In Which Jara Provides a Nearly-Wordless Post

I want to start updating regularly.

I'm in the middle of grad school applications.

Non-essay writing isn't happening right now.

Here. Have a picture of a peacock feather.

I hope you have a nice day.

(I think I was inspired by this picture, originally:)

 

I like that quote.

Home is Where the Heart Is

When we were little, my sister used to save everything. With the extravagant and gullible affection of childhood, she would harvest toys, pictures, even little pieces of paper if they were sufficiently "cute" and colorful (meaning purpley), to go in a little treasure chest overflowing with what nobody else would have considered valuable.

I did not understand sentimental attachments. I had them, of course, but they didn't make sense to me. An object's sentimental aspect comes from its associated memories and feelings—things which are inherently inside your head and cannot be taken away from you. If lost, they are things forgotten, which a mere physical item can not bring back. So—if circumstance provides that you misplace the item, or find it no longer worth the space it takes up—what have you lost? Nothing important, so long as the important part is still inside of you. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.

And yet, in June, as I piled and boxed my stuff on my roommate's living room floor, an old stuffed horse and a blanket tumbled out of the trash bag that had housed them for three years, and a wave swept up and melted a side of my heart. These...feelings. Come from images I can no longer remember (oh God, my brain, empty fumes, I mean rooms, I mean how do you call the flipping mind thingies that hold memory stuff) but they somehow—how?—still are embedded in me. Strongly.

It's like... I used to remember all the important things. Now, my mind's out of fuel and out of space. It's no longer an empty bookshelf or even a full one, but a museum of the scars and events of my life, its very structure a memorial to the history that created it.

It's like... I'm no longer entirely inside of me. I've left little pieces of me all around, without a map to find them all, and the environment around me is the key that unlocks those associations and brings them back.

*     *     *

I remember taking a walk in the waste field behind my first apartment complex, climbing up on top of a pile of rocks, fenced in by a net of wire to form a containing wall. A weed had burst out of the caged rocks, and, given that it grew with no soil to speak of, I admired its verve.

“When you transplant a plant,” Steve said from beside me, also regarding it, “it’s the tiny little roots you need to be careful of. You want to keep them intact as much as possible.”

That surprised me. My train of thought switched tracks. “Not the taproot?”

He shook his head. “The taproot is important as an anchor, but that's not where the plant gets most of its water and nutrients from. The smaller, more fibrous ones have the greater surface area.”

As a recent transplant myself, and one who'd paid a lot of attention to her anchor points, a lot of inexplicable things abruptly made sense.

*     *     *

What makes a home a home? It's many things, but one of the most elusive pieces comes from the thousand associations you build up in a place over hours and years of simply being there. You can't describe it, any more than you can consciously tell your life story in minute detail from beginning to end. Nor can you even remember exactly what it looks or sounds or smells like. But when you're there with it again in the flesh, each detail is a key—a key to a set of stories, habits, memories with an overlapping spectrum of emotions—that opens the door to a past life, a past self.

This is what I've lost, by starting over, in a new place, with no former associations. But—it's never truly lost. For better or for worse, my history is the same; I just need to find new ways to strengthen my connections to whichever parts I want to keep connected to.

(I wonder if this is the secret to happiness in old age. Tie all your flashbacks to your happy memories. Make lots of happy memories to tie back to.)

*     *     *

Sometimes, when I used to bike home from work, I used to count it up as "making memories." The scenery didn't change enough from day to day for there to be any one ride for me to remember, but over time, I imagined that I'd beat out a path in my mind strong enough that I'd look back on it vividly and feel some sort of connection to it.

I biked that road the day before the day before I left Austin. And it did, it held something—something more than just the feeling of the moment. There was an echo there from times before... The time when I'd seen deer crossing the road late at night. The times of relief, using my legs after a long day at work. The daily view of the lake and its heron, and a few, glorious maple trees in the height of autumn. The construction pillars along the side of the road and the pop music spilling all down the hill after the Top Golf there had finally been completed.

I held the echoes carefully next to the dry and real moment I was experiencing and tried to feel all of them at once. (It's important, I guess, to feel the weight of what you've experienced and the value of what you're leaving behind when you tell a place good-bye.) And then I made it larger. I tried to bring in the feeling of the wildflowers, the endless sunny air; the goofiness and techiness and food and fun. The sweat in the summer and in the dojo; the midnight light pollution from the highway. The times I'd walked outside and skipped over to the park; the times I'd gone to Wind Ensemble practice. The first people I became friends with and the last people I became friends with. The different places we played board games and the different seasons we went kayaking. The smell of the juniper, the call of grackles. The parkour gym. The church.

And the other pieces... Getting tired from being too busy, getting busy because things were missing and needed to be made up for. Times I tried to help people who never got better. Times I hurt people I liked. The times when I was irresponsible. The times I cried because I was irresponsible. The times I tried to become better and the times I failed over and over again anyway. Times I felt out of control. Times people leaned on me anyway.

The times when I was admired. The times where I wondered if anyone who liked or admired me really knew anything substantive about me. The times I talked too much. The times where someone saw beyond what I was saying.

The times I let someone hurt me. The times I needed help from someone I barely knew or couldn't pay back. The times where I connected with somebody. The times where I had to give up...

*     *     *

I held all those overlapping moments carefully, folding the corners back from their edges and examining them piece by piece and then all together. I waited, more patiently than I often do, for all those experiences to percolate. And, tangled and woven together, I found myself holding a nest of grungy and golden threads.

They were all so clear. Beads of glowing, shining moments, so small, so precious. Completely overwhelmed by gray and grunge.

No doubts: I want to go back home.

This should have been “home.”

A bright future. But another failure.

*     *     *

It's a strange feeling—coming back to a place that you know you knew, a place you already know you love, with barely a memory of why. Everyone I recognize I'm happy to see, as though my memory hands me the “overall positive experience” banner without any indicator of how strong a history was used to make the assessment. And yet, at the same time, there's a feeling of strangeness that jars with the strong-and-immediate attachment. There's a new shopping center in my town. A classmate makes jokes about a vice I never knew him for. People have moved. Some have married. Stuff has changed. It's eerie, because I still already love them anyway. But that's ok. There are reasons for all these feelings.

*     *     *

I stand at the edge of the backyard, thumbs in pockets, regarding the trees skeptically. The leaves are golden. A downy woodpecker pecks up a pine tree. For all the times I told people I missed the trees here, the immediate rush of affection is entirely memorized. I stare at them for a few minutes, challenging them to inspire me.

The woodpecker flits to another tree. A squirrel takes a few hops through crunchy leaves. It's nice, but it's hardly magical. I frown up at the woods appraisingly, then go to the shed and grab a hoe.

The garden bed has gone completely to seed, so I can get a good workout from hacking the weeds up by the roots. After half an hour or forty-five minutes of this, I lean on it and stare up at the trees again.

There are more birds; the woodpecker is gone, but there are two tufted titmice making squawking calls much bigger than they are. A small flock of sparrows or wrens flies overhead, and a cardinal chirps out of a nearby bush. The squirrels in the leaves keep changing their minds about whether they should run up a nearby tree or not—they take a three foot dash, pause, then go about their ground-sniffing business as though nothing whatever's the matter. For some reason, I find this amusing.

I set the hoe aside and meander onto the trail that goes farther back into the woods. I find scars on some bark, collect sweet-gum leaves, startle a doe when I try to mimic a tree-climbing squirrel. She doesn't go very far, though, and lifts her white tail daintily in my direction as she goes back to browsing.

I think I'm an undernourished person, trying to compensate for long-term starvation in a single sitting. It's like a thunderous rainstorm after a drought; even good things don't enter immediately. Absorption needs soft rain on soft soil, and time to percolate.

Woods, I address them, though not audibly, I think I'd better acknowledge that I don't know you like I used to. So, I'll stop pretending like I do, and we'll get to know each other again in the usual way.

It'll probably go faster; we've got a good foundation. Regardless, I'm looking forward to it. Last time was fun.

I'm re-knitting myself into this place. It's the intangible aspect of coming home.

After a long break...

I didn't forget you. I think about you all the time: words bubble out of me and splurt onto a page...but for several years now they've been better kept in other places.

For one thing, stories involve people. Real people. People who probably shouldn't have their interactions with me sub-anonymously sprayed out in a forum where technically, everybody could see. For another thing, sometimes I think the writing is for you, but it's not. It starts out pretty, then jumbles and snarls, and a few hours later I thank my computer for the therapy session and stuff the pages into a folder on my computer and then go to bed.

Sooner or later, I want the words to go farther. And hopefully, be packaged more neatly than the garbled stuff that comes out of my mouth when I normally feel the urge to share my thoughts and feelings.

No promises on chronological order. No promises on consistent theme. Someday, the blog can be predictable. For now, it's mostly for me.

Service

On my way home from NC a few weeks ago, while I was standing at my gate, looking back at the escalator longingly and making homesick posts on facebook, there was a couple nearby me getting their suitcases in order and preparing to board. The man was in a wheelchair, and the woman was handing him luggage to put in his lap because she couldn’t push both the suitcases and him. While I was watching absently, this other old man from all the way down the row got up, came over, and asked the lady if she could use some help. And she smiled in relief and said yes.

My first impulse was to mentally kick myself. That should have been me! I’m younger, I was right here; why didn’t I help? But then a warming thought sprouted in my heart: “Isn’t it nice that when you were distracted, someone else stepped up and did it? That you don’t have to always be the one to help?” Oh gosh, yes. Yes, it is. The world would be in dire straits if we all depended on one person to get all the problems fixed. There are too many people and problems in the world, I don’t have enough time, and then there are things like having the right skills or prior personal connection or being in the right place at the right time—the whole idea is ludicrous. On a more sober note, helping other people is something everyone needs--as much as I love it, it’s incredibly good for /everybody/ to get the opportunity to practice seeing other people’s needs, extending themselves for them, and feeling happy when somebody else is happy. That fulfills a part of our humanity. That's the way we were made.

Moving on, the end of my story: I got to have my private moment when I needed it, and still someone was helped. It was a wonderful moment that that man will never realize happened. And I wanted to mention it because this weekend, realizing that what I wanted for my birthday wasn't to have something so much as to be something, I drove down to Bluff Springs to help Austin Disaster Relief and Mormon Helping Hands with the cleanup from the flood a few weeks ago--in time to see tired volunteers coming back after having worked all day ripping up tile and cutting down rotting drywall and insulation. I didn't get to do very much myself, but it was a heartening thing to see how many people willingly came from all over for this, many who'd only heard about the event by word of mouth or because it was mentioned at their churches. People who did really physically demanding stuff, and people who did mundane, non-ego-validating stuff. Like honeybees together, wonderful things happen: not because the task isn't monumental, but because when people care more about their community than their own convenience they can chip away at those things that are ugly and hard and with imperceptible work make grand improvements. You know who you are, even if I don't, and you're the reason the world is a beautiful place. =) 

Thanks to all those who serve. You give me the ability to do good and the strength that I follow.

Catalog of Injuries

     I once read a blog post by a girl who was self-conscious about her skin: apparently, she bruised easily and she hated it. I remember considering this bemusedly, as I’ve never been ashamed of my bruises—they’re like a comic strip I once read by Bill Watterson:

     That’s right. Grass-stains and bruises: signs of a life being fully lived. Temporary tattoos of awesomeness. If they show you’ve been doing something cool, wear ‘em with pride!

     A caveat follows. I say this with enthusiasm, but I do acknowledge a disappointing trend: it’s never my most adventurous activities that leave their mark properly. If I come home from a full night of jujitsu, I’ll be sore all over and covered in small points of tenderness, but it’s the table I walk into afterwards that leaves the biggest mark. What gives? I still tell people it comes from martial arts, and I’m probably not actually lying. It’s believable enough that after a good, hard workout, I was too tired to get out of the way of the oncoming furniture, and I also have a selective memory that works to my advantage. But, for real—it happens over and over again that the small, daily things that didn’t seem worth being cautious about leave much more evidence behind than the larger, more dangerous undertakings I pursue. I guess that for big things, I take safety precautions—and if I do get hurt, it’s too deep to be obvious until days later when I have no recollection of the cause of injury. Thus, when I tried to use the reminders I’d inadvertently left myself on the canvas of my skin to refresh my memory on my most recent exploits, I came up with an anticlimactic tally:

To be accounted for: 7 bumps, scrapes, and bruises.

• One scrape on the back of my calf from tree climbing.
• One scab on the back of my heel from running down the pebbly apartment stairs in bare feet and on one step, landing too close.
• A bruise on my arm and my hip from no-idea-what
• Four maladies for my left middle finger alone:
• Tip—shiny with scar tissue from where I cut into it while shelling acorns. (For the record, there are more optimal species to gather from than Texas live oaks, if you want to go acorn-hunting. Now I know.)
• Nail—still dried blood underneath it from rebounding a basketball poorly during an IBM celebratory barbeque two or three weeks ago.
• An indiscernible pinprick from a health check-up.
• A burn mark on the knuckle from the stove.

     This is a respectable number, but for some of these, I know I could have found cooler causes. I’d just started my aerial silks class earlier that same week, and over the weekend I’d done a little fire-staff for the neighborhood kids. So, basically, I could have burned myself while fire-spinning, but no, this mark comes from the time I was putting a baking tray too close to the burner that I’d just been using to make scrambled eggs. *makes a face* I’ll just have to try harder next time. How about we go back to grass stains? I got a right-purty green smear on my slacks on the day that the kids next door were borrowing pieces of cardboard to slide down the hill. It even came out when I washed it, which is nice, because there's only one other pair of slacks in my closet. It also means that these pants have been through the dust and dirt of Tanzania (and the paint—I think this is what I was wearing that day that I got locked in the KCMC bathroom, oh so long ago) and still live on to get dirty in some future day, grass-sledding again with the neighbors. That’s a trusty pair of slacks—and that’s just the life it’s had since I got it from Goodwill. ^_^ I like things like that—things that can be well-used and still-useful. *glances down at the fading scars on her arms and legs* Those sorts of things are worth keeping around for a long time. ^_^

Beginning the Austin Adventure

     Argh. One hour and five minutes left to enjoy the dregs of my twenty-second year. Five minutes left, back in North Carolina. Then I’ll be older again, or at least have to acknowledge it. Man—I’m pretty sure I got older last year, too. How long ago was that? It feels like only a handful of months ago…

     Ok. Well. I need a giant grandfather clock, or something to gong out the hours for dramatic effect, but my North Carolina self is now one year older than my Texas self, and is past the barely-entering-adulthood age of twenty-one—has entered the actually-undeniably-an-adult age of twenty-two. I’m not entirely sure what I think about that. With age comes experience, correct? And with experience, maturity? I think this is a misconception; I was better at handling myself a year ago. And, if I’ve regressed, I’ve also just lost one year of credibility for my “immature age” excuse. *makes a face* Woe is me.

     Okay, okay, in all seriousness, now is a fine time to be trying out this intriguing new stage called “adulthood,” to make my foray into the wild, wide world on my own, and see how well I can handle it. This is a totally different kind of adventure than the sort that invaded my life last semester, which (as you probably know, since I talked about it nonstop) involved not just the usual pre-graduation flurry of job and grad school applications, senior classes and theses, panicked soul-searching and identity crises, but also thieves, a battered damsel, the test for my black belt along with the shoulder injury immediately prior, and an interview with my now-current employer that took place after I missed my flight and got 3.5 hours of sleep. Dude—if I can handle all that, I can handle anything. 

     …except, perhaps, mundanity? The good news is, it only takes a touch of novelty to transform prosaic living into what feels like an adventure. (A tame, nobody-gets-hurt kind of adventure, which is admittedly more comfortable than the recent alternatives.) So my first several weeks were full of the excitement of navigating the roads; setting up my (first ever!) apartment; checking out local parks, dojangs, and grocery stores (all the important things, you know); introducing myself to a million and a half people at church, work, the airport, the apartment complex, the local branch of the SCA… My parents have gotta be so proud of me; I can handle everything from carless travel from the airport with a suitcase, to sleeping on the floor with no blanket; from preliminary house management (I would like AC, please) to cooking my own food in a disposable pie tin with some stolen Wendy’s utensils. Between living out of my carry-on for a week while I waited for my boxes to arrive and the theft of my backpack during spring break, I feel like this year has been an exercise in living minimalistically. Behold, capricious Fates: I rise to the challenge. 

     Once my boxes arrived, there were other interesting things to do. Unpacking, for one thing, with less than twenty-four hours before my first day of work. Buying preliminary furniture, some basic home-decoration items, and the start of my patio garden, for another. I know this all sounds trivial, but you cannot possibly underestimate my enthusiasm. I gave my parents regular updates: “Look! Here’s a picture of my mattress! Of my curtains, the Craigslist couch! I have such wild and crazy plans for my patio, you wouldn’t believe—and Mom, I went to the grocery store yesterday AND IT HAS REAL FOOD IN IT. Like, seriously, you can buy meat and vegetables. Duke did not prepare me for this awesomeness; I think I’m going to go cook something now.” My apartment has a gigantic living room, with huge glass sliding doors on one side and wide, wide mirrors on the other. The kitchen is open and airy, with large counters and an arched ceiling that provides great acoustics for all your happy working songs. The patio not only holds my herb pots, flower boxes and vegetable bins, but comes with two identical barn swallow nests on either side of the porch that mark our apartment as the preferred hang-out for fifteen or more adorable, tiny birds. Friendly barn swallows, I will take your poop without complaint, for the sharp, dainty way you cavort with your little blue wings. Maybe my patio could use a bird feeder as well. What think you? XD

     Some things don’t go quite so smoothly as my garden and my patio. I’m gratified to realize that I recognize at least seventy-five percent of all the terms my team lead uses to introduce me to the project, which makes me think (somewhat hopefully) that maybe I do have the background to qualify for this job. The folks there are really friendly, but despite everything, I can’t help but feel a bit intimidated. My training is self-guided, which is difficult because I don’t always know what it is that I’m ignorant about or who I’m supposed to ask for the answers. Plus, I’m also struggling to overcome the feeling that I used to have at my old summer job, back at Duke—that I’m really there only out of generosity, to get paid, and that no one expects me to actually contribute anything useful. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I was afraid that my productivity was of minimal importance next to the value of my teammates’ uninterrupted working time, and I wasted tedious days poring over convoluted manuals, trying to extract every esoteric detail available before I finally asked my team lead for a basic understanding of the way our unit works. Things improved significantly from there.

     Socializing is another thing that started off beautifully and then began to hit bumps. Austin is a city with its own character; its reputation is a motley combination of hippy and nerdy and it claims to live by the motto, “Keep Austin Weird.” Well, that’s all well and good, I thought. When I arrive, they’ll probably crown me queen. Oh my goodness, did I underestimate this place! Yes, it has everything—from its own SCA chapter to a circus school at the end of the famous 6^th Street. But I did not even know the definition of nerdy until I came here. At church, the engineers are in the majority—I think I’m going to have an identity crisis—and someone made a legitimate Star Trek reference during a Sunday School lesson. In a way, it’s fantastic. In a way, I don’t know how to handle it. It’s sort of confusing to think that you have a lot in common with a group of people, to hit it off immediately, and realize a while later that there’s still no substitute for good, old-fashioned time to truly cement a friendship with a person. I’m also dealing with culture shock in a way that I didn’t expect—when everyone is unashamedly abnormal, what is left to make sure that we’re all still sane? I used to joke that sanity was overrated, but back then I had friends who would keep me from bouncing off the walls. Now, it seems like I may have to be the voice of normalcy in a crowd, which is sort of a shocker, and frankly, requires a lot of effort. As much as I like people, socializing with them can be draining, and I never get enough time afterwards to recharge. I think that maybe, during college, I got so comfortable with my friends that I forgot that I’m naturally an introvert—now I’m relearning. 

     Another issue that eats at me is scheduling: how on earth am I going to enjoy all my hobbies and keep up with all my old friends when I have so little time? Eight hours is a third of a day, but it sits smack dab in the center of everything and leaves remarkably little around the edges. I’m too excited with all my house projects to miss my old life too much just yet, but I hate the idea of abandoning anything and there are definitely some hobbies of which I immediately feel deprived. Taekwondo is the first. A lot of my free time the first week or two goes into exploring the local dojangs, but it’s surprisingly difficult to tell which one is going to fit. There’s a kung fu place that reminds me of my old dojo, but I can’t tell if the casual atmosphere translates into casual technique. There’s a jujitsu place that offers a free intro lesson, but my shoulder still isn’t all the way recovered and besides, I want an art that’s not only functional, but beautiful as well. I didn’t realize how important to me the aesthetic aspect of martial arts was until I saw myself surrounded by people who are all trapped in the same poor habits that I’m susceptible to. Dojo after dojo contains people kicking stiffly or standing with necks jutted forward, computer-posture style. Is this the downside to living in a town full of engineers and nerds? I adapt to my surroundings, so I need people whose behavior doesn’t encourage my disproportionality but instead helps keep me balanced. After two months of searching, I’ve still not found a place I’m satisfied with, and my fast from exercise is killing me. Sometimes, if I really can’t stand it, I jog around my apartment complex for a while before bed, but I’m a terrible jogger, and so mostly I just get super fidgety and turn the occasional cartwheel. The Fates are trying to turn me into a runner. I obdurately refuse; if martial arts falls through, I’m switching to parkour. =P

     (Random funny story: I was walking around work early on, just to stretch my legs, and thought I might get my blood moving up to my head faster if I went upside down in a cartwheel. I might be the only new hire who’s accidentally put a sneaker streak on the wall—at head level. Oops. When I said I was going to be normal now, what sort of expectations did you get? *googly eyes*)

     …It’s been several months since I’ve talked with most of the people I know—in fact, today marks the fourth month since I left North Carolina. (No, it’s not my birthday anymore. I wish I could write this much in a day, but that time issue that I mentioned before keeps getting in the way.) I have a lot of your names on a list in my planner, staring plaintively at me and waiting for me to write you a letter; if you look half as pitiable as they do, then I sincerely apologize for my slowness. Poke me with another letter of yours and tell me you miss me; I promise I’ll get back to you twice as fast. =) In the meantime, though, I wanted to sketch out some of the things that have been occupying my time here in the land of sun and gnarled oaks. Four months is a long enough time to have a few good, stand-alone stories; prepare yourself, ‘cause they’ll be coming up. Soon. I think. ^_^

—Jara

The End of the Story

     Once upon a time, Jara began a story—a story of an ordinary engineering student who found herself suddenly far away, in a strange land—and as you all know, she never finished it. =P There are good reasons for this; hospitals don’t like to have publicly published details of all the ways they don’t measure up to first world standards, nor to have cultural biases placed on them that they don’t have the opportunity to refute. The good news is, the story ended just the way you expected it to, complete with minor mishaps and emotional crises all the way up until the final, happy return home (yes, I did survive)—so you didn’t miss all that much. ;-)

     In all honesty, though, there were some parts of the trip that I like to have been able to share. I can’t bring you to the waste field outside the student’s compound of KCMC, to hear the choral cascade of birds singing over each other; I can’t show you the muddy, uneven rock-and-mud street that we sometimes tripped along in the dark without a flashlight. The mangoes we bought from the street vendors, sprinkled with salt and chili powder; the crushing heat of the dala-dalas; and the small, crumbling cave underneath a thin waterfall in the jungle of Mount Kilimanjaro are all black-and-white pixels to you. So instead, I will share with you a few vignettes that can stand on their own, and continue posting from there.

     (Disclaimer: as these stories are mostly based on my journals and photographs, I consider them to be reliable, but I make no guarantees for the details and dialog supplied and simplified by my memory. Errata may be posted by you in the comments section. =) ) 

July 28, 2011

In Which a Quest is Given, and Not Received

     It was some time in the late morning or early afternoon. I don’t really know; all I remember is that it was bright and hot, and that doesn’t narrow it down much. I and my two companions had left our little workshop behind, half-dismantled medical equipment scattered recklessly over its rough wooden table, and were in pursuit of a hardware store and some masking tape. Labeling was the objective. The supplies officer at Mawenzi didn’t check in on us much to retrieve the repaired equipment, but even if the machines stayed in our workshop untouched until the following year, future EWHers would want to see what we’d done and what we hadn’t. In two days, when our shift at Mawenzi came back around, we’d want to see what we’d done and what we hadn’t. And so, disregarding the mess of screws and rags and splinters and little pieces of blood pressure cuffs strewn about our simple workshop, we ventured forward in the cause of better organization. 

     It was the second shop we stopped at. Just past the corner on the main street, with stacks of thermoses, dolls, and—hanging in the window—some sort of adhesive. Not quite masking tape, but similar enough to warrant a second look. We shrugged and entered and greeted the store owner.*

     The shop was full to the gills with stuff. Wooden shelves went from floor to ceiling, overflowing with everything from fly swatters to light bulb sockets, while larger items were stacked in piles by his desk and the back exit on the other side of the room. If it didn’t have the chaos of a mysterious old wizard’s shop—you know the stories, the sort of place that’s full of strange and eclectic objects, perfectly suited to attract the curiosity of the young hero in spite of the odd old man who works there—it was only because too many items in the motley assortment of merchandise were made of un-mysterious-looking plastic.

     “You’re British?” he asked, once he knew what we wanted, moving to the back toward what could ostensibly have been the Tape Cubbyhole. “Tourists, or medical students?”

     “American,” we corrected pleasantly. “Though we are students. Wanafunzi wa uhandisi wa vifaa vya hospitali.”

     “The engineers!” He stopped, turned, gaped at us. “I remember you from last year! You work at the hospital? Fixing equipment? What you do is so good!”

     He’d totally forgotten about the masking tape. I nodded and smiled happily; this wasn’t anything like the reception we’d gotten from the doctors on our first day at Mawenzi.** The man looked at us eagerly, dark eyes bright—

     “I need to tell you something.” 

     He moved quickly to the front of the shop (stepping around a plastic bag, a stack of boxes, the counter, and us), looked out the doorway, and pulled the large iron grate and door shut. Keys jangled in his hand. We eyed each other nervously.

     “I talked with the American engineers last year,” he began, moving back behind the counter. “I told them about the real problem of Tanzania. But they didn’t do anything!” He turned his back to us and bent down and inserted a key into a cardboard—wait, no, wooden—box that inhabited one of the hundred or so shelves that covered the wall from top to bottom. He pulled a sheaf of papers from it and laid them before us across the counter. They were newspaper clippings, pink slips of paper full of handwritten notes, photocopies of magazine articles—all arranged in no particular order, but with one word in common: Drugs.

     “Drugs,” he said. “The real problem in Tanzania is drugs. You see these people out with their baskets, selling items on the street? Those young men waiting on their motorcycles at the street corners?*** They sit there all day! How can they make enough money? They deal drugs.” He pulled up pictures from the magazine articles—some were of high-level Tanzanian officials that had been caught in the business, several covered record drug hauls. One particularly poignant one was of an Afghan farmer whose illegal opium fields had been destroyed by police, forcing him to sell his 14-year-old daughter’s hand in marriage in order to pay off his debt.

     “You see here!” he exclaimed, pointing to yet another article. “There are people who fill these small items with drugs so they can import them. Then, by day, they sell the items on the street. By night they deal drugs. Have you noticed, people will always sell you things, even for a very low price? That’s because that’s not where the money is! The money is with the drugs!”

     It was somewhere around this point that the power went off, plunging the store into gloom. The sun outside was bright, or we wouldn’t have been able to see anything; the light filtered in dim and yellow through the dusty and overcrowded store window. Our strange shop owner didn’t miss a beat; he pulled out a flashlight from somewhere and continued to talk.

      “People everywhere are involved in it! High people, low people—the whole pyramid; it’s a system.” He started to read off of one of his pink pieces of paper. “People in tourism, in hair-cutting places—no one needs a haircut every day!—in government, in church, anywhere you can get large groups of people together. Sometimes people will start an NGO to help some orphanage or some hospital and undercover they are doing drugs. But no one wants to say anything against them because they are ‘doing good work for the children.’

     “These people are everywhere. Some of them are in government and they arrange for the drugs to be imported and exported. Some are at the bottom, selling in the markets by day and dealing drugs by night. They undersell us honest merchants. If they sell to you for less than the cost, what does it matter? That’s not where the money is. The money’s in the drugs. Then how are the shopkeepers supposed to make a living? They go into drugs too. Everyone’s involved in it. And even if you’re not involved, you have a son or a sister or an uncle who is—so, what are you going to do?

     “They like to have women, to use women. They have a woman go to talk someone into allowing the drugs, and she offers herself to the man. ‘If you don’t like me, I have a sister who is even more beautiful’—and so, we are only men, what will we do?

      “You are a foreigner, so you do not see it,” he grinned at us, “but if you ask for drugs from anybody, they will show you.

     “It is the cause of much crime in Tanzania. It is in the corrupt politicians, and Tanzania is poor because of this drug system; all the money goes to the people at the top. People will steal medicine and equipment from hospitals, even people who work there, because crime is part of the system. And sometimes the police may be part of it.”

     “Why,” I asked finally, after a long time of this, “are you telling us this?” Fred’s patience was wearing thin and Christine was shifting uneasily, clearly uncomfortable. But some of the things he was saying were clicking into place in my brain, and I was intensely (if unwisely) curious.

     “You need to tell the world that this is the problem of Tanzania. We cannot do anything because we’re too involved in it. But when you go back to the United States, everyone needs to know. Don’t tell them my name, though,” he said, white teeth flashing in the darkness. “If they knew it was me, I would be in danger. I tried to oppose them, and they tried to kill me.” He was still grinning as he pointed to a scar on his arm that I couldn’t see in the dimness.

     “You trust us a lot,” I said, trying to sound respectful through my building wariness. “Why, of all people, did you choose to tell us?” An unconventional question, but I feel that an ordinary person who suddenly has a quest thrust upon them ought to have the right to know.

     “You’re not from here, so you’re not involved in this,” he said. “And you’re the Americans who come here to find what the biggest problem at the hospital is so they can fix it. This is the biggest problem. Drugs. Everyone needs to know.”

*             *             *

*             *             *

     Eventually we extricated ourselves and made it back out to the open street. It was almost a relief to be in the sunny, smoky air. We’d been talking with the man for over an hour: it was almost time to leave Mawenzi for the day, so we trudged back up the hill to the hospital to label our equipment before we returned to KCMC. (“This isn’t even masking tape!” Fred complained when he opened the package. “It’s some weird sort of packing tape!” He looked up at me and Christine, uncharacteristically exasperated. “He kept us there for an hour and a half and then didn’t even give us what we came for.”)

     “Do you think,” I said as we waited on the side of the street for our dala-dala, “d’you think what he said was true?” 

     “It’s either true or he’s crazy,” Fred answered. “Neither one is a good thing.”

     “Locked up for an hour with a probably-crazy guy,” Christine mused. “That was kind of scary.”

     “The door wasn’t locked,” I said. “He just closed it. I was watching him.”

     “I thought it was locked,” said Christine.

     We waited a little longer in silence.

     “He was definitely obsessed with the idea,” I started again, after a moment. “It would explain a lot, though. What do you suppose we’re supposed to do?”

     “Do?” Christine asked. “What can we do? We’re students!”

     “He seemed to think we have a lot more power than we do,” Fred observed. “Anyway, we have no way of verifying his story. That would be the job of law enforcement.”

     “Yeah.” I glanced at my toes as they made little scuffing motions over the sidewalk, waiting for the uncomfortable feeling in my gut to subside. This is why I have partners—so that when my gullibility leads me to feel responsible for a burden of action that someone has irrationally placed upon me, I have someone to give me a reality check. No. Trying to meet that obligation is stupid.

     …But if it’s a real problem, somebody should know about it. =\

*in English, the language one can use in stores, because stores are run by Indians and Indians speak English. Far, far better than we speak Swahili, anyway.

**The first few days at each hospital were by far the most unproductive. Between paperwork, tours, and the mandate that we meet all the right people before we start working, we lost half a week at each place before we were actually able to start working on equipment. We struggled especially at Mawenzi to get the ball rolling. First we were unqualified because we were students, then they said we needed someone to supervise us, then they said they only needed biomedical engineers, then they said that because their operating ward was in the process of being demolished they had no equipment to be repaired. By the time we got a small room to work in and a few machines on a table, we felt distinctly unwanted. That first day, we repaired a wheelchair, a hinged lamp, and an autoclave. We high-fived each other with maniacal grins and went home exultant. Two days later, no one had come to retrieve any of it. We finally asked the supplies officer for permission to find our own things to repair and return—and then, simply had to earn the trust of every. single. doctor in the hospital. >_< Mawenzi was where we did our best work—but Mawenzi was hard.

***Men on pikipikis (motorcycles—the name refers to the sound they make) and in taxi cabs are stopped all along the streets. You need to go someplace, you can hand a rider some money and climb on behind him, and off you go! Jen and Ashgirl got hooked on pikipiki rides on the steep mountain slopes near Machame hospital. I was sort of tempted, but my eagerness to get the “whole Tanzanian experience” warred with my “let’s not die while we’re trying to save people’s lives, shall we?” side, and in the end, procrastination won out and I missed my chance. =\