Pronouns and Other Highlights of Living in Zanzibar

I’m running a research study in Zanzibar where I’m falling in love with my study staff.

There are five Zanzibari men and two women who show up each day and work long hours for $400 per month. For this wage, they must ask people really personal questions about sexual behaviors that are anti-everything they’ve been taught to believe by their religion and culture. And they do it with respect and compassion for the men they’re interviewing. The two women take their blood samples and create the space with another person where you can talk about health and life in real terms about a real disease with real consequences. Some times the results are good, and sometimes they’re not. These women show up either way and do their best to provide support and guidance. They also tirelessly try to find veins of injectors. Imagine trying to thread a needle made of Jello: that’s how I’d describe what they tell me it’s like to try to collect blood samples from these respondents.

We’re learning about one another while we spend hours together. I’m coming to know their personalities and have especially come to love the quirky way of speaking English one of the interviewers has. He is an openly gay man—he is even a hairdresser. And he goes right on about his life here in Zanzibar living as such. He showed up for work on Friday in his white prayer robes after coming from the mosque. He uses two pronouns in the English language: ‘I’ and ‘you.’ He is ‘I’ and everyone else is ‘you’. As in “Father, you dead” which is how he told me his father is dead.  

(I promise at some point I will teach him properly and reinforce it, but for now I just like it too much when he says “You say _____________” which is how he explains to me whatever anyone he interviewed answered.)

As with universal truth, my Swahili is surely equally flawed. And yet somehow, we work together all the same.

More highlights of the past few days of life in Zanzibar: