All weather, no seasons

It is a very strange thing to realize that Lent is over, and that I wasn't really aware of it at all. I realized it was Good Friday today around noon. It is strange to be so distant from and unaware of the passing of the Church year. Maybe my failure to observe Lent this year can be made up for, in part, by joining in Ramadan this year, as I will be in a very Muslim community, similar to the village I am living in now.

When you are living on the other side of the equator in a different culture with different religions and holidays, all of a sudden all the markers of the passage of time, such as winter, spring, Lent, and Easter, aren't relevant anymore. You think in terms of hunger seasons, long rain seasons, mango seasons, and the season the river will be so high that the crocodiles will come back. 

Every day is only a little less hot than the tea you drink, cup by cup, sweating and thinking you made a mistake, until all of a sudden you don't feel quite so hot anymore.

We had the afternoon off, so the eight of us (from our village and the next) decided it was time to go to the river and look for the crocodiles we heard live there. Red clay rutted trails through the bright greenery, downhill all the way, getting cooler as we descended into shade and cool air, and we saw the river. A group of women downstream washing their clothes greeted us. A dog rested next to a pile of harvested sticks and a machete. We peered into the slow water, then walked along a trail upriver, finding a man and two boys washing their clothes too. The man was gutting two catfish he caught, and told us the river was too low for crocodiles, but that there were turtles around. He offered to go get one, leaving his catfish on the flat rock and running up the trail.

We chatted with the young boys for a few minutes, waiting until the man returned, empty handed. "The turtle ran away," he told us. We laughed, thanked him, and made our way back to our villages.

This is Tanzania, where life slows down so much that even tortoises have a fighting chance. :)