– Messud, The Last Life

Nothing to see here.  Just leaving this here because I wanted to write it down and didn’t have a better place to put it.

And, just to provide a little more context about “Where is this all going?”, here is Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn bringing up what I think are some interesting points regarding the movement, money quote:

“Last week, we had the biggest consumer battle in a generation in Illinois,” Quinn said. “It’s important if you’re doing an ‘Occupy’ movement, maybe to get down to the state capitol, help with the program y’know?” Quinn said to laughter. “We’re trying to win for the 99 percent of consumers who aren’t very happy about Commonwealth Edison’s big increase. You’ve got to be an organizer, figure out where the people are. I know the people are on our side. Consumers did not get a fair shake. We’ve got to come back and win in the days ahead. Maybe the folks outside could beat the drums for that.”

Here’s the link: http://www.suntimes.com/news/8529324-418/quinn-on-occupy-chicago-protesters-organize-for-a-cause.html

As always, I find TNC super instructive on the issue:

The funny thing is even while these more human portraits attract me, they actually point out why I am ill-suited to radical activism or activism. In re-reading Douglass’s denunciations of Lincoln last week, I couldn’t help but feel that sometimes, they were really unfair. And yet, leaving aside the fact that I have never lived as a slave, I don’t know that it’s the job of any activist to be “fair.” It almost seems “unfair” to ask radicals to function in a moral universe where no other humans, especially those with power, tend to live. I strongly suspect that any serious history on Mandella’s ANC will find the exact sort of behavior, if not behavior that’s even more complicated.
And yet, while being convinced by Kennedy’s defense, there is not a single African-American in the world who I feel comfortable disparaging as a sell-out or a Tom. Indeed, I’ve never liked Malcolm’s “house slave/field slave” comparison. I couldn’t see myself physically threaten someone for riding the bus, if only because, I’m very much an individualist. I understand why these tactics existed, but I recoiled while reading about them. I think about gay rights activist outing conservatives who support anti-gay policies. I recoil at that too. But I’m not an activist. Nor is it really my fight.
I’ve been listening to a lot of lectures on Napoleon and the French Revolution. I think I would have been with Burke. And yet, the Revolution was good, yes?

2) After the Trojan beach has been taken. The chief from Super Troopers is accepting tributes from lesser kings and decides he’ll help himself to Achilles’ hostage-girlfriend. “I think I’ll have her give me a bath” muses Brian Cox. “You bloated sack of wine!” Brad Pitt fulminates, putting the evil tyrant at the point of a sword.

3) Storming of Troy – Final Act. Peter O’Toole, frantically hoping to salvage his city-kingdom wheels in an admirable yet feeble defensive gesture. How now – what’s this? Old Priam’s jaw is locked open in a death gasp. When we saw the picture in theaters, my friend Kaniecki knew in an instant. His anguished cry rang out through the Cineplex Odeon: “AGAMEMMNON!” Lawrence of Arabia’s visage slides from the screen a final time, confirming our awful suspicions.

Honorable Mention: Achilles riding helter skelter in front of the Trojan walls, repeatedly screaming “HEC-TOR!” “HECTOR!!” My family took a vacation to Lake Michigan some years back and my dad adopted the phrase as his preferred means of summoning another beer as he languished at the sandbar offshore.

ESKIMOS 3, SOUTHPAWS 8

*as is their way, the only way they know.

4 Mar 2010              1100 local Moshii, TZ

Final Day of Expedition

Became terribly lost on the backroads of Moshii in an effort to walk to Talia’s school yesterday.  In my travails I chanced to encounter two street artists who had hawked me their wares the previous night and met with summary rejection.  Not having acquired their names during our first roundabout, I asked after them now and was informed that they were christened as “George” and “Jimmy Carter,” respectively.

George and Jimmy Carter hounded me relentlessly.  Finally, I was able to convince the pair that I could not possibly visit their shop on account of some very important business I needed to attend to at The Coffee Shop (a local mazungu hangout); the last thing I wanted to admit to was being lost.  George and Jimmy Carter insisted they would wait outside for me.  Luckily, I was able to slip out the back way and take ancillary refuge in the Moshii Public Library.  I paid 1,000 Tsh for a day-pass and read a fascinating tome about Luna or, as the reader may more commonly know it, the (earth’s) Moon.

Giving my pursuers the slip, I stalked about concentrically until I at long last found my quarry, the Mary Goretti School – a Jesuit boarding institution, and one of Tanzania’s finest.  MCBRIDE, M CBRIDE’S FATHER and I offered a stirring guest lecture.  In general, I found the pupils to contain remarkably higher confidence and spirited inquisitiveness than those students I had taught in Madibira (young men and women who , perhaps, exercised a bit too much deference in the face of authority).

Notes on Tanzania’s Urban/Rural Chasm and Thoughts on the Future of the Country

In frankness, my inspection of the school at Mary Goretti Secondary (a Jesuit boarding school) left me with the starkest of contrasts to my beloved Madibira Secondary.

An all girls school in one of the nation’s wealthiest cities, Mary Goretti represents the best of the best from within the country’s female student population.  Dormitories are spacious and the seminal Form 4 Exam (the standardized test every student takes to determine aptitudes for attending University) is a simple concluding formality to a student’s career – it is assumed each young lady will perform superbly.  By contrast in Madibira students live packed into communal concrete halls and fewer than 15 percent of youth come within a mortar’s lob of passing marks on the Form 4 Exam.

A dormitory building at Mary Goretti in Moshii. Note the building's multi-floored professional construction as well as the foreground's manicured hedgerows and overhead municipal power lines

Student dormitory space at Madibira Secondary School. Forty young men share this floor space for all-purposes, from study to storage to sleep.

Mary Goretti, situated in the tourism-driven city of Moshii, is a paragon of organization: a highly-motivated, expert faculty holds instruction on a strict timetable and when not in the classroom can be found at work in the spacious teachers’ lounge.  In this lounge each teacher has their own drawered-desk and a television mounted on the wall is perpetually tuned to BBC or CNN International.  In Madibira, village off the map , class “schedules” are suggestive at best – I myself cancelled lessons on account of other teachers feeling the impulse to instruct.  The faculty “lounge” about the campus is an action rather than a place.  Much of instructors’ time is spent idling on about nothing in particular.   Frequently students are removed from class for the purposes of menial errands (fetching water, purchasing cell phone voucher, etc.), to say nothing of the practice of abrupt school-day cancellation for agricultural purposes.

The gulf, chiefly, is one of region.  In many ways the divergence between the two mirrors that between modernism and tribalism and undergirds the mustard seed-fragility of globalism.  The cities and ports may indeed serve as fertile sowing ground for the international style but in the bush the soil is rocky, the sun scorches and but for a few exceptions the revolutions of the modern world are quickly burnt up.

Particularly to our subject of education, in the rural part of the country the utility of educated persons to society is marred by novelty.  The paradigm is such that educated persons are exempted from the laborious tasks of day-to-day life in the country; that the learned few among them would have their energies ‘wasted’ on quotidian ends such as washing clothes or tilling land is viewed as a shameful proposition by teacher and villager alike.[1] The learned man is a prize rather than an asset. The reader can imagine with ease how quickly this point of social protocol can mutate into ugly habits of laziness and entitlement on the part of the educated.  This misfortune is not unique to Madibira – it has been a uniform complaint issued by every Western educator I’ve spoken with during my time in country.

I am reluctant to lay full blame at the feet of these rural teachers, however.  Life in the village is demanding.  Water must be fetched from rivers and streams (often several kilometers distant) and boiled thoroughly before drinking.  Cooking is a monotonous and labor-intensive process, from gathering charcoals to preparing all materials quite literally from scratch.  Electricity is a sporadic phenomenon.  It is easy to see how an individual who grew up under such conditions might view their virtually singular success in educating themselves as an entitlement, perhaps even an obligation, to a life different in kind, one more privileged and relaxed than that which they had previously lived.  The price of admission to life in most of Tanzania is a disciplined existence.  There simply is no alternative (other than death)  to rising early to go to the river, to taxing work in the rice fields, to enduring heat & cold, all the while accomplishing anything and everything with tools limited in quality, quantity and variety.  When discipline is imposed as a nearly immutable condition of life, its status as a self-evident virtue is easily and quickly obscured.  ‘Hard work’ does not build character, ‘hard work’ keeps one alive.  In many ways it is no surprise that an individual with a chance to put his or her feet up will take every opportunity to do so.

In Moshii, however, the compulsion to perform diligently at a specialized profession arises from the familiar-to-us realities that 1) there are many other individuals who could and would usurp one’s station and 2) the imperatives of the workplace are the starkest, most pressing one will face on a day-to-day basis (e.g., as opposed to the village, where imperatives are more existential).  These motivating exigencies are absent among teachers, officials, et al. in places like Madibira.

Furthermore, there is a longitudinal component at play, a generational effect, if you will.  The sensation of educated people in rural villages here is a new one; those teachers have no model for conduct or comportment.  By the same token, students have no clear model (from parents, cousins, siblings, etc.) of what to expect from their schooling.  Boots’ opinion is that the best result Madibira Secondary can bring about (short of perhaps one or two alumni eventually matriculating at university) would be imparting the parents of tomorrow (i.e., today’s students) with a healthy infusion of Cosby-esque ‘Back-in-my-days.’ Ideally, as the notion of education itself sheds its cloak of novelty in these parts of the country the populace’s vision and expectations for the institution can become more refined, clear and demanding.  Tanzania is a young country still, both historically and demographically, and it has been exceedingly fortunate in evading many of the scourges (sectarian violence, political instability, etc.) that plague the Global South.  Here’s hoping the nation can leverage these advantages, pivot on the recent flush in Africa’s economies and experience prosperity in its remote sections as well as its famous cities.

On that note I suppose it is time to bring an end to this, the OFFICIAL LOG OF THE 2010 EAST VILLAGE HOCKEY LEAGUE (EVHL) GOODWILL EXPEDITION TO THE GLOBAL EQUATORIAL ZONES, INCLUDING TANZANIA and ZANZIBAR.™  A thousand thanks to our most generous hosts and allies, Mama Devo, Deo, Happi,  our Jesuit benefactors, the German girl from Iringa, the Dar Es Salaam YMCA and, of course, the darkly welcoming SHANGHAI HOTEL, as well as dozens of unnamed others.  The road has been long and the pace has been swift, but know in laying your heads down that all SPORT HOCKEY denotes – grace, courage, bravery, power, swiftness – shall not, and will not perish from the golden lands of this earth.

We depart now, to cross over the sands and seas which we first traversed so many nights ago.  What glories and calamities lie ahead in our future travels we cannot know, for time may never be known, except that it is short.  It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.

Oh, and McBride successfully summated Kilimanjaro.

Or so he claims.

McBride. Can he be trusted?

It is the case in many bouts that the outcome is not determined  at drama’s height, the seconds ticking away and defeat drooling as a giddy beast over the adversary’s shoulder.  Rather, the deciding blow is struck incognito; as an exciting flurry, perhaps, but unrecognized in true import until the match is studied in cooled hindsight by combatants and commentators alike.  While in the throes of struggle we are momentarily wizened to the idea that there is still time for more of the story to be written. So many victories and defeats we do not realize until after the pieces are set.  Travels over the River of Toil.

Thus, once committed the string must be played out.  Once gear has been donned and the field taken alertness and sincerity must be preserved or rot will set in and bitterness thereafter. The time for glory may be passed (or may never have arrived at all), but one cannot rule out that it might appear again, and this must not be forgotten.  The soldier relaxes his guard only at the enactment of the armistice, not the announcement.

Leisure in Moshii

The first cup of brewed coffee in a month

The ceremonies of the week-end are behind us.  My host Jesuit auxiliaries returned to work today, leaving only Leiha (Peace Corps Volunteer on holiday) and myself to mill about of our own devices.

Today, this comprised substantial absorbance of Moshii’s Eurocentric circuit.  First off was a long breakfast of sausage rolls at ABBAS ALLY’S HOT BREAD SHOP.  After weeks in Madibira the opportunity to idle casually with a countryman[1] was enjoyable beyond expectation.  Chatting with someone whose background according to this relative universe so radically approximates my own, in a setting so familiar in generality (if not specifics) has brought on a feeling of transition, as though my departure from Tanzania has already begun.

Transience is (in bursts) unquestionably good for the spirit, but my mind is beginning to warm at the rapid approach of homeward shores.

3 Mar 2010              0930 local Moshii, TZ

Made a tour of the local Jesuit Secondary School, Mary Goretti Secondary with Talia and Beth this morning and came away very impressed (much more on this at a later date).  Afterwards, we took lunch at the Sikh Club, which boats a full-size field hockey arena[2] and toured a local art market.

About town, we encountered a friendly fellow who spoke no English, but happened to know the Spaniard tongue quite well.  No stranger to the language

Kindoroko Hotel - Rooftop View

myself, we enjoyed a worldly 3^rd party language conversation and made arrangements to meet that evening at the Kindoroko Hotel’s rooftop bar

The venue was picturesque but extremely, extremely .expensive (4,500 Tsh/beer[3]).  The evening unfolded well, until our Spanish speaking friend’s text messaging to the female members of our party touched inappropriateness in both volume and aggression.

Dinner was found in the form of street kebabs.  Exquisite.

JCV Talia Coveleski and PCV Leiha Costa pose with a clever sign following the 2010 Kilamanjaro Marathon. Women were allowed to compete in the race, something which would have been impossible 200 years ago.

Marathon.  The very word brings images of heroism to the front of the mind: heart over hardship, the victory of endurance over exhaustion, Philipeddes’ nude form in its last instant of life.   The brave men & women of the mazungu world descended on Moshii in the infant hours of 2010’s third month, venturing out in the predawn hour to join their East African brethren in running circles around the stone form that sits aloof in the clouds above the African plain.

THE TRAVELER, however, put credence in none of this.  The first line of the East Village Hockey League Goodwill Emissary Handbook: Do No Harm.  Never actively aid & abet a competitor.  A large, glorified athletic competition in the shadow of Tanzania’s most storied landmark?  A more vile competition for the game of Sport Hockey can scarcely be imagined!  The bastards at KILIMANJARO PREMIUM LAGER[1] would not wring a single mile’s worth of flop-sweat from my brow.

After carefully stowing the bags of the JVC runners I surveyed the grounds.  Inflatable beer bottles, a stage piled high with loudspeakers, beer tents and food peddlers utilizing power from portable generators: a scene more Taste of Chicago than Tanzania.

I inquired after t-shirts.  The scheme afoot was such that those seeking commemorative garb had two options.  One was to trot dozens of miles in oppressive heat, the other was to turn in emptied beer bottles as game tokens and complete a puzzle featuring Kilimanjaro (both libation and landmark) within a sixty-second timeframe.  The rising sun on my back I made for the concession area and secured my first beverages.

Some time later (my notes are somewhat difficult to make out) I had won several promotional t-shirts, which I promptly buried.

The heroics completed for the day, the marathoners finished their race and we collectively set out for the celestial trappings of the Moshii Young Man’s Christian Association.

16 An American reads a Dungeons & Dragons text in Moshii. This fair town sits under the growing influence of a Level 5 Globilzation spell.

The walk through commercial Moshii reinforced the sensation that I was a world removed from Madibira.  The misadventures of my late-night arrival notwithstanding, the evidence of Moshii’s innate Western-ness was undeniable.  Electricity and concrete stretched as far as the eye could see.  English reigned as the local lingua franca and mzungu seemed a picayune designation – Europeans were everywhere.

The full reemergence of technological convenience into my world manifested itself dramatically in the form of the Moshii YMCA.  The facility is truly outstanding, boasting an Olympic-sized swimming pool (with diving board), outdoor lounge and full food & bar service courtesy of the attached hoteliers’ college.  Lounging poolside in my neck scarf, I indulged in a dip, played a spot of keep away with local youth (international rules) and did fifty under-water pull-ups on the pool wall.  My appetite earned, a plate of sweet & sour chicken(!) tided me over as I chatted with poolside guests and paged through an English-language newspaper.

As afternoon gave way to evening I joined a group of young American do-gooders in making for The Glacier, an outdoor bar where we met a local language teacher (Robert) who had made good-natured but ultimately unsuccessful romantic overtures to most of the Yankee women in the city.  Ultimately, an expeditious party of Robert, Talia, Paul (a JVC from California), Beth (a JVC from Arizona), Leiha (pictured, above; PCV from Boston) and a Swede gentlemen claiming to be a paleontologist set out restlessly in search of a venue showing the Olympic Gold Medal Ice Hockey[2] Before the night was over, Robert showed us a side of Moshii we’d never otherwise see, including a bar in the basement of an office building that suspicion tells me was once an old-time bank.  All of the ‘bartenders’ were behind teller cages and the only furniture to speak of came in the form of scattered beach chairs (many of them broken) unarranged over the venue’s floor.

Absent a “tequila” shot that was decidedly not tequila, the indubitable familiarity of the night’s activities to the reader leave your correspondent with precious little worthy of further report, except for the begrudgingly made editorial comment that I have no choice but to take back some of the things I’ve said about paleontologists over the years.  Some of them.

1 Mar 2010     1730 local Moshii, TZ

It is the muffled time just before dawn.  The city of Moshii lies supine at the foothills of Kilimanjaro, the great mountain shrouded to invisibility by mist but unmistakably present, a divine guardian over the people below.  Moshii – the names means “smoke” – is a world apart from THE TRAVELER’s previous surroundings.  Corner stores (which are plentiful) sell (not peddle) frozen vegetables, instant coffee and box wine.    Exotic, yes (we are upon the equator, after all) but the first place in many moons with well-worn footpaths for the unadventurous tourist.  We are not concerned with them.

I arrived at the Moshii Bus Depot following a fragrant, memorable 16-hour bus ride; that is to say I arrived in the morning’s small hours, wearied and abandoned of my olfactory faculties.  The facility was all but deserted and (as I am finding uncharacteristic of this city) no one present spoke English.  I had arranged accommodations with the local Jesuit Volunteer House (an old friend is in residence there), but with no inkling of where it might be and limited practical verbiage at hand I decided to improvise.  Turning my trusty trip journal to a blank page, I drew a crucifix, wrote the words ‘Jesuit Volunteer Corps’ along with my contact’s name and walked the empty streets near the bus depot showing the page to strangers in hopes that a guiding spark might be lit.

It was a long while before goodly taxi driver took interest in my dilemma.  The driver, his name (or at least the word he said most) sounded like “Ingsho,” cast a wizened eye over my hieroglyph and drove for an indeterminate time through the darkened city streets.  We stopped outside a house with a small gate barring the driveway.  After the taxi’s headlights shone into the house a few minutes an old man emerged in a ragged t-shirt shirt and slacks.  The old man displayed no flicker of understanding at my diagram, nor in response to Ingsho’s terse and jabbered repetitions.  We pursued this fruitless dance for a few cycles of conversation until we were well-resigned to the age old diplomat’s curse: three men speaking (and writing (and drawing)) past each other.  The old man turned heel and sauntered back into the house waving his arms above his head.

Grimly, Ingsho and I returned to the cab.  Mutually, we entertained previously unconsidered thoughts of difficulty.  For all I knew, Ingsho was seeking to bring me to a criminal hideout, fell villains waiting to crush me with their fists and laugh at my bitter tears as they stole and broke my silly possessions.  For all Ingsho knew, I was in possession of dangerous and illicit narcotics and involving him in a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse with the only ‘Alley-alley-oxen-free’ being sounded out of the barrel of a gun.    An uncomfortable silence settled over the cab as we drove off into the velour blackness of the Moshii night once more.

Roadmap to Salvation

After some time we came upon a walled, gated estate.  There was a guard at the entrance but, alas, he also spoke no English.  I wrote my contact’s name (‘TALIA COVELESKI’) and sketched a quick rendition.  Again, Ingsho and I found ourselves getting nowhere.  Then, in a starburst of inspiration, Ingsho climbed back into the driver’s station of the cab.  Firmly he pressed down on the horn, and then again, and again.  The guard leaned against the wall impassively as the cacophony stretched on.

Madly the tonal assault continued, the air bladder within the tiny automobile gasping like a man who has just run for his life.  HONK . . . HONK . HONK . . . HonkHONKHOnk!  It was several minutes before a ghostly figure approached the gate.  Ingsho edged the cab forward, bringing into illumination a wood-carved sign mounted on the compound wall:

JESUIT VOLUNTEER CORPS: MOSHII COMMUNITY

Talia had appeared.  The time had come to rest.

EVHL Tanzania Region Agent BOOTS HIMSELF and I parted ways at 0830 local following a brief meeting on the tarmac of the Iringa bus depot.  The old fellow should be back stateside in late December, which is fortuitous; we are set to be out on the path of adventure again shortly.

Speaking of adventure, upon leaving company I was gripped with excitement for my journey’s next leg: a solitary, 16-hour cross-country trek to Moshii (city in the shadows of Kilimanjaro).  As things turn out, however, one cannot swing a dead cat these days without hearing a dull thud against the person of a friendly mzungu.  Laura, the German[1] girl we’d encountered the previous evening at SHOOTER’S EXPATRIATE CLUB.  Laura, it so happened, was making her way to Arusha (an hour’s ride past Moshii on the anti-clockwise circuit favored by Tanzania’s most prominent bus lines).  In addition to my new German (speaking) friend there were two other white-skinned passengers on the manifest: Jackie, a 23-year-old Harvard University graduate jaunting around the country on fellowships and stolen satellite internet and Daniel, an MIT alum who works for an NGO that offers bicycle alternatives to handicapped persons and, as fate would have it, grew up a scant four blocks from my boyhood home in the leafy politically-correct utopia of Oak Park, IL..

Social convention dictated that Laura and I sit near each other, as by the time of departure we had been acquaintances of some 16 hours.  Of course, given the stark novelty of our complexions our seating proximity ensured a consistent battery of questions about our marriage and family life.  Laura’s English skills, while impressive, are more aptly geared towards understanding than speaking, so over the initial three-hours of our overland trip I discoursed at length on the following topics:

• The geography of the United States
• The Electoral College
• My girlfriend[2]
• The Great Chicago Fire and the 1893 World’s Fair
• The reversal of the Chicago River
• The Matsukane/Zgrabik Engagement
  • The presumed bridal party and guests list and the historical subplots therein.

All that said, we have slipped into quiet conversational fatigue these past twenty minutes.  Well enough, as my reserves of semi-interesting knowledge were nearing exhaustion and Laura, for her part, seemed to be getting exceedingly weary of answering my polite questions about her pet horses in Austria.  Newly commanding our attentions are the vast numbers of Tanzanians growing violently ill around us.  Travel by autobus is by no means a common occurrence for the TZs, and the combination of bumpy roads, heat, perpetual motion and the constant elevation change since we departed Iringa have beset many (approximately 60 per cent) of our fellow travelers with heaving motion sickness.  Such is how Laura and I observe the countryside rolling endlessly beside us: an affable, tired silence punctuated by the hum of the bus engine and the damned chorus of vomiting strangers.  13 hours remain.