namaste Delhi! please don't turn me into roadkill.

almost didn't start writing tonight because i should be resting for the intense week of lectures, readings, and field visits to come. not that it won't be a blast, but i know it will be exhausting. apparently our country coordinator likes to work us to the intellectual bone. despite this, i felt that i had to write because these first days in India have been so unbelievable. we arrive on the morning of the 24th after some 18 hours of traveling (at the least). immediately after settling in i went for a walk. our hostel was in the diplomatic sector of town, and it was some kind of holiday, so the streets were empty and bland. when i walked through the mostly shuttered-over market, however, there were just enough places open to fill my nostrils with scents that i'd only sampled occasionally at home. i knew then where i was, and i was overwhelmed by existential contentedness.

the second day i latched onto an internet cafe search party. after a 2 km walk with little success, we eventually crammed ourselves into an "auto-rickshaw" (also known as a tuk-tuk or 3-wheeled mini-taxi) and headed to Connaught Place, right in the center of Old Delhi. being Sunday, nearly all of the shops were closed, so we didn't get much of a feel fro what must only be the utter madness of a typical day. the roads were still lively, though, and their contribution to the atmosphere was readily apparent. in some places the smog was so thick that if i looked down a straight street i couldn't see the third block. it's difficult to describe the layout or visual aspects of the city - i'll have to save that for a later entry. or you could just look up a map. sorry, i'll hold off on the sass.

anyway, we found one place with decent computers, and, lo and behold - DSL! i was beginning to think that i would never encounter a connection that loaded a page faster than i could finish a sudoku, which was the standard in Tanzania, but the IT gods have certainly smiled upon the Subcontinent. granted, we still spent several hours there finishing our paper. in our post-assignment completion, chai-assisted ecstasy, we went to lunch next door - thali (naan, rice, daal, paneer curry, some yogurt and cheese thing, and fresh onions and radishes) for Rs 35 ($.90) that strongly reinforced my notion that my taste buds, and hopefully my gastrointestinal system as well, will attain nirvana in India long before my scattered, overflowing mind will. during lunch, my friend and i communicated mostly through stupid grins and elated, i-can't-f'ing-believe-this giggles.

after a brief rendezvous back at the hostel to pack and receive instructions from our country coordinator, we all separated into our homestay groups, loaded into taxis, and launched. Adam, Nate and i had not idea that anything could possibly be better than our Zanzibar family, but we grossly underestimated the plenitude, the cornucopia (thank you Adam, the walking thesaurus, for feeding me new vocabulary as i write) of our collective good karma.

our homestay mom just be the coolest and quirkiest person i've met so far on this trip. she lives out in some area of town that is transitioning from agricultural to urban in a 3-storey house in a walled compound with 3 outbuildings, a half-acre organic farm, 2 cows, 3 goats, a chicken, and her German Shepherd, Radya. the whole place is mostly waste-free, and the majority of the food she eats is grown on the premises. the house itself is spacious but luxuriously decorated with hardwood furniture, marble floors, a modern kitchen, many beautiful paintings, wi-fi, 3 computers, a hot shower (mega-bonus in cold Delhi) and a large-screen TV where we ended the evening watching Tom and Jerry with her and her domestic help.

dinner was, in line with the rest of the pleasant surprises, absolutely delicious. unfortunately, it was intentionally not very spicy because she wanted to be "on the safe side." however, when i ate one of the hot peppers in the daal (which i was told post facto were just for flavor, NOT eating) without much difficulty, she tried mimicking me and it was too spicy for her. she relayed this apparently impressive information to her mother in Hindi, and i'm sure i must've blushed a little from the flattery. i guess i'll have to look further for a real challenge of buds. i can already envision my famous last words: "sure, i like spicy food."

the last three days have been full of really engaging classes on everything from religious and cultural syncretism to groundwater restoration to the social psychology of the nation-state. luckily, we have chai breaks between our lectures to let the information settle before another round of really interesting oral knowledge is transferred. there is usually enough time to ask one or two questions so that our guest speaker can touch on another fascinating area just long enough to grab our attention, but never fully explaining. such is the nature of the program.

with that, i'll end my transmission for the night. there are too many other priceless details to mention. until next time, may peace be upon you, namaste, hakuna matata, -tanner.

i am thankful for... donkeys, cheese, and thunderstorms

today being Thanksgiving back home, i must start by giving thanks to all days, and to tomorrow, when i will leave for India. every hour on this trip so far has been worthwhile and useful and contributed to my learning and progress. i've had the last 6 days to reflect, unwind, relax and regenerate myself mentally, physically, and emotionally from the bombardment of information and experiences of Tanzania. for my vacation i returned to Maasailand with 3 friends. we spent 3 nights at the hostel at Ilaramatak community development center in Terrat and one night at the boma of Neyeyo, our translator from the previous visit. the ride over was crowded, bumpy, dusty, and absolutely wonderful. we crammed into a beat-up old safari jeep and took the long route from Arusha to Terrat, through dry gullies and acacia savannah and little villages scattered among pasturelands and corn and bean farms. for the first time we really travelled like the locals, and i felt so at home. my kind of ride.

on the second day the girls went back to our boma to give gifts of snuff and photographs (the former for the men, the latter for the moms and kids). i stayed at the center with Neyeyo's mom to help her make cheese and talk about education, geography, and life in general. i also finally got some alone time, which i relished by reading the Bhagavad Gita and sitting on the grass looking out at the quiet landscape. the next morning we walked with Neyeyo, Tataiyo (another translator friend), and Daniel (a warrior friend/bodyguard) for a good hour and a half to get to Neyeyo's boma. she lives in a clean concrete house very close to a large forest inhabited by a troublesome population of hyenas, lions, and leopards. didn't get to see any, though. we spent most of the day just talking and resting, and then we mande everybody the pasta marinara from supplies we carried from Arusha. i also helped prepare the chicken. i'm not just talking about the cooking, but also the plucking and gutting. i was so happy to get back in the kitchen and be useful. i hadn't realized how much i enjoy preparing food.

on our last day, we walked back to Terrat, stopping at Daniel's boma to meet his family and drink some goat-juice-and-herb soup. yummm. saying goodbye was really hard, but i know that the friends i made here will last. i don't know if i've ever gone somewhere and been able to relate to people so quickly and honestly as i was here. someday i'll return, i'm sure.

on our last night, a storm passed through, complete with lightning, thunder, and rough heavy rain. i stood outside to greet the oncoming torrent, feeling the surge of a real African rain, the beginning of the fertile season. in fact, the experience was so powerfully sublime, my inner romantic-naturalist Walt-Whitman wanna-be self could not be restrained, so i decided to write a little poem about it. please read (out loud if you like - this kind of thing sounds much better coming from human lips than from a computer screen) and enjoy. also, i always appreciate criticism. or snide remarks. or any kind of comment, really. or publication.

----

rain through the acacia

-

the wall the shadow

the sky's mighty hiss

no sunlight to frame its coming

no satellite report to quantify droplets

or categorize the response from the trees

as they cry softly and exhale

before the expecting mist blankets

the reaches of every possible trail.

-

and me, bowing backwards to the thunder

on my knees, eyes freed like liquid compasses

to find true headings from the clues

flooding every pore and nerve

and i greet the advancing battalions

with a sapling howl, i cry in freedom

for the rain on the acacia

washes out the blood from the old kingdom.

-

every day at home where the rain

falls and flows and drains - unappreciated

i scour my news and my most ethical

muse, but i am no medicine man

for the pain of this battered land

with symptoms on Wall Street and hospital

sheets stained with the epochs of death

that history books lazily relay - unappreciated.

-

somewhere under this soil and over the gray

the water runs parallel and rich as milk

but i still sink thoughtlessly when i know

that those gilded sorrows in the arteries below

flow north to saturate lands seeking grace

and the veins returning wind up in this place

with some bread, bullets, beer

and a bill for the disoriented human race.

-

out here exposed to the storm, to true people,

to resiliency and faith, to a working definition

of home

there is a great grasping pulse that pulls

as the night walks near and the slightest

warm breeze brushes off the fear unbounded

to reveal the sound of hope - grateful and silent

like the rain through the acacia

as the roots are released to feed.

----

now i'm back in Arusha, 15 hours away from leaving for India. not sure if i've got much closure on Tanzania, but i do feel a lot more grounded and strengthened for the next leg. it has been tough to balance my academic, personal, spiritual, and social lives, but i'm learning to sway between them more gracefully. all in all, i don't think i could possibly gripe about anything. i still feel almost sickeningly lucky and priviledged and honored to be here.

TTFN, and i'll check back in once i get to INDIA!!!!

mmmmooooooo. cows. goats. endless savannah. yes, you're in Maasailand.

the final formal leg of the Tanzania program was a stay at a Maasai "boma" or family compound. we drove to a small village way out in the savannah where we stayed for 5 days learning about and living closely with the Maasai people. all of us stayed in one boma but in separate huts. the boma is a circular area fenced with thorny trees to protect the people and livestock on the inside. our boma was owned by one man named Taon Matinda, but he shared it with three others and their total of 22 wives, 10 of which were Taon's. each wife has her own hut made from sticks and a mixture of mud and cow urine and covered with a straw roof. with no ventilation and a constant fire going inside, the interior is small, very smokey, hot, and dark. but in a cozy way. Adam, Nate and i slept on a dried goatskin (very dried - practically jerky) covering some straw and twigs. not very forgiving on the back, but i slept okay. personally, i really enjoyed the rustic conditions. felt a lot closer to the earth. though i did have a lot of black stuff in my handkerchief at the end of the stay.

we did all kinds of things while were there. the first two nights we participated in traditional dances. there were no drums, but the dancers would sing, grunt, and make a whole range of other sounds i'd never heard from a human before. that provided the rhythm and melody for the dancing, which consisted of a lot of small shaking and shuffling movements interspersed with men entering the middle of the dance circle to jump straight up in the air. the whole event was very jovial and fun, and they were especially entertained to see us students try it out. i got a lot of congratulatory handshakes for my jumping, though i think it was less because of the height that i jumped and more because of the absolutely ridiculous and completely off-beat "dancing" that i introduced. one of my friends got video. please don't watch it - i look like a jack-in-the-box on a trampoline in an earthquake.

on the first night there, many of the Maasai from the village came to hang out. some of the moran (warriors) slaughtered and roasted a goat right in front of us. it was damn tasty. i employed the services of a translator named Abrahim to talk with an elder man, who i later learned was the traditional leader of the village. we talked for hours about education, culture, science, history, and astrology. we got to comparing the ways that we used the stars to interpret reality and/or predict changes in things. he seemed to know a lot about reading the stars for signs of changes in the weather. i explained a little bit about how astrology works in a Western context, but in pretty simple terms. at this point, the conversation was pretty exciting (for me, at least), and as you may know, i get a teensy bit exuberant and crazy when i'm excited. just a little. so before you knew it, i was down on my knees, drawing a representation of the solar system in the dirt and spinning my fists around to demonstrate orbit and the change between night and day. the propane lamp gave a simply luminous performance as our sun. i also attempted to explain why different stars appear at different times of the year. in fact, i found myself teaching things i didn't even knew that i knew. maybe i was channeling Bill Nye the Science Guy.

he seemed pretty impressed with the model, and he said that he had never understood that the earth revolves around the sun. i guess Copernicus isn't exactly a well-known dude around here. after this jaunty into astrophysics subsided, the conversation was pretty well spent and he had to return to his boma. elated, i spent the remaining hours before sleep sitting around the campfire with other students and some of the warriors.

after class the next day we grouped up and walked the 45-minute trail to our home for the next 3 days. the boma welcomed us warmly. over the course of my time there, i was able to converse with many people, with or without a translator, and learned a lot about their culture. on the first night, one moran i talked to extensively about theology tried to convert me to Christianity. i tried to explain that my set of beliefs did not conflict with his, my own lame attempt at proselytizing religious pluralism, but he insisted that when i return home i need to "find Jesus." talk about reverse globalization. most of the younger Maasai are Lutheran, Catholic, or Baptist, and i didn't meet anyone my own age who seemed particularly interested in alternatives to Christianity. as upsetting as this was at first, i later realized that many Maasai don't perceive Christian religion and their own traditional spirituality to be at odds, so the missionaries may have been less culturally destructive than i initially surmised. as i always say, ...and by always, i mean right now... "you can never stop learning." yup. ain't that the truth. uhhh-huh. okay, bye.

safari njema! lions and buffalo and elephants and rhinos and... no leopards. OH MY!

maybe after reading this you will understand why i haven't posted anything for some time. currently, i'm in Arusha, which is one of the largest cities in Northern Tanzania, situated just at the foot of Mount Meru, Kilimanjaro's little brother. over the course of the last two weeks, i've spent at least half of the time in places with no running water or electricity, just the light of the millions of twinkling stars. literally - it was crazy, i thought i was seeing things but they actually would flicker. it has been so good for me to get out of the city and into some wilderness; i was the happiest i've been since we left.

we started in Arusha with a visit to the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, just to keep things on a light note. it was the first time we were all sobered into silence. we were able to witness part of one trial and then have a long lecture/discussion with the Registrar, an old college buddy of Fatma's, who had some really interesting insights on human rights in the African context and the role of international law and justice in the decolonization process. one aspect of the trial that i found particularly interesting was that it was the first time a government leader had plead guilty and been convicted of genocide. i could go on and on, but i wouldn't be able to do justice (no pun intended) to the eloquence and formality of the trial. their website is http://www.un.org/ictr/ if you want some more detailed information.

in a strange change of scenery, we left the tribunal to head out on a 3-day safari of Lake Manyara, Ngorongoro Crater, and Oldupai Gorge. i saw all manner of wild animals, including hippos, elephants, a rhino, a lion, ostrich, wildebeest, zebras, and two cheetahs laying down not 20 feet from our car. despite the disgust of being such a blatant camera-toting, giddy ecotourist, not to mention the obvious disturbance to the ecosystem we were causing, it was still amazing to actually be there and be that close up. my pictures tell the rest of the story.

one anecdote that tells a little about our campsite: we stayed on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater for two nights at a place called Simba Camp (simba is Swahili for lion). during the daytime, we were left with the illusion of isolation from nature. "sure, there are big toothed, hoofed, horned mammals down there, but we're totally out of their range up here. um... right?" when we noticed the guards that came at night to patrol the periphery with AK-47s, we began to wonder just what was out there that necessitated such a high-firepower presence in our quaint little camp. the first clue that i got was when, on the first night, i shone my headlamp across the field and saw a half-dozen zebras grazing. Maureen, our program fellow, said that she spotted a few hyenas snooping around, probably looking for an easy kill. "okay, cool. i guess we've got a few visitors, but at least they're keeping their distance." so thought naive tanner, before walking out of the outhouse at 9 pm (well past sunset) and having one of the kitchen staff nonchalantly wave his arm to my right and say "mind yourself." i looked over, not knowing what to expect, but certainly not a 13-foot tall (at the shoulder) bull elephant with his trunk hanging inside the water tank, standing within 30 yards from me. just having a little nightcap, i suppose. i almost jumped up and down from the goosebumps and joyful excitement. i quietly retrieved a couple close friends and told them to follow me, and then we watched him wander off into the forest, silent and majestic and totally HUGE. but, the fun didn't end there that night. later on, while sitting around the fire with some of our guides, we heard a somewhat unnervingly loud RRROOOOAARRRR from behind us. yup. lions. sounded pretty damn close too. the guards checked their radios and found out that a male had passed by another camp not too far away, so they estimated 3-5 km. we heard the roar a few more times before i went to bed, and i don't think i've ever heard another creature make any sound that commands so much force and respect. i felt privileged to even hear it.

the last day on safari, we went to Oldupai Gorge, one of the most human archaeological digs in the world. some of the oldest evidence of our ancestors have been found in this serene corner of the Great Rift Valley, the speculated eden of homo sapiens that runs from Mozambique to Ethiopia. sadly, we only stayed for 2 hours, much too short to really feel the place, and we didn't even leave the visitor center at the edge of the gorge. still, i found some quiet time to really BE there, and i could definitely pick up on the holiness of the place. i felt like i was the late arrival to a huge family reunion. there was such a density of wisdom and history there. i can't even begin to describe the sensation. it was hard to leave; i'm going to have to come back someday.

sisal, sisal, sisal - scary! (i.e. Halloween in Africa)

hello from Super Mzungu Tourist Warrior! i'll explain later. seeing as i didn't really cover much recent stuff in my last edition, i'll go over some of the highlights from the beginning of the Northern Tanzania part of the program. the focus for this part was on the agriculturally-based sectors of the Tanzanian economy, specifically the sisal plant. since you obviously already know what sisal is, i'll just jump right into it. just kidding, i'll be painfully descriptive. sisal is a cactus in the agave family that originated in the Yucatan but was imported into Africa by the Germans during the colonial period. unfortunately, it is not used to make tequila (my first question), but the leaves are instead ground up and the sinuous fibers inside are used to make natural rope. they're really strong, too. they gave us a sample, and one clump of 20 strands no bigger than human hairs was almost impossible to break by hand.

the sisal economy in Tanzania was government-run until recently. the price had dropped dramatically in the 60s due to the introduction of synthetic alternatives, but it started gaining popularity again in the early 90s, so the govenerment decided to privatize it in order to take advantage of the market shift. we were hosted by a one Mr. Shamte, a former government official who now runs a large-scale private sisal company with some interesting strategies. first of all, they divided their sisal-growing land into smaller plots, usually around 15 hectares, and then handed the plots over to families on the condition that they grow sisal and sell it to their company. the families are allowed to grow sustenance crops on their land as well. the company itself owns several sisal processing plants, two of which we were able to visit and see close up. the conventional factory was your standard industrial agriculture facility - large biomass goes in, small valued output comes out, and lots of waste is produced. however, they had just completed a new factory using state-of-the-art technology, and it seemed to be moving much more progressively towards their goal of sustainability. in addition to the processing of the fibers for ropes (a mere 2% of the sisal plant), this factory utilized almost the entire plant to create a variety of marketable products like natural chemicals, fertilizer, and methane gas, which was used to run their on-site generator to provide power for all the industrial processes. although they were still in the red because of the high investment costs, the factory is supposed to be completely self-reliant and nearly waste-free, within a few years.

while i was touring the facilities and walking through the fields of sisal, mostly i just wanted to say "bravo!" for the seemingly successful ingenuity and creativity of it all. but, seeing as this program is called Rethinking Globalization, i knew that i should not jump to conclusions. true, the efforts we witnessed were more progressive than the majority of industrialized agricultual cash-crop production schemes, but the entire industry was admittedly and overwhelmingly export-based and proudly capitalist. neoliberal definitions of development were prevalent in many of the conversations i had with employees and farmers, and they seemed to be totally okay with that. from this perspective, it is difficult for me to award this economy my personal seal of sustainability. however, the controversial debate is still open and i don't think i'll ever really be able to take a conclusive side on the issue.

in order to unwind from the rigorous theoretical analysis of this part of the program, we held a pretty spectacular halloween party at our hotel in Moshi. not everyone dressed up, but the common theme of the night was to take someone elses clothes and impersonate them for the evening. in this picture each of the girls dressed up as the one to their right, and Jasmine dressed up as... can you guess? well, perhaps she accentuated my subtle hippie/rasta qualities a little much, but yeah, she was me. last minute as usual, i dressed as SuperMzungu (mzungu is the Swahili equivalent of gringo, or white person). basically i went as the tourist from hell (see picture at top). it was a good time.