I must have been almost crazy
to start out all alone like that on my bicycle
pedaling into the tropics carrying
a medicine for which no one had found
the disease and hoping
I would make it on time.

I passed through a paper village under glass
where the explorers first found
silence and taught it to speak
where old men were sitting in front
of their houses killing sand without mercy.

brothers I shouted to them
tell me who moved the river
where can I find a good place to drown?

Shortly after I had malaria last fall, I went to Mafia Island with Dr. Chilowaka and Jorji, one of the community health workers. My second night on the island, I stayed at one of the tourist lodges—a place with a tile, rather than cracked cement, floor; with crepes for dessert in the evening; with a gorgeous beach and lounge chairs that Tanzanian staff would run up and cover with a woven straw mat and a bolster pillow as you approached. It was a world I’d forgotten existed—as I turned on the air-conditioner that night and went to sleep looking out over the beach, I wondered whether I was still sick and my illness had now progressed to hallucinations.

Standing at the reception—the front of a massive banda, whose rear stretched out to form a shaded terrace, overlooking the sea—as I fished out my wallet to pay $70 to enjoy tile, crepes, and a manicured stretch of sand, I wanted to sink through the floor in humiliation—I couldn’t help but see myself as I must appear to Jorji, who had driven me across the island to the lodge: I felt myself brutally exposed as a fraud, as someone all together different than the Buguruni native I had been pretending to be.

But, while I might have been fooling myself, I don’t think Jorji or any of my other Tanzanian friends were ever really fooled—Jorji hardly batted an eyelash as he climbed back into the Jeep and set back off to the other side of the island. (Although he did later ask me to buy his friend a pair of “original” Timberland boots for Christmas.) What was exposed was not my true material circumstances, the core of me that craved some sort of aesthetic soothing after a month in urban Dar es Salaam, but my own wishful thinking.

You see, I had been living all along with this relatively deluded idea that Jorji—and everyone else I knew in Tanzania—considered me to be one of them. I sputtered along in Kiswahili; I sweated at night inside my cement shack; I carried buckets of water and used squat toilets; I argued with banana vendors—and I had imagined that, living in some sort of approximation of their lives, they would believe me to be no different than they.

It was a bitter realization of my difference, then, as I sat quietly with the curtains blowing in from the sea, eating my crepes, speaking softly in Kiswahili to my waiter. The whole experience stuck in my throat; even as I sat on the beach in the sunrise, sketching the men clambering off the sailboat that brought them out to the island to work in the morning, I kept glancing over my shoulder. It was as though I were a criminal.

I have come to grips with some, although not all, of this in the time since, and playing the tourist still is quite a tricky piece of work for me. But something Beverly told me last year, when I was telling her about how Jorji watched me in that reception area on Mafia as I pulled a stack of bills out of my bag, has stuck with me: that I was never going to be a Tanzanian—I was raised in a suburb in the Midwest of the United States—and it was a good thing for me to know who I was and what I needed to keep myself going.

Because, like it or not, I am not a Tanzanian, and to live here as one for so many months has been a trial at times. I needed that day on Mafia after being in Buguruni—I needed these past two weeks of vacation after being at Olania. I accept that. But still, there are moments when—switching on a fan, climbing out of a swimming pool, getting into a taxi cab—that I suddenly freeze, looking for the exposing flash of a camera, and think to myself: what a fraud.

Abu and his compatriot—Olania’s two “fundis” or handymen—give me a daily update when I make my late afternoon rounds. I come to visit them when the light grows low and lovely and the temperature becomes remotely humane, sometime around 5 pm, with my body sticky but mellowed from having sung and danced with the girls at their afternoon prayer service. The new screens filter the light that pours into the classroom at this time of day, further softening it, and it is a pleasure to look on Abu’s work—a pleasure to think that these screens he is helping me build are something that I have contributed to the girls here at Olania.

That all being said, it has seemed an age to get these screens constructed and in place. Moreover, they seem to have presented no end of expense and hassle—from bobbing along in the daladala with Christina to buy the first round of materials, to the crooked businessman in Mpigi Magohe who sold us rolls of screen with much less than the meterage advertised, to Abu’s penchant for buying half the wood or nails he might need at any one time—primarily, I imagine, so as to eke out additional trips, financed by Mary, to Mbezi throughout the week. Thus I am impressed that we have made it even this far. I have even promised Abu some English lessons before I go in a shameless attempt to ensure that he finishes with everything squared away even if he has to continue with his work after I have gone. [Considering, however, my stellar teaching record (see previous) I am not sure who is getting the better end of this alleged bargain.]

In the meantime, we are still waiting for Mr. Gao and his truck of long-lasting nets to arrive. This is Tanzania after all, and everything goes polepole (slowly slowly), a reality further complicated by the fact that Gao—the only major LLITN distributor in Dar—somehow has run out of nets. I live in fear that the few things I have been able to physically contribute will crumble away, go unfulfilled, or be only partially finished.

Similarly with the files, brochures, newsletters, and other paperwork I’ve been helping the German volunteers design. They, too, seem to have caught the polepole disease, and as I see the need at Olania as looming, omnipresent, pressing, it is for them somehow much less urgent. Perhaps this is their method of adapting to living here for almost six months now. I wonder, though, if the files I have spent days writing and designing and editing will ever, ever, be put to any sort of use. If only I had four more weeks, I keep thinking—four more weeks to go crazy in, perhaps, but four more weeks to shepherd things along a bit more. There are so many little boats I keep launching, ideas of folded paper that I keep floating, pushing towards the people to whom I keep talking about this place. I know some of them will capsize, but I hope something—anything—will reach its destination. That something will bear fruit.

Keep Olania and her girls in your prayers.

There are some real clunkers of exams that have passed through my fingertips—I tend to be most indignant about the English tests that I am unable to interpret, understand, or otherwise translate into any recognizable idiom—but similarly amazing are the science tests with the answer options:
The sun is a star because:
A) The sun is nearer (to what? than what?)
B) At night have sun bright (paint me clueless)
C) Sun is the last star (of what?)
Sometimes, in typing the exams, I and the others make mistakes, and we get corrections back in glaring red pen. I accept the science teacher’s demands that I spell “sulfur” with a “ph” and hemolysis with an “ae”, but I drew the line at renaming “aluminum” “aluminium”.

Some of the tests straight-up terrify me: typing the Kiswahili exams, with their long stories, comprehension questions, essay assignments, and heaven knows what else in what resembles a complex code, and a frightening one at that, rendered with the red, jaggedly scribbled teeth that underscore pages and pages in Microsoft Word. Typing these pages goes slowly, especially as my mind is prone to wander—I get stuck imagining what I might mean if I had invented the verb” alimchinja”. It sounds painful. Like doing the splits without lots of stretching first.

It’s also a strange and frustrating task to be assigned. Given the painstaking labor that so clearly went into the calligraphy, the hand-drawn diagrams, the tables rendered with Bic pen and plastic ruler, I feel as though this endless litany of typing and correcting lies on the interval between pointless and worthless—couldn’t I be more helpful in some other capacity? This, indeed, is the constant weight I drag about and I am still uncertain about.

Indeed, I don’t know that I am of much use to the girls. When I sit with one or two over their English notebooks, I rarely fathom what, according to their notes, are supposed to be the rules of my native language, and my attempt to equate English with Kiswahli is met with anger or fright. Or, when asked to lecture to the class of essentially non-English speaking Form I girls on the nature of “compound-complex” sentences, I am prone to a lot of hand-waving (a trait I hate in my own teachers) in combination with a great deal of hand-wringing (an inherited failing). In helping the girls with chemistry, we keep getting caught up with the periodic table and the charges of protons and electrons—which appear to change, in their minds, hourly—as what for me is essential background information is to them incomprehensible English babble and much less interesting than the actual answers to their homework, delivered ASAP. I am more successful with maths—demonstrating factoring is easy, until, that is, you get the girls who cannot multiply. I still shudder when I recall the aghast faces of Form III when I suggested that condoms prevent the spread of HIV. I briefly feared stoning. Perhaps the only thing I have done successfully is help a half-blind Form I student, Oliva, draw an outline map of East Africa.

This is compounded by the fact that I am only here for one month, and I am less than sure that anything I say, draw, or pontificate about will have an effect. The girls need good teachers who write good exams and speak good English. They need consistent teaching, where they learn to think, not to memorize—most of Form I can tell me what an independent clause is (“a sentence that can stand by itself”), in the perfectly harmonized chant of the successfully brainwashed, but when I ask what any of that means (or give them a board full of phrases—”big coconuts”, “if I go”, “I went swimming”, “because of this”) they could not identify one to save their lives. They need more than me, or more of me than I am able to give in just four short weeks. It makes me angry.

So, in the meantime, I type, I proctor, and I try to convince myself that, for the time being, I am not completely useless.

This past weekend the “delegation” visiting us was “very special”, according to the school’s accountant, Christina. She confided this to me while bobbing along on the dirt road from Mpigi Magohe to Olania, each of us guarding two, huge, just-purchased rolls of mosquito netting and wire mesh from the other daladala passengers. I did not receive her news, I fear, with the appropriate excitement: I was involved in an ongoing battle to keep the fingers of three 15-year old girls out of my hair, whose texture was apparently an overwhelming temptation.

I was also less than enthusiastic because it had been quite a feat to get Christina to participate in my purchasing venture in the first place. Indeed, I had to lay ambush to her in the midst of the school’s garden patch where, wearing an Illinois basketball T-Shirt and battered sneakers, she was leaping over sisal plants, hurdling dirt mounds in a single bound, and shouting orders at the top of her lungs while gesticulating madly in several directions at once. I had to steadily steer her up the hillside like a shepherd collie—always staying just below, pushing her upwards one line of latitude at a time, until she found herself out the gate and at the street, bouncing from one foot to the other as we waited for the daladala to arrive.

Further, I personally believed that the preparations for this delegation—the activities that Christina’s aerobics were designed to encourage—were ridiculous. The hoes—taller than some of the girls—were out in full force, and they were being sturdily and repeatedly applied to each tiny blade of grass that had managed to sprout up out of the sandy hillside. Those girls without hoes were wandering with plastic maize sacks and a knotted bundle of sisal stalks, which they used for sweeping stray palm fronds or pieces of grass into little heaps, and then, with their hands, scooping the piles into the empty sacks. I was not wild about the (desolate) results: without any roots to hold it, the quantity of dirt washed away in each afternoon rain shower is something to marvel at, and the mounds and humps where the dirt accumulates afterwards leaves the landscape weirdly undulated and dangerous to navigate.

I’m surprised, actually, that Christina interrupted her enthusiastic overseeing to visit Mpigi Magohe or even to listen to my opinions on terracing (resurrected lectures, courtesy of my Minnesota-farmer father), as the delegation was, indeed, quite special—a true blue (or should I say purple?) cardinal of East Africa arrived Saturday along with a horde of women and men, swathed in blue and white printed vitenge and T-shirts advertising a society of a sacred child, a society which none of our girls could tell me much about—all that came across was that its founding had involved Pope John Paul II, which did not exactly narrow down the possibilities.

I wish I felt that all the environmental terrorism I witnessed on Friday—all the bags filled with tiny shreds or grass, all the uprootings here and there, all the stacks of chairs the girls balanced, seemingly unconcernedly, on their heads as they strutted across the just-cleared, brown-swirled moonscape of our hill—had been worthwhile, but I must admit I found the whole visit a great bore: Sarah and I were entrusted with someone’s baby until it began to cry noisily and without pause; the printed schedule was overly ambitious to the tune of three hours, and sitting through a mass in Kiswahili that involves six priests and one bishop is no more exciting—although much longer—than a normal service featuring only one pastor.

All the fuss for the bishop did pay off, in one respect, however: there were special supplies bought for his lunch—which he hardly touched—and thus everyone has been eating quite well these last few days: specialties such as honey, hard-boiled eggs, and cookies have been popping up at meals quite unexpectedly. Maybe the bishop’s prayers will come to something, too—one of the few invocations I understood mentioned preserving our school in good condition. As I trek back and forth from the school rooms to the dorms—inspecting screening and teaching English classes—I find myself surreptitiously evaluating foundations and superstructures. I wouldn’t want my bedroom to be the next thing to wash up down on the playing field.

Take, for instance, my Thursday late-morning adventure: a prospective trip to the Pugu Hills to go hiking in what Sarah (German volunteer #1)’s German guidebook promised to be a beautiful “Ur-wald” on the outskirts of DSM.*

[*Aside: I cannot tell you how excited I was to go on a hiking trip with a crowd of Germans. I pictured past wanderings through the Waelder outside of Vienna, complete with lots of cheese, rye bread, and German hiking songs. Translating this to the context of Tanzania promised to be the stuff of hilarity—at the very least stuff of real anthropological interest. I packed my notebook and pencil and was ready to go two hours ahead of schedule.]

With Alexander (German volunteer #2) driving the Olania school bus (part of the comedy of this whole outing was provided by the fact that everything occurred in, on, or within the near vicinity of this large, completely incongruous, gas-guzzling vehicle), it took us more than two hours of driving—and getting lost—to reach Pug, although Pugu, it turns out, is really not that difficult to find. Our search was complicated, however, by the fact that the person giving directions was speaking in English (i.e., me) and the person who was listening to the directions (i.e., Alex) was having a debate in German with Philip (German visitor #1) about the relative talents of the band Coldplay. It was also complicated by the (brief) arrest of the driver: pulling an un-signaled right turn onto Nelson Mandela, Alex attracted the attention of a policeman, who demanded his license, gesticulated intimidatingly, and, after bumming a ride for about one mile, decided to forego writing an official ticket and just to fine us 20,000/= TSh for the infraction (i.e. he accepted a bribe to let the matter pass).

Upon finally reaching Pugu, it turned out that you cannot go hiking without prior reservations. It also turned out that hiking illegally (we were on a roll, already, so why not continue) was almost impossible without a guide, as the forest paths are uncut and unmarked and what footways there are are difficult to navigate and/or offer only scenic tours of local rock piles—discouraging to us but not to the crew of local children who enjoy trailing troupes of Wazungu chanting “Money! Money!” in a sing-song cadence that recalls Abba hits of a previous generation. This refrain appears to have also infected the young men who had agreed to stand guard over our school bus (which had barely managed to bounce down the narrow, unpaved, stone-filled dirt road to the nature outpost and was now tucked away in a grove next to some one’s rusty tractor) while we hiked—because although our foray into the forest had lasted all of maybe thirty minutes, they demanded the price originally agreed upon for three hours worth of vigilance. They eventually accepted a discount, but only after obtaining a ride into the city center—and, as we had an entire, empty school bus at our service, they were not the only ones who tried to flag us down.

I had not counted on the bad mood that can oppress a German male (volunteer #2) whose well-made plans have gone quite notably askew. Example: in an effort to lighten the mood, I told Alex that our trip had, after all, been quite valuable, as it had proved the viability of a new fundraising scheme for Olania: we should begin a daladala service between Mpigi Magoe and the Pugu Hills. He, unfortunately, did not find this funny in the least.

Because there was only one place to hide safely during the night time hours—on my bed, shaded by the plastic, insecticide-impregnated expanse of my blue Olyset net, a net through which I had to maneuver by prying it up from the edges of the mattress and limboing underneath the hem, and then, kneeling on my pillow, methodically tuck back into the bed frame, my fingers squeezed together and bent to form spade-like tools.

How does one imagine the little cave a mosquito net describes? If it’s a really good net, the cave is square, the net suspended at four corners from two wooden T’s tacked on to the head and foot of the bed frame or from hooks screwed into the ceiling plaster. (This prevents touching it at night.) The net’s top never seems to be pulled fully taut but instead sags a bit in the middle, drooping under the weight of all the N2 and O2 molecules bearing down from above. Climbing in under a net is sort of like being tucked in at night: both the physical act of pushing in the mesh all around and the idea of having, through that ritual, shut out something quite dangerous, something that—even though you can look out at it from your safe haven—cannot get in at you.

A net really only works, though, if the mesh is intact and has been treated with insecticide—it is only protective if it can entangle and poison whatever is trying to pass through it. An untreated or hole-filled net is about as helpful as the preferred technique of one of my study subjects in Buguruni: lying underneath a mattress—i.e. it’s hot, inconvenient and completely ineffective.

Here at Olania, none of the girls have square nets; none have insecticide-treated nets, either, and most of their nets wouldn’t be useful as rags. To make matters worse, there’s not a lot of other protections out there: the classroom and dormitory walls have never been sprayed with long-lasting insecticide (too expensive), none of the buildings where the girls study at night have screened windows, let alone screen doors; and no one really likes to put on long pants and long sleeves when the temperature is 85 F with 100% humidity, even at midnight.

And the girls drop like flies from malaria. Many have it monthly—lying on their bunks, self-administering quinine injections, missing class and taxing their tired bodies still further. It’s brutal.

Sitting here at Olania, I’ve felt almost as if I’m being assaulted by needs on all sides—the unfinished laboratory, the Form IV girls who will be cut loose next September, the eroding hillside, the broken fish-dam. Mosquito nets, however, are something I know a bit about; that is a world where I have some connections.

So I spent Thursday back in Buguruni—my old house has been taken over as the public health center, and it required a weird mental readjustment upon seeing Cecy, the MEA secretary, with her desk full of three (all broken) printers in the middle of my old living room. Most of the time there I was talking with Mr. Gao, who agreed to give me nets at a marked discount, and—once the full order arrives—to drive them out to Olania along with a community health educator for a day of instruction about net-use and malaria prevention. I plan to use the remaining funds Ann and Alan put together to see if anything can be done to screen the buildings.

You see, it’s not just a matter of abstract sympathy; it is more practically personal. I—like the girls—have been going to bed these last weeks under the exact same type of nets as they do. For the past weeks, my bed—like theirs—has been not a fortress but rather an indefensible battle zone. And it’s scary, knowing that the one place I’m accustomed to finding safety has become, instead, the one place I’m most vulnerable. I hope the nets arrive soon.

I had begun with two of the girls in gingham—we were all late for the 8 AM departure time—but we soon caught Maristella, thunking along slowly on her own at the back of the group, the clay soil of the road giving her great trouble.

It took the two of us a long time to reach the church, the humidity and the heat slowing us perhaps more than Mama Maristella’s badly-twisted, clubbed foot. Indeed, I often forget Maristella’s disability; it is only when she walks that it is apparent, and even then, the bright attention of her face—cocked, a bit pained, twisted towards one shoulder in order to help leverage her lagging leg alongside—is anything but impaired.

Although Mama Maristella did not found Olania—that was done, curiously enough, by an accountant in the National Ministry of Energy and Minerals—she is the school. It is Maristella who goes unpaid whenever the school cannot meet its operating budget, trying to prevent the other teachers from realizing how strapped Olania is for funds and abandoning the school. Every year it is Mama Maristella—with her painful clubbed foot—who travels from end to end of the country, financed by whatever donations can be scraped together, interviewing orphans and trying to bring back the most needy to Olania. And it is Maristella who teaches the girls to tie their kitenge skirts, who lectures them on avoiding snakes in the long grass, who makes them into her children.

I tried to speak with her, as we labored slowly along—Mama Maristella bridling and hurriedly limping to the farthest edge of the roadside at the sound of every approaching car—about Olania’s finances. Maristella understood my description of a 501(c) only vaguely, turning the conversation instead to their unfinished laboratory building—stalled for lack of funds in the shell stage, decorated with hanging conduit, piles of cement powder, and uninstalled sinks. She talked, too, of how the school does not have enough money to hire teachers licensed to instruct Forms V and VI, the years of high school necessary to complete the college entrance exams and earn university scholarships. Nor, apparently, does Olania have enough money to pay the fees of the local, government secondary school, where the girls might study these final forms while continuing to live with Maristella. Maristella literally wrung her hands and, unfolding her handkerchief, wiped the perspiration from her forehead, as she thought of how, come September, she would have to send all her Form IV students back to the lives she had rescued them from.

I am not sure how Mama Maristella bears it—I, outsider that I am, felt infected by despair as we talked. I am also not sure what can be done—for, as briefly as I have been here, I am convinced that something must happen. Even as there was need in Buguruni—need to finance mosquito nets, distribute sanitary birthkits, offer free HIV testing—there is an essential need here, too: to teach young people—young women in particular—to want more, to know more, to understand more than their parents did. These are the young women who will demand mosquito nets, safe deliveries, and protected sex.

In trying to articulate “what can be done,” I struggle, too, with the ethic of “successful mission”: of not “doing for” but rather “doing with”. I sit here and dream of grants to finish the laboratory, of sponsors to pay the $60 a term to send the high-performing students to Forms V and VI at the government school in Mbezi, of a formal connection with some organization who can provide regular funds. And then I poke holes in all my little bubbles: who will send reports back to the grant-providing organization? Who will communicate with sponsors and send them reports, letters or photographs from the girls? Who is able to check email, update the website, coordinate internationally, network, or write grant applications?

What I am asking myself—and I hate myself for thinking like this—is who can be Olania’s permanent Mzungu? And is there another way? How can one set up something that is (to use Priscilla Z’s old refrain from my Buguruni days) “sustainable”?

And—and this is the worst part—despite one year spent hither and yon in Tanzania, I still have no idea.

The pressures and the schedules here are at the Olania school are intense: at 5:30 this morning I was awoken by the girls singing hymns to the pitch black sky; they had already been out of bed for an hour, having only slept for five preceding that. Their long days are consumed with a combination of hard study and hard physical labor: when there is not enough of one or the other, the headmistress, Mama Maristella, invents something for the girls to do. For instance, as I write, she is directing a crowd to level the land around the school dining hall; this is, in many respects, a senseless effort: the school is terraced into a precipitously sloped hillside of sand, and to level the land would require many months’ work with heavy machinery and supports for the shifting soil. Mama Maristella, however, expects them to dig away for the rest of the daylight hours, the crowds of purple and red clad girls swinging hoes high into the air and sinking them into soil that has already been dampened and loosened by buckets of water.

Yet Mama Maristella is neither sadistic nor insane. The stakes here are just incredibly, unbelievably high.

For everything about the existence of this school and the continuance of these girls’ educations is tenuous. The school subsists strictly on charitable donations; if no local parish sends a truck on Saturday, the meager gardens that the girls rake and hoe and water from five until seven at night are their only source of sustenance that week. Their scholarly futures are similarly uncertain: Olania can only offer the first four—instead of the full six—years of secondary school, and once the class of fourth-year students takes their completion exams in August, they will be on their own again, as legal adults. How they fare, once released back into the world that Olania “rescued” them from hangs on what they have learned—at the very least, in order to try to continue their education elsewhere or get a job in Dar es Salaam, they will need excellent English skills and high grades on the leaving exams. For Mama Maristella, then, every moment is crucial: if the girls are not tending the gardens, they may well starve tomorrow; if they are not studying their books, they may well starve next year. The work she invents is conceived and born of this desperate vision.

At the same time—as much as I rebel against this tableau of constant, unending work, this version of adolescence spent in a semi-convent without a moment’s rest—it is not all so dire. The girls’ exam results are incredible: despite Olania’s meager resources, the scores on last year’s leaving exams placed the school 27th out of a regional crowd of 538 other secondary academies. Moreover, the scene is not one out of Oliver Twist or Annie, the girls are engaging and engaged, they dance as they carry water to the garden or stand to sing during a pause in their afternoon study time. They laugh; they do aerobics with a German volunteer on Wednesday afternoons. They mercilessly tease the only male volunteer (he can never find his flip flops).

Indeed, as much as they are driven by Mama Maristella, there is in them the seeds of their own internal drive: whether the headmistress has lit that light or whether the girls came here with it already flickering, it is amazing to see.

Explaining the last weeks would be difficult to do at best and incomprehensible at worst, so forgive me if I summarize: there were several messages, steadily accumulating, that told me it was time to leave Dodoma.

When I re-arrived in Dar in January, fresh off my plane from the States—when Anania picked me up at the airport and navigated me around the hot nightmare of the city streets—it was such a relief to see Dar passing by my windowpane and to know that I wasn’t going to be living here again. There is something about this place that, living in it day in and day out last fall, I found so strenuous, so exhausting to push back against, to be constantly vigilant regarding.

Yet here I am again.

And while I dread the humidity, the dirt, the pressure, the aggression, and the frustration that I associate with Dar es Salaam—the lack of amenities from water to electricity to cool, quiet nights and mornings—when my bus trundled into Ubungo station yesterday evening, I was exhilarated to find myself in the midst of this uniquely Tanzanian bedlam. I felt almost buoyant as I hopped (after an hour of waiting–this is still Tanzania after all) into Anania’s car—catching a glimpse of myself in the side-view mirrors, wearing a yellow, crumpled T-shirt, laughing fit to cry as Anania told the tale of his father chasing him with a shot-gun through the bush hollering: “I have eight children! What do I care if I kill one, and it is seven? Better not to have such a trouble-maker in my family!” It felt welcoming. It felt right.

Because there was—and is—always something happening in Dar—from the crazy traffic jams, to the pumping discos, to the crowds of banana and cell phone and newspaper vendors in front of the post office; this city is alive. And the aid organizations here are active as well—in contrast to the 10 or 15 that DCMC attracts, Buguruni, for instance, sees well over 150 patients per day.

I am not going to Buguruni again, however—there are certain stressors that I know well enough to avoid. I will, instead, be outside the urban center of the city, in the ward of Mpigi Magohe, working at a girls’ secondary school for orphans from all over Tanzania, situated at the end of what my friend Beverly has told me is an 8km dirt road, perfect for running on.

And I will be busy.

I expected a lurch leaving Dodoma—leaving behind the rock hills I’d climbed, the ice cream store I’d frequented, the dusty roads I’d run, the men and women of whom I’d rapidly grown fond. And I felt it—felt the pull of goodbyes and the wonderings of whether I’d ever have such a comfortable life anywhere else in Tanzania.

Simultaneously, I knew this was the right thing. There was nothing more for me to contribute in Dodoma, and as the bus circled the downtown round-about, roared past the Jamatini Mosque and daladala stand, and headed out toward the rainy hills of Morogoro, I felt only expectation: what, exactly, will I be called upon to do next?