The Bus Stops at Every Baobab Tree: Dispatches from a Volunteer in Tanzania (Post # 3)

“I’ve got orientation schedules, an Arusha guide and price lists for each of you,” says Nancy who passes out the papers to all thirteen volunteers. I have a feeling Nancy changed the subject on purpose. Some of the volunteers, not me mind you, are starting to look a little panicked.

The Arusha guide, a small booklet called “Little Big Town, your guide to people, places, events in Arusha,” is full of advertisements from town businesses and services—the Mambo Jazz Café, car hires to Nairobi, Kase bookstores, the Discovery club sports bar, Dolly’s Patisserie and “Subscribe today to TV Burudani!”  A list of restaurants is included, offering a variety to revile that available at home: French, Indian, Italian, Chinese and Ethiopian. It also contains a map and guide to current entertainment like disco dancing at the Colobus Club, Step Reebok at the Noble Fitness Centre, and French movies at Le Jacaranda hotel.  The guide promises that Arusha, with a population of 250,000, is quickly becoming “cosmopolitan.”

Cosmopolitan? Discos? French restaurants? Pay TV? This isn’t the volunteer experience I’d expected. It isn’t the life I’d be living in either. This is the Arusha that caters to the wealthy ex-pats working for well-funded NGO’s (non-governmental organizations) and the United Nations employees working at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, not the low-budget Visions in Action volunteers who plan to live on a $50 a month stipend.

“Price lists? What is this for?” I ask looking at the “Buying Guide for the Markets” sheet that Nancy handed out.

“This is how much you’re supposed to pay for stuff at the market,” she says. “It will help with your bargaining.”

The list has prices and the Swahili words for dozens of fruits and vegetables. For example, “Green pepper is 50 to 100 shillings per pile of three.” At 800 shillings to the dollar that comes out to less than three cents per pepper. “Pineapples 500-700 shillings each; passion fruit 200-400 shillings per kilo; mangoes 50-100 shillings each; papaya 200-300 shillings each; eggplant 150 shillings for three, and so on. The raspberries alone warrant a warning: “raspberries 400 shillings per bag, available from the raspberry man, but don’t pay more!!”

 Two exclamation points!! Why? Is the raspberry man an infamous rip-off artist trying to squeeze an extra 50 or 100 shillings out of unsuspecting foreigners who don't possess the official Buying Guide for the Markets? I’ll have to keep my eye out for this guy.

According to the Orientation schedule, every spare second over the next month is programmed: Swahili lessons—four hours per day; lectures on safety, health, the environment, education, history and current events every afternoon. Some days, field trips are scheduled to places with names like “Mkombozi,” “Marangu” and “N’giretsi;” During the final week each of us will have job interviews for the volunteer placements we hope to land, and home-stays with a Tanzanian family.  I get that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, the same as when I schedule my annual dental and gynecological check-ups. I know it’s good for me, I know it’s something I have to do, I may learn some important information, but if I could bribe God or sell my soul to the devil to get out of it I would in an instant.

Eventually, we each drift to our rooms. It has been a long day, starting with the ten-hour bus ride from Dar es Salaam to Arusha.

My last lucid thought after I give up trying to read, before falling into a fitful but dreamless sleep, is that I’ve been declared insane, triggered by an anti-malarial medication overdose. I'm driven off in a white ice cream truck to the institutional grounds in a straitjacket, where I spend the rest of my days in a heavily medicated state. 

***

It’s eight a.m. Monday morning (four p.m. in Milwaukee my mind automatically calculates). We are in a room above the main post office, across from the Clock Tower at the center of town for our first of twenty Swahili lessons that we’ll have over the next month.

Swahili is the most widely spoken language in Africa, with 50 million speakers in ten countries, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, eastern and northern Zaire, northern Malawi, northern Mozambique, northern Zambia and the Somali Republic. After World War I the League of Nations made Tanzania, then called Tanganyika, into a British mandate. As part of this legacy, English is taught in Tanzania schools.  But because the vast majority of Tanzanians receive no education beyond primary school, they speak only Swahili. In other words, if I want to eat or get a ride on local transportation and buy food in the markets, I need to learn at least the basics of Swahili.

Mr. Kimaro, a short, slight, be-speckled man in his fifties, with a smile that never leaves his face, has been teaching Swahili to foreigners for years—adult foreigners. Which confuses me since this morning around 10 a.m. as the jet lag began creeping in and our faces sagged into a numbed daze, he has us stand up next to our desks that are arranged in a square facing the blackboard, and sing a child’s song to learn our numbers, “moja, mbili, tatu, nne, tano, sita, saba, nane, tisa, kumi.” Kimaro’s eyes dance in delight at our correct pronunciation of the numbers. Swahili is easy to learn for Westerners except for the double consonants he warns us. We sing our new numbers, over and over, until they began to sink in.

I try to imagine a friend from home opening the door to this scene, fourteen Caucasian men and women and the leader of this curious group, one thin Tanzanian, all of us singing, clapping, tapping and bobbing our heads like Stevie Wonder, with unintelligible sounds emanating from our mouths and goofy smiles on our faces. I can only suppose they would have thought the worst; that in just three days we’d fallen prey to the Tanzanian equivalent of the Hare Krishna’s and are in serious need of deprogramming. 

The Bus Stops at Every Baobab Tree: Dispatches from a Volunteer in Tanzania (Post # 2)

          Six months ago, I’d decided it was now or never. And now that now is here, I suddenly wish I’d chosen never. Of course I don’t have to stay. It’s not like I’ve been conscripted into the French Foreign Legion. If I quit, I wouldn’t have to move to Canada and assume a new identity.  “Volunteer” means voluntary, right?

I’ve been in Tanzania for one day and I’m already losing it.  Maybe it’s the anti-malarial medication? I’ve been taking it for three weeks now. According to Tom, a volunteer headed to Mwanza, that’s plenty of time for the side effects to set in.

“She had this crazed look on her face,” said Tom, earlier tonight after dinner about someone who had taken the same brand I’m taking. “Half the time she couldn’t even remember her name. Then one day she tried to slit her wrists with a panga.  They had to strap her to a gurney and airlift her to Europe. I wouldn’t take that crap if you paid me a million dollars. It’s tooootally poison.” Tom had spent time working with refugees in Mozambique a few years ago. The poor woman he was referring to was one the development workers at his camp.

 Tom held court from a woven mat on the living room floor with his arm around his wife Katrina.  They looked like two al dente strands of spaghetti curled up together cross-legged on the floor. The two of them together couldn’t weigh more than one of my thighs. From the looks of it, they’d each suffered more than a few bouts of tropical disease.

 “But surely that has to be an isolated incident,” I said, thinking that I hadn’t heard the words “side” or “effect” and certainly not the word “poison” come out of my doctor’s mouth when she’d prescribed a year’s worth of anti-malarial medication to the tune of $400.

“Then there was Charlie in Zimbabwe,” Tom continued, ignoring my question. “It started with nightmares, and then he turned paranoid.  Started hearing voices. After a while all he could do was lay in his cot, balled up under his mosquito net, and blubber like a baby.”

Tom explained to everyone that he and Katrina thought of this as their life—“this” being development work. For them it was not just a career, but a lifestyle. They’d been in Zanzibar for the last month taking intensive Swahili lessons.  At the Dar es Salaam airport, they sauntered up to us, having just gotten off the ferry from Zanzibar.  In the coastal breeze their jeans lapped fluidly over their thin hips. Despite only a month in the country, they'd already assumed the air of bored ex-pats. They were so relaxed and laid back it was as if they had never had a worry or responsibility to speak of in their lives. At first, I attributed their utter mellowness to their tropical island stay, but as I got to know them over the next few weeks, I discovered this was how they always were.

“But what if you get malaria?” I asked Tom.

“I’ve already had it a couple times,” he said with a hint of pride in his voice.  “First time was the worst. Mozambique, 1998. Three weeks of night sweats and puking my guts out. I lost twenty-five pounds. But the severity of the symptoms lessens each time you get it.  It won’t be bad at all the next time around,” he said smiling. He was positively gleeful.

The next time?  If he lost another five pounds he’d no longer be visible to the naked eye.

“Well I’m taking it, I’m not worried,” said Kim. Kim, a twenty-five-year old with freckled Irish looks, is a chemical engineer from Toronto. I’d never met any actual chemists before Kim.  I’ve always put scientists on an Olympian pedestal since chemistry in my life has only meant an abysmal four-credit C-, bringing my G.P.A. down to the atomic weight of zero. Kim seems far from the stereotypical pocket-protector nerd that can pas de deux her way around the periodic table, but can’t manage a conversation with the mailman about the weather. If cool Madame Curie was taking anti-malarial medicine, that was good enough for me.

The Bus Stops at Every Baobab Tree: Dispatches from a Volunteer in Tanzania (Post # 1)

Hello everyone, I was a volunteer in Arusha, Tanzania from July 1999 to July 2000. I kept a journal while I was there, which I'm going to share in excerpts on my blog. Thanks for visiting!

Chapter One: My Lips Are Turning Blue

               My last weekend in the United States, I went hiking in the Colorado Rockies over the Fourth of July holiday.  I’d stayed in a tent for three nights, did not shower, slept on the ground, endured dozens of mosquito bites and hiked for hours each day at elevations ranging from 7,000 to 11,000 feet, all while carrying thirty-five pounds of gear on my back.  Some people might consider that “roughing it.”  I’d considered that roughing it.  That is, until I spent my first night in Arusha, Tanzania.

The electricity has been out for several hours. I’m wearing nearly all of the clothes I’ve brought for the next year, and I’m doing my best to cover my body with a British Airways blanket, which is about the size of a generous hand towel. I’m wearing a “coal miner” headlamp strapped to my head because the candlelight coming from the candles stuck in Coca Cola and vinegar bottles on the table next to my bed, give off less light than a firefly at one hundred paces.  I’m attempting to read, but can’t because my hands are shaking uncontrollably and I can no longer turn the pages of my book.

Coming from the frigid hinterlands of Wisconsin, I recognized these symptoms as the first stages of hypothermia.  Alright, I don’t really come from the “hinterlands” but my hometown of Milwaukee does get very cold in the winter.  Unless I had taken the wrong flight yesterday, I shouldn’t be anywhere near the frigid hinterlands of anywhere.  Arusha is within spitting distance of the equator, but here I am freezing my rear end off.  How is this possible?

Tripled up in a bedroom with Sally and Nancy for the next two weeks, I examine my temporary roommates.  They look warm, comfortable and snug in their sleeping bags. They are having no problems reading their books.

“JoAnn, didn’t you get my e-mail last week?” Nancy asks.  “Hey, your lips are turning blue.”

Nancy, our volunteer guru for the next month, was the coordinator hired by Visions in Action, the volunteer organization that has sent me here, along with twelve other volunteers. Her job is to guide us through orientation and job interviews until she returns to the U.S., the apron strings are cut and we start our real volunteer work.

“What e-mail?” I ask.

“I told everyone to bring their sleeping bags since it drops down to the fifties at night,” Nancy replies.

That is the fifties with no central heat, storm windows or R-40 insulation. Tanzania is south of the equator so it is the dead of winter.  Arusha town sits at just over 3,700 feet elevation. This might have had something to do with the low temperatures, but the equator is right over that hill.  What is six degrees south in a potential longitudinal range of three hundred sixty?  Equator is supposed to mean sweltering tropics; Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn sweating buckets on the African Queen, but nonetheless, despite all the humidity and perspiration-stained clothing, managing to fall madly in love.

When I’d met Nancy earlier that day just outside of customs at the Dar es Salaam airport, I loved her honeyed Georgia drawl, but noted immediately that she didn’t look a day over nineteen.  (She is actually twenty-three.)  She sports shoulder-length dreadlocks and has a nose ring.

Sally, a twenty-two year old volunteer from California with waist-length pale blond straight hair, has classic, California girl looks and with her athletic build she gives the impression of having just stepped off a surfboard after landing a nine-foot swell off Half Moon Bay.

Sally is one of four volunteers in our group headed to Moshi town, about fifty miles to the east of Arusha, after our month-long orientation.  I am one of five volunteers assigned to stay in Arusha. The house we are in will be my home for the next year. The other four volunteers in our group face a two-day bus ride to their final destination, Mwanza, a malaria-cursed port city on Lake Victoria in northwestern Tanzania.

Moshi is known as the “gateway to the roof of Africa” because supposedly it is at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro. I say supposedly because you cannot actually see Kilimanjaro from Moshi except on rare and special occasions. Kilimanjaro is very high strung and moody and only shows herself during certain times of the year. When one happens to be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of her, usually it is only a partial view of the top, the base or the middle, rarely the whole. But even an incomplete look at Africa’s highest mountain is breathtaking. I saw Kili earlier today, on our ten-hour bus ride from Dar. All of a sudden there she was on the blue horizon; the flat, snow-covered top seemed to float on the gray clouds that completely obscured the base of the mountain. I took this as a good omen for the next year.

Year. A year is a very long time. I suddenly wonder if I will make it? In fact, I am beginning to wonder what I’m doing here in the first place. I don’t know a soul on the entire continent, I’m freezing to death and I’m sharing a room with two women nearly half my age. And, did I mention I am sharing a room? 

Mother Natures’ Lesser Half

I wrote this while I was still living in Milwaukee. I feel beyond fortune to live within driving distance of this gorgeous vista taken just last week from Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park.  Hope you enjoy this tongue-in-cheek essay about National Parks, which are near and dear to my heart.

In planning this year’s summer vacation it has come squarely to my attention that there are serious inequities in this country.  I’m not speaking of gender bias, racial discrimination or the widening economic and social gaps between the rich and poor.  Yes, these are deeply troubling, but a simple glance at a U.S. map will reveal injustices of far greater latitude and longitude.

It seems as though certain states have been inordinately blessed with the riches of nature, while others lag far behind like the ugly duckling stepsister, wobbling Quasimodo-like through life, trying to get by on personality alone.  From sea to shining sea, Mother Nature’s partiality and favoritism is sorely evident.

According to Wikipedia (the source for all knowledge) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_parks_of_the_United_States there are 59 national parks in the United States.  But shockingly, only twenty-seven states and two U.S. territories share in this fruit of plenty.  Simple arithmetic would seem to dictate that one park be assigned to each state, and, with nine left over, divide them equally among the territories (Puerto Rico has no National Parks!) Among the twenty-five have-not states, given the cold shoulder by Mother Nature, many must make do with inferior millenniums-after-the-fact attempts to rectify these gross disparities, through man-made consolation prizes in the form of national military parks, battlefields, historic sites and monuments.

For example, Connecticut, along with a half dozen other states, shares the Appalachian National Scenic Trail and also shares a National Heritage Corridor (whatever that is) with Massachusetts.  But, unfortunate Connecticut can claim only one place of pilgrimage of its own:  the Weir Farm, a National Historic Site designated in 1990 for one of America’s earliest impressionist painters who summered there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  But is the farm of a dead artist really supposed to keep Connecticut happy in comparison to say, the Grand Canyon, or the mystical vision of the granite face of California’s Half Dome?

Then again, perhaps Johnny-come-lately Connecticut should count itself fortunate compared to Delaware, the only state in the union that has absolutely nothing!  Delaware is no doubt extraordinarily embarrassed, as it should be.  On the other hand, everyone knows that Mother Nature created Delaware as the perfect location for businesses to incorporate.  Too much beauty and splendor or history in that state, and the next thing you know the stock market is taking a nose-dive. But even among the halves, some must make do with tiny slices of the pie of National Park glory.  Should we begrudge Idaho their small sliver of Yellowstone, America’s first national park, when that state must share it with Montana and Wyoming?  This hardly seems fair given that Montana has splendorous Glacier National Park all to itself and Wyoming shares its magnificent Grand Teton National Park with no one.

But exactly what kind of behind the scenes pork barrel politicking went on when Mother Nature decided that California would get nine national parks, Alaska eight, and Utah five, while Illinois must be satisfied with an odd historic trail or two and the Lincoln Home National Historic Site, and only then because of an accident of birth? Likewise, can Kansas in America’s heartland truly be contented with its amber waves of grain and its Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve when it knows deep down inside that this could never come close to National Park material?

I ask you, is this fair? What was Mother Nature thinking?

New York no doubt feels fortunate to have its gorgeous Fire Island National Seashore, as does my home state Wisconsin with our Apostle Islands National Lakeshore on Lake Superior. And yet, I can’t help but feel a certain sense of inferiority since for reasons unknown, these shores weren’t quite good enough to achieve National Park status.

Don’t cry for us California and Alaska.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  I’ve decided to forego this year’s summer road trip.  Instead I’m going to spend my vacation in the safety and comfort of my lovely Milwaukee backyard while I enjoy the bustling wildlife antics of the common gray squirrel and the breathtaking views of the newly built addition to my neighbor’s bungalow.

Mombasa or Bust: Part II

With two hours to kill, Katie and I walked in circles around the courtyard of the Tanga bus station, since there was nothing else to do. We later learned from a Tanzanian passenger that the bus station vendors had nicknamed each of us. Katie, a Canadian of Irish heritage with curly hair and freckles, was named “beer girl” presumably for a Guinness beer T-shirt she wore. My shoulder-length blonde hair was clipped into a ponytail and I was dressed modestly in an ankle-length skirt and a long-sleeved blouse, but was mysteriously branded "woman of the night."

We boarded the second bus at the appointed departure time. The bus remained motionless for an hour and forty minutes.  During that time, vendors pressed against the bus, shouting into the open windows in the hopes of making a few shillings. I had a choice almost as varied as the selection offered by my favorite grocer back home, without moving from my seat: peanuts, cashews, hardboiled eggs, vegetable or beef samosas, soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, mangos, bananas, oranges, combs, mirrors, and hair curlers.

But the strangest item of all was a single tan-colored brassiere tacked to a board by its strap, hanging limp like a dead fish among the other sundry items for sale. Did this aspiring undergarment salesman really hope to make a sale of a bra through a bus window?

“Sir, is that a B or a C cup?”

The bus finally left and stopped a minute later at the petrol station. After fueling, we returned to the bus station. After thirty minutes we left again and drove to a private residence in town. This seemed to be a normal layover since all of the passengers immediately exited to stretch and have a smoke. There, we waited for another thirty minutes while one of the passengers packed his luggage. We drove from the passenger’s home and returned directly to the Tanga bus station. I was now feeling as though I’d entered the Tanga, Tanzania episode of The Twilight Zone. 

              We finally left the station for a third time and stopped at a nearby ice cream shop to pick up more passengers where an American and Dutch man boarded. As the American passed us, his first words were, "Are you enjoying this never-ending nightmare?"  They’d had a far worse journey having left Dar-es-Salaam early that morning, but along the way their bus had broken down.  They’d been stranded on the roadside for hours without food or water. I gave them my cashews, which they immediately devoured.

Finally, on our way once again, our second “express, non-stop” bus to Mombasa stopped repeatedly at tiny villages along the way. No one boarded, but at every village the driver yelled out to ask if so-and-so friend of his was there. At each village, a chorus of voices rang out in unison, “Hayupo” (Swahili for he's not here) and we continued on.

Other than kerosene lamps and flickering candlelight, there was nothing to see in the night so dark it was like traveling through a black hole. I dozed at times, but deep sleep eluded me. Anyone who has traveled in East Africa knows that the condition of the roads is frightful because they are pockmarked every few meters with potholes the size of small craters. And, because it's so dark, the driver often misses them.                 There's nothing like going 80 k.p.h. over a massive pothole. Many times during the ride, I was jolted from a light slumber as I hurled to the ceiling and then plummeted back down into my seat. Under the circumstances, I think I should have been entitled to a fifty percent refund on my bus fare since I was out of my seat, for at least half the trip, but I didn’t think it would be worth the time for a four-dollar reimbursement.

              Just before the border crossing into Kenya, a torrential rain broke.  The parched ground was suddenly flooded with an inch of water. The Kenyan customs officer, an underpaid, bored bureaucrat in a crisp white uniform, chose this opportune time to search our luggage. All of the passengers on the bus dragged or carried their luggage, fifty feet through the muddy deluge, to the customs building. After a superficial glance at the contents of our drenched luggage, the customs official was apparently satisfied that no contraband was present after all and we were allowed to return to the bus through the downpour. I'm fairly certain that if someone chose to smuggle drugs or perhaps a cache of arms across an international border, they wouldn’t leave them lying on top of their luggage!

              We finally arrived in Mombasa at the stroke of midnight with only moments to spare to catch the last ferry of the night into the city.  A promised twelve-hour trip had taken eighteen hours, about the time it would’ve taken to fly from Tanzania to New York. Fortunately, Katie and I were able to enlist the help of our fellow male passengers in misery, who gallantly accompanied us by taxi to a guesthouse, where we spent a safe and uneventful night before heading to the beach the next day.

Mombasa or Bust (Part I)

 “Whatever you do, don’t arrive in Mombasa after dark!”

We had every intention of heeding this warning, made repeatedly by Kenyan friends in the know.  But bus travel in East Africa is infamous for its unreliability, so it was almost assured that we’d arrive in Mombasa at the worst possible hour.

My housemate Katie and I were halfway through a one-year volunteer program in Arusha, Tanzania. We’d planned to meet some Kenyan friends on the beach in Mombasa for the New Year holiday, but our travel options from Arusha were limited. Air travel, given our budgets, was out of the question.  Because we’d waited until the last moment to make travel arrangements our first choice, taking the shuttle to Nairobi and then the overnight Nairobi – Mombasa train, was no longer available as the first and second-class compartments had been booked for weeks. We were left with only one grim alternative, the Simba Express Luxury Coach.

My first clue that the coach would be neither express nor luxury was of course the name.  In Tanzania, the “express” buses are usually the slowest. The “luxury” buses are typically rusting hulks, teeming with masses of humanity that pitch to and fro across Africa, like toddlers learning to walk.

As a veteran of six months of excruciating bus trips within Tanzania, I’d learned that all is fair in love and bus ticket sales.  Exaggeration, if not outright lying, is a standard business practice.  So when the ticket salesman at the central bus station in Arusha assured us that we'd have ample leg room in our reserved front seats, that the bus was direct to Mombasa, it was scheduled to arrive no later than six in the evening, and it was “non-stop,”I knew enough not to believe him. I faced our journey with the forbidding resignation of one confronted with months of painful dental procedures.

My seat was a single at the very front of the bus. Katie was directly behind me. Every square inch of the bus, including what would have been my “ample leg room,” was packed with people, luggage and provisions from the market: bunches of bananas, bags of oranges and plums, baskets piled with carrots and tomatoes and plastic totes containing half-suffocated chickens.

Children were made to stand in the aisles while their mothers and fathers perched on the luggage rack, to my right. A certain numbing rhythm developed as a child swayed, every few seconds, into my right shoulder. The ageless woman seated opposite me periodically gummed an orange. Her mouth puckered like a fish as she spat the seeds around the child, across my lap, and through the open window to my left. Most, but not quite all of the seeds escaped out of the window. Whenever a seed landed on me, the woman simply smiled, exposing her few remaining slanted yellowing teeth rooted in her brown gums.

I turned to the scenery. Mount Kilimanjaro was hidden that day, but as we traveled east from Moshi, I saw the southern Pare Mountains appear suddenly from the arid plains like a sleeping giant blanketed in green. This made me think of sleeping, which I’d desperately tried, but it proved impossible.

Along the way, we stopped at every village, mud hut, cattle dip, baobab tree, termite mound and watering hole. At every stop, streams of passengers boarded and a few got off. The reason for the number of stops is simple. Our “luxury coach” was the only local transportation available for the thousands of rural residents who used it to visit relatives and to go to the market.

It took eight hours to cover the two hundred sixty miles between Arusha and Tanga, a port city on Tanzania’s coast, where Katie and I learned that our direct-non-stop-to-Mombasa luxury bus, had terminated its journey. The bus driver informed us that a second "express, non-stop" bus was scheduled to depart in just two hours and arrive in Mombasa at 8 p.m. With over one hundred miles to go, arriving before dark was now impossible.

Extreme Penny-Pinching

I can still picture my mother spending long hours at the kitchen table scouring the Sunday newspaper, not for the latest news, but for bargains.  This was in the late-sixties—before double coupon bonus days, midnight madness and weekend blowout sales. It was the dull age of retailing when one might see a “half-yearly” or “Lincoln’s Birthday” sale, but for the most part you were lucky if Gimbels Department Store had foundations at 17 ½ percent off.

Mom would sneak a cigarette or two late at night, a habit she’d successfully kept hidden until I was in high school, and pour over the advertisements like a bookie adjusting her point spreads.  Her total absorption burned holes through the vinyl gingham red-checked tablecloth. 

No household item escaped my mother’s frugality. Plastic bags of all types became valued pieces of luggage.  They were washed, dried and re-used again and again until the synthetic fibers finally disintegrated and were given a proper burial in our trash bin.

On special nights out I’d often catch mom spelunking inside a nearly empty tube of lipstick with a bobby pin. “The tube is almost half full,” she’d say.

My two brothers, sandwiched between two older and two younger sisters, had to endure the worst of mom’s thriftiness; wearing hand-me-down leotards from their big sisters under their pants in the cold winter months.  Under duress, my brothers donned thick, stretchy tights of the type worn by Robin Hood and Superman, but in girlish pinks and yellows.  It might have worked if only it had been several years later when Joe Namath made pantyhose for men seem GQ. To this day, it’s a taboo subject at family gatherings.  If anyone wants to bring an immediate flush of embarrassment to my brothers and send them into an emotional tailspin, just mention the word “leotard.”

There were no trips to the barbershop for my brothers.  Haircuts for them were more like hair divestitures; their heads were shaved, military style.  Mom would sit them down on a chair in the backyard, throw a towel over their shoulders and shear their heads practically down to the bone.

I’d add to their misery by rubbing my hands over their freshly-shorn, sandpapered skulls saying, “Women go wild!”

            But my sisters and I also suffered my mother’s tonsorial mutilations.  Every few weeks mom would have us sit on chairs in the kitchen with the linoleum floor lined with newspapers.  She would pull out scotch tape to secure our perfectly straight hair across our foreheads to trim our bangs.  It never did the trick. Year after year of childhood photos show our bangs slanting upwards, on a twenty-degree angle, giving each of us a vaguely extraterrestrial, Mr. Spock-type look.

There was no reason to buy new rain boots when our old leaky boots could be made weatherproof through mom’s ingenious re-use of Wonder bread bags.  Of course she meant well, she wanted our feet to be warm and dry when we got to school.  But what she didn’t foresee was the horrible cloakroom scene when the boots came off and we were left wearing the bags.  With the ensuing taunting from classmates at the unmistakable primary red, yellow and blue Wonder balloons covering our shoes, it’s a wonder none of my siblings or I were humiliated into a lifetime of intensive psychotherapy.

We six bread-bag-footed children of Vulcan bangs and buzz cuts and unisex leotards skipped through our childhoods believing this was all perfectly normal.  And then one day I discovered that my mom was different.  It could’ve been the time I learned that our daily treat of baked cakes and cookies made from scratch, always waiting for us after school on the kitchen table, was special because other mothers made theirs from something called mixes.  Or perhaps it was when I found out that no other mothers in our neighborhood made soap out of lye and pig’s lard from the hog my father had slaughtered each year. (We lived in the city.)

I’d like to say I’ve completely escaped mom’s legacy of exuberant prudence, but as Cokie Roberts wrote, “We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters.”  How true.  I’m just like her. I can’t seem to throw out a plastic bag to save my life.