Last week, our friends Andrea and Meg came along with Hunter and I for a day trip out to Umaasaini to see our good friend Peter, the Cali boy we met during President Bush's visit to Arusha in February. Peter, who was a student at Fresno St. during that amazing David Carr season, somehow found himself seven years later smack dab in the middle of B. F. Monduli, a town a ways away from Arusha, in the heart of the Maasai steppe. It is the kind of place that comes to mind when kids who grew up during the Lion King generation think of Africa.

Hakuna matata, what a wonderful phrase

Escaping Arusha for a day can do wonders for your soul. Achana na black ehxaust smoke. Achana na street vendors calling you a Mzungu and trying to peddle their cheap, Made in China, "domestic" tinga tinga paintings. Achana na traffic jams. Achana na the sight of British tourist cankles. Achana na the grind. Now you're in Monduli. Nako2Nako's "Arusha Nightmares" seem like a past life. Your body shifts down a gear -- you don't feel quite as strong of an urge to protect yourself. The air here is so clean; it's almost like you can feel that fact in your pores. The quiet; that's another thing about Umaasaini, and about all the rural areas of Tanzania. That background hum, the one also known as maendeleo, "development," is absent.

You look up. The sky above is blue, incredibly blue, and so vast that it seems to envelop the entire universe. You hear the herds of goats or cattle in search only of something to eat, periodically bringing traffic on the bumpy, rain scarred laterite roads to a halt in the process. Crossing your path are aged yet still fierce looking Maasai wazee slowly walking by in a pack, usually of three or four. They are never too far separated from a separate group of those indefatigable beasts of burden, Maasai women, all circumcised, who balance buckets of water or bundles of firewood on their shaven pates, with earlobes the size of the "O" on an Orioles cap hanging halfway down their necks. This is Monduli. This is Umaasaini, the Maasai lands of northern Tanzania.

The school Peter helped start opened a couple of months ago. It took roughly three years of work to make it happen. To say that he's "given up his life" for this mission is not hyperbole. He doesn't make thousands of dollars living in the States; he makes enough to cover his expenses in Monduli, and that's it. They've got just over 40 students -- all Maasai, all from the surrounding areas -- enrolled in two pre-Form 1 classes that are preparing for the big national exam in September, the one that will determine which of them are ready to move on to secondary school, and which ones will be sent back to their boma's in Umaasaini. So the clock is ticking. And the pressure is on.

Each and every one of the students I met that day understands the stakes. And none of them want to go back to their boma just yet.

They all know what kind of life is waiting for them otherwise.

The only thing Peter said to Hunter when we called him from the car was that anyone wearing a red sweater was not to hear a word of Swahili. Kiingereza TU! Just English. Most of the students there didn't know a word beyond the basic "How ah YOO!"/"I em fine, sank yoo sah" /"Goody mohneeng"/"Geev me my muhn-ay!" package until they enrolled in school last April, and with the clock ticking until the national exams, every bit of English matters.

The dunce cap.

But I just couldn't help it. Some of my emotions simply come out in Swahili now. It doesn't matter who I'm talking to. Anyone who has ever spent a significant amount of time in another language zone knows what I'm talking about. And of course, the first time I slip up -- I tell two dudes "Tuko pamoja" (We're together) when I hear they like Nako2Nako -- Peter just happens to be right behind me, and I become the whipping boy.

No less than two minutes later, though, I hear Mwindaji slip up, and like the kid that tattles on his classmate, I let Peter know that I am now passing the dunce cap over to Hunter.

Music Teacher Mwindaji didn't utter another peep of Swahili the rest of the afternoon.




Knowing how to play guitar and having a passion for songwriting like Hunter does comes in handy on days like these. All I could do during music class was stand outside talking to Peter. Hunter got to write a song with all the students and serenade the two lovely girls sitting against the back wall of the classroom.




"Does anyone know what a rhyme is?"

No one was anywhere close to being confident enough to raise their hand and say yes to Hunter's question. He was trying to spur them on in the last verses of the song.

"Art, start, cart..." he said, trailing off as the blank stares showed no inkling of fading.

"Fart," I chimed in from the back.

I don't think anyone picked up on it.




For two periods, one in each of the two classrooms on site, Music Teacher Mwindaji fine tuned a nice little ditty. After that was lunch: ugali and beans, with a slice of avocado to mix in here and there. Ugali is the Ramen Noodles of Tanzania. It's the standard food for poor people -- but since pretty much everyone is poor, it's more like the hamburger of Tanzania, because everyone eats ugali, without exception. All it is is corn flour stirred in water for like 29 hours until it forms a thick paste, thicker than the thickest oatmeal you've ever had. I sometimes call it the "food version of water." There is no taste to this paste. It's just blah in your mouth. Ugali is the best food ever, though, to shove in their when you're trying to put out a fire from a pilipili that was just too kali. It's a 14 on the pH scale, ugali, with absorbent properties that bring to mind those of a sponge. And it doesn't settle well in your stomach when you feel forced to finish the entire plate out of respect for your hosts. Ugali is the kind of food that makes people who disregard the half hour rule drown.

It was on a stomach full to the brim with this stuff that I jogged out to the kickball field.

I'm just glad I didn't tapika all over the place.




Kickball is the shizit, by the way.




Jeff and Jenny, a Canadian couple that haphazardly found their way into volunteering at Peter's school after their plans to do something similar in Kenya were derailed due to the post election violence in January, brought the game to Umaasaini.

And the kids took to it quite quickly.

"We play football, and volleyball," one of the older boys was telling me shortly after the four of us pulled up in the morning, "and kickball."

"Kickball??" I asked, startled to hear that anyone in the entire country had ever heard of it.

"Yes," he said, smiling. "We like kickball very much."

I knew at that moment that we were going to be able to persuade Peter to let us get a game in.

"We like kickball very much."

"Mnapenda kickball zaidi ya chemistry?" I asked them all after we finished playing.

"NDIYO!!!!!!"

Do we need a translator on that one?

Shades of Big Papi

Of course they like it more than chemistry class, which is what we sacrificed for a couple of innings of "everyone bats." Outs were irrelevant, "runs" were called "points," the concept of tagging up was explained almost as many times as it was not understood, and the final score was a mystery to us all. But it beat the hell out of sigfig's and periodic tables.

Checking the runner.

The highlight of the day was undoubtedly the match up between myself and Mwindaji. It was what everyone had paid to come see. The main event.

I'm Jeter. Hunter is Kim. This is Game 4 of the '01 Series, bottom of the 10th.

I went opposite field, tagging a line drive down the right field "line," (there was a very loose definition of foul territory during the game), right past the photographer.




Even with my right sandal falling off the entire time around the bases, it should come as no surprise to anyone who knows the kind of wheels I've got attached to my body that I scored standing up on an inside the parker.

Hunter, too, had a home run of his own, but neither of our at bats could really compare to that of Mzee's, the Maasai askari at Peter's school.

Maybe it was his pre-game snuff that powered him.

Whatever it was, it was working. Because Mzee (pronounced mm-zay, Swahili for "old man") absolutely crushed that soccer ball.

This, is globalization.

If there was a fence, the ball would have gone over it.

Terrible relay. Who taught these kids how to play kickball, a couple of Canadians or something?

With ease.

Not to be outdone, other faculty members tried to get in on the game.

Like the carnival scene from "The Natural."

But none were as powerful as Mzee.

Not even Meg, who gave it her all.






Or Hunter, who was a wall.




But I don't think anyone really cared about the final score. Not on a day like this one, not when they were all just happy to be getting out of chemistry, loving life under African skies.




And thankful for the opportunity that they've been given as the first crop of students ever to go to their small little school out in Umaasaini.

Even if they haven't learned the concept of tagging up.