzanians fell through in he end. Well, Jann recently received an email from an organization that saw the documentary and wants to fly Fatuma to New York City to sit on a panel of grandmothers from various countries, who will describe their respective circumstances.

Jann hadn’t yet told Fatuma. We knew she’d be at home that day because she was hosting an all-day school meeting. We arrived to see the “meeting” (they’d hired a DJ, and the entire staff was doing coordinated dance routines- the hilarity of that scene could be a blog entry by itself) and we were ushered to our usual spot on Fatuma’s couch. Here’s how I remember the conversation:

Jann: “Fatuma, I have some important news”

Fatuma: (With a ray of light shining on down on her) smiles

Jann: “You’re going to New York City! A group of grandmothers is being flown in to talk about their lives and they’ve invited you! Isn’t that amazing?!” Fatuma: Silence with no expression ….smiles……starts laughing……arms start flailing…she stands up and starts this emotional thunderstorm of laughing and sobbing and flailing.

If you’ve got a free minute, here’s the actual first 60 seconds of that interaction (stopped filming when Fatuma started crying):

Had to be the brightest moment of my time in Tanzania.

Once things settled down, we started talking about the children. Without Jann knowing Swahili, her conversations are choppy at best, and even if a Swahili person knows some English, you can easily see that the meaning of lots of statements get lost in translation. My being in Mbagala with Jann was a rare opportunity for her to be with someone who fully understands what she says and knows enough Swahili to communicate those ideas directly to Fatuma. I don’t know how this happened so fast, but the two of them, through me, quickly started talking about the sexual well-being of the oldest girls at Bibi Jann’s- they’re ages 9-11.

Note: from here on out in this post I’m going to change the names of the children and (regretfully) not going to show any pictures of the ones we discussed.

Fatuma considered four first and second-graders to be at very high risk. They’re unsupervised for various reasons and use their free time visiting various neighborhood homes, and spending an inordinate of time near some dirty nearby river. She thinks all of them are being sexually abused by various community and family members. One of the girls, I’ll call her Safina, is so emotionally damaged that Fatuma doesn’t believe she can be remedied. In addition, she isn’t an orphan which means there’s no chance of bringing her to live with Fatuma, as happens fairly often. Safina is possibly the cutest child I’ve ever met. She’s nine.

Imagine what may happen to Safina. Right now she’s a nine-year-old 1st grader. Shy, but loves to be held, likes dodgeball even though she’s not coordinated enough to be very good, and loves drawing with magic markers. Next June she could easily be an HIV-positive single mother who never finished second grade. That’ll be it for her. Ten-years-old, terminally ill with no money in an area of 70,000 people with 90-95% unemployment and a three-month old child to care for.

Another girl, Alisha, is a ten-year-old orphan who lives with two much older brothers, notorious for being thieves. Fatuma says Alisha has two boyfriends, one is 11 the other 15, and they’re teaching her “very bad things” (still unclear if that was sexual or something else). She wanted Alisha to come live with her but the brothers don’t want her to move out. Alisha has a European “sponsor” who sends money intended for clothing and school. I could have told you that in those circumstances the money wasn’t being used for clothing or school, and Fatuma made that abundantly clear.  In situations like Alisha’s, where a family can’t or won’t support the children, “sponsors” can be important income sources that discourage the family from finding a better home for the kids.  Fatuma believed that with Jann and I we could go to the house and convince Alisha’s brothers to let her move out and live with Fatuma.

So ten minutes later, there we were. The three of us sitting on a blanket outside the family home with Alisha and one of the brothers (the other had been in jail since a few days earlier). I don’t have a ton to say about the conversation. The brother certainly did not seem like a cold-hearted career criminal. He was about my age, had a kind of nervous optimism where he’d alternate between smiling and talking about how hard it had been since their parents died. With Jann’s guidance I essentially explained that everyone at Bibi Jann’s was worried about Alisha but believed that she had a chance. Through finishing her education she could make something special out of her life and in turn help the family. Within our approximately 30 minute conversation, Alisha started bawling and telling us how she had done very bad things, the brother talked for a long time about how much he cared about Alisha but knew she wasn’t doing well behaviorally or in school. Jann cried. Fatuma cried. Alisha cried some more. Towards the end of the conversation, before I directly asked the brother to let Alisha move in with Fatuma, we had a long, heavy silence. The quiet was broken by a loud voice. An elderly woman had been sitting on the ground by the house next door, listening to our conversation. She kept this eerily stone-cold facial expression and yelled to us, “send the girl to Fatuma! All of the problems in my life are because I never finished school. This girl is young and still has a chance.” Alisha started bawling, and ran to Jann. Just clung to her while both cried for a good three minutes.

She moved into Fatuma’s house last night.

fatuma

I think Tuesday was a game-changer for me.

run, visitors! the sidewalk is falling out from behind us.

Just before my two-week stint in the US, a few friends from Wisconsin, Dan Genter, Carli Mueller, and Maggie Airriess, came to visit.  What a trip it was!  The whole thing was a monster cultural immersion. First stop?  Isaac’s wedding.  Isaac is a Tanzanian friend of mine who studied at Dartmouth.  He can be pretty well summarized by the phrase “the man.”  He’s been my cultural translator for years.  I honestly don’t really understand how Isaac has become the person he is, but somehow he manages to breakdown the cultural barriers that I feel with almost every other Tanzanian.  With most conversations here I spend a great deal of time worrying about how to phrase things in a way what people will understand and trying to wrap my head around what is being said to me, but with Isaac it’s like I’m hanging out with a buddy in the US. Anyways, the wedding was an extravagant Christian affair.  There were two obvious highlights.  First was the slideshow his friends put together.  I still don’t get if someone was playing a prank or if this was a cultural thing, but many of the pictures were of Isaac on a trip to Amsterdam.  I started to realize this wedding would be unlike any I’d ever been to when the huge screen showing the slideshow stopped on a picture of Isaac giving an enthusiastic thumbs up in front of a wall of dildos.  Hilarious. Then the most amazing thing happened.  People began toasting the bride and groom, as happens at every wedding I’ve been to.  Usually, however, toasting is followed by cutting the wedding cake.  Not here.  Definitely not here.  In Tanzania, after the couple is toasted, a fully intact, cooked goat carcass is brought to the newlyweds and the groom cuts and feeds a piece to the bride.  You’ve got to see this for yourself:

We squeezed in a three-day tour of Dar es Salaam.  Did the highlights- lots of looking at art, getting stuck in traffic,…  But we had another memorable day when we took the entire Bibi Jann’s primary school to a tiny, very out-of-place water park.  I was convinced the kids wouldn’t enjoy it.  I thought they’d be overwhelmed by the site of the massive, bright, plastic slides.  Boy, was I wrong.  The kids went insane.  I’m glad no one drowned because I’ve never seen those kids so tired as they were at the end of that day: We closed out our trip with a visit to Zanzibar.  We lucked out and stayed at this little hotel run by a young american couple, the Duniani Lodge.  They’d closed down for the rainy season so they gave us a villa for $30/night.  Let me just describe it by saying I know exactly where I want to have my honey moon.  White sands.  Thatch roof huts. Ocean side drinks with Masai.  A huge stereo that they let us DJ for both of our two days.  Movie night with a projector on the beach.  All in all it was an amazing couple days.  We did the standard Zanzibar stuff- saw lots of monkeys and went on a spice tour.

Then things got real.

We’d come to Zanzibar on a great ferry.  It was totally modern- outfitted with new seats, clean walls, high-speed, TVs (although the TVs played some middle-eastern hidden camera prank show on a loop- guess you can’t win’em all).  The trip took about 90 minutes and the schedule said the last ferry to return to Dar was at 10 pm.   I was flying out to the US at 8:40 the following morning, so I figured I’d get in around midnight, stay up all night and sleep on the plane.  Great plan…

The last thing on our Zanzibar to-do list was to hit up a nighttime seafood market.  I stuffed my face with lobster and fish and crab and every single bite was an increasingly worse idea since we’d board a ferry shortly after dinner.  At 8:00 we headed to the ferry building to make sure everything was still on schedule.  It wasn’t. They’d cancelled the 10:00 ferry.  At the ticket office, people started frantically trying to pull us over to their ticket counters for other night ferries.  It was a pretty bad situation- it was all in a dark alley in an area we didn’t know, and more importantly we had no idea which people were selling us tickets for ferries, which were counterfeit, and which were for horribly unsafe boats.  I asked a bunch of people which boat was the nicest and got a consensus that the sea-horse was our best bet.  The lady at the counter told us that we were only allowed to buy VIP tickets, so we gave her our $20 each.  Little did we know how bizarre that VIP section would be. Turns out the Tanzanian ferry industry is wildly racist.  The VIP section is actually the white section while the coach section is the Tanzanian section.  We walked up some stairs labelled VIP, and when we got to the top it looked like the hulk had just torn through a faux-leather furniture shop.  Faux-leather chairs, couches, and love seats were scattered all over the place.  We claimed a corner and settled in for what we expected to be a 1-2 hour ride, the same length as the ride coming over. Our scheduled departure of 9:00 came and went.  9:15.  9:30.  Then around 9:45 a staff member ran up into our section and started tearing out dirty mattresses from some cabinets that lined the VIP section.  You might ask, why was he pulling out mattresses for a 90 minute boat-ride?  Well I asked him.  Turns out it wasn’t a 90 minute ride.  It was a eight-hour ride.  Holy shit.  That meant not only had we just had a feast of street seafood, but it was before an eight-hour ferry-ride on our faux-leather couches and dirty mattresses.  If everything went perfectly, we’d get in at 6am.  The airport was across town from the ferry building, my flight was at 8:40, and I hadn’t even packed.  Now it started to feel like the sidewalk was falling out from behind me. I’m sorry to say I don’t have any pictures from that fateful ferry ride.  I never threw up, but for the entire eight hours, I thought if I moved enough to get my camera that I’d vomit everywhere.  Longest eight hours ever.  I took this picture on the way out to give you a sense of the non-vip part of the boat:

So we got in at 6:00.  Get to my place, pack and shower and leave at 7:15.  The airport is 40 minutes to two hours away depending on traffic.  Arrived at the airport at 8:10.  8:10 at the semi-functional Julius Nyerere airport for my 8:40 flight to London.  Somehow I made the flight and arrived at Heathrow at 4pm on April 14th.  Left at 6:30.  Know what happened at 8:00 on April 14th?  That volcano erupted in Iceland. After I escape the insanity of the trip from Zanzibar, my flight barely misses being grounded by an explosion of ash from a god damn volcano.

Well I made it home somehow.  Managed to outrun the figurative sidewalk that was falling out from behind me.

Kilimanjaro from the plane

a wild and successful day

I’m back from a bit of a vacation.  I returned to the US for a few weeks in April/May to meet with some people important to my work here, and to visit a couple med schools. I’m sorry if you blog readers have felt a bit neglected during the last month but now you’ve got my explanation.  Now I’m back and feeling re-invigorated.

For the next month a close friend and fellow SALAMA: Tanzania co-founder, Brian Christie, will be living on my couch and working with me to get things going at Bibi Jann’s.  Saturday we set out on our first adventure to the school and it was quite day.

First, I should tell you that anytime I get in my “car” these days I feel like I’m living the life of Indiana Jones.  Yesterday was no exception. I don’t want to focus this blog entry on my trip so here’s a quick summary of our insane day:

800: leave for school in bajaj

845: can’t change gears in bajaj, notice a screw missing from the engine, replace the screw with a screw from my license plate, bajaj works again

945: arrive at school, do our first video chat with a family friend/elementary school teacher in Madison, WI (it was amazing- madison news covered it)

1000: Bibi Jann’s newly created board of directors meets and their conversations/debates were AMAAAAAZING (that’s the “successful” part of the title for this entry- more on this in a minute)

1200: three hours of dodgeball, showing kids how to use a camera, and general playing with kids

1530: crowd gathers at a small shop down the road from the school- they’ve caught a thief.  The thief has his hands tied behind his back and a police officer leads him through the street as local residents smack him with shoes, headbutt him, punch him, and generally beat the hell out of him.  He was 16 and apparently stole a piece of chicken.

1545: after a debate about our obligation in the thief situation, we decide to take off in the bajaj and possibly give the cop and thief a ride to the main road to prevent the kid from being beaten to death.  Bajaj doesn’t start.

1600: Bajaj mysteriously starts but we can’t find the thief.

1630: Bajaj gets stuck in a big mud pit on our way back to town.  Brian pushes us out.

1640: a (likely corrupt) police officer points at the bajaj from a distance so we rapidly change our route to avoid passing the cop

1650: Brian buys ice cream bars.  I can’t eat my ice cream because if I remove either hand from the bajaj’s handle bars the engine stalls and turns off so Brian has to feed my ice cream from the back seat.  We get stuck in a traffic jam.  Brian’s ipod, our music source in the bajaj, switches to some strange french accordion music.  A crowd gathers to watch two white guys in a bajaj (which usually gets stares and laughter by itself), brian feeding me ice cream, and all this as we’re listening to a damn accordion blaring through the radio.  For the entire duration of the accordion track I feel like I’m living in some kind of french surrealistic movie

1700: nap then dinner

2200: meet friend at a bar

whew!

To elaborate on the Bibi Jann’s board meeting, it’s important to know that I’ve decided to focus my time here almost 100% on creating an effective board of directors to make decisions at the school as well as serve as an interface for SALAMA. Saturday was the first meeting of the team we’ve built, so it had the potential to make me feel as though my work here has been ineffective.  I’m posting an excerpt from an email Brian sent to the SALAMA board of directors:

The meeting was phenomenal. Ben and I introduced ourselves, and explained what exactly SALAMA’s role in the school was, and then proceeded to sit and the back and listen to the meeting go down. It was well-organized and involved participation from nearly every member of the board. When the topic of the land purchase came up, we encouraged them to discuss it themselves, without much input from us (promising budgetary guidance in the near future), and the response was incredibly encouraging. Their was a great back and forth between multiple members of the board about the best location and acreage of the land, as well as the schedule for purchase of the land. They formed a subcommittee to go out and visit individual sites themselves to evaluate, and plan on meeting again in 1 week to discuss. As the meeting continued, the headmaster stood and requested more books for certain subjects, stating that land was important but that the books were also necessary. A lengthy discussion followed there as well.

Bibi Jann's new board

AWESOME!  It’s been too long since I had such a wild and successful day.

everyone loves polaroids

In the two years I’ve been coming here, I’ve tried to remember my favorite activities from childhood and bust them out at recess.  I’ve had mixed results.

Plaster masks?  Turns out they’re really, really hard to make if you have no memory of how to make them.  Naima, if you read this I hope someday when you’re older you’ll understand why I left your face covered in Vaseline for 45 minutes.

Soap bubbles?  Holy shit.  If you haven’t seen 70 kids see those for the first time, you haven’t lived.  You also probably haven’t feared being trampled by 70 children so excited that I swear I saw a couple of them foaming at the mouth.

bubbles!

Of all the games/activities people have tried out at Bibi Jann’s, taking Polaroid pictures just might rank up there as my favorite.  Up until a couple weeks ago, two super motivated, enthusiastic Dartmouth students were out here.  One of them, Cameron, brought a Polaroid camera and an impressive amount of film.  On his last day, he wanted to take pictures of as many kids as possible then have them take the pictures home as gifts.  Student reactions ran the gamut.  Some smiled.  Some frowned.  Some flashed hilariously exaggerated gang signs.  Some made funny faces.  But when it came time to write a name on the blank part on the bottom of the Polaroids, 99% called their pictures “wassup?”

Awesome.

On an unrelated note.  Later that day one of the younger classes was learning English through songs.  There’s this one kid in that class with the kind of glasses that magnify the wearer’s eyeballs.  Every time I see him I can’t help from smiling.  Seriously though, if he doesn’t make you smile there might be something wrong with you:

17 kids

I set out to update this blog weekly. I’m one month in and already I missed a week. Truth is, I haven’t written because I’ve been a bit down and I don’t want people to feel obligated to read this (hi mom and dad) and then feel depressed. For the last two weeks, two things have weighed on me.

The first- my Tanzanian friend Isaac explained to me why houses here seem so poorly constructed. He told me that banks won’t give local people mortgages. That made sense. I told him that I don’t know the name of any street within four blocks, let alone my specific address. People don’t have social security numbers or credit scores. I have no idea how banks would ever decide who could pay them back, and track down those who defaulted. “No,” he said. (Paraphrasing) “Banks don’t give loans because they don’t know when people are going to die.”

The life expectancy here is 46. How can a bank feel comfortable making 30-year mortgages standard procedure?

a family of five

The second heavy-hearted story?  The life of a woman called Bibi Issa.  Many of the children at Bibi Jann’s school are orphans and due to a bunch of factors, they often live with their single grandmothers.  I’ve spent a bit of time with Bibi Issa because I’ve developed a particular affinity for her grandson, Issa, a student at Bibi Jann’s.  There’s a steep language barrier with the grandmothers, so other than watching them cook and play with their grandkids, I don’t know many back-stories.  I found out last week that Bibi Issa has had 17 children.  All of them are dead.  Damn.  17.

Bibi Issa

What must that be like for her?  For Issa?  Hell, I remember vividly when I was in 6th grade in Madison and a kid named Mike McKinley’s mom died.  Half the class was in tears and professional counselors came to offer us their support. Bibi Jann’s is 160 kids.  60 of them have watched their parents die.  Then you look at Issa’s case, given he’s in a bad circumstance, but it’s not all that extreme for Bibi Jann’s.  That kid was born into a place where death is everywhere.  What does that do to his expectations about life?

That brings me to why I’m ready to post these depressing stories.  The kids at Bibi Jann’s have grown up in chaos.  AIDS and malaria.  Orphaned and homeless classmates.  Food shortages.  Wild school bus crashes (my bad on that field trip gone wrong…).  A few months ago there was an explosion at a munitions plant that scattered debris across the school- no one has even mentioned that one since I arrived.

The management of Bibi Jann’s is exploring the idea of building a boarding school.  We’ve looked at gorgeous 5-10 acre plots of land surrounded by palm trees, rolling hills, and with views of the Indian Ocean.  Gone would be the density and open piles of trash and extreme poverty that surround these children now.  With the support of donors in the US and the planning of parents and teachers, I think we can address these kids low expectations.  They could bank on three nutritious meals every day.  Know that the water, from their own well, is safe and always running. Draw power from their own solar panels that would keep the lights on at night.  There are lots more grandmas like Bibi Issa- a lot of them make less than $1 per day to feed their grandkids.  Maybe we can hire some of them to care for the kids at night.  I’m sure I’ll face plenty more patches of frustration and glumness, but I’m excited about the prospect of what could happen.  I think there’s a chance that through this project, we can start to change these kids’ expectations of what life can bring.

what this is all about

I may have gotten a bit ahead of myself with that last post.  Problem was, at the time of creating this blog I was just too excited about that vehicle to talk about much else.  To give a bit of context, here’s the breakdown of what this blog (and my life for the next four months) will be all about.

About two and a half years ago a buddy of mine, Brian Christie, and I came to Dar es Salaam to help some doctors from Dartmouth start-up an undergraduate internship at their new pediatric clinic.  One thing led to another and we ended up spending a ton of time at a school where a bunch of the students were patients.  The school, Bibi Jann’s, was in a sprawling slum on the outskirts of Dar, and as you might expect, they had some heavy-duty funding shortages.  If I haven’t already made you watch this, here’s a three-minute video about the school as it was when we were there the first time, back in 2007:

After 10 weeks in Tanzania, I went back to Dartmouth full of thoughts about how to maintain Bibi Jann’s and turn it into something bigger. Brian stayed in Tanzania for a few more months. He was living with an old friend of his, Paul Reynolds, who was also working in Dar. At some point along the way, both of them also fell under the Bibi Jann’s spell. The spell causes people who spend time at the school to dream of ways to keep it going. For a year, I raised money while Paul and Brian put it to good use on the ground. At the same time, the three of us set out to start a non-profit- we wanted a long-term platform to channel our energy.

We recruited three doctors to help us. I, for one, felt a lot more confident moving forward with their enormous amount of combined international experience, management ability, and general outward kindness. The non-profit became Students for the Advancement of Learning and Medical Aid in Tanzania (SALAMA: Tanzania). Right now Bibi Jann’s is physically too small for all the students to finish primary school there. SALAMA’s first goal was obvious; raise the funds needed to expand Bibi Jann’s.

So here I am. Back in Dar. I’ve got a grant from Dartmouth to cover my expenses and donations from over 200 people who were generous enough to support us. The road ahead isn’t clearly laid, but I’m confident that by the time I leave we’ll have turned Bibi Jann’s into something truly special.

That’s enough for now. I can’t fight the urge to get back in that “car” any longer…

not the same trip

I’ve been in Dar es Salaam for just over a week and it’s already obvious that this is going to be much different than my trips here as an undergraduate.  The most glaring difference between this trip and the last is that this time around, I’ve got a “car.”  Instead of taking the absurdly unsafe public transportation (the buses have custom painted, very un-reassuring nicknames like Titanic, One more Try, and Please Don’t Crash), I’ve bought my favorite vehicle in this country.

An example of crazy public transportation

My used bajaj, known as a tuk-tuk in many other countries, is incredibly fun to drive.  I’ll admit the first day I drove that thing, my chance of dying was probably at a record high- I had to simultaneously learn how to drive a manual transmission, navigate the insanity of East African roads, and practice extreme patience with the oddities of my Bajaj (eg I need to pull a huge lever to start the engine, and there is no gas gauge, speedometer, or odometer).

Now that I’ve been driving for a few days, I’ve grown to love my vehicle.  Bajaj here are almost always taxis, so I get flagged down all the time.  I generally don’t pick people up but I have a really hard time turning down kids walking home from school as well as Masai.

Masai are known as the warriors of Tanzania.  They’re the people you’d see in a national geographic article about this place.  They walk around in huge flowing red robes, carry several rudimentary weapons, and have many large piercings and tattoos.  My first day driving, two of them flagged me down as a taxi.  When they offered to pay, I asked them to pay me with a picture when we finished our ride.  Bad idea.  I dropped them off in a crowded, pretty sketchy area which meant that we’d be taking out my huge digital camera in an area where I shouldn’t be displaying wealth.  Sure enough, neither of them had any idea how to take a picture.  With my camera, you have to press the shutter-release button halfway down until the image is focused, then the camera beeps and you press it the rest of the way to take the picture.  Well, that ended up being a very difficult concept.  After a few minutes of one Masai unsuccessfully trying to take pictures of me with the other one, I grew nervous and said to one of them, “It’s OK, I don’t need the picture and I’m afraid that a confused-looking white guy with an expensive camera will draw the attention of thieves.”  He responded, “You don’t worry about thieves when you’re with us.” And pulled back his robe to reveal a sword that ran the length of his leg.

I felt simultaneously reassured and terrified to contradict either of the two men. So I patiently taught them to take a picture and left.  Here’s the best one they came up with: