"It's an angel!"

So my latest adventure in Tanzania started with the fact that I have not gone to Mass in English in over two months and I was realllyyy itching for something familiar. I woke up extra early on a dreary, rainy Saturday morning to attend Mass at the Jesuits at 7 am. The Mass was wonderful and just what I needed. I understood everything and was really able to participate, the spiritual lift I needed. I had breakfast with them afterwards (I was told I was a good luck charm because it was the first time the cats didn’t bother them during Mass).

My real adventure begins on the way home around 9 am. I was almost home when I hear someone say “Emirrryyyy!” I looked back and saw it was my friend Erasto. We exchanged greetings and then he asked me what I was doing later. Oh goodness, I thought, what is he going to ask me to do. So I say I don’t know but I also don’t know if my community mates have anything planned. As I can see my response is not the one he wished for, he asks me to go to his friends birthday party with him later that day. I said that I wasn’t sure if I would be able to go but he should call me later. He says I really should try to come, he really wants me to come and so does his friend (whom I have never met). Ok, so I bought some time to decide what I was going to do. I hadn’t heard anything all day so I thought I was off the hook. Caroline and Christen came back from Posta around 3:30 and informed me that Erasto called and texted us and said he will be by around 4 pm to pick me up. Yeah so I had a half hour. I realized I had not showered since Thursday night because I got back late on Friday and was going to go for a run later that day, so I grabbed a bucket to get water to take a shower. I walked outside and guess who was standing there! Erasto was at our house a half hour early (Tanzanians never show up on time, they maybe show up an hour or so late so I thought I had some time). Not only was he early, and I had not taken a shower, but earlier in the day I did laundry so all of my sheets, towels, and underwear were hanging outside to dry.

Ok, turn around, grab something to wear and just suck it up and go. I felt my face turning bright red (that has happened a few times here already). I quickly got ready and five minutes later we were out the door. I asked him where we were going today and he responded with “to support.” Uh? “It is my friends birthday, we go to support him.” Ok. Cool. We went to his house so he could change and I met his mother. We sat outside together, she only speaks Swahili and I only speak maybe 10 phrases of Swahili so our conversation did not go very far. We said an awful lot of “karibu” “asante” – “welcome” “thank you.” So if anybody is coming to Tanzania we are very welcome at Erasto’s house.

I met Erasto on my first day here and then on the fifth day here (the next time I saw him) he quizzed me on who he was and when I met him and he also quizzed me on my Swahili. I do not know any of his friends, neither do my community mates. So here I am venturing off in Africa alone with a Tanzanian friend to a place I have never been before to “support” a person I have never met. This is what I was anxious about. Thank goodness before we left Caroline told Erasto to take good care of me. Yeah, thanks. Well he took this very seriously (and I think he enjoyed it). We got to out stop (after he paid all of the dala fares) and he took an even stronger hold of my hand – he had been holding my hand almost the entire way, this is pretty common here though – and he held onto me for dear life as we crossed the road. Then he got on a kick of asking me if I was fearing or worrying. Because he had to take care of me he did not want me to fear or worry, so I had to give all of my fear and worry to him (what was I fearing and worrying about, I still don’t know but it’s ok because he took care of it). We walked and walked and I began to wonder where exactly he was taking me, and then just when I thought things couldn’t get stranger (by this time he had asked me to be his girlfriend), we arrive at the house of the birthday boy before the birthday boy. His mother and sisters were home so we sat inside and waited…and waited…and waited…I took in the room – the blinking Christmas lights, the stuffed animals displayed in the china cabinet next to the TV, the picture of Jesus on the wall. Finally another person came and Erasto leaves me to go outside. So I am sitting in this strangers house along. Soon he came back and we both went outside together where we did some more waiting. Slowly more people come and eventually even the birthday boy comes!!!

Tanzanian birthday parties typically follow a pattern, eat, drink, eat some more, drink some more, feed each other birthday cake, make a speech about the birthday person, talk some more and then go home. So sure enough, we eat samosas, chapate, and other snacks, drank fanta, ate some more and drank some more. Then the birthday cake came out and DC, the birthday boy, cut it into smallish pieces and got ready for the feeding – the most awkward part of any birthday here. I got ready, keep in mind I met this person maybe 2 hours earlier, and it comes to be my turn. So he takes a toothpick and a piece of cake and we get awkwardly close and he feeds me a piece of cake. Meanwhile this whole time there is a dude on the other side of the table taking pictures of me the entire time we are there. Every time I look up he had the came pointed at me and is smiling. Well my cake experience is done for this birthday – phew. We finally do some introductions, I have been sitting at a table of all guys for 2 ours and none of them talked to me and I didn’t talk to any of them. Turns out I am the first “person like me” that they ever met. I was also the only girl. Even though I didn’t talk to them the entire time, they were definitely talking about me in Swahili because they were quite obvious about looking at me while talking. Towards the end, DC wanted to show us his hens. I was like what? You have chickens, ok. Yeah no he has hundreds of chickens. He had a pen for the older chickens and then a pen for the baby chicks, there were literally hundreds. My favorite chickens are the ones with their neck feathers missing because they got into fights, they look so funny! DC walked Erasto and me to the dala stop and somehow I ended up with the rest of the birthday cake. On the last dala, we were smushed in the bus and a baby next to me was staring at me. Erasto leaned in to me and whispered, "He must be thinking 'It's an angel'." That might have been the best line of the evening. We got home and my community mates continued to tease me about the evening as we enjoyed the rest of the cake,

Also a quick update on everything else. My one student crush-er has turned into three - that I know of. Samson and Claus have joined the ranks and opt to sit with me outside instead of playing football with everybody else. I have also come to the conclusion that David is Napoleon Dynamite. They dance exactly the same way. I caught David doing a Michael Jackson impression the other day, he was totally in his own world. I wrote in a Valentine post-it I gave him in class that he dances really well. He came up to me and asked me if I meant it. I said of course! He was so happy that he did some more dance moves right there in class. Today he made a cell phone out of a piece of paper and was talking on it all day long, creativity at its finest in Tanzania.