Walazo: The Wazee

Possibly the best Kiswahili-immersion experience ever is hanging out with interesting, storied octogenarians who don’t know any English. Moving to Walazo was not very considered – it was more an act of “following my heart,” or my gut, which has always been (for me) the best decision-making matrix.

At Walazo, there are 40 boarders – ten women, thirty men.  Most of them are Muslim, most are well into their eighties, most have no family to speak of.  Many have lost their fingers to leprosy, or their mobility to arthritis, or their minds to time.  Some of them are grumpy, some of them are stoic, some of them are amazingly happy, some of them lie still and unspeaking for days and days like the already-dead.

While I mostly worked in the kitchen during my time there, I was assigned random tasks with the wazee every afternoon, like clipping their fingernails, or handing out Vitamin-C tablets, or embroidering their names in the collars of their shirts.  This gave me a premise for visiting and chatting and piga-ing stori, which, as the Sisters kept repeating, “is the best medicine.”  I can’t write about every mzee here, but I'll mention some of the ones that are sticking with me.

There is Mzee Haji, who has three teeth and sings this song to everyone who visits him, in the most winsome and haunting of voices: “Hurry, hurry, bring no blessing.  If you do hurry, you will stumble.  And if you do stumble, you will fall down." 

There is ex-nurse Mzee Adam who wants to control his own medication regimen.  He was never without a horrible scowl on his face, because he hates having the Walazo-nurses determine which pills he gets.  He was usually sitting outside the Sisters' house by seven in the morning to protest his medication.  He was kicked out of his last nursing home.

There is Mzee Abu Bakari who looks fresh and young, with a trimmed salt-n-pepper beard and cleanly-pressed shirts.  When I first met him, he shook my hand -- gracious and straight-backed -- and I couldn't understand why he was even in Walazo.  I found out later that his mind is almost blank.  Once, I was trailing Sister Calista as she handed out bread for an afternoon snack.  She went to Mzee Abu Bakari's room ahead of me and then headed down the hall.  Mzee wasn't expecting me to follow behind her, and when I poked my head in the door, he had most of the loaf of bread shoved in his mouth, and the rest of it bunched in his fists, torn and messy.  I felt somehow guilty for seeing him that way, undignified.    

There is Mzee Abdul, the sharpest mzee of all.  He sits in a wheelchair on his porch and surveys the campus with his hawk eyes.  He knows everything that happens, everywhere.  

There is one Mzee in an end room that overlooks the sea; everyone knows he just wants to die.

There is Bibi Teresa who never had her shirt on when I visited, but her radio was always on.  That's how I knew we were going to be friends.  Bibi T always played dansi tunes. She had lived through Ujamaa, and it was so weird to hear her describe the history I'd read about so many times.  At one point she asked me, "What tribe are you from?"  I told her I don't have a tribe, and she was like, "Ahhh, now you're just being coy."  

One day I was visiting the ladies' dorm, and I heard amazing taarab music coming from the room next door to Bibi T's.  It was Bibi Sofia; she had radio on and was so happy to have a fellow-listener.  After we'd hung out for a few minutes, Bibi T suddenly turned up her volume really loud in the room next door.  "Shani!" she called, "I'm playing dansi in here!"  I went over to say hi to Bibi T, and Bibi Sofia turned up her music a few notches.  It devolved into a radio-duel, each Bibi trying to drown out the other one's tunes.  Chaos in the ladiez dorm!

There is Mzee Hatibu -- small, spry, bright-eyed -- who is super inappropriate and raunchy, and always called me his "girlfriend" and hugged me for as long as I would let him.

The main thing that struck me, over and over again and with increasing sorrow was how dull and repetitive and generally life-less their lives were.  Before I say anything else, a disclaimer: I believe in the conquering, creative power of the spirit, in its ability to transcend the grimmest and smallest of situations.  I remember the specific moment I internalized this truth -- I was pretty young, seven or eight, and reading Anne Frank’s Diary.  Afterwards, my head was spinning at the richness and complexity of Anne's life and thoughts, despite her external confines; she and her family lived in a hidden concave behind a bookshelf for years.  Anyway, the old people at Walazo have similar lives: monotonous, restricted.  I read an article last week about an old people’s home in LA called EngAGE, “senior housing where the old go to flourish, not wither.”  EngAGE provides lots of engaging art programs, social events and creative outlets for the elderly, and it’s an admirable thing – but the contrast to Walazo is so terribly stark that it breaks my heart.   Those two worlds (the tango-ing grandparents in LA, and the sleepy silent wazee of Walazo) are infinitely distant from each other.

Walazo: Jikoni

During my time at Walazo, I mostly worked in the kitchen.  I won’t go into the paltry details of my contribution there, but suffice it to say that where I once thought I “knew how to cook,” I now believe myself slow, inept and non-intuitive around food.  I cannot even properly hold a paring-knife.  Still, in my Walazo weeks, I learned some wonderful secrets and techniques of Zanzibari cooking, including how to make: coconut stock from fresh coconuts, a spicy mchuzi, samaki paka and a festive pilau, among other wonders.

Besides being a home for the elderly and a convent, Walazo is kind of an alt-hippie-commune.  They grow their own veggies, milk their own cows, pump their own water and breed their own chickens.  They have a stone milk-room (also the laundry room), where tin pails are lined up in different corners of the room, filled with cream or milk or curds or butter, or sheets soaking in bleach.

In the kitchen, we’d start cooking at about 7:00 am, and have lunch ready by 1:00.  The kitchen was pretty sparse and industrial, with four huge black cooking-vats whose wood-fires needed constant stoking, and four square cement chimneys that rose up through the middle of the room.  They were black near the ceiling from the layer of smoke that hung in the top third of the room.  While I always found the food we created to be delicious and lovingly-spiced, the old people rarely thought so.  Every afternoon when I hung out with them, they complained about lunch.  They though the spinach was too watery, the fish was too salty, the guy in the bed next to them got a bigger mango, the soup was too oily, the rice had a faint burnt aftertaste, the chai wasn’t sweet enough, the beans were inedible (one lady, Bibi Jane, actually threw her beans on the ground in protest).  Their complaints were creative and varied and endless.

Working in Walazo kitchen -- and fielding the ensuing gripes from the wazee -- was kind of taxing.  Even on the days when the old people seemed to enjoy their food, there was no recognition of the effort (and even the love and affection) that went into the meal.  Head-Chef Costa was always murmuring to himself as he stirred the pots, about how he hoped they would like this dish or that sauce – he really wanted his food to be a pleasure.

I think there are some aspects of our lives that we only notice years later, when we gain an awareness or a perspective that eluded us at the time.  And for me, sweating through those smoky mornings in Walazo kitchen made me think, suddenly and regretfully, of my high school cafeteria.  The workers there cooked three meals a day for a boarding school of 500 kids, on a comparably limited budget to Walazo’s.  And I probably complained about nine out of every ten meals there.  Like Bibi Jane, there were meals where I deemed the food totally inedible.  I made a habit of stealing a loaf of Wonderbread from the dinner buffet and eating it for the next three meals, until I could get another loaf… resulting in a severe case of anemia my senior year.  Anyway, in retrospect the food was fine, especially given the worker-to-student ratio, and I wish I’d been more grateful to the kitchen-guys.  Maybe they were apathetic about their work, but maybe they were hoping for just one day where we'd all come to dinner and say, “Wow this food is fantastic!”

There were three cooks in the kitchen: Costa (fatherly head chef), Simai (sad middle-aged man) and Hasani (cheeky 23-year-old).  When I first met Simai, he was picking out the bad beans from the good beans, going through them one-by-one on a plate, which takes a long time when you’re combing through beans enough for forty people.  I soon found out that bean-sorting was his only job, and Walazo mostly hires him as an act of charity.  Last year, he had a bad motorcycle crash that broke both of his hands, leaving them permanently busted and bent.  Simai usually comes to work dressed up in a pseudo-suit, carrying a book and stroking his small, combed moustache.  At tea-time on the first day, he pulled out a hefty physics textbook, and wanted to tell me about “locomotion.”  On the second day he brought a trashy Kiswahili romance novel, which I read later while he scratched his way through thousands of beans.  On the third day, he brought a gory Tanzanian horror-comic; the drawing on the cover repulsed me so much that I didn't open it.

Walazo: The Dadas

Walazo is an old people’s home (kwa watu wasiojiweza) located about twenty minutes inland from Stonetown, Zanzibar.  It’s perched on the top of a high hill; from the dala-dala stop on the main road, it takes fifteen minutes to climb up to the gate.  From inside Walazo’s compound, you can see all of Stonetown sprawling out yellowy-grey and mysterious and tightly-packed until it hits the sea, and the coastline all spiked with dhows and ropes, and the huge, silent cargo ships wallowing just off the coast.  You see the quaint roofs and minarets of Stonetown shift abruptly to the geometric Soviet-era-like housing blocks that rim the city, and then the gradual spreading-out of buildings – more greenery, interrupted by corrugated tin – as the land gets nearer.  And then a huge green mosque just below, one of its two giant speakers aimed toward us, and the other toward the sea.

Walazo is run by three Catholic nuns, who I grew already terribly attached to.  At lunch on the afternoon I arrived, they were pouring each other tall glasses of sour milk – thick, clotted, off-white. 

“Take some, it’s so good,” said Sister Rita.  I declined as politely as I could, and she shrugged and drank her own milk with gusto.  The sour-milk smell clung to their clothes for the rest of the day and made me feel slightly nauseous.  By the time I left two weeks later, I was fond of the smell -- or at least I didn't mind it, the way you don't mind hugging the guy you love after he's played a game of soccer and is drenched in sweat.

The American elections happened a week after I arrived, early Wednesday morning.  Sister Gemma (the leader of the Sisters: stout and regal) had questioned me extensively about the US election process.  The Sisters were all emotionally invested in the outcome, and during their prayer-time on Tuesday, they asked God to choose the best leader for our “great nation.”  I woke up early the next morning (midnight in the States) to watch Tanzanian coverage of the results on the Sisters’ TV.  Everyone else woke up with me, and cheered when letters at the bottom of the screen read: “Obama Victorious.”  The channel kept showing the percentages of the popular vote that each candidate received: 48% to 49.5%, numbers like that.

“Yaani, Kenya needs to learn from America!” said Sister Rita, a Kenyan.  “Your voters are almost half-half, yet you can elect a president without violence!”  I don’t know if the caricatured bipolar system we have is the greatest democratic model, but I do feel privileged to come from a country where democracy “works” (though I just read an article about a bunch of states petitioning to secede after Obama’s reelection... haha).

Sister Gemma went into town for groceries that morning and came back with a tub of blueberry ice cream to celebrate; she called it “the Obama Party.” The blue ice cream was probably not political on purpose, but I was silently amused.

The Sisters prayed twice a day in their prayer chapel on the bottom floor of their house.  It was dark and cool and I loved sitting in the back while they sing canticles out of a prayer-book. Sister Gemma changed the words when she read prayers aloud: where it said “our brothers” in the book, she read “our brothers… and sisters.”  Loved that little feminist streak.  There was a red light in the front of the chapel, set inside a little enclave, that "housed the Holy Spirit."  Whenever we entered the chapel, the Sisters dipped their fingers in an iron receptacle near the door that contained Holy Water and dabbed it on their foreheads.  When they prayed, they lit candles in front of two large plastic figurines of Mary and Joseph.

One thing that kept amazing me was how superstitious the Sisters were.  Some folks think religion in general is superstition, that belief in God is equivalent to belief in fairies and gnomes.  I'm not one of those people; I believe in God.  But the Sisters were always talking with utter gravity about the wild and freaky elements of the Supernatural!  Once, they told me about the decennial unveiling of St. Francis Xavier's body and how it doesn’t decompose and still flows with blood.  They said that at the last unveiling, one devout Catholic cut off Francis' toe as as souvenir, and the blood that came gushing out was as bright and red as a teenager's.

They talked about the mermaids off the coast of Mombasa who come out when the sunlight is at its brightest, surfacing like a flash in a pan, and then diving back underwater when a cloud covers the sun.  They're visible, far offshore, with hair as long and dark and flowing as the sea. 

They told me about one old man in their home who used to practice Black Magic on his porch, and how the school-kids near Walazo would come to him after school; they wanted him to predict their futures and cast spells over their exam results.  One afternoon, the Sisters discovered his porch littered with sticks and seeds and leaves and dust in dark vortexed patterns.  After that, they moved him to a room directly opposite their house, so they could "keep on eye on him."

Sister Njeri told me about her bus-ride back from the Uluguru Mountains last week.  She had boarded the bus with a fellow nun, and this man suddenly sprang from his seat and started screaming, “The angels have arrived!  I can’t do it any more!  Our plans are ruined!  There will be no blood today!  I’m sorry Asha!  Oh the cross, the cross, put it away!”  He was shielding his eyes with one hand and pointing to the rosaries around their necks with the other. The Sisters informed me that Asha is the demon that inhabits the man – a demon who lives off of fresh human blood.  For the rest of the bus-ride, the man kept crying and apologizing to Asha, and listing off his recent victims: “I left Fatuma in Dar es Salaam!  I ate Anna in Moshi!”

The man was riding the bus in order to cause an accident (with casualties) so that he could feed his hungry demon.  The sisters told me with utter seriousness that vampire-demons are the reason for most of the bus wrecks in Tanzania: “That is why you see no blood on the road, even when many passengers die.”  The demon-man was scaring so many passengers that Sister Njeri doused the guy with the last centimeter of Holy Water in her plastic water bottle, and he grew quiet for the rest of the ride.

The Leaning Season

He left just as I was starting to need him, which was a timely lesson in (in)dependency: it’s good not to need anything too much.  I read an article earlier today that said coffee might be extinct in 70 years, and my first thought was not, “How can we save our environment and remedy this terrible issue!” Instead I thought “Ugh, I should probably start weaning myself off of coffee now, instead of waiting til it gets super rare and expensive.”  Maybe one day I'll devote my career to saving Arabica-region coffees… but for now, I’m learning about detachment.  I’ve found that a lot of life consists of finding things that we resonate with – people, places, causes, organizations – followed by a period of loving and growing more attached to them, followed by a period of creating distance and letting them go.  It’s always like that: the drawing close, and then the backswing, the unavoidable distancing.  I’m still pretty young and maybe my life-paradigms are influenced by my mobile history, but everything seems marked by its temporariness.

One night, leaving Soma Book Café after a music show, we were squished in the back of a car with some of his coworkers.  The guys in the front seat were tossing around the word shoga as an insult (bad Kiswahili slang for ‘homosexual’) and he interrupted them and asked angrily why being a shoga is a bad thing, he said it’s a great thing, he said that Tanzanians need to accept that being a shoga is normal, and his Kiswahili was perfect -- it always gets better when he's arguing.  His friends laughed, dismissive or embarrassed (I couldn't tell which), but I think I loved him then and I catalogued all those comments in my mind, and took note of the weight he assigned to words, to people.  

He doesn’t like America very much, and I guess that should bother me more than it does, but neither of us have a strong sense of nation.  He thinks Americans call everything “awesome” until the word is emptied of meaning. He thinks we say “like” too often – a theory that I only helped to concretize.

One night after dancing to the old school beatz of Msondo & Sikinde, I slept over because I couldn’t find a taxi, or just because I wanted to. He had an itinerant’s room; spare, only partially unpacked.  There was an empty soymilk box under the kitchen sink, and colorless European toothpaste in the bathroom, and a few books scattered around the room.  His bed was neatly made. These are the things I remember:

He was washing up in the bathroom and I was flipping through a book on his bed (Outliers) and telling him about another Malcolm Gladwell book called Blink, whose thesis is that we can tell a lot about each other from our first split-second impressions, before we start misleading each other with words and gestures.  I was talking too much about things I didn’t know much about, which is what I do when I’m nervous.  He called out from the bathroom over the sound of piss on ceramic, “Yeah, we’re always acting… I mean, all of life is a performance.” And I didn't know if he was talking about himself, or about us, or about people in general; I felt that I had no gauges for him, no ways of measuring the things he said.

Later, after we turned out the lights and turned on the fan, I rolled over to face the wall and tried not to look at him, afraid that his beauty would overwhelm me – afraid that if I were to glance at his shoulders, I might reach out and touch them.  For some reason, I felt like I wasn't allowed to touch him, that I'd be breaching an unspoken pact between us if I did.  We talked a little under the whir of the fan.  Before I fell asleep, I remember feeling his weird braid between my hands in the dark while I told him about my mom.