Christmas in Image Village

December 24-25, 2009



Image village's first Baby Brie has been born. I didn't even have to have her myself or be conceited enough to name a child after me. I feel a little bad for her because she inherited a name from some white person she will never really know and it is a difficult name for Tanzanians to say. She is the fourth daughter of Kipambe and this third wife. He has six wives in total and 21 kids that he knows of, he told me once proudly- I said the only thing that I could say- "Ummm, Wow." So now there is a Brie in the family- she is small and pretty with engaging eyes. We look nothing alike. (Haha)



The exam score have come back and I was very pleased that Rebecca (Catherine's older sister) was successful and will be going to the best secondary school in our area. Msanga, her uncle, has already put money aside for tuition for his brilliant orphaned niece. Rebecca proudly came to my house to tell me. Smiling, she said, "Brie, maybe I really will get to be a doctor!" I reminded her that she can be whatever she wants.



Christmas eve. I sit with a bottle of South African wine and a pot of popcorn that my cats are sharing with me. Nothing in this scene feels like Christmas. So I pretend that it is not. Sometimes it is just easier that way. I think about all the guys at the bar who I asked earlier when they were going home to be with their wives and children. They looked confused, like they didn't know what they were supposed to do at home with their families on Christmas. What should they really be doing? Making a fire in the big stone fireplace, watching their kids open their flannel pjs, eating the pie their wife cooked, making sure that all of the Christmas lights are working, reading "Mortimer the Moose" or singing "You're a Mean One Mister Grinch", thinking about how they will make boot prints on the hearth and tell their children that they heard sleigh bells and hooves landing on the thatched roof? I realize that I don't know what they should do. All my ideas embody my own father and are silly in a African context.

The next morning, I wake up and go to church. It is actually very beautiful. They have decorated and the dancing and singing is the best that I have seen in Tanzania. After church it is like an enormous block party, everybody is cooking, eating, singing, dancing, playing all over our village. That night, while I am squatting behind a pig sty (literally) watching my villagers dance around the bonfire, their shadows moving in the dark, I think about how surreal it is hat I would ever be peeing behind a pig sty on Christmas in a village in the heart of East Africa. This wasn't like a Christmas I had ever had before, but it was one that I will never forget. And I feel happy that the adventure continues, that every morning I wake up somewhere that feeds my adventurous side, where everyday you never know what is going to happen or where you'll end up, so you just go with it...