Porch Sitting: Christmas in August

Yesterday evening I ended up sitting on my porch surrounded by students from all different standards. We moved from discussing differences between New York and Tanzania to asking, and in my case, answering, all manner of questions about Father Christmas. They wanted to know what he wore, making the motion of a stocking cap; if he flew (I described reindeer and even sang 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer'); if he had a family; where he lived; what he did the rest of the year and who made all the presents (elves). In addition, they asked whether children ever waited up to see him (we talked about leaving milk and cookies here and a girl commented that that was why he was so fat!), and how the letters the children wrote really reached Santa Claus in the North Pole? I learned that even though they had heard that Santa visits all over the world, he did not really come to Bukoba, and that they did not have, "what are the socks that presents are put in?", stockings.


After this, they wanted to compare different foods that we ate. Every single student thought that matoke (unsweetened mashed bananas) was the most delicious food in the world, and grasshoppers, which they insisted I had to try when they came in season, were a close second. According to one of my students they are lightly fried, crunchy and sweet. Before I had time question the tastiness of grasshoppers, I found myself receiving my own private Swahili lesson with about 10 teachers at once. They were all curious to find out which words I knew, and laughed when they heard me say them in Swahili!

My Swahili lesson was cut short by the gong announcing bed time, and I found myself sitting and enjoying the night. The moon is orange tonight - primeval. The night is relatively quiet, but the noises I do hear are unfamiliar, unknown and wild. Perhaps I am describing what one would stereotypically call "Africa", but the truth is, that it is completely and utterly wild and different from our American wilderness. The north woods has wildness in the unfriendly spruce, bears and moose and in the stillness and peace of knowing that the darkness contains streams, lilypadded lakes and the smell of balsam fir. The wildness here is full of bright colors, trees and flowers that I have never seen before, thistles that grow as tall as myself and trees that have inch long thorns on them. It is strange, but even the silence itself is wild and foreign, I think, because it contains the unfamiliar - I don't know what the dark is holding or how an orange moon will illuminate it.