The New To-Do

Dear Long-suffering Readership,

I’m back! Really. I’m in a writing mood and I feel a flurry on entries forthcoming… I have been out living a lot of life recently and just haven’t had the chance to properly document much of it. But the writing bug has bit! So stick around and you won’t be sorry. At this moment I am going through random papers from my purse and was amused by a recent weekend to-do list. It’s in these little things that sometimes I feel a moment of outside perspective of how my life has completely changed. This place is working its way into me and I’m definitely flowing more with the African ‘come what may today’ experience mentality…but yet I still have huge remnants of my ‘make a plan’ mode of functioning that work their way out of me in the form of To Do lists!

It’s hard to explain, but somehow even my mentality towards tasks is changing. Making a To-Do list for any given day indicates solely that these are things that will be attempted, started, chipped away at, or hoped for on any given day. It’s usually emotionally wiser to plan to begin something and hope to see its completion come about some way, sometime, somehow…with lots of twists, turns, and plenty of relationship building in the process, as any plan to accomplish something usually takes until about Plan C or D to accomplish. I’m aware this approach sounds maddening to most. It often is, but it can also involve loads of interesting experiences, unpredictable outcomes, and lots of opportunities for relationships.

Anyway, here are some things I attempted to accomplish this past weekend. Funny measure of the realities of my life right now.

To-Do 5.31:

-spend extended time with Jesus by the ocean
-filter water for drinking (running low on clean stored water)
-take deworming medicine
-text fundi about car again (text no. 157 or so in the past 2 months. We’re on issue no. 9. Can anyone say lemon? I tried to explain this phrase in Swahili (“limau”) to a Tanzania friend. It did not really translate and there was a long pause in which she stared at me thinking, ‘Crazy mzungu, talking about a car being a lemon!’)
- find Tumaini and give him money I owe him (guy in neighborhood I owe for a smash& grab on the window of his car that I was using)
-find Sarah and check in with her about mirco-loan I gave her (repayment responsibility lies with the lender, not the borrower in this culture. My search for Tumaini is solely part of my Western-formed conscience!)
- memorize 50 new Swahili words (the never-ending quest…)
- try to find out where to begin to look for population stats for different neighborhoods in Dar (ongoing for 4 months now - asked around again in the NGO/business circles this weekend…success on getting a lead!)
- Go neighborhood exploring in Dar (1 taxi, 3 bus lines, a couple miles of walking and lots and lots and lots of Swahili later, I return, a more educated Darite regarding the city I live in, adventured, stonger-calf muscled woman)

Well folks, I think that it’s for this show, but stay tuned for our next episode, in which Grace recounts The Day The Man In The Bank Made Her Speak Semi-Bad Swahili In Front of Over 100 Listening People and Kept Teasing Her and She Couldn’t Leave Because She was Finally Almost to the Front of the Line to Pay the Monthly Taxes for the Water Project. Oh yes. Life in Dar...

Love from the other side of the world,
Grace

P.S. I can’t seem to stay away from writing lists…I AM one of those people…http://todolistblog.blogspot.com/