the anniversary of the day of your birth

In honor of Ms. Barca, today would be the perfect day to talk about birthdays in Tanzania, or the lack thereof.

Of course everyone has a birthday, for pretty obvious reasons. But historically birthdays are not celebrated here. It used to be that people wouldn’t know their birthday and some still don’t. Birth certificates are a relatively modern thing. If you think about it, if you’re born into a community, then you’re a part of that community and everyone knows that you’re a part of it. So in villages and rural areas, and even in the cities here, people are born into communities. So paper records aren’t needed since you’re known. One of coworkers said that he didn’t know his birthday until he was 10 since his dad forgot it and only his mom’s family remembered it. It is only the year that matters.

Since the day and the month aren’t crucial, no one celebrates the individual day of their birth. Everyone turns another year older on the first of the year. So if you’re born in January or in December of the same year, you’re the same age.

Which brings us to the translation of “happy birthday”. There isn’t an easy translation- the closest way would be to say “congratulations on the anniversary of the day or your birth”.

So Ms. Barca…
Hongera kwa siku ya kuzaliwa ya wewe, hongera kwa siku ya kuzaliwa ya wewe…
Hongera kwa siku ya kuzaliwa ya weeeeeeweeeeeee,
Hongera kwa siku ya kuzaliwa ya WEWE!

bertha and gimpy

Bertha and gimpy are my new friends. And when I say “friend”, I mean I-have-never-in-my-life-been-this-scared-of-anything-before. They are both spiders- the same type actually, but they live on different sides of the house. As you can tell by the pictures, neither would really be classified as a cute little spider like the late Gary or Water Jr. that lives by my desk. bertha and gimpy are the type of spider that hollywood would rent to put in movies and scare people. Gimpy is a good 5-6 inches (inches) long from scary leg to scary leg while bertha is slightly smaller at about 4.


Gimpy recently appeared on a car that’s resting outside our kitchen window. She rapidly wove a web that’s more like twine than what I would normally consider a spider-web. If you take the car out for a drive, she stays on the car and the web remains undamaged. A normal spider would die or fly off the web. Oh no, not gimpy- she’s very much alive at the end of the drive. (And she conveniently manages to catch a few tasty morsels in the process.)



Yes, for now I am going to call gimpy and bertha my friends in the hopes that one of them don’t decide to eat me. Or one of our guard dogs- if it came to that, I would sadly have to bet against that dogs. And hopefully gimpy is happy on the car. For as much as we don’t want her outside our kitchen window, the thought of having her wander around and us not know where she is… it’s too much like a bad horror movie.

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I wrote this post last week and started to post it, but the power went out and then I got too busy to post it. Since then… since then Bertha has disappeared. She’s no longer on her web against the garden wall. (The wall is actually white stucco, but the green is the mold growing on it.) Nor has she reappeared on the web, despite all my hopes.

So I did a quick search on the web trying to find this type of spider, so that I would know how long it would take her to wrap my body in twine (aka her ridiculously strong web) and eat me. Thankfully, bertha and gimpy aren’t poisonous. (Though the reliability of Wikipedia is doubtful.) But really, does anyone want to wake up to bertha crawling across their face?

(oh, and i'm guessing you can tell which pictures are of gimpy and which is bertha from the rather obvious naming...)