The bus to Idodi

Last weekend Anette and I traveled to Idodi, 90km northwest of Iringa and 20km outside Ruaha National Park, where Anette helped facilitate a head teacher’s meeting for Friends of Ruaha Society at Idodi Secondary School. In a Land Rover the trip takes about an hour and a half, but I went by the only public bus that serves the villages near Ruaha and it took me five hours.

It was the worst bus I’ve yet been on in Africa – listing heavily to one side, holes rusted in the floor to give you a good view of the road beneath your feet, every window shattered like broken ice on a shallow pond. The window in my row of seats was half knocked out, the remaining glass turned inwards and barely hanging on, threatening to fall on and slice the next passenger. Large pieces of glass were scattered all over the floor of the bus, which had not been cleaned out in years.

First we waited at the bus station for a half an hour as the engine roared and smoked and I watched the rain slant through my broken window and soak the seat next to me. Then we started moving, but it was only to drive 20 meters back into town to a gas station, where it took us a half hour to fill up our 100-liter tank. As we waited, I watched a young man fill an old container with petrol and tie it fastidiously to the frame of his bicycle, and I wondered what would happen if he were to fall off his bike.

Finally the tank was full and off we drove, but alas, it was back the 20 meters we had just driven to stop for more passengers to cram themselves in like sardines. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud as I realized that after an hour we had gone in a 40-meter circle and were no closer to our destination. But such is African transport, and I was happy to be going out to Idodi.

The road is paved until about 15km outside of Iringa, and then it gets rocky and sandy, which is the rainy season means rocky and muddy. After two hours of being bounced around I was positive I couldn’t hold my bladder in such conditions any longer, and I prayed that we would get stuck so I would have a chance to get out and pee. My prayers were answered, for soon thereafter we heard a CLUNK and felt the whole bus grind to a halt. Sure enough, we were stuck in the mud and I was overjoyed. I navigated my way down the aisle over 50kg bags of maize flour (used to make the Tanzanian staple ugali) and plastic bags bursting with tomatoes and onions sold by side of the road vendors, and I leapt into the bush to relieve myself.

The driver and his crew were obviously prepared for such delays because they immediately broke out the shovels and began digging away to level the mud underneath the giant bald tires of the bus. After about ten minutes half the passengers got behind the bus and began pushing as the driver revved the engine. Slowly the bus lurched over the humps of mud and with the passengers jogging alongside we made it to drier ground.

At another one of our unplanned stops I saw two hands grab onto a window from the outside, and then watched as a man hoisted himself onto the roof of the bus. A bicycle was then lifted up to him and we took off down the road. I forgot all about him until about fifteen minutes later when the emergency hatch opened and suddenly two legs were dangling above my head - the guy jumped down from the roof, through the hatch and into the bus at speed!

My only regret is that I did not have our camera with me, so I will have to keep the images of rainy, muddy Iringa as seen through a jagged windowpane in my head until our next bus adventure. For those who know Spanish, this picture of another bus will provide some laughs - the "super ugly" express!

A Child Soldier in Sierra Leone

Upon returning from Idodi yesterday I read the last two chapters in A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah, published just last year. It is one of the most gripping, horrifying accounts of war I’ve ever read, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about Africa. I shudder to think that I was barely aware of situations like Sierra Leone and Rwanda when I was in high school; people my age trying to survive in those countries were exposed to the absolute worst of human nature, while I was afforded the privilege of a safe suburban upbringing.

Is it the accident of birth, as my grandmother used to say, that determines who experiences what in this world? To a certain degree I believe this to be true, which is why it is so important to travel – in books, on foot, in movies, or by dalla-dalla – and get a sense of what other people’s lives are like. Here are some other books I’ve read this year that have given me insights into the African experience:

When Victims Become Killers (Rwanda) – Mahmood Mamdani
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (historical) – Walter Rodney
Into Africa (Livingstone & Stanley) – Martin Dugard
The Zanzibar Chest (Ethiopia, Somalia, etc.) – Aidan Hartley
The Africa House (Zambia) – Christina Lamb
Dark Star Safari (Cairo to Cape Town) – Paul Theroux

CAC Swimming Champs '08

The Capital Athletic Conference (MD, DC, VA, PA) Swimming Championships finished up last weekend, hosted by my alma mater St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Six years ago, when I was a student and swimmer there, we couldn’t have hosted the event because we had just one 25-yard pool. Now there’s a state-of-the-art natatorium and SMCM have become annual hosts. Our women did well, the men are improving, and no one in the CAC this year beat my times from 2002: 59.29 in the 100 breast and 2:10.07 in the 200 breast. One year I’ll make it back for Alumni Day to see the new pool and see if I can still hang with any of the current swimmers.

Citizen Journalism: uandishi wa kiraia

Last Wednesday my senior classes were honored to have Maggid Mjengwa, Tanzanian journalist and blogger extraordinaire, talk to us about citizen journalism. He took this picture, and here's what he posted in Kiswahili on his blog about the visit:

Leo nilipata bahati ya kualikwa Iringa International School kuongea na wanafunzi wa sekondari juu ya dhana uandishi wa kiraia (Citizen Journalism). Natumia fursa hii kuwashukuru wanafunzi hao kwa kuniuliza maswali mengi na kushiriki kikamilifu katika mazungumzo yetu. Wengi wa vijana hao pichani wana blog zao.

Rough translation: Today I had the opportunity to visit IIS and talk to the senior students about citizen journalism. I would like to thank the students for asking many questions and participating actively in our talk. Many of these youths have their own blogs.

You can visit my students' blogs, which they created in our IT class, by going to http://globalfriendszone.blogspot.com
From this student's site, there are links to all the other students.

Ole Einar Bjørndalen

I know it's quite a leap from Kenyan violence and sustainable development to the relatively esoteric sport of biathlon (skiskyting) but if this blog is to be a reflection of my life and interests, then this post is long overdue. I moved to Norway in January 2004 to live with Anette and was immediately drawn into the world of biathlon. I quickly realized that Ole Einar was one of those athletes at the absolute pinnacle of his sport - so good his every move seems effortless, head and shoulders above the rest of the competition. This was also the time that I learned to cross-country ski (at the age of 24!!) and as my love of zooming through the snow-blanketed Norwegian forests grew, so did my love and respect for the sport of biathlon.

Four years later I'm as mad about biathlon as I was about baseball as a kid growing up in Maryland. Although I'm living in Tanzania and don't have a TV right now, I still managed to check the results of the recent IBU Biathlon World Championships online. Ole took gold in the pursuit, but was surprised by his 22-year old teammate Egil Hegle Svendsen in the sprint and the mass start. It was an auspicous week for the future of Norwegian biathlon, and should make for an exciting '08-'09 season leading up to the next Winter Olympics in Vancouver in 2010.

As I was digesting the news of Svendsen's improbable victories over his mentor, I realized why baithlon has smitten me the way it has - it's so much like swimming! For fifteen years I trained alone in pools all over the East Coast and lived for those few minutes of all-out competition at championship events. Although my teammates are lifelong friends and we shared the unique camaraderie of training and competing together, swimming is ultimately not team sport, it's intensely personal. There's no comparison to football, baseball, basketball, etc. So when I watch Bjørndalen gliding through the forest, then stopping alone to shoot down his targets before his competitors arrive, I get flashbacks of the 200 breast, my pull-outs, my turns, my strokes per length, and I am transported in that way that only sports can trasport a person - to the sublime!

So here's to Biathlon, Norway, Swimming, and the endless pursuit of self-improvement. It took me 15 years to break a minute in the 100 breast, and Ole Einar's got his eyes on gold in Vancouver.

The keys to sustainable development

Relationships and time, according to Andy Hart, are the two essential ingredients in a successful development project. So we learned today on our Geography class trip to Ismani village, located half an hour outside of Iringa on the tooth-rattling road to Dodoma. Andy, a British veterinarian and CMS missionary whose wife started Neema Crafts, took five students and me to see his development projects in the village, which include chicken vaccinations, cattle dip tanks, solar water disinfection, solar panel distribution, and most recently, bat farming.

Chicken vaccination is always the first project Andy implements in a new village. The average family in rural Tanzania usually keeps at least six or seven chickens, but is rarely able to increase that number because 60% of the chickens die every year from Newcastle disease (kideri in Kiswahili). For 2,800 Tsh, or about $2, Andy buys a vial of vaccine in Iringa and takes it to a village. There, he trains a local team to be vaccinators and community organizers. The team goes around to all the houses in the village and tells the families to keep their chickens inside that night; the next morning, the team comes to each house to catch and vaccinate the chickens.

Catching chickens, as anyone who grew up on a farm will know, involves diving behind chairs, under beds, and even climbing into cupboards. Once all the chickens have been vaccinated in this manner, the team has not only performed an invaluable veterinary service to the chickens, but they have (unbeknownst to the families) been able to assess the poverty level of each family in the village by looking for radios, lamps, water filters, and other possessions that indicate standard of living. If something troublesome catches their eye, they simply ask the family for a cup of tea, and then sit down to talk about it.

Once Andy chased a chicken into a grain silo and found a seven-year old child lying in the dark in a straw basket. The boy was born disabled so the family hid him away - common practice in a country with no social services and massive prejudice against disabled people. The neighbors didn’t even know the boy existed. Now, after two months of physical therapy, the boy is able to walk and will hopefully begin school soon. Contrast this with the highly paid mzungu who drives up in a shiny Land Rover to ask the families why they are so poor. Get it? Relationships. Catching chickens is everyday business, and villagers helping vaccinate chickens talk more honestly with each other than they ever would with an outsider with zero knowledge of their community.

The results of the vaccination program are astounding; many families see their chicken population quintuple within four to six months. Once these families have thirty or forty chickens running about the shamba, their children’s protein intake increases, which in turn improves their performance in school. Some families are inspired to entrepreneurialism, selling chickens for pigs, and pigs for cell phones and tin roofs that won’t leak during the rainy season.

Because of its quick, concrete results, the chicken vaccination program is the perfect way to gain villagers’ trust, and more importantly, for them to develop a new outlook on their own possibilities. With more money, a more comfortable home, and healthier children, villagers are much more inclined to listen to the next project Andy proposes, like cattle dip tanks, for example.

Cattle Dip Tanks

When Andy first started working in Ismani five years ago, the cattle dip tank that served the surrounding villages was falling apart. When the villagers came to him and asked how they could get a new one, he invited all the cattlemen to a meeting. Sixty four cattlemen showed up, and instead of being given a handout, Andy told them to go back to their villages and see if they could rustle up the materials – sand, bricks, wood, tin – to revitalize the dip tank. His only contribution was a few bags of cement from town. Three weeks later, the new dip tank was servicing 500 head of cattle per morning.

Now, the surrounding villages only lose three head of cattle per year, compared to 105 per year before the tank was renovated. Furthermore, the tank is making a handsome profit (about 200,000 Tsh per year) for the council of cattlemen elected by their peers to oversee it, and they are planning use this money to protect the spring from which everyone in the area gets their drinking water. My students and I crouched down at the spring, which is nothing more than a faint trickle, and tried to scoop up the water with our hands – no luck.

Andy explained to us that the cattle arrive first in the morning, drinking, urinating and defecating in the water, and then the villagers come to fill up their water jugs by using their hands or small spoons. One can imagine the extra hours of work this entails, not to mention the deadly diseases passed from home to home by this water. The council’s plan is to create three concrete tanks that will fill up overnight, so that the cattle can’t get to the spring in the morning and the people can simply turn the tap and fill their jugs in a matter of minutes.

The Tanzanian government, interestingly, has also launched a campaign to renovate dip tanks, but in contrast, they use 10 million Tsh - per tank. As much of that money goes to outside contractors and corrupt officials, I doubt there is any money for the local to reinvest in frivolities like protecting their drinking water.

SODIS: Solar Disinfection of Water

SODIS solar disinfection of water is perhaps the cheapest and easiest to implement of all Andy’s projects: fill a bottle with water, leave it in the sunshine for a few hours, the water heats up, the parasites die.

I’ll get to the specifics in a bit, because it’s a bit more complicated than this, but consider the fact that most African villagers use charcoal (which means they cut down all the trees in their shamba) to make their water safe for drinking. Now consider that more women and children die in Africa each year from smoke than from malaria. No, I don’t mean cigarette smoke (thankfully, this is one category in which Africans are world leaders) but smoke from cooking fires, which is inhaled at close range by women and children on a daily basis. One-week old babies, wrapped tightly against mother’s back as she stirs the evening meal, are powerless to stop the smoke from entering and destroying their tiny lungs. Respiratory systems are severely damaged, leading to an overall reduction in immune system efficiency and an ultimate death from flu or pneumonia.

Can these deaths really be prevented just by putting bottles out in the sun? Andy believes so, and so do the thousands of villagers in the Iringa region who he has helped to begin purifying their water by using SODIS technology. Ideally, the bottle should be between 1 and 2 liters in capacity, and should be placed on a strip of corrugated metal to help the water heat up faster and more thoroughly. This allows the water to reach 30 degress C, at which point all harmful parasites die. Two hours of direct, hot sunshine will do the trick, but six is better.

But where can the villagers get corrugated metal and plastic bottles? Half the mud huts in these villages are roofed with corrugated metal, so there are always scraps lying around, and there just so happens to be a spring water-bottling factory (Maji Afrika) not 30km outside Iringa. These bottles are usually chucked from bus windows (like the blue plastic bags that blight the gorgeous African landscape) or into burn piles where they leach their poisonous chemicals into the atmosphere one way or another. So instead of degrading the environment with these bottles, we can actually beautify the land and save people’s lives while we’re at it.

Andy has introduced this concept to dozens of local schools, ensuring that each child places a full bottle of water on the roof of the classroom in the morning, so that when school ends he or she can take a bottle of clean water home for the night. Anette and I have been using SODIS here at home in Iringa for several months now, and we would like to help students at all 23 of FORS’ schools in Idodi and Pawaga to do the same thing.

Our Kenyan Neighbors

What to say about our neighbors, Kenya? The historical reason for the violence is the same as why most of the rest of Africa is drowning: colonialism and slavery. Country lines were drawn without regard to African interests, and ethnic groups were often forced by colonialists to occupy different spheres in the economy and society, thereby exacerbating inter-tribe rivalries. These truths are fresh in my mind after finishing "How Europe Underdevloped Africa" by Walter Rodney (thanks JQ).

Some editoralists in the local papers have said that Tanzanians (semi-jokingly) view the violence as proof that Kenyans are somehow inferior to Tanzanians, but if anyone entertained such thoughts in the first days after the election, my sense is that now everyone here is deeply concerned and empathetic. What has happened is horrific, but it is important to realize that it is not unthinkable. Yes, many are shocked that Kenya, bastion of African stability, is now devouring itself, but we should never think that such things are beyond the realm of possibility. Even Rwanda, where ordinary people carried out much of the killing, was not unthinkable. There are concrete causes - many of them rooted in Western oppression and indifference - to these periodic African, Latin American and Asian hemmorhages, and it is our responsibility as global citizens to work to reverse the conditions that produce such violence.

Many believe all it will to take to incite another Rwanda is for a group of young men with machetes to descend upon one of the camps where the quarter million Kikuyus are now living. Seeing as how the photo-op meeting with Annan hasn't helped matters in the slightest, and two ODM politicians have been murdered in the past two days, this is not an unrealistic scenario.

Our Tanzanian friends have mixed feelings about whether such violence could happen here - some say the country will implode in 5 to 10 years due to growing socioeconomic injustice, others say that because no ethnic group is more than 13% of the population, and everyone identifies through Swahili as Tanzanian, it won't happen. But Kenya is now the 4th of the 5 East African countries to be consumed by violence in the past twenty years - is TZ really so different?

I'm not sure what immediate action we can take to prevent the deterioration of the situation in Kenya, but I believe it involves a commitment to working together that most politicians the world over are sorely lacking. Why, then, must we wait around reading headlines about murder while our leaders refuse to act? In the Western world, I believe we're all too comfortable - until the violence reaches our doorstep, we prefer to sit on the couch (myself included - why didn't I do everything in my power to stop Bush from taking power in 2000?). Why, instead of going to war with Iraq, didn't the US government drop everything and send our resources to Darfur, or even New Orleans for that matter? Is it so hard to organize people on a mass level to produce positive change?

As our Peace Studies teacher Colman McCarthy would say, it's up to our generation to change things, and I am still hopeful that we can. ICOs (Impoverished Cesspools of Oppression - don't ever let yourself use the euphemism 'developing country') all over the world will continue to suffer spasms of post-colonial violence, but as our generation and our students' come into power, let's work together to ensure that the positive forces of globalization prevail, i.e., decreased racism, increased care for our brothers, sisters and our Mother Earth, and more social entrepreneurialism of the kind that can give an African family the start-up money it needs with the click of a mouse in Berkeley or Berlin. On that note, check out this website:

friendsofruaha.org

Anette just starting working there and I'm helping out on weekends, trying to bring solar disinfected water, SODIS, and solar panel technology to the villages around Ruaha National Park. Gotta start somewhere, and in my experience, that means small, personal and meaningful.

Ruaha National Park

Last weekend we went on our first safari, and since neither words nor pictures can justly capture the experience, I took about an hour’s worth of video, which I’m editing down to 15 minutes or so. We went with Anette’s best friend from Haugesund, who is about to begin her sixth and final year of medical studies in Szcecin, Poland. Anette and I visited her in her first year there, so it’s only fitting that as we continue our travels, our path intertwines with the paths of those we love.
Another example: Summer of 2005 (as a new teacher) I went to Norway, then started my Master’s program at GMU, then visited Jake in The Gambia (one of the first posts on this blog). Summer 2007 I went to Norway, then Jake (as an RPCV turned teacher) and I took classes together at GMU, then we both went to Africa. Cosmic circles. I wrote a song about them at Walden Pond in the summer of 2002 when Jake and I lived in Boston; I’ve since forgotten the chords and lost the words, but the circles spread ever outwards, as Emerson wrote in one of my favorite essays – Circles (1841).
Now then, our safari. We woke up at the crack of dawn and were picked up by our driver, Esau, in his open-roofed land rover. Ruaha National Park is about 110 kilometers to the northwest of Iringa; 20 km of road are paved, the rest is sand and rocks (although still much better than most roads in The Gambia). We drove for three hours past villages of dilapidated mud and brick houses with falling-in grass roofs, past villagers pushing huge bundles of charcoal, firewood, or vegetables on their bikes towards the local markets, past fields of fruit trees, crops kept green by irrigation that has caused the Great Ruaha River to dry up in recent years, and yellow fields scorched by the sun and starved of rain. We ran over a Puff Adder on the road – they’re slow moving and often get hit by vehicles. We passed several overloaded buses filled with people (some sitting on the roof) and wares, and Esau confirmed what we’ve already seen on the roadways here – that these buses are dangerously topsy-turvy, and often flip over.
Upon entering Ruaha, we immediately saw a troop of at least twenty yellow baboons running over the rocks of a river pool, birds of all kinds and shapes (fish eagles, storks, etc.) on the banks of the river and in the trees, and hippos and crocodiles lazing in the water. We checked into our banda, prepared our bags and packed lunches and headed off on our first game drive full of excitement and wonder. Not five minutes away from camp Esau spotted a lion resting in the shade of a Baobab tree, and as he swung the land rover up over a rut to get a closer look - BANG! - the axle smashed into the ground, the engine began to roar, and the wheels spun uselessly. All this did not succeed in waking the lion, but it quickly became clear that we had lost our four-wheel drive. Fortunately we were able to drive to a workshop, where a clever fundi fixed the car in about three hours, during which time Anette, Klaudi and I sat on the balcony of our banda and watched the procession of wildlife come down to the river to drink – giraffe, buffalo, zebra, kudu, warthog, impala, etc. It was just as good as a game drive, but we were glad when Esau came back with the car.
I won’t go into the details of our day (that’s what the video is for) but I will say that luck smiled upon us, for we saw three cheetahs (rare and seldom seen in Ruaha) AND a leopard high up in a Baobab tree. Esau was ecstatic, because he has very rarely seen both of these animals in the same day in his twenty years of guiding in Ruaha. An enormous male elephant came within three feet of our car, and we caught an alpha male lion in the act - of mating, that is – and we caught it on video. The big game was indeed extraordinary, but as a beginning birder I was especially fascinated by the hornbills, rollers, and bee-eaters. The feeling of standing up in the land rover and holding on tightly to the metal bars while Esau sped along the dusty road to get us back to the banda before sunset, with the big African sun setting red over the acacias and the plains, just like in the logo for all the PBS Nature shows that I watched growing up, was quite unforgettable. A bit like flying, a bit like surfing, a bit like NOLS Alaska and the AT, and a whole lot like Heaven on Earth. Oh yeah, and lions woke us up at 5am running around outside our banda, making the resident hippo nervous and roaring so loudly that we thought they were going to jump through the thin screen and into our banda at any moment!

Iringa ni safi kabisa

So I tried to upload our first video about Iringa onto the blog, but East African internet couldn't seem to handle it. Hey, I'm not complaining - the fact we have internet at all is more than I expected. I haven't posted much yet becuase most of my thoughts are still in their preliminary stages. We're trying to figure out this new language, new culture, new rules, new people, and we're having a blast. Going on our first safari this weekend - maybe I can post some pics of lions after that.

The Operator

A slightly revised, faster, more eclectic version of what we played in high school...


Just as I prioritized flamenco over school this spring in Berkeley, this weekend I prioritized Meridian 2007 over grad school. Here is another one of our "classics" from twelve years ago - maximum respect to Eric once again for his incredible studio skills as a drummer, bassist, beatbox artist, and professional producer. The three of us played from midnight until 3am on Saturday, then from 10pm until 1am last night, and we had way too much fun. Then Jake and I got up early this morning to go to grad skool, where I gave yet another presentation. Finally going to finish the Master's on Friday - ole!! Always gotta make time for music, though. Thanks for staying tuned, y'all, I'll be posting from Tanzania soon...

The Funkmaster J.I.S. and his Big Red Wrench

This one's a little sloppy, but we were really tired last night...


OJO!!! ALL THESE SONGS WILL SOUND BETTER IF YOU HAVE GOOD SPEAKERS!!!! (my computer speakers are terrible).
Check out the new rhymes at the end of the song - but don't be alarmed when I talk about the developing world. All I'm trying to say is that it's a euphemism that makes it okay for us to go on eating our dinner in front of the TV and not do anything about the situation. Read my second-ever post on this blog (from 2005) if you want to learn more, and see pics of Ali and Baboukar.

Original Meridian Pics from '95-'96

Just got back from twelve days in Norway: swimming and fishing in the fjords, and singing country songs with Anette (video to come???). Anyway, now I've started grad skool again (just three weeks to go) so I'll be too busy to post regularly, but in the meantime, here are some old pics of Jake and me and our band. Listen to Da Spanish Song, look at the pics, and that's pretty much what we were like back in high school!!

El arte de MFST

So my folks have a really cool printer/scanner/copier that can take old photos and scan them directly to the computer. I've been playing around with it, and was able to get my old graff pics from SMCM onto the link on this blog. This photo is just a sample - check the link on the right hand column.

Da Spanish Song

Meridian 2007



Escucho mucho porque esta es
La canción con dos frijoles
Negros y también sabrosos
Bueno para nosotros si comment tallez vous

Yo no puedo caminar en el agua
Porque la cocina está muy blanca
Bananas y papel, siempre soy fiel
A mi guitarra y mis lagrimas can’t you tell?

Quiero decirte que yo te quiero
Que el amor es eterno en el cielo
En la tierra vivimos muy bien
Los sueños tragicos vil du vaere min venn?

Espero que a ustedes les gustó mi canción
Ahorita tengo que ir para romper mi corazón
Pero no se pongan tristes - todavía viviré
En los ritmos del tambor de la Gran Madre

OK, this is absolutely too much technology in one day for a Luddite like me. That being said, I'm embracing it wholeheartedly because it's at the core of my summer project - recording the classic songs from my high school band, Meridian. Today I went over to the Thomsen house and recorded this song with Eric, who's a boss when it comes to studio work. Not only is he an amazing drummer and musician, but he's transformed the basement from the dungeon it was when we practiced there ten years ago into a professional-grade studio, complete with shag carpet! We recorded this in three takes using Pro Tools, which we then transferred into ITunes, and then burned to a CD, and finally posted to the blog. I have to say I'm rather proud of myself, but really it seems that anyone can create and publish their own art because technology is making it so easy.

Clownin' in the Yay

It's my last night in Cali
my time is done
I love the Bay
but this ain't where I'm from

I play the guitar
I beat the drum
People call me mister
but I been known to go dumb

Got my stunna shades on
I'm a push you all in
Be at the casino all night
cuz I'm here to win

Just got a suitcase on Shattuck
Throw some deez on it

I be rollin' in Berzerkeley
with my punked out hair
I ain't no vegan
and I just don't care

Gonna move to Tanzania
where they call me mzungu
you don't know about me
cuz you don't come from where I do -

The suburbs
yeah I'm stacked like that
it don't matter
cuz I'm black like that

Baboukar Sallah
Gambian Boss
I pray to Allah
when I'm at a loss

Yo I'll come to your block
But I'm a stay in my car
and keep my doors locked

Una noche flamenca

So I think I got my flamenco name tonight - obviously enough, it's Alejandro Cerca. One of my fellow guitar enthusiasts hosted a night that began with accompaniment for Roberto Zamora, a well-known Bay Area singer whose story you can read at
SF Flamenco. The six of us played for two hours, and then some more of our friends from the local dance classes came over for tapas caseras. David Gutierrez, my guitar teacher of the past six months, gifted me with a tape (recorded from an LP) of La Familia Montoya from 1970 and Pepe Habichuela from 1983, which we listened to in awe. The roads that led each of us to flamenco are very different, but our love for the music and our desire to continue learning connect us as we strive to improve our technique and style.

Many of us told stories about Spain, and it's amazing to me to hear how I describe my life in Sevilla to other people. It sounds like a dream, but it was only four years ago that I left. What a romantic year it was! The wonderful thing about the flamenco community is how musical and cultural knowledge is passed on through personal relationships, and how careers and adventures overlap. Most of the people sitting around the table tonight were thirty years my elder, and although Sevilla has changed a great deal since Franco's death, the bridges and cobblestones are still the same, and many of the flamenco clubs and peñas have endured. And so we have common points of reference as we share stories and pieces of music with each other. A fascinating example of this is that I played David a couple of Bulerias falsetas that I learned from Juan in Sevilla, and David recognized the "aire" because he had taught another student who also studied with Juan at Taller Flamenco. Juan's compositions are that distinctive, and David's ears are that discerning. Que mundo mas pequeño, no?

Bye Bye Berkeley High

Wow. One day left as a public school teacher in these Disunited States of America. Disenchanted with the system though I am, my idelaism is still intact, and more importantly, my understanding that teaching is all about the personal relationships. Case in point, two of my students gifted me with pairs of socks today - an amusing homage to my collection of crazy and colorful calcetines, which my students always love to comment on and laugh about. We ended our last class with this group photo. The picture quality isn't that great because I took it with the camera on my phone (2007 - what a trip!!) but hopefully one of my students will send pics or even videos of our lasy days together. I'm going to try to upgrade my personal use of technology with a videocamera and some type of music recorder so I can capture all the brilliance of Taznania and hopefully start sharing some of it on the blog. Gotta finish the master's this summer, first, though. I'll keep trying to write regularly, though - thanks for reading, y'all.

Adios a Berkeley

So my two years here are fast coming to a close. A week from today I'll be on a plane back to DC, and in seven weeks - God willing and the creek don't rise - Anette and I will be together in Tanzania. My CAS colleagues, who are also some of my closest friends out here, had a BBQ for me up in Tilden Park yesterday. It was perfect California day, 75 and sunny, and we had an array of platos sabrosos, including Oliver's parrilla mexicana con carne asada, cebollas y tortillas, Leah's cilantro mint cole slaw and grilled eggplant and zucchini, and Elisabeth's authentic Norwegian "kransekake." Leah also gifted me with a half a dozen water filters that proved their mettle on the CAS Tanzania trip last summer. The Halpern, Martinez and Crawford clans brought their kids, who delighted in throwing the frisbee into the poison oak again and again. Bill showed up on his bike in the late afternoon, having already ridden 100 miles up Mt. Diablo and back (he biked across the country before becoming a teacher). We lingered until the last slanting rays of sun lit up the golden hills and transformed the bark of the majestic redwoods to their true color.