field work

Have just returned from doing my first two interviews ever, at Kashozi parish near Bukoba. To say that I did them both is an overstatement, because the first one was in Kihaya. I do not speak Kihaya. But the priest who is helping me does, and now I have another language to add to my list of ones to learn. The man we spoke with was born in 1917, and I asked lots of questions about memory and sleeping sickness, what people said about the Germans, the missionaries, about being sick and healing.

The man's house was just behind the parish church - it used to be a mission church, and it's a sort of complex now, a bit rambling. There was sweetgrass spread on the floor of the room we sat in, and pictures of Jesus and Mary and the pope all over, and a ceramic crucifix on the wall -- it's a very Catholic area, here. The mzee (= elder) was very generous, if very old, and I hope I can figure out what he was saying and get it transcribed somehow. It was promising.

The second interview was in Swahili and English, with a man who was a teacher -- no hitches there, but not as much remembering. He had a house amid what looked like a major banana plantation, had been some sort of official. His wife served us Coke, Sprite, and Fanta halfway through.

In both cases, the wives stayed out of the way, and I wish I had known the etiquette for asking them to talk as well. It's something people have talked about, but it is an awkward situation, sort of, once you're in the middle of it.

The rest of the day I am still processing. Everyone has been so generous, but then it's also totally bizarre sometimes. Case in point, the priest who is helping me is doing so of his own accord and apropo of nothing; then the first priest I met at the parish today asked me to send him three batteries for his digital camera and was halfway through a beer and had a gun in a safe. The main parish priest knew a ton of history and gave me citations. The church at the parish is huge and airy, and has a shrine to the first African cardinal (I think) in it. A small church behind a little ways looked like it might have been the first one built there. There was a big stonework of Jesus carved into one of the other buildings. I took pictures of everyone to send back. The digital camera is still a great hit.

But the thing is, overwhelmingly - it's beautiful here. Even with what you can tell is probably a lot of clear-cutting, the hills are still green and there are farms everywhere. Schoolkids in neat uniforms all over the place. The roads are cut well, red dirt or gravel when they aren't tarmac, people get around. Farms have bananas and sometimes coffee intercropped. But it's just so green. And no wonder - I woke this morning at 6 trying to figure out why, despite hearing the ibis cawing and flying, and a rooster somewhere, it was not light. But it was not light - it was dark with big fat rainclouds, and proceeded to pour and thunder for an hour. I almost thought we wouldn't go up to Kashozi today, but it cleared and was fine. But everyone has a big umbrella here, I'm noticing.

I don't have a sense of how wealthy or poor people are looking around, though today, one man was clearly wealthy, and the other was not. It was very prosperous here for a time, but then the coffee market dropped out. We saw a sick woman being carried from a minibus today; people talk about TB, and HIV/AIDS has been a huge problem here. The cathedral has been under renovation for years; but the church is prospering. So are revivalist splinter churches, though, attractive and anti-status quo. It's safe, which means crime must be low. It's hard to know how to respond to everything. Here, like elsewhere in Tanzania, like everywhere, there is not just one thing going on.

But my job right now is not to respond, yet - I'm still absorbing and collecting. And tomorrow, I've got a 9 o'clock appointment with the bishop! Any handy tips, Catholic friends?


p.s. we also moved hotels, having decided we would within 4 hours of arriving of arriving in le sketchy beach motel (definitely mo-, rather than ho-). now in a beautiful guest house with fascinating birds in the trees, a good restaurant, and hot water!