License to swat

I am not a very violent person by nature. But this weekend I found a deadly contraption that even I can love: a mosquito racket.

This little invention takes two AA batteries and turns them into a tractor beam of destruction for the little critters that bite me in the night. The package reads:

“Once the mosquito get in touch with the swatter net, it certainly will not be able to escape, it may be either drawn into the inner net or fastened by static force…and it will eventually get...zapped immediately.”

I took that as a license to swat.

So with my radio blaring, I harnessed my inner-Martina and swatted my way from one end of the house to the other. Unfortunately, in the first half hour the only thing I managed to electrocute was myself, and I had to pin mosquitoes against the window in order to get them later in the evening (I surprised even myself by being as inept with a mosquito racket as I am with a tennis racket; something I didn’t know was possible).

So while it may seem a “backhanded” thing to do, brandishing the mosquito racket is a great way to relieve stress, get exercise, prepare for my inevitable doubles match when Martina is next in town, and improving the health of me and my neighbors - perhaps even saving lives.

So maybe I don't have what it takes on the grass court, but the moves I am making around the house are improving health standards and - who knows - maybe even increasing the life expectancy in Kigoma (of people, not mosquitoes). I would like to see Roger Federer make the same case for his game.

Squall line

If you liked the cumulonimbus cloud I posted on September 10, check out the one above from Saturday night. This double-anvil cloud system was likely full of ice crystals at the top - hard to believe given how hot it was that day. There are still so many sights and sounds that I am getting accustomed to here, but I don't think I will ever tire of seeing clouds like these.

Bug photos

I have been learning a lot about bugs here. For example, last night I learned that you shouldn't touch a jumping bug on the forehead with your pen - even lightly - because they might hit you in the face. And you most certainly shouldn't do it again, because then they might hit you in the eye.

Here are the photos of a few of the incredible bugs I have encountered in the past 2.5 months. You can click on the photos for a clearer image (although the images are still compressed for size).

a Maiden Fly resting on a stem

a Maiden Fly close-up

a beetle crawling across my shoe on the beach

a bizarre little zebra-striped bee digging a hole in the sand

a bug a friend found in the water

a dead beetle I discovered near my office

a scorpion on the floor of a friend's house where I had been walking barefoot

an insanely well-camouflaged stick insect on the ground
(don't ask me how I spot these things)

There are more great bug photos to come. Stay tuned.

I need your vote

Sending books and DVDs to NGO workers in Africa isn't cheap, and thanks to recent legislation in the US, international parcels can now only be sent via Priority Mail, which means Mom is spending three to four times as much money sending me packages that I may or may not ever receive.

Help my mother save money. Please sign this petition today:

Petition to Save the USPS International Surface Mail Service for Humanitarian Projects

Doing so will help satiate the voracious appetite of NGO workers for E. Annie Proulx, Karen Blixen and Carrie Bradshaw. Don't just to it for me, do it for all the people I share my books and movies with.

Ivory irony

I was buying toilet paper this past weekend and the woman asked me “Unaomba tembo au waridi?” Did I want the elephant roll or the rose roll? What a silly question, I thought. “The elephant roll!”

Elephants are highly regarded in marketing here. A popular Tanzanian cement company is called “Tembo Cement.” The local bank calls their credit card the “Tembo Card.” And the logo of the Hilltop Hotel features a giant elephant with massive ivory tusks – a creature which seems as likely to walk the hotel's grounds as a woolly mammoth.

The elephant image appears to be successful at marketing a variety of products associated with size and strength. But it is an unfortunate irony that elephants haven't been more successful at marketing the intrinsic value of elephants.

The last elephant near Kigoma town was probably killed at least two decades ago, during a time when they were associated less with toilet paper and more with wrecking gardens and ivory payloads. Today some elephants live in the southern part of the Kigoma region, but only a few remain, and they are getting fewer.

I spoke with a colleague about this over tea this morning. “Burundi is the number one exporter of ivory on the black market,” he told me, “and that’s a problem because they don’t have any elephants left in Burundi. So that means they are coming down to Kigoma, killing our elephants and then hiking back through the forests to Burundi with the tusks – hiking for weeks at a time if they have to. You’d be amazed at how quickly someone can hike with a huge ivory tusk over his shoulder.” It seems the heavier the tusk, the lighter the poacher is on his feet.

I attended (and presented at) a series of meetings last week that discussed the challenges and opportunities for conservation in an area south of Kigoma. I learned that the population of people in that area is still relatively small and disbursed, and that it is possible to help these communities live in harmony with the animals in the region, including elephants. But a proposed road has the potential to change all of that, slicing through the ecosystem and bisecting the migration routes elephants have used for generations.

Are elephants in the region being replaced with Tembo Cement? And if so, will the children of tomorrow know that elephants once roamed where concrete is being poured today?

My colleagues seem to think it is possible to meet the community's needs and to save room for wildlife, such as elephants - but we don't have time to waste. As strong as elephants may seem on a bag of concrete, they are not stronger than homemade shotguns or the will of consumers to collect ivory (on the international scale) or to buy meat (at the local market). So until a shotgun replaces elephants as the marketing symbol for strength, elephants will continue to be driven off their land by the very products their image is helping to promote.

I am not a Tanzanian, but I do think there needs to be a place in Tanzania for elephants beyond cartoon images on cookie boxes. If that is going to happen, a lot of work needs to be done to market elephants for the sake of elephants. And if that doesn't happen, I fear that one day Tanzanian students will sit in a concrete classroom eating elephant-shaped cookies and open their textbook to find these magnificent beings sharing a page with their woolly ancestors.

Language of coffee

If French is the language of love, then Spanish must be the language of coffee. I know this because a woman from Lima was recently in town advising the coffee-production efforts north of Kigoma. I had a chance to meet with her and a couple of her colleagues as they rated the coffees in the region, and they showed me how it's done.

Two of the people in the room were professional “cuppers,” trained in the art of evaluating coffee, similar to sommeliers in the world of wine. They take a spoon of coffee and slurp it loudly and quickly, letting the taste fill every corner of their mouth. They then swirl the coffee around for a few seconds and spit it into a bucket. Then a spoonful from the next cup, and on and on.

It is a rather loud and somewhat disturbing process, with so much slurping and spitting happening you almost forget this is how million-dollar cash-crops get started.

There are different criteria that are used to rate coffee. On the day I was observed the cuppers, they were ranking coffees based on five measures: aroma, body, flavor, acidity and aftertaste. It was incredible to watch three people in the room taste and rank coffees, and compare notes that were miraculously synchronized with each other. "Cup four of coffee eleven had a light essence of cassava to me..." "I said that, too!" were the types of comments you heard as they compared notes. They turned to me, "What did you think of the blend?" I searched for flavors of chocolate or honey or fruit - since they seemed to find fruit flavors in so many of the coffees on the table - but all I could come up with was "it tastes hot."

This is what I learned: first coffee cherries are picked, then the seeds are shucked from their fruit and washed and fermented – the latter step taking somewhere between 18 hours and three days, which I believe helps to finish removing the pulp from the seed. The seeds are then dried and tumbled to remove the outer-shell of the coffee seed, called “parchment.” Seeds are then hand-sorted to ensure no parchment makes it into the roaster, and they are sifted through screens which allow small or fragmented seeds to fall through (apparently they have poorer flavors). What is left is roasted, packaged and shipped to coffee drinkers from Bubango to Bellingham. All that just for a cup of coffee.

The woman from Lima spoke so beautifully about coffee I almost forgot she was speaking in English. Between the "chocolate aromas" and the "essences of honey," I wondered how I had ever ruined a cup of coffee with caramel syrup before. And while it's not yet a language I totally understand, I am willing to take the time to figure it out.

Cumulonimbus over Kibirizi

I was stunned to see a Cumulonimbus cloud towering over Kibirizi Road on my way home from Gibb's yesterday. As I watched, it grew up and up and up, the upwelling pushing it higher and higher and making it puff and bubble like a bag of popcorn.

I ran home to get my camera. Unfortunately, by the time I took this photo, the cloud's top had fallen over and it was being dispersed by the wind.

But the omen was clear. Precipitation is entering the atmosphere again; the wet season is upon us. I can't wait!

Endless blue

I just walked down by the lake to stop by a colleague's office. It has been thundering and sprinkling all day today - about a month early for such weather here - and I was surprised to see smooth, steel-gray clouds stretching all the way out to the horizon, where it met with the smooth, steel-gray lake that stretched all the way back to where I stood. It was a blue so deep and vast that I felt like I might fall into it, or that it might wrap me up like a warm blanket.

The scene was surprising not only because it was a powerful image, but also because so often there are no clouds in the sky at all during the dry season.

I can tell that I am going to really enjoy the wet season ahead.

God's will

I went to a funeral earlier this week. It was the fourth funeral or wake I have attended since I arrived less than two months ago. While waiting for a car to go to the burial, a friend of mine said to me “when God decides it’s your turn to go, there’s really nothing you can do…"

I was speechless. The thing is, this wasn’t the first time I had heard that phrase. It wasn’t even the fourth time. And I was concerned to hear someone so well respected spreading a philosophy I believe may threaten the wellbeing of the people who live here. Let me explain.

The principle seems to be this: God won’t take my life before it’s my time – regardless of whether I wear a seatbelt, or use a mosquito net or practice safe sex – and when God decides it’s my time to go, there is nothing I can do about it.

I understand that it’s not my place to attach value statements to the beliefs of others - who am I to judge? But this particular belief system worries me because I believe it gives people an excuse to live their lives without taking responsibility for how their actions impact their lives and the lives of others. I also have a problem with the notion that God is somehow in the business of taking lives - which seems an odd hobby for someone who's moniker is "the Creator" - but that’s a different matter.

I discussed this with one of my friends while walking into town this afternoon. How can NGOs here help reverse the chief threats to people's wellbeing when highly respected members of those NGOs are perpetuating belief systems that seem to devalue the precautionary measures they are distributing? He completely understood. He gave me a great anecdote. When he goes home, he often has to tell his mother to shut the door to his sister’s bedroom at night, or else the mosquitoes will get her, and she will be at a greater risk of getting malaria - which is too often a death sentence for children under the age of five. “Oh, no,” his mother tells him, “God won’t take her life unless it’s her time.”

There was a similar story when I traveled through Dar when I first arrived in TZ. I was told that Mothers were not using car seats because, they said, if God wanted to take their baby, they wanted it in their arms when it happened. Car seat companies had a hard time convincing mothers that if they used a car seat maybe God wouldn’t take so many of their children. The story went that car seats only started to sell when one manufacturer had them blessed by a Priest.

One of the first times I heard the phrase was when I was talking to another respected community member who grew-up in a local village. “Did you swim there as a kid?” I asked. “Oh, lots,” he said. “Were there crocodiles there then?” “Oh, yes.” “Weren’t you scared?” "Why would I be scared? If a crocodile ate me, it would mean God had decided it was my time to go."

Perhaps that kind of blind faith is comforting when, as one person told me, death is "so simple here." But I am concerned because it seems that this blind faith may actually be part of the problem. A big one. Malaria and HIV/AIDS are killers, and it requires precautions to keep from contracting them. Those precautions - mosquito nets and condoms - are becoming increasingly available, and yet the death toll keeps rising. Over one million people die every year from malaria; that's more than twice the toll a generation ago. So what are we doing wrong?

If we are going to make an impact, I think people need to take responsibility for the choices that they themselves make. Until they do, I fear that all of the money and medication and condoms in the world won’t be able to abate these threats in any sort of long-term way. And for someone like me, who came here hoping that a little work and money could go a long way, it is disheartening to see that one of the chief barriers to our success may be paradigms of the very people who need help.

Live from the front lines

I have known for a while that Kigoma is considered a "hardship post" by the UN. But I learned today that the Peace Corps and similar organizations have actually banned their volunteers from serving in the Kigoma region. They have apparently labeled it a "war zone," which must be a reference to either the high population of refugees in the region, the proximity to the Burundi boarder, or the driving-by-sonar methods of the taxi drivers.

If I were a betting man, I know where I'd put my shillings.