ask for a little.....

yesterday was the craziest day of my life

FIRST, I was in Mwanza to teach my Lifeskills period at the Teachers Training College. That went fantastically well, they performed a great drama and I taught the most tiring and draining lesson that I think any of us health volunteers teach (it's about behavior change concepts. very abstract. vague answers. )

So what was crazy was what had preceded it: I had gone to the AMREF office and, after waiting fruitlessly for the internet to come back, decided to go get some lunch. On my way walking down the street, I saw some gawkers standing on a corner and looking down the road - usually a cue for me to keep on walking and don't look back. But I rubbernecked and checked to see what was going on, and saw about 10 individuals chucking rocks at a big building.

Over the next hour, I pieced together the following: There are guys who walk around the streets selling all kinds of stuff: pants, underwear, handkerchiefs, sunglasses, toothpaste, cheap plastic made-in-china trinkets, perfumes, electronics (that break after 10 minutes of use), the list goes on and on. Well, they're not supposed to be selling this stuff on the street. Though I later heard a claim that they had been given permission to do so during the election campaign, so no one would get upset, lets not ruffle any feathers. But now action is being taken, and yesterday the police confiscated all of their goods - quite a big loss to people that don't exactly have the easy life.

So they started chucking rocks. And breaking windows. And burning stuff. And vandalizing cars. People were running down the streets, sirens going off, sound of tear gas bombs being thrown. I at this point had gotten to my favorite restaurant, and looked on stunned as the owner quickly rushed to the entrance and locked us all in by slamming shut the big iron gate. He opened it up after about 10 minutes, and I immediately paid my bill and grabbed a cab to the offices, and then got the hell out of town as quick as I could.

Scattered news reports (since electricity was out), 1-3 people died. Lots of business vandalized, even as I was in a car going out of the city yesterday I saw that ALL the businesses had shut their doors, very unusual for middle of a Wednesday, I temporarily felt like I was in a war-zone, it was abandoned. My first thought was, 'this is the stuff that most Americans usually see on the news about Africa, funny I'm seeing it for the first time and it's completely unreal.'

So that was exciting. But I got out, taught my lesson, got a car home, and arrived in my house just in time.....

...for the biggest freaking monsoon of a rainstorm I have ever witnessed in my life. Winds, hail, pouring rain - my house flooded, I did my best to barricade doors and shutters and windows, though it didn't do much good. Moved a lot of stuff into my dry bedroom, which doesnt flood. All this while the electricity was out and it was too windy to use candles, so I was going by the faint glow of my cell phone light.

Now you do the math here: daytime rioting/tear gas bombs, overnight thunder, and Wednesday is the day I take my 'dream-enhancing' anti-malarial medication. Yeah, that was a fun night.

Thanks to all those sympathetic to the East African drought, but be more selective when asking for rain - we need just the right amount, not too little, not too much. All the corn around here is pathetically sagging to the ground, I can only hope it rebounds.


And on a completely unrelated but incredibly surreal note, the day BEFORE yesterday I was priviledged to watch the Miss World Tourism show, taped in Arusha, Tanzania. Pretty bizarre, when you're used to a culture where modesty is a virtue and women wrap cloth around the clothes they're already wearing, to see 100 ladies strutting their stuff in swimsuits. This pageant looked a little, well, how do I say this politely, 2nd rate. The models were ok, lots of wardrobe malfunctions (though none of the interesting type, the only thing that fell down were lots of bizarre hats). No representative from the USA. Miss Canada was, again looking for polite words here, 'beefy'. Maybe that's not polite. But hey, its cold there, right?!