“Slightly stunned, a little overwhelmed, and completely out of his element”

Say you are an average Tanzanian and in addition to your day job you raise a few cattle on the side to make some extra money and get milk. Well, what do you do if you get a call one late afternoon while you are away—yes, the average Tanzanian has a phone, two if they want to maximize cell phone coverage—telling you that one of your cows has accidentally asphyxiated itself on its tethering?

Do you:
A. Heave the body into your walk-in freezer to preserve it for another day?
B. Cut your losses and let it rot?
C. Find a way to haul it to the nearest butcher 2 km away and pay him to chop it up?
D. Leave it out overnight and risk the local dogs tearing it apart?
E. Return home right away and get to work preparing the meat by yourself for several hours?
OR
F. None of the above

If you answered “A. Heave the body into your walk-in freezer to preserve it for another day,” reality check: the average American doesn't own a walk-in freezer! Or, if you chose “B. Cut your losses and let it rot,” well listen Mack, not everyone has Grade A USDA beef at their disposal. But, if you answered “F. None of the above,” give yourself a gold star and a pat on the back because you are correct! Technically the correct answer is you: “Find some local students to loudly hack at it with an ax until past 11 pm much to the chagrin of the neighboring mzungu trying to get some friggin shut-eye.”

This is the situation I found myself in a couple weeks ago. Only before I found out what the real cause of the racket preventing my beauty sleep was, I ignorantly and hastily made a racket of my own by yelling at the students (their laughter at my frustration didn't help) and then at the neighbor demanding an explanation thinking that clearly this could wait until daylight. “I mean honestly, I gotta get some sleep before those damned roosters wake me up yet again at 4:30!” So when I did find out, I was more than a little shocked and unbelieving at first, but then I just felt foolish for jumping to conclusions, and laughing at the sheer absurdity of it all: here's this well off nonnative volunteer with no real clue of what is going on around him, bitching about not getting his sleep while his neighbor justifiably wants to secure an investment that unexpectedly took a turn for a worst. “Only in Africa,” right?

“Slightly stunned, a little overwhelmed, and completely out of his element.” That's a quote from an article (sent to me by good friend Emily George volunteering in Namibia) in the January 12th New Yorker titled “Strange Stones” about a Peace Corps Volunteer's experience in China (Check it out; I was amazed at how well it spoke to my experience here, putting words to much of what I've noticed in the last 10 plus months), but I think it does a perfect job of describing in varying degrees 99% of all volunteers who step into a foreign land wanting to lend a helping hand or simply want to get away from it all and immerse themselves in something altogether new. Some are more stunned than overwhelmed. Some shake off their surprise at certain behaviors and customs but then get overwhelmed by something else. And some may be able to fit right in with their new surroundings, speak the language, eat the food, but I'm not sure that you can ever escape the fact that you're the outsider, different from everyone else around you, and in that sense be completely out of your element.

It's certainly how I feel here. I'm still stunned at certain things Tanzanians do or say or react to. Other things overwhelm me and my patience causing me to throw my hands in the air and wonder what more I can do. And then there are the things like losing sleep because a suicidal cow needs to be butchered or else left to the dogs, where no amount of training or self-help books or advice can possibly prepare you, where you realize you are completely and utterly out of your element, and you can only muster a smile and take things with a grain of salt. Some of it results in positive reactions—laughter and curiosity, for example, after investigating the high pitched squeals emanating from the neighbor's pig to discover he's being castrated to cause him to grow larger. (Still searching for an explanation on that one so all you zoologists and agriculturists out there are more than welcome to help me!) Others result in more negative reactions—I still struggle with the “fish bowl effect” and get pissed (though not outwardly) when, even if I just go to the border town, people stare at me like I've got a tree growing out of my head. But I think that simply acknowledging those differences and the helplessness they can sometimes cause is teaching me patience, flexibility, and an ever-expanding sense of humor. Afterall, is there really anything I can do about the difficulty of science I'm required by Tanzania to teach or about the color of my skin that causes others to stare or the midnight hack-fest of a deceased bovine? Hakuna, there is nothing, but despite that, I'm growing and gleaning so much about life along the way.