Football: Students vs. Other Students
4 p.m. A scraggle of wispy clouds lingers in the afternoon sky twelve-thousand feet above Madibira. The tranquility of the scene is broken only by the shrill report of a whistle (the only one in the village). It is Tuesday – ‘Sports Day’ at Madibira Secondary. The young men have taken to the futbol field southeast of the school compound to engage in their favourite pastime.
The whistle shrieks again – - and again and again. It is in the control of one of the young men restlessly agitating about the field, anxious for some type of game to begin. An interminable series of practiced corner kick exercises occupies the players while an urge towards organization swells into tangible purpose.
The arena is a semi-cleared field on one of a mountain’s gentlest slopes. At the perimeter a narrow pathway has been trod to determine the boundaries of play. Within, the turf ranges from overgrown in some spots to dusty and hard in others; unevenness exists throughout. Goals are simple three piece structures consisting of two vertical logs with a lengthy crossbar, unnetted. The losing team will regularly claim that the goal they are attacking is the narrower of the two, but there is no way to know for sure.
19 Feb 2010 1200 local Madibira, TZ
My recent venture in self-employment has met with a drastic interruption. The father of the secondary school’s mathematics teacher passed away last week and while that gentleman I away tending to family affairs I have been asked to teach Form 2 mathematics in his stead.
For the past two days, McBride and I have endeavored to instruct the class. Lesson plans are nonexistent here, but near as we can tell (from our review of student notebooks) we are intended to be covering the process of solving quadratic equations through factoring. Algebra has never been a strong suit of mine. Accordingly, the concepts discussed have thus far been very basic, though I can happily report that by the end of yesterday’s session several of the students appeared to be comfortable with and proficient in the basics of the material. We have assigned five homework problems over the weekend.[1] Boots advises a ‘pop test’ on Wednesday. The students at the school evidently quite enjoy assessment.
Socially, we recently enjoyed the expedition’s first home-cooked Tanzanian meal. We dined last night in the home of Boots’ friend Deo. A man of uncommon intelligence and industry, Deo hails from what for all intents and purposes is the “first family of Madibira.” This is, to be sure, no official designation, but rather a reality of the size and success of his clan. Deo’s father (Baba Deo) had nine children, all of whom survived to adulthood and each of them has found some station of success. One son, Lucky, owns the Twin Lion Pub, another (Edgar) owns an agrodealership, two of the girls are married and living elsewhere. One son is a technical teacher, one son is at university, one daughter works at the Twin Lion, one son is in secondary school and Deo himself is a farmer, butcher and entrepreneurial dynamo.
Deo’s wife, Happy, is very beautiful and true to her name a radiant personality. They married in 2007. The blissful couple has one little girl, Dance, who is very well behaved, though a bit fearful of mazungu as well. Deo and Happy are still young (around 25 years old or so) and have plans to expand their brood, but not until Dance is a few years older, perhaps of 
primary school age. They would grow the size of their family sooner, but Deo says that times are changing and it is now much more expensive to rear children (school fees, cell phones, etc.) than it was when his own father was raising nine kids.
We arrived at Deo’s at 5 p.m. and did not eat until nearly 9 o’clock. During our extended visit we were joined by another Peace Corps Volunteer named Kaitlyn. For the purposes of the evening, Boots and Kaitlyn were worth their weight in gold. Neither Deo nor Happy speak more than a few words of English, but they exhibit an enthusiasm for bridging the language gap stronger than anything I have seen in other Tanzanians. Even so, without Boots and Kaitlyn as translators the evening would have proceeded at a much more basic and halting rate than it did.
The weather was a bit stuffy (something I have found to be uncommon at this altitude) so we moved the main table out of Deo and Happy’s two-room house and into the lightly fenced-in front yard to eat. Our meal was a veritable feast. The main dish – ugali – consisted of a malleable cornmeal mega-roll (removable on a piece-meal basis), beans, boiled spinach and eggs with onion and green peppers. Served with this spread were avocados (the size of a grapefruit!) pineapple (freshly grown!) and bananas (ditto!). The fruit was superior by several marks to anything I have enjoyed in the U.S.
As we ate a light rain began to fall. Fortuitously, the drizzle did not accelerate until we were done eating, at which point we were forced inside. The amplifier of the aluminum roof allowed the rain to suffocate any conversation below a shout, so after dinner chit-chat proved impossible. Near midnight we took advantage of a gap in the storm to make our way home. The rains resumed with renewed strength very shortly thereafter.
[1] 6x2 +10x = 0
X2 – x = 0
1/3(x2) + 3x = 0
6x4+ 2x3 = 0
X2 – 2x – 24 = 0
Good stuff.
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