Reading List

I'm going to start a new reading list for the next year. In all I read 27 books over the last year, which averages out to about one every 2 weeks. Of course, I read 4 books over the Christmas holidays which were only 2 weeks long, so it didn't quite work out evenly - I'm finding that I read non-fiction much slower than fiction.

I'm putting my reading list from the last year here for reference.

• - The Exalted Company of Roadside Martyrs - Warren Cariou
• - Assata - Assata Shakur
• - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
• - The Sunday Philosophy Club - Alexander McCall Smith
• - Ten Thousand Lovers - Edeet Ravel
• - Blue Shoes and Happiness - Alexander McCall Smith (Africa)
• - The Kalahari Typing School for Men - Alexander McCall Smith (Africa)
• - Running with Scissors - Augusten Burroughs
• - Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond
• - When a Crocodile Eats the Sun - Peter Godwin (Africa)
• - The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories - Ernest Hemingway (Africa - slightly)
• - 28 - Stephanie Nolen (Africa & HIV/AIDS)
• - A Great Feast of Light - John Doyle
• - The Constant Gardener - John le Carré (Africa)
• - The Devil Wears Prada - Lauren Weisberger
• - State of Fear - Michael Crichton
• - The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver (Africa)
• - The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
• - The In-between World of Vikram Lall - MG Vassanji (Africa)
• - The Book of Secrets - MG Vassanji (Africa)
• - The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
• - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - JK Rowling
• - The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B. - Sandra Gulland
• - In the Company of Cheerful Ladies - Alexander McCall Smith (Africa)
• - Tears of the Giraffe - Alexander McCall Smith (Africa)
• - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith (Africa)
• - Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

One Year!

Wow! I've now been in Tanzania for a whole year. It doesn't really seem like it - it's hard to believe.

In some ways I feel like I've adapted, but in other ways not at all. I can get by with my basic Swahili and I can pretty much navigate day-to-day life without any problems at all. But in other ways I don't feel like I completely fit in. The politics of race are certainly alive and well here. I will always be an outsider because of the color of my skin. The history of colonialism is still quite fresh. I sadly heard someone (a white guy) just today saying how much better things were during the days of colonialism.

In terms of my job, things are going as well as possible under the circumstances. I have reflected quite a bit about how my position was set up and what kind of support is provided by the organization that sent me and I had been a bit depressed by the reality versus the intent. Things are not perfect. In addition, a merger is coming that will mean I do not have the option to extend my contract and stay a bit longer. Despite all of that, I have looked at my limitations and decided what is possible to do within them. I think that there is still a lot I am able to do and I think I might even be able to make a small difference before the end of my contract.

This past year has taught me many things about myself and about what direction I want the path of my life to take. In a general sense, I want to DO something with my life - I always have. I hope that through my professional and personal life I can make a contribution of some kind to making the world a better place - toward moving humanity toward a more fair existence. I had thought that doing a volunteer placement like I am now would mean that despite all the things that present barriers to making change, I could be in control of my environment and do something worthwhile in my own little sphere. This has not been very realistic though, and it has been a big learning experience for me. There were a hundred things that preceded my arrival that I had no control over. In addition, I don't have control over the knowledge, attitudes, work and personal practices, and willingness to accept my contributions at my work. These things have consequences that affect me now and are affecting what I can do in my placement. It means that the onus is not 100% on me to make things work. I think that learning this has been both a bit disillusioning, but also very valuable. Overall, I don't necessarily want to change the path of my life, but I feel like learning this and other things will help me make better decisions about what to do next.

What to do next continues to be a big question mark for me. I still have a year left, so there is some time, but for probably the first time in my life, I'm not sure what it will be. I am a consummate planner, so this feels a little unsettling. I'm trying to just breathe deep and relax and hope that it will become clear.

As for the next year here, I plan to design and facilitate some training sessions for my organization. They have expressed a desire to have more individual level capacity building trainings, so that is what I want to try to do. I just have to convince them to stop throwing all the reports and grant proposals in my directions, so I can get the trainings ready to go.

Everything else is pretty ok. My stitches from the New Year's accident came out about a week after I got them and the nurse was really impressed with how it looked. The ER doc had said that he had a lot of experience with plastic surgery, so now it is difficult to even see the scar when I try to show people. My hair is growing back quite quickly as well. The ER nurse who shaved it was kind enough to leave a bit around the side of my head so that my other hair covered it up and now it's hardly noticeable at all.

Late Beach Pictures

So, I promised beach pictures, and here they are. For Christmas we went to Bagamoyo, the former capital of Tanzania (then Tanganyika) during colonial times. For New Year's we went slightly south to Dar es Salaam, the unofficial current capital (technically it's Dodoma, but Dar is where everything important happens).

Here's me on the beach at Bagamoyo.


We only swam in the ocean one time during our whole vacation. Unlike Zanzibar, the beach on the mainland is a bit dirty (lots of seaweed and regular ocean dirt) and the tide goes out forever. I'd had no idea it would be like that. In the mornings, the tide would be out the length of a football field. We could literally walk on an empty ocean floor. We found lots of beautiful shells that way. The tide would fully come in about 3 or 4 in the afternoon and by that time we would often be sleeping by the pool or swimming there. The beach was slightly cleaner in Dar. In Bagamoyo there were lots of fishing boats and large mangroves, which also made swimming hard.

Walking along the beach when the fishermen came in with their catch was really amazing, though. One guy brought this:

There was a big group of women bidding on it and the winner let me take a picture.

Here are a couple of pictures of boats in the water and fishermen pulling their boats to shore when the tide is high.




There was also something on the beach that was clearly not seaworthy anymore, and I thought it looked like a boat skeleton


Bagamoyo was once a major hub for the slave trade run by Arabs. There are ruins of the old Customs House attached to the current Customs House that is still in use and right on the beach.




There are also some interesting ruins from the 1400's of old Arab settlements. The major structures are graves, which were built around the burial spot, and ruins from a mosque.


There was a museum at the ruins site that showed some old art depicting common images from the slave trade times:


One more thing that was really cool to see in Bagamoyo was a tree on the way to our hotel that is literally called a Christmas tree - it's a poinsettia (the whole tree)!


In Dar, we stayed just outside of town in a compound-like hotel (almost like an all-inclusive). We couldn't really walk along the beach since each hotel had blocked off their own section. There were some perks though - we got to watch TV and movies, had good air conditioning and a free shuttle ride into town everyday. We probably spent half the time roaming around Dar and most of the rest of the time (that we weren't lying on the beach or in the pool) watching movies and TV. In town, we went to the national museum, the botanical gardens, and near our hotel we saw more ruins and went to a small island about 15 minutes away by boat.

Here are a few selections from the National Museum:






The museum had an old part and a new part. In between they had a couple of exhibitions, including a shattered window and a completely mangled motorcycle that were recovered from the bombing of the US Embassy in Dar in 1998:


The botanical gardens are described in the Lonely Planet guide as "languishing" and it is true. But there were some beautiful peacocks making their presence known with their loud calls. Here is a great picture of one of them in a tree:


The ruins that we went to see were similar to the ones in Bagamoyo with the exception that for some reason they weren't protected as a cultural site. There were more graves and in better condition and less destruction to the mosque. I have no idea why the Tanzanian government hasn't protected them.


It took us forever to find them because no one seemed to know they were there - except this guy:


I just have a couple more pictures to post about some enormous trees. There is a children's book here called "A Baobab is Big" and are they ever! This first picture is from a museum at a Catholic church in Bagamoyo. There was a sign that said it was last measured in 2000 with a circumference of 12 meters. It was planted in the early 50's. I can only imagine how big it is now. The second picture is at the ruins near Dar and is WAY bigger than the first tree.