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.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Sunday, July 20, 2008
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!!
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
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!
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!
Thursday, July 10, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, July 4, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
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!
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!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
