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Epilogue Binti Dadi has hundreds of children. She is well known for helping women “get pregnant quickly” (kupata mimba haraka haraka). Each child that her roots and leaves and kombe have helped to bring into the world she calls “my child” (mwanagu). Over the past decade, I have watched her prepare countless concoctions to help women and men who want to have a child. In the process, I have dutifully noted down the plants and trees used to make medicine; the conversations between Binti Dadi, Mariamu, and the women seeking children; the details of the therapies; the therapeutic itineraries of women who have sometimes sought care in a variety of settings before coming to Binti Dadi; and the births of children. During the first few years that I shadowed Binti Dadi, an old Sony Walkman sat in a corner recording the sounds and voices of these women’s visits. I had them all transcribed into the red school notebooks I bought in the Newala market. The notebooks into which the complaints, fears, and prayers of these hot days found their way now sit in the closet in my study, the familiar curly round handwriting used by so many educated women in Tanzania starting to fade. In the beginning, when my immediate goal was still a dissertation and this book part of a vague, as-yet-unformed future, I read through them all and marked pages with little Post-it notes. Each note was designed to draw my attention to patterns among therapies or particularly interesting exchanges or dramatic events. On later trips, I used digital files and videotapes. A few of these stories have found a home in the pages of this book. All anthropologists, I suspect, feel that the lives of their friends, adopted kin, interlocutors, and interviewees are never fully captured in their tellings. Not all the fragments of the stories held on old cassette tapes or in field notes can come together in the sadaka, the thank you, that we offer through our writing. Yet the dust gathering on the stories I collected seems particularly poignant as I look back at my more recent field notes and notice a glaring absence of writing on the day that Binti prepared medicine for my partner, Jeff, and me. We had arrived in Newala for a visit shortly after the rains had finished in 2008. I was spending six months in Dar es Salaam beginning a new research project. Epilogue 241 Eager to see our friends, Jeff and I made the safari to Newala as soon as we could. We noted the changed roads along the coast. The long-awaited paving had begun between Dar es Salaam and Mtwara, the provincial capital and the town where one turns west to head to Newala. All but sixty kilometers was smooth blacktop, raising our hopes for other changes that might bring greater ease to our friends’ lives in the south. (On the way home those sixty kilometers managed to eat up three days when our car broke down in the middle of what the long-distance truck drivers familiar with the route called “bandit country.”) When we peeked our heads through the slits in Binti Dadi’s fence there was much elation. Binti Dadi, though now perhaps in her mid-nineties, danced delightedly . We spent two glorious days lounging in her courtyard; catching up; laughing; wondering at her granddaughter Yanini, now nine and a half years old; delighting in her daughter Sofia’s new house; and savoring the company of Binti DadiandMariamu.Wordspreadquicklythatwewerebackintown.Theinfamous neighbors who had cut down Binti Dadi’s tree so long ago merely shouted their greeting from next door. All other visitors poured into the compound. In the midst of so much excitement, Binti Dadi chose a relatively quiet moment—when the teenagers had Jeff’s attention and Mariamu and Yanini were helping an elderly blind friend, whose leg I had once watched Binti Dadi heal, find a comfortable spot on the grass mat—to ask me the familiar question. This time she asked in almost a whisper, “So, when are you going to have children?” Over the years she had asked this question in many ways. She had also taken it upon herself to publicly defend my childlessness many times, asserting to others that “Stacey must finish school.” Binti Dadi is a strong, independent-minded woman, and as a healer she bent many of the expected gender norms. One day in 1999 when I arrived at her...

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