A Birthday and a Typical Day

Today is my own little mother's birthday, so happy birthday to her! I wanted her to throw a 6-6-6 party, but she thought it might be in poor taste. Sigh... I guess my particular sense of humor isn't for everyone.

My day here in the outskirts of Morogoro was one very typical of a day in Tanzania. I will highlight some of the most excruciatingly typical parts of it for you to get an idea of what I mean.

This afternoon, one of the language school students fortunate enough to possess a land rover announced that he would be making a run into town and that whoever wanted to go would meet at 2:30. Around 3:00, when most people had eventually turned up, we overloaded ourselves into the vehicle and headed toward town. Somewhere along the main road someone started shouting in the back that we had passed the place where we were supposed to let him off. The driver is supposed to know those things by intuition of course. We let him off as soon as we could pull over, with him complaining of how far he now had to walk. You're welcome!

Linda, the resident southern mama of the seminary, and myself were dropped off at the fancy grocery store. It ws completely empty as the food is imported and so expensive that only the missionaries and western volunteers can afford to shop there. The locals buy their goods off the street. Despite the fact that we were the only two people there, it seemed to the staff extremely necessary to mop whatever aisle we were trying to explore at any given time. The floor was sopping wet and we skidded through the store, gazing longingly at bottles of Hershey's chocolate syrup and Twix bars. I was a good girl and only bought some vanilla yogurt. If I get one serving of dairy every other week while I'm here, I'll be pretty impressed with my own resourcefullness in finding it.

I paused when spotting the feminie hygiene products long enough to wonder how the local women deal with issues of their own feminie hygiene and then realize that I really had no desire to learn the answer. My find of the day was the Muslim Barbie pencil set, which I ran to the checkout with! Blue-eyed blonde Barbie is sporting a jean skirt and the Islamic headcovering for women in all of the pictures. Insert high-quality rant about the perils of globalism and the continued existence of colonialism in a more perverse form here.

When finished with our shopping, Linda brought me dowstairs for the promised-for ice cream.
Of course the don't have any. No restaurant in this country has any business having a menu at all because they never have half the things on it, and that is not exaggerating. I order a veggie burger off the menu and am delighted when the man nods and smiles rather than telling me they have no burgers of any kind. Twenty minutes later, I am presented with a heaping bowl of rice. Linda and I stare at it blankly, wondering if the burger is underneath it somewhere. Of course not. I apparently ordered vegetable birani rather than vegetable BURGER in this man's hearing. There is no time to wait for more food, so I pick at my mess of Indian-style flavored rice (and I hate flavored rice), which was of course more expensive than the hoped-for burger, until our ride returns.

Our driver stops for gas. Unfortunately, the gas station has lost power so the pumps do not work. We wait for them to pull out the generator to give them enough juice to give us the fuel to make it back to the seminary.

Was I at any point shocked by any of this? Nope. Did I ever bother to get agitated? That would be entirely pointless. It was actually a very nice ride into town with fewer hangups and a quicker turn around than usual. The rice was pretty bad, though. Especially when you think you are getting a veggie burger.

I haven't decided who will be the lucky recipient of Muslim Barbie's pencil set, but whoever does is in for quite a treat in their stocking this Christmas!