Notes from the Pacific

I took my last malaria pill tonight. That means it's been 81 days since that first night in Doha, dozing in a chair and conversing awkwardly with American missionaries headed, like me, for places they'd only read about. That also means it's been 30 days, give or take a few missed doxycyclines, since I returned. The danger of bloodborne parasites has passed. Africa, one might say, is out of my system.

But of course it isn't. My room, like my head, is full of mementos from my trip: Zanzibari scarves folded on the corner of my desk here in Honolulu, a hand-painted card from Dar's museum beside the computer, the skirt I had tailor-made from kitenge fabric hanging in my closet. My wandering thoughts and eyes both frequently come to rest on notions of Tanzania. But the card remains unsent; I never could figure out for whom it seemed right. The skirt I've only worn once--its bold, waxy print just feels out of place, and besides, the fit is a little off. And the unworn scarves sit in mockery of my ignorance of both the city in which I bought them and the one into which I have since moved; neither, in any season, is cool enough to facilitate their wear.

I haven't decided what to do with these things. I don't yet know all that my experience really meant, or what, besides a few scarves, I should take away. The residue of that trip has also inadvertently become a part of my foundation here in Hawaii, as I've been adjusting to my new situation even while ruminating on my recent past. The two have already blended in at least one respect; I am designing a Swahili course with one of my professors (UH offers an amazing array of languages for study, but Swahili happens to not usually be one of them.) Who knows; maybe I'll find myself back in East Africa for research someday. Perhaps my new life as a grad student is actually just an indirect and incredibly expensive continuation of this experience.

At least for right now, though, I'm just an island-bound student bobbing in the gentle wake of my first week of classes. Despite the fact that everything has been incredibly easy so far, though, I often have the creeping feeling that I'm some sort of impostor, that I'm not smart enough to be here with all these amazing students and that sooner or later someone else is going to catch on to this. Sure, it's not really true, but something about the thousands of hours of serious labor that I put into my undergrad degree, only to discover that none of it was enough to distinguish me to employers, eroded my confidence a little. I'm working on getting it back; maybe this is where I'm supposed to apply some lessons from Tanzania. In the meantime, I'll take a lesson in humility.

Well. It's late here on my watery slice of the globe. The streetlights are reflecting off the shiny wet blackness of my post-rain lanai, a reproduction in miniature of the stars on the ocean that I can see from the top of my block. It's unlikely that I'll arrive at any sort of concrete answers to my musings any time soon, but I think it's healthy to keep my memories of Tanzania out where I can actively interpret and integrate them into this latest Hawaiian episode. Now I just need to figure out what to do with these scarves.

The Beach, The Boat, The Beginning

After arriving back in Stone Town that evening, July 31, I had dinner at the street market next to the Beit El-Ajaib (House of Wonders--i.e., Zanzibar Museum), a huge and lovely old building with supposedly one of the world's largest carved wooden doors. Vendors lined the street at the market, all displaying a very similar array of fish kebabs, calamari, dangly tentacle-things, banana chapatis, and these funny little "Swahili pizzas," which were dough pockets filled with ground beef, an egg, and cabbage, and topped with the strawberry-jam-pinkish-red ketchup that they served all over Tanzania. The fish was actually rather dry--maybe I was a few hours too late--but it was still fun to be out in such a lively atmosphere. I also ran into a Dutch guy I'd met back in Lushoto and an Icelandic girl from the spice tour, and I convinced them to join me in searching for this place I'd read about in my Lonely Planet where some taarab band rehearses in the evenings. We actually found it--no small feat in those winding alleys, especially since it turned out to be in the top floor of some unmarked, mostly-empty building. We just followed our ears up to where the band members (several violinists, an accordian player, some tambourine players, a bassist, and quite a few singers) were practicing their rhythmically wailing, Arab-inspired music. For the last number, the women floated over to us in their acres of sumptuous fabric and asked the Icelandic girl and me to dance with them, which we did while laughing at our own robotic attempts to mirror their effortless undulations. It was a good time.

Afterwards the three of us went to a ridiculously overpriced bar on the waterfront and chatted for a while; I joked that I was hanging out with my two oldest friends on Zanzibar, which was amusingly true. Our bar, along with pretty much the entire city, shut down by 11pm (the Islamic influence, no doubt), so after not too long we called it a night.

The next morning I got up with the mosque at dawn again, put my bathing suit on under my clothes, and headed out to the sketchy-as-hell bus station to find my ride to the beach village of Jambiani, on the southeastern coast, chosen because of my guidebook's description of its quiet atmosphere and "otherworldly" turquoise waters. The driver told me I had about a 45-minute wait until my "bus" (read: flatbed pickup truck, actually rather nicely appointed with benches in the back and a covering over the top) left, so I wandered over to have black coffee and sweetbread with a group of men seated under a tree. They found this very funny in a good-natured sort of way, their amusement augmented by my comical attempts at Swahili. The guys were even so kind as to offer me my sweetbread for free, and while I didn't take them up on that, I sincerely appreciated the offer. These salesmen posed an interesting contrast with the dozens of guys per day who tried so hard to sell me overpriced stuff. By doing something completely out of the ordinary for a tourist--after all, only local dudes sit around under trees drinking out of weeks-since-they-were-washed enamel cups--I suddenly became their guest, and they wanted to take care of me as such. It was a really lovely moment.

Anyway, the ride to Jambiani took somewhere in the neighborhood of three hours, despite the fact that it wasn't that far away. The driver and his two helpers were remarkably amenable, though, to helping passengers hoist all kinds of luggage up onto the roof over the flatbed: stalks of bananas by the dozen, huge bundles of firewood, bags and boxes and burdens of all sorts went up there.

I've spoken before about the idea of personal space in Tanzania, but this bus ride provided the best example yet. In Western countries, when boarding a public vehicle with benches stretching out in front of you, you'd probably scoot all the way down to the far end to make room for the people getting on behind you. There, though, people sat as close as possible to the end at which they entered, whether there was any room there or not. If other people were sitting by the end, they'd just sit on them. Even if there was no one at all sitting on the back half of the bench, people entering would still crowd into the front half as if they had no other choice. And, perhaps strangest of all, those sitting on the far ends made no motion to scoot down to alleviate the crush on one side of them. Nobody minded being squished. It was just so completely normal to them.

Anyway, Jambiani was as idyllic as the book said, with little tiny huts made of rough white sea stone (some kind of coral, maybe) and the whitest white sand I'd ever seen. It was so powdery that it swirled into the waves as they lapped the shore, giving the shallows a milky quality; it was so fine that, when wet, it was sticky to the touch, sucking my sandals off like a giant mixture of flour and water. I was the only patron at my little guesthouse (whose "reception" was a solitary desk with absolutely nothing on it in a bare concrete three-walled room, while the "breakfast area" consisted of several chairs and tables plunked into the sand under a thatched roof.) I swam, practically at my doorstep, in the Indian Ocean that night, and spent the next morning walking out to much-receded waterline. The tide was at least a mile out, leaving behind a fascinating array of tide pools filled with sea urchins and starfish that took me over an hour to veeeeeery carefully pick my way through. The water was so marvelously clear that I could see every hair on my toes, even through knee-deep pools. There were lots of women and children in the water tending the seaweed crops (some random guy named Ali who walked me all around the beach the day before had told me that they sell it to Denmark for cosmetics.) It was such a beautiful scene, with the women's kangas and headscarves billowing out on the water as they worked, fully clothed, up to their chests in the vividly blue-green water. I wandered around that foreign landscape for quite some time.

I took the open-sided dala-dala back to Stone Town that afternoon in time to catch the night ferry back to Dar. The ferry trip to Zanzibar usually takes about two hours. Because of the currents, the ride back usually lasts four...unless you take the infamous night ferry, that is. Then it takes ten hours.

My rusting hulk of a ship was crammed to at least 150% capacity. Walking down the aisles between the rows of seats was impossible, as every square inch of floor space was covered in sleeping people. We finally sputtered away from the dock at about 10pm, proceeded a hundred yards into the harbor...and dropped anchor, staying put for the next two and a half hours. I think this was done for safety reasons; they didn't want us to have to be in the Zanzibar port too late at night and didn't want us to arrive in the Dar port before dawn. While I did appreciate the concern, the wait was excruciating. My knees ached from the cramped seats; babies all around me were crying, and while I understood their discomfort, they were really loud; the chalky fluorescent lights were glaring, even through my eyelids when I attempted to close them. I finally forfeited my seat and climbed over the bodies to a patch of standing room by the rail, where I was quickly joined by a local guy who made the interminable wait pass a little faster by asking my questions about what he euphemistically called "instructional videos" (i.e., porn) in America.

Several hours, a light rain, and a handful of invitations to Porno Man's house later, the ferry finally started moving and I made my way to some chump's vacated seat, where I nodded off sporadically for the next five and a half hours, my moments of wakefulness punctuated by the melodic sounds of vomiting all around me. We docked in Dar at first light, and I groggily got a cab and headed straight for the airport to await my afternoon departure.

I once again had an overnight layover in Doha, Qatar, and was completely prepared to spend it, as I had on my way to Tanzania, alternating between dozing in a chair, pacing the airport, and accidentally squirting myself awake with the bidet in the ladies' room. Because it was still relatively early in the evening when I landed, though, I decided to try going through customs first to see if they'd let me out into the city for a few hours without buying a visa. I went up to the guy behind the desk, told him I had a connecting flight in the morning and that I was hoping to leave the airport...and then the clouds parted and Allah smiled and he handed me, completely unbidden, a voucher for a free cab ride to my free hotel with a free buffet dinner and breakfast before my free cab back to the airport in the morning to catch my next flight. Not kidding.

What little I saw of downtown Doha (on the way to my Free! Free! Free! accommodations) was a bizarre mass of construction projects and brand new skyscrapers flaunting an abundance of shiny steel and an excess of windows, all incongruously thrust into the 110-degree air (and this was at night) above empty streets blowing with desert dust. It seemed very much like a city that had just sprung up the week before, built by an eager contingent of citizens who had suddenly realized that they're richer than God.

I chased the sun westward all the next day, and by the time I touched down on home soil it was still high in the sky, though 20 hours had passed since my sunrise. I was glad to be back in my beautiful and diverse home country, glad to be in a place where I could communicate easily, understand the customs, and not be a public spectacle. I was also, though, truly sad to stop traveling, sad to no longer be living so independently and spontaneously. Sometimes the trip was very removed from my typical daily reality; a life-away-from-real-life. But then again, sometimes I was frustrated. Sometimes I was bored. Sometimes I was excited, nurtured, afraid, content, amazed, lonely. In many ways, the trip was as real as real life gets.

I am now a graduate student. I arrived in Hawaii one week ago, just eight days after I returned to the US. I've been to the beach, the forest, the art museum and the farmers' market. I've gone to a slack key guitar festival and been given a lei. I've been rained on at all times of the day and night. I've watched geckos scamper across my kitchen table.

I start class on Monday, and I'm a little nervous.

I'm already planning my next big trip.

Putting the 'Zan' in Tanzania

Zanzibar is a semi-autonomous archipelago off Tanzania's coast; it joined with the mainland, then called Tanganyika, in the sixties, and the whole country's name was changed to include the "zan." I spent my three short days there on the main island, also called Zanzibar. It was a truly fascinating place that was just as Arab as it was African and just as Indian as it was Arab. (It used to be the seat of the Sultan of Oman, so the cultural influences there are vastly different from those of greater Tanzania.) Men in long white Islamic robes sat under intricately carved wooden doorframes sharing long-spouted silver pots of coffee, while women with only their eyes showing shepherded children through the impossibly narrow cobblestone alleyways. And of course a million tourists milled around, but that only marginally detracted from the allure. The place seemed to handle its glut of visitors with relative aplomb.

My first evening walk through the main city, called Stone Town, was positively magical--straight out of Arabian Nights--with the winding streets bathed in soft gold lamplight and the smells of cardamom and cinnamon and cloves wafting from restaurants and kitchens. I stopped at a little gelato cafe right on the beach (true, gelato isn't entirely authentic, but there is actually a large Italian population on Zanzibar for some reason), which was highly atmospheric. I couldn't wait to get started on my day the next morning, and the 5am wailing of the mosques made it pretty easy to get up early.

I found the next morning that the town actually lost a little of its mystique by daylight, but it was still great. I joined a spice tour that morning, which I honestly didn't find all that interesting. I was driven in a dala-dala with eight or so others to a spice farm a little ways outside of town that seemed to have been made specifically for tours, as there were several other large groups there too. Our guide let us smell and taste plants like clove and vanilla bean; I was really surprised to learn that cocoa bean pods are covered in a slippery, sweet gel, like lychee, and that the beans themselves are purple. I also got a whiff of cinnamon bark and fresh ginger root, and at the end they cut up several fruits for us to try--breadfruit, Zanzibar apples, jack fruit, some type of orange, etc. Then we had a really good lunch of rice and curry and mboga mboga (stewed greens), followed by a strange and unplanned trip to some slave caves. After slavery was abolished on Zanzibar, the slave traders used networks of underground caves to store slaves until they could be illegally sold and smuggled away by boat. We entered by descending two flights of stairs, and then the guide walked us back into the cave maybe about a hundred yards or so, which was funny because we were all wearing sandals and only the guide and his helper had flashlights. Walking was difficult, but I was most intrigued by the fuss that people put up about it. Their attitudes made an interesting contrast with the African perspective on walking; namely, it seemed to me throughout my seven weeks there that Africans rarely stumble and that they never complain about distance or terrain. Everyone--children, old people, sick people, pregnant women, everyone--was like a mountain goat in their sure-footedness, despite (or perhaps because of) always walking barefoot or in broken plastic flipflops imported from China. I was noticeably, remarkably clumsy by comparison in my village, even in my indestructible hiking boots. It was funny, in the cave, to once again be around people who slid and stumbled just like me.

After the cave, they took us (briefly, briefly) to the beach, a trip cut short by the encroaching tide. Zanzibari tides were the most dramatic I've ever seen--when they were out, they were way out, and when they came in, the beach disappeared all the way to the treeline. We hurriedly snatched our shoes away from the encroaching waves after only ten or so minutes there, which was fine with me, as I was excited to get back to Stone Town.

Admission of Computer Illiteracy

I don't know how to shrink this picture, so whatever. I like it.

The Mountains

The day after my safari ended, I took a bus to Moshi, at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro. The only real reason I had for stopping there was to see the mountain, but that proved infinitely harder than one might imagine, given that it was only about 15 miles away. It was completely ensconced in fog--every bit of it, bottom, sides, and everything--for all but a very brief moment in the evening, when I saw a hint of snowcovered side peeking out. I never saw the whole thing, and certainly not the top, but that little fraction of a side was nice...I guess. It loomed significantly higher in the air than all the surrounding scenery, giving a hint of what the mountain's actual size might be, which was cool.

I'm glad I stopped in Moshi anyway, though. It was so much quieter than Arusha (and on a different scale altogether from Dar). I spent the afternoon on a long walk outside the city and encountered something strange that I could only call...suburbs. The streets were peaceful and shaded by large trees. There were no open sewage drains and very little trash. Houses were neat and tidy, painted, and made from stucco and stone, glass and metal. Some people even had flowers and shrubs planted around their homes. It was truly odd seeing this, as all I'd experienced in Africa until that point were the crowded urban areas, with their hordes of people, speeding cars, and mounds of trash, and the sudden, stark contrast presented by the villages of mud and thatch and farm animals and children in rags. The suburban houses looked as if their owners had built them with the intention that they would last; both the urban and rural structures always seemed to be built as quickly as possible from whatever materials were on hand, and often appeared to be on the brink of collapse.

After my underwhelming rendez-vous with Kilimanjaro, I left by bus for what turned out to be my favorite destination on mainland Tanzania. The tiny city of Lushoto is tucked away in the green, misty Usambara Mountains, beautiful enough that the people are relatively used to seeing travelers, yet small and remote enough that most locals don't make their livings hawking things to them. I checked into a hilariously gross hotel attached to a bar. My little concrete room had two beds, a window with a broken screen and shredded curtain, and a ceiling alive with mold. The room was off a concrete courtyard that contained a truly smelly pit toilet and an oil drum filled with water and swimming insects to use for washing. I only ended up spending one night in that hotel; I changed to a nicer one for the second night. It wasn't so much the facility itself that I couldn't abide, though the atmosphere there was pretty depressing; it was the scent of my unwashed sheets that drove me away. They didn't smell particularly bad, I suppose. They just smelled distinctly like someone else. I spent the whole next morning catching whiffs of myself-as-another--it was the smell of African hair creme, and it clung to my slippery strands just as well as it would to any braids. It was finally just too weird, and I moved my stuff to another hotel down the street and showered, though it wasn't even my shower day--the only time during my trip that I bothered with more than two showers a week, if that gives any indication of how odd the odor situation really was.

In Lushoto, I spent the first evening walking to a place farther up in the mountains called Irente Farm and "Biosphere Reserve" (whatever that means--it looked pretty much like a farm to me). I bought a wheel of cheese, but I had underestimated the amount of time it would take to complete the 7-mile roundtrip journey, and it was already 5pm by the time I arrived, so I just bought my cheese and headed immediately back down to my hotel so as not to be out after dark. The walk was absolutely stunning, though; everything was magnificently lush, and the path afforded beautiful views of the valley below. I actually went back the next morning so I could spend more time there; I ate breakfast on the patio of the farmhouse (they offered a set menu of bread with jam, cheese, cucumbers, carrots, and tea), and then headed about a kilometer farther up the mountain to a place called Irente Viewpoint. It was a stunning perch with unobstructed views of the arid plains far below (and yet it was so very green around me!); I even saw the bus I'd be taking the next day trundling by on a puny rope of asphalt that, somewhere far eastward, would end by the sea and mark the conclusion of the overland portion of my journey.

That sea was precisely where I found myself the next evening as I boarded a ferry to the Zanzibar Archipelago, formerly known as the Spice Islands. This, my last destination, turned out to be the most unique, surprising, and utterly delightful place I visited; I will finish up my travel tales with stories of Zanzibar when I next get a chance to post.

A Somewhat Belated Continuation

I'm back at home in Tennessee now, where I've been for six days. I'm sitting on my bed with an Appletini a la Mom, I'm over the jetlag, and I've had ice cream almost every day since I returned: in other words, life is good and I have no excuse not to finish these posts. Furthermore, since I'm shipping out to Hawaii in only slightly over 24 hours, it might well be now or never.

So where was I? Ngorongoro. It was cold. Okay, the water in my bottle didn't freeze, so it couldn't have been below 32, but I'd be surprised if the nighttime temperature were any higher than 35...and that's cold when you're in a moth-eaten cotton tent from 1982. I wore pretty much all the clothes I brought to Africa with me, or at least all the ones that I could fit on top of each other on my body at the same time--three t-shirts, two long-sleeved shirts (one, luckily, had a thin hood, which helped), three pairs of pants, and three pairs of socks. Even with all that I couldn't feel my toes at all for 18 straight hours, despite the boots into which I bundled them.

The crater was really beautiful, though. Our lush campsite on the rim was completely ensconced in fog all morning, giving our breakfast (huddled, wrapped in blankets, over steaming cups of Milo) a dreamy quality. Soon after daybreak we drove down the steep, switchbacked road into the crater. It was bloody cold down there too, keeping some animals away, but we still saw quite a profusion. Most notable were the wildebeest, traveling around the grassy parts of the crater floor in their great herds, with their long bodies, spindly legs, and oddly thin faces. The wildebeest were often accompanied by groups of zebras--a symbiotic relationship, our driver, William, explained, as one species likes to munch on tall grass while the other prefers short. We saw wildebeest first thing upon reaching the crater's bottom; a large herd of them was running--nay, frolicking--across the road. The way they leaped and bucked their shaggy heads was pretty amusing. We also saw cape buffalo, lions, flamingos, a cheetah, and many more DLTs ("deer-like things;" Gretchen's term.) We didn't find the elusive and highly endangered black rhinoceros for which the crater is famous, but the lubberly love of the two mating hippos we encountered was perhaps treat enough.

We drove up and out of the crater that afternoon, and I stood with my upper body out the top of the Land Cruiser the entire way, like a dog out a window; there's something innately pleasing about the wind and the smells and the whooshing sensation, and even the black film of dirt that I wiped off my face afterward was a satisfying testament to both the speed and the intimacy with which I had encountered the land we'd traversed. After striking camp (I went with such a budget company that we not only slept in tents, but we also got no offers of help from the driver when it came to putting them up or taking them down), we headed out to Lake Manyara National Park. We arrived in the mid-afternoon, and unfortunately weren't able to do much with the rest of the day; something about park entry fees prevented us from entering before the next morning. Our campsite was very nice, though, with a beautiful overlook and a nice little open-sided hut serving as a mess hall.

That night, as we waited for dinner from Pius, the slowest imaginable cook (four hours to boil pasta?), an entire troupe of acrobats bounded into the mess hall unannounced. Dressed like actors from an ill-equipped community theater's valiant attempt at The Lion King, they all wore motley incarnations of animal print, except for their leader, who attired himself in a spandex wrestling suit and a skirt of feathers. They then proceeded to make me wince with their daring (and, as it turned out, nicely performed) stunts on the bare concrete floor, and then just disappeared back into the night after asking for some well-deserved tips. Bizarre spectres in an unlikely location.

The next morning we drove into Lake Manyara National Park, which was beautiful and very different-looking from the other parks; it had lush, thick, green forests that gave way to grassy plains and then finally to the lake itself, with its amazing contingent of flamingos. There were so many that, from a distance, the lake seemed completely pink along its shoreline and for quite a ways out. Giraffes grazed calmly near the lake, and we saw several elephants crashing through the brush. There were also many baboons, vervet monkeys, and blue monkeys, as well as a huge monitor lizard and a plethora of birds. The leopards and the famous, if rarely sighted, tree-climbing lions didn't make appearances. While Lake Manyara definitely offered the lowest number of animal sightings, it had arguably the best scenery--plenty of green; great baobab trees with their impossibly thick trunks and spindly, clawlike branches; bushes covered in butterflies; the scent of fragrant flowers wafting in through our pop-top. It was also our warmest destination, which helped. After lunch back at the campsite, we drove back to Arusha, and William, Pius, and my safarimates left me in front of the same hotel from which they'd retrieved me four days prior.

Ack, so much more to tell! I'll do my best to finish tomorrow.

The "Way Too Much Has Happened for One Post" Post

Lord, I'm never going to fit this all in before I have to go get on my plane. Yes, that's right, I'm leaving Africa today. I'm variously glad to be going home (hot showers! potable water on demand! no one who even knows what "mzungu" means!), and also very disappointed to be leaving. I know I haven't seen any more than just the beginning of what this part of the world has to offer. Such diversity, such color, such vibrance. Such a short amount of time in which to try to understand it all.

Ok, so we drove to the Serengeti on the first day of the safari. My travelmates were three American kids traveling together (two of whom were--get this--UCSD students, and all of whom were in Tanzania through UCSD's Arusha Project), and one Canadian guy traveling alone like me. We started out in the gloom of Arusha and went up, up, up, past Lake Manyara, across the misty, rainy rim of the Ngorongoro Crater, and down to the (finally sunny, almost) grassland of the Serengeti. It wasn't quite the endless plain of my imagining; there were definitely trees here and there (including some magnificent, and very "African" looking, flat-topped thorn acacias, as well as many others not quite so much like you'd picture) and blue mountains off in the distance marking a definite endpoint of the lowlands, as well as the mounds of flaky rock, cropping up out of nowhere, called kopjes. We saw some great animals and scenery--perhaps, even, the best of our whole trip--one the loooong drive through the park to our campsite (a cleared-out area right there in the park where everyone who is sleeping in a tent must camp together; safety in numbers, right? Though on that night we spent there, we definitely heard the snuffling of an animal--zebra, perhaps?--grazing right outside our tent and even nudging our heads out of the way to get the grass underneath. We also heard the lions roaring just before dawn as we sat down to breakfast.) On that first drive in, we saw hippos, cheetahs (a mother and two adolescents!), zebras, giraffes, elephants; more gazelles, impala, and antelopes than I can count; dik-diks, an African Wild Cat (looks almost exactly like a housecat), baboons, two rock hyraxes (East Africa's answer to the rabbit), cape buffalo, the morally poisonous puff adder (one bite kills a human in ten minutes), and countless birds (eagles, vultures, cranes, secretary birds, etc.) Perhaps best of all, we saw a male lion in his fully-maned glory, lounging by the side of the road (right by the side of the road) before he sashayed lazily across it directly in front of our car. We marveled at an astounding sunset (reds, golds, feathered clouds, a burning ball that sank below the grass leaving the chill of darkness behind), and then hit the hay early for our 5:30 am rise.

The next day was chilly and unreasonably rainy (lamest dry season ever), which kept us inside the pop-top and many animals at bay, though we did see a pretty good showing even so. Nothing that we hadn't seen on the way in, but hey, who can complain about giraffes loping through the bush twenty feet away? After lunch on that second day, we drove back up into the mountains to the lush rim of the Ngorongoro Crater (an ancient, collapsed volcano that calls itself, with perhaps some degree of accuracy, the world's eighth wonder), where we FROZE.

Ok, computer time is up and I have to go check in from my flight. May have to finish this stateside. Onwards and upwards--next adventure, grad school!!

Love to all. See you soon.

Safari!

Wow, so a lot has happened since I left Kiganza. I flew from there to Dar es Salaam a week ago and was surprised to find that all but one of the seedy hotels near the bus station were full. The availability in the one that wasn't was limited to a ridiculously expensive double room with A/C (didn't work, and cost extra), hot water (ditto), and a grainy TV picking up a handful of god-awful Indian music video stations. I sucked it up and paid for it, and spent a sweaty night lying flat on my back (on a double bed, though) in my underwear, musty mosquito net flopping irritatingly against my face, trying to stay cool. It was funny seeing the city for a second time. When I first landed there six weeks ago, the first thing I noticed about Dar es Salaam was its dirt, chaos, and lack of what we as Westerners would call "development." After five weeks in a villlage, though, I was stunned by how modern Dar suddenly seemed. There are cars on the roads! Billboards! Women in--can it be?--pants!! I felt infinitely more confident navigating my way around and dealing with the inevitable attention I attracted.

I left by bus at 7:00 the next morning. There were some minor hang-ups--my ticket had been sold, or transferred, or something, to a different bus company than the one I'd chosen, and there was a 5000 Tsh (about $4.25) "luggage fee" (i.e., rip-off), and all the passengers had to change buses only about half an hour into the trip, but otherwise the 10-hour journey was pretty smooth. We had one 15-minute lunch break at a funny little roadside restaurant, and two bathroom breaks en masse in someone's cassava fields (sorry, farmers). The clouds that I'd woken up to in Dar that morning followed me all the way to Arusha, which is about halfway across the country and to the north, and at a much higher altitude. I spent a chilly night in my teeeeeny little hotel room (so small that the bed blocked the door from opening all the way and I had to take my backpack off and push it through ahead of me to get in), and woke up the next morning to a cold drizzle. My first stop, the tourist info office, proved very helpful, in part because of the passel of safari company hasslers who sprang on me the instant I exited. At first I tried to ignore them, but then I grudgingly had to admit that they were pretty useful for showing me around to all the safari offices (doubtless trying to collect a tip from whichever company I chose), and were saving me lots of time standing around in the rain with a map. So my five new friends and I set out to visit tour companies all over Arusha, and by the early evening I was booked as the last member of a 5-person safari, 4 days, 3 nights, leaving at 8:30 the next morning.

My ride (a pop-top Land Cruiser) arrived, as expected, at around 9:15 the next day, and we spent the next two hours driving around the city so that the guide could run some errands (grab his sleeping bag here, visit the ATM there) and buy our food (as if he somehow hadn't known in advance that he was leading a safari that day.) We finally left Arusha a little after 11 am for the 6-hour drive to Serengeti National Park.

At this point I feel I need to explain myself. I am not the safari type. I do not have a silly khaki hat with a chin strap. I do not have a billion-millimeter zoom on my camera, nor do I fantasize about sampling champagne and caviar under a baobab tree. I did not come to this country to spend ten thousand dollars getting shuttled around in style. But as I learned while researching Tanzania's northern national parks, "safari" simply means gaining access. Walking in these parks, for obvious reasons, is not allowed. Therefore, to get in to the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, and all the other breathtakingly astounding natural places here, you must hire a car and guide, and by that point, it's cheaper to go through a tour company so that you can join a group and split the cost. That needed to be clarified.

So where was I? Yes, the drive to Serengeti. Unfortunately, it's Sunday, and this internet cafe is closing, so I'll have to finish later.

Leaving Kiganza

I'm flying out iof Kiganza today and into Dar es Salaam. Though that's terribly out of the way for my final destination of Arusha, transport here is such that there's almost no other way to get there, besides hitchhiking with truck drivers, which I don't think I'm up for. Arusha is about a 10 hour bus ride from Dar, so I hope to arrive Monday night and start planning my entrance into the Serengeti. Have to go catch my plane!!

Sharing Gombe

Yared, Heather, a 16 year-old local girl named Nema, and I hiked into Gombe Stream National Park on Friday morning, which was in itself a unique experience. Gombe is one of Tanzania's most isolated national parks, and is officially only reachable by ferry on Lake Tanganyika. We, however, started out from Kiganza and came in overland through the back of the park, arriving at the front office only after having already been in the park for quite some time. According to Yared, Heather and I may have been the first Westerners to ever enter the area on foot--a claim that's impossible to verify, but still means that we were lucky enough to get a very unusual introduction to Gombe. The hike took about five hours over moderately strenuous terrain; we started out westward through Kiganza's neighboring villages, first dropping down to the river and hiking through tropical forest before climbing back into the arid (or maybe just badly deforested) mountains. We then half-slid our knee-breaking descent back down the other side of the mountains and, finally, directly to the beach on the shores of the world's second-deepest freshwater lake. The first view of the lake as we topped the mountain was really incredible. If you forgot which coast you were on, you'd think it was the ocean...thick forest vegetation suddenly just gave way to a pristine white beach, deserted except for the baboons, and then a blue-green expanse of water stretching all the way to the horizon and beyond (comforting, in a way, that you can't see across it, given the instability of what lies on the other side.)

After hiking along the beach for a mile or so, we arrived at Gombe's front office. We were all filthy and drenched with sweat, but Heather and I were really eager to start our official chimp-tracking hike into the forest, as Tanzania's park entrance fees for non-Tanzanian citizens are outrageous. Every day we spent in the forest would cost us over $120, and because Heather and I were required to pay for Friday (because we'd hiked through the forest to get there), we wanted to go ahead and use the rest of the day for chimping. Yared informed us, though, that the man who collects money at Gombe had gone to the mosque that day instead of coming into work (even though Yared had called ahead to announce our overland arrival.) We were absolutely restricted from paying anyone else, he said, and positively forbidden to re-enter the forest without paying. Furthermore, the guy collecting fees would likely not be in until the evening, after the forest was closed to visitors. So we were simply compelled to sit around and wait to pay a man for an activity that we didn't get a chance to do...because we were sitting around waiting to pay him. This was horribly frustrating to my American sensibilities (value for money? Ability to complain to a manager?), and if the beach hadn't proven so indefagitably luxuriant, I would have been pretty incensed.

As it was, though, the waters of Lake Tanganyika were glorious beyond comparison. They were just the right combination of calm and tepid, and utterly clear. I spent the afternoon swimming and doing "laundry" by scrubbing my clothes in the lake (though a baboon did try to steal my only pair of pants out of a tree while they were drying, causing me to alarm the Africans down the beach as I splashed out of the water, yelling.)

We were lodged in a simple two-bedroom resthouse (it's actually more expensive to pitch a tent than it is to stay in the resthouse, for some completely unknown reason) with only a sliding bar latch on the door to keep out the baboons and mouse poop under my pillow (hanta virus, anyone?) The extra poo on top of my mosquito net alerted me to the fact that they were living in the ceiling above my bed; not always the most comforting revelation, but at least the net was there. We even had a passable cook, Joyce, who made us unseasoned rice and beans twice a day and brought us room-temperature pints of Kilimanjaro lager in the evenings.

On the second day, we went out to find the chimps...which proved incredibly easy, as a family of about 12 of them happened to be hanging out outside Jane Goodall's research station that day. We got incredibly close--no more than a foot away at one point, when two chimps came down our path from either direction at the same time and we had nowhere to go to get out of their way. (They actually greeted each other when they met! I saw chimps hugging!) They were fun to watch, though I didn't see them make tools or build a house or play Yahtzee or anything else strikingly human. After that, our guide (mandatory, and expensive) took us hiking to a wonderful waterfall that looked straight out of The Jungle Book, with water crashing over a rock ledge into a clear pool and a backdrop of moss and low vines. We then hiked to Jane's Peak, a mountaintop where we got a great view of the lake on one side and the mountains through which we'd come on the other.

We left the next afternoon by sharing an official Gombe boat with a tour group of Tanzanian government officials from the Dept of Immigration who had arrived the day before. Speaking of sharing, that's one of the aspects of this culture that most sets it apart from the US. People share everything here, which can be both a good and a bad thing... An illustration:

On our second night in the park, as Heather, Nema, and I were sitting at the kitchen table in our little house, a man in a towel walked in, greeted us cordially, and went straight into the room where Nema had been staying. When he had shut the door behind him, I leaned over to Nema. "Who was that?!" I hissed incredulously; she just shrugged. "But...he's in your room!!" I continued, a fact which also rendered Nema entirely nonplussed. (We later learned that she'd been kicked out of her room in favor of the immigration tour group, despite having been there before them, news which she accepted with a similar degree of nonchalance.) The next morning, Heather and I woke in the face of a full-on invasion. The whole dept of immigration was in our living room, drinking the coffee that our cook had packed for us to bring along, and making such a racket that continuing to sleep was simply not an option. Incredibly, Nema was out there waiting on them, refilling their mugs with (her) coffee, clearing their scraps and taking their dishes down to wash in the lake. (I don't know whether it was her gender, young age, or their own inflated senses of self-importance that allowed them to accept this as normal, but it really bothered me.) They did, however, invite Heather, Nema, and me to share their soup, which I found innocuous enough, and which resulted in me eating goat intestine for breakfast.

They presented us with three cauldrons of decreasing size, and when I saw a full jawbone, complete with all teeth, emerge from the biggest pot, I knew this was no tomato bisque I was going to be eating. The second pot, even scarier than the first, contained all the parts of the animal that we American omnivores like to pretend don't exist. Pale, knobbly intestines snaked around piles of whole organs; a geodesic stomach balanced on chewy arteries ("It looks like a soccer ball," observed Heather); an entire cardiovascular system burbled back to life in its steaming stew. The third pot contained unctious, boneless chuck of what seemed to resemble, more than anything else present, what I would usually call "meat." "Karibu! Welcome!" they chirped as a woman took a full ear out of the second pot and began chewing on it. Heather and I each took a piece from the third container and bit hesitantly into what turned out to be goat liver, which I guess is what we get for trying to eat like Americans. The officials insisted that we take more, though, and plopped some bony masses onto each of our plates, as well as a yellow-grayish, braided-looking section of intestine ("I think I got the rectum," commented Heather calmly, indicating the fluted end of her piece.) I took a chewy bite and immediately knew where the faint manure-like smell permeating the room was coming from. After a few greasy attempts at the bony thing, I thanked them--quite sincerely, as it was a great experience--and snuck off to scour my teeth and slurp my iodined lake water.

I will be leaving solo for the Serengeti within a few days, which really excites me!! I will then hopefully spend a few days around Arusha on camel, and the go to Zanzibar. Whee!

Let Them Eat Dirt

On the recommendation of the government of Tanzania, I have eaten dirt.

I speak the truth. Pattie, Heather, and I were in the van with six or seven others on the way back from Burundi (more on that later) when I used my small-but-growing Swahili skills to ask what those huge white sacks lining the road were for. Soil, they said. For selling in Dar es Salaam. To plant crops? I asked. No, to eat, they explained, as calmly as if we were talking about bananas or bread or Pixie Stix. This caused quite an uproar, as Heather, Pattie, and I tried to figure out if there had been some miscommunication and the rest of the van laughed hysterically at how confused we were. It's called Pemba, they went on, and the government recommends that people eat it, especially pregnant women, which didn't exactly clear things up for us. They finally said they'd buy us some, which they did a few days later...and yes, it's actually dirt. We got two kinds, white and red, dried and packed into turd-shaped clumps. I guess pregnant women might eat it as an antacid, because it was pretty chalky...and tasted exactly like you might expect a clump of dirt to taste. I was flossing out little bits of sticks and other debris that night. Hmmm.

Unfortuantely, we didn't get the opportunity to see a whole lot while Pattie was here, due, in part, to the extraordinary degree to which this culture is community-based. We can never go anywhere without a packed vehicle, and because not everyone has the same schedule, we often have to defer to group consensus (or we just get overruled because we can't speak the language). We did, however, take a looong drive up into the highlands and into Burundi. Because we Westerners didn't have visas, this was accomplished through some cajoling at the border (and almost resulted in problems getting back into Tanzania; the border guards eyed me so suspiciously that I started wondering how big the bribe was going to have to be.) We were only out of the country for about twenty minutes, but we did see a UN refugee camp (rows and rows of tin shacks), several herds of long-horned cattle, and part of the Great Rift Valley. The climate in Burundi was also completely different; the air was much cooler and had a piney smell.

The next day, Sunday, we went with another vanload to Lake Tanganika, which is a huge body of water separating Tanzania from DR Congo and Zambia. Heather, Pattie, and I went in up to our calves; we wanted to stay and swim, or at least hang out, but our vanmates wanted to keep moving. On the way back to the car, though, we did see a herd of zebras!!! I always thought zebras lived in grasslands, but we were in a deciduous forest, and we just heard a galloping noise and saw stripes through the trees. It was one of the coolest things I've seen so far.

By that point it seemed only logical that we should split off from the van and take public transportation home in the evening. Inexplicably, this suggestion caused a lot of conflict; it was finally agreed to, though, so we three wazungu were left in Kigoma, blissfully alone. We took a daladala to the neighboring village of Ujiji to see the David Livingstone museum (a ragtag collection of watercolor paintings and funny plastic statues) and a giant mango tree, supposedly grafted from the very one under which Stanley met Livingstone and made his famous presumption. We decided to heed the proprietor's advice to avoid the beach in that location ("Too many bad people there" seemed ominous enough), so we went back to Kigoma and hung out at a bar for an hour before going back to the village. People there were extremely worried about us, though we'd been on our own for a grand total of five hours. While I really appreciate all their care and assistance, I do think that I'm often not given enough credit for being self-sufficient (one guy even tried to tell me not to go watch the Euro Cup game at the Kiganza market because there would be too many men there; if only he knew that I'd gone to a live game at the stadium in Dar where guys got beaten up right next to me and Lauren strangled a pickpocket!) Oh well, it's better than if they didn't care what happened to me at all.

Pattie left on Monday, and yesterday was the first day on which I was given any work to do. Heather and I, along with several locals, spent a long morning stuffing plastic tubing full of dirt in preparation for seeds being planted. It was good to finally do something, though I did mention to them several times that half the dirt we stuffed will have to be dug out again when they plant the seeds...but no matter. I have started to wonder how long I'm going to stay here, since there's not a lot for me to do and I could be traveling. Heather, Yared, and I are hiking to Gombe Stream National Park tomorrow, though, for a three-day stay on the shores of the lake with the chimpanzees. Gombe is the site of Jane Goodall's research station, so we will get to do chimp-tracking as well as hiking and maybe swimming (the water is supposedly free of biharzia, we can hopefully avoid schisto if we stay away from the reeds, and they say river blindness is easy to cure. Now about those crocodiles...) I'm really excited to get out and see more of the area.

I'll post again when we return from Gombe. Take care, everyone.

Choir

(From July 4, 2008)

They've arrived! Yared and Heather (who's Canadian, not American--oops) flew in yesterday afternoon. Heather will be a senior at Utah State this coming fall and seems like she'll be a great companion. There have been so many times during the past two and a half weeks when I've really wanted to turn to someone and say, "Did you just see that??"

I still don't know what I'll be doing now that Yared's here, but we'll see. Yesterday Heather and Lucas and I went to the annual regional Catholic choir gathering at the Kiganza parish. The priest (whose name is Jehosephat--not making that up) is a really intelligent guy, and very kind; he sent me a personalized written invitation to the choir event. It was typed up on a typewriter and arrived at my door via messenger in one of those air mail envelopes with red and blue triangles on the edges. The front of the envelope read, "Miss Amanda Hamilton, Kiganza Village," making it possibly the most delightfully addressed letter I've ever received and definitely ensuring its place in my scrapbook.

The gathering at the church was huge. I'd been hearing about it ever since I arrived in this village, and the people started coming in from all the neighboring villages several days prior. They would walk up and down the streets singing their beautiful, intricate vocal harmonies for hours--even late into the night--which was amazing to hear. There's nothing quite like sitting in the complete darkness of an electricity-free village under the brilliant Southern stars and hearing all those voices float past. Heather and I reported to the church around 2pm yesterday and were shown to the only seating available--a wooden bench--which made both of us feel like oafs, taking the only seats when there were old people and nursing mothers sitting on the ground. But they really and truly wanted us, as "guests," to have the best place. (Funny, because most of the people there were real guests in Kiganza, while Heather and I have a house there and so are at least a little more like residents than they are.) You can't imagine the stir we created. All of Kiganza knows me by now, but many of those from other villages don't, and plus, I had multiplied!! There were two of me! Throw in the fact that we both had cameras with us, and you have yourself a sideshow.

Seventeen choirs performed, a feat which took almost five hours to execute. The highlights were the unique instruments they brought. There were bongos, cymbals, wooden whistles, waist-high drums made from sawed-off oil barrels covered in cowhide, and these fantastic dried gourds. They were roundish, about two feet in diameter, and hollowed out with a hole in the top. People played them by placing tiny three-legged wooden stools on top of them and scratching them from side to side. Perhaps best of all, though, were the dancers whose ankles were wrapped in dried fruits filled with seeds; these instruments sounded like maracas as their wearers danced with a rhythmical wildness. (All the time I kept thinking about how different a Catholic choir gathering would be in the US.) The worst part about the music was definitely the keyboard, which they euphemistically refer to as an "organ." They have one of those Yamahas from 1989 with the preset drumbeats (why would you use them when you have so many amazing drummers right there? But yet they all did), and the warbly, carnival-like sound. I was glad when the amp went out halfway through and disappointed when they fixed it.

Eating is one of my favorite pasttimes, especially while abroad, and Tanzania has been mostly satisfactory on that account. My breakfast is waiting for me on the dining room table every morning when I get up and has so far been a rotating trough of hilarity. The first week was eggs only; then we moved on to these bizarre eggy pancakes. They were almost like crepes, but eight times thicker and swimming in palm oil. Oh, and also filled with bugs. The cook's flour must be infested, because I would hold my pancakes up to the light and pick out at least twenty worms and winged things--luckily, quite dead--from each one. Once I tried to dab the grease off one with a napkin, but it was so sopping, and the napkin so thin, that I just ended up with a buggy, paper-coated breakfast. The bugs didn't bother me, but for some reason I found myself unwilling to eat the pancake covered in napkin. And, perhaps most inexplicably of all, for the past two mornings I have arrived at the table to find four slices of white bread and nothing else. (Did the cook oversleep? Is he trying to avoid a trip to the market? Not quite sure.) Lunch and dinner are tasty, which is good, because there is almost no variation. I get beans and rice twice daily, sometimes supplemented with ugali (a stiff, sticky paste made from cassava or maize flour), stewed potatoes, boiled cassava, or these little green tomato-things in groundnut sauce. (I once helped the cook make the sauce; he actually pounds out the nuts in a giant wooden mortar and pestle every day.) Desserts are completely nonexistant here; the sweetest things they have are bananas and pineapples, which I am usually supplied with in profusion.

I had the honor of being invited to supper at Mama Fubusa's last week. I "helped" stir the ugali in the pot that was expertly balanced on three stones over the fire, but found it so cumbersome and wobbly that I quickly handed the spoon back to Mama amid the good-natured laughter of all the women. Dinner was real, true, out-in-the-bush African style; all the women sat on a grass mat in the dirt around a communal plate of ugali, while all the men stood around a similiar plate on a tiny table inside. They squished down into the center of the ugali a bowl of small, anchovy-like fish, pan-fried and gleaming with oil. We ate handfuls of ugali with the fish--whole fish, heads, tails, fins, bones and all. Anyone who was present for or heard about my Spanish fish-eating experience knows my apprehension at having my food look in death exactly as it did in life...though I ate a lot of Mama's fish before I felt it was acceptably polite to stop. I was very honored to be invited, so I hope I was able to disguise my disgust at the eyeballs I was swallowing.

Off to the airport to pick up Pattie, an old American collegemate of Yared's who will be here on a three-day visit.

Soccer et All

Well, Yared and the other American girl's arrival didn't happen on Tuesday as planned, though they're supposedly coming in today. I expect that much will change when Yared arrives...I look forward to accomplishing something, though for the most part I haven't minded just hanging around chasing goats (those suckers are so dadblasted cute, but fast, too.) And the baby baboon and I are friends, though he did try to poop on me the other day, so I have things to keep me entertained.

The biggest news in my house is that I now have electric lights! Some village dudes coaxed the solar panels on top of the house into functionality, so now I read at night by the glaring light of a compact flourescent bulb rather than by candlelight. Funnily enough, I was kind of hoping that they wouldn't be able to get them to work...there's something romantic about scratching away in my journal by flickering flame. I certainly wouldn't want to spend my whole life living in darkness for twelve hours a day, but I like to think that there are still places on this earth where I can go to try it out for a time. This attitude is, I realize, horribly unfair to the people of developing nations who should of course be allowed the same degree of development, if they want it, that we in the West have enjoyed. It's tempting to want some places to remain primitive just for the joy of visiting, but that is both unkind and unrealistic.

I went with Lucas, the cook, and some other dudes to the market to watch the 2008 Euro Cup finals a few nights ago. Someone had rigged up two regular-sized TVs to a generator in a corrugated tin shed and was charging a few cents to get in. It was completely dark inside except for the light from the TVs, and there were no chairs except for two small wooded benches in the back. Everyone else was seated on grass mats sprawled on the packed earth floor. I think pretty much every young man in Kiganza was there, plus me (I was the only girl.) It was really fun, and almost like a bar (remember those?) Minus the alcohol. And the chairs. And the women.

I'd have more to say on that topic and on many others, but I'm being hurried to leave for the airport to get Yared and Heather (my new fellow mazungu.) More later!

Work Shmerk

When I typed in blogspot.com on this computer at the internet cafe, it immediately opened to my account, all signed in and everything...which is really weird because I have never used this particular computer before. Hmm...

My days have started to blend together. Lucas and Evalina and I had a very sincere debate last week about what day of the week it was, and all seven possibilities were up for consideration. We couldn't even eliminate weekends.

The fact that weekends are no different from weekdays here brings up the concept of "work" and what it means in this cultural context. In some ways, the people here work harder than we as Americans can even imagine. Washing clothes by hand in a bucket, planting, tending and harvesting crops, pounding cassava into flour and making flour into food, building homes from thatch and mudbrick...Evalina sometimes asks me about "machines in America," and I try to explain washing machines and ovens to her. They are almost impossible to imagine here. And this is all accomplished while raising eight or ten or twenty kids; I've even heard of families with over thirty children. In their homes and gardens, the people--or more accurately, the women--of Kiganza work tirelessly. But as far as actually having a job outside the home, or working for money rather than subsistence, I have seen no evidence, at least not in Yared's family compound (inhabited by about 30 people.) Many of them are supposedly employed by GOSESO (whether in a full-time or paid capacity I don't know), but apart from the lovely garden, I really don't see evidence of much work being done. Lucas, for example, seems to be the organization's Number Two, or at least its Number Three, but it really appears as if he does nothing but walk me around the forest in the mornings and hang out on the patio with the other local men in the afternoons and evenings. Someone with his local knowledge could surely be creating valuable progress for the organization, but whether from a lack of direction from the upper management or from a dearth of ability or motivation, he really doesn't seem to be doing much of anything. When I asked him how many trees he plans to plant this year, his rather enigmatic response--"fifty thousand hundred"--left me puzzled. I asked him to write the number, and he scratched 500,000 into the dirt...which would mean well over 1000 trees per day. Since I've been here over a week and have witnessed the planting of precisely none, it seems likely that they will fall short of this ambitious goal. (It is also possible that Lucas didn't know the answer and was just making something up, as I get the feeling he does sometimes.) I can't judge the situation. My American work ethics simply don't apply. There is just a marked difference in the way work is done here.

I taught some of the villagers hopscotch the other day. I was meandering through the garden by myself one evening because I didn't have anything better to do and didn't want to seem antisocial by reading all day (though that option really would have been fine with me.) As usual, two half-naked toddlers began following me at a safe distance, giggling and murmuring about the mazungu. I ducked behind a giant banana tree leaf and played Peek-a-Boo for a minute, and then, encouraged by their laughter, I grabbed a stick and drew a hopscotch board in the reddish dirt. When I began drawing I had an audience of only two. Around the third square I heard a shuffle, looked up, and was surprised to find that the crowd around me had quintupled in the past sixty seconds. By square five a young teenage girl was standing over me and shouting to Mama Fubusa a play-by-play description of what I was doing, and before I reached ten Mama was there herself. I then began a completely wordless demonstration of how to play, using a rock as a beanbag. The game didn't last long, as only a few children were brave enough to give it a try (though Mama Fubusa was daring enough to play up to the second square!) I think that, for the gathered audience, I was more of an attraction than the game was. I left wishing that it had caught on a little better but still really satisfied that I had been able to interact with the children and some of the villagers with whom I don't have much contact.

For the past three evenings, Lucas has taken me to watch the Catholic church's choir practice in the dried-up cassava fields behind someone's house. On the second day, he informed them that I would return the next day and bring a Moving Camera, and it would be a Very Big Deal. This caused quite a stir, making me feel awkward about the fact that I will have no way to share the video with them, since they don't have computers or TVs. I did take a short video with my camera, though, and it turned out really nicely.

On the way home from the practice on the second night, Lucas took my by the home of an older couple. The man spoke very good English, and while the woman didn't, she made up for it with the gusto of her welcome. As the four of us were walking from their front door, through the house, and into the backyard/shed/cooking area, the woman suddenly reached out and caught my arm with such force that my camera flew out of my hand; it was only by some miraculous and uncharateristic instance of bodily coordination that I was actually able to catch it midair with my other hand. I thought she was preventing me from stepping on a snake or a baby or off a cliff or something. Instead she compressed me to her chest, my back arched by the strength of her vicelike hug and by the fact that I was trying to keep my feet back so as not to step on hers (and also, if we're going to be honest, from an effort to stay back as far as possible.) With her ample bosom crushed into my stomach, she wrenched her face from my collarbone and looked up at my confused and somewhat alarmed face with what may have actually been tears of joy in her eyes. In her thickly accented voice, she emotionally proclaimed, "I love you!" I managed a lame "Thank you," and a smile that was part honored, part frightened, and part I-can't-wait-to-tell-people-about-this. Most people here have been very--though luckily not equally--welcoming to me.

I can't wait to hear update from all of you--I look forward to your emails!!

Indoor/Outdoor Biology

I was in the middle of writing a post a while ago when the electricity at this internet cafe went out...we'll see if it works this time.

I've now been in Kiganza for a week and my schedule is somewhat regular. Yared, the master of all that is GOSESO, is not actually here (he arrives July 1), and I have been under strict instructions from him to spend my first two and a half weeks here "getting to know the culture" and avoiding any sort of work. While this seems like an inefficient use of over two-sevenths of my time here, I can't argue, so it works for me...hakuna matata, as they say (thanks for teaching me, Disney!)

I get up each day around 8:45 or 9 (bordering on inexcusably late for an agrarian village, but without an alarm clock it's really the best I can do right now.) Breakfast is waiting for me on the dining room table when I emerge, and there must be some sort of village-wide signal that means "Amanda is up" (the cook probably sees me heading for the detached bathroom) because within minutes I am invariably joined by several locals. There's always Evalina, the girl around my age who has either chosen or been appointed as my almost constant companion, and Lucas, the similarly-aged guy who seems to sort of be in charge around here (or at least in charge of me.) Breakfast hasn't really changed since I've arrived: several (three-ish) fried eggs with onion, two slices of buttered-beyond-belief bread that have been toasted over charcoal, and a banana from the garden. One day I actually got three fried eggs with a side of two hardboiled eggs; Evalina got half my breakfast that day. I'll have to get my cholesterol checked when I get back.

After breakfast Lucas usually leads me on a long walk somewhere, usually thorough the GOSESO forest, though the objective of these trips is not always clear to me. More interesting than where we go, though, is often who we go with. Wherever I wander in this village (or in this country, it seems), I attract a sizeable following. Parents Beware: If I walk through one end of your village, your children will follow me out the other!! So Lucas and Evalina and I start off from my house, collecting a random assortment of fifteen or so children and adults as we go, and by the time we reach the forest I'm like the Pied Piper of Hamlin with half of Kiganza in tow.

We've been back to the forest hut frequented by the baboons several times now, and they (and I) have gotten much bolder with each other. The younger ones now climb all over me, and the older male allows it as long as I don't really move while his family is around. If I move, he bares his teeth, lunges, and shrieks, causing me to remember with some regret the rabies shot I turned down at the travel immunization clinic. The baby baboon is unbelievably adorable, though. It snuggles me and hugs my neck like a human child.

In domestic news, the lizard finally ate the tarantula off my walls a few nights ago. I watched the whole thing go down (literally and figuratively). I can't say I'm too sorry for the loss, though the wildlife of my bedroom has certainly not depleted. Last night around midnight, as I was carrying my candle into my room, I noticed a shadow on the floor that looked suspiciously alive. Upon closer examination with my flashlight, I saw that it was some crazy-looking bug that actually resembled nothing so much as a crab. And it was huge--as long across as my palm. One bad thing about having a cook and therefore no access to the outdoor kitchen--and there really aren't very many bad things about that situation--is that I also have absolutely no access to dishes. This is a minor problem when I need to do things like sterilize my toothbrush (which I did the day before yesterday, as I had zoned out and stuck it under the tap--Yikes!!). Or when I need to cover the world's largest crustacean/insect combo creature and scoot it out the door. It did occur to me that I could just drop my Lonely Planet on it, but I felt sorry for the poor thing, and plus, I didn't want to clean up a mess like that. I tried covering it with one of the slightly-concave saucers that we put candles on, but the thing was way too big (though amazingly tolerant), so I finally threw my towel over the thing and dragged it all the way through the house and out into the courtyard, muttering all the way about how it had better be grateful for all I was doing for it.

No sooner had I gotten back to my room and tucked myself into my mosquito net, though, than I heard an unmistakable squeak and scratch coming from under the bed. I tried to pretend it was outside and go to sleep, but I didn't want to end up with holes in my backpack, so I grudgingly got up again to try to shake the mouse out of my pack. I opened my bedroom door first, hoping it would get the idea, and then picked up my bag and SHOOK it by the bottom. The mouse was having none of it, though; I don't know how, but it held on with the tenacity of a pitbull playing tug-of-war. So for the second time that night, I dragged one of my belongings, and a creature with it, out into the courtyard. I shook and shook and shook that bloody thing, but the mouse would not come out. Finally I used my phrasebook to write MOUSE on a scrap of paper, set it next to my pack, and left it in the courtyard. This was three a.m.

Six a.m.: a frantic rap on my window. A flashlight beam comes through the dark room. "AMANDA!!! AMANDA!!! Welcome outside!!" someone bade me. So I sleepily fumbled out into the courtyard, where the guard had found my pack (but not my note--or perhaps he can't read) and had freaked out, thinking that I had been abducted in the night or something. He'd woken Lucas, who was standing there confused and half-dressed, and apparently half the rest of the village as well, because a huge crowd formed around me. I said it was only a mouse, no problem, I'm sorry, everyone, it's okay, and so they looked through my pack...and of course the mouse had absconded in the night. Mouse, they said...right. And trudged off, likely thinking what an idiot I was to have panicked the whole town before dawn. And of course the pronoucement by Filipo, one of the village's most respected men, that "There is no mouses in this house" didn't help my case any. Like he'd know since he doesn't live there...anyway.

Okay, the party bus from Kiganza has been waiting outside for me for way too long, so I will post again later.

Digging with Sticks

Hey all!!

I have much to say but less than 10 minutes at this internet cafe, so I will have to make it short. I have arrived in Kiganza! This is a village on the far western border of Tanzania close to Kigoma (where I am currently in order to access the internet.) Everyone in Kiganza knows everyone else--I think they may all be related, in fact--and they have been SO NICE to me. I had a welcoming party bus at the airport (a contingent of seven or eight or nine that kept growing and shrinking as we picked up friends seen walking along the road, dropped off people at the market, and gave rides to random police officers.) I am staying in Africa's most amazing house. I was expecting poor conditions out here--most people do in fact live in mud huts with thatched roofs--but Yared (the guy who runs this nonprofit) has built a lovely place. Several bedrooms, detached kitchen and bath (with Africa's only Western toilet, I think!!!!), and only one lizard and one tarantula on the walls of my bedroom (sleeping under a mosquito net really gives one a sense of security.) All my meals are cooked over a fire and provided for me--still no electricity, but I hardly notice now. Lots of rice, beans, eggs, pineapple, and bananas.

This whole village is involved in GOSESO (Yared's nonprofit). The gardens are huge (where all my food comes from), and they have a big reforestation program going, with little seedings in plastic tubes. I dug into the dirt with a stick yesterday and planted some!! I also saw three baboons and what I think was an Ituri monkey...something like that. The people here pet them and let them climb onto their laps like rambunctious cats. I have to admit that I was a little freaked out by them, and they were obviously interested in me, squaking and chattering around me, though not daring to touch.

One minute left!! Gotta go, will try to get more internet time soon.

Africa Time

(From June 15, 2008)

Hey again, all!

I still have easy internet access because I'm still in Dar es Salaam--long story, I'll get to that later--but I figured I'd go ahead and post again while I can.

On Friday afternoon I ventured off by myself to the Village Museum, which is a collection of huts built in the styles of various Tanzanian tribes. Getting there was an adventure, as I decided to walk rather than try to figure out the haphazard dala-dala route. I took Lauren's Rough Guide map with me, and two different people at her office drew me maps too, but within a hundred yards of her office door I had completely lost my orientation. There are no street signs anywhere, though some of the roads do supposedly have names, and not even the mapmakers were quite sure how they all connect (there are plenty of spots on the Rough Guide map that are just left blank.) It was a long walk--about an hour and a half--and close to the end I was sure I was irrevocably lost. I finally got out my new Swahili phrasebook, stopped a guy on the street, and tried to ask him if he spoke English. Of course, I couldn't even get that sentence out, so I ended up just pointing to it in my book. Because his answer was no, I just pointed to the museum on the map and made a confused face. He waved his arms, pointed this way and that, and finally just said "Too far!" It was only half an hour until the beginning of the traditional dance performance at the museum, which I really wanted to see, so I decided to get a cab. This in itself is a process in this city, because cabs are in no way labeled as such and I would be a fool to get in the car with any of the 1000 guys per day who yell "Taxi, sister!" at me. I just happened to be right beside one of the nicest hotels in the city, so I went in and asked one of the army guys who was lounging around doing nothing if there were cabs in the area. He waved one over, I got in and showed the driver the map, and he looked at it for a really, really long time. Finally, he gave me a confused look and pointed out the window...at the Village Museum, whose driveway we were sitting in. Silly mazungu (whitey).

The traditional dance performance, staged under a big tree in the museum's yard, was nothing short of hilarious. There were four elderly drummers and one young guy who played a metal chair with a stick (very innovative!). There were also four middle-aged-to-elderly performers who chanted and danced. Half the time they looked like they weren't sure what dance they were supposed to be doing, but the one old man in the bunch really made up for the confusion with the gusto of his hip-waggling. I was also the only audience member, so he sometimes felt compelled to really include me in the performance by approaching and waggling in my direction, which was a little awkward. Near the end of the show, the lead drummer came over, unceremoniously poked me with his drumstick, and pointed with it to a "donations" plate which was apparently not so voluntary. Of course I was going to tip! The show just wasn't over yet. I thought that was rather rude, though not entirely suprising, as I definitely am regarded by some as a walking bank account.

Regarding the Rich Mazungu issue... nearly everyone I pass here is at least noticibly surprised or interested in my presence (there are almost literally no white people here). Most people are also helpful and kind, even saying nice things like "welcome to our country" as I pass. A significant and vocal minority, though, are really mean and pernicious. It makes it easier sometimes to not understand Swahili, because I can just brush off the insults. No one has yet attempted to pickpocket me--at least not that I've felt or noticed later--though both Lauren and her roommate, Gaia, have been nabbed twice in the past day. (I also don't keep anything in my pockets--not even the front ones--so maybe there have been fruitless attempts.) Two of the four incidents have been really interesting. One was at an incredibly crowded outdoor market, where the following happened twice within a few minutes: a man stuck out his foot right where Gaia was about to step so that she stepped on it. He would then throw a fit, grab and twist her arm so that she was nearly bent over, and scream about how she hurt him (I imagine). The first time this happened, I thought maybe he was trying to get her to pay for damages or something (she just smacked him off and kept going), but the second time she felt his accomplice's hand in her pocket. That time was really fascinating, though, because the entire crowd around us--dozens and dozens of people--stopped what they were doing and started making some loud, repetitive, threatening noise. The hand in her pocket let go of whatever it had grabbed and ran off; the crowd was protecting us. It was an experience that made me both doubt and trust human nature. The other great theft experience was at a soccer game yesterday, when a guy grabbed the equivalent of about $18 out of Lauren's pocket (that she had just that very second put in her pocket to pay for a second ticket to the game, as her first ticket had also been stolen). She snatched him by the back of the neck and screamed, "HEY!" at him; he dropped the money and ran. I don't know if I would have had the guts to do that--it may not be worth risking a punch to the face in my book--but it was totally awesome to see. I just avoid the situation by keeping my pockets empty.

The funny thing underlying all these Dar es Salaam experiences is that I'm not supposed to be here anymore. I was supposed to fly to Kigoma on Friday, but the guy picking me up got the departure time wrong and we missed it. Then I was supposed to leave yesterday morning. The flight was at noon, so we agreed that he'd pick me up at 10am at Lauren's office. I called him about 10:15, and he said Ack! On my way, I'll be there in five minutes...by 10:45 I was preparing to call him again, but a one-legged man hopped into the office and Lauren and I both had our phrasebooks out and were trying to figure out what he wanted. My ride finally showed up at 11:15 and we tore through the city on its dirt roads that would put any BMX bike track to shame, lurching into sofa-sized potholes and sending pedestrians and chickens hurling themselves into the bushes (we even hopped the ditch and drove on the sidewalk for a while). When we arrived at the airport at 11:59--seriously--we were told that the pilot had decided to take off early that day. The plane had left at 11:00...they had tried to call him, they said, but they couldn't get through so they just cancelled my ticket. Hmmm. We were able to reinstate my ticket for Monday, though, so we'll see how that goes. The guy driving me will be out of town, so he's sending another dude from his office...I may still be here when I fly home in August. Oh well, it's fun.

Went to the Cameroon/Tanzania 2010 World Cup qualifying match yesterday...that was very exciting, with 60,000 in the stadium...it was a 0-0 tie. I would have been nervous to see what would have happened if they had either won or lost, so I guess a tie was the safest outcome for me.

Ok, this is long enough. Yes, I'm being safe, no, I'm not walking after dark, yes, we lock our doors. Lauren lives in a really safe neighborhood, too. I'm always aware of my surroundings.

Take care, everyone!!

(Mostly) Arrived!

(From June 13, 2008)

I flew out of Washington Dulles on Tuesday night (actually, I think it might have been Wednesday morning before the plane actually took off--bad weather or something. Because I had the world's longest layover awaiting me, though, I was in no distress.) I got to skip part of the REALLY long line at the ticket counter because someone came through yelling for passengers traveling alone. This happened to me on another international flight once, and I got bumped up to an empty seat in business class for free, which pretty much made my year. Hoping that this might be the same case, I was quick to identify myself as a solo traveler. Unfortunately, this time it was actually the opposite of the business class situation...they had one seat left that no one wanted, so they gave it to some poor sucker (i.e., me) with no travelmates to feel bad for her. I got the middle seat in the middle section of the Ages 2 and Under row...and if you've never been on a 13-hour flight with two toddlers on each side of you and a kindergartener kicking the back of your seat, well, you've never really flown. The good news, though, was that it was the bulkhead row, so the extra legroom actually made it worthwhile...maybe.


I landed in Doha, Qatar around 7:30pm local time. It was already completely dark out, and I didn't have a visa anyway, so I just made myself at home in the airport. As far as airports to spend the night in, Doha was far from the worst. They had a designated quiet room with darkened lights and minimal PA announcements that I spent a few hours in pretending to sleep, but I finally gave up and went back out to the main area around 3am to wander around and read more about Tanzania in my Lonely Planet. Sunrise was early--well before 5am--and unimpressive, with a yellow ball of heat rising in a completely gray, dusty sky. The air in Qatar was a color I had never seen before. I don't know if it was pollution or just an incredible amount of dust and sand everywhere, but everything was gray and visibility was so low that you would have thought it was snowing out there. There was no wind, though, so a sandstorm didn't seem likely. I don't know what it was.

I flew out later that morning and was even able to phinangle a change to a window seat from the lady at the ticket counter. The flight was truly incredible...we flew over Saudi Arabia and then south, so I got to see the Persian Gulf and part of the desert before the attendants came around and made us all close our window shades. I don't know why--maybe they thought people were disturbed by the light or something--but I was rather put off by that. Heaven forbid I should see the Arabian Desert out the window if the light disturbs someone else's ability to watch Die Hard III. I did see, however, a section of really bizarre, huge dark circles, hundreds of them, in the sand. I might guess they had something to do with oil drilling, though I don't know.

Approaching Dar es Salaam by air was really interesting and, I think, a great way to get a feeling for what the city might be like before seeing the city itself. There were about three big paved roads, each going vaguely either N-S or E-W, but that was it. After those three roads, everything else was dirt. But not dirt roads like you might imagine, either, because they didn't even really look like roads. Nothing is straight; the houses and buildings are all in a massive jumble. It looked like someone had picked up the city, shaken it up in a tin can and thrown it back out again. Tin roofs were everywhere, on top of each other practically, at weird angles and with irregular spacing. There were no straight roads because buildings were built right in the middle of them.


I was met at the airport by a board member from the organization I'll be working with who also happens to be the chief economist for the Ministry of Health or something like that. He was very helpful and took me to the office where my friend Kim's friend Lauren is working for the summer. She and I took a bus called a dala-dala into town to find some dinner. The dala-dalas aren't actually buses, but gutted minivans with their tops hacked off and some weird carpet things installed instead in order to make the roof a foot or so higher. You stand inside them as best you can, which means that I was significantly hunched over, but it's really the teeming mass of humanity that can fit inside these things that amazed me. Twenty people in a minivan? Riding in luxury! Thirty? Just put that dude's head in that other guy's crotch and we'll fit. Thirty-five? Everyone on the left can stick their torsos out the window, right? If the people in the back need to get off, those glassless windows can also double as doors. Here we go! At 25 cents a ride, it wasn't such a bad deal.

Staying at Lauren's has also been fun. There's no electricity, though there is (brown) running water, so I showered by candlelight last night. The bathroom itself is truly a testament to innovation, as the whole thing is tile (so no need for a tub or basin) and large hole in the floor drains both the "sink" (a spigot low on the wall) and the shower while also serving as the toilet. Yep, the toilet hole's in the shower--shower shoes are even more important here than they were in my freshman dorm. When I stepped in a wet place in the road outside Lauren's house where the mud enveloped my entire foot and ankle and nearly sucked off my shoe, Lauren joked that I was experiencing Africa with all five senses on my first day, and she was totally right.

Leaving tomorrow by plane for Kiganza, the village where I'll be staying--I was supposed to leave today, but there was some confusion--anyway, I should be there by tomorrow afternoon. I'm excited to see what real life in the bush is like. I'll try to get internet access as often as possible.


Many hugs to you all and I look forward to hearing from you soon!!