Transitioning from Comoros to Colorado

It has been three months since I returned to the United States from Comoros, and that transition has been especially on my mind with the recent arrival of Peace Corps Comoros’ second group of volunteers and a wonderful visit here in Colorado from two dear friends from PC-Comoros who happened to both come to Denver at the same time.

The old adage that practice makes perfect also applies to transitions between countries, and each time that I have moved to another place, my experiences of culture shock (or reverse culture shock) have been less frequent and less intense. Of course, the cliché of returning to the US and trying unsuccessfully to choose from 87 different varieties of toothpaste or to order from a menu the size of an atlas is real, but I always struggle to make those choices quickly no matter how well settled I am.

In my return from Comoros, the only surprising bit of reverse culture shock has been an occasional touch of road rage, which is something I had never experienced before. In my seventeen years of driving, I’ve always been able to stay calm (and get out of the way) when other drivers do crazy/dangerous things, and heaven knows that the fractured asphalt of Moroni was host to circus far beyond even the most unruly roads in the US, but I was quite good at staying zen in the midst of that chaos. Somehow it’s this current transition back to the comparatively orderly traffic of Colorado that has my blood boiling a little when someone weaves through traffic or cruises through a stop sign. Knowing rationally that my reaction stems from a foolish presumption that the rules of the road in America could be completely effective at preventing the universal human predilection towards dickish behavior does little to assuage my entirely emotional reaction. Stop being so reckless with your fast-moving box of potentially people-smashing metal!

This is in Kyrgyzstan, but the message is valid everywhere.

Some other big differences that have stood out to me as I’ve been readjusting to the US from Comoros over the last three months:

• I’d gotten used to a steady stream of bug bites in Comoros (even with repellent and sleeping under a mosquito net, there’s only so much you can do), and I was pretty good at using force of will to resist scratching and not aggravate the itch, but that mental toughness faded quickly when I wasn’t getting bitten here. When I got a bunch of bites in Louisiana, I could not handle the itching.
• Having good public pools here in Denver is awesome, but it’s no substitute for being able to jump into the warm, clear water of the Indian Ocean and snorkel above amazing coral and fish. 
• Running water and electricity on-demand, 24-hours a day is like sorcery. Seriously, it’s crazy to just be able to flip a switch or turn a knob with absolute confidence that a light will come on or clean drinking water will start pouring out.
• I miss the teachers I was working with and the students I was teaching. There were lots of challenges and frustrations working in Comoros, to be sure, but it is energizing to work with smart, motivated people with a shared sense of purpose. In addition to the pleasure of being able to help good people achieve their goals, it’s a pretty awesome ego boost to be looked up to by bright people with great things in their futures. There’s a sense of purpose that comes from doing good work that matters, and the end of such work always leaves a void, even if you’re leaving to do something else that is also very important.
• Productivity has a very different feel in America. I have a much longer to-do list here, but I also am able to cross things off of it much more quickly and consistently.
• The often unpleasant amount of sound is actually pretty similar between my life in Moroni and now in Denver, but each one is a very different sonic atmosphere. In Comoros, it would be noisy from clear sources, like the roaring crowd that gathers when someone in the neighborhood has a projector to show a Real Madrid match or the mosque in front of my house testing the limits of their loudspeakers for the call to prayer, but in the US it tends to be more undifferentiated noise from the combination of lots of cars and other sources of noise all blending together. 
• Plenty of ink and electrons have been spilled about Donald Trump and this crazy election cycle, and I don’t have anything to say about the politics of it that hasn’t already been said by others. In terms of the experience of coming back in the middle of it, while I was in Comoros I thought I must have been seeing only a partial picture that made things seems more bizarre than they really were, but then I came back to discover that no one can really explain what’s going on and everyone is unhappy, confused, and upset. It’s all even more disturbing and unfathomable up close.
• There are beautiful sights in both places, but it feels like in Colorado I do have to make a little effort to seek out that beauty, while in Comoros I often stumbled upon it without even trying. Of course, that could also be function of my many years of familiarity with Colorado, as opposed to the fresh eyes with which I saw Comoros. 
• People respond very differently to the discomfort of talking about incurable illness and death. Everyone is different, but from Comorians I often hear messages of unshakable hope (usually explicitly religious) and encouragement to be strong, while the typical response from Americans is more focused on how my mom and I are feeling while avoiding direct mention cancer or illness in general.
• Alone time and personal space work differently. There are many more people in Denver than in Moroni, but here the default setting is to move through my day on my own, and connecting with other people happens in specific contexts or through a conscious choice. In Comoros that was flipped, as my time was automatically spent talking with or otherwise engaging with other people unless I made a deliberate effort to step back to work on something or have some time with my thoughts. Both modes have their advantages and disadvantages, and I’m very glad that for this transition I had the built-in structure of all the things I’m doing with my mom to minimize the potential isolation of reacclimating to the US. 
• I am not built for the heat. Of all the challenges of Comoros, coping with the heat and humidity was my biggest struggle, especially at night, as I can’t sleep when I’m too hot. Having a bedroom that’s cool enough to sleep under a blanket makes me very happy.
• When it comes to weather, I prefer variety to consistency, and I really love having changing seasons. It was a bit of a shock coming from a tropical climate to Colorado in March, especially as we had greater than usual frequency and quantity of spring snow, but even that cold weather was welcome. Warm weather is great, but I appreciate it more when there’s other weather to provide a contrast. 
• It didn’t take me long to get readjusted to American standards of dress, but I suspect that my eyes were bugging out a lot early on at the sight of so many bare shoulders and low necklines (and I had another little round of double-takes when the weather warmed up and everyone broke out their shorts).
• Not long after I got back, Denver opened a new train line between the airport and downtown that has a stop just a few blocks from my house, and I already love it so much. American public transit leaves a lot to be desired, but everything is relative, and after dealing with the nightmare that is transport in Comoros, the existence of a fast, clean, car-free option to get around is magnificent. 

In spite of all the many differences between different parts of the world, what always strikes me most profoundly in each place I’ve been is how fundamentally similar people are. The dissimilarities shock us partly because so much of life is the same. How people act when they are hungry or tired, the attraction we feel for beautiful things, our sad propensity to judge what we have by what others have rather than by what we need, the love that parents feel for their children (and vice versa), the pain of injuries and disease, the warmth and cooling of the weather (and our elaborate efforts to moderate both to within a comfortable range) and so many other qualities show up in people everywhere. There are so many different ways to be human, and one of the joys of travel is getting to experience enough of the variations to also recognize underlying theme of our shared human experience.

Mountain Gorillas in Rwanda

One of the most incredible experiences of my life was hiking to see a family of wild mountain gorillas up close in their natural habitat in the mountains of northern Rwanda. Their tranquility, formidable strength, and incredible mixture of similarities and differences remains vividly etched in my memory even after many weeks. It’s a cliche, but they truly are majestic creatures, while also inspiring an extraordinary feeling of sympathy due to the familiarity of so many of their actions and gestures.

Starting from Kigali, in the center of the country, we drove up to the northern part of the country the day before our trek. Our trip took us up and down steep hills on our way to Musanze, the town nearest to Volcanoes National Park, where the Virunga mountains form the border between Rwanda, Uganda, and DR Congo. As we traversed the steeply terraced hills, I could get a sense of views that are probably quite breathtaking normally, but unfortunately the effect was muted by haze (which we later learned was smoke drifting over from large grass fires to the north in Uganda).

We spent the night at Garden House, a very nice bed and breakfast in Musanze with comfortable beds and a lovely garden full of flowers and fruit trees. The check-in time for the gorilla trek is very early, so we were up at dawn to have a quick breakfast and head to the entrance to the park.

We arrived to the sounds of drumming, and there was a local arts group performing traditional dances and music to welcome us to the park. The check-in process was quick and orderly, and then we joined the rest of that day’s 80 tourists to have coffee and listen to the drummers while the park officials divided everyone up into ten different groups, one for each gorilla family.

We were assigned to the Hirwa group, a fairly large family that lives in territory closer to the border of the park. There are ten family groups that are habituated to visitors, and a maximum of eight tourists will be assigned to a group each day. The Hirwa group is led by the silverback Munyinya, along with multiple females, one blackback (adolescent male), and a few babies, including a pair of twins!

The different starting points to hike up to each group are all a fair distance from the check-in center, so we rejoined our driver and 4×4 (booked with Amahoro Tours, a good company that I would definitely recommend) for the drive to the trailhead. The normal roads in Rwanda are in very good condition, but these were unpaved dirt tracks full of giant ruts and big rocks, and a formidable vehicle was essential. We crept along, gradually approaching the massive volcanoes that give the park its name.

At the trailhead, we met our guides, François and Placide, and we were each given walking sticks carved with images of gorillas (which we had the option of purchasing at the end of the hike). We began by walking through some potato fields to reach the formal boundary of the park, and our guides were very good about stopping at various intervals to talk about the local plants (the gorillas eat everything, but they are especially fond of eucalyptus), the meaning of different gorilla vocalizations, and other interesting bits of information.

Once we crossed a little stone wall and entered the park proper, we followed a moderate, but steadily ascending path through a thick bamboo forest. Each of the gorilla families has its own territory, and each group is under 24-hour surveillance by armed guards to protect against poachers. The territory of the Hirwa group is in a lower part of the mountains and they are usually an easier group to reach, but when our guides got in radio contact with the trackers to confirm exactly where the family was that day, it turned out the gorillas had moved away from the easily accessible area they had been foraging in the day before. To reach them, we ended up having to descend from the bamboo forest down an extremely steep slope into a dry riverbed, hike up further up that rocky wash, and then climb back up the side of the ravine to the area where the gorillas were foraging that morning.

Getting to the gorillas took over two and half hours of pretty intense hiking, but it was worth every drop of sweat. As we first approached, the gorillas were perceptible only as movement in the underbrush and occasion glances of black through the thick leaves, but after a few minutes they emerged from under the trees and ferns and actually came right towards us. As we’d been instructed, we all got down low while a female passed very close by us on her way to a tree that she casually decided to pull down and eat (and once she sat down, we noticed that a baby had been clinging to her chest the whole time).

There were several adult females all around us, two of them with little babies. The gorillas were not at all afraid of us, and while they clearly saw and acknowledged our presence, we were not objects of any special interest. They continued steadily striping and eating all of the plants in reach, while we gazed in wonder and took lots of pictures.

Among the most striking aspects of seeing the mountain gorillas up close are their expressive eyes and the fact that they make real eye contact. The way that you can perceive a difference between a person who is merely looking at your face as opposed to actually making eye contact applies to the gorillas as well. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think it’s the fact that in addition to looking you in the eyes, the muscles of their face and brow make the same subtle movements that trigger a sense of eye contact without being individually distinguishable. It is an incredible thing to experience that sense of connection with an animal that is in many ways so similar and yet clearly is not human.

While we were admiring the females and babies, one of our guides was carefully exploring the area to find the silverback, who was napping under a tree nearby. At first glance he was just a big patch of dark fur in the leaves, but as we drew closer, his true size became apparent. Munyinya is a silverback in his prime, a literal 500lb gorilla who looks every bit of it. His features are similar to the much smaller females, but the difference in scale is stunning. Seeing such a powerful creature up close certainly gets the heart pounding, but he was so calm and tranquil (and he even seemed a bit shy) that the experience was exciting rather than scary.

The silverback continued napping, so we turned our attention to the twins. We spent a lot of time watching them play with each other, and their tumbling play was amazingly similar to the sort of roughhousing that you’d see between two human siblings, including even a headlock at one point. At first they were playing a little bit away from the adults, but after a little while they climbed over and started playing right around Munyinya as he was napping, though they very clearly remained just beyond arm’s reach. The dynamic felt very recognizable, with the two kids actively seeking their father’s attention while he tried to nap, while very aware that he might smack them for being so aggravating if they got close enough for him to do it without getting up. When their antics failed to elicit much of a response, they upped their game from playing on the ground around him to climbing up into the tree above him, unconcerned by the fact that the little tree was not large enough for both of them. They would climb and fall (sometimes due to a shove or a leg-pull) and climb back up again, playfully testing the limits of their balance and agility.

Munyinya’s size was very impressive, but what stuck with me more than his overall bulk were his hands. The gorillas’ fingers resemble human ones to a great degree, and while that underscored my feelings of similarity when watching the females, whose hands are comparable in size to our own, it was quite uncanny to see how the silverback possessed such huge versions of those same familiar fingers. At one point Munyinya started scratching himself with an extended middle finger that just happened to also be pointed in the direction of our group, which gave us all a good chuckle, but the digit he was extending was closer in size to my wrists than my fingers.

Visits with the mountain gorillas are limited to one hour (among other reasons because their similarities to humans also extend to the ability to catch our respiratory diseases, but without our built-up immunity), and after our time was finished, we got very lucky to have an extra little encore visit with them. While we were climbing back down the steep slope to the dry riverbed at our slow, human pace, the gorillas came down a different way to start foraging on a eucalyptus tree right alongside the riverbed, and our guides let us spend a few extra minutes watching them in this new spot. Munyinya pulled down the tree and then installed himself beneath it, munching away and refusing to share. The females were all gathered around, but he refused to let them eat any of the eucalyptus, even smacking one of them on the arm when she tried to grab a handful. They did not accept his selfishness quietly, forming a half circle around the tree and vigorously vocalizing their displeasure at his unwillingness to share.

As we hiked back down through the lush jungle, the excitement and euphoria of my visit with the gorillas receded, giving way to a more tranquil sense of wonder. The mountain gorillas are large and powerful, but they move through their world calmly and peacefully, with only occasional actions like effortlessly pulling down a tree that reveal their incredible strength. My mind still struggles to reconcile how amazingly similar and yet also profoundly different they are from humans, but that challenge is the sort that makes me question the nature of sympathy and the feelings and assumptions that usually reside below the surface of my consciousness. Words cannot really do justice to the whole gorilla trekking experience, and I hope that these photos and the video below manage to convey some fraction of the sublime wonder of it all. This experience was one of those things in life that are truly invaluable, in the sense of transcending whatever time, money, or effort they require, and I cannot say enough about how glad I am to have done it.

A teacher-training tour of Anjouan

My last big activity in Comoros was to travel to the island of Anjouan to conduct a series of workshops for English teachers in different villages there. I had conducted many teacher training workshops in Moroni, but the cost and challenge of traveling in Comoros meant that many motivated teachers from other parts of the country were left out. It wasn’t until the break between university semesters that I was finally able to fly to Anjouan, where I spent a week conducting trainings and visiting different parts of the island. It looks and feels very different from Ngazidja in many ways (though they share the magnificent blue of the Indian Ocean).

My first stop upon arrival was the capital city of Mutsamudu. I had been led to expect someplace very different from the capital of Ngazidja, but what I found was another little port city with a slightly smaller core than Moroni but more similarities than differences. One of the biggest similarities was the traffic, which was especially congested due to one of the big political parades that are a key element of election season in Comoros. Other similarities were the sweltering heat and a potentially gorgeous waterfront marred by lots and lots of trash.

After walking around a bit and getting some food, I headed out to the first stop on my tour, the village of Tsembehu. Tucked away in a mountain valley towards the center of the island, it was a delightful change from the heat, and it was cool enough that I actually slept under a sheet for the first time in almost a year.

The next morning was meant to be first of my series of teacher trainings, and the volunteer who works in Tsembehu was able to show off some of the best views of any village I’d seen as we walked to her lycée (secondary school) under a brilliant blue sky.

Of course, things never go perfectly smoothly in Comoros, and we arrived at the lycée to find that no one had designated a room for the training and no one seemed to know where the head of the school was (and of course only the head could possibly make a decision about which of the several empty rooms around the school we could use).

We did eventually find him and get a room for the training, and we’d planned for exactly that sort of delay. We arranged the desks and put up signs to direct the teachers to the right spot.

Punctuality is not a highly-prized quality in Comoros, so it wasn’t a surprise that no teachers had arrived for the training at that point, even with the delay in getting the room sorted out. However, the minutes continued to pass without any English teachers appearing on the scene, and we were eventually forced to conclude that no one was going to show up.

It was more than a little bit frustrating to have a total bust for the first workshop of the tour, but I decided that we should try to salvage at least some educational value from the morning. We walked around the courtyard and found a group of première (11th grade) students who were on break between classes, and we played a fun little listening/pronunciation game.

As we walked back across the village, the rainy season reasserted itself and the fine weather that we had been enjoying shifted into a light rain. One of the most common reasons that people don’t show up for something in Comoros is because it’s raining, so it was especially bitter that the one workshop with all no-shows happened during the longest stretch of good weather that I had during the whole trip. The frustration gave way to camaraderie, as a few other volunteers joined us for a lovely dinner that evening, and everyone went off to their various home villages the next morning.

The next stop on my tour was the town of Domoni, just a short way down on the eastern coast of the island. According to everyone in the area, it’s supposed to be an easy, direct taxi ride to get there from Tsembehu, but instead the volunteer who lives in Domoni and I found ourselves waiting by the side of a very empty road, while the rain gradually increased from steady to torrential. Eventually we found a taxi that was willing to take us the short distance to the intersection with the main road that runs between Mutsamudu and Domoni, and we waited under the shelter of an abandoned building, hoping in vain for a bus or taxi headed from Mutsamudu to Domoni (which is the second-largest town on the island and normally a fairly high-traffic destination). Eventually a bus came that was headed in the right direction, and while it was already more than full and was actually headed to a different village, we jumped at the opportunity to get ourselves closer to Domoni and down onto the coast, where there might be more transport options. The pouring rain had turned the already terrible road into a disaster area of ruts and holes, and I was wedged into a space between the seats and a broken door that wouldn’t close. Needless to say, it was a massively uncomfortable trip, and the awkward position put agonizing pressure on my hip with every one of the many, many bumps we went over. The one highlight was when I looked out the window and saw a huge, rain-swollen waterfall on the opposite side of the valley. We finally arrived in the village of Bambao-Mtsonga, where it was still pouring rain, and I almost hit the ground face-first as I attempted to get out of the bus and my leg declared that supporting any weight was not going to happen. Somehow I managed to hobble over and jump into a taxi that agreed to take us the final stretch to Domoni. In the end it took us three hours to cover a distance of only eleven miles.

After the failure of the first workshop and the terrible journey to reach Domoni, I was a bit anxious when we got up the next morning and it was raining again. As we walked over to the lycée, I worried that the rainy season might have doomed the whole teacher-training tour.

Fortunately, the English teachers of Domoni quickly put my fears to rest, arriving (relatively) promptly and (absolutely) full of motivation!

We had a great half-day workshop, with sessions on methods for teaching vocabulary and guessing meaning from context. The teachers were really active and asked the sort of good questions that showed that they were really engaging with what I was presenting and trying to figure out how to apply it in their classes.

After the workshop, we spent some time exploring Domoni. Some of the little differences between Anjouan and Grande Comore were the most striking, such as the less rigid gender rules on display when we passed a small group of very young boys and girls in their underwear splashing and playing together in a pool of rainwater by the side of the road. It was also interesting to hear how different the Shinzuwani dialect is from Shingazidja (I went from being able to get the gist of most conversations on Ngazidja to understanding hardly anything), and a go-to “joke” among the Anjouanais when they heard that I was from Ngazidja was to repeat the Shingazidja word ngamandzo (I want) and laugh at how different it is. Domoni used to be the capital of Anjouan, and its historic character is easily visible, even in the rain. We made sure to visit the town’s most important site, the mausoleum of Ahmed Abdallah Abderemane, the first president of independent Comoros.

In the early stages of planning my trip, I had hoped to conduct a workshop in the village of Bimbini, on the far western tip of the island. Although that training didn’t end up coming together, I still wanted to see that part of Anjouan and visit the volunteer who lives out there.

Bimbini is a beautiful little fishing village, with a long stretch of beach and mangroves framed by steeply rising slopes. The people were especially friendly, and I had a lovely moment shortly after I arrived when a tiny little boy, just barely old enough to run and grinning ear to ear, came chasing after some older kids, saw me and stopped  for a moment, then started grinning again and resumed his wobbly sprint to try to catch up to the others. It also felt more remote than any other place I had visited in Comoros, and I made quite a stir when I accidentally went to the primary school instead of the lycée, quickly drawing a crowd of seemingly every kid in the school, all of who reacted like my presence in their school’s courtyard was the most exciting thing that had ever happened.

Luckily, my second bit of good weather came during my visit to Bimbini, and my friend and I decided to go exploring to see what kind of swimming spot we could find. We ended up going on more of a hike than we expected, following a path that ran between the fields uphill from the coast. Eventually we found a way down to the sea and ended up on a gorgeous sandy beach bracketed by more mangroves. We snorkeled a little bit, but there was no reef nearby, so we just swam and enjoyed the water.

After my wonderful little visit to Bimbini, I made my way back to Mutsamudu for the final stage of the teacher training tour, a big combined workshop for teachers from Mutsamudu and the adjacent village of Ouani. I met up with the volunteer who teaches at the Mutsamudu lycée, and we stopped in to talk to her proviseur and confirm that the teachers had been invited and that they knew the workshop would be in a different location. In the courtyard of the Mutsamudu lycée I got to see a cool reminder of the first iteration of Peace Corps Comoros, this map of Africa painted by an unknown volunteer over twenty years ago:

The Ouani/Mutsamudu training started off well, with several teachers actually arriving early and eager to learn, so we practiced a couple of extra warm-up activities while we waited for all of the teachers to arrive.

The final workshop was definitely a case of last but not least, and the teachers blew me away with their energy, intelligence, warmth, motivation, and good humor. It was a joy to work with them, and it was a great mark of how interested they were in the training that in spite of an especially heavy rainstorm rolling in towards the end of the last session, everyone not only stayed to the end but most of them stayed after because they wanted to ask more questions.

I am profoundly happy that I got to visit Anjouan. The varied landscapes of the island were breathtakingly beautiful (even through the rain), I had lots of fun with my fellow volunteers, and the teachers I worked with were simply awesome. Among the many fond memories that I will cherish of my time in Comoros, that (mostly) superb week in Anjouan occupies a very prominent position.

Back in Colorado

After two days of travel across both hemispheres and ten time zones, I am grateful to be back home in Denver. Even through the fog of travel fatigue, my heart leaped at the much-anticipated sight of my mother. As difficult as it was to leave Comoros, I know with certainty that I am exactly where I need to be.

I am working on getting settled back into life in America, and mostly I’m concentrating on spending quality time with my mother and helping her with whatever needs doing (which thankfully includes a lot of eating her leftover food!) 😁 Colorado has given me a very typical welcome, with a mix of warm, spring-like weather that occasionally shifts to dark clouds and even a brief bit of snow.

Although I’m back in Colorado, Comoros is still very much on my mind, especially all the people who I already miss so dearly. My thanks to everyone for all your kind words, sympathy, and support.

My final weeks in Africa were so eventful that I didn’t have time to write, but as I get settled in here and have a bit more time, I will post a few things about those adventures.

Leaving Comoros

Peace Corps is all about learning to cope with the unexpected, and now my service is ending in a way that I could never anticipated. My mother has cancer, and I am going home to be with her for the time she has left. She is telling that story in her own words, which you can read here.

I will be leaving Comoros almost exactly one year after I arrived here, and it is very difficult to say goodbye to all the people who have become so dear to me. My mother’s condition has highlighted with painful clarity how ephemeral life can be, and while I am profoundly anxious to be with her as soon as possible, I have grateful that her current condition is good enough to allow me the time to more carefully conclude my life in Comoros. I had made a lot of big plans for this new semester and beyond, but instead I’m now wrapping up my work and trying to make the most of my final days in this beautiful country that I have been so fortunate to call home.

It’s hard to put into words all the things that have tied my heart so closely to Comoros, but the sheer breathtaking beauty of this country is one of the greatest. As soon as I step out my front door, I have the green slopes of Mt. Karthala towering over me, with the eye-popping blue of the Indian Ocean just a few minutes walk away, and the oranges and purples of the sublime Comorian sunsets putting on a show every evening. I cannot believe my good luck to have world-class snorkeling just a twenty-minute walk out my front door, and I will never forget the pure joy that I felt when I was out swimming by the village of Ntsaweni with wild dolphins jumping and doing flips all around me. Every place I have visited on each of the different islands has rewarded me with new expressions of nature’s beauty, the memories of which I will cherish forever.

As much as I love the beauty of this place, that’s not what is most responsible for my attachment to Comoros. The people here have done so much to make my time here truly special. It’s easy to talk about how important peace is, but it’s something else entirely to live in a place where it pervades everything so completely. I have walked through every corner of Moroni and all sorts of other towns and villages all around the country, and I have never felt unsafe for even a moment. It’s a rare gift to be so at ease in a capital city, and that comfort comes from not merely the lack of threat, but the active friendliness of the Comorian people. I will never forget a moment early on when one of Comoros’ sudden heavy rainfalls left me stranded on the wrong side of a muddy torrent in my best clothes on the way to deliver a training. Before I could even think to ask for help, two young guys spotted my plight from a distance and immediately came over help, picking up some big stones and wading in to the water to make a row of stepping stones for me to get across. I am always energized by the kindness and joy that so many Comorians display in everything they do.

Of course, it’s the specific people who I’ve formed relationships with who I will miss the most. I cannot say enough about what a joy it has been to teach the brilliant, funny, motivated, talented (and so much more) students of the English department at the University of Comoros. They have inspired me in so many ways, and I feel confident that they will continue to learn and grow to develop into the new generation of leaders that Comoros needs. I have also worked with some amazing English teachers, who work incredibly hard at an under-appreciated task, often without pay, and their motivation to work with me and improve their craft is a testament to their character and dedication.

The work that I have done would not be possible without the support of my fellow Peace Corps volunteers and the amazing staff of Peace Corps Comoros, who are some of the most incredible people that I have ever met. It has been my profound pleasure to not only work with them all, but to have the honor to call them my friends. I also have a lovely host family who have made me feel welcomed and comfortable from the very first day and dear friends from Comoros and elsewhere who have shared in the fun and the challenges of living in this weird and wonderful place. Life in Comoros is difficult in many ways, but the deeply fulfilling work that I have done here is inextricably linked to those same difficulties. I am very sad to be leaving without getting to contribute further to this grand project of development that I have been a part of, but I will remain connected to Comoros and the people who are etched on my heart. While the sun is setting on this chapter of my life, this will be a transition rather than an ending, as Comoros will forever be a part of me.

 

Rainy Season in Comoros

After a few false starts thanks to El Niño and the disruptions of climate change, the rainy season here in Comoros seems to have finally begun in earnest. Comoros is in the southern part of the tropics, about 800 miles from the equator, so the temperature is consistently warm all year and the seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter do not apply. What we get instead is one season of clear dry days for half the year, and another season of this:

Today was a good example of rainy season weather, as I awoke to overcast skies here in Moroni, which darkened and began raining lightly by mid-morning, then quickly progressed from steady rain to a massive downpour.

Although my house has reasonably large eaves, I have learned the hard way that I have to close my windows and also the outer shutters to keep this kind of driving rain from getting in around the window-frames and flooding my bedroom.

The quantity of water in this kind of rain is so great that both my courtyard/garden and the road in front of my house quickly begin filling up with water, which falls from the sky faster than it can flow down the road to the sea (less than half a mile away).

The rainy season is a difficult time to get anything done, as many people will skip work or school rather than go out in such weather. I had plans that I was unwilling to abandon, so I waited until the wind calmed down enough that the rain was falling straight down, then went out armed with a good umbrella and sandals so that I could wade through the rising water. After only about an hour of rain, the relatively shallow water in my courtyard was already ankle-deep.

The road itself was completely flooded, and I had to wade through water up to the middle of my calf. The rain continued to pour down all afternoon, drenching everything, but it quickly drained away when the rain stopped for about half an hour, thanks to the proximity of the sea and the island’s porous volcanic stone.

Even in the rainy season, this kind of overwhelming rain is not an everyday occurrence (often the rain is more moderate and/or shorter in duration), and although it can be quite annoying if you have to do out in it, it’s still vastly preferable to the miserable heat and humidity of the rainy season on days when it doesn’t rain.

Reading from a different perspective in Comoros

Living in Comoros has also given me a different perspective in a lot of ways, especially in terms of life without functional infrastructure. I read a lot here because there are few other options when the power is out, but I also read differently. There are great many stories, both fictional and historical, that change dramatically when you can no longer take for granted that all the complex and unseen activity that undergirds modern life automatically “just works”. Some books don’t hold up as well in that light, but in general my reading this year has been enriched by this new perspective.

The cliche of Peace Corps volunteers reading a lot has a solid basis in reality, though I generally read a lot no matter where I am. I’ve found that having a Kindle here in Comoros has been especially useful. I prefer ink and paper books, but there aren’t many of them here, and I’ve noticed that the quality of my reading material here has been much higher than it was in Kyrgyzstan, where there seemed to be dozens of copies of “Three Cups of Tea” but none of the books I was most interested in. I have read 51 books in the ten months that I’ve been here in Comoros, and thanks to my Kindle and careful preparation before I left the US, I’ve been able to read quite a few big books and series that have been on my mental to-read list for a while now. Here are few that have been especially interesting in the context of living on a little island on the margins of the modern world.

The Path to Power, Means of Ascent, Master of the Senate (the first three volumes of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson)

This biography of Lyndon Johnson is a masterwork (I list only the first three because I just recently finished the third volume, and I’m just starting the fourth and final book), and Caro doesn’t just tell the fascinating story of one unique individual, but also the story of American government in the twentieth century. There are so many outstanding elements to these large volumes that it’s hard to do justice with a summary, but there were some aspects that were especially resonant for me reading them in Comoros. For example, living here made me respond much more emotionally to the situation of the families in the Texas Hill Country in the early twentieth century, who were left behind by the rest of the country because they had no electricity and no hope that the private utilities or the laissez-faire government would ever change it. Johnson’s achievement in overcoming the combination of opposition and institutional inertia shines that much brighter when you can look outside and see first-hand what it looks like without such leadership. Caro’s brilliance lies in his ability to make you see the brutal, manipulative man who was tirelessly driven to dominate, but who used the power that his ambition drove him to amass to make the government actually work to help people (as long as helping people didn’t conflict with his ambition). In a place where the government doesn’t really work, it’s especially poignant to see what it takes to get things done.

You’re Never Weird on the Internet (by Felicia Day)

Felicia Day’s memoir is about how she created a path for herself in life by following all of the passions that made her weird by many people’s standards, and it especially resonated with me because I keep making choices in my life that are not normal but that allow me to do the interesting things that I want to do. The books is full of very funny moments, but it also shows how much of the challenge of following your heart about figuring out just what the heck it is that you want. While I am not on the sort of creative path that she is, I have long admired Felicia Day for her ability to carve out a successful life without any model to follow, and I found myself very moved by many of difficulties that she overcame both externally and internally. I was great to read about someone else who is happiest when she’s doing good work that she finds interesting, and a career is really just the story we tell to fit that good work into form that we can talk about to others.

Dead Aid (by Dambisa Moyo)

I have seen first-hand how many aid funded projects not only fail to achieve anything of value but actually make things worse. Moyo’s analysis of the problems with direct foreign assistance to African governments is incisive, and she paints a sharp picture of the way that aid bolsters corrupt elites, delays substantive reform, and protects leaders from the consequences of their incompetence in a way that ensures further incompetent leadership. I was with her through her condemnation of aid as terrible for true development, but it’s always easier to identify a problem than to solve it, and I had a lot more doubts about her plans for how to build a “world without aid”. Having lived in Central Asia and seen that economic assistance from China comes with very heavy strings attached, I found her uncritical embrace of such help for Africa more than a little disconcerting, and there seemed to be a lot of overly optimistic assumptions behind the idea that cutting aid and relying on the international bond market and remittances will magically lead to booming African economies (which criticism of course benefits from the advantage of hindsight about the effects of the global financial crisis). Ultimately, the flaws of her suggested solutions don’t take away from the power of her analysis of the fundamental problems with aid, and the book crystallized a lot of the misgivings from my here in Comoros and elsewhere that I’d felt but hadn’t fully articulated.

Hyperbole and a Half (by Allie Brosh)

I can’t pass up a chance to enthusiastically recommend this book, as it made me laugh more, harder, and longer than anything else in recent memory. There isn’t any special Comoros connection, but it does deal a lot with the challenges of being functional adult-ish person, which surely contributed to how powerfully it struck a chord with me as I deal with important questions like “What the heck am I doing in life?” and “Should I eat nutella on cookies for dinner?”.

Station Eleven (by Emily St. John Mandel)

Post-apocalyptic stories have become their own narrative category, and one that I quite enjoy, but often the narrative function of stripping away the world as we know it seems to be to create space for grand or brutal adventure and a big message about humanity and the meaning of life. What I loved about this was how beautiful, dark, and lyrical this story was even as it unfolds an active and compelling narrative. Great fiction shows rather than tells, and the story of the intersecting lives of the various survivors shows how ordinary people in an extraordinary situation (which like everything in life becomes the new “ordinary” with time) reveal their individual humanity through the decisions that they make. I loved the way that the novel explores the fact that art is not an expendable luxury of comfortable life, but rather a core part of what makes us human, to be treasured all the more profoundly in the midst of a struggle for survival. I feel and see first-hand how precious art is when everything else is a mess, even though the conditions of hardship in Comoros are only a faint shadow of the shattered world of the novel.

 

The full list of my reading in Comoros is here.

A Forest Hike and Colonial History

Last weekend I went with some friends on an excellent hike through the lush tropical forest on the slopes of Karthala up to one of the historic sites of Comoros’ colonial history. We started by driving down to the village of Djoumochongo in the southern part of the island, the starting point for our hike up into the forest.

Although our trail led through dense forest, the land we passed through has a long history of human cultivation, as evidenced by a wide variety of different edible plants along the way.

Cloves

Guava

Jackfruit

Oranges

Cinnamon (the spice comes from the dried bark of the tree)

Our path took us through the forest to the village of Nioumadjou, one of the major sites of the Humblot company, the 19th-century colonial authority that created plantations and processing factories for spices and perfumes. The area is dotted with the ruins of the solidly built stone structures from that period.

The area is hardly abandoned, and there is plenty of agricultural activity going on all around.

Its historic value is also recognized, and one of my fellow Peace Corps volunteers is working with people from the village to improve the site and its old botanic garden as a potential tourist destination. Along the somewhat steep trail up to the Humblot house, they have created little rest stops with nice benches and displaces where information will be posted about the animals, plants, and history of the area.

At the top of the trail, there are some buildings that have been reconstructed, and although the repair/rebuilding work that was done in the past was marred by low-quality materials and did not maintain the historical character of what was there before, it’s still a very interesting place to see.

The view from the top of that staircase is quite impressive, and it also allowed Humblot to literally see whether the factories down below were operating.

The size and complexity of the plantation is evidenced by the variety of different ruins scattered around:

Bakery

Cemetery

Hospital

Part of my fellow volunteer’s project is preparing the main building to become a museum, and they have been uncovering all sorts of interesting artifacts during their work clearing some of the invasive foreign plants that were killing the botanic garden and damaging the old stone staircases and paths. One of the most interesting bits they have uncovered is this ironwork angel.

In addition to the 19th-century colonial history of Nioumadjou, there was another period activity about 75 years ago, when the site became a logging base and lumber mill. This is what remains of the building and log-cutting machinery.

There are a lot of carcasses of old cars all around Comoros, but regrowing forest around this skeleton of a very old truck that had been used to transport timber made for a very striking image.

The slopes of Karthala get huge amounts of rain, but the thin soil and volcanic rock of the island of Ngazidja is so porous that it drains away very quickly. As a result, there are no year-round rivers or lakes anywhere on the island. People rely on cisterns to collect water, but animals have get creative, like this cow that we came across sucking the water out of some bamboo.

In the rainy season, the area around Nioumadjou gets huge downpours that create massive but short-lived torrents down the side of the mountain, and we crossed over a few of those empty riverbeds. In colonial time they built stone bridges across many of them, but today this is last one still standing, and that’s in part because the water carved away the bank to create an additional channel around the bridge (on the right in this photo, with an improvised wooden extension to the bridge).

It’s a lovely and fascinating area, and it made for an excellent daytrip (though it’s probably better in the dry season, as we got thoroughly drenched on the hike down).

A Day to Remember: Comoros vs. Ghana

Last Friday, I had the rare chance to attend an event that was, without hyperbole, the most important sporting event in the history of Comoros. After improbably overcoming Lesotho in the first round of qualifiers for the 2018 World Cup, Comoros was matched up for the second round of home and away matches against one of the strongest teams in Africa: the Black Stars of Ghana. Never before has a team anywhere near the level of Ghana come to Comoros, and on paper this should have been an incredibly lopsided match-up between a former World Cup quarter-finalist ranked 27th in the world and the 186th-ranked team that had lost every single World Cup qualifying match in its history until this year.

However, the results are determined on the pitch rather than on paper, and at the end of the day the whole country would be celebrating the outstanding performance of the Coelacanths of Comoros, who pushed mighty Ghana to the limit for a hard-fought draw. Allow me to share the crazy adventure of that superlative day for Comoros, a truly unique event that I feel very fortunate to have been able to be a part of.

The adventure started the day before the match, on Thursday, November 12th. The largest stadium in the country is in the town of Mitsamiouli, in the far northern part of the island. Because on the morning of the match there would be thousands of people cramming onto the rough road that leads from Moroni up to Mitsamiouli, two other Peace Corps volunteers and I made plans to head up the day before and spend the night at the house of a Comorian colleague.

Moroni was already in a lively mood, with more Comorian flags than usual in view and people selling cheap replica jerseys and all sorts of other green shirts, the team’s primary color. It was an awesome feeling to walk around town with my green and white jersey and hear happy exclamations of “Allez les verts!” from everyone I passed. At the market there were fair number of others who’d had the same idea that we did, and every vehicle heading north was filled to brim with people ready to cheer on the Coelacanths.

Our very cramped but good-spirited taxi ride north only took slightly longer than usual, and we arrived to find Mitsamiouli full of people preparing for the next day’s match. Not long after we arrived at the house, the electricity came on, a rare event outside of the capital. The power company had clearly made some special arrangements because of the match, as the power stayed on until well past midnight, which helped the dancing and music to go on all night (though the people in Mitsamiouli were in such high spirits that they surely would have kept partying with or without electricity). We had an early morning ahead of us, so we stayed in and just played a few rounds of Cards Against Humanity before heading to bed.

We got up at dawn and made the ten minute walk over to the stadium, where there were already huge crowds waiting for the match that wasn’t set to kick off for another nine hours. All around the stadium there were enterprising people selling drinks, sandwiches, Comorian cakes, shirts, and even miniature Comorian flags (sadly, no one was selling larger flags, which I would have snapped up in an instant, as they are surprisingly hard to find here). We’d arrived not long after dawn and the path leading down to the main entrance to the stadium was already packed, and there were multiple lines extending off in different directions.

For this special match, there were three tiers of tickets: cheap seats along the eastern side of the field, with overflow “seats” right up to the fence and extending around the north and south sides for 4000 KMF (roughly $9), a much smaller covered section on the western side (further protected from the afternoon sun) for 8000 KMF, and the VIP section for 16000 KMF. The discretionary portion of the Peace Corps living allowance isn’t much, so of course we had the 4000 KMF tickets, and we walked around and talked to people to figure out which of the different lines to stand in. There were actually two lines for the cheap seats, and we were able to get somewhat better position by walking away from the first line was pointed towards the center of Mitsamiouli and around to the south side (closer to Moroni), which was shorter but quickly filling up as people started arriving from the capital.

We still had a long time to wait, and no one had any idea when they would start letting people into the stadium. We took advantage of being in a group and I held our spot in line while the others made quick runs to get things to eat and drink. After a couple hours we were joined by three other volunteers who’d left Moroni that morning. The spectacle of the huge green-clad crowd was simply incredible, with people wearing crazy outfits made from green rice bags, painted faces, and a growing train of people singing, dancing, and waving flags up and down the street all morning long. It’s a truly amazing feeling to be with thousands of other people who are all full of the same excitement and joy.

Our line ran parallel to the line for the people with the 8000 KMF tickets, and we happened to be right next to the gate through which they would enter. There was a significant difference between the wild excitement in the street to our left and the somewhat more well-heeled population of the line 8000 KMF tickets to our right, but they certainly were not quiet whenever anyone tried to wander up and slip into the line close to the gate. At around 8:00, one of the two metal doors of that entrance opened up, as they prepared to begin letting in the people with the 8000 KMF tickets, but the gendarmes (police) were there providing security remained on the inside of the gate. To absolutely no one’s surprise, the sight of the open gate attracted tons of random people who wanted to sneak inside, the sight of which made all of the people who’d been waiting in line push toward the gate too. They weren’t letting anyone inside, but the pressure of all the people crowding forward broke the other half of the gate off its hinges. Before anyone could follow the gate as it fell inwards, two gendarmes came out swinging with their nightsticks, delivering solid blows to anyone who didn’t or couldn’t get back quickly enough (including a pointed strike at the bag of sandwiches and water bottles carried by a guy who had been trying to sneak in to sell them inside the stadium).

Shortly before the force of shoving bodies broke down the other half of the gate.

After that show of force, things moved in an orderly fashion at that entrance, but there continued to be no movement up ahead of us in the line for the cheap seats. We waited about another hour in the strengthening morning sun before our line finally started moving forward. It started as the orderly movement of a line advancing, but as we entered the path to the stadium’s main entrance and merged with the line from the Mitsamiouli side, the order started breaking down and it was simply rows of people walking forward as quickly as they could (and passing anyone who was walking slower). We came up to the area in front of the big metal gates, and there was simply a solid mass of hundreds of people, with no more forward movement possible. The gates were closed and there were gendarmes and soldiers with AK-47s standing on top of the walls looking down on the crowd.

As people quickly packed in behind us, it was definitely a bit unnerving, and that feeling grew as minutes passed without any sign that the gates would open. One of the gendarmes on top of the gate was shouting down to the crowd that they couldn’t let anyone in unless they could check people’s tickets. It was clear from earlier in the morning that if they opened any part of the gate then the people in the back would see it and start pushing forward, but with hundreds of people in the crowd such a push would be disastrous. The guy on top of the gate kept shouting about needing to see people’s tickets, and someone clever towards the front responded by taking out his ticket and holding it up, a move which quickly spread throughout the crowd. After a few more minutes, they swung the gates open wide and we were swept forward in the surge. The only thing to do in such a situation is to keep moving forward and stay on your feet no matter what, and because they’d fully opened the gate it was only a moderate bottleneck that we reached quickly and passed through into the safety of the open space around the field.

After those tense moments of being at the mercy of fluid mechanics with tightly packed humans as the fluid, we were back into an atmosphere of happiness and excitement as we made our way over to the seating area. There were six of us from Peace Corps Comoros there support our new home in this historic match, and lots of Comorians who were thrilled to see Americans cheering on the Coelacanths. It felt a little strange to have people thanking me for being there when I was feeling thankful myself for the opportunity to be a part of such a unique and wonderful experience.

It was nearly six hours before kick-off, but the regular stadium seats were already completely filled. There were plastic chairs set up as additional seating in the space between the regular seats and the fence (theoretically there was supposed to be either a regular seat or a chair for every ticket sold- ha!), but those were also already occupied, so we did what everyone else was doing and picked a good spot to stand right behind the chairs.

As the day progressed into late morning, the section of the stadium behind us no longer provided us with any shade from the intense sun. The heat was punishing, but there was a beneficial side to it, as some of the people in the chairs close to the fence retreated into the shade, allowing us to gradually move right up to the fence. We still had to deal with the sun beating down on us, but we relied on our endurance and some old-fashioned Peace Corps ingenuity to get through it.

Waiting all those hours with the sun beating down on us was difficult, but it was made much easier by the incredible atmosphere in the stadium. Just like outside in the street, there were trains of people dancing, waving flags, and blowing horns, and the energy of the crowd was infectious.

After all those hours of waiting, we finally reached the start of the match, and whatever excitement there had been to that point was completely eclipsed by the outpouring of support when the Coelacanths finally took the field. The fatigue was replaced by adrenaline as the crowd rejoiced to see their green-clad heroes finally begin the event we’d all been waiting for.

The match was lively from the start, as the Comorian players showed no fear of their star-studded opposition. Just a few minutes into the match, a well-organized push forward nearly led to a goal for Comoros, with the shot rebounding off the left post. Ghana was clearly taking it easy and trying to win without much effort, and that early threat did little to shake them out of their complacency. They did have a clear advantage in size and strength, which they used throughout the match to win headers and disrupt Comorian attacks.

Ghana livened up a bit in the second half, making more of an effort to keep possession, but the well-organized Comorian defense gave them no easy opportunities. As the match went on, the Ghanaian players finally started to push forward with a will, but that just led to better opportunities for counter-attacks. The key moment of the match came when one of those counters led to a goal that set off an earthquake of joy in the stadium, but the linesman called it back for offsides. I saw the goal well, but we were on the far side of the stadium so it was impossible to judge in the moment whether he had been onside, and the rest of the stadium was similarly accepting of it as soon as we all stopped celebrating enough to notice. Tragically, the video evidence makes it pretty clear that the linesman simply screwed it up and wiped out what should have been a monumentally important goal. You can judge for yourself:

The match was far from over, and Ghana finally woke up and started really pushing for a goal. For the last 20 minutes the Comorian keeper played brilliantly, rescuing the team with a string of excellent saves (as well as getting quite lucky when two different shots rocketed off the post in less than a minute). The Coelacanths weathered the storm, and when the final whistle sounded, there was nothing but joy in the stadium. No one outside of Comoros had believed that the national team of such a small country with no history of success could possibly resist Ghana, but powered by the passionate support of the entire nation, the team proved once again that nothing is impossible.

The most stirring part of the whole day actually came at the very end, as we drove around the back way to return to Moroni. Every single village that we passed through was celebrating out in the streets, from the youngest little kids shouting “Allez les verts!” to the oldest grandmothers waving the green, leafy branches. It was an inspiring display of unity and shared sentiment, the likes of which I’ve never before seen first-hand.

Of course, all of that was just the beginning, and now it all comes down to the second leg of the match, which will be played in Ghana tomorrow, November 17^th. Anything is possible, and the spirit of the nation will be with the team as they attempt to shock the world (again). Allez les verts!

Visiting the Mohéli Marine Park by Sailboat

Last month, I was very fortunate to have my mother make the very long journey from the US to come visit me in Comoros. It was great to be able to show her my life here and introduce her to my friends and colleagues, and the centerpiece of our little tour of the country was a four-day trip on a sailboat to the island of Mohéli to visit its awesome marine national park.

We arranged a trip with David of Bluesafari Comores on his sailboat Blue Peter, together with one of my close friends in the Peace Corps and a friend of hers who fortuitously happened to be visiting from the US at the same time.

For four days and three nights, we lived on the 40-foot boat as we sailed from Moroni down the coast and across to Mohéli, circling that island and then sailing back up to Moroni.

We also got to steer the boat sometimes, and it was an awesome sort of tactile geometry exercise to feel the wind and figure out how to angle the boat to get that wind to propel us in the direction we wanted to go rather than the direction it was blowing.

Both Grande Comore and Mohéli are very beautiful, and it was really cool to see them from such a very different perspective. There are lots of really interesting little islets and other features of the coast that can only be seen from the water.

Of course, the most interesting part of visiting the marine park is all the wildlife, and with the sailboat we were able to access some amazing different isolated beaches and coral reefs.

We also took a really cool side trip to the village of Itsamia to see the nesting sites of green sea turtles. Every night at high tide, huge turtles drag themselves up to the dry sand above the waterline and dig a huge pit to lay their eggs in.

The village has taken great measures to protect the turtles and their eggs, and community members have been trained as guides to show them to visiting tourists without disturbing them from laying their eggs.

We also got to eat fresh fish that we bought from a passing fisherman and prepared on the boat.

During our little excursions off the boat, we had chances to see a little bit of more typical rural life in Comoros, which is naturally quite different from how things look in capital.

I love waterfalls, so one of the highlights for me was a little side trip to visit the falls of Miremani. Sadly, the pool at the bottom was really gross, so we were limited to just looking at them from a distance.

It was an absolutely extraordinary experience, full of awesome snorkeling, all kinds of different marine life, and scenes of incomparable beauty. It was an outstanding way to show my mom some of the best that Comoros has to offer.