Choir

(From July 4, 2008)

They've arrived! Yared and Heather (who's Canadian, not American--oops) flew in yesterday afternoon. Heather will be a senior at Utah State this coming fall and seems like she'll be a great companion. There have been so many times during the past two and a half weeks when I've really wanted to turn to someone and say, "Did you just see that??"

I still don't know what I'll be doing now that Yared's here, but we'll see. Yesterday Heather and Lucas and I went to the annual regional Catholic choir gathering at the Kiganza parish. The priest (whose name is Jehosephat--not making that up) is a really intelligent guy, and very kind; he sent me a personalized written invitation to the choir event. It was typed up on a typewriter and arrived at my door via messenger in one of those air mail envelopes with red and blue triangles on the edges. The front of the envelope read, "Miss Amanda Hamilton, Kiganza Village," making it possibly the most delightfully addressed letter I've ever received and definitely ensuring its place in my scrapbook.

The gathering at the church was huge. I'd been hearing about it ever since I arrived in this village, and the people started coming in from all the neighboring villages several days prior. They would walk up and down the streets singing their beautiful, intricate vocal harmonies for hours--even late into the night--which was amazing to hear. There's nothing quite like sitting in the complete darkness of an electricity-free village under the brilliant Southern stars and hearing all those voices float past. Heather and I reported to the church around 2pm yesterday and were shown to the only seating available--a wooden bench--which made both of us feel like oafs, taking the only seats when there were old people and nursing mothers sitting on the ground. But they really and truly wanted us, as "guests," to have the best place. (Funny, because most of the people there were real guests in Kiganza, while Heather and I have a house there and so are at least a little more like residents than they are.) You can't imagine the stir we created. All of Kiganza knows me by now, but many of those from other villages don't, and plus, I had multiplied!! There were two of me! Throw in the fact that we both had cameras with us, and you have yourself a sideshow.

Seventeen choirs performed, a feat which took almost five hours to execute. The highlights were the unique instruments they brought. There were bongos, cymbals, wooden whistles, waist-high drums made from sawed-off oil barrels covered in cowhide, and these fantastic dried gourds. They were roundish, about two feet in diameter, and hollowed out with a hole in the top. People played them by placing tiny three-legged wooden stools on top of them and scratching them from side to side. Perhaps best of all, though, were the dancers whose ankles were wrapped in dried fruits filled with seeds; these instruments sounded like maracas as their wearers danced with a rhythmical wildness. (All the time I kept thinking about how different a Catholic choir gathering would be in the US.) The worst part about the music was definitely the keyboard, which they euphemistically refer to as an "organ." They have one of those Yamahas from 1989 with the preset drumbeats (why would you use them when you have so many amazing drummers right there? But yet they all did), and the warbly, carnival-like sound. I was glad when the amp went out halfway through and disappointed when they fixed it.

Eating is one of my favorite pasttimes, especially while abroad, and Tanzania has been mostly satisfactory on that account. My breakfast is waiting for me on the dining room table every morning when I get up and has so far been a rotating trough of hilarity. The first week was eggs only; then we moved on to these bizarre eggy pancakes. They were almost like crepes, but eight times thicker and swimming in palm oil. Oh, and also filled with bugs. The cook's flour must be infested, because I would hold my pancakes up to the light and pick out at least twenty worms and winged things--luckily, quite dead--from each one. Once I tried to dab the grease off one with a napkin, but it was so sopping, and the napkin so thin, that I just ended up with a buggy, paper-coated breakfast. The bugs didn't bother me, but for some reason I found myself unwilling to eat the pancake covered in napkin. And, perhaps most inexplicably of all, for the past two mornings I have arrived at the table to find four slices of white bread and nothing else. (Did the cook oversleep? Is he trying to avoid a trip to the market? Not quite sure.) Lunch and dinner are tasty, which is good, because there is almost no variation. I get beans and rice twice daily, sometimes supplemented with ugali (a stiff, sticky paste made from cassava or maize flour), stewed potatoes, boiled cassava, or these little green tomato-things in groundnut sauce. (I once helped the cook make the sauce; he actually pounds out the nuts in a giant wooden mortar and pestle every day.) Desserts are completely nonexistant here; the sweetest things they have are bananas and pineapples, which I am usually supplied with in profusion.

I had the honor of being invited to supper at Mama Fubusa's last week. I "helped" stir the ugali in the pot that was expertly balanced on three stones over the fire, but found it so cumbersome and wobbly that I quickly handed the spoon back to Mama amid the good-natured laughter of all the women. Dinner was real, true, out-in-the-bush African style; all the women sat on a grass mat in the dirt around a communal plate of ugali, while all the men stood around a similiar plate on a tiny table inside. They squished down into the center of the ugali a bowl of small, anchovy-like fish, pan-fried and gleaming with oil. We ate handfuls of ugali with the fish--whole fish, heads, tails, fins, bones and all. Anyone who was present for or heard about my Spanish fish-eating experience knows my apprehension at having my food look in death exactly as it did in life...though I ate a lot of Mama's fish before I felt it was acceptably polite to stop. I was very honored to be invited, so I hope I was able to disguise my disgust at the eyeballs I was swallowing.

Off to the airport to pick up Pattie, an old American collegemate of Yared's who will be here on a three-day visit.