Camp Graduation

Camp Msasani ended for the summer. It was wonderful to spend time with Bodie and 14 toddlers beach combing, making art, singing and dancing. What was amazing, and unforeseen, was how the nannies (each kid was accompanied by one) gelled so that they’d start singing at a moments notice. The songs, all from their youth and in Swahili, have certain movements, and these two year old kids learned to put their hands on their hips and shake, or raise their hands to their heads, singing, “ay ay ay kipepeo, kipepe”.

One of my initial goals in coming to Dar was to get to know Tanzanians, and I’ve felt thwarted in that. But over the summer, I’ve been able to spend a good part of each day with 14 Swahili-singing, dancing and drumming women.

Last Thursday, after a mind-challenging exercise of finding and counting 10 things on the beach, the kids came up to the house for a brief graduation ceremony. Each received a certificate of achievement and a Camp Msasani t-shirt with primary colored handprints stamped by each camper. Each nanny received a camp t-shirt with “staff” emblazoned on the sleeve.

Parents came for this first graduation and the nanny’s started dancing and singing the songs they’d been singing to the kids all summer. All the parents stood and cheered the show, and I thought smugly to myself that I’ve had the luxury of being a part of this for six weeks. If anyone is considering starting a Tanzanian summer camp, a good selection of songs include: Jambo, jambo bwana, Mauwa Mazuri, Ukuti Ukuti, Watoto Wadogo, Kofia Yababu, Lingu Lingu, Tulingeba yuyo, Saa yakwenda kwetu, and the classic Simama kaa.

Green Acres

We planted/had our gardener plant a small vegetable garden with tomatoes, peppers, and cabbage. Since we are living in our own-created small community of Tom and his wife, Judith the housekeeper, and Grace the nanny, our thinking was we’ve always loved the idea of growing our own vegetables, and everyone else would as well.

So I bought seeds for some vegetables I knew and recognized. Tom also planted something called mchicha, which is a locally eaten spinach-type green, tembeye, a sort of sweet potato, and corn.

The irony is, the 85% of the country’s GDP is agriculture-based, and the same proportion of the populace are small farmers, with most being subsistence farmers. They grow what they need to live. People behind walls with staff in the house don’t grow vegetables, they buy them. But I’ve always had the organic farmer fantasy without the energy or enthusiasm to actually weed and care take a garden. This garden-delegation project seemed like a dream realized.

We planted in April and it’s now been a few months. The tomato plants are diseased, with a white powdery looking fungus on the leaves, and a fair number of small green tomatoes that have been small and green for some time, and don’t seem inclined to ever get big or red. The pepper plants produced a few gumball-sized green peppers, suitable for stuffing with a single small mushroom, or a half-teaspoon of breadcrumbs. The cabbage refused the invitation to even venture out of the soil.

It is funny that in the midst of my thinking through various work and occupation options here, it is easy to strike the entire gardening/organic-farming category right off the list.

Complexities

A few things have gone missing around the house – Hillary’s Walkman that she uses for running can’t be found. She has somehow managed to lose two new blackberry phones in the past few months. More disturbing, her wallet seems to have been riffled. Hillary asked if I had taken money as the bills were turned in a different way than she puts them in (this is the wallet that has been with her since college, so she has deeply formed habits about its usage.) Two weeks ago, Hillary had an advance of three hundred dollars for a trip she was about to take. The day after getting the advance, she went for lunch and there were only two one hundred dollar bills in her wallet. Last week, she received her monthly local draw, the portion of her salary that is supposed to see us through the month. That envelope, containing $1,000, was gone the next morning.

We had started wondering who might be pilfering and ran through the list of every potential suspect. Was it someone from Hillary’s office? Was it Judith, our lovely housekeeper? Under that warm, caring façade, could she be nabbing our cash? Or Grace, who we entrusted with Bodie? And on and on.

It was a rough period of a few weeks, feeling betrayed, not knowing by whom, and feeling uncomfortable around the house. We assumed it was someone at Hillary’s work place, so Hillary held a meeting of her key team at the office to figure out who could be stealing. But when the thousand-dollar envelope went missing, we sat and, like good CSI-devotees, figured out a minute-by-minute scenario of who could have had access and opportunity.

Hillary received and signed for the envelope at 5:30 pm. She discovered it missing at 11 am the next morning. So we traced her steps: upon receiving it, she put it in her bag, which was by her feet, and worked until 6:45 pm, whereupon she left for home. By the time she got home, Judith and Grace were well gone for the day. The bag went on the kitchen counter by the door, where it goes every night. She left for work the next morning at 7:45 and had her bag with her until she looked for the money at 11 am.

There didn’t seem to be any opportunity for anyone, even a knowing and stealthy financial person, to grab the envelope at the office. But how could it have happened at home? Judith and Grace were gone, and no one else came in the house.

Hillary called me at home that morning and asked me to check if it were possible to reach in through the kitchen window to the bags on the counter. I tested the theory, and it was not only possible, it was easy.

Ok, the money was taken between 7 pm and 7 am, and the window in the kitchen seemed to be the point of access. That narrowed the list down to three, Sebastian, the night guard, who I’ve referred to as the happiest man on the planet, Tom, the devout seventh day Adventist gardener or his wife, Martha. If it were Tom or Martha, Sebastian would have to have watched them pad over to the kitchen window and either just let it happen, or collaborate. If it were Sebastian, he knew when everyone was asleep, had the role of walking around the house to check things out, so needed to be by the kitchen in the middle of the night, and knew everyone’s habits. It seemed to be coming clear.

My plan was to wait a week, put another envelope in the bag, and I’d sneak into the kitchen in the dark and wait, stealthily (and hopefully awake) through the night to capture the culprit in the act.

We called Knight Support, the agency that provides security and for whom Sebastian works, and told them of our suspicions. The operations head asked us if anyone else lived on the property. We told him Tom and Martha did, but that it would be both very difficult for them, and we had huge trust in them. He asked where they were from. When we said Malawi, he responded, “That’s all I need to know.” And launched into a diatribe against Malawians, the vehemence and nature of which I’d only seen in movies and footage depicting prejudice a century ago. We told him that it was possible, but highly unlikely given his devout church-going nature and lack of opportunity. “Those Malawians are like that, acting one way and stealing from right under your noses,” he said.

That night, Knight Security had a new super-askari, James, at the door, and sent a local supervisor to bring Sebastian back to the main office. I never got to enact my catch-‘em in-the-act plan.

We’ve thought about this a lot. The initial anger at being betrayed was quickly tempered by putting ourselves in his shoes. If I earned 80,000 shillings a month, or about $850 per year, had a wife and 4-year-old son, and access to $1,700 (the total amount we think was taken, not including the stuff), would I reach through a window in the middle of a long, dark and lonely night? The temptation of two years salary coupled with the need to provide for a family on $75 per month makes it hard to be outraged.

It is the mix of relationship and need that makes easily reconciling this difficult – Sebastian brought his son over one Sunday; he made little bicycle-men for Bodie; and repeatedly listened patiently as I struggled to form sentences in Swahili. He also apparently quietly pocketed money and things that he assessed, probably rightly, that he needed far more than we did.

Camp Redemption

Bloodied but unbowed, I refuse to let those toddlers get me down. Today found some redemption. With Thursday camp being at George and Mie’s house on the beach, I wanted to take advantage of what the kids wanted to do anyway. After the morning singing circle, I passed out an empty jelly jar to each.

The tide was low, leaving countless shallow tidal pools. The kids waded into the tidal pools (each with a nanny) and looked at small darting fish, scurrying hermit crabs, shells, and floating forests of seaweed. Nannies and children chased small fish, wading from rock pool to pool. The exercise, planned for 30 minutes, went for over an hour as kids ran and splashed and filled their jars.

They came up from the beach for snack time, wet, diapers full of seawater, giddy with playing in the ocean, carrying jars with small fish. The arts and crafts activity was construction paper with crayons and stickers in the shape of, yes, a fish! The day was thematically coherent (always essential to a two-year-old), and seemed, for the first time, to fly by.

A Three Hour Cruise...

Nothing to make one yearn for a desk job like hard, grueling labor. Take, say, cattle roping, working an offshore oilrig, or heavy construction. All look pretty cush after three days of three hours straight with 15 toddlers.

Yes it’s joyful to spend time and share in the innocence and play of children blah blah blah. But I am wearing out the little belt holster on my cell phone from checking the time so often. It is astounding the pure elasticity of time from, say, 10:42 to 10:44. Can that really only have been two minutes? We just sang, crawled like crabs and did an art project? In contrast to the Buddhist idea of relaxing into the impermanence of everything, that time is passing and so shall all things, I may well have discovered the one thing that brings time to a clawing, numbing, screeching halt.

So 15 kids – Adler, August, Bodie, Bennett, Clara, Ethan, Hannah, Jessie, Joshua, Juri, Kanto, Marisa, Matthias, Rohan and Sadie. All cute and charming individually. Put them together and I feel like the targeted Piggy in Lord of the Flies.

This week we tried a range of activities: collecting and painting rocks like lady bugs, singing everything from Rolly Polly to I’m a Little Tea Pot, dancing to Aloyce the drummer, and crown-making This is the stuff of college application essays.

Lessons learned from week one at Camp Msasani:

• Many short activities are needed. The morning is now broken into 8 different segments ranging from circle time/singing to art activities to movement activities, with plenty of free time.
• Hydrate hydrate hydrate – dealing with toddlers for three hours is, according to experts, comparable to running a marathon. So lots of liquids, carbo-loading, and glucose gel.
• Have bloody mary’s ready at 11:30 pick-up. It gets parents there on time and is a nice carrot to make it through the morning.
• Change Ivy League curricula to somewhere address toddler’s mercurial needs. Maybe cut a little Milton or Shakespeare and substitute with something more real world, like how to deal with a screaming two year old in the midst of a temper tantrum because the dog won’t let her grab its tail.
• Finally, don’t worry if you screw up. Stay just shy of permanent traumatization and you’ll be fine. They won’t remember any of this, because, hey, they’re only two years old!

Camp Msasani

“Desperate times call for drastic measures.”

Preschool ended last week. Little Scholars had an end of semester party, which meant Bodie was buzzing on a chocolate cake sugar high when I picked him up. He was running around manically hugging teachers and unwary kids, saying, as everyone else did, “have a great summer!” I doubt he really understood what this meant. Walking home from school, we passed a goat munching grass on the side of the road. “Have a great summer, goat”, yelled Bodie.

As we were leaving, I was handed his first report card. I had a flash of fear – I’m a dad now and I need to treat this report card with some gravity. In my mind, we needed to have a sit down and celebrate his strengths but also address some issues. We needed to have a man to, well, 2-year-old talk about how he was doing. I remember those talks vividly, and I’ll be damned if he isn’t going to have that same trembling fear at the end of each year also.

(This next paragraph is mostly, rather, entirely, for my mom). According to his report card, Bodie seemed to excel at preschool. In terms of Personal Development, “He is a well-behaved and polite student. He is very independent when playing and picking out the toys of his choice. He enjoys doing many tasks on his own such as finding his own shoes, getting his bag ready for snack time and picking out the color crayon that he would prefer.” (I’ve been working with him in the evenings on picking out crayons, so am glad to see that hard work rewarded.) Here is the room for improvement: “Although he rarely gets in trouble on his own accord, he sometimes gets influenced by the older boys (this trait is hereditary from Hillary’s side.) “When playing with blocks, he can stack 6-8 objects and expresses good eye-hand co-ordination especially while throwing or catching (all those long training afternoons in the backyard are paying off!). He enjoys dramatic play including make believe kitchen (from Grammy) and talking over the toy telephone (goes without saying). He has a wonderful sense of humor, and he “enjoys hugs.” “He is particularly concerned about the well being of the other students – wants to know why they are crying or lets the teacher know if anyone fell down” (I’ll own the compassion part). He shows well developed communication skills and uses them when wanting to express his feelings and thoughts (I’m guessing this one isn’t from me…) And critically, “he uses play dough properly and enjoys molding it”!

All in all, a pretty successful first stab venturing out into the world of critiquing. All that money we’ve chosen to stock away in his therapy fund instead of a college fund looks like it can accrue a little more interest.

It took a day for it to fully dawn on me. No school means, well, no school. So Bodie in the morning, Bodie at lunch, Bodie in the afternoon and Bodie in the evening. This is good, I told myself. I love him. I love spending time with him. He is funny and I get to spend all day with him. The entire, livelong day, every day… Argh!

A drastic measure was needed. I googled, but could find no sleep away summer camps for two year olds in East Africa. I needed another plan. Out of sheer panic, Camp Msasani is being launched as a place for 18-month to 3-year-old kids to congregate and play three mornings a week. Why, if one scrambling toddler is overwhelming, would I want to submit myself to a dozen? One word: reinforcements.

Most toddlers will come accompanied by a parent or nanny. I’ve hired a teacher from the preschool. I imagine that I’ll be able to sit and have a Bloody Mary and issue directives: “ok, you kids, I need you to clear these concrete blocks from the back yard now.”

Camp Msasani (the name of the peninsula where we live) kicks off next week with a dozen registrants, a teacher, a guy who plays African drums with kids, and a fresh stock of arts and crafts supplies. I am banking on the court system here being arduous and arcane, so any liability suits that may ensue will take years to catch up with us.

Let the Comeuppance Continue

Our car was finally received, less the radio, which mysteriously was listed as “not included” in the papers from the Dar Port Authority. My take is that some higher power is suggesting that rather than drumming and swaying to African music on the road, we should pay attention to swaying cars, buses, roaming goats, bicycles, carts, chickens, etc.

While the car is here, it doesn’t have plates, registration papers, or insurance yet. Getting these essential things entails another dive into the muck of local bureaucracy.

So, knowing full well that it is stupid, I have been driving around when I need to. I don’t know what Tanzanian prison is like. I’ve seen plenty of movies with South American prisons and Turkish prisons holding drug mules, and can only guess that those might look like a Four Seasons in comparison. But my thinking is, most of the police here are on foot. What are they gonna do? Run after me? Or call on their radio (which I’m pretty sure they don’t even have) for someone with a car to go after a car with plates… oh wait, there are no plates. I’m sure there are significant disadvantages to having a police force so under funded that they don’t have vehicles, but in this one instance…

Bodie is still surfacing from his bout with stomach flu almost a week ago, and has eaten very little. Getting him plump had been a fervent mission of our housekeeper and our nanny, Judith and Grace. Grace had a prepared a weekly menu of high-carb mush – potatoes with carrots and leeks, or some variation. Each afternoon, they’d each wield a spoon as he’d go racing around. It was almost like a lacrosse game, with each holding a spoon, and Bodie’s mouth the net. And it worked. He got rounder and fuller.

But all the nice rolling little neck jowls and rounded belly that Judith and Grace were so proud to put on him disappeared over the last week. He has become, like his cousins, (and his parents until relatively recently) skinny. He has refused virtually all food for a week. And if anything were ever going to turn me into my food-pushing Jewish mother, this was it. Here Bodie, try this special sandwich I made you, here is chocolate for breakfast, how about this yummy cookie with jelly…

Yesterday, I threw out the idea of pancakes and, for the first time in a week, he showed real excitement. I drove our cute little unlicensed, unregistered, uninsured car up to Slipway with Bodie singing ‘pancakes, pancakes” in back. As only my mother's voice deep in my head could say, he doesn't need to go to school, he's going to eat!"

So focused on pancakes and food actually going in Bodie, I forgot that that’s where Barclays bank is. And where a bank is, police are. As soon as we pulled up, a policeman, rifle slung over his shoulder, beige uniform, black boots and beret, came over. “Where are your plates?” he demanded. I told him they were coming later in the day and I just drove down the road to feed my son. I thought some element of that worked, because we walked away and he seemed satisfied.

After pancakes, and playing at a playground, and looking at boats, so a good hour and a half later, Bodie and I went back to the car. The policeman was still right where we’d left him, standing by the driver’s door. He said, “in this country, this is a serious matter.” I was thinking of saying I was an ambassador, but was unshaven and in shorts, so instead said I’d take the car straight home and not drive. He stared at me for a while, then gazed off in the distance, mulling his options.

Thoughts of how I wished I’d paid better attention to Swahili class to navigate Tanzanian prison danced through my mind. I wondered, who is going to take Bodie to school in the morning. I wondered if I’d be able to blog from prison. After what seemed like many minutes, he said, “I want a soda.”

“I’m sorry?” I said, thinking that I completely misheard him.

“Give me money”, he responded.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a crumpled 1,000 shilling note (about $1) and he shook it off like a pitcher shaking off a catcher. I handed him a 10,000 shillings note (about $10). He smiled, took it, cautioned again that I shouldn’t be driving, and walked away.

I knew I had been playing a dangerous game, but got out of it for a simple $10. I was no fool.

It was only later, with the retelling of the story to Hillary, and her, compassionate response, “he was a security guard, not police”, with the unsaid, “you idiot”, that I realized while I thought he was mulling his options, he was trying to assess whether I’d be dumb enough to think he had some real standing. He had correctly sized me up.

Anniversary Do’s and Don’t’s

Anniversary Do’s, clearly seen in Hallmark ads or commercials for diamonds, include: romantically gazing into each other’s eyes over a fancy white tablecloth dinner murmuring little loving quips in a loving way, maybe some hugging and effortless swinging of the wife around in a circle on a beach, maybe champagne being raised in a toast with recollections of this day X years ago in which you exchanged vows of devotion in front of family and friends….

Anniversary Don’ts include slim jims, a broken car window, and the ever-present, but necessary for full effect, kid heave-o-rama.

The evening started with great promise. A friend, K, generously offered to take Bodie for the night so Hillary and I could follow the prescription for Anniversary Do’s. She came to pick up Bodie, and as I shoveled him and a week’s worth of diapers into the back seat, where Marissa, her one-and-a-half year-old was strapped in, K asked if he needed a car seat. I figured he could hang on as they weren’t going far. Not wanting to be seen as the type of parent who thinks that his two-year old could simply hang on, I ran to retrieve the car seat, installed it, strapped Bodie in, kissed him good night. He was begging for some keys to play with, just like Marissa had, so K graciously offered him another set of keys to play with. I shut his door and K, shut the door on Marissa’s side.

Instantly, we heard beep beep It’s a familiar and usually reassuring beep beep. The car is locked and all is safe thanks to the magic of Japanese inventiveness that allows you to push a little button and lock all four doors and the rear hatch at once! Marissa had found the lock button on her keys, which weren’t really play keys, but the keys to the car. Both kids were strapped in, safe, like two astronauts ready for blast-off, because that’s the good kind of parents we are.

K was calm and suggested calling the security company as they have an auto service, so would easily be able to slim jim the door open. I called and tried to explain the situation. The emergency operator kept asking me the wrong questions and clearly didn’t understand what I was trying to explain. The tenor and pitch of my voice rising with aggravation might not have been the best way for me to communicate. I ended up demanding someone that spoke English better (which I’m sure was well received). Meanwhile, Hillary, not one for nuances of a phone conversation in a crisis, had pushed the panic button. Five minutes later, the security car, sirens blaring, pulled up.

Five minutes is a long time if you measure it in verses of Old MacDonald. K and I stood outside the back windows, singing at the top of our voices, verse after verse. Bodie and Marissa, strapped in, clapped and moo mooed here and neigh neighed there, enjoying the game.

When the security guards came though, Bodie wanted out. He had had enough of the game and started to cry and reach for Hillary. If you were to examine the evening like an archeologist with various phases, that was the end of the Calmozoic Era. I wanted to break the window and end this, but there was a conference of six security guards standing around the car, talking over each other. They checked the doors. Yup, locked. Lots of gesturing with prying motions, lock picking intimations, and more conversation.

Hillary, seeing Bodie crying, said sternly, “Alfred, break the window.”

I grabbed a large garden hoe, but waited another minute as the conference of security guards poked and prodded the Land Cruiser like a giant acorn squash, to see if there might be some soft points for easy access.

It wasn’t until Bodie was wailing full throttle, reaching for Hillary through the glass, yelling, “Mama!” that Hillary said with an appropriate degree of hysteria, “Break the f#*@ing window!”

Hillary grabbed the garden hoe and raised it shoulder high as if a curveball had been pitched. I had this vision of any trekking guide carefully explaining that when hiking, you never want to get in between a mother bear/elephant/lion/hippo etc. and her cub. I nevertheless stepped in between Hillary and the car and grabbed the hoe. Dangerous a maneuver as it was, I sure wasn’t going to be emasculated in front of six guards and K while my wife broke the window. I was going to smash it.

One of the members of the guard committee had a crowbar and was gently prying a back window. I told him to push and break the window, which he did. Glass pebbles rained down on the driveway. I hopped in through the open window and freed the kids.

Kids released, safely enfolded in mother’s crushing arms, we decided that Bodie going over to K’s house might not be the best thing for him or us right then, so we all went out to dinner at a TGIFridays imitation steakhouse. The restaurant clearly didn’t know they were supposed to have white tablecloths for us. There were crayons on the tables, a playground with legos for kids, and blaring American pop music. Thinking the trauma of the evening was over, Hillary had a gin and tonic at the playground, and we went home.

About the time that I should have been tossing Hillary around in a circle on a beach per protocol, Bodie offered his own version of an anniversary gift with a different type of tossing. At 1 am he heaved (and answered the question that had been in my mind for a few weeks of whether he was really eating the snack I packed for him everyday in preschool, which I was glad to see that he was). He is not a kid to just dabble in things though. He took a measured, metronomic approach. He retched all over his bed at 2 am, ralphed on his clothes and our bed at 3 am, hurled on the new sheets we’d put on at 4 am, and culminated with a good effort pillow and floor-covering heave at 5 am.

So perhaps not worthy of a De Beers ad, this Anniversary actually may be a better real world reflection of how we’ve managed to create cohesion out of two separate lives over the past few years. Anyone can weather a fancy dinner marred only by a soggy profiterole, but we managed to extract two trapped toddlers, wash three loads of laundry and nurse a feverish son, all with coherence and solidarity in approach and a fair divvying of duties. Somehow that makes this anniversary more telling.