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.