- Mr. Pronoun strikes again. He came in on Saturday morning and told me that his friends would come for interviews that afternoon. It got round to 3:00 p.m. and they hadn’t appeared. We were closing at 4:00 so I asked Mr. Pronoun if his friends were coming. He replied, ‘No coming. Yesterday you drunk.’
- This morning as I was walking to work I heard a man in the street calling ‘Mzungu.’ That means ‘Whitey’ and I hear it a lot—so much that I don’t respond to it. I just ignore it and keep walking. He called out ‘mzungu’ four times in under a minute. This guy was not a quitter so I turned my head. He was a guy I recognize from my street where he stands outside his shop trying to get ‘mzungu’ to come in. He was walking his little boy to school. He knew I was heading that way so he passed off his son to me. Hand in hand, I walked the little chopper to his nursery school—neither of us knowing the first thing about the other. I didn’t even know where his school was. There were other kids in the same uniform getting dropped off where he led me so I think we got it right.
- I’m learning the names of the costumes Muslim women wear here: the loose gown they wear over their clothes is called a buibui; the scarf they wear over their hair is called an mtandio. My favorite name is for the mask covering the face which conservative women wear. It’s black and has a slit for the eyes giving the woman a window from which to see out. It’s called the ninja!
(In case you’re wondering, I don’t wear any of these! I keep myself covered up with long sleeves and long skirts, but that’s the extent of my cultural modifications in wardrobe.)
