COW

Last weekend I went to yet another village – cow village. The name of the village in Kiswahili, Ng’ombe, means cow. There actually weren’t many cows that I could see, though there was a soccer field full of shit, a telltale sign that a rather large herd had slept over the night before on their way to Mwanza, eventually Dar es Salaam, and finally someones dinner table.

The reason for the visit was to finally see the house where my best friends Dominic and Deus grew up. Dominic, Deus, and their 10 other brothers and sisters [one of whom, Mama Leo, is my neighbor and I eat dinner at her house almost every night].

No, I didn’t accidentally hit the 0 key. That’s right, a total of 12 kids [11 still surviving]. Kind of mind boggling. The first one was born in 1960, the last in 1992. That’s 32 years of childbearing for Mama Ndembeje, but she looks surprisingly resilient and active.

Just for fun, we did a bit of calculating. I added up all the people in my ‘clan’ on both sides of my family. In other words, both of my grandfathers, their wives, their children and their children’s spouses, and their grandchildren [myself included]. Total was 35 give or take a few.

Then we looked at my friend Dom’s family. Dominic is a few years older than me, his brother Deus is my age. If you take JUST his parents, and then count the number of grandchildren they have [i.e. children of Dom and Deus’ brothers and sisters], they alone number more than 40. Yikes!

Most of the family has already dispersed. Mama Leo lives in Misungwi [my neighbor], as does her younger sister who studies at the high school. Another younger sister still lives at home with her husband, as does the youngest brother who still studies in primary school. The father was away on business, but many of Dominics other brothers and sisters still live nearby, creating an atmosphere that the entire village was basically one big extended family. It certainly made it complicated to walk around and get a sense of the place, as we had to greet everyone and eat 3 or 4 times [sweet potatoes and tea mostly], and I was constantly being introduced to relatives of some sort or another that I couldn’t keep straight.

The house where they grew up is very small. They like to tell me stories about how the young kids and parents sleep in beds, but then when the boys got big enough they got kicked out of the beds and slept on animal skins on the ground. They also used to herd the cattle around to look for food. We got to see the house and outdoor kitchen etc. I also got to see some of their means of income, namely cattle pen [not many cows though, around 6], and a tobacco shed [will try to get a picture of this up soon - they all started laughing hysterically when I pointed out that they had placed a padlock on a building made of straw which could easily just be broken apart in order to enter…]

We sat around mostly, because that’s what you do here, especially in the villages. Of course it would be nice to chat with the people you are visiting, but they are usually busy preparing food and the likes for the guests. Dominic’s mother spent basically all her time in the kitchen, so I just hung out with Dom and Deus. They killed us a chicken, which tasted really, really good.

We then spent the afternoon on a tour of the village – churches, health center, primary school, various rock formations that offer great views of surrounding environments, etc. It was all rather ordinary, but ordinary in a very peaceful and relaxing way.

By far the most entertaining part of the day was when we were all sitting around back at the house. There were about 8 of us sitting around chatting when a group of 4 women came by the house to visit. As they approached, the greetings started.

And kept going.

And turned into one of the funniest moments I think I’ve ever witnessed.

Imagine each one of these four guests exchanging elaborate greetings with each of the 8 seated residents. Not a simple ‘hi’, but a ‘Hello how are you? I am fine how are you? I’m great, how are things at home? Things at home are good, are your children well? Yes they are well, and how is everything here?...’

MATHEMETICIANS: project. Someone do the calculations as to how many greetings were exchanged, as I don’t have enough time or brainpower to do it here. Lets say there were 4 of them and 8 of us, each of them exchanged greetings with each of us, and lets say a ‘greeting’ is a question/response, and that EVERY person offered 2 greetings as part of each exchange.

I had a difficult time holding up my end of the greetings exchange, as I was holding back hysterical laughter, but I managed to calm down enough to be the last to greet the visitors [in Sukuma, of course].