One Long Day

Entry via Letter

Days in Africa only seem long because they can begin so early. However this day was longer than most due to the sheer amount of craziness that manages to occur in one Mako-day, and all in my own home! School looming only days away, I decided to lock myself into my stone home, emerging only to chote (carry) water or greet returning Students. My student (Musty) who moved in with me to help guard my solar panels and do the daily chores (choting maji and sweeping the sand, as well as helping take phones in our now booming cell phone business) has discovered a taste for homemade chips and salsa, and thus on this near perfect morning we decided to get cooking. I was slicing up the salsa, making tiny perfect tomatoes and chilis, when we suddenly heard my name screamed with more panicked yells for Musty and for us to hurry. I dropped the chopping knife and raced past 2 waiting cell phone customers who had barely lifted their hands to knock at my door, rushing under the Korosho tree where my panicked neighbors were all but jumping up and down in excitement (this automatically indicated to me some thing was wrong, then usually plant themselves so firmly on the ground you would think they were dead). Subconsciously I knew this somehow involved my cat Pepsi, as she has become big enough to start playing with chickens, I all but expected my neighbor to be chasing her with a meat cleaver, as she had threatened to kill her the week before. My neighbors was speaking rapid-fire Swahili, throwing my cat’s name in liberally and pointing to a near by Korosho tree. Slightly annoyed, I turned around to witness not a guilty Pepsi with a bloody chicken dangling from her mouth, but a playful Pepsi lying under a low branch and taunting with her paws the biggest Green Mamba (second-deadliest) snake I have seen in Tanzania. Immediately I yelled for Pepsi, who flipped over and bounced towards me in a “wow, you came outside to play” perky way. Picking up the now purring lump of fur and handing her off to the house girl, I then yelled for Musty to bring my machete, while I looked for a stick. The snake, possibly sensing its impending thrashing, slithered up into the tall branches of the tree, just out of beating range, and by the time the machete arrived had disappeared altogether. Ticked at being aroused from our cooking without a proper killing under our belts, we stalked back to the kitchen, leaving our now growing cell-phone clientele with a mix of bewilderment and fear on their faces. Perhaps it was the look in my eyes or the machete held firmly in my hand that made these people scatter from my porch, either way we knew they’d be back.

Musty and I entered a smoke-filled kitchen and immediately found the cause of the stench, our chips oil had been forgotten on the fire. Lifting the pan with a dirty dish towel, I slowly made my way out of the kitchen with the boiling oil and was doing well, until I hit our kitchen step, causing the oil to bubble up on to the fingers of my left hand. Immediately I threw the whole pan down and backed away, screaming and jumping and teaching wide-eyed Mustafa a whole new “American” vocabulary. After several minutes of blowing, water pouring, and colorful metaphors, the twin sized second-degree burns stared at me from my left hand just as a smaller second degree burn I sustained 4 days before from a pot of boiling water peeked up at me from my left wrist.

After we had settled down to eat our now soggy chips and salsa, and between jumping up and down to the door to take phones from the villagers who had the courage to climb back on my porch, my student, collapsed in his chair from the excitement, looked up at me with nothing but the most endearing sincerity, and stated, “Mwalimu, perhaps it best if you give up cooking in Tanzania”.