Today I was walking down Bowery, just minding my own business, when a "street" kinda guy passed me and said very kindly "Hey nice hat, bitch." To which I replied "Thank you." To which he yelled back "Well you're welcome, and have a nice day."
And that is why I live in New York City.
What I want to point out first is how young this girl is. Young enough to suck her thumb for ten straight minutes and not respond to a word this strange Mzungu was saying to her, that I know for sure. But as for her age? Most Wabongo kids I ask don’t even know their own birthdays, let alone birth years.
“Sita!”
“What’d he say?”
“He said he was six.”
“That kid is six?? How 'bout two?”
“Una miaka mingapi tena?” I ask again, giving Joe Little Kid Tanzanian another chance.
“
“Apparently he just turned seven. He has no idea.”
I’ve had interchanges like that more times than ten.
I guess it’s like this in most extremely poor countries recovering from two decades of debilitating socialist economic policies, but every Mbongo mdogo is a potential Danny Almonte.
"I'm 12."
Until you see a legit birth certificate with your own eyes, you can never be 100 percent sure. But as for the little girl sucking her thumb? Esther … or Glory …. ? I’m not at home right now so I don’t have her application in front of me, but I think that both are about four.
Four-year-olds Esther and Glory are going to boarding school.
No wonder she was sucking her thumb! I remember 10-year-old Mzungu kids being homesick to the point of tears at summer camp, and that was only three weeks long. If I was a four-year-old about to be dropped off at Usa, away from everything that had provided me with all formative experiences up to that point, together with four other kids from my orphanage, but still feeling pretty alone, I’d be nervous/scared/sad/bewildered/paranoid, and every other synonym for “freaked out” that exists in the English language, too.
In all the focus on numbers, tests, transport, applications, school supplies, tuition payments and diplomacy, I forgot a basic fact of life: four-year-olds are really young. In fact, they’re pretty much babies. And I hold difference between the East African scale of social maturity and our own to blame.
Simply put: people grow up fast here. And not even in the, “I’m European, I can drink in parks and smoke joints when I’m 15, I hate George Bush, I’m so mature, and they even show nipples on basic television channels,” sense. I mean almost as soon as they can hold a bucket, they’re shaking hands with the harsh reality of poverty, wearing hole-riddled garments that used to be my own clothes, brand new when I was their age.
Baraka, for example.
He’s the third in a line of four brothers who Mwindaji and I have creatively coined “The Brothers.”
Baraka is chilling in this photo; he’s done his job. But his little bro Yohanas, No. 4 in The Brothers, is not chilling. See him down there in the bottom left corner of the shot? He’s having a hard time carrying up the hill his bundle of kuni, necessary for the daily cooking that, in villages such as mine, almost invariably takes place over an open flame in an outdoor jikoni. Baraka crushed his task, probably because he’s six now, a real man. Yohanas is finding the crazy steep climb difficult to accomplish, though. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he’s got to do it while simultaneously balancing a huge bundle of firewood on his head. Or perhaps it’s because I’m forgetting that he’s just five.
Other than that, though, Tanzanian kids – (the ones who are getting enough to eat, at least) -- have amazing lives.
They CHILL.
Picture a world where you're ten years old again. In this world, it doesn't even matter what kind of grades you get at school, since regardless of whether or not you have an F average or a 4.0, you're advancing to the next grade (at a public school, because the government has no money thanks to rampant corruption; at a private school, I have no idea why. *Usa River is an exception, which was one of the most attractive things about the place. A 55 average is mandatory to pass. Still a pretty sweet life for a ten-year-old kid). Hell, if you don't want to go to school, you just don't. Tons of your peers in this world openly choose chilling in lieu of literacy.
Picture a world where you can roam the paths of your village like you're a kid patrolling the streets of your suburb in Baby Boomer America, coming home only when chores are to be done.
Picture a world where you don't have to shower but once or twice a week.
A world where, thanks to a lopsided demographic situation, you've got 50 percent of the population at your disposal for choosing playmates.
Pretty sweet world, huh? Pretty much the only thing you have to do is go to church on Sunday, or to the mosque on religious holidays. I had to do that myself my entire Hell-fearing Catholic childhood, and I lived.
We really don’t even need roosters as alarm clocks in Patandi, thanks to Baba Juma’s day care center next door. Meru Peak Day Care Center is my alarm clock.
Instead of a ring, a ding, or even a guitar-playing rooster yelling, “Heeeeey, yeeeaaaahhhhh, everybody wake up, it’s time to dance with meeeee!!” ,
... I get woken up by the screams, laughs and flash flood-sudden cries of Patandi’s pre-K’ers as they swing on tires and fly down a slide that is dangerously steep.
Graduation Day, Meru Peak, December 2007
But kids can be kids and still remain useful. Everything aside for alcoholic old men has a use of some kind here, young human beings being no exception. In that respect, there's no difference between a child and some empty paint tins (flower pots), or a heap of plastic bags (roll them together, fasten with a few rubber bands, and you've got yourself a soccer ball for the week), or some worn out tires (the sole provider of footwear for the local Maasai population). Children get the words "collecting firewood and whatever else adults feel like making them do" inside of their parentheses.
There are 34 of them in our scholarship program for the start of the 2008 school year. That puts the total figure of kids whose names I need to know, (as one of the people responsible for the welfare), at well above 60. All the original gangstas, all but two still enrolled at FK, I’ve had down pat for months now. But I also see them every day. I won’t have the luxury of such repetition with this new crop, since I don’t teach at Usa. Oy.
Well at least I will remember one name: Dickluck. What a name!
Tanzanians are all about using English nouns of virtue for their childrens’ names (see: Prosper, Goodluck, “Jifty” [Gift], Happiness, Glory, Angel), but I’d never heard Dickluck until I met the one and only. The first time I saw it written on our list, I just pumped my fist and nodded.
“Yes.”
I admit it: I can't even remember which one he is! Luckily, I snapped a photo of his box.
And it got better – turns out there was a Dickson of the same last name. Dickluck and Dickson are brothers. I don’t even want to know what a potential sister might be named.
In my defense with the ignorance of the names: I’m sorry, but it’s true that when almost every single kid – girl, boy, young, old – has the exact same hair color and hairstyle, it is hard to tell them apart from one another at first. I know, I know, that's "racist."
"Oh, what, they all look the same or something?"
Ombeni
Dickson Mdogo
Not sure. A girl.
I mean.... kind of?
Not after you get to know them, obviously. It has nothing to do with race, either -- I can't tell you how long it took me to tell Ashley Judd apart from Charlize Theron (sp?). And does anyone disagree that Tiki Barber looks like Shaun Alexander?
I think this new school is gonna be good. Perhaps I was a little biased from Day One, when I saw a pristine, almost shiny buffered concrete basketball court, with clear white lines painted and two solid backboards standing in between the boys’ and girls’ dormitories. But it's not just that -- the food is better, the organization is better, and it’s more expensive.
And it’s got a basketball court.
Oh my God, no joke, right as I was writing that I remembered the jersey I brought back with me from the States to wear at Soweto, because what a pun what a pun!
I bought it at
This the best photo I could come up with, but you know which letters are running across the chest?
USA! .... River!
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Just a few photos for the short of attention.
One jogoo, many chickens. Very nice.
The day of reckoning is near, Mwindaji.
