More recycled trash art!

http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/08/01/recycled-trash-robots-lay-waste-to-the-earth/

So no updates for a while now. I feel like I’m still trying to get a handle on being in the archives…what I’m actually going to find, and writing about it seems premature. And really, while this is week two, I lost one day last week to a national holiday and one and a half other days so far to power outages. The power has been going out a lot here. Apparently we’re all waiting for it to start raining…and then there will be power again. Apparently also, when the power goes out, the archivists won’t look for documents. I’m thinking about bringing my headlamp in to see if they’ll use it. If they don’t get documents, I don’t think they do anything except for read a few different daily newspapers, and wait. Wait wait wait. And there’s nothing for me to do but sit and sweat as the temperature rises, waiting. There is so much waiting, and so much tacit compliance with waiting. I wonder if I would be any different. The archivists are nice though, and helpful when they can be but I am basically in the process of just seeing as many documents as I can, and trying to figure out what the hell I am doing. What I’ll be able to do, where to go next, how I should try to make the most out of the limited time I have left. Every day I sit in there feels like my margin of time to figure out if I should be looking elsewhere is getting smaller and smaller. If the power in the archives goes out, where should I go, what should I do with that day, who should I try to talk to… I don’t know yet how to be resourceful but I think the key is simply to start asking more questions. I think the reason people stay for a year for research like this is not because you work for a year…but you figure out how to work and then finally in the last four months…get everything done.
Right now I just don’t know…there’s lot’s of stuff on Colonial town planning and establishing municipal governments, court papers on wives that left husbands and thieves that stole livestock, and committees being formed and called to order…but nothing yet that I can imagine utilizing to tell the environmental history of the city after independence…not much from the sixties on, even less in English (which is an issue i haven't yet solved) from the sixties on…and nothing yet that helps me understand relationships between resources, space, new migrants to the city and municipal government. Not to mention waste, trash and pollution. It is weird to realize when you finally go to the archives that no one has probably ever told you as you trained to be a historian, how to read banal, everyday documents and turn them into a narrative, or to even have the foresight to know to at least collect these documents and take them home, and that later, when you collected more, you’d know what you needed and how to fit it together. I’m enjoying it, but its also makin’ me nervous.

the beach

Fundi Funguo

Sharon, the woman whose house I am living in told me to get a set of keys made last week and I’ve been dragging my feet about it. Actually, I was a little annoyed…I’m the renter, she has a car…I have no clue where to get keys made and she’s probably had to do this before. I started asking the maid in bad Kiswahili where to get keys made and then I moved my inquiry to the streets, walking along the road by my house asking in the shops that look like hardware stores. Finally, I arranged with Godfrey, the askari (guard) for him to go with me today. We got in a bajaj (autorickshaw...see above photo) and went over to Kinondoni, driving on sidewalks as pedestrians darted out of our way seemingly unperturbed, and started asking in different places where the fundi funguo was. Here, people who make things or fix things are called fundi…so you have a clothes maker (fundi nguo), plumber (fundi bomba) electrician (fundi umeme) cell phone repairman (fundi simu) etc. When we finally found it, the shop was more like a slot about four feet wide with at least five people inside leaning against walls or sitting, reading the newspaper. The ceiling was a lattice work of spider webs with an impotent looking light bulb hanging down, and a crooked, photocopied painting of the last supper in pastels hanging in the back. I had to sit on a stool and wait for the fundi to return. The fundi put my keys in a vice and ground the new ones down by hand. I don’t know why I was expecting a key machine. I was expecting one of those hulking, chugging key machines they have at home depot that spits your shiny key out in ten seconds and probably costs more than a house here. Even when we got there I still thought, well, maybe the big key machine is out back somewhere. It was one of those things that once you realize it isn’t there, you immediately realize how preposterous the idea was in the first place…
Godfrey thinks he has malaria and so he left me there and went to the doctor and he looked as if he was waiting for me to give him a few bucks on his way out, which I awkwardly did as I had planned to… then I had to pay for the keys and pay for my bajaj driver to take me home. Money is always an awkward issue here. My natural inclination (and need) is to be pretty cheap. But I also want to be perceived as something other than a wealthy, walking bank when I am in need of the help and guidance from people. Its not that locals are not genuinely hospitable and helpful, but they are also smart enough to know to ask for money for their time. Knowing nothing here, costs money…that’s the just the way it is. Back home, you look things up on the internet, you get on Google maps, you walk into any Wallmart and it has the same Deja vu floor plan. There is very little value placed on local knowledge, very few times you have to ask five people how to get something done, what street it is on, where that street is (nobody knows street names so they have to take you) and when it may be open. Here, it happens all the time. Every little task takes time and money as a foreigner. Not like driving to Home Depot and flipping absentmindedly through home improvement magazines as your key gets stamped out.


Update: Godfrey is back at the house. He has malaria...two different kinds. Geez.