1.
The first friend I made in Zanzibar was rather unusual, but he still remains to be one of my best friends. The friendship is unusual because he’s probably well over my grandparents’ age (though I don’t know how old he is exactly and I doubt he himself does.) and I don’t even know his name. I just call him “Mzee”, a respectable address for an old person in Kiswahili. I’ve often wondered what his real name is. I know it wouldn’t hurt to ask, but whenever I see and talk to him, I just feel Mzee best describes him and that calling him otherwise somehow may weaken our friendship.
He sells coffee every morning and evening on my street, it’s the Arabic coffee that you drink with a tiny cup while it’s really hot and with bites of sugar-coated snack called Kashota to ease the bitterness in your mouth. The coffee is really strong and I often find it difficult to fall a sleep at night if I have a couple of cups in the evening. So I limit myself to go have a coffee only on the weekends, but whenever I pass by him, I stop and we chat for a while. We talk about our family, Japan, his life or other trivial things.
Oftentimes being one of a very few foreigners in the neighborhood who speaks fair amount of Kiswahili and stops at the coffee stand to actively engage in conversations means you’d be bombarded with lots of questions about you and your country. While I enjoy these friendly interrogations, it gets irritating when the person you’re talking to persistently asks you questions like “how much money are you making?” or “you guys eat snakes and frogs, don’t you?” Those aren’t really questions out of curiosity but they ask them anyways to confirm what I’m like based on their assumption which probably classify me as someone like an extremely rich guy with huge appetite for unappealing creatures.
But the Mzee never does that. He often scolds those who come up to me with those questions.
Whenever he gets into the question mood, he’s very unassuming, open-minded and curious about my family and eagerly listens to my answers. He never loses his patience trying to understand my Kiswahili and he always takes time to make sure that I understand what he says. In fact my improvement in the language is largely attributed to having those daily conversations with him.
When my parents send me a package, they put lots of Japanese snacks and I always share them with him and others at the coffee stand. He loves them, especially packs of peanuts and tiny rice crackers. I’ve told my parents about him, and I’ve already asked them to bring lots of snacks when they come to visit me in December. (Yes, my family’s coming over for the holidays!) The Mzee is also excited that he could meet my family.
A couple of weeks ago, I stopped seeing him at the usual spot in the mornings and evenings. The word on the street was that he was hospitalized for some kind of gastrointestinal disease. I couldn’t figure out what exactly was wrong with him, but I figured being hospitalized is a serious trouble. I didn’t see him for a few weeks and was starting to worry, but this week, as I was walking down the street, I heard a familiar yell. I turned my head to the side of the road and there he was, sitting on a long bench in a shade with couple of other neighbors. I immediately run and greeted him. Apparently he recovered and came home. He looked quite healthy, in fact looked five years younger than the last time I saw him. He said he needed to take a break for a little while from coffee vending, but would be back in business within a few weeks. Excellent news. I’m looking forward to his return now. He’ll still be able to meet my family and we’ll all be able to sip the cups of coffee and share the snack in December.
2.
I recently started learning Arabic. It’s not intensive at all. I don’t expect to be able to understand the language any time soon, but I’m enjoying it.
I really should be focusing more on Kiswahili but the fact is, at this point I could get by with what I know. I can’t use it fully in classrooms, or understand what the radio says except for hourly Kiswahili news segments on BBC which is followed by English news, but I can convey my thoughts on fairly complex topics like religion and understand what others are saying to me.
The opportunity to learn the new language came to me abruptly. One morning during assembly, I was sitting beside an Arabic/Religious studies teacher. I made a comment on the Arabic exam paper he was holding, saying that the letters looked so much more complicated than the Chinese characters. Then he was quick to explain to me that they really weren’t. He started writing the Arabic alphabets on my note and that marked the beginning. Since then, he teaches me a few vocabularies and grammar rules every morning and though very slowly, I’m making a progress.
The teacher’s name is Jabir. He’s one of my best teacher friends, but it wasn’t that way in the beginning. My first encounter with Jabir was in March this year. I remember when we first talked, I was rather annoyed by his persistent touting of his religion. Being a religious studies teacher, he is a very devoted Muslim and every time he saw me, he was keen to explain how Muslims already knew, thousands of years ago, many scientific facts such as the earth orbiting the sun, and that teaching science was technically teaching quaran. He was also eager to make detailed analysis of contents of the student preaching during Thursdays and Fridays and repeatedly describe them to me. He was doing those things out of favor partially as a religious studies teacher to introduce me to the religion. Although I didn’t mind learning about it, I often couldn’t catch up with his enthusiasm.
But as I got to know him, I realized he was a very tolerant and progressive individual. Religion is a sensitive topic. People often look at me with disbelief and hint of superiority over me when I tell them that I don’t have any religion. Whether it’s Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism (though the latter two are much less prominent in the country) or any other religion in the world, pertaining to a particular faith comes as a second nature to many Tanzanians. Having no religion is often considered to be unenlightened. So what happens in general is that a person with no faith would be considered very odd and if your faith is different from a person you’re talking to, he/she would have my-religion-is-much-better-than-yours attitude. It’s like a competition as my friend once put it. So I often tend to avoid talking to people about religion.
Jabir, though very devoted Muslim, is different. As much as expressing his ideas on the religion, he is eager to know and explore different faiths when I explain to him what I know about the Buddhist philosophy. (To most of the people I’ve talked to, the concept of being dead as a human and revived to lead the next life as another form of organism is completely absurd and unacceptable.) Not only about religion, we’d discuss politics, our laments on corporal punishment (as far as I know, he’s the only one teacher at school who criticizes the practice.) and time-consuming and unyielding staff meetings. In fact, he’s the only one person I feel comfortable talking honestly about many sensitive issues which I refrain from disclosing to the other teachers or friends.
I’ve been impressed by his optimism and energy. He’s the only one teacher who would get up during the morning student preaching time to encourage the students to read more books (though being old, our school library has quite a collection of books thanks to donations from a high school in the UK) and learn time management, while the other teachers would spend their speech on reprimanding the students for their lack of effort to learn and always being late to school. I can understand how they just want to put all the blame on the students in a rather dismal situation like this, but he constantly reminds me what we ought to do.
This week he said he wanted to learn Japanese, so I started teaching basic Japanese alphabets which I admit are quite difficult to remember if you aren’t used to the strokes and patterns. But he is making a progress. One time when he told other teachers in staff room that he started learning Japanese, they replied that the language is extremely difficult and impossible to learn. Then he said, very calmly but in assuring manner, “nothing is difficult or impossible if you put thought into it.” In a place where there are many difficulties and challenges and where trying hard may amount to nothing in the end, it’s hard to maintain your optimism and energy. Then there he is. I am very lucky and happy to have him as a friend.
