A Day in Mkoroshoni, Pemba
The electricity is on right now. Second morning in a row. For more than a week the power has been heavily rationed so we sometimes get a couple of hours in the evening and maybe a few hours between midnight and early morning. But I had heard that the big power crisis had been handled and then I was lulled into complacency when a couple of days ago we got more than 24 hours straight.
Yesterday evening I came home from my office at the PHL (Public Health Laboratory) and immediately headed out for a run, figuring I would get in at least six miles well before dark. When I got back home my housekeeper, Hasina, was outside. No power, she said. I thought that was over, I replied.
But as our language skills only overlap by a few dozen words, she merely replied, badai. Later.
She asked if I was going to shower – and seemed concerned that I do so immediately. Perhaps the waning light or the fact that we don’t get much water when the power goes off. Yes, I said and headed immediately for a quick shower, then donned my kangas (over shorts and a tank top) – one around the waist, one covering the head and shoulders.
Hasina asked if I was ready for dinner. OK, I said, figuring I might as well get it over with inasmuch as there isn’t much to do except hide from mosquitos once the power goes off.
But Hasina had a different plan. She had laid out a colored straw mat on the porch and set three places. I had wondered about the red car – her husband’s – parked outside the house. I hadn’t seen him but thought perhaps she had been waiting until I returned from my run to leave with him to break fast together. But instead the three of us had dinner. Hasina’s husband only shows up from time to time. He has three other wives, he explained, and he alternates days.
Hasina wouldn’t let me help, but instead kept going back and forth to the kitchen until she had laid out a feast: rice with coconut, a kettle full of broth with some kind of gristly but flavorful meat, tea with ginger and cardoman, chapati and a delicious juice of passion fruit, lemon and pineapple. We ate with our hands, as is customary here, a messy way of eating that I can understand in the absence of accoutrements, but here we have them and, in fact, Hasina had brought out a spoon for me. But I figured if I was going to have a traditional dinner in traditional dress, I could also eat the traditional way. Very messy for me – especially with the broth from the meat mixed in with the rice.
After dinner I did what I always do when there’s no power – hide under the mossy net and fall into a fitful sleep fueled by fumes from the kerosene lantern until the power comes back on again. I always leave the fan switched on so the breeze wakes me and I can take advantage of those few precious hours of recharge time. No matter what the hour, I get up, plug in devices and do whatever errand I had planned to do – uploading photos, recharging cell phones, logging my run. And eventually I fall asleep again. But always with the computer and my array of electronic devices – iPhone, local cell phone, Kindle and even my Garmin running watch – in the bed with me. I suppose those bits of technology are my lifelines, the precious links to life at home and the talismen to prevent me from falling off this far end of the earth.
The opportunities to give in are immense. I could so easily disappear into this strange other life here. Ever since I started wearing the traditional clothes in public I have been getting marriage proposals – on the street and through channels. People come to Hasina and tell her they like the American in the baibui. He likes you too much, she tells me, describing one shop keeper or another – the men who have seen me walking to work day after day.
What an alien world it is here: We are held captive to the mosques. There is no place in Pemba where you can miss the call to prayers. They blare from megaphones in the towers of every mosque. Now for Ramadan there seems to be an extra call to prayers at 4:30 am. I believe that signals the resumption of fasting and, for some, the start of their work day during Ramadan.
I ask my Muslim friends how they do it – fasting for 30 days. And not just no food: no water, no coffee.
Said explained that people generally eat a huge dinner (which he calls breakfast) and then wake again to eat a large meal before the cut-off time. It’s not that we eat any less during Ramadan, he said, we just switch the hours around.
Whether people actually work at 4:30 is debatable. Said may, and certainly the women who routinely gather wood, fetch water, feed animals and children and tend to crops do. But I doubt that the people at government ministries are nearly so energetic. Regardless, most businesses close at 2:30 during Ramadan as everyone’s energy wanes. When I go running in the late afternoon, I see hundreds of people sitting around outside, just waiting for sunset so they can eat again.
