Two Potlucks and a Christmas Fair

I'd just like to start off by thanking everyone for their kind wishes. I am feeling much better* and I am thankfully off my antibiotics. Now then:

Our Friday night Potluck was a bit thrown together, but in the end, it all worked out. We decided chapati burritos are definitely our signature dish, so Jodie got the chapati and had Glady our office secretary make the beans (I was still pretty useless most of the day). Reuben sent out a bunch of invites and picked up some people since our house is quite a way from the main road. And the two of them did an amazing job cleaning up the house so that we could have people over for the first time. We told people 7, and even though we knew people would come late, we decided we should try to have the food ready by then.

I picked up everything to make the guacamole and I had started just after 6. Jodie was popping lots of popcorn on our stove top as an appetizer. Reuben had brought Angela (she's the president of our Frisbee league) who had chapati and guacamole as well, so we were incredibly relieved when she pulled out hummus and fresh veggies and explained that she had also brought an appetizer. So Angela was chopping carrots and green pepper in the kitchen. And Reuben was putting together a tuna-pasta salad. By that time, I had moved onto the beans, which had been seasoned with a big MSG flavor packet, so I was trying to undo that flavor and restore the normal flavor. For the first time, the kitchen felt cramped.

Starting at 8, the guests began trickling in. Half of them were from my roommate Mic's dance group (they're break-dancers), all Tanzanian men in their 20s. The other half were the girlfriends of the dancers, all white volunteers in their 20s. It was nice talking to everyone, but the demographics are a little odd. When someone asked me about it, I said that it was a case of supply and demand. Not exactly the phrasing I was going for, but I was still a bit loopy from the antibiotics. Basically, the type of volunteers who come to Arusha tend to be a bit different from the type of volunteers who go to a place like Voi. I don't know how they self-select, but it definitely seems to happen.

Anyway, the Potluck went well, although with all the conversations going on around me, I found myself getting a bit lost. Still, I managed to stay up until 11 and when I woke up in the morning, I discovered that Jodie and Reuben had managed all of the clean-up.

Saturday was a typical day at the office, except that we all locked up at 1 to leave. This atypical behavior on our part (leaving on time) caused a bit of confusion over relaying our sets of keys, but it all worked out in the end. After work, there was a Thanksgiving get-together with some friends. Reuben made some macaroni and cheese, while Jodie steamed some carrots and I made garlic mashed potatoes. I'd never made any kind of mashed potatoes before, but I figured that with milk, potatoes, salt, pepper, margarine and garlic (and most importantly, a masher) I couldn't go wrong. The only challenging part was that I added the salt late and it was rather difficult to mix it in evenly. Oh well, practice makes perfect.

We headed over at 4 PM and found a pretty crowded house. There was turkey and stuffing and almost all the fixings. Sadly, cranberry sauce was not to be had (I was shocked, since I knew of two supermarkets in town that sell it). Angela's roommate Jana was hosting everyone (we've met up with Jana a few times). She works at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and aside from Angela and Jodie, Reuben and I, everyone was from the Tribunal (and everyone was from North America or Europe). Everyone was really nice and I had interesting conversations with people, but I was really shocked how little interest they seemed to have in general with Tanzanians, Rwandans or the culture that was all around them. They seemed to work with other Westerners all day and go drink with them in the bars on evenings and weekends. I'm certainly generalizing based on short interactions with a few people, but I will say that almost no one there spoke any Kiswahili (even those who had been in Tanzania for a year) and they didn't seem terribly interested in learning. (I did have a "small world" moment when I was talking to a girl at the party and she mentioned that her cousin Abbie had gone to MIT, and it happened that Abbie had lived in my dorm and been a friend of mine.)

Apparently the party went on until 10 before they continued it at a club. Jodie and I left early since I was still pretty drained from the bug I had all week. However, before leaving, we did agree that we would go to the Christmas Fair in town the next day.

The Christmas Fair** was in a part of town that I'd only passed through when leaving Arusha and never really noticed. Turns out there's an enormous country club-type place there. The fair was on a polo field and there were dozens of tents forming a huge horseshoe. I made a circuit of the tents and realized how uninterested I was in most of the crafts there. I made sure to greet most of the people I knew from frisbee, but other than that, I spent most of the day studying people. I have to say that the experience felt even further removed from my village experiences even than any place I've ever been in Nairobi (and that's saying a lot).

There were plenty of Tanzanians selling crafts and knickknacks and a good number of upper-middle- and upper-class Tanzanians around the grounds shopping, so that was refreshing. But I definitely did not feel like I was in a country where 80% of the population are employed in the agricultural sector. I felt more like I was in a suburb in the US than in Tanzania. Which is not to say that the experience is inauthentic or doesn't reflect the reality on the ground, it's just a stark contrast to the villages where I've worked and much less interesting to me.

I don't want to convey the notion that anything was unpleasant this weekend. I'm mostly trying to convey how I felt moving in a different society this weekend from the one that I'm used to.

* And my total weight-loss throughout this bug was one belt loop. I'm guessing that's 5-7 lbs there. Good thing that I put on some weight while I was in the states.
** I especially like the part where it says that "all funds raised are donated to a charity of good cause." I was hoping that it would go to a charity of nefarious cause! (I had an overwhelming urge to include links on "nefarious" to some charities that I particularly dislike, but I decided to hold my tongue.) Well, in any case, I'd love to hear what their determination of a "good cause" is. I'm always skeptical of the goodness when people don't just say what charity it is outright.