As I wrote in my last post, life in Tanzania for wazungu can be a difficult balancing act at times, particularly if you live in a larger town or city.  Sometimes the pull between the lifestyle you led in the U.S. and the lifestyle more typical of the average Tanzanian can result in feelings of confusion and guilt.  At other times, the desire to mark certain occasions or celebrations in a fashion that feels true to your own traditions has to be negotiated within this new cultural context.  Too often we think about culture as something that other nationalities/ethnicities/people have.  But the truth is that we in the U.S. also have our own cultural practices that mean something to us.  While it’s important to embrace Tanzanian culture while we’re here, to immerse ourselves in new experiences and practices, I know that for myself and for other wazungu friends I have here, there are times during which we feel a strong need to assert our own culture in order to recharge our batteries, so to speak, or simply to mark what would be an important day in our own country.

This need recently arose in a very specific way for a friend of mine.  Jerianne, a missionary from the U.S., was a fellow student at language school in Morogoro.  She lives in Kigoma, which is in the far west of Tanzania, on Lake Malawi (or Lake Nyasa, as it is called here).  In just a little while, Jerianne will be marrying a Tanzanian man by the name of Amani and they plan to live here in Tanzania permanently.  Naturally, given that, her life going forward will look very different from her past life in the U.S. and while I admire the enthusiasm with which she has embraced this, and the, at times and to American eyes, huge compromises she has made, she has acknowledged one thing from back home that she was sad to miss out on… a bachelorette party.   

“A bachelorette party,” you might ask?  “Is that really the kind of American cultural tradition we want to be known for, the kind of cultural celebration that you feel the need to practice overseas?”  But hear me out.  I could get into anthropological theory regarding rites of initiation, liminality, and a lot of other jargon but to boil it down to something I think everyone can understand, bachelorette parties are part of the rite of passage marking the movement of a woman from single status to married.  They are the final celebration of singlehood, and mark the process of saying goodbye in a sense to a specific social status that you often share with your fellow celebrants.  They are often a strange combination of giddy excitement touched with an element of sadness, as your friends recount the things you will no longer be able to do or the upcoming change in your name.  I would argue that traditions like these are every bit as important as those we like to exoticize when we visit other countries.

After a lot of discussion, a couple of friends and I determined that we simply had to give Jerianne a proper send-off into married-womanhood.  Given that this is Tanzania and Jerianne is a missionary (as were several other attendants), we weren’t looking for a drunken booze fest marked by the appearance of a Policeman with tear-away pants.  But we still wanted to celebrate in style.  And this past weekend, we all converged on Morogoro with plans for 24 hours of pool, sun, good food, and maybe even a little dancing.

We had booked a room at the nicest hotel in town.  Shantelle and I went shopping for some decorations and spent about an hour blowing up balloons until we were red in the face.  We bought her the usual American type of gift (i.e. slightly racy), as well as a Tanzanian kanga she could wear for her soon-to-be husband.  As the final touch, we commissioned a cake for her from a local restaurant.  Cakes aren’t common here, so we were particularly excited about this piece and the fact that we could have a message written in icing on the top.  When we showed up to pick up the cake a couple hours later, the woman was quite excited to show it to us because she had taken it upon herself to not only write a congratulatory message on it, but also to press strawberry halves around the edges (berries are a huge luxury here- my friend once paid about $7 for 12 raspberries).  It looked delicious and we had to spend a good five minutes sharing in her excitement.  The last step was to take everything back to the hotel and set it all up before we went to pick up the party participants: Jerianne, Michelle, and Grace.

What followed was a fun evening of great food out on the patio of our hotel, where we watched the sunset and enjoyed live music; dancing did occur.  Shantelle and I were a bit dismayed to find that when they ceremoniously brought out the cake, the heat had caused the chocolate icing to melt and the strawberries (formerly on top of the cake) had now traveled halfway down the sides.  But let’s be honest, since when do a group of girls let something like that stop them from devouring chocolate?  The hoped for sun and pool time did not materialize the next day as planned, but a couple more friends, Ingrid and Santa, joined us for lunch and serenaded Jerianne with an impromptu duet  as a gift, while our fellow diners looked on and wondered why we were interrupting their brunch.  But I thought it was a lovely idea in a place where it can be hard to come up with inventive gift ideas.

It may not have looked and felt exactly like the traditional American bachelorette party, but we were fairly proud of our attempt, and now Jerianne can get married without feeling like she has missed out!

I think I’ve mentioned once or twice the orphanage in town.  I had been hearing about the children there from Shantelle nearly since I first arrived.  It is clearly a place close to her heart.  I had met some of the older boys a couple of weeks ago at the Boone’s house, but that was all.  Although I had wanted to visit for a while now, I hadn’t had a chance until this week.  Shantelle, the Boone family, and their friends Chris and Emily, were planning on spending the afternoon with the kids and I decided to tag along.

The orphanage is run by Catholic nuns.  It is a mid-sized rectangular building set around a central concrete courtyard, with a playground out back.  The children are all pretty young.  If I had to guess, I would say they were all under the age of nine or so.  Truthfully, to our eyes, it looks pretty sparse, but it was clean and all of the children appeared to be pretty well taken care of.  As soon as we pulled up, children were at the door of the orphanage, yelling out greetings.  It was clear my friends were favorite visitors.  We greeted the nuns on our way in and paid our respects, but as soon as we crossed the threshold, we were pulled into a whirlwind of energy.  The kids gathered round, shouting out for their favorite adult, demanding hugs, eager to start games.

One of the first things we did was to gather some of the babies and toddlers from the nursery.  Given the number of children, this age group often does not get as much affection and attention as it should.  I don’t mean to be critical.  It is a large job and the nuns clearly care about their charges.  But the reality is that the older children are naturally more vocal about their needs and have each other to play with.  The babies and toddlers are often in their cribs most of the time.  So we each gathered up a little one to cuddle and feed while the older kids ate their lunch of rice and beans.  The kids would periodically come over to help with a bottle or stroke a baby’s head.  It was clear that nuns had taught them to be gentle and careful with the younger ones.

I had brought stickers with me from the States for kids that I met.  In the past when I’ve traveled, I’ve found that having a little something like stickers or coloring books can be a good way to break the ice with kids I meet when we don’t speak the same language.  I had this image in my head where I would take out the stickers and be able to tear off a couple from each sheet for each child in a calm orderly fashion that would ensure everyone got a roughly equal amount.  (Anyone who has children is probably laughing at me right now.  Actually, given the size of my extended family and all of the children I’ve spent time with over the years, I am laughing at myself).  Of course, the minute I pulled the stickers out, they were pulled from my hands  by the biggest of the kids, who rapidly started peeling them off and sticking them to anything (or anyone) standing still, including themselves.  Chris and I managed to re-establish some semblance of order to oversee the distribution, and I will say this, I was so impressed with the older kids.  Although they weren’t going to give up control of the sheets, they did make sure that all of the little ones got stickers too, sometimes going so far as to pull them off their friends and re-stick them on those who had fewer.  It was a feeding frenzy for a bit but you really can’t blame them.  Stickers are awesome and toys are definitely scarce.

The fun then moved outside to the playground, where the adults were very quickly worn out and the kids showed off all of their moves on the jungle gym with boundless energy.  The playground is the kind of bare bones metal death trap-looking structure that no American parent nowadays would let their child near…and that I and my friends had an absolute ball on when we were kids.  (I remember when my former elementary school rebuilt their playground after I had moved on to Middle School and all I could think at the time was how boring it looked).  Now, as an adult myself, I tried to focus on the joy in watching the kids, and pushed down the rising panic every time a child almost flew off the merry-go-round.

Eventually, it was time to go and hugs all around were given.  The kids saw us off to the gate, yelling goodbyes.  Just a great, great day.