Graduation, or Showdown at the Rice Depot

At the time, I only knew that graduation was a big deal, but how big I had no way to know. The ceremony itself, which took place on the following Saturday in late September, hosted about five-hundred people, not including students. The head table and seating area were beautifully decorated with ribbons and cloths, and streamers were tied to the support poles (or tree trunks), which were dug deep into the ground and held together ingeniously by a complex system of branches and twine. (Some of these students have a definite future in engineering.) A thatched roof of banana leaves was carefully laid over both seating areas to keep off the rain, which thankfully didn’t come. **

The graduation committee, of which I was a part, was one of my most memorable experiences in learning how planning works in Tanzania. After an hour-long meeting, mostly in Kiswahili, all of the teachers were divided up into different groups to handle tasks, such as cooking, decoration, and supplies. I was put on the supplies team, which meant that a group of us walked to town that afternoon with a list and a small amount of cash to get the things we needed. Fine. I had a hot date with the couch and one of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books that afternoon, but I supposed it could be rescheduled. I had no idea what I was in for as we walked to town. I was still relatively new, remember. I thought we might be able to methodically find what we needed and cross things off the list, one by one. How wrong I was. As soon as we got to town, my friend Juma left to go to mosque, since it was Friday. Why he hadn’t thought of this is beyond me, but he said he’d meet up with us later. Since he was in charge and the holder of the list, he passed it to me. Perfect, give it to the white guy who speaks no Kiswahili and doesn’t know where to buy anything. My friend Tibert took pity on me and we made our way from the soda wholesaler, who conducted business hunched over a few cases of Sprite as a guy with no shoes pounded a warm Safari beer on a plastic chair under his roof, to Mama Africa, where we bought plates and cutlery, which didn’t look like nearly enough. Then, as an afterthought, we had to make another trip to The Expensive Lady for more plates and napkins (an afterthought).

Chicken and meat were on the list, but I had no idea how to accomplish the task of purchasing those, so I ignored it completely. Next was rice and beans. Fine. I thought I knew how to find those, but turns out I was wrong again. Instead of going to one of the smaller dukas where they sell them in bins and measure them out into plastic bags for you, we went to the source: the rice depot, the place where all the giant forty-pound, toddler-sized bags of rice were delivered, cleaned, and sold to shops in Mahenge. A group of five suspicious people were sitting outside in the entrance, and the interior looked a) deserted, b) like an industrial accident waiting to happen, and c) reminiscent of the lair of a particularly inspired serial murderer. I heard loud, clanking machinery seemingly running at full clip, but it didn’t look like anyone was concerned. A fine haze of rice dust stuck to everything, including the people sitting outside, and iron bars covered the windows. We approached slowly, exchanging greetings, and they looked distinctly unhappy to see us. Was it me? Was I not welcome in the rice depot? Could they sense my fear? Never had I been so hesitant to engage in the purchase of rice. The thought crossed my mind, “Was it a front?” The group of teachers stood facing the rice gang at the entrance to the building, like the Sharks and the Jets, and waited, tensions flaring, feeling each other out and waiting to see who would budge first. Or so it felt to me.

Tibert reached into a nearby sack of rice and pulled out a few grains, as if inspecting them for quality, demonstrating perhaps some reason that this rice was of inferior quality and justified a price break. “Don’t accuse them of having bad product!” I thought, knowing (maybe) how that goes down on the New York piers and the docks of Shanghai during stand-offs such as this. Someone was going to yell something crazy and shoot a gun off into the air! Instead, a member of the rice cartel, a woman, laughed and shouted very rapidly to an invisible person who must have been inside the depot. “No!” I thought, “It’s the leader, he’s here, he’s coming for us! He’ll have a giant scar across his face and carry some kind of club and speak only in one-word sentences!”

**

Instead, the teachers laughed and reached across to shake hands with the rice gang. Evidently, a deal had been struck. “Let’s go, Mr. Steve,” Tibert said. I happily followed him back up the stairs and across the street, where I was told to wait on the front stoop of a duka that mostly empty inside save for a few ratty kangas and some shovels to collect the delivery of rice. “This must be the supplier!” I thought. “Pretty soon, a truck is going to pull up and two skinny guys are going to race around to the back and throw unmarked sacks on the side of the road and then pull away into traffic, swerving wildly and making rude hand gestures at everyone. I can’t wait.”

Instead, I sat on the stoop of the duka for about an hour and a half, attracting the attention of a few small kids who came and sat next to me, looking over shyly every few minutes, and conferring quietly together, probably trying to figure out what was wrong with me. All of the other teachers had disappeared one by one with no explanation leaving me to my solitary confusion. “I should just leave,” I thought. “I have no idea why I’m here or what I’m waiting for.” A few moments passed. “I can’t leave,” I thought. “I have to be here in case someone comes back, or in case someone with fluent English happens by and explains exactly why I’m here and when the rice will be delivered.” It was a real Waiting for Godot situation. With rice.

So it went for an hour and a half. Just as I was truly beginning to give up hope, and to succumb to the pangs of hunger and exhaustion, guess who ambled by. Juma! He had just gotten out of mosque, which happened to be right down the road, and he laughed as he saw me sitting there dejectedly. I explained the situation, and he laughed again. What a guy. With a few leaping bounds, he was inside the duka talking to the proprietor, who had remained unseen during my residence on the steps, and he stepped back out a few moments later. Two teenagers followed with large sacks of rice on their shoulders. What was this madness? Was there a secret password I didn’t know? A hidden back storeroom that housed the good rice that wasn’t for public consumption? Had we negotiated the deal to end of all deals and gotten away with one? Clearly, the rice had been there all along, and no one had told the duka guy why I was loitering on his property. He probably just thought I was lost, or tired, or maybe that I particularly enjoyed the view and wanted to pass an hour enjoying quiet contemplation. (It’s not uncommon for Tanzanians to sit down for an hour or two and chat, especially when they are supposed to be en route to perform a very important errand. They will tell you, if you ask, that they are “going there now” and the task is “almost done.” There is no real sense of urgency in any situation. It’s both maddening if you need something done and freeing if you use it to your own advantage.) Juma, laughing once again, thanked the kids with the rice, who stacked the bags neatly at the side of the road next to my feet and disappeared again. Now what, Juma? I thought. What’s next, Mr. Answer Man? “Oh, we will need transport,” he said, as his phone rang and he turned to answer it. “Yes,” I thought. “We will.” Another half-hour passed as I sat there, unable to do anything to bring about a solution to the problems I faced. Powerless. (Even when I had electricity, I was often powerless.) Instead of being able to take swift action, or even inquire of someone what my options were in a given circumstance, I was helpless. Like a tree battered by raging winds, like a paper boat on a violent river, I followed the direction that fate pushed me. This is a particularly frustrating feeling for someone of American habits in which almost every situation can be navigated by asking the right questions, or finding someone who knows the information you need. Think about it: help is all around us, all the time. Warning signs, instructional videos, experts on TV, infomercials. Every product you buy, including shampoo, aluminum foil, and potato chips, comes with a set of warnings, instructions, explanations, a web address, and a phone number to call in case of questions about the use of the product. I can’t think of a single earthly reason why I would need to call someone to acquire assistance to consume potato chips, but I sleep better at night knowing that the option exists. I know I will never find myself sitting by the side of the road, paralyzed by uncertainty about what to do with my bag of Lay’s, and for that I am thankful. At this moment, sitting in the hot afternoon sun as motorbikes kicked up dust and people started to look concernedly in my direction, I dreamt of the aisle in Wegmans in which clean, prepackaged rice without rocks or dirt existed in large quantities. Then I dreamt of the ease of carrying a bag to the checkout line, paying, and leaving, a transaction that caused no hassles, doubts, or existential questions. Soon, Juma returned. Again, he laughed. Not at me, I don’t think, but the amusing situation, and the joy of being alive on a Friday afternoon, just as the sun was beginning to sink below the dark horizon, in a beautiful town in a beautiful country. He was a pretty happy guy. He shouted across the street to a guy who had been lazing under an awning, who immediately shot up, hopped on his motorcycle, and skidded loudly over to us. Juma motioned to the bags and told him to bring them to Nawenge. The guy stacked them on the back of the motorcycle, tied them down with a length of cracked rubber cord, and took off like a demon up the road, honking at women and children in his path. “Now there’s a sense of urgency,” I thought, as Juma helped me to my feet. We walked back through town and headed home.

Food in Other Places, or the Tanzanian Hamburger

Since a typical bus journey began at 5:30 am with a hastily consumed breakfast of oatmeal or a banana in the dark before setting off to the bus stand, usually in the pouring rain, the first bus meal was always greatly anticipated. Unfortunately, it more often than not consisted of a pack of biscuits or a few grilled bananas sold from a grill on the side of the road (the green kind, served with pilipili and salt—not life changing, but better than nothing). Travel was a constant disappointment in this fashion: things weren’t bad, necessarily, but they sure could be one hell of a lot better. I was careful not to over-hydrate lest I had to use the facilities (read: wander to the side of the road and urinate nonchalantly), since I’d heard many stories of people running off into the underbrush to relieve themselves only to return to find the bus a few hundred yards down the road and gaining speed. I preferred to keep my seat, if I was lucky enough to have one, and risk with a broad smile any resulting sepsis or dehydration.

The best part about bus trips was that the destination city, as long as it was not Mahenge, promised ascending degrees culinary delights the further away I got. In Ifakara, the town across the Kilombero River, sat a small grocery store that stocked goods that no self-respecting African person would ever consume: artisanal breads; the kind of fancy multi-seeded crackers your grandmother might serve on Christmas eve; Pringles and other salty snacks with brand names I had actually heard of; a host of decadent chocolate bars, cakes, and cookies; real honest-to-goodness Italian olive oil; a cornucopia of sour and multicolored sugary candies; wine that was not made down the road, and, yes, cheese. It was what every volunteer craved more than anything else. And it was good, Swiss dairy-milk cheese. 

The shop was clearly marketed toward whatever population of foreigners congregated in Ifakara, which was, as far as I knew, limited to the doctors and staff at the health clinic, volunteers like myself and my friends, and any foreign person who might have stumbled into town and had a thirst for a Slavic Cabernet and a hunk of smelly cheese. I only set foot in this store once, on the weekend of my birthday, during which time I stocked up on provisions for a small feast with my friends consisting of red wine made from actual grapes (I think it was from Croatia, which is not known for its oenological prowess, but no matter, it was strong), some kind of heavenly cheese, French bread (or let’s call it “French-inspired,” since I doubt it this grocery store employed its own resident boulanger), pretzels, several types of artificially yellow cheesy crackers, and chocolate cream cookies. I almost ended up falling in the empty swimming pool later that evening, so one can assume that it was an occasion to remember (if one had any memory of it, which I did not).

Past Ifakara, the next stop on the typical bus journey, the much larger city of Morogoro, boasted a similarly stocked white-people grocery store, as well as a sprawling city center containing hotels, guesthouses, and tea shops. It also had the usual array of small bars and restaurants like those in Mahenge, the sort that kill the chickens in front instead of discreetly in the back, and serve the beers warm and cheap. 

On a journey back from Dar es Salaam, en route to Mahenge and its gastronomic deprivations, I decided to treat myself and dine at my hotel, which was rather large and fancy, though its proximity to the sprawling bus stand did little to increase its charm. My room had an actual wall-mounted television that got three international stations, promising an entertaining night of rugby, cricket, and news stories about places I’d never heard of, an ancient remote-controlled air-conditioning unit, and a balcony the size of a windowsill—in fact, I think it was a windowsill—with a beautiful view of the golden sun setting behind the distant Uluguru mountains. This spectacular panorama, for Morogoro sits in a particularly verdant and appealing corner of the region, was tempered in the foreground by my personal bird’s-eye view of hundreds of idling buses belching diesel fumes into the pristine African sky.

The dining room was in the basement, below the lobby, down a staircase that looked as if it led to some kind of detention facility. This should have been my first clue that what followed was not going to be luxurious. The room itself, sparsely decorated with fake flowers and hanging paper decorations reminiscent of a low-budget New Year’s Eve party, was arrayed with large, banquet-style round tables set for eight people, only a few of which were populated with businessmen (I guessed, since they were wearing suits) and one priest. 

I chose a spot as far away from everyone as I could get while still being polite and waited with my hands in my lap (no smart phone to divert me, remember, no Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat—it’s amazing the mental weirdness that transpires when one is left with one’s own undivided attention) until my waitress, or the waitress, since there was just the one, appeared. She silently handed me a plastic-covered menu and strode off. After a few minutes spent weighing the options for my last meal in civilized society for a period of unknown months, I chose chicken curry with vegetables and rice. A conservative choice, but it sounded hearty and comforting. When the waitress reappeared empty-handed from the kitchen a quarter-hour later, a nearly inaudible sigh of disappointment rose from the other diners. Clearly, they had been neglected longer than I had. I hadn’t noticed until that point that the table in front of each of them was curiously empty. This did not bode well. “I��ll have the chicken curry with rice, please. Naomba chicken curry.” “Wali?” “Yes, please, with rice.” “We don’t have chicken curry. Choose again.” “You don’t have chicken curry or you don’t have rice?” “No chicken curry or rice. Choose again.” Never in my life have I witnessed or heard tell of a Tanzanian dining establishment that did not have a steaming pot of rice on the fire or the stove. It would be like McDonald’s not having French fries, or Ed Sheeran not having bad tattoos. It’s just what they do. Flustered and hoping not to annoy her to the point of disappearing again, I took another minute to review the menu. I turned it over multiple times to buy myself a few frantic seconds with the manner of someone who was dutifully prepared with the answer to a question but  is struck by a momentary bout of amnesia. (Have you ever noticed that you instantly forget what you want to order when the server appears, even if you’ve spent the previous fifteen minutes memorizing the name of the meal?) Then, I saw it, and despite every atom in my body warning me against it, I said it before I could stop myself: “May I have a hamburger, please?” “Hamburger?” “Yes, please. Preferably with a bun. Mkate (bread).” I made a circular gesture with my hand. She moved her head slightly in a way that might have signaled acceptance of my order, or was perhaps it a sign to a henchman lurking in the corner to kill me that night as I slept, and strode off, disappearing once again into the kitchen. The problem with ordering a hamburger anywhere in the world outside the United States of America (and perhaps Canada, since they’re doing passably well up there) is that it will inevitably disappoint you. If you are in the appropriate state to order a hamburger—that is, human and hungry—you want it to be the biggest, juiciest, thickest (and other adjectives of a slightly salacious bent) hamburger ever created, then stacked with every topping available within a three-block radius. It’s just the proper method. I once ate a hamburger with peanut butter, hot dog pieces, blueberry barbeque sauce, and a fried egg on top, so don’t fuck with me on this.

Needless to say, my hamburger, when it arrived seven hours later after I’d begun gnawing hopefully on a corner of the plastic tablecloth, was not big, juicy, or thick. It was a hamburger, according to the definition of the word, but it lacked entirely the spirit of the endeavor. A grayish meat patty sat on a flat, rigid bun of questionable provenance (the cook probably found it abandoned on a bus seat) accompanied by a few thin, stringy slices of yellowish tomato and a limp lettuce leaf. I might have invented the lettuce leaf, actually—I’m not sure if it was actually there. Memory is a funny thing. Thankfully, the dish came with chips—a good French fry only enhances the glory of the burger it accompanies—but these were cold, chewy, and completely uninspiring. For condiments, my choices consisted of ketchup, which was actually a sweet red sauce made (I would guess) with refuse cooking oil, red dye, and a trace amount of real tomato, or a stack of paper napkins. I opted for the napkins for their protein content and dug in.

By that point in the evening, I was the only one left in the dining room and the cleaning crew was waiting to close up for the night. It was 7:45 pm. “It’s not my fault your guys can’t make a decent hamburger in under half a day,” I thought, then immediately felt guilty, for these people just wanted to clean up and go home. Hunger makes a monster out of a man. I consumed the whole thing in exactly six minutes and immediately wished for another, despite its general lack of taste or appeal, if only to line my stomach a bit further with food that someone else cooked. The waitress appeared smiling with the check as soon as I’d set my napkin down on the table, apparently now finished with the duties that had detained her for the bulk of the evening. “Where was that smile earlier?” I thought to myself, and immediately felt guilty again. She probably had an hour-long daladala ride to get back to a house that she shared with seven other people, and I could look forward to spending the night alone in an air-conditioned room, with breaks to observe the stars from my windowsill balcony, and trying to decipher whatever the fuck actually happens in a rugby match.

Culture Shock at the Mall

Here’s a story about the first time I was steamrolled by culture shock. Absolutely flattened. Never have I felt so overwhelmed, exhausted, and confused as when the group of us descended upon a shopping mall in suburban Dar, located on the outskirts of empty fields and marshy slums, in order to buy our Tanzanian phones and internet modems and check that the rest of the world hadn’t imploded. The day we had planned to shop happened to coincide with Eid al-Fitr, the Islamic holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, a month of fasting. The mall was mobbed with people, as if every single person had invited every person they knew, living or deceased, and they in turn invited every person they knew, mostly deceased. Times Square on New Year’s Eve is a close comparison, and at least there if someone bumps you, you can politely tell them to back off in English and be understood.

It was nearly impossible to walk down the mall’s central corridor because people were streaming around us in such vast quantities that I was unable to avoid colliding with a stranger every few feet. The next steps involved a) locating the Vodacom store, b) attempting in very slow English with a few Swahili words to explain what we needed to the cashiers behind bulletproof glass, and c) filing slowly in a line with our order forms while trying to stay out of the way of people cutting ahead and trying skip us in line. Theconcept of queuing, perfected by the British, has not been adopted in many places in the world, and I’m sure I made great skipping target with my bewildered expression and general perplexed look. 

To start, I don’t much like large, overcrowded places. They give me anxiety. Too much humanity in one place. Then take away my language skills, points of reference, familiarity with cultural behavioral norms, and ability to communicate, and I really start to lose it. I stared at an imaginary point straight ahead and watched the little kid standing in front of me, his mother paying him no attention, who kept screaming in my direction and kicking at my shoes. I imagined him falling into a deep, dark well. It was mildly diverting, at least.

When it was finally my turn to present my order, the cashier took my form, tossed it on a heaping stack to her left, and asked me a string of questions in very rapid Swahili accompanied with an expectant look. Slightly stunned, I shrugged unconvincingly, and then shuffled dejectedly past her to make room at the counter. I then engaged in a panicked, protracted discussion with a few of my friends about what kind of phone is best to buy, which carrier to use, how many SIM cards it was best to have in case of loss of service on one carrier (the answer, I later found out, is about five), and which carriers would be best in the different regions of the country to which we were going. Tanzania has multiple phone carriers, and most people have between two and five SIM cards at all times, so this was not as simple as it would seem. I would have been more than happy to be handed a phone and a modem, shake a couple of hands, fork over a huge sum of money, and be on my way. For all I knew about the transaction I’d just completed, I could’ve been bidding on farm animals, or sending all my money into space.

After the Vodacom store exchange, new phone in hand, my needs took me on a journey to the Airtel store to purchase a USB internet modem, where I sat in an uncomfortable chair while a man I didn’t know took my newly acquired phone and my ID and disappeared into a hidden room for about six hours. He returned with a box containing my modem and asked, in Swahili, if I had any questions. I responded by holding up a list of rates and data plans with a cheerful shrug, hoping it was like a picture menu at a restaurant and all I’d need to do was point at what I wanted.  

It’s one thing to listen to a conversation you don’t understand as you imagine that the most positive compliments are being exchanged, but it’s another thing to try to engage in an exchange when you need something and cannot express yourself in a way that will be understood. There are few situations that reduce a relatively confident person to a shriveling blob of jelly than being asked a series of technical questions in a foreign language and then being expected to provide an answer. In that moment, if Stalin himself had walked up to me and translated what the man was saying into English, I would’ve thanked him heartily (and then kicked him as he walked away). I was that desperate to know what was going on. The salesman could’ve been asking me if I wanted the super deluxe internet plan that provided its own generator and helicopter evacuation (and if so, I should have accepted it) but I had absolutely no contextual clues or vocabulary skills to aid me. There is a sort of happy innocence in the initial stages of being a foreigner, but only if you like being treated with a sense of exasperated pity, like that one kid who can’t keep his pants buttoned and needs help tying his shoes. In the end, I got what I needed and only parted with a fraction of my money, so thankfully the clerks weren’t out to get me. 

We arrived at Msimbazi Centre, a hostel in Dar that was our home for the next few days, for dinner, bug-spray application, and (thankfully) a cold beer at the outdoor patio. My room was the size of a broom closet with similar charm, and contained an improbably large armoire that looked like it had been transported there from an English manor house. It also contained a bathroom in which the toilet sat directly under the shower, as if the housekeeping staff couldn’t be bothered to clean the toilet separately. I’ve heard the saying “Shit, shower, and shave,” before, but never had I had the opportunity to do all three at once. Later, it was revealed that the housekeeping staff didn’t bother to do much at all, when my friend Sarah found a community of maggots living in her shower drain. No one, except Sarah, seemed overly concerned by this.

Following a few Tuskers on the patio, I showered after taking off my sweat- covered clothes, spent a happy hour moving my worldly possessions from bag to bag to bag for no particular reason, and watching the fan in my room struggle to churn the air before giving up completely. I counted the mosquitoes and spiders on the walls and felt the hot air envelop me like a blanket. Using my new internet modem, I checked my email for the first time in weeks to find that nothing exciting was going on in the world across the world. I listened for a few moments to the honking cars and pounding bass and drums from a party across the courtyard, and fell immediately to sleep.

Dar es Salaam

Dar es Salaam, referred to as “Dar” and usually translated as “haven/home of peace,” is the largest city in East Africa, with a population of around 4.5 million people. The city itself dates back to the mid-nineteenth century and was constructed under the reign of Sultan Majid bin Said of Zanzibar before falling into decline, only to be revived by the German East Africa Company and turned into a hub of industrial and administrative center for German East Africa, those bastards. The city switched into the control of the British during World War I, who spent many years sitting under acacia trees drinking gin fizzes in pith helmets and not realizing how ridiculous they looked. Not much changed until Dar grew quickly after World War II and Tanganyika, as Tanzania was then known, said, “Thanks but no thanks, you pricks,” won independence from colonial rule in 1961. In 1964, it merged with Zanzibar to become Tanzania. It’s a combination of Tan- and Zan-, get it? It took me a few months to figure that one out, so I present it to you here with my compliments.

Tanzania has an incredible capacity for puzzling governmental decisions: In 1974, Dar es Salaam, the country’s main city, main port, and cultural and social heart, located on a picturesque natural harbor, lost its status as official capital to Dodoma, a dry and sprawling city in almost the exact geographic center of the county, significant for the crossing of two main highways, a university, and not much else. The official migration of government powers from Dar to Dodoma wasn’t complete until 1996, more than twenty years later. I like to imagine a caravan of trucks loaded up with official government paperwork, bookshelves, and desk chairs pulling off on the side of a desolate highway. The drivers get out and leave them there. Then a family of monkeys moves in and sets up camp in the trucks. When someone finally starts looking for the missing equipment, they find monkeys sitting at the desks holding an accounting meeting. These are the things I think about early in the morning.

My first experiences in Dar did not present any havens or any peace. The city is chaotic, dirty, pungent, and full of every kind of activity imaginable. It is a true third-world city, with crumbling facades and dirty buildings and stray dogs and people walking barefoot along dirt highways. Teahouses with men in prayer shawls overflowed on street corners, cars honked and swerved and bumped each other at non-existent traffic lights, motorbikes swarmed the roads and sidewalks, and people walked on every available surface. Brightly colored shops lined up next to each other in long rows, stood adjacent to every street, and small mobile phone shops, travel agencies, book shops, and hair salons filled in the gaps. Tall hotels stood dark against the hazy sky, and signs with hand-drawn depictions of celebrities from President Obama to the Notorious B.I.G. advertised barber shops and restaurants—it was often clear to see the cultural influences at play. I once passed a store called “American Visa” in Iringa and wondered idly if anyone mistakenly went there to request travel paperwork and was met with knockoff Gucci t-shirts and soccer jerseys instead.

Told you. Construction cranes dotted the horizon in every direction and it seemed that buildings were in various states of completion wherever I looked. I’m not sure if they were being built or dismantled, but in any case, it is clear that a lot was going on in Dar. Traffic is stifling in every direction, and highways seem to arise out of need, not engineering. If you need to get somewhere, and traffic is stopped, the Tanzanian thing to do is to pull to the shoulder of the road and barrel ahead, tossing pedestrians from your path and grazing the fronts of shops and running over the toes of street vendors. Once enough people start to follow, a new highway is created.

The next day, we were scheduled to meet with a group of young volunteers, many of them in their early twenties, who work as educators and counselors at the Institute of Social Work to provide education on HIV and sexually transmitted diseases. Their clinic stood next to a large soccer field near a university. Rama, my excellent guide, and his colleagues, showed us their office where they administer HIV tests and give pre-/post-test counseling. The volunteers broke us into groups and took us on a tour of Dar. Our first stop was an open-air market near their office. Rama took us deep into a covered labyrinth of stalls made from wood and tarps, jammed next to each other and tables covered with piles of underwear, shoes, t-shirts, soccer jerseys, wigs, cell phones, and multitudes of things. Shoes, agricultural equipment (housed in a giant parking garage-looking structure that also looked like an abandoned sports arena), fake iPod headphones, dresses. I honestly lack the ability to enumerate all of it. I’ve never seen anything like it, ever, anywhere, not even an American mall at Christmas. AND, according to Rama, because of the Eid holiday, it was only about half full. He then took us to a different market, this one underground, where there had apparently been problems with tourists taking pictures in the past. As we entered, he warned us about the vendors not being as friendly. Most people we encountered were curious, at best, or, at worst, indifferent. The only exception to this was a man on crutches who stood on a street corner asking for money. As we passed, he swung himself backwards to get some momentum, like a gymnast preparing for a jump, and kicked me with both legs. It wasn’t a direct hit, thankfully, because I’d already swerved to get out of the path of an oncoming motorbike, and I never figured out what I did to deserve it.

This underground market was truly eerie—it was in a cavernous underground chamber, for lack of a better word, that looked like what I imagine abandoned New York subway tunnels look like. It was dimly lit by yellow bulbs and full of men perched on hulking bags of every conceivable vegetable or fruit imaginable, smoking cigarettes, peeling oranges, and playing board games with soda caps. The smell: ripe, pungent, slightly rotting. Our guides were patient and kind, and offered up many kinds of advice. After the markets, we took our inaugural daladala ride, and Rama’s first piece of advice was to get on the first daladala (small bus) that comes by, even if you don’t think it’s the right one. Daladalas are local buses within Dar, smaller than the public buses in many American cities and comparable to passenger vans. The bus was full almost instantly and we took off with people still jamming the door trying to get in. (Again, Rama said that traffic was down because of the holiday, but on normal work days it’s an actual fight to get a seat.) The bus system was completely foreign to me, but unlike the village, it had a set structure in that the buses only stopped at set points, didn’t dawdle or stop unexpectedly, and actually seemed in a hurry to get where they were going. Once we got off, after about a ten-minute ride across the heart of the city during which a small woman sat on my lap and another small woman repeatedly kicked me in the shins, we walked into the Dar es Salaam Village Museum. Rama negotiated a fair price for a huge group of Americans and had a organized a complex mathematical system by which we were able to pay it.

Since it was now about 1 pm and we were hungry, we (as a full group of about twenty-five people, led by Rama and the others) walked across the street and were met by a team of competing restauranteurs vying for our business. They stood around and tried to entice us, literally beckoning us forward. Once we selected a place, tables for all twenty-five of us appeared and then I set about trying to figure out what I wanted. It wasn’t until some of my companions started asking for substitutions and questioning the ingredients in different dishes on the menu that I realized how stereotypically American we were acting, assuming that things could be made to be just as we wanted them.

Perhaps it was my desire to fit in, to avoid stupid questions and act like I knew what I was doing, but it’s my belief that when dining in a new place, you should pick something from the menu at random, hope it isn’t liver or brains, and eat it without complaint. The existence of vegetarians is laughed at in many places in the world, and such was the case here. People must eat what they can get. In the developed world, at practically any time, day or night, one can get almost anything one desires, whether it’s chocolate cake, chana masala, or a steak the size of a dinner plate. The available variety is staggering, as is the instant gratification. Keeping my frustrations to myself, I ordered beef and bananas, a culinary combination I’d never seen presented before except on a grocery list, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

It’s bananas, b-a-n-a-n-a-s. We then proceeded to the Village Museum, where we watched four dancers and four musicians perform a beautiful and intricate mix of dances and songs set to varying drum beats. It crossed my mind that they were presenting a mediated version of their heritage for money instead of us going to see the real thing, but I’m not sure what is potentially more harmful: losing their heritage or cheapening it by dancing for tourists at a museum, or tourists infiltrating native villages and clamoring to see dance in its natural form. I’m sure both already happen and will continue to do so.

Since I was unable to solve the issue of cultural appropriation in one afternoon, I focused on the intricacies of the dances. The best part was watching the performers tune and tighten the drumheads by holding them over a fire that was kindled behind a tree. The second-best part was that I wasn’t enlisted from among the crowd to participate in the dancing, as were some of my friends. (See above.) The museum contained about twenty replicas of tribal housing styles from all over Tanzania, along with placards explaining the origin and features of each. They were amazingly constructed, and I grew sweaty inside most, which means they were also well insulated. Most, circular in shape and standing about twenty feet high and fifty feet wide, were partitioned into intricate systems of rooms and hallways and storage areas and depending on the tribe, bedrooms for children, men, women, or first wives and second wives. All were dark and smelled vaguely of manure, smoke, and hay, and only a few had windows or even holes for light to enter. Most were constructed to maximize security and warmth. One even had a “satan shrine” used to exorcise demons, which was the one I decided I’d take if I was offered a choice.

Village Museum. “Satan shrine” not pictured. After walking around for about two hours, we finally left and piled (ALL OF US) onto an already full daladala, standing the entire ride in the middle of the bus, holding onto the bars, while the conductor pushed his way past us on all sides to collect fares starting at the back. At one point he ended up on my lap as he squeezed through, a situation that didn’t seem to faze him in the slightest.

Bus Magic

Yes, that’s my bus, stuck in the mud. You try getting a better picture.

Before I begin, let me state that buses should stay flat on the ground. I think we can agree on this. Yet, ending up at wide angles with respect to horizontal is well within the realm of possibility on a Tanzanian bus. This will usually be rectified within a few hours by a team of shirtless men who show up out of nowhere to dig the bus out of thick mud or deep water or whatever obstacle in which it has entrenched itself. I swear, these guys showed up every time one of my buses got stuck. It might have been the same guys every time, I have no way of confirming. Maybe there’s a team of heroes who are dispatched to rescue stuck buses. Even on the deepest, darkest road in the most uninhabited stretch of land in southern Tanzania, they appeared at any hour with shovels and picks, and bravely struggled to dig out the tires and push the bus out of the hole into which it had plunged. Nine times out of ten, I’d say, they were successful. I was always slightly concerned I’d handed a shovel and get drafted into helping, but I remain thankful that never happened.

To set the scene: I was on the way to Mahenge after a lengthy spring holiday in Cape Town, South Africa, about which more later, but the shock of being back in Tanzania after two weeks with hot showers, strong coffee, and fast internet hadn’t fully set in. I arrived armed with the steely conviction that I would survive my last months in Mahenge as safely and happily as I could, or die in the process. It was this attitude that I assumed as I boarded the bus.

The journey started as propitiously as it could, under the circumstances. Morogoro was hot and dry, the sun stuck flat in the middle of the sky, but I knew further south the rains had come and would be in full swing by the time I arrived home. I bought my ticket the day before with surprisingly limited hassle (after I confirmed the hour of departure three times) and arrived at Msavu, the Morogoro bus stand, an hour early. After waiting for twenty minutes, the assembled crowd was told to walk across the street to a gas station. Buses pay a small fee for entering the bus stand, and as the bus was already en route from Dar, it was easier to pick up passengers at the gas station along the highway than deal with the traffic inside Msavu. Fine. The busI got on, and discovered I had two seats to myself. Enjoying my surprising luxury, I quickly assumed bus Zen mode and stared out the window, watching as the houses and people thinned and gave way to acacia and baobab and vast swaths of brown, swaying grass and clouds draped over distant mountains. Things were going well.

We departed Morogoro at 9:30 am. It was an hour or so before I saw the first dark puddles at the sides of the road. A few people had already gathered around to fill buckets with water before balancing them on their heads and walking on. As puddles go, these were small, I thought, only a few inches deep and nothing to worry about. Amateur puddles, a few years away from signing a college contract. About an hour later, the puddles had begun to spread across the road. Thin creeks tinkled under makeshift log bridges at the road’s edge. The bus slowed once or twice to ford a stream that had bisected the road and cause all of us in the back to fly out of our seats. It was an ominous development but the sun was out, the road was still paved, and I was determined to stay positive at any cost. (At the time, I was inwardly screaming at the absurdity of everything: “I want a beer, I want a pizza, I want Peanut M&Ms, I want to be off this bus, I want a bed, I want to go home.”)

At the Cape Town airport, I had purchased 1Q84, a brick of a Haruki Murakami novel, and brought it out of my bag to keep my mind occupied. I didn’t normally read on buses, it was often too bouncy and dusty, but I felt an ill-defined sense of uncertainty rising at the base of my neck, just out of reach. The fact that Murakami's novel takes place in an alternate world that often crosses over into a parallel reality seemed appropriate for my current situation.

“What if we get stuck?” a voice asked, quietly. “Where will you go? What will happen to your backpack, stowed out of reach? How will you get home? What will you eat? Do lions get hungrier during the rainy season? How long can you survive by drinking you own pee?” These are questions that used to plague me before any journey, my mind running through endless loops of contingency plans and emergency procedures. In my travels to this point, at which I’d been in Tanzania for about eight months, I’d learned to silence them, or at least to ignore them until they subsided. There was a way for everything, I knew, even if it was unpleasant or unexpected. Things were fine. They would be fine.

At about 3 pm, the bus switched with a lurch from the paved road onto the local dirt highway that stretched the rest of the way to Mahenge near the entrance to Udzungwa Mountains National Park. The park is home to the second largest biodiversity of any national park in Tanzania, and contains the magnificent 170 meter-tall Sanje Waterfalls—popular with backpackers and hikers—a glimpse of which I saw tumbling grandly down the mountain between a break in the clouds. It’s also home to a hell of a lot of water, much of which fell from the mountains and collected into rivulets that fed into larger streams along the roadside. The jungle, dense to the point of entering the bus by force and buying us dinner, was held back by the force of flowing water. A channel about four feet across flanked the road on both sides and deepened and widened as we progressed. It looked like we were driving not on a road, but on a thin, dirt-covered bridge over a vast river.

After another forty minutes of bouncing along over rutted tracks, things suddenly became not fine at all. The road curved around a hillside and disappeared. Like a river cutting through a canyon, the road, or what was left of it, was subsumed completely into a flowing mass of murky, silty mud bordered by towering walls of red clay and brown grass. The delineation between the dirt and the mire was clear: as if painted by hand, brown earth gradually gave way to black sludge for about one-hundred meters. The bus slowed to a stop. From the other direction, a Jeep heaved its way through the morass, its engine revving mightily as the tires cleaved into the ground and sprayed inky mud in every direction. I watched its progress enviously through the windshield. It eventually cleared the mud and drove past us, jauntily honking its horn as if to say, “Good luck, suckers.” At this point, everyone around me started to whisper quietly, which for Tanzanians is as close as they’ll come to true panic. I looked around at my neighbors, trying to gauge the seriousness of the situation by their expressions. One by one, they rose and began to walk toward the front of the bus. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I groaned to no one, and picked up my bag.

All of us congregated on the side of the road in the shade of some banana trees while the driver, a stout man wearing rubber sandals and a Manchester United jersey that nicely accentuated his paunch, conferred with his friends. At least, I assume they were his friends—they might have been strangers from a nearby village. Maybe they were from a nearby village but they were actually his friends, and he stopped the bus here on every journey so they all got a chance to hang out. In fact, I never had any inkling of where people appeared from on the road, or how they got there. People just seemed to appear from the tall grass, like those dead baseball players in Field of Dreams, perhaps drawn by the prospect of watching some bus drama unfold. I can imagine that was the main activity in a lot of towns.

I took a seat on a damp log, trying to keep my new black Converse shoes, fresh from Cape Town’s shopping district, from sticking in the mud. It turns out it is possible to be vain about one’s appearance even while stranded with a group of people who don’t speak your language while sitting on a log by the side of a swampy road. If I’d been in a better frame of mind, perhaps seated in a comfortable reclining chair with seven cold beers and a bag of chips, what unfolded might have been highly amusing. I would’ve recorded the entire process and submitted it to one of those TV shows that feature videos of people getting defenestrated or accidentally tossing their toddlers down a flight of stairs, with a studio audience of buffoons cackling madly in response. “Schadenfreude for Idiots” is the genre, I think. Anyway, it would’ve fit in perfectly.

I finally figured out, after spending twenty minutes waiting and listening to snippets of the conversations of people around me, that the driver asked us to leave the bus in order to lighten its weight and make it more buoyant (or so I would guess). In what seemed a strange group dynamic, even for laid-back Tanzanians, no one seemed perturbed or even slightly worried about our situation. The men quickly formed small groups as if they were socializing after church, many laughing and slapping each other on the back like they’d just found wads of cash in the tall grass instead of being forcibly removed from a sweaty bus after a truncated seven-hour journey. (If you’re counting, which I was, seven hours was the time the entire journey usually takes from start to finish. It had taken us that time to make it about a quarter of the way before we stopped.) Women quietly gathered in separate groups and spoke softly, the younger ones watching the men reverently, many using banana leaves to shade their faces. I sat on my log and continued to watch while I wiped spots of mud from my shoes.

The driver, clearly having reached an accord with his associates, boarded the empty bus and, with a theatrical roar of the engine, took off as fast as he could. “Hey dudes, watch this! I’m going to see how stuck I can get this bus and then we’ll ditch all these people and go back to town and get drunk!” he shouted out the window. After a few seconds, he accelerated sharply and turned the bus at a slight angle, hoping to skid across the mud and use the bus’s force and momentum to arrive pointed straight, more or less, on the other side. He, I’m sure, had more experience than I have piloting a two-ton metal block through waist-deep mud at high velocity, so if I ever see him again, I will admit that I didn’t do incredibly well in high school physics, so my opinion probably isn’t worth much. I do know, however, that in order to move a wheeled craft forward in a set direction, one must point the wheels to travel in that direction. It makes sense, does it not?

The front set of tires bit into the mud and held tightly, churning the bus forward with a thunderous force before succumbing to a lack of traction and spinning aimlessly as the rear wheels became mired in the tracks the front wheels had created. The weight of the bus was pulling it down into the mud, and the tires, traveling at an angle, forced themselves in deeper until they were completely stuck. The bus stopped, its front left tire spinning madly in the glare of the afternoon sun, with its nose pointed at a 15-degree angle into the ground, and the rear tires elevated slightly, so that all of the passengers, had we still been aboard, would have been dumped toward the front.

The driver hopped lightly out of the side door and landed with a splash in the mud, his feet sinking a few inches with every step. He seemed supremely unconcerned. This, I suppose, in retrospect, worked in his favor. Since most Tanzanians rarely get visibly frustrated or flustered, they’re able to shake off any failures and carry right along. There's something to be learned from that, I suppose. Life lesson: when you’re stuck in the mud, go get beers and things will be fine.

After conferencing again with his advisors, he stood for a moment and surveyed the scene, his stance suggesting, maybe only to me, the rugged determination of a prizefighter about to enter the second round. I’d like to say that everyone grew silent and apprehensively hopeful as he climbed aboard the bus, but really, no one seemed even to notice. For all I could tell, this turn in the road was our destination all along and, having successfully reached it, people were content. Maybe this was where the journey was meant to end. The thought of a lion stumbling on our party of castaways, as if a lion stumbles onto anything by chance, was arresting enough to cause me to remain stationary on the log with my head propped up on my chin. I love lions, but only in certain situations. This was not one of them. The sun bore down through a thin veil of cloud that fluttered across the cyan sky, and ripples of gauzy heat radiated up off the road in the distance.

His second attempt was more successful. After a slow start, the bus lurched ahead, jittering and shaking madly like an unbalanced washing machine, and with a great deal of pushing by the driver’s advisory council, some of them sinking to their knees in mud (part of the job, I guess) the tires gained a grip on solid ground. The small groups standing around in the shade looked up as if someone had announced that dinner was served, and made their way slowly back to the bus. We climbed aboard and in five minutes were on our way again.

The Titanic. RIP.  We only made it a short distance, however, before another natural waterway hindered our progress. After successfully extricating ourselves from the first dig-out, we arrived at Ifakara and spent three hours waiting to cross the Kilombero River because the ferry was was “broken.” You’ll notice my skepticism. After watching people (it was hard to tell who were the officials and who were overzealous observers) spend two hours attempting to resuscitate a second ferry, rusted and half-sunk in the shallows along the riverbank, I found another seat in the shade of a banana tree. The rescue crews made their way to the Titanic, which is what I named the rusted ferry, in shallow canoes and rowboats before nearly capsizing in the Kilombero’s swift current. I made a game of guessing which canoe or boat would make it to the Titanic’s rusty hull first. Would it be Speedy, the showoff in the flashy red canoe? Or Baldy, making his way slowly but surely in a homemade brown rowboat? It made for an entertaining afternoon of competition.

About an hour after I sat down, Speedy and Baldy had both boarded the Titanic, but it turned out that the first ferry actually did work, and the friendly driver forgot to put the key in or wanted a break from the monotony of driving back and forth. Maybe be had an existential crisis. Maybe he suddenly realized that life is about the journey, not the destination, since his destinations were literally the same two every day. It was impossible, and indeed probably detrimental to my mental state, to know what actually happened. My resolution to remain happy and positive was shaken, but on the plus side, this delay afforded me quite a lot of time for forced relaxation and quiet contemplation.

Eventually we all climbed aboard the functioning ferry. The driver or captain or whoever, apparently still in doubt about his chosen profession, didn’t pull it close enough to the bank, forcing all of us to wade through ankle-deep water. So much for my black Converse. By some miracle we made it across the river, waited for another thirty minutes for the bus to catch up with us on the other side, and pressed on into the mountains.

We got stuck four more times over the course of the next ten hours between Ifakara and Mahenge, a trip that took one hour during the dry season. It was the same every time: the bus got wedged in waist-deep sludge the color of rusty blood, everyone climbed off and waited at the side of the road, the driver recklessly attempted to extricate himself from the mire, failed, and a group of guys with picks and shovels appeared to dig it out. I can’t confirm whether he knew all these guys, but the chances are pretty good. Maybe they have a phone tree or a Facebook group.

My favorite instance of getting stuck was at 11 pm, in complete darkness, at a point where the road narrowed drastically and the red clay soil gummed up the tires. We had once again exited the bus, as we did each time it got stuck, and were standing on the side of the road with a wall of dense forest at our backs. It was hard to see anything under the pitch black sky, but the mood was more subdued than earlier, and many people were propped up against each other dozing. The only light that filtered down through the trees was from a ghostly moon, imbuing everything with an eerie glow. It was at this moment, perhaps under the influence of the the pale moon, that an adventurous spirit stirred in me and I decided I was going to make it home. Armed with positive thinking and two working legs, nothing would stop me, I decided, not even the lack of adequate vehicular transport. Okay, maybe a lion would stop me. Or a hippopotamus. Or the fact that I’m hopeless at navigation and would probably have ended up eaten by a crocodile in the river. But I was on an adventure, god damn it, and I intended to see it through.

At that moment, cutting through the silence, I overheard someone say, “Simba atajkuja (The lion is coming),” laughing. “Simba atakuja hapa, sasa hivi! (The lion is coming here right now!)” It took a few moments for my brain to process this statement in the context of where I was and what I was doing there. What kind of reality was I living in such that the appearance of a lion in the depths of a black night made any rational sense? I had heard tales of a rogue lion patrolling this part of the jungle, roaming far outside its territory in Selous Game Reserve. I chalked it up as one of those local legends that people like to use to scare the white folks, even though I was the only one around at the moment. In actuality the lion probably wouldn’t challenge such a large group of people. At that moment, it didn’t matter. To hear someone say, “The lion is coming right now,” accompanied by a maniacal laugh, while standing by the side of a desolate, moonlit road in rural southeastern Tanzania with no means for escape—well, it’s hard not to take that seriously.

Kufika (Arrival)

There were a multitude of thoughts that went through my head when I was waiting at the airport, about to depart for a year in a very foreign place. My family finally left, after a series of tearful farewells. I cleared security and ate a bagel. I organized and reassembled my belongings and made sure my belt and shoes wouldn’t fall off. Then, I was finally alone with my thoughts, at the brink of a descent into a new adventure that might very well change my life forever.

Chief among my thoughts was surprise. Despite the fact that I signed up for this trip more than a year before this day arrived, and I spent the better part of five months preparing, both mentally and physically, for whatever was to come, I lacked the existential ability to understand that the day of departure, for weeks circled on my calendar, had arrived. A mistake, perhaps? Surely just a mislabeling by the people who print the calendars. Or perhaps this was all an elaborate exercise to train my loved ones to prepare for an emergency departure should a drug cartel or shadow government set its sights on me. Yes, a mistake! “Good show, everyone. Back in the car! Just toss all the luggage in the garage and throw a tarp over it. Let’s never speak of this again. What’s for lunch?”

The true surprise was that I hid the reality of the departure from myself for as long as possible, instead focusing on the preparations for the trip: the vaccines (“These will keep me safe when I go on safari, and swim in beautiful, flowing rivers,” I said, as the nurse rolled her eyes); the purchase of vast quantities of clothing (“I bet doing laundry is going to be an unique and interesting experience”); stocking up on camping and survival equipment (“This thermal sleeping bag, first-aid kit, and oversized knife will keep me safe, warm, and happy”); and the good-bye parties (“Yes, yes, I’ll do my best not to come home with any African wives, but you know it just can’t be helped, what with these good looks of mine”). What stood between the months of preparation and the day of departure was the stark difference between the known, the familiar, the comfortable and the vast and yet-to-be determined future. I was about to embark, truly, on a journey into the unknown.

Intertwined with my surprise that this was all actually happening, that my family has really left the airport and wasn't going to turn around in a fit of rage and demand to extricate me from this calamitous situation into which I’d somehow become enmeshed, was the cold drip of a slowly intensifying panic. We aren’t talking junior varsity–type panic, either. This is Friday-night-deep-in-the-heart-of-Texas-varsity panic. This panic was scouted since it was 16. This panic was going pro. It was reminiscent of those grimly vivid anxiety dreams in which the very thing you’ve dreaded is coming to pass and there is nothing you can do to stop it. I had to give up control to the great wave of the universe and let it push me toward wherever I was going.

Yes, I tricked myself into thinking what a grand adventure a year in Tanzania would be, and everyone for some reason listened to me and let me get on with it. If you ever find yourself in this situation, here is my advice: sit in one of those slouchy, faux-leather airport chairs, arrange all of your bags in a pyramidal structure within your immediate reach, close your eyes, and make a mental list of all the things for which you are thankful. Try not to think about how much you will miss them when you finally yield to the as-yet-unknown-to-medicine innard-consuming parasite that you will undoubtedly contract. Positive thinking in these situations is key, as I will demonstrate again and again.

While you meditate on your future, a number of other, somewhat more practical, thoughts will vie for space in the tumult of your mind: “Why did I pack so much? Surely I won’t have any use for seventeen pairs of underwear and three bath towels. I’m sure I can just pick up a new one if one becomes soiled at the local grocery shop, along with some cough drops and a decent bottle of Scotch.” Following this might be, “Why did I pack so little? I need at least two good frying pans, and seventy-five more toothbrushes. Damn those TSA guys for making me throw out the Wi-Fi router and my French press.”

At various intervals, other thoughts will attempt to intrude: “What does CPR actually stand for? Does my vaccine for yellow fever cover other colors of fever, or just yellow? When they said to be ‘conversant’ in Swahili upon arrival, does that mean stop-and-chat or full-on debate and interrogation techniques? Why the hell will I need hiking boots? What if my roommate is a mouth-breathing racist who doesn’t wash dishes? Who is going to file my taxes?” You have a few connecting flights to take before you get to New York to meet up with the twenty strangers who will form your network of friendship and emotional support for the next twelve months, so focus on one thing at a time. Take as many deep breaths as you can manage without passing out, put one foot in front of the other, and count down the minutes until you board the international flight and the booze is free. This is good advice. Trust me.

***

After a thirty-six hour journey that commenced with drinking coffee in Buffalo; enjoying celebratory beers in the sterile and characterless halls of JFK’s international departures terminal; watching the sun rise over the Swiss Alps; flying into Nairobi, Kenya, over a vast wildlife park and trying to locate zebra and giraffe from the plane; and watching brightly lit ships cross the dark ocean near Zanzibar, I arrived in Tanzania. During the long layover in Zurich, verdant, rolling Swiss hills framed the rising sun from the airport’s windows, and I was tempted, more than a little, to stop off there, find a stylish hotel next to a medieval pub, and put an end to this crazy African adventure before it had begun. (Hopefully it would be the very same hotel in which my stunning and brilliant flight attendant happened to be staying, to provide an opportunity to embarrass myself in multiple languages.) I didn’t, though. Otherwise this book wouldn’t exist and I’d be living happily in Switzerland, writing about chocolate, mountains, and my love for cozy sweaters.

The only hiccup occurred in Zurich immediately upon boarding the Swiss Air flight to Dar es Salaam, when I noticed that the entertainment system on the plane wasn’t working in some rows. The thought of an international flight without the sedative of television was unsettling. A beleaguered flight attendant paced back and forth between complaining customers, murmuring quiet apologies. To compensate, I took to narrating in my head the plot of the show being watched by the woman three rows ahead of me, where the TVs were working, while opening the first of many tiny gin bottles. Finally, someone in the back of the plane hit the power console with a brick and the screens jumped to life. Fourteen hours, four movies, and many tiny gin bottles later, I arrived in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

The Dar es Salaam airport, which was more the idea of an airport than the actual thing, was small and confined, with one ticket desk and one baggage claim. After searching for a few minutes, I found a bathroom to which the door didn’t close all the way. Everything, including the walls and ceilings, looked to have been lifted directly from a mid-century American shopping mall. The customs process led to our group of twenty volunteer teachers, with me as a representative, hastily presenting a stack of passports and about $1,000 in brand new US $50 bills to an amused official to pay for our Tanzanian entry visas. I stood warily next to the counter, keeping a respectable distance but quietly watching to ensure our passports were properly returned with stamps and visas. They were, and everything was in order. Suddenly, we were allowed to enter the country. Lesson One: Somehow, Tanzania has a way of evening out the most chaotic exchanges, and things wind up right in the end. But I didn’t know that at the time.

From there, we made our way outside into the late-evening Dar heat. The sky was streaked with the last vestige of the day’s light. What a sight we must have made to the cab drivers, shopkeepers, and native travelers, with our bags and backpacks and hiking boots and walking sticks and safari hats. You can’t help but look out of place when arriving somewhere after a long plane ride, especially one that traverses multiple time zones and countries. A great machine picked you up, whisked you away for a period of hours or days, and spat you out on the flat surface of somewhere else. You practically reek of foreignness. Because the actual experience of air travel is mostly anodyne and repetitive, with most trips seeming identical from the inside of the plane, arrival in a new place becomes even more jarring, like waking up from a strange sleep in a new place. “How did I get here? Where am I and what am I doing? Why is it so hot?”

The air was cooler immediately outside the airport’s entrance, laced with flowers and far-away smoke and the sweet evening scent of fading heat. The exterior courtyard of the airport was ringed with Plexiglas stalls selling snacks, SIM cards, and postcards of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Small kiosks with colorful signage offered money exchange and safari tours. It was a place that, though I could not know at the time, I was destined to spend many more hours before my journey was complete a year later. A group of cab drivers stood near us, probably trying to decide if we needed rides and if it was worth trying to approach us. I was instantly on guard, a product of exhaustion and the defensive instinct that kicks in upon arrival in any big city.

One of the drivers, whose badge was visible on his Manchester United jersey, approached me and greeted me in English. “Looking for a ride?” he asked. I explained that we were waiting for transportation, speaking slowly and probably sounding like an idiot. I had no idea how my speech patterns would be understood, if at all, so speaking clearly seemed a good plan. The driver nodded, in a friendly way, and continued standing next to me.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“America,” I replied. “We are teachers.” He nodded again.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“All over,” I said. “We don’t know yet.”

He seemed confused at this and didn’t reply, probably thinking I was a bit crazy in addition to being rude, but he stood next to me for a moment longer. I’m sure he was trying to get a fare, yes, but he was also trying to be friendly and to welcome us to his country. He held out his hand and I shook it, bringing an end to our conversation. He walked back to the group of drivers and commenced an animated discussion with them in Swahili. I was left feeling very out of place. Not for the last time.

After we stood around nervously for about twenty more minutes, sweating in the unfamiliar heat and watching people come and go with the jealousy that belongs only to outsiders, our Field Director arrived to collect us in a bus with Mustafa, our driver, and we piled all of our bags into the back. Think twenty people multiplied by about 100 pounds of luggage per person—a veritable mountain. I was surprised the bus didn’t tip over. Not for the last time.

The journey from the airport in Dar to Mpingo Farm Stay, about 24 miles (38 km) outside the city, was one of the most surreal I have ever taken. The combination of exhaustion, adrenaline, darkness, and the intoxicating smells and glimpses of an unfamiliar world, created a panorama that will never fade from my memory. Surrounded by my companions, who were newly energized by our arrival, I sat crammed into a tiny bus seat with my forehead pressed against the window, trying to fight off my body’s nervous energy and find some sleep. I settled instead for staring out the window at the unfamiliar tableaux that passed by in islands of light. These visions were surrounded by shadows that seemed deeper and more mysterious than I’d ever seen. The bright lights of the airport quickly faded into the enveloping darkness as we drove down a wide highway lit only by dim street lamps. In the darkness, I saw countless people walking along the sides of the street, in pairs and groups, riding bikes, sitting and eating. It looked as busy as a Sunday morning.

Tiny shops, built from concrete blocks in the dirt and mud at the road’s flanks, dotted the night with flashes of light as we passed. I saw barber shops with neat, hand-painted signs; tiny hair salons with long strings of beads covering the door; shops the size of phone booths flanked by bags of grain and cement and oil drums, generators, symmetrical mountains of fruits and vegetables, soccer jerseys, bright bolts of cloth and fabric, and stacks of colorful plastic buckets of all sizes. Other shops were surrounded by wooden headboards and bed frames, unvarnished chairs and table legs, and piles of luggage and suitcases. Small bars and open-air restaurants with glowing television screens and neon beer signs were ringed by plastic chairs set in pools of eerie, hazy light. A solitary man walked down the sidewalk holding a tray of gum and cigarettes for sale, lit by a single candle. A pool table was illuminated by a lantern hung from a tree, around which dozens of people were gathered, some observing, some discussing, some dancing.

Candles lit tiny spheres of night, illuminating fleeting scenes and leaving me with only parts of a large whole. My exhaustion gave way to confusion, and the passing heads and bodies silhouetted in pools of candlelight became scenes from a strange night market in a new, post-apocalyptic world. Hovering somewhere between exhaustion, panic, and relief, I watched as we passed motorbikes, cars, trucks, three-wheeled motorcycle taxis called bajajis, and a multitude of people standing, walking, eating, drinking, fighting, singing, and dancing in the darkness. I felt as if I’d stumbled into a play with no audience. It was both oddly familiar and astonishingly new, as if remembered from a dream.

Tune In/Tune Out

Tuned in, I’d say.

We don’t notice it, but we are constantly listening to other people. At the grocery store, in line at the train station, through an open car window—we hear pieces of conversations, we understand what is being said, and we immediately know whether to ignore it or to take action. It is incredibly, fundamentally, distracting. We are constantly taking in extraneous information and processing it, but this effort is largely a waste of mental energy. Imagine if all that irrelevant noise stopped, like someone turning off a radio blaring static, and everything was quiet. You now exist in isolation, left only with your own thoughts. The conversations of the people around you are, quite actually, incomprehensible. You are confused most of the time, but lack the ability to comprehend what is taking place around you. So you tune out. You let go. Things happen, you watch them, you wonder why, and you move on. (That sums up most of my time in Africa, actually.)

The brain’s ability to process stimuli is amazing. As it assimilates new information and places it in a hierarchy of importance, it learns what to filter out. In your home environment and culture, this process is virtually unnoticed because it is so normalized. When you engage in the same routine and see the same things and do the same things every day, you stop noticing the details—indeed, you might stop noticing anything at all. (Think of that drive to work when you are engaged in a mental debate with yourself over whose turn it was to wash the dishes and upon arrival, wonder how you got there at all. Then think that some people live that way all the time.) I had an English teacher my freshman year of high school whose first assignment to new students was to notice three things on the ride to school. That’s it. Pay attention to the outside world and notice three unique things, and remember them. As simple a task as that may seem, it can sometimes be difficult to fight through your brain’s impulse to ignore the familiar. In a foreign environment, this observational sense goes on high alert, trying to process and decode and organize new information, and you suddenly notice everything. Because you don’t know what is important and what can be ignored, the wash of new stimuli is exhausting.

As I spent more time in Mahenge, a strange thing started to happen. I developed something I called my “interior mental space,” a place within my own head where I could retire to tune out the outside world. It was part meditation, part trance, and part blank-eyed stare. I spent a lot of time in there during the many bus journeys I took, and especially during long staff meetings in Kiswahili. (If my co-teachers started suddenly speaking in English suddenly, I knew they were talking to me, but other than that I had every reason to read or scribble in a notebook or stare out the window. On the most memorable occasion, I came to after reading a book for two hours when the headmaster announced that I was now the head of the English Department. Imagine tuning back into a staff meeting to find out you’d been promoted.) The creation of this interior mental space was a product of my ability to disengage from conversations and activities around me that took place in Kiswahili. I didn’t understand them, and I didn’t need to. Instead of eavesdropping on everyone’s conversations around me, and trying to figure out who had wronged who in an argument, or whose kids got caught throwing rocks at old ladies, I was able to exist, largely, in my own head.

The creation of a mental space is a necessary coping skill for living in a foreign culture. If you are always trying to decode everything around you, it will quickly become overwhelming. Apart from a twinge of joy whenever I recognized a few Kiswahili words, I learned early on that it was a difficult task to translate on the fly. If I heard words or phrases repeated over and over, I wrote them down and looked them up later, and was thus able to put together a working vocabulary, but in the course of normal speech I quickly became overwhelmed. It was like trying to paddle against the current of a raging river in a rented rowboat. The blessing of it was that I realized that most conversations didn’t concern me.

There is a definite narcissistic element to our eavesdropping in English: we assume that people are talking about us, and we want to know what they are saying. I know for a fact that my colleagues often talked about me, but since I couldn’t understand them, I didn’t care. I hoped they were saying nice things and left it at that. I disengaged. In most daily activities, if my attention wasn’t fully required, I tuned out. It is an amazing skill to learn, for it is a one that requires mental discipline, especially for travel and long periods of inactivity. The ability to entertain oneself with limited resources is a benefit for life. (Keep in mind that I didn’t have Wi-Fi or 4G or a smartphone or any kind of internet access when I traveled. No bathroom or snacks or cold water, either.) If I had paid attention to every creak and jolt and chicken and falling bag of beans on a cross-country bus trip, I would have lost it. I came close, but was able to salvage my sanity by escaping into my own head to plan my best-selling novel and to start casting the movie adaptation of my life. Even with the luxury of hanging out inside my own head for most of the day, I was usually somewhere between being peckish and absolutely famished when I arrived home, my mental and physical energies were depleted after a long day at school and the trek to and from, and I would retire daily around 8 pm in a state of near-delirious exhaustion. It is draining, no matter what you do. 

My advice: When you are new to a language and a culture, context is built one word and one experience at a time. As you engage with the people around you, your brain absorbs everything and begins to make sense of it. This is why it is necessary to immerse yourself in that culture, as difficult as it might be. Get out of the house and do something, anything, that challenges you, even if it’s just walking down the road and buying a Coke. You will profit from the experience, you will strengthen your bonds with your neighbors and community, and your fear and uncertainty will diminish a little bit more with each engagement.

Travel

Reality, when it comes to travel in Tanzania, is subjective. The best example of this phenomenon happened right in Mahenge, in our own backyard. There are two offices for each bus line: one is in town, usually staffed by a person with the bewildered, uncertain look of someone grabbed from the street and told to fill in for five minutes, and the other is at the bus stand, staffed by no one, or a ghost. I once went to the bus stand four times in one day to make a bus reservation, each time to find that no one was working at the office.

In preparation for a long trip during the December holidays, I wanted to make sure we could get out of town, so I planned ahead. I reserved a ticket on the Al Saedi bus to Morogoro a few days before my planned departure, thinking that travel would be at a high around that time. All went well. Things were fine. Then, on the day before we were set to depart, a knock came on the door around 3 pm. Since the neighborhood kids never knocked, they just yelled, and we weren’t expecting visitors, I opened the door apprehensively to find a man I’d seen around town at Riverside Bar, but didn’t know personally. He introduced himself, with a series of apologies for disturbing us, and politely asked us to follow him to the Al Saedi office. We left the house puzzled, trying to figure out if he worked for Al Saedi, even though he’d introduced himself as a teacher at Mahenge Secondary School. He said nothing else during our walk, and kept a few paces ahead of us. When we got to the bus stand, he excused himself and I found the Al Saedi office, staffed by another very tall man I’d never seen before. He explained that the bus set to depart the next day had not returned from its run to Dar the night before and so was not leaving as scheduled. He offered formal apologies in Kiswahili and for the next forty minutes walked with us to the Moro Best office in town, arranged for us to get new tickets for the morning (thereby giving business to his ostensible competitors, though this made me think that the two companies were working together most of the time), and made sure we had everything we needed. Both of them, the teacher who came to our house and the employee from Al Saedi, were thoughtful and polite, and I never forgot the lengths they went to make sure we were prepared for our trip. Sometimes things surprised me—just when I got downhearted, or assumed that everything would go wrong and plans would go askew (as they most often did), something would restore my faith in Tanzania’s essential goodness and kindness. *** Living on a volunteer’s decidedly small salary precluded many travel options, including international flights. During the December holiday, I planned a trip around East Africa with friends, the logistics of which, looking back, are staggering. The short version of the plan looked something like this:

Mahenge to Morogoro

Morogoro to Dar es Salaam

Dar es Salaam to Zanzibar

Zanzibar to Dar es Salaam

Dar es Salaam to Kigali, Rwanda

Kigali to Kampala, Uganda

Kampala to Jinja, Uganda

Jinja to Kampala, Uganda

Kampala to Nairobi, Kenya

Nairobi to Kisumu, Kenya

Kisumu to Arusha, Tanzania

Arusha to Dar es Salaam

Dar es Salaam to Zanzibar

Zanzibar to Dar es Salaam

Dar es Salaam to Morogoro

Morogoro to Mahenge

It is that fifth entry down that now concerns us, Dar es Salaam to Kigali, Rwanda. If you look on a map and trace a line from Dar to Kigali, a long distance separates them, to be sure. They’re not close by. Instead of looping our way from country to country, starting with Kenya, the closest, and working around in a circle, my two fellow travelers, friends and co-teachers, decided, rather ambitiously, to go big right away and head across Tanzania diagonally to get to Rwanda. Various estimates put the bus ride at eighteen hours, twenty-four hours, and twenty-seven hours. None of those sounded fun. I knew it’d be long, yet laughed about it in that confident way of someone who is preparing to climb Kilimanjaro but hasn’t yet set foot on the mountain. The reality was somewhat more severe.

When we bought our tickets for Kigali (which cost about 100,500 Tsh, or $55) we were informed that the bus only ran certain days and that we would have to come back in two days for departure. Fine. We spent the intervening time drinking Konyagi, local Tanzanian bathtub gin, and eating sandwiches at Kipipeo Beach outside Dar. It could have been much worse, as it was about to be. The bus company instructed us to arrive at Ubungo, Dar’s central bus terminal, at 5:30 am on the day of departure, which means we left our hotel at 4 am to get there. Once we found our bus, after several mistaken attempts, we waited. The good news was that we had seats reserved for us. The bad news was that every horizontal surface in the bus, including the overhead baggage bins, storage lockers under the bus, and the aisle down the middle, was already full of bags, packages, and suitcases. This was the only bus to Kigali, and indeed probably one of the only methods of sending goods from Dar to Rwanda, so the bus was packed full of shipped goods as well as people. There was no room to walk—to access my seat, I had to climb over the seats of others and incur the wrath of an old lady who yelled at me for putting my feet on her chair. “Lady, it’s 5 am,” I said. “Lighten up and move your giant rucksack of chickens out of my way.” I should have said that anyway, but instead I offered a smile and kept climbing.

The chairs were the same size, I imagine, as a fighter pilot’s seat in the cockpit of a WWII-era Spitfire, and about six times less comfortable. I am of average height and build and could not find a comfortable way to arrange my body to avoid losing feeling in various extremities. The windows were riveted closed, and a sharp ridge jutted out where two steel plates came together that intersected with my knee and thigh on the side paneling. I could lean forward a few inches and touch the seat in front of me with my forehead. My seatmate, a thin man of about my age, seemed to have planned ahead for this journey and packed light. I didn’t see him open a bag the entire trip. I can’t imagine he undertook this journey on the spur of the moment, like a heiress jetting off to the French Riviera sans accoutrements, but I did wonder if, given his slender size, perhaps some larger person employed him to make the journey in his stead and save him the discomfort.

Just as in Mahenge, buses were not allowed to leave before 6 am. I don’t know why this is, but it means that every vehicle in Ubungo, which holds about 200 large buses and countless smaller buses and vans, lined up to leave around 5:45. At 6 am, when the gates were opened by police, every single one of them waited to pay the exit fee and turn onto the same small stretch of road. That road happened to be under heavy construction the entire time I was in Tanzania. It made for quite a confluence of angles. The front-running buses, straining to leave, became backed up for miles in either direction as they joined already congested traffic on the roads, thereby forcing other buses to wait inside Ubungo for their turn to leave. We drove in circles around the interior of the terminal for almost an hour, but didn’t leave until about 6:45 am. By this point, I’d eaten all my snacks and tried three times, all unsuccessfully, to nap. Instead, I stared out the window and wondered, yet again, what forces working together to shape my fate had conspired to bring me to this place. It was a beautiful morning to watch the sun rise over the city as it stirred to life. I didn’t see much of it, as we were still stuck inside the confines of the bus terminal, but I watched as streaks of red and pink spread across the sky and the small universe around me came to life. Maintenance workers appeared from the shadows, like actors stepping onstage, to sweep up trash and women with baskets of maandazi and nuts and bananas balanced on their heads walked from bus to bus. Each official vendor wore a vest with a number on it, and “UBUNGO” in large letters on the back—quite a step up, I remember thinking, from the chaos of bus terminals in the village, and the accompanying swarm of vendors and taxi drivers and moneychangers. In an unoccupied corner outside a supply building, water poured from a hose onto the ground under a tree and formed a small swamp, but in typical relaxed Tanzanian fashion, no one seemed to care.

Maybe it was my advanced exhaustion, or the excitement that comes at the start of a long journey, but I felt very happy to be on that bus, my seatmate’s head dozing on my shoulder and bouncing lightly when we hit potholes, watching the awakening world crawl by and about to embark on a trip across a beautiful country. We advanced slowly toward the exit, passed out of the terminal just as the sun crested the horizon, made a slow path through dense traffic in the city, and then reached the highway and were on our way. ***

The trip from Dar to Kigali took thirty-seven hours. I was going to wait and build up to that fact and then reveal it at the end of the story to heighten its shock value, but I think it’s shocking enough on its own. Thirty-seven hours in that cockpit chair, my knees brushing my chin and my backpack shoved under my feet. Google Maps tells me it should take approximately twenty-one hours, so the initial estimates were not wrong, but those assume passable roads and an average traveling speed, neither of which we had. The bus stopped twice for purposes of sustenance and relief, the first time at the same desolate rest stop I’d visited after first arriving in Tanzania months before, and the second at 3 am in a small town, probably somewhere around Singida, in the middle of the country. I remember the latter as an indistinct haze of small buildings in the smoky light of early morning, a dark and circuitous route to a dirty bathroom, and chapatti and tea that I was not hungry enough to eat but forced myself to finish while sitting in a plastic chair awash in the blinding glow of the bus’s headlamps.

I have no distinct memories of the trip strong enough to divide it into segments or endow it with any recognizable features. Once we reached Morogoro and entered a stretch of highway I’d never seen before, it was a blur of passing villages, beautiful scenery, and intense boredom and discomfort. Apart from being yelled at by the old lady every time I got off the bus, and trying extra hard to put my feet on her seat on the way back while climbing over stacks of luggage and bags of potatoes and onions that only seemed to increase in size, I shared my space with Junior, as I affectionately named my seat mate, and passed the time existing. Since we had no reliable estimate for when we might arrive, I stopped wondering. Every pothole, every muddy road, every stoppage with no explanation happened as if to someone else. I breathed in and out and put my mind as far away as I could. I traversed sandy beaches and swam in azure waters as the bus shuddered across barren plains. I think I slept at times, but it was not restful or regenerative, and my neck was craned at a nearly impossible angle in order to keep my head from rebounding on the hard window glass when we hit a bump. It’s what I imagine purgatory would be like—no knowledge of where you are, minimal comforts necessary for survival, and no estimated time for your arrival. It is an exercise in acceptance of your complete powerlessness to understand or change your situation.

The views, though! I don’t think purgatory comes with such stunning landscapes. As we traveled through the true heart of Tanzania, the road passed through Mikumi National Park en route to Morogoro, then through Kigosi Game Reserve near Tabora, and next to the tiny Burigi Game Reserve. We came within a hundred miles of Serengeti National Park and N’Gorongoro Conservation Area, home to most of Tanzania’s Maasai population (of which I am a honorary member). We came very close to the border with Burundi, a country the U.S. State Department warns citizens against entering—but I found a piece of Burundian money on the bus floor and considered it my souvenir in case I ever had to invent a story about my unauthorized entry and subsequent escape. The northwest part of Tanzania felt fantastically remote from my home in Mahenge, like the sky was pulled apart and stretched thin over the rugged landscape. Towns and villages seemed further apart with much more wild land between them, strewn with mountainous rocky outcroppings, wide plains, and a horizon that seemed to extend infinitely in every direction. Thick clouds sat atop distant mountains, blending together until sky and land became one, but we never seemed to reach them, and they remained far off for the entire journey. Even though I was very obviously still in Tanzania, the land seemed much more isolated. Villages were smaller, and people had fewer modern conveniences like cars or tractors. It struck me that living in a village set back from the highway with few access roads and visitors is probably much like living in the nineteenth century, with the ways of life uninterrupted and unchanged, for better and for worse. In remote places in America, you will find poverty, but not without electricity and satellite dishes and fast food. Here, people farmed with shovels and hoes, carried water from the river, lived by candlelight, and used traditional medicines. Time passed. I checked my watch at infrequent intervals, but time lost any significance once we reached the twenty-four hour mark. I could no longer tell if I was hungry or thirsty, tired or awake, dead or alive. I was somewhere in the middle. Around mid-afternoon on the second day, people around me began to perk up and start looking out the windows in a way that suggested they knew something I didn’t. I saw a man three seats ahead of me begin to unpack luggage from the overhead rack. We were close. But how close? And how were we going to get across the Rwandan border?

By foot, though I didn’t know this at the time. After chugging along at something close to top speed for most of the afternoon, the bus suddenly pulled over on the side of a dirt road, disgorging all of its passengers and luggage. One moment I was dozing in my seat, cuddled up with my seat mate, and the next I was beating a hasty exit while climbing over the obstacle course that the middle aisle had become. In the mad dash that ensued, I hurtled my way out, aiming to knock that old lady on the ear, and suddenly I was standing in bright sunlight at the side of a dusty road watching the bus disappear in the distance, hoisting my backpack on my shoulders, and following two men I’d never seen before to a dirty Toyota Hilux for a “ride to the border.” Come to find out, the bus had stopped far before it reached the customs post—about 20 km before. These men and their Toyota seemed a bit suspect to me, but the sun in which I was basking moments before (the first natural light I had experienced in two days not filtered through a two-foot glass window) had given way to sudden, sharp raindrops. We got in and, newly reunited with my bag, gripped it tightly to my chest. The driver, with a mysterious passenger brought along to light his cigarettes or something, spun out on the road and started driving back the way we had just come, then cut sharply across the road. He drove like NASCAR was recruiting him. Were there so many people being dumped on an unmarked road in northern Tanzania and waiting to be driven to the border that his speed proved lucrative? Did he have to make it back to load up and go again? Was he trying to break his own land speed record? I knew not.

It is interesting to note that we were actually in Rwanda before we crossed the border on foot. After being unceremoniously dropped off by our new friend, the Tanzanian Dale Earnhardt, Jr., I realized that it was another few hundred yards to the border post, under a gray sky with heavy rain beating on my skull. The border post is located at Rusomo, Rwanda, next to the Kagera River, which raged, heavy and brown with silt, over Rusomo Falls just before the border post. The Kagera, which is part of the upper headwaters of the Nile, begins in Burundi as it flows out of Lake Rweru, then  makes its way along the border with Rwanda and Tanzania before it meets the Ruvubu River and flows to Lake Victoria in Uganda. My friend told me, in a quiet voice, as we stood on the bridge overlooking the river, that during the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the river turned red with blood as thousands of bodies flowed under the bridge. News reports from May 1994 confirm that as many as 10,000 dead washed down the river into Lake Victoria. As the dead washed under the bridge, refugees fled over the bridge, this very bridge on which I stood, into Tanzania. It was a chilling way to enter the country, but a necessary reminder that this beautiful place in which I stood had a gruesome history. One of the worst genocides and crimes against humanity of the modern era had taken place just nineteen years before, and present-day Rwanda, beautiful and modern and advanced, had progressed very far since that time.

Once we crossed the border and received the appropriate stamps and permits, our ragged, wet, and sleep-deprived appearance amusing the border agents greatly, I needed food and a bathroom. Kigali, the capital city and our destination, was 160 km, or a two-hour ride, away, though once again, I didn’t know that yet. I had half-heartedly hoped that entering Rwanda would offer a change in the landscape, that there would be gleaming restaurants and hotels and shops and markets stacked up welcomingly as we crossed into the country. It was not to be. The border was still impossibly remote and deep in the bush, far from the glitz and shimmer of cosmopolitan Kigali. We found a restaurant, really just a rickety house with linoleum floors and a small seating area that served chapatti and some kind of mystery meat with two-day-old rice and beans, judging by their temperature. Unfamilar with Rwandan currency or the exchange rate, I wasn’t sure if we were being ripped off for our meal, but I didn’t care. Thirty-seven hours on a bus greatly lowers your expectations for anything in life, so a warm meal felt like a gift from the heavens. A few local men were sitting at tables near us eating the same thing we ate, so it seemed safe enough.

I asked after the whereabouts of the restroom facilities and was told to follow the stairs to the basement of the house. Not a good sign, I thought, but I was desperate. The sudden influx of food had wakened my sleeping stomach and the situation was growing dire. The stairs led to a dark basement, through which I followed a narrow path that led outside to the back of the house, situated on a sharply descending hill. Everything in Rwanda is on a hill—it’s one of the most mountainous countries in East Africa—but I didn’t expect the can to be on an incline as well. I found the small outhouse facing away from the main house with a view of the river we had just crossed, which was a good thing, as it had no door. I peered inside to find a hole, a bucket, empty, and nothing else. Luckily, I had packed toilet paper for such moments of need, and struggled for a few moments to locate it while balancing my bag against my chest so as not to set it down in the mud. Afterwards, feeling much better, I realized that a) never again would I have the need to heed nature’s call on the Rwandan border in an outhouse with no door (al fresco is what it would have said on the tourism brochure, had one existed), b) what a story it would make, and c) the lack of door emphasized the view of dense, green trees overlooking the river, which was actually quite pretty.

The remainder of the trip to Kigali, by comparison, was uncomplicated. The bus that took us into the city was clean and new, and the two-hour journey took place on neatly paved roads past happy schoolchildren with tidy uniforms and men sitting outside shops in sturdy wooden chairs. The whole scene could have been lifted from a Tanzanian village I’d passed along the way, then cleaned by a set decorator and placed down along sloping hills. For the hills were everywhere. Graceful hills, checkerboarded with neatly plowed fields and dotted with snug houses, rolled into the distance as far as I could see. My first impression of Rwandan villages was evident prosperity marked by careful attention to detail. Homes were painted and landscaped with flowers and rocks, the roads were marked with freshly painted lane indicators and crosswalks, and each rest stop had a paved parking area and building that housed transportation police.

These rest stops were remarkable for one reason apart from their orderly layout and spectacular cleanliness. As soon as the bus stopped, my window was immediately crowded by two, then three, then four and five, Rwandan men who saw tattoos on my arms and gathered around to stare, smiling shyly at each other and sometimes giving me a thumbs-up. Since my window did not roll down, I couldn’t talk to them. This never happened in any other setting in any of the other countries I visited. My students and co-teachers knew I had tattoos, but it was never remarked upon in any setting. The ride to Kigali was the only time I received such lively attention, and even more noteworthy was the fact that it happened three separate times at different rest stops. I was puzzled then, and remain puzzled now. Once I got to Kigali, I didn’t receive a second glance, perhaps owing to the large numbers of different nationalities and appearances in that sophisticated city, or the fact that I was vastly underdressed by the standards of many stylish and jaw-droppingly attractive Rwandans and probably not all that much to look at.

I do not think I can describe in accurate detail the wonders of Kigali, a modern, clean capital city of a stunningly beautiful country, especially for someone so recently removed from two days spent in a coffin with wheels, but suffice it to say that only such a magnificent and wondrous city would make worthwhile the perils and suffering entailed in a thirty-seven-hour journey.

Beautiful, yes, but I fell down the side of a mountain like this. Afya (Health)

I had malaria for the first time in September, only one month after arriving in Mahenge. Let me rephrase: I thought I had malaria for the first time, and no one did or said anything to make me think I didn’t. In Tanzania, malaria is like being innocent in our justice system: you have it until it is proven that you do not. And with good reason: The Center for Disease Control estimated that, in 2013, there were 198 million cases of malaria worldwide and more than 600,000 deaths, mostly occurring in the African region, and mostly children whose immunity to the disease has not matured. In 2012, the World Health Organization reported that malaria was the fourth highest cause of death in Tanzania, killing 20.9 million people. It all started one afternoon as I was pacing around my Form I English class. Because of the large number of students in each classroom, I tended to wander up and down the tightly arranged aisles between desks to keep an eye on the students in the back and make everyone nervous that I might steal up behind them. The view from the classroom windows looked out on the rolling plains, as distant as if I was looking at them from an airplane window. Heat shimmered like mist. As I gazed the window, trying to locate the horizon, my head began to vibrate. I felt as if I was in the direct path of the radiating heat waves. I propped myself up on a desk, while one of my students looked on, probably confused, while the weight of my bones threatened to pull me earthward. This spell continued for a few minutes until I made it to the end of class, and then stumbled to the staff room to report my condition. “You have malaria,” I was told cheerfully, as if I had sighted a rare and elusive animal. “You must go to hospital. Go, go now!”

Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease caused by different parasites belonging to the Plasmodium genus that commonly infect a certain type of mosquito. The disease generally begins to show after seven to thirty days of receiving an infective bite (the incubation period), and immediate symptoms include shivering, sweating, headache, vomiting, aching muscles, fatigue, and fever. Here’s where it gets complicated: in many countries, including Tanzania, education about malaria is prevalent and immediate treatment is generally available, but in other places where the disease is common, these symptoms are often attributed to other illnesses, a flu or fever, perhaps, and left untreated. In cases where malaria is not diagnosed or treated within days, serious organ failure and abnormalities in the blood can occur, as well as the onset of cerebral malaria,  (potentially causing loss of consciousness, coma, seizure, speech difficulties, deafness, blindness, and ataxia, or difficulty with movement). Pregnant women have an increased susceptibility to malaria, and contracting the disease during pregnancy can lead to severe problems, including low birth weight and a decreased chance of a child’s survival. Malaria is a particularly detestable disease because it kills so many people, despite the fact that it is almost completely preventable given the right resources. The disease is prevalent in Africa because of many contributing factors: a climate that allows the parasite, and the mosquito that hosts it, to thrive; weak infrastructure to stem the spreading of the disease; a lack of prophylaxis materials, including medication and mosquito nets; and the large financial burden of effective intervention methods. The good news is that the CDC reports the last ten years have brought a 45% decrease in malaria-related deaths due to a growing international effort to control and prevent the disease. Education about the disease, the availability of medication to treat it, and the supplying of mosquito nets and insecticides to prevent it are combining to reduce malaria’s disastrous impact, but the battle is far from over. Malaria was a daily scourge among my students and friend. People contracted it at the same rate, and treated it with the same level of seriousness, as people in the developed world treat a common cold. It was seen as a nuisance, or a necessary evil that rarely did any harm. But I saw my friends in the throes of a malaria-induced fever, and it is nothing to be taken lightly.

I was told I must go to hospital, so I went. The hospital in Mahenge is made up of a series of long, low buildings with corrugated steel roofs connected by covered walkways. There are people around, and a few nurses in lab coats, but mostly it contains a host of mysterious doors and windows into darkened, empty rooms, giving it the feel of a place that has been recently abandoned. I wandered around surprised to find people at work in offices, but more often surprised at the emptiness of entire wings. Bits of grass and leaves collected next to open doors and ancient stretchers stood vacant next to stained and peeling walls. The waiting room is just that: a large, roofed structure under which to wait. About fifteen people were already there when I arrived, carrying the requisite daftari (notebook) for the doctor to use to record my case. Little happened while I waited, save the wailing of a small, ill child and the worried murmuring of her parents. People with various ailments sat quietly with an air of resigned patience, staring vacantly at nothing. The wooden benches were rigid and uncomfortable, and I found myself entertaining the first stirrings of self-pity. My dizziness had subsided, giving way to a general fatigue that I thought surely indicated the presence of malarial blood parasites. I waited.

In addition to the ever-present threat of malaria, HIV and AIDS still claim the highest number of lives in Tanzania, killing more than 73,000 people in 2012 (World Health Organization). Despite the financial and human resources poured into awareness campaigns and education about this disease across Sub-Saharan Africa, its prevalence in Tanzania has not decreased in more than ten years. At Nawenge Secondary School, students were assigned research topics and essays about AIDS, but it was not a commonly taught topic in the classroom, owing to the community’s conservative social and religious beliefs. In my experience, sex education was virtually nonexistent, and an open discussion of preventative measures like condoms or birth control methods was rare. During my time spent in Namibia, condoms were provided by the government and could be found everywhere—in bars, restaurants, grocery stores, schools—anywhere people regularly congregated. By contrast, I did not once see any condoms distributed publically in Tanzania.

After thirty minutes spent waiting in a covered outdoor plaza ringed with wooden benches, a door to one of two consulting rooms opened and a young mother and father with a tiny child walked out, seemingly dazed, but smiling—perhaps they had just received good news, I thought. My neighbor on the wooden bench, an old man who I thought to be asleep, poked me in the shoulder and said, “Wewe,” you, go. As I entered the room, with Megan, my roommate for whom this experience presented no challenge, the doctor smiled and nodded as if he had been expecting me. I later found out that Mahenge has two doctors in residence: one tended to wander through town singing and muttering to himself for the better part of the day until it was time to hit the bar. One late night with Nick and Jonathan at Riverside, I saw him sitting in a white plastic chair in the middle of the dance floor with a large bottle of beer cradled in his arms, swaying contentedly along to the music as people wended their way around him. A few weeks later, on a walk to town, he joined me along the road, happily asking me nonsense questions in English, like, “What do you see over there? Who is it? Why is there that?” I nodded and smiled, walking a bit faster, until someone shouted at him and abruptly turned and staggered down a narrow alley. The other doctor, luckily, was the man in front of whom I now sat—a smiling, kind figure whose enthusiasm for my basic attempts at Swahili would have been welcomed were it not for the dizzying effects of the blood-borne disease I believed to be coursing through my veins. Megan described my symptoms (“My friend, he is sick, head and stomach”) and he nodded, and I nodded along with him, for lack of anything better to do. After talking to himself in Kiswahili, and scribbling some notes in my daftari, he switched to English: “You must return tomorrow. The lab will test your blood.” Tomorrow? Could I survive another twelve hours with undiagnosed malaria that was surely now infiltrating my immune system en route to my delicate and undefended cerebellum? Sensing my concern, he smiled again (he was awfully jovial for a man who deals with disease and death regularly, I remember thinking) and wrote down the name of a medication for me to take, then said, “Go to the dispensary, just there. Get the medication and start it today, just in case.” I nodded again, ending my consultation with a moment’s hesitation about the fact that surely there must be other questions to ask, were I not limited by my clumsy lack of language knowledge, before I stood and walked out into the fading afternoon sun.

Tanzania is, unfortunately, an easy place to get sick. A quick look through the Center for Disease Control’s list of recommended vaccinations for travelers to the country makes this abundantly clear. In addition to the normal vaccinations, flu and polio and measles, prevention against typhoid, Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, Rabies, and Yellow Fever is highly recommended, along with the requisite malaria prophylaxis via shot or daily pill. I can report that the Yellow Fever vaccine is particularly unpleasant, with a needle the size of a Number 2 pencil. Once the vaccinations are complete, the CDC has a long list of recommendations for safe travel, among which is the admonition to consume only safe food and water, not including anything that is served at room temperature, from a street vendor, raw or soft-cooked, undercooked, unwashed or unpeeled, unpasteurized, or belonging to a category called, rather unpoetically, “bushmeat,” described as “monkeys, bats, or other wild game.” Other sound advice included avoiding tap water, well water, unpasteurized or fresh milk, and “local alcoholic drinks.” Duly noted, but the CDC did not count on the vehemence and persistence of the local retirees who invited me, every Friday afternoon, to join them in a cup of freshly brewed pombe (beer made from fermented maize) in the front yards on my way to school. (Even still, I heeded the warnings and sadly declined these kind invitations.) As I made my way home from the hospital, I felt an odd sense of pride welling in my chest. I am living with malaria, I thought. I am a survivor. They should make an inspirational commercial about me. Like Hemingway and the Crocodile Hunter, I had come to a wild and untamed place and dealt with the worst things it could throw at me. My dizziness, no doubt amplified by nervousness at the hospital, had subsided and I felt only a vague sense of imbalance, as if my center of gravity was a few degrees off. I should mention that the doctor, the day before, had given me the week-long dose of medication to treat malaria, but since they were out of the adult version, I got the child version, complete with brightly colored instructions and pictures of animals running along the top, as if a friendly giraffe would make me feel better. His instructions? Take two pills instead of one. In order to celebrate my first hospital visit and to nurse my malady, we decided to eat dinner at Riverside and avoid cooking. I sat quietly during dinner, with the righteous poise of a recovering invalid. “It’s not so bad,” I said. “Nothing to be afraid of, really.” How tough I was! How manly and stoic! The next morning, however, proved to be a test of my newly acquired ability to navigate a Tanzanian health-related emergency. Feeling somewhat stronger on my feet, I arrived back at the hospital first thing in the morning and sat down to wait. After a few minutes, I realized I was the only person there, and wondered whether the doctors kept different examination hours, or if I was fated to have an audience before the drunken doctor. I stood quickly and walked back out to the main covered walkway, determined to disappear before he might see me and continue asking me nonsense questions. I wandered for a few more minutes, but found no staff working in the empty whitewashed rooms I passed at regular intervals. One large room contained nothing but five rusty stretchers on thin metal legs.

Before I left for Tanzania, as I was learning the health and safety tips that would allow me to return without any missing limbs, my friends joked about the requirements for eating and drinking. “Whatever you eat, you have to boil it or peel it,” they said, “no matter what.” One even offered to buy me a vegetable peeler to carry with me at all times. As farfetched as these requirements seemed in a place with clean running water and fresh produce available all year, lack of food and water sanitation in Tanzania and much of the developing world leads often to a wide array of illnesses, including typhoid fever and dysentery, as well as the more severe schistosomiasis and Hepatitis A. Typhoid, not to be confused with Typhus, is a bacterial infection caused by Salmonella typhi, a nasty bacteria that spreads in the intestines and blood as a result of eating or drinking contaminated water. According to the CDC, risk factors for contracting typhoid include poor sanitation and hygiene, and traveling in the developing world. Like malaria, it is common in Tanzania, and particularly in Mahenge, due to the lack of adequate supply of clean water. As I watched people drink and bathe in water that collected in puddles or in gutters on the sides of the road, I cringed at what the effects could be, and often were. One of my friends contracted typhoid and I have never seen anyone look so uncomfortable. Let’s finish up diseases before we move on: Dysentery, a type of gastroenteritis, is caused by an infection in the intestines that leads to inflammation and severe diarrhea with the additional possibility of abdominal pain, muscle ache, and weight loss. Fun! Schisosomiasis, also known as bilharzia, is a parasitic disease spread by infected freshwater snails that literally invade the body through the skin and take up residence in blood vessels. Risks for contracting the disease include any contact with sources of fresh water, including bathing, swimming, fishing, handling or working with livestock, or doing laundry—many of the things Tanzanian people do regularly as part of daily life. Symptoms include fever, muscle ache, rash, itchy skin, and coughing; the disease is propagated by infected people urinating and defecating in common water sources. After years of infection with the parasite, severe damage to organs is possible, including anemia, inflammation, and scarring. That one is a real winner. Hepatitis A, a liver infection caused by the Hepatitis A virus, is caused by contact with an infected person or consuming contaminated food or water. Symptoms include all the big ones common to food-borne illness: fever, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, joint pain, and jaundice. Many people, including children, who are infected with the disease do not show symptoms. I turned a corner and approached a covered walkway I had not yet taken, one that led away from the main part of the hospital toward the rear, where a few residential houses stood in the shade of a grove of banana trees. The first door I passed stated “LABORATORY” in large letters on the door. This seemed promising. I passed through an empty waiting room, containing darkly stained and tired-looking chairs and knocked on the glass door that led to the lab. A man in a lab coat looked up from a clipboard and motioned for me to enter. I held my daftari out in front of me as an explanation for why I was there, motioning like an idiot at the page where the doctor had scribbled “malaria.” The whole time, I was convinced that I would get in trouble for skipping a second examination by the doctor and setting out on my own to locate the lab. In case he didn’t get the gist, I said, or perhaps whispered out of nervousness, “Malaria. I need a test.” I never found out if he spoke English because he never spoke, but smiled and nodded as if I had confirmed a long-held suspicion. I could not tell how old he was—for one, I am a terrible judge of age. Once a person hits age sixteen, I can no longer accurately gauge how old they are. There is nothing so dangerous as when people coyly ask me at parties, “Guess how old I am?” I invariably guess on the wrong end of their desired spectrum and receive glares and huffy rebukes. The second difficulty is that people in Tanzania age very gracefully, showing very few signs of aging as I might notice them based on experience here. Their skin rarely shows wrinkles, their teeth are white and straight, and many people are already bald, so hair loss is not a reliable demonstrator of age. Many times I was shocked to find that a person I thought to be around age 30 was well past 50; other times, I realized that someone I took for an mzee, or old person, was much closer to my own age.

The technician pointed to a chair for me and walked to a glass-fronted cabinet across the room, bringing back a colorful cardboard package about the size of a thin paperback book. With a deft flick of his hand, he opened the box and pulled out a few molded-plastic instruments—the basic elements of a MRDT, or rapid-diagnostic malaria test. Now, remember that I was fully convinced at this point that I had malaria, and, with the self-righteousness of a martyr, was mentally prepared to suffer the consequences. The test would just be a formality to confirm my self-diagnosis. The lab technician moved with a subtle grace, the product of performing the same maneuvers and motions many times, and before I realized what was happening, pricked my finger and placed it on a piece of gauze held in an oblong disc of plastic. Smiling again, he removed the rest of the pieces and placed the test pad, now complete with my contribution, on the table in front of me and pointed at the clock. By this point, I was becoming incredibly adept at waiting patiently for indeterminate amounts of time for reasons I did not understand—it was a form of giving up control, a skill I imagine Buddhists try to attain through meditation and mindfulness. I was learning to accept things as they happened without planning, and one trick I developed was to engage in a complete observation of the things around me. Since virtually everything was new, I was constantly presented with a feast for my senses, even if the setting was an anonymous and slightly menacing laboratory room set deep in the recesses of an outdated hospital. Posters advertising health and safety tips in Kiswahili adorned the walls above more glass cabinets that stored medical equipment and supplies, most of which looking new or recently produced, in contrast to the ancient and rusting things I had seen hidden away in disused hallways. The technician moved with a quiet efficiency, giving off the air of someone who is used to being very busy and doing many things at once. I wondered how he had come to work in Mahenge. Was he posted here by the government? Was he a native who had gone away to school and returned to help his community? Perhaps he was a student, just passing through on a brief assignment? I thought about his day—had he woken up that morning, as I had, cursing the lack of electricity in his house, or was he accustomed to it? Did he make himself a cup of tea on the jiko? As the sun climbed past the mountains, set out on the road to walk to work? These are the questions I never answered, but always had running through my mind. How is my day different from yours? Is it different, or does a place change you and bring you in line with its routines? This man and I had never met, and we would never see each other again, but I found myself sharing time with him in an unlikely place—unlikely for me, anyway. For him, a lab and a white coat and a room full of medical equipment (in whatever form it could be procured) was his normal. Perhaps it was my state of extreme agitation and nervousness, or the remnants of the dizziness I had felt the day before, but I felt a strange and unexpected kinship with this quiet, graceful man. I imagined him here in this lab, hidden away from the rest of the hospital’s staff and patients, going about his daily tasks of conducting research and experiments, testing blood samples for malaria and other diseases, and helping to stop the spread of sickness and pain. It seemed a noble job, one that was likely beset by many challenges, including inadequate salary, an almost certain lack of resources, and the difficulty and inconvenience of living in a remote place. He had almost certainly gone to school in a large city, perhaps Dar es Salaam or even Arusha, and had now returned to the relative backwater of Mahenge. Like many of the teachers who escape to universities in cities, I wondered if he resented being here, in this quiet and remote town. Did he miss the fast pace of life in the city, or its nightlife’s glamour? Perhaps he had a family elsewhere, as many people did—was he able to see them, or talk to them? Were his children growing up without him? Did he dream of working in a hospital, or was it the only opportunity he had? How had he gotten here, and where was he going? I was brought back from these reveries when he touched my shoulder and pointed to the white plastic dish in his hand. My blood was smeared across its mouth and had faded to a rusty brown, the color of the clay soil near the river. “No malaria,” he said, pointing to the test strip next to my blood that could indicate the presence of Plasmodium falciparum, the nasty parasite I believed to have infiltrated my body. “Negative,” he said, holding the test closer. I sat up with surprise, thinking I had misheard him. It must have only been ten or fifteen minutes since I had arrived, but it felt like hours. “No malaria,” he said again with a small smile. “No malaria,” I repeated, probably sounding a bit slow. “So can I go?” He nodded with another patient smile pointed to the door. I stood and slowly walked toward it, my head spinning now with a rush of confusion, relief, and exhaustion. I turned back and said, “Asante,” thank you. He looked up from a pile of tests he was arranging on a shelf and said, “Asante na wewe.” Thank you, too. In a heady haze of relief, I navigated the same covered hallways and corridors, sunlight already streaming across them and casting long morning shadows on the concrete floors. The heat had risen during my short time in the lab, as it did every morning on my walk to school, and my shirt stuck to me after a few minutes. I made my way back to the road in front of the hospital. People had already begun to line up to see a doctor—babies wrapped in kanga fabric held close to mothers’ breasts, old people balanced on canes and held up by their children, a few students in school uniforms standing apart, knowing they would not have to attend school, at whatever cost it might bring. I who had (seemingly) escaped the clutches of a disease that afflicted so many of my neighbors, I wished them all well. This happened many times in many places in Tanzania, when I felt a bit of my love and my energy and my heart go out to people I had never met, and to whom I could not lend assistance apart from a kind word or a smile. Traveling sometimes is being an observer, a witness to the lives of others.

I had not contracted malaria, it was official. After a few days of rest and careful hydration, I began to feel better. My entire hospital visit, including the consultation, medication, and MRDT, cost me about 4,000Tsh, or somewhere around $2. Take that, corporate healthcare industry! According to the World Health Organization, malaria diagnosis free in Tanzania, and all patients should receive a diagnostic test. The WHO also confirms that ITNs, or insecticide-treated nets, are distributed free in Tanzania, but I did not see any evidence to confirm this. Most often, I saw nets for sale in markets and along the sides of the road. The CDC reports that ITNs can reduce malaria and other insect-borne diseases in children by up to 20%, which is a wonderful thing. Most homes in Mahenge that I saw personally were equipped with mosquito nets, including nets for children. But I also saw nets strung up between wooden stakes in a few front yards to serve as makeshift chicken coops, the bright blue netting a strange contrast to the brown earth. This does not mean that the people in those houses were not protecting themselves properly—I hope that they were, but undoubtedly the nets that prevented the chickens from running away could have been put to better use and might have prevented people from getting sick.

Apart from the constant threat of disease, other dangers lurked everywhere in Mahenge: slippery and muddy roads, bus rides, falling off the side of the mountain, standing water, snakes, large animals, dehydration, vitamin deficiency, sunstroke, lack of access to emergency medical care or evacuation—the list goes on. Proper hygiene is expected in Tanzania, perhaps to combat the spread of sickness or disease, and apart from the fact that not everyone bathes every day, leading to some pungent aromas in the classroom, everyone you pass on the road or in town will have neatly pressed clothes and look presentable. (Ironing was commonly done with a metal iron filled with hot coals that had to be kept at the perfect temperature to avoid burning or blackening clothes. Think of that the next time you complain about it.) I have mentioned before, numerous times, that my standards for personal hygiene fell precipitously. While I wore clean, pressed clothes to school every day, and was never seen in public looking less than respectable, I hardly ever felt clean. Why was this? A few factors included dirt roads, frequent walking and climbing, nearly constant sweating, as well as bucket showers and hand-washed clothes. Let’s talk about bucket showers. They are exactly what they sound like, and many people who have gone camping (or perhaps lived in a commune) might be familiar with them. The mechanics are thus: take a large bucket, preferably one of the red ones containing clean water, and place it next to the tub with a smaller, hand-held bucket accessible. Proceed to fill the smaller bucket and dump it over your head. For the full experience, make sure it is 5 am and completely dark outside, and that the bulb in the bathroom has burned out. Better yet, imagine that the power is out and you are attempting this by candlelight. Romantic, right? Right up until the neighbor’s pig starts squealing from outside the window. I assure you, you’ll be wide-awake after the water hits your skin, and until you start shivering uncontrollably, you have about two minutes to clean your entire body and hair. Soon, you’ll have the whole thing down to a science that involves using shampoo as soap and somehow bathing while keeping half your body dry.

Hand-washing clothes is another treat. It involves two buckets on the kitchen table, one for washing and one for rinsing, and a great quantity of powdered soap. There’s a scrubbing method that I picked up after a while that involves using your palms to grind the material against itself and thereby remove dirt grime, and chafe your hands beautifully. At the outset of the year, we hung all of our clothes on a laundry line strung between our house and the remnants of an old wooden gazebo in our yard, but when that went missing, I tied up my own laundry line across my room. Underwear cannot be hung outside to dry because it’s considered inappropriate to display it (and they really don’t like my collage of Victoria’s Secret models), so I have to set up a chair in my room and let it air-dry, hoping in vain for a cross breeze. (I once hung a load of underwear up that took four entire days to dry.) Jeans and sheets are the toughest part because they take an eternity to dry, but I think I washed both things once over the course of a year, so overall I didn’t mind. And I would still say hand-washing is preferable to sitting in a Laundromat.

Toward the end of the year, I grew very concerned about the fact that I could not get out of Mahenge. Quite literally could not get out, even if I wanted to. This was not a matter of lack of will. Cowboys on bad TV shows often say, with a forlorn look of self-pity, “Oh, we’re all stuck in this town, baby,” while trying to get into the pants of the flashy New York lawyer who found her way into the bar while researching a family law case (I just invented this plot, by the way, but I think it has some promise), illustrating the plight of a someone who might feels literally trapped by his situation. In reality, he has a large number of methods of egress available to him: he could hop on a Greyhound bus, call a taxi, charter a boat, steal a car, purchase a plane ticket, or ride the rails ‘til judgment day. In short, he has options. I had a few measurable skills! I had ambition by the truckload! But unlike the bad TV show guy, I was stuck with no way out.

During the rainy season, the roads are all but gone, turned to soupy mud, and buses and cars cannot get through. If something happened to me (or anyone else, but toward the end of the year I was selfishly focused on my own health), adequate emergency care was completely inaccessible. Even if I was able to get to the hospital in Mahenge, many medical authorities discouraged it, given that the standards of care were not anywhere near global standards. (I heard stories of men with broken bones being given a stick and some rope to fashion their own casts.) What an idea, this remoteness! This disconnectedness! Even in remote areas in the United States, medical assistance is almost always available via whatever means necessary, including helicopter evacuation in extreme circumstances. Was anyone going to chopper me out of Mahenge to get to a hospital, if the need arose? I think not. This played all kinds of tricks on my already tired brain, including one memorable psychosomatic instance of chest pains for which I, in a state of panic, called a kindly doctor in Dar es Salaam who reminded me, over and over, that he could not diagnose anything over the phone and if I wanted to see him, I had to come to his office. He said the address a few different times, and I struggled to explain that I could not get there, even if I started walking that very minute. In order to make it to Dar, I would have had to get some kind of transportation out of Mahenge, which in itself would be tricky, given that not many people had cars and the daily buses were not running daily due to the muddy roads. They would get stuck and have to be pushed the remainder of the way, churning wheels-deep in glutinous, sticky brown mud, or abandoned until the road dried up. If I did get on a bus, I ran the risk of getting stuck in the bus, as happened on the night I returned to Mahenge from Cape Town, and worse, not receiving a refunded ticket.

I experienced all kinds of aches, pains, cramps, spells of dizziness, bites, and scrapes, and each time I grew convinced that this particular symptom was the long-expected harbinger of my doom. Due to my perambulatory commute to school every day, I was getting excellent amounts of exercise, and I drank copious amounts of water. Undoubtedly, my lackluster and unbalanced diet of carbs in many forms did not play a starring role in my good heath, and I sometimes felt weak and dizzy, but I chalked it up to hunger and lack of protein. In my room, I kept a small book of travel health tips, listing common illnesses and how to treat them. After a few months, I hid it away in a corner to keep from consulting it hourly and pronouncing my own diagnosis (undoubtedly I had contracted jaundice, diphtheria, or some other crazy malady and would walk around the house declaiming the symptoms one by one and confirming that yes, I had experienced leg tremors, heart palpitations, difficulty breathing, and a tendency to fall unexpectedly asleep—or whatever they happened to be). I constantly created contingency plans for how I would get myself, or one of my friends, to medical care. They went something like this: “Okay, so if I fall down and break a leg, I’ll call Nick at the mine and he can maybe drive down with the Land Rover and pick me up, but the Land Rover will get stuck on the way from the mine, so maybe I can haul myself up and get a big stick to use to pull myself along . . .” and on and on in endless permutations. Luckily, nothing terrible happened to any of my friends, apart from a few chipped teeth on rocky rice and some bouts of malaria. I made it through relatively unscathed, apart from both malaria scares (the other while on safari in Selous Game Reserve), a cough and a cold every now and again, and the story that I will now relate of how I found myself on, and subsequently tumbled dramatically down, a mountainside in Arusha in the middle of a rainstorm. I sustained an injury during this tumble that plagues me to this day—a lasting reminder of the potential dangers that lurk everywhere, and a testament to my good fortune that nothing worse befell me.

***

A series of interesting events led to my presence on this mountainside in Arusha, in northern Tanzania, long before I slipped and tumbled heels-over-head down its vast and gelatinous slopes. I was on winter break with friends in Arusha, home to Mount Meru, the second tallest mountain in Tanzania after you-know-who (4,562.13 meters/14,968 feet). Consequentially, my friends wanted to hike. It seemed like the thing to do. We booked a day hike at a tourist office in town. The night before, we stayed out til 5:30 am and drank very minimal amounts of water. You’re nodding your head knowingly. We have all been there.

Fast forward a bit: my room at the hostel was the size of a coffin, if a coffin was triangular and had a window overlooking the busiest street in Arusha that came alive at 6 am with honking, yelling, and singing. (Traveler’s Note: If you ever find yourself in Arusha, Tanzania, don’t stay at the Arusha Backpackers. Sleep on the street before you sleep there.) We had to be ready to leave for the hike by 6:30 am. (Again, we got home at 5:30 am. Like got in the door. Like didn’t even make it into bed.) Next: shouted entreaties through hostel doors to see if everyone was still alive and hike-ready, a bumpy taxi ride, a miles-long (seemingly) walk to a house with a brocaded couch and a multitude of tiny kittens, a rigidly polite Tanzanian breakfast of chai and bread with butter, and the kind of tiredness that throbs in waves through your entire body. Keep in mind that there was no water, only milky chai. I might have had Africafe in hopes of caffeinating myself sufficiently to endure what was to come, but honestly, who remembers.

The day was beautiful, all sunny skies and swirling clouds backed by the crumbling peak of Mount Meru in the distance. But because we were in the mountains, things changed quickly. Our guide, John, for whom I still possess a range of apologetic-to-angry feelings, was enthusiastic in the way that comes from having to deal with cranky tourists who are forced to walk through forests and talk to the locals. By those standards, we were probably the best tour group he’d had in months . . . until I almost scissor-kicked him to certain doom. As we climbed, dark rainclouds rose over the mountain and we soon found ourselves in a deluge, struggling to find shelter under the trees. It quickly passed, but came around again. Those rainstorms, especially in Mahenge, were always coming around again, and again, and again. Then it passed, bright sunlight dappling the trees, kids running shyly alongside us, then it came back again and drenched us once more. The clouds were incredibly complex and beautiful, especially right before it rained. Because of the high elevation I could see storms coming across the plains until they were right on top of us. I watched the clouds pile up over each other like layers of icing on a cake.

The path we were to take down the mountainside was set at about a 90-degree angle to the horizon, and now it was wet. Did this stop our fearless leader? He had a safari hat and comfortable shoes! Nothing stopped him. Down we went, and down I went. I tumbled down the incline for about thirty meters, repeatedly losing my footing and falling again, until I grabbed the curve of a sapling to steady myself. I felt a slight popping sensation, then a twinge of pain, and there went my shoulder. I heard a rip and everything. That was about it for me, or so I thought. “I’ll see you jerks later,” said I. “I’ll be right here, under this shady grove of trees, where I will ponder my place in the universe and soon succumb to devastating dehydration. Do alert my kin.”

No sooner had I nestled myself against a tree than a little dude, probably about 7 or 8, popped up over the hill and asked me, in Swahili, if I was coming. I answered in the negative. He repeated his question and pulled me up by my hands. I heard the guide calling me, a smile in his voice, barely audible down the path. Fine, I thought. If this is how I go, fine. Navigating down the slippery, treacherous path, riddled with false turns and drop-offs and mud the consistency of melted Ghirardelli, roots and branches sticking up like the severed and discarded limbs of my predecessors, I had a fair time keeping my mental energy up, let alone my physical. This kid saved me, truly.

He held my hand every step down the mountain, cutting footholds for me with a sharp rock and telling me when to wait and when to go, and pointing with a stick at the exact spot to place my foot. He, and a few of his confederates who I found when I arrived at the base of the ravine, for that’s what it was, had accompanied my friends and stayed with us the whole time we walked in and around a snaking, shallow river (in Vans slip-ons, don’t forget, or barefoot, as I was the entire way down the mountain, uncomplainingly carrying my shoes and saturated socks) to find the fucking waterfall that was our destination.

Anything less than a majestic cataract of epic proportions would have been a waste of my time and not worth withstanding dehydration, a determined hangover, and numerous very real threats to my bodily health and mental fortitude. But we made it and it was beautiful. Oh, and situational update: now we had to make it back before the rains, which were mildly bothered on our descent but had now worked themselves up into a boiling froth, re-soaked the path, and made the ascent nearly as treacherous as the way down.

Our faithful guide, ever optimistic, to his credit, pulled us into an unplanned pit stop at a small guard station, a hut, really, on the side of the path. The guards, about five of them not counting the one passed out asleep, were there to protect the coffee plantations in the area from marauding coffee thieves, I suspect. The hut, two rooms decorated in the typical Tanzanian style of not at all, was a welcome shelter from the rain, but I felt bad for sitting on someone’s mattress in awkward silence while the guards leered at my female friends. The rain continued, unabated, for quite some time, but still the slumberer slept on. I am convinced he knew we were there and feigned sleep just the same, but who can blame him. They, or actually the unluckiest of them, were cooking ugali on a fire outside under a corrugated steel shelter, with the familiar stirring and kneading of the frothy white concoction, but the situation didn’t seem as if an invitation to eat would be forthcoming. Unperturbed, we departed about thirty anxious minutes later into the forest, waving goodbyes to our newfound, silent friends.

A roundabout walk through the forest that had, only that morning, seemed so idyllic and friendly followed, including, in no particular order: the passing of a rogue cow, rain-saturated goats bleating stupidly in small groups, and a spell of waiting under the holey tarp roof of a Masai church, complete with a cruficix of branches and a rudimentary pulpit, during which I watched water drip through the rents in the fabric and contemplated the dangers of trying to drink them to stave off my dehydration vs the diseases I would undoubtedly contract as a result. I remember that the tarp was blue and the sky was slate gray with white patches around the edges, as if lit from within.

Once we made it down the main road to the starting point, after what seemed like (and probably was) hours, our guide insisted, in his typical indomitable fashion, that we end the tour with the requisite trip to a Wa’arusha home, part of the “cultural tourism” aspect of the trip that was only “thirty minutes” away on foot. I think our groans told him that a joke of that nature was liable to get him assaulted, or just tipped a lot less, so with haste he led us through winding fields of corn and cabbage to a traditional Wa’arusha domicile and proceeded to narrate the entire situation of the family—while they were sitting there cooking and going about their business. We were encouraged to go inside, to see the dark, smoke-filled living space, smell the odor that occurs when animals cohabitate with people, and gawk at the small sleeping spaces and primitive cooking supplies. It was very odd, especially considering that our guide hailed from the same town and was of the same tribe. He even suggested I take pictures, which I did grudgingly, though oddly, none of them seemed to have survived. The woman of the house sat proudly stirring her cooking and not looking at us in the manner of someone who has ignored certain things for a long time and will continue to do so. I was faintly comforted by the knowledge that a portion of our tour fee went to help these families, but I still can’t quite square “cultural tourism” with the de-humanizing effect it often has on the people it is meant to celebrate.

Once we made it back, for good, to the house from which we began, tipped our guide (generously, for after all else, he had led us out alive), and declined any further (strongly suggested) donation to the local schools (seeing that they were in much better condition than the schools at which we already taught), we piled in the taxi and I trained my eyes out the window for the first duka with water. My dehydration at this point had passed the stage of a theory and become a fervent belief (accompanied by my own belief that I did not want to end up in hospital). We finally located one, after a ride down a dry and corrugated road, and our friend was dispatched to get water. After a little agonizing wait during which she shopped around for banana prices and surveyed the kanga selection, looking for gifts, she brought it to us, in big, shiny, blue plastic bottles, and at long last, with a pain in my shoulder and a dizzy head, I held in my hands the key to my salvation.

Later that night, showered and rehydrated and feeling very proud of myself, I realized that the kid who had helped me down the mountain, carrying my shoes and holding my hand, was now the proud owner, intentionally or otherwise, of my dirty black socks.

***

Safari (Part III)

Silence

“For a long time I stood motionless on the white desert, numbed by these lowering horizons so oblivious of man, understanding at last the stillness of the lone animals that stand transfixed in the distances of Africa.”–Peter Matthiessen, The Tree Where Man Was Born

A view from the water affords a different view of the majesty of the Selous. As the trees and brown dirt fade into the distance, the constant grunting and splashing of hippos in the water grows louder. It always seemed to me that these giant animals, the most dangerous in Africa, were having one long, slowly unfolding conversation punctuated by long silences. They would dip their heads below water and resurface a few minutes later to continue talking. When confronted by eavesdroppers in boats, these two-ton ancient creatures would fade silently into the depths of the dark water like spirits summoned away.

Note: “Bata” means “duck” in Swahili. Duck boat. In the shallows along the shore, among the herons and cranes and tall grass, crocodiles lay across sandbars like logs: real dinosaurs, before me in an ancient and beautiful land. The steep riverbanks that climbed above the river, twenty-five or thirty feet high at some places, were pockmarked with the nests of white-fronted bee-eaters (Merpos bullockiodes), a small and distinctive bird species that forms busy colonies inside the sandy riverbanks (below). Each nest was marked by a hole about the width of a baseball, and there were as many as one-hundred in each colony. When viewed from across the river, the individual holes connected to form what looked like ancient runes etched into the soil.

White-fronted bee-eater nests in the riverbank. On our first boat safari, timed to coincide with the sun setting over the lake, I witnessed scenery that would make any seasoned photographer blush. It was an embarrassment of scenic riches. Tall, proud palms jutted up past the treeline toward the horizon as if trying to touch the last dying light. A lush sunset ripe with purple, crimson, orange, and pink clouds stacked like icing on a cake, spread over the intersection of land and water next to which we flew on the rippling surface of an ancient grayblue river. Around us, majestic swaths of land, empty for miles and miles of any other presence, stretched into the gathering darkness. I felt like I was at the center of a universe that was quietly, peacefully coming to a close around me, for there is no other way to understand the coming of darkness in the deep parts of the world but the ending of the world in preparation for it to begin again.

Lake Manze spreads out during the rainy season and reclaims some of the land. As we rounded the last bend in the river and headed toward the small dock next to camp, our captain strayed close to the riverbank against which, in the shadows, a trio of hippos were resting. We were all surprised, the humans and the hippos, when we got a closer look at each other and realized that we had caught two of them in flagrante. The male let loose a mighty roar, extending his jaws wide above the body of the female underneath him, and for a moment, I saw this animal, with its powerful, vise-like jaws and its two tons of bulk, for what it was: the rightful owner of this land. Like any unwelcome intruders, we quickly motored past, breaking out into sheepish grins only when a safe distance had passed between us. “That’s not something you see every day,” I thought. “Sorry for interrupting.”

Oh, hey there. We see you. ***

When, after a few days, my stomach illness did not get better or respond to basic medications, I figured it was time to test myself for malaria. The camp director supplied me with a Rapid Diagnostic Test (RDT), consisting of a small plastic tray and a single-use needle to prick my finger. While she exhibited signs of concern and sympathy, her detachment indicated that she had seen all of this before. She had the tests, she had the pills—what else could she do? Under her reassurances, I sensed a resolve that wasn’t entire comforting but realistic. You’re here. This is Tanzania. You might have malaria. That’s all we can do about it.

By that point in the year in Tanzania, eleven months into my residency and deep in bush, I had earned the risk of coming down with malaria. The odds were good that I’d get it at least once. Thankfully, I escaped for the second time from its sweaty, feverish grasp. By this time, I was far more than a tourist and felt a kind of kinship with Tanzania. We had been through a lot together, and though I was tested, I had survived. I was never a native, I cannot claim that honor. But still, I grew to welcome the early morning stillness and the seductive twilight. I both expected and loved its beauty, as the proud son expects and loves with a fierce longing the special features of his homeland. I understand the land, as much as I could, and grew to understand some of its ways and habits and moods. I was awed by this land every day for a full year. I could only imagine the recent arrivals whose entire days, I expect, were spent in varying stages of slack-jawed amazement.

***

Cozy by candlelight. We moved camps after four days, to another camp two hours to the west along the shores of Lake Manze in an area of the Selous said to have the richest diversity of game anywhere in the reserve. The tents here were simpler, the entire back section forming an enclosure for a candlelit toilet, sink, and a solar shower with an open roof under the vast sky. Unlike the previous camp, there was no electricity here during the day or night, so candles and flashlights were necessary. I had already grown used to the simplicity of life without electricity, and watching how jarring a transition it was for my family, I realized how much I had changed in the previous eleven months.

On our first morning in the new camp, we ate a quick breakfast and joined Emmanuel, our new driver and guide, for a morning safari. The sun was already high in the sky, casting angled shadows, and a cool breeze brushed past us over the swaying grass. Emmanuel was young and spoke the most fluent English of any Tanzanian I had met the whole year. He also spoke a bit of German and aspired one day to fly commercial international airliners. He was wonderful, patient, and kind. If you ever find yourself in the Selous, look him up.

Mmmm, sulfur. Our agenda for the day was a long trip into the nearby Beho Beho hills, during which we would pass Selous’s grave. After a morning’s drive through the now-familiar terrain, we arrived at the hot springs, nestled deep in a series of steep, jutting cliffs. Since it was a cooler time of year, we were free, Emmanuel said, to jump in—the sulfurous water was perfectly safe. I climbed over a series of rocks and approached the first, lowest pool. The water was translucent but flecked with emerald green, giving it the appearance of holding a shimmering light suspended between its molecules. As I climbed higher, the path grew more rocky, and I approached the second pool. It was shallower than the first, with a gray bottom and a coating of yellow algae along its sides. I stuck my hand in. It was hot water (maji moto) indeed. I never climbed all the way in—I must admit that I am only adventurous to a point—but it was a memorable, if slightly simple, highlight of the day.

Beho Beho Hills in the distance. On the way back, after a short lunch, the sun was already starting to descend in the west and a new set of shadows stenciled itself across the road. As we turned down a sharp incline toward a grove of spiny acacias, Emmanuel paused and stopped the car suddenly. “Look,” he whispered. “Can you see them?” Twenty yards in front of the car, a female lion lay stretched across the ditch of the road from one side to the other. To her right, another sat upright on its haunches in the shade of an acacia. Next to her, a young male, possibly her offspring, stretched out lazily, and next to him, another young male rested his head on the flat ground near the tree. On the other side of the road, a fifth lion, this one another young male, lay sleeping. We had stumbled across five lions within thirty yards of one another, lazily sleeping in the afternoon heat.

Just lion around.

Emmanuel edged the car off the road and circled around to the right so we could get a closer look without disturbing them. Like the previous pair after mating, they stretched out like house cats on the dark earth, their golden coats blending perfectly with the tall grass in which they lay. The two young males grew restless every few moments and batted each other as if attempting to instigate the other to rise up and give chase, but in the end, in the manner of all smart children, they stayed put next to their mother. The interaction between them was amazing, as was the combined feeling of complete relaxation and total awareness. The females kept a close eye on the offspring while supine on the ground, resting for the hunt that would take place in the dark of night. I could sense them communicating through grunts and exhalations, keeping tabs on one another, reassuring each other that they were there, that no one would be left alone.

***

The next afternoon proved to be the highlight of the safari, the undoubted National Geographic–worthy crowning moment and the most engaging natural spectacle I have ever witnessed.

In the morning, we came across a freshly killed bison. Well, we didn’t—the camp sends out scouts in the morning to get a sense of what the animals in the area are doing so they can plan the morning tours. So we knew that there was going to be some activity. But what activity it was. A family of lions, probably the same one we had seen resting on the road the previous day, was guarding the kill, which must have taken place during the night, after they had eaten their fill. We could see their distended stomachs and hear their tired grunts from the truck, only a few yards behind the kill. There were no adult males, so the females kept guard over the animal while watching the offspring who were too young to fend for themselves if challenged. Since there were no males in the area, they would face any immediate challenges. We watched them doing much the same things they had done the day before: lay contentedly on the ground and rest.

On the move.

Emmanuel, having parked the truck and stood up to look around with binoculars, paused while looking in one particular direction, far off to the immediate right of the truck. After a few moments, he turned, but immediately went back and looked again, as if trying to ascertain some specific piece of information. I could hear him muttering to himself as if asking the questions he could not answer (and we had experienced his ability to answer almost every question with confident ease, so this was truly a unique situation). “I think I see something there, but I’m not sure yet,” he said. “Let’s stay here and watch what happens. If it is what I think, this will be interesting.”

Over the next ten minutes, as the lions lay as still as before, he grew more excited, but would not tell us why. “It is what I thought,” he said, but would say no more. After five more minutes of helplessly scanning the horizon, he handed me the binoculars and pointed in the direction he had surveyed before. “Look there,” he said. I looked, trying to pick a solid object from the maze of golden-brown grass and tree limbs. “He is there. He knows the kill is here and he is coming.” I pressed the binoculars to my eye, all of us now looking in the same direction, and, finally, I saw it: a male lion in the distance, his mane matted around his neck. The same one we had seen with the female a few days before after mating.

“He is coming for the kill. They do not know he is here yet, but they will,” Emmanuel whispered, gesturing toward the female lions, who, as if on cue, sat up in unison and looked past the truck in the direction he now pointed. The air, as if charged, grew thick with heat and apprehension. The young males, oblivious to the situation, continued to paw the ground and chase each other while the females stood still and silent, watching the horizon. Emmanuel looked back to where the male was slowly approaching. “He will not want to attract their attention, but he is moving. Watch. He will get closer before you know it.” Like a trained sniper, the male moved with an almost imperceptible speed, weaving from side to side. I lost sight of him for a few seconds at a time, only to pick him up again a few yards ahead of where he just was.

The tension mounted around the kill, and the females now stood and paced around the carcass. The offspring sensed that something was wrong, but unable to do anything about it, sat quietly waiting for a cue from their elders. One female kept her head turned toward the intruder at all times, while the others took turns herding the young and keeping them close. The male was now about three-hundred yards away, sheltering in a grove of trees that led to an open patch of mud with no cover. He was about to make his move.

He was out there, somewhere. Try and find him. Good luck.

It was his slowest approach yet. I felt like a helpless bystander waiting as an advancing army approaches a city. I could feel panic rising. The young, now bristling with fear at what they did not understand and could not see approaching, whimpered and stamped on the ground for attention. The females quietly paced back and forth, setting an invisible boundary between the intruder and their property.

Then, suddenly, he had crested the last hill before them and was among them, moving with the stately grace of a conquering king. There were no overt challenges. The females knew they could not attack him as a group, and merely snarled at him as he moved between them to the carcass. His might had been challenged, but he had prevailed without a fight, and was now the owner of the kill and the females who protected it. Because they harbored with them young males, he cut them off from this food source, physically placing his body between the meat and the young. The females, pacing back and forth, visibly bristled at him, understanding now that their source of food was gone and they would have to protect their young males against him, the tyrant who would suffer no rivals to his authority.

As we watched, silent and awed, the male approached one of the females. Emmanuel had said only a few words during the exchange after the male arrived, but now whispered to us, “He is choosing her. She will be able to eat. The rest must go.” The male had accepted one of the females as his mate and as such, she was given the privilege of eating. The other females and the young had lost, and would be forced to move on to whatever fortune they could find for themselves.

The entire duration of this majestic drama was about ninety minutes, from the time Emmanuel spotted the male in the distance to his final usurpation of power. For ninety minutes, we sat spellbound under the full heat of the African sun, watching this ancient ritual play out in front of our eyes. I have never seen such an amazing display of power as I watched that day. It was a supreme drama on the world’s oldest stage.

I’m no photographer, but it’s hard to take a bad photo in Selous.

To be in the deep interior of Tanzania is a humbling experience. It is one that must, to be truly felt, be felt with the body and the hands. The land must be smelled with the nose, seen with the eyes, and touched with the soles of the feet. The sky and sun must cast their spinning shadows across the neck and the back. The air must touch the skin. To reveal itself, the land must be blessed with sweat and dirt and blood. It is too vast and too old to be understood by young eyes that look only once. It must be remembered like a secret and told like a story.

Safari (Part II)

Selous

“. . . the stillness in this ancient continent, the echo of so much that has died away, the imminence of so much as yet unknown. Something has happened here, is happening, will happen—whole landscapes seem alert.”–Peter Matthiessen, The Tree Where Man Was Born

Until I took a 7 am flight out of Zanzibar and landed on a dirt road in the middle of the bush, I’d never been on safari.

We boarded the plane in the haze of the early morning, climbing over one another to sit closest to the pilot and the only exit. The plane, about the size of a taxicab, drifted lazily at 30,000 feet over the southeastern part of the country, the islands and white-flecked blue water extending to the horizon like the skin of the planet, reflecting a thousand jeweled suns through the gauzy early-morning clouds. 

When we began our safari in Selous Game Reserve, I had lived in Tanzania for ten-and-a-half months, and I quickly realized I was about to undergo the transition from resident back to tourist. Instead of cooking my own meals or walking down the road to the village bar, I would have elaborate prepared dinners and stay in a tent that was better appointed than the house in which I’d lived. In the middle of the bush, I’d enjoy hotter showers and larger meals than I’d experienced in months. I was seized simultaneously by apprehension and pure excitement. It was the place of dreams: a land untouched by time, in the possession of the creatures that had walked its surface for millennia. 

I imagined, as many have, that I might see, or step my foot onto, a piece of land that has never before been touched by humans. It is a laughable desire, but exists firmly within the realm of the possible. Among the ancient places of the world, there are few as staggering as Tanzania, and of that land, few exert an equal draw on the imagination as the Selous.

***

Selous Game Reserve covers 50,000 square kilometers in Tanzania’s southeastern highlands region, is one of the largest protected spaces left in Africa. Progress reigns, and across much of the country, undisturbed wilderness is growing as scarce as the animals that inhabit it. The reserve is named for Frederick Courteney Selous, a British army officer during World War I, and a noted explorer and conservationist. 

Frederick Courtneney Selous was the kind of Victorian gentleman of the colonies around whom a fictional character is created to make believable his many exploits. In fact, this did happen: Sir H. Rider Haggard, author of King Solomon’s Mines, created the character of Allen Quatermain (later brought to bombastic life by Sean Connery in such cinematic masterpieces as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) based on Selous’s many skills and adventures. 

Selous counted among his friends heads of state (such as Teddy Roosevelt), naturalists, explorers, adventurers, and philanthropists like Cecil Rhodes, founder of the Rhodes Scholarship, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and one of the parties chiefly responsible for the British running around Africa thinking they owned the place. (In fact, one of Selous’s inspirations for a life of adventure was none other than the explorer and missionary David Livingstone (of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” fame), the cause of quite a bit of attention on Africa a few decades before Selous arrived. More (lots more) on him to come.

Born in London in 1851, Frederick Selous seems destined to have a life of adventure. At the age of 19, he traveled to South Africa and, from there, explored previously unknown regions as far north as the Congo Basin, hunted game and collected animal and plant specimens to send to museums back in England, worked for Cecil Rhodes to build Rhodes (sorry, roads) into what is now northern Zimbabwe, and all the while befriended various tribal leaders and chieftains. He was, in other words, the epitome of the pith-hatted, gin-drinking colonial explorer: all the men want to be him, all the ladies want to be with him (at least on his few sojourns back to London).

After a life of exploring and fighting in tribal wars throughout Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Selous rejoined the British Army, which found itself enmeshed in World War I taking place throughout East Africa. While under attack by German troops on the banks of the Rufiji, Selous was killed by a German sniper. He is buried under a tree near where he fell, and memorialized by a modest gravestone with a bronze plaque.

There are remnants of British and German artillery scattered throughout across the land, some of it conserved and on view for tourists, and some of it buried deep in the bush and slowly melting back into the land. In 1905, Germany annexed the territory as part of its colonial administration and by 1912 had established four separate reserves that were combined in 1922 (at least we can thank them for that). The reserve was named a World Heritage site in 1982.

“Captain F. C. Selous D. S. O., 25th Royal Fusiliers, Killed In Action 4.1.17″ ***

As the plane thudded to a halt on the runway, the stillness of the bush descended around us like a cloak. There was no noise. As I jumped down from the plane, I looked up at the sky that surrounded me. It was a clear milky blue marked by lazy clouds untethered to any structures on the land, left free to float above the trees and scrub brush. The grass and dirt under my feet was the color of dusty gold.

Soon, guides drove up in khaki-colored Land Rovers to retrieve the other passengers. The guides each nodded at us with a smile as the bewildered passengers shouting excitedly, their bags tossed up to them after they climbed aboard. We made our way to a small boma and waited until our guides Dennis and Victor arrived. Dennis, the senior guide, drove the Land Rover while Dennis greeted us in the shade and offered us small cartons of chilled mango juice. We signed some paperwork that, I assume, gave away our life rights in case of a spectacular, movie-ready death, and were soon on our way down the rutted trail.

Tanzanian roadblock. The bouncing and shaking of a large vehicle on an uneven road can be pleasant, if you’re not in a hurry. As I took in the view around me, I was more pleased to see the awe on the faces of my family members. They were here. I’d been here for the better part of a year, but they had finally made it. As if to mark the occasion, Dennis slowed the truck to a crawl and pointed out the side. We looked over, perched high on our safari seats, to see the dark, thin tail of a snake twirl menacingly as it disappeared into the dense brush at the road’s edge, leaving only a thin mark in the tan soil, charting its path like a navigation line. If my mom was not already so excited, I think she would have passed out.

Immediately, a herd of gazelle bounded forth from the grove where they had sheltered, bounding theatrically across the road in front of us. Dennis accelerated to follow them, and the engine churned dutifully as we whipped over the rutted dirt. My eye was drawn to the white glint of the Rufiji River in the middle distance. A cinematic hush fell over the scene as the truck again slowed, this time to a complete stop. Dennis pointed slowly out the right side of the truck, toward a stand of acacia. “Elephant,” he said with a smile. ***

The main lodge of the camp was set high off the ground under a thatched roof with wide verandas overlooking the Rufiji, which curled off into the horizon like a green snake basking in the morning sun. Giant borassus palm trees towered over the land at odd intervals, and paths from camp led out into the grass and acacia trees. The camp is set on the banks of the Rufiji in the northern part of the Selous, nestled between Lakes Mzizimia and Siwandu, and water was visible from every vantage point. It took on different appearances throughout the day: in the morning, it hazily reflected the pale sunrise; gaining energy at midday, it vibrated bluegreen in the afternoon heat; and in the evening, its hue was absorbed into the brilliant sunset that each night robs the land of color, turning it back to a deep and silent black.

We wasted no time in dropping our bags at the tents, also raised off the grounds on three-foot platforms to keep out any of nature’s potential intruders, and ventured back out onto the road with Dennis at the wheel. As we rounded small turns in the dusty road, he pointed out different species of birds: the African Golden weavers, whose puffy nests hang like lanterns in the dark Acacia trees; the cattle egrets and grey herons patrolling the banks of the river; the impossibly odd yet festive Guinea Fowl scurrying along in groups near the road; and the Malachite Kingfisher, my favorite of the bunch, with its blue head, red beak, and orange breast.

The banks of the Rufiji; African Golden weaver nest make every tree a Christmas tree. Later that night, after a few Safari lagers in the bar and a seat by a dancing fire, we dined under the vast roof of stars. Extremely courteous waiters served our different courses in the gathering dusk as the last light of the evening settled gently over everything. Each meal was meticulously prepared and presented. I, who can barely stock my own kitchen, cannot image the cost or planning that goes into ordering, transporting, and stocking enough food and drink to sustain a camp of hungry people in the same territory in which lions are hanging out looking for dinner. Breakfast was just as good (fresh mango juice and blessedly delicious coffee), as ring-necked doves called their morning greetings from the trees around the lodge (I’d grown so used to their unique call that I barely noticed it, but my family picked up on it immediately. The saying goes that the dove is saying, “Work har-der, drink la-ger”) and tiny common waxbills perched on the fence railings that surrounded the dining area, eyeing the bread and jams set on each table. 

Hey, that’s a hell of a tent. All eight tents in the camp were arranged in a loose semi-circle around the main lodge, far enough apart to retain a sense of detachment. My tent was the furthest from camp, abutting the Rufiji, which I saw as a tan slab of silt and blue water just to the east about 300 meters away, but far enough away to hear only the silence and crickets and myriad mysterious rumbling in the brush around me. I can’t pretend that commercial safari is the same experience as fending for oneself in the bush, but it was the closest to nature I’ve ever been, and with the added thrill of unknown dangers lurking or slithering or climbing a few feet from where I lay my head. The camp is open, remember—this is not a zoo. Animals pass directly through, sometimes between the tents and the lodge, cutting guests off from the rest of the camp. One night, I heard the passing of what sounded like a particularly loud freight train at about 3 am. When I arrived at breakfast the next morning, I was told that a hippo had passed directly next to my tent on the way to water.

Sure, hippos are cute now, but wait until they walk by in the dark. At night, Maasai askaris (guards) guided us to our tents with spears in one hand and flashlights in the other, responding shyly to my greetings and questions, and speaking softly, almost imperceptibly to each other as they passed along the paths in the dark. Professional athletes, world-class singers, those are skills I will never have, but to have the innate, instinctual awareness of a Maasai in the bush is far more amazing to me. They knew this land as well as anyone can know their land anywhere in the world. We would often return to the lodge in the morning to see the Maasai crouched under the main structure, leaning comfortably among the supporting beams and talking quietly, as if they had been there passing the time pleasantly all night.

Best breakfast nook ever. The stillness and calm of an early morning in the Selous is a joyful and amazing thing. Not when you get a stomach bug that reduces you to a shivering, shaking wreck, but in any other case. While sitting at a picturesque lakeside breakfast after a 5 am safari, I felt the immediate need to excuse myself and find a place to be sick. Victor accompanied me to make sure I didn’t encounter any unexpected animals in the underbrush around the lakeside banks. Though the guides have scouted it regularly, it is impossible to tell when a crocodile will want to crawl out of the water and make a new friend. 

I didn’t want to abort the safari, but I agreed to let Dennis drive me back to camp, feeling discouraged at my weakness and much less manly than Hemingway—until Dennis said the magic words: “We will go, but first, let us go find the lions.” I have never been as excited to see an animal than I was to see an African lion in Africa. As we chugged along on the pockmarked road, each jolt sending my stomach into a flurry of unease, Victor pointed at a speck on a muddy plain ahead of us and to the right. We grew closer and Dennis slowed the truck. A male lion lay on his side in the mud, his mane gnarled and curled around his neck, his tail smacking the ground contentedly. Twenty yards away, a female lion, about two-thirds his size, lay in the same posture, her stomach and well-defined ribcage rising and falling as if in a daze.

Post-conjugal bliss.

It was mating season. The pair had just finished and were resting as the morning heat rose around them. The cool mud and its proximity to the riverbank was a prime spot to wait out the sun, which was cresting the treetops around us and beginning to bear down with its full force. Lions are largely nocturnal and, to conserve energy, remain largely dormant during the day. As Dennis said, “The lions, they are very lazy creatures. They will not do anything unless it is for food or mating.” The female lion is the main provider for the pride, and does the hunting in groups at night.

Since we were the only truck that had located this pair so early in the morning, we were free to linger as long as we wanted. A few times, the male seemed ready pull himself up off his haunches, but he would turn a different way and flop back down onto the mud. The female slept as if dazed, barely moving except to swish her tail in small circles and to let out an occasional sighing breath. To be so close to these animals is a rare privilege. In most other parks in Africa, animals are scouted as they begin to move and are not left alone for the remainder of the day. Trucks pull up next to them, sliding into the viewing spots just vacated by different trucks moments before, as if keeping on a schedule that must be met.

Selous is unlike many other parks in Tanzania in which the animals are accustomed to crowds of tourists with outlandish lenses masking their faces and the constant grunt and pull of diesel engines. As Brian Nicholson, Matthiessen’s companion on the journey catalogued in Sand Rivers, notes, “The parks are all very well in their place, but they are parks. The Selous is the real Africa. This is what most of Africa really looks like.” Indeed, as Matthiessen later notes, the variation in land and habitat, as well as the close proximity to water, makes the flora and fauna in the Selous “probably more diverse and more abundant than in any comparable area in Africa.”

Animals in the Selous, as I saw, were indeed perturbed by the presence of our trucks, and often tolerated our presence warily, unlike animals in the Serengeti that lazily perform their daily rituals, habituated to the throngs of people surrounding them. Though by all accounts a lion or elephant cannot differentiate between a human and a truck (unless a human becomes separated from his truck, which is prohibited and also a really fucking bad idea), they see the trucks and recognize them as intruders. On a few occasions, Dennis was forced to throw the truck in reverse to get away from an elephant we had suddenly encountered past a curve in the road. (How cool is that, to run into an elephant around a corner?) I saw the ears of one bull spread wide in challenge as we passed it, asking us what we wanted and why we were there. It’s a good question, and one that requires some quiet introspection (especially after pondering what it might feel like to be mauled by an angry elephant).

Next week in Safari (Part III): Boats, birds, and lion drama. All photos are mine, taken in Selous Game Reserve in June 2013.

Frequently Asked Questions

So, what’s the deal with this blog? I started writing this blog in August 2012, before I left for a year teaching English in Mahenge, Tanzania, as part of WorldTeach. I updated it regularly during the year (when I could, depending on when I had electricity at my house) with photos and writing about my experiences teaching, living in the village, and traveling. When I arrived back in the U.S. in the summer of 2013, I realized I still had a lot left to say, and wrote some longer, more polished posts. In late 2014, the idea dawned on me that this could, maybe, become a book-length thing. Since then, I’ve been writing consistently and now have about 150,000 words finished and organized into a loose chapter structure. In 2016, I decided to start posting excerpts or full chapters once a week.

Who are you?

I’m an American living in New York state. I work as an editor.

I have questions. I have comments. How can I get in touch with you? Email me at [email protected].

What’s WorldTeach? WorldTeach is a volunteer organization based in Massachusetts, in the U.S., that places volunteer teachers in countries around the world.

Where’s Tanzania?

Tanzania is located in East Africa, here:

I lived in the town of Mahenge, in Morogoro Region, Ulanga District, which is approximately here:

What’s Tanzania like? Well, as you might imagine, this is a tough question to answer in a few words. It’s gorgeous, diverse, friendly, and vibrant. Coming in as an outsider, it can be challenging, confusing, and sometimes frustrating (though this says more about the visitor’s temperament than the country itself). It’s the home of some of the most iconic places in Africa, like Serengeti National Park and Mount Kilimanjaro, and some of the most iconic tribal groups, like the Maasai. 

Where else did you travel?

I traveled throughout Tanzania, and to Zanzibar, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa. On a previous WorldTeach trip in 2011, I lived in and traveled throughout Namibia and visited Victoria Falls in Zambia.

Who took the photos in your posts? Can I reproduce one?

I took almost all of the photos that I use in my posts, unless there is a note that indicates otherwise. I’m not a professional photographer, but if you’d like to use one of my photos, please send me an email request at [email protected].

Safari (Part I)

“In this gloomy hollow of sere thornbush, the gray rainless sky of African summer seemed to weigh upon the earth, I remembered the words of a girl born here in Tanzania: ‘Africa overwhelms me so, especially at twilight, that sometimes I burst into tears.’” –Peter Matthiessen, The Tree Where Man Was Born

I am in the deep wilds of Africa. The sun is slowly descending toward the horizon. A soft wind brushes wood smoke across my face. The flesh on my arms and hands tingles with dust and ash. I listen as the land settles into the coming night. A growing legion of bats, unseen save for inky smudges on the black sky, send forth chirps and peeps and careen at mad angles through the air. Acacia trees settle as their shadows lengthen, staining the ground the color of smoke. As the sun approaches the line of distant mountains, it is, for a moment, cut in two, perfectly divided between earth and air. A rustling erupts from a tree behind me—I turn to catch a glimpse of my attacker, but it is only an impala, running from the darkness to catch the rest of her family and the remains of the daylight.

I am miles away from any signs of civilization save a small camp and a fire. There are others with me, but they are silent, observing. Waiting. The air chills as the sun falls lower. A golden glow emanates from behind stacked purple clouds at the horizon and stains the rolling plains a dusty yellow. I can make out the curve of the path that leads to the road in the distance, shimmering with a ghostly pallor as if the land shed its skin as the sun fell and displays its pale bones. The light dulls, matching the color of the waving grass. Just before the sun sinks, a brilliant, radiant light escapes its cover and catches the jagged undersides of the clouds. The land is illuminated and laid out before me. A fresh breeze pushes through the fire, which responds with a quiet curl of white smoke.

I listen as the land settles into the coming night. Fireflies appear and hang in the dark like freshly made stars, of which, I now understand, there are many more than anyone will ever know. The vastness of the African continent is outmatched only by the infinite plains of the heavens, dotted with stars that migrate nightly across the firmament. The buzzing moths in the gauzy circle of light around the lantern flit endlessly in countless diagonals, trying to touch the light. I pull the blanket tighter around my shoulders and think, “I wonder if that is how we look to God.”

***

That which is known of this land in most of the world, of the famous creatures who call it home and the landscapes that sweep from coast to horizon, is seen on television ads and travel posters. One might glimpse a giraffe’s graceful neck silhouetted against a flat acacia flanked by green grass and blue sky, set against the grimy wall of a subway station. Perhaps an elephant might speed by on the side of a bus, calmly gazing over its land with a serenity that is lacking in the city that surrounds it. 

These are the snapshot images of Africa, neatly encapsulating everything people think they know about this place. The both create and reinforce the idea of Africa’s exoticness. Its appeal becomes borne out of the fact that it is immediately recognizable as being “not here,” and holds within this otherness the vast promise of its many unknowns that will, undoubtedly, be discovered.  When I first committed to spending a year in Tanzania (and writing about it), I had no way of knowing what to expect save what I had seen so often before—rolling hills, dense jungles, lions, hippos, smiling people wearing outlandish clothing singing a happy song, and maybe a giraffe with its long tongue extended around spiny leaves. I imagine the experience is similar for the millions of tourists who venture here every year. They want the full package, what they’ve been promised by the allure of those posters. They want the chance to discover the secrets of a vast land, to possess a piece of the knowledge that is stored in the rocks and hills and dust of these ancient countries. Mostly they want to sleep in air-conditioned tents, swim in heated pools, and be driven around in comfort as they ask why the animals are always so far away.

***

This IS a safari.

The concept of “safari” in its Westernized cultural sense calls to mind echoes of colonialism: pith-helmeted, khaki-clad Englishmen piloting clunky Jeeps through dense jungle, like lions chasing gazelle, hell-bound to rescue the natives from their godless ignorance, all of those years spent engaging in (and perhaps creating) the whole National Geographic experience. It is the cultural territory of long-dead explorers and gin-sipping colonizers, the kind of exploration that has been turned into a luxury industry. The real thing is so much more. It’s a weak comparison, but think of the experience of watching a sporting event on television: you are comfortable, supine (presumably in your own home or a familiar place), and listening and watching as someone explains everything that is going on. Far from being engaged in the action, you are a spectator, and everything is clear. Now think of the experience of attending a sporting event—sitting, maybe, in the first row as the sweat of millionaires mists your face. You are as close to the action as possible for someone of your athletic ability. Here is struggle, sweat, shouting and cursing, raw physicality and bodies performing at peak levels, doing what they were designed to do. Nature takes its course before you, and you cannot turn away, or change the channel. There are smells and sounds and everything before you is immediate, unmediated, and unexplained.

In Kiswahili, safari means to travel or undertake a journey. When you leave the village, people will say, “Safari njema,” or “Travel well.” The Western sense of a safari as a trip to the bush to follow animals around is a recent, if not modern, invention. In 1990, sub-Saharan Africa received 6.7 million visitors. By 2012, that number climbed to 33.8 visitors, contributing more than US$36 billion to the region’s economy. With increased mobility made possible by more regular flights to African hubs, and a population that has expendable income and a desire to experience the exotic, sub-Saharan Africa, Tanzania especially, is among the world’s emerging tourist markets.

Tourism at its finest. But it’s very comfortable! Tanzania, in 2013, was one of two countries in sub-Saharan Africa ranked by World Bank as “Consolidating/Maintaining Success” in terms of tourism potential (in comparison to “Pre-Emerging,” “Potential,” and “Emerging”). East Africa accounts for 40% of all tourist arrivals in Africa, more than any other region. (Interestingly, the majority of tourists to Tanzania come from the United States. For Kenya, the majority are from the UK.) Tanzania is one of only three sub-Saharan nations for which tourism makes up more than 8% of the country’s GDP (the others are Zambia, home of Victoria Falls, and Namibia, a country with a growing tourism-based economy).

With two of the most popular destinations in Africa, Mt. Kilimanjaro and Serengeti National Park, it can be argued, and will be by me, Tanzania defines and encapsulates the Western view of Africa. As of 2013, Tanzania ranked eleventh in forecast long-term economic growth in the period of 2014 to 2024. And in 2013, leisure travel spending, both coming into Tanzania from abroad and domestically, made up 87.8% of the country’s travel and tourism gross domestic product, compared to only 12.2% for business travel. Is this a narrow view representing only a small slice of what things are like here? Yes. But is that a bad thing, if it funnels money into the country? Not necessarily. A 2013 World Bank report with the snappy title “Tourism in Africa: Harnessing Tourism for Improved Growth and Livelihoods” indicates that Africa can and should compete with other regions of the world to attract tourists if it can “effectively plan for and integrate tourism into their economies.” From 1980 to 2000, the rate of international arrivals in the Asia Pacific region grew from 8% to 22%--but during the same period, Africa’s share of the market only grew 2%, from 3% to 5%. Because of the global growth of international tourism, the World Bank called on African governments to work together with the private sector to improve infrastructure and transform tourism opportunities into business and job opportunities for their countries. The outlook is good: the number of tourists arriving in sub-Saharan Africa has grown more than 300% since 1990. But tourism in Africa faces a number of challenges, including corrupt land management, a lack of electricity and infrastructure, and a lack of available training. ***

Tourism has a complicated history in much of East Africa, owing to deeply rooted disparities between racial groups and the legacy of colonialism. Peter Matthiessen, the American author and naturalist, was among the first Western writers to examine the social and cultural environment that surrounded tourism in Tanzania in the 1970s. At that time, tourism was far from the industry it is now. The people who undertook to explore the wilds of Africa seemed to end up there after pursuing other routes and jobs and careers and failing, or at least reevaluating their career options. It took a hardy person to engage in exploration in the bush. Threats of death by disease, injury, or animal attack were all very real and, as such, the people who spent a great deal of time in the bush, according to Matthiessen, all seem to be a bit odd. 

Attitudes toward the native people were likewise far from generous, with many people possessing negative opinions, calling them lazy or misdirected, and employing racial slurs. Hemingway’s gruff attitude toward the locals is obvious in Green Hills of Africa, published in 1935, and little had changed by Matthiessen’s experiences in the 1970s and 1980s. For it was only white foreigners with financial and material resources that could afford to undertake the expense of a safari. Native Africans did not experience the alluring draw of their lands that drew foreigners. As Matthiessen notes, “Not long ago it was estimated that only one East African in twelve had ever seen a lion, though lions are common in the park at the very outskirts of Nairobi, but one is not allowed into the parks without a car, and very few Africans have access to a car, far less own one.”

Since many native Tanzanians were, and are, engaged in a daily struggle for survival, exploration of their cultural heritage did not take priority. As for the wealth of magnificent animal life around them that drew visitors from across the world, Matthiessen notes, “The average citizen has more fear of than interest in wild animals, which most Africans regard as backwardness, a view in which they were long encouraged by European farmers and administrators. Far from being proud of the ‘priceless heritage’ so dear to conservation literature, they are ashamed of it.”

Thankfully, with the advent of education programs and pushes to train tourism and hospitality workers, this attitude has largely disappeared. Tanzanian students are taught about natural history and the variety of flora and fauna that bless their home. To gain valuable employment in the tourism sector, many Tanzanians are learning English and taking courses in environmental conservation, natural studies, and hospitality. The value of the natural world, and the need to study and conserve it, is felt as strongly through Tanzania as anywhere else in the world. But for many Tanzanians, the sight of a famous African animal is a regular occurrence. 

Some friends I met. Much in the same way that we might not blink an eye at a deer along the side of a busy highway, many Tanzanians on bus rides paid little attention to giraffe and zebra and elephants on the side of the road. On a long bus trip from Morogoro to Mahenge, the route passes through Mikumi National Park, at the northern tip of the Selous. Lulled by the hours of repetitious grasslands and mountains, I was suddenly thrilled to catch a glimpse of a giraffe’s head rising above the horizon, and to its left, three zebras standing peacefully. All around me, the other passengers napped or chatted or gazed out the window with unchanged expressions. An older Tanzanian lady sitting two rows ahead of me, seeing my excitement, pointed out the window across the other side of the bus, where I saw another giraffe and two elephants. Because I was easily identifiable as a foreigner, she was clearly proud to show me, and proud again of my awed reaction to the wonders of her.

Tanzania is once again proud of its cultural heritage, and is striving to share it with the world. But trying to convince village-dwellers, many of whom live in abject poverty and subsist on food grown themselves, it is difficult to extol the virtues of tourism as the savior of the country:

“It is no good telling a shamba (farm) dweller that tourist revenues are crucial to the nation when his own meager existence remains unaffected for the worse. ‘The nation,’ the concept of national consciousness, has not penetrated very far into the bush; as in the Sudan, there are many tribesmen who have no idea that they are Kenyan or Tanzanian and would care little if they knew.”

This attitude, though captured by Matthiessen in the 1970s, still exists to some degree. National identity, and all that accompanies it, has little effect on people who live as their ancestors have lived for thousands of years in remote areas untouched by politics. These people might never see the impact of the influx of tourism-related profit that flows into the country every day. It is difficult, too, to understand the double standard that exists between trophy hunting, for which foreigners pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to shoot animals for sport, and hunting for meat to feed one’s family. One is allowed, even encouraged, while the other is illegal and punishable. It is, and will remain, beyond my understand why some people are possessed with the desire to kill a living, breathing creature for no other reason than to assert some kind of dominance, or gain the reassurance that one is, in fact, alive, by virtue of the whatever thrill might be contained in ending a life. But the cultural importance of hunting, and the specific impact of trophy hunting on Tanzania’s economy cannot be overlooked.

In 1972, Matthiessen reported the following:

“Rural Africans in the vicinity of game reserves and parks quite naturally believe that the numbers of wild animals are inexhaustible, and see no reason why they should not be harvested as they always have. Hunting, with its prestige for the good hunter, is a ceremony and sport as it is for westerners; its place in his economy as well as its risk to the poorly armed native hunter make it considerably less decadent. And no one can explain why killing animals is permitted to foreigners in search of trophies but not to citizens in search of food.”

I can’t explain it either.

In Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway relates the story of his first kill: “I was so surprised by the way he had rolled over dead from the shot after we had been prepared for a charge, for heroics, and for drama, that I felt more let down than pleased. It was our first lion and we were very ignorant and this was not what we had paid to see.” Despite the place of this work in the romantic literary legacy that surrounds East Africa, this is hardly a ringing endorsement of the allure of the hunt. 

Hippos: adorable death machines.

In March 2013, Alexander N. Songorwa, the director of wildlife for the Tanzanian Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism, wrote an editorial that was published in The New York Times. In it, Songorwa expressed distress that the United States Fish and Wildlife Service was considering adding the African lion to the list of endangered species, which would make it illegal for hunters to bring their trophy kills back to the United States. He explains that despite figures cited by conservation and animal-rights groups citing the loss of habitat and the prevalence of disease in Tanzania’s lion population, which makes up nearly half the lion population in all of Africa, the numbers in Tanzania are stable, the lions are healthy, and not at all endangered.

The point of his argument is to maintain the influx of hunting revenue from the United States, which makes up the biggest market for trophy hunting. Trophy hunters, Songorwa reports, spend ten to twenty-five times more than regular, photo-shooting tourists, and travel to (thus spreading wealth to) rural and remote areas rarely visited by tourists. What kind of money are we talking about?

In Tanzania, lions are hunted under a 21-day safari package. Hunters pay $9,800 in government fees for the opportunity. An average of about 200 lions are shot a year, generating about $1,960,000 in revenue. Money is also spent on camp fees, wages, local goods and transportation.

So, what is the real impact of trophy hunting on African economies? The African Wildlife Conservation Fund estimated in 2007 that trophy hunting across sub-Saharan Africa generates at least $201 million per year, and that Tanzania has a “sizable and growing hunting industry.” In 2013, Songorwa reported that in a three-year span, from 2008 to 2011, trophy hunting generated $75 million that was put to use maintaining twenty-six game reserves, as well as improving infrastructure, schools, and hospitals in Tanzania.

The majority of Selous Game Reserve, more than 90% of it, is set aside for private hunting expeditions, with a small section along the Rufiji River designated for photographic safaris. (I want to make t-shirts that say, “Shoot to remember, not to kill.”) 

Despite my feelings on hunting, I would rather it be sanctioned, controlled, and beneficial for the country instead of allowing rampant poaching, which decreases animal populations and does nothing to help. Songorwa ends by calling upon the American government to help Tanzania: “In short, please work with us to conserve wildlife, rather than against us, which only diminishes our capacity to protect Tanzania’s global treasures.” It is a convincing argument, I suspect you will agree. Because of the large amount of money at stake, it is better to allow hunting to sustain conservation efforts and maintain national parks than to let the familiar evils of poaching, corruption, and mismanagement destroy the delicate natural balance of the land. ***

This tree is more than 1,500 years old. Just think about that for a minute. Once, many years ago, I had opportunity to visit the home of a wealthy surgeon who was hosting a whiskey-tasting party for his friends. As the owner of a world-class whiskey library, he asked my boss at the time, the manager of a high-end wine and liquor shop, to attend as an instructor, and I was tapped to be on hand as backup (in reality, I think it was because I had a car and was willing to drive). You can imagine my surprise when I realized that the man’s entire home, from floor to vaulted ceiling, was covered with every manner of taxidermied exotic animal, the centerpiece of which was a proud African lion. 

In the place of honor above the mantle to his hearth (sized to accommodate the U.S. Olympic basketball team), he displayed his hunting rifles, arranged in a glass case like museum artifacts. Along with the lion, he had mounted the head of a rhino, and displayed the full stuffed body of a zebra, warthog, and impala, as well as an actual bearskin rug. All of his (nearly) priceless whiskies were arranged on a pool table larger than my car. During the course of the evening, as many doctors and lawyers loosened up on many expensive whiskies, I overheard someone whisper that the surgeon didn’t even shoot the lion. He paid a safari guide to do it for him.

Is it wrong to grow outraged over the killing of one animal when animals are killed, both legally and otherwise, everyday? No. But it brings the debate about pay-to-play hunting, and what animals can and cannot be killed, to the fore. I don’t know the answer. Hunting brings valuable injections of cash to an otherwise cash-strapped part of the world. Is Tanzania losing, or selling, its heritage for profit? Does it have any other choice? It’s not an easy question to answer. But for every lion that is killed, there is one less lion in the world, and that is a sad thing.

Next week in Safari (Part II): the history of Selous Game Reserve, the legacy of Frederick Courteney Selous, and my arrival on a dirt runway in the middle of the bush. All photos are mine, taken in Selous Game Reserve in June 2013.

Food

NOTE: Welcome back. At the risk of getting wildly off-topic before we’ve even started, I want to clarify that I haven’t given up on War and Peace. I admit that I thought about watching the BBC television adaptation instead of finishing the book, given that the show has both many more attractive people and many more flashy-boomy battle scenes than the book while simultaneously having far fewer dense and draining examinations of psychological motivations, human failings, and the irrationality of life, but you know. I have some standards. Also, I haven’t yet gotten any more Scotch, but once it hits 65 with a hint of sun, it’s gin season.

Thanks to the ingenious title, you’ll notice that this week’s excerpt is from the chapter about food, which is one of the last I wrote, sometime during the dusky evenings and chill mornings of last fall. It was a bit tacked on—I hadn’t envisioned a chapter on food when I started out—but I quickly realized that food was one of the most important things to talk about. As before, the photos are mine.

Most of the questions I got about living in Tanzania, both before I left and after I returned, centered on food, specifically how and what I cooked. The answers were often less than thrilling, for no one wants to hear about more than three-hundred days with a steady diet of rice and beans. I lost twenty-five pounds. Let’s start there. The first thing I ate when I landed in the U.S. was a burger the size of a Volkswagen. The second thing was 7/8 of a pepperoni pizza. The third thing was six beers. Then I fell asleep for two solid days. But I digress.

The methods behind my cooking were fascinating to people, but I got the sense that many thought I was embellishing or elaborating on the truth, though I had no reasons to do so. Why would I exaggerate about food, of all things? My experiences speak for themselves, and scarcity breeds creativity. I learned how to “brew” instant coffee using the leftover water from boiling pasta made the night before. I baked an entire birthday cake from scratch, including homemade frosting, on a charcoal stove on my front porch. I can make seven different kinds of rice and nine kinds of beans, and I can combine them in various inventive ways. I can light a charcoal fire using sheer strength of will. If ever faced with a long-term power outage here in the States, I expect people to queue in front of my apartment for help. I have a gas grill and a large knife, so no one’s going hungry around here.

***

My kitchen in Mahenge. Could use some new countertops and a backsplash.

I don’t consider myself a gourmand, but I love food. I love thinking about it, talking about it, cooking it, and watching other people cook it for me. People often became fixated on the fact that we did not have a refrigerator or a working oven at my house in Mahenge, and often cooked on charcoal using a jiko. I admit, not having a working fridge was tough, but I forgot about it relatively quickly—I would have forgotten more quickly if the goddamn useless hulk of plastic and steel wasn’t slowly crumbling in the corner of our kitchen. But for most people, I think the refrigerator makes the kitchen, and the kitchen makes the house. And I don’t know if people can imagine a house without a kitchen.

Go ahead, try it. Think of the house in which you grew up, the familiarity its hallways and rooms. Imagine the kitchen. Most kitchens share the same features, so it is quite possible that yours resembles millions of others across the world. There are probably chairs tucked around a table, a countertop with a range of appliances, a series of cupboards, closets, and drawers, one of which inevitably containing layers of junk and detritus like empty tape dispensers, left-over Chinese take-out chopsticks, a series of pens of different colors with no caps, half a clothespin, a plastic cup full of buttons, pennies, and sugar packets, a few dead batteries, and a set of mysterious car keys that no one remembers ever having used before. There is probably a wealth of food, and an array of products and tools that allow you to eat it. The kitchen is a place of plenty. From a survival standpoint, you will do well in the kitchen.

Now try to imagine the kitchen as an empty room, with perhaps a clay cookstove in a corner, and, if you’re lucky, a sack of charcoal—no furniture to speak of, save a few plastic chairs. No refrigerator, no microwave, no automatic ice crusher. It’s difficult to do, since the kitchen is a sacred space for most people in the developed world. It is a place of familiar pleasures, of comfort and sustenance, and the site of family dinners and afternoon snacks. At parties, guests often congregate in the kitchen without realizing it. The kitchen is often the heart of the home—or the stomach, if we are being true to our bodily imagery. When you are homesick and wishing for the comfort of your house, I doubt it is the front hall or the guest bathroom for which you yearn. In the kitchen, abundance abounds, as does comfort, security, and familiarity.

It is also a repository for things of all varieties. As a kid, my mother often reminded me to remove many of my belongings from the kitchen: soccer cleats, backpack, textbooks, baseball bats, shopping bags, candy wrappers, beer cans (that last one came later). It is the center of family life, the place where the family comes together most often to share a meal, to spend time together, to enact the ceremonial ritual of eating as a group. The kitchen also contains a wealth of technological innovations that have come to define modern life and the ways that we prepare and eat food: the refrigerator, the oven, the dishwasher, the microwave, the electric mixer, the blender, the electric can opener, the garbage disposal, the hotplate, the George Foreman grill—the list is virtually endless, with new miracle gadgets being thrust at us all the time.

You might have thought that the 1950s and 1960s were the heyday of culinary and kitchen innovation, but take a quick glance at QVC, or if you’re more digitally inclined, QVC.com. In the same way that my grandmother looks suspiciously at my iPhone—the function seems familiar, but not the form—someone from 1955 would take one look at a kitchen now and have no idea what half the things were for. The Kitchen & Food tab on the aforementioned website boasts a list of categories for products that include Bakeware, Cookware, Grills (in many places in the world, those are all one thing), Kitchen Tools and Kitchen Electrics (arguably the same, but one with more pep), Major Appliances (but, oddly, no Minor Appliances), Storage & Organization (again, redundant, since one leads to the other), Tabletop (not sure on this one), and Knives—of course, as its own separate category. One is left to imagine why there is no category for Electric Knives, but perhaps they learned from experience that it’s best not to advertise those too heavily, lest the influx of letters from state penitentiaries pick up again. Incidentally, the site also prompted me to subscribe to an “eNewsletter,” which is a fancy term for an email that I will quickly delete, called, curiously, Quisine—a name I would more readily associate with either a) an off-brand medication prescribed by questionable doctors for a persistent skin malady or b) an extinct breed of French waterfowl.

Before I wander too far on this diverting tangent, let us agree that the kitchen is an important space, no matter where it is found. This is because the kitchen is, if you’re lucky, more often than not full of food. And it is important to think about, and talk about, food from different places. It is what makes us who we are. Italy would not be the same without pasta, France without wine and cheese and bread, Mexico without tacos, Japan without sushi. I am from Buffalo, New York, which would not be the same without pizza, chicken wings, and Canadian beer. But I digress again. 

I went to Tanzania with few expectations about what I would eat every day. At the time when I was preparing to leave, it was easiest not to know. Yes, it was important, up there on my list of Things to Worry About, but not as vital worrying about the things of which I knew there would be too much (malaria, large predatory animals) and too little (water, single females, internet). With the confidence of someone who has never known hunger or had to worry about food, I trusted that I would not starve. What I did not realize is how very lucky I was to make myself that assurance and have it be true.

***

During training, Petro (right) taught us how to cook Tanzanian-style.

Nearly every culture in the world, apart from some hunter-gatherer cultures or the type of people who subsist exclusively on a diet of Pringles and Mountain Dew, engages in some kind of food preparation, and has passed down traditions from one generation to the next. Looking at the history of a culture’s cooking can serve as a map of its political and social influences. Cooking methods and recipes, the culture’s “foodways,” which in itself sounds like the name of a grocery store chain (Foodways: Eat Vague), are some of the most important and distinctive things to understand about a culture. As Anthony Bourdain, the king of food and culture, has said, “There is, of course, nothing more political than food. Food itself. Who's got it, who doesn't? What's cooking is usually the end of a long, often violent story.”

There is no faster way to understanding the heart and essence of a culture than understanding what people eat, how people eat, and how people get and cook what they eat. These three things bring with them a world of details about the history, influences, customs, and beliefs of a specific place or people. Architectural trends come and go, businesses and industries rise up and fall away within years, and even language, the bedrock of civilization, changes and evolves over time. Food, especially indigenous foods prepared with unique recipes and methods, is one of the only markers of culture that can be tied to its specific home and its region. Food is culture, history, and politics. And on top of all that, it marks important occasions and life events. What would a wedding be without prime rib and a wilted side salad? Christmas without chicken and waffles? A funeral without a breakfast buffet? (Every tradition is unique!) When visiting heads of state are honored, it’s not (always) with karaoke and bowling, but an elaborate, formal dinner.

***

Nothing I experienced fascinated people more than what and how I ate. For example, when I explained that I learned, according to local custom, to eat everything with my right hand, including pasta and rice, and never to use my left for anything, I was met with shocked stares and uncomfortable laughter.

“So let me get this straight, you lived in a hut and ate everything with your hands?”

“No hut, for the fifth time, and not everything, but most things,” I’d respond cheerily.

“Was it a shack? What about eggs? Meat?”

“Not a shack, it was a large house. Yup, those too. Only with my right hand, actually. The left hand is considered unclean.”

“Wait, a large house with one room? And why the hand thing?”

“No. Well, you should Google that. It’s an Arabic and African custom.”

“But why?”

“Because food is traditionally shared communally out of large dishes. And due to the great Cutlery Wars of 1414, utensils were in short supply and people adapted to use their hands.”

“. . . Really?”

“Yes. They melted down all the cutlery to make hand grenades.”

“Wait—shut up. But why the left hand thing? What’s that about?”

“I told you, just look it up.”

“Is it a prejudice, like lefties are bad?”

“There are no lefties. They’re forced to change when they’re young, so everyone is a righty.”

“So what is it?”

“Which hand do you wipe with?”

“Wait, which hand do I wipe with? Wipe wha—oh.”

The difficult part, I suspect, was for people to juxtapose the stereotypes that had hardened in their minds of “Africa,” a singular place with a few defining features, with the reports I shared of what I actually saw and did. In some cases, the challenges I faced lived up to expectations (“I told you you wouldn’t have a microwave. Hey, how’d you make burritos?”) though I found that people were still racked by disbelief of another kind. Because their abstract idea of a place without familiar luxuries and comforts was made real in my descriptions, they confronted the fact that millions of people actually live a life that is, to them, unimaginable. Upon my arrival home, it was difficult to discern which fact made people more uncomfortable: that I didn’t have access to high-speed Internet, or that I didn’t have a refrigerator.

***

The national food of Tanzania is ugali, a type of porridge made with maize flour or millet, generally cooked in a pot the size of a kettledrum over a wood fire. It requires copious amounts of stirring and the upper-body strength of a sailor to wield the paddle with which it is stirred. When finished, it is white in color and dense in texture, bringing to mind the paste that we used in grade school art class, with about a third of the taste. Next, the other parts of the meal, usually greens, vegetables, or meat, are served alongside a communal plate of ugali. Everyone at the table, or on the floor or on the ground or wherever you happen to be eating, scoops up a hunk of ugali using the right hand and makes a little ball with which to scoop up the other food.

Rice and beans, food’s answer to gray sweatpants.

The next most common dish I ate is the old staple, rice and beans (wali na maharage). White rice, cooked on a jiko in a large pot, is covered with a heaping helping of steaming red beans, sometimes cooked with spices like pilipili (chili) or garlic, but most often served without any spices. It is often the culinary equivalent of Ohio—it could be worse, but it could be a lot better.

I ate rice and beans almost every day at school, which I would send a student to retrieve from the mamas who cooked near the soccer field at Nawenge Secondary. I learned quickly to keep a spoon in my backpack. On the occasions that I forgot, I ate with my right hand, which took about three times as long due to the pile of rice I accumulated down the front of my shirt and in my lap. For the next three hours, a sticky, filmy residue covered my fingertips and would not wash off. Eating with one’s hands is not as simple as it might seem, especially when the dish is rice and beans or spaghetti. It’s possible, but not easy. I watched some older people use their fingers with the same practiced skill as a Japanese person using chopsticks—it is often a graceful, patient way of eating borne of years of practice.

Tanzanian cuisine mirrors its cultural and geographic heritage. It is part Arabic, often utilizing aromatic spices and exotic flavor combinations, and part African, with a utilitarian grace and elegance. The staple foods, often starchy dishes like the two mentioned above, are generally accompanied by a few types of vegetables, often mchicha, or boiled spinach, or mboga, a generic term for vegetables such as stewed bitter eggplant or cabbage. The most common bread is chapatti, a flatbread similar to naan that is generally prepared on a frying pan, though some women in Mahenge were famed for their bread rolls (called, curiously, scones). Fresh fruit accompanied almost every formal meal, including banana (ndizi), mango (embe), and a more exotic addition, including what we call paupau, referred to as matunda, or plain old fruit.

I would estimate that close to 65% of my daily protein intake came from beans, eggs, and peanut butter. We went through a 48-ounce tub of locally made peanut butter every week. I put it on everything, including an interesting and informative afternoon during which I tried it on avocado (gritty), rice (chewy), and pasta (sticky). All things considered, not as bad as you might think. Meat was available in town, at small butcher shops no larger than a bus shelter. The few that were close to my house in Mahenge had no glass in the windows, allowing all manner of bugs to attach themselves to the pork ribs and beef shanks hung for all to see, as well as no door, and, as you might guess, no refrigeration. Needless to say, heeding the CDC’s warnings not to endanger my health, I never set foot in a butcher shop.

Chipsi mayai. You want this. You really do.

If I desperately needed animal protein, which I did about once a week, I walked down the road to Riverside Bar and enjoyed a meal of mishkaki, spiced beef chunks grilled on a stick, and chipsi mayai, the greatest food ever invented. It’s French fries cooked into an omelette, which you eat by tearing hunks off and dipping them in salt and chili sauce. I’m getting hungry just writing this sentence. Depending on the day, Riverside also had a selection of chicken, pork, and goat, usually fresh. Sometimes you even heard the dying animal’s screams. Dinner and a show!

I often thought about heading down there for dinner every night, but only went once a week, if that. Why? I suppose part of it was the price—even at $2 for a full meal, it added up quickly. The other concern was my pride. Sure, I could have someone else cook for me every night—other people certainly did, and no one thought poorly of them. But cooking and eating was a challenge, one I felt obligated to overcome, since I’d asked to be in this situation in the first place. It was rarely easy—cooking took an average of two hours for a simple meal of rice and beans, and up to four if the power was out and we couldn’t use the oven or stove and had to keep the fire going in the jiko. I went to bed on many occasions tired, frustrated, and very hungry.

As a man, I was expected not to cook. Cooking was not men’s work. Since I had a female roommate, it was expected to fall to her to do the cooking and cleaning. I did my part to fight this patriarchy: my roommate and I took turns cooking and cleaning and split all the duties equally. We both got pretty good at it. And when I explained to my fellow teachers, both male and female, that I loved to cook and did often in America, it was fun to see their looks of amusement followed quickly by dismay. What’s cultural exchange if it doesn’t work both ways, right?

The routine and lack of variation in our meals could get frustrating, but we tried to expand our diet as much as possible—not only for the sake of variety, but for our health. When I heard stories of past volunteers growing gaunt and pulling their hair out, literally, due to lack of vitamins, I made sure to take a multivitamin every day, along with a healthy dose of vitamin C tablets. Because of the heat, vegetables and fruits all spoiled very fast, sometimes within hours. My neighbors Nick and Jonathan saved my morale (and saved me from gnawing on my own limbs) on many occasions with an invitation to dinner at their house, usually consisting of a barbeque feast of mishkaki, kitimoto (pork), heaping mountains of chipsi, or French fries, vegetables, rice, and bananas. (I should note that there are two types of bananas: the yellow ones, which we eat raw, and the green ones, which ooze a sticky sap when peeled with a knife and are cut up and boiled like potatoes. Both are delicious.) ***

Most, if not all, of the food we ate was grown locally. Rice and beans arrived in large burlap sacks from somewhere else and were sold in bulk at stalls in the covered market (as opposed to the open market, about which more later) along with nuts, spices, eggs, and a variety of other sundries. Colorful mountains of powders, nuts, grains, seeds, and other unidentifiable substances sat in rows, with the stall’s owner usually asleep on a pile of rice sacks next to them, or a few stalls down chatting up someone else’s wife. When they saw me approach, probably practicing in my head the Swahili I’d rehearsed at home, they ran down, all smiles, and shook my hand, putting various handfuls of things up to my nose for my approval and telling my the Swahili names for all of it. (I still had no idea what most of it was, and I suspect even the English names would not have helped.) Everything, especially rice and beans, had to be carefully sorted and washed before cooking, lest one accidentally ingest a poisonous bug or lose a molar on a pebble.

Farmers in or around Mahenge grew the fruits and vegetables that made up the bulk of our diet. I also tried my hand at farming, if only for the pleasure of quoting Meryl Streep in the opening of Out of Africa: “I had a farm in Africa.” I fucking did, too. Take that, Isak Dinesen. Modesty forces me to admit that K., my student and neighbor, did the larger share of the work in preparing it once she realized my ineptitude in all things agricultural. It wasn’t much of a success, either. I planted local maize (corn) with K.’s help, but the rest of the crops (beans, peppers, cabbage) grew from seeds my aunt sent from the U.S. I fear they were not of hardy enough stock to make it in the Tanzanian soil, and many grew up stunted and malformed. Our harvest consisted of a few ears of maize, which were largely pilfered by neighbors and chickens, a few handfuls of beans, and a sad array of shriveled peppers.

This was only a fraction of the assembled audience. My attempted herb garden inside the house fared little better. On the afternoon I chose to start planting, I attracted a small army of kids who had never watched anything as ridiculous as a white guy shoveling dirt into a peanut butter jar. Within five minutes, the word got out that Mr. Stivu was up to something again, and every child in Mahenge under ten years had joined the throng around my front porch. They were standing six deep. I think some were charging admission. I felt like I was giving a TED talk. Naturally, a few of my fellow teachers from Nawenge picked this exact moment to pay me a visit. After shoving sixty kids aside, they too watched me in mild disbelief. One teacher, let’s call him Mr. Frowny, had not to this point said more than seven words to me at school. He selected this moment to say, with a derisive smile, “Those, they will not work.” The others, sensing my growing spirit of defeat, laughed heartily, shook my hand, and, after shoving another fifty kids out of their way, strutted back toward the road. Tanzanians aren’t much for commiseration or pity, but at least I knew that their laughter was meant to express nothing more than slight confusion about my horticultural instincts along with a general sense of camaraderie and respect. I think.

I left my fledgling seedlings on a windowsill with high hopes, envisioning waking up one future morning to don a bright, crisp apron, while whistling a tune and sipping a steaming flagon of Starbucks coffee, then shuffling to the window to pluck some fresh basil and thyme for my morning omelet. (I was pretty deprived of luxuries and had a lot of time on my hands.) My vindication in the face of my laughing critics came quickly. Within days, small green shoots of basil, rosemary, and thyme poked up from the black soil. Suppressing squeals of joy, I watered each plant with tender attention every night and gave each one a loving caress before bed. 

Looking back, I think I was starved for affection and attention at this point in the year, and feeling pretty lonely. I must have transferred this energy, along with my unrequited desires for companionship and new friends, onto my plants. Alas, the mental and physical strain was too great. After a few days of spectacular progress—Tanzanian soil is naturally be imbued with fertilizers and all the right minerals, for I’ve never seen such quick and energetic growth—they unceremoniously began to turn brown and wither away. Within a few weeks, all of my seedlings had committed herb suicide, and I was left with three peanut butter tubs of dirt on the kitchen table. I kept them there as a memorial.

***

That tree on the left. 

Undaunted in the face of my failure, and blessed by the verdant surroundings in which I found myself, I pressed on. I did this a lot—press on. I had no choice, and I was dumb enough not to know when to quit. Thankfully for me, food was all around us. In fact, we had a large grove of banana trees overhanging our roof that during storms sounded as if it was attempting to gain entry into the house, but I yielded to the neighbors’ claim and let them cut them down. Toward the end of the year, avocados and mangos were in season. Often, they literally fell from the trees. Sometimes they had some help.

On one particularly quiet afternoon, a squadron of kids showed up at my door around 4 pm, which was about their usual assembly time. My small friend Peter handed me an avocado and gestured to a large, spindly tree about fifty yards away (see above), at the border of my yard. He then handed me a rock, and pointed back at the tree. A few minutes later, I was gleefully chucking rocks (along with seventy-five kids, who had appeared out of nowhere—I think they used smoke signals or Morse code to let each other know that something was up at the white people’s house) at each branch of the avocado tree, aiming to knock some of its prized fruit to the ground. The whole affair was remarkably civilized and calm. Peter, and Paulo, his twin brother, handed me a few shapely rocks recently unearthed from the dark soil, then assumed an appraising stance, like coaches at spring training, to watch me take aim and, inevitably, miss. You would think ten years of little league baseball would come in handy. There is a reason my parents urged me to switch to soccer.

The older kids, including James and Simon, possessed better marksmanship, and we soon had a good system in place. The small kids, excited to participate in a caper of this magnitude, scrambled around digging up rocks from every available surface, including the cracked and crumbling foundation of my house. The older kids took aim and fired, usually striking a branch with a hefty load of fruit, and then other small kids ran to scoop it up. I, as the most senior adult on premises at the time, quickly realized that precautions needed to be in place to avoid injury or harm to any of my protégés. By devising a timed system in which the older kids threw in unison, aiming at different targets to avoid mid-air collisions, I allowed a chance for the smaller kids had a chance to sprint giddily to retrieve the spoils, without anyone getting beaned by a rock. “This is what Henry Ford must have felt like when he devised the assembly line,” I thought. “I am a genius of management.”

This went on all afternoon, and we quickly amassed a pile of avocados that would cost you a small fortune at any upscale grocery store. Little did I know, however, that our fun was soon to be cut short. Peter and Paulo’s house sat just down the hill from my house, behind the avocado tree and a tall cement wall. Their grandmother, an ancient woman of about 156 years, must have been the recipient of one too many rock bombs on her corrugated iron roof, and started the ascent to my yard. I would guess it must have taken her the better part of the afternoon to make the climb of a few hundred yards, because we had been going strong for ages when she arrived.

Now, as one of the resident white people in the region, I was generally immune to the scoldings and punishments that the kids received from their parents for staying out too long, or being late for dinner, or the thousands of other things they did that could be traced back to my house. I felt a bit guilty about my exempted status, for it was generally my fault that they got riled up and raided the neighbors with bows and arrows, or showed up at home with a raging Pop Rocks sugar high and covered in glitter, or adorned in odd places with fake tattoos and stick-on mustaches. 

Not my fault. Well, kind of my fault.

I was the crazy uncle, the one who doesn’t have kids and uses other people’s as an excuse to do everything society dictates he can’t do on his own. Making fart noises in your armpits? Encouraged. Testing the limits of the tensile strength on the screens and windows on the side of one’s house with various projectiles? Permissible. Once the fun is over, the crazy uncle goes back to drinking Bud Light in front of the TV. That was me, except without the Bud Light or the TV. Picture someone drinking tepid water in front of a bare wall, and that was me.

Needless to say, our bibi (grandmother) was not happy when she ascended the hill to my yard. Like grandmothers the world over, she was busy and did not need a crowd of unruly youths disrupting her day. When she set eyes on the group of us standing guiltily around the base of the tree, she gathered her skirts around her and began berating the first kid she passed, who immediately froze and dropped a small armload of rocks to the ground. We’d been busted. Since I didn’t understand a word of the scolding we were in the midst of receiving, I quickly adopted a stance of chaste piety, looking askance at the ground beneath by feet as if searching for a trapdoor into which to disappear. The small kids around me hung their heads in abject shame as I stood next to them, acting similarly dejected and penitent. It’s a funny thing about a language barrier—when someone is mad at you, you know it, no matter what words they use.

After spending the balance of her energy and vitality on berating us for the better part of a quarter hour, she made her exit with an impressive huffing of breath, leaving us standing silently in the gathering dusk. As with a forest stirring to life after the passing of a hunter, we regained our composure and our spirits quickly rose. Within a few minutes, a throng of small kids surrounded me, thrusting avocados into my arms, the spoils of our labor. Soon after, we repaired to the porch for an afternoon dance party and our shame was forgotten. None of us, however, went near a rock for the rest of the week.

Willful Incongruities

NOTE: For the past year and a half, I’ve been working on turning the contents of this blog into a book. I’ve been successful enough, or dumb enough not to quit, that now I have this heavy stack of manuscript pages sitting on my desk. It’s all there, in some nascent form, fifteen chapters and about 150,000 words, but editing my own writing is worse than self-surgery, so I’ve hit a bit of a wall. I don’t have writer’s block—no, the damned thing has been written. I have editor’s block, which is way more annoying, and way less romantic. You can’t appeal to the Muses for inspiration with editor’s block. They’re way too distracting and sexy. Nothing’s happening with them around. You have to appeal to, like, the Titans or the Furies or one of the way more badass groups of deities that get shit done.

So my plan for this winter, when November rolled around, was to hibernate with War and Peace and whiskey and get the goddamn thing finished so I could emerge in the spring with a sparkling manuscript and a book deal. I’m about 300 pages into War and Peace and keep forgetting who the fuck is who (or, for that matter, who is fucking who), so needless to say, none of that happened. Except for the whiskey. That happened. Anyway, that stack of pages has been sitting there for almost two months, untouched, until I decided just this week that I need to get going again. Maybe it was the April snow, maybe it was an overdose of vitamins, or the fact that I’m running low on Scotch, but I decided that I need motivation. I need energy. I need . . . more whiskey? Yes! But in this case, no. I need a reason to start working again. Which brings me back to this post: I’m going to try, once a week, to post an excerpt or a full chapter from that manuscript. A weekly post will get me to edit things just enough so that I won’t be mortified to open it up to public scrutiny and the judgment of my friends and admired peers and loved ones. After all, isn’t that the motivation for anyone who writes? The full-fledged fear of judgment coupled with the fervent hope for acceptance and praise?

This chapter is meant to be the closer, in which I meditate on travel and all its vicissitudes and joys. I know I’m not starting in the right order, but the first chapters, rather paradoxically, aren’t done yet, so just deal with it. All the photos are mine, mostly taken in Stone Town and Mahenge in June 2013. Here we go.

In the Keatsian spirit of negative capability, specifically the ability to be “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” I introduce a new term: willful incongruities. By this I mean the set or sets of circumstances that arise during travel when the familiar and the unfamiliar begin to blur and combine to create a completely new experience of reality.

Travel is the conscious decision to abandon the familiar in search of things that inspire confusion, questioning, and wonder. Part of traveling is being lost and completely out of place, and feeling that you are not where you are supposed to be. Traveling alone heightens this sense because there is no one else to confirm what you see or to validate the sense of difference. To put it another way, there is no one to lock eyes with and say, without words, “Yes, this is a fucking strange situation that we are in. How did we get here?”

Being alone helps one to disappear more fully into the experience—there is no one else to remind you of your difference. I felt much more at ease walking through Dar’s crowded streets alone than with a group of Americans, both for the lack of attention I attracted on my own (it was the big city, after all, not the relative fishbowl of the village) and the ability to observe without the necessity to put into words what I was thinking. A constant need for dialogue interrupts observation, and distracts from the experience at hand. (If you must travel with someone, make sure that they can go for more than five minutes without a pressing need to render an opinion about everything they see around them, and that they have a large bladder.) Achieving a sense of displacement, both physical and emotional, is exactly the reason to travel. The traveler is able to see things as both a participant and an observer. With distance from familiar things first comes confusion, then understanding, and then a deeper clarity. Here’s a photographic representation of deeper clarity:

My experiences of willful incongruities are many and varied—willful because I chose to experience them, or allowed myself the opportunity (which is just as important), and incongruous because much of what I saw did not match up with my limited view of the world. Things were pushed together and combined in ways I had never thought to imagine. A Maasai man riding on the back of a motorcycle while holding a baby goat in his arms? I never would have thought that one up with that one on my own, but I saw it. He smiled as we waved at him from the bus window. And if that is possible, what other possibilities does this huge, crazy world contain? Willful incongruities are both experienced as moments in time and internalized as part of a shifting, expanding view of the world. They are, in short, the small miracles inherent in travel, moments that prove the world is a vast and unexplored place full of amazing people and wondrous things. *** It might not seem obvious, but traveling is a skill. There are people who are good at it, and there are those who are not. The good thing is that anyone can be good at it—it’s mostly dependent on mental and emotional preparations and an open and curious mind. But it takes practice. 

I was not a good traveler before my first trip to Namibia. I worried about everything, from the smallest detail of my itinerary to the location of my wallet, on a nearly constant basis. It was not until I embraced chaos, and learned to live in uncertainty, that I learned how travel truly works. 

Not to get all New Age Guru, but things happen. Some are good, some are bad. You cannot control anything but your response to them. When someone asks you to go somewhere, say yes. Always say yes, despite your fear of new places or your upset stomach or your exhaustion. Do as many things as possible. Do not worry about being tired or jet-lagged or uncomfortable. Everything will work out in the end. You will find everything you need—and if not, it will make for a good story later. You might even write a book about it one day. Kurt Vonnegut said, “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.” These are wise words from a wise man. The miracles of travel are only possible when you give up control and experience things as they happen. By some law of nature, more things will happen that way, and you will be happier for it.

On my last night in Stone Town, Zanzibar, while walking toward the location of the happy hour at which I’d become a regular, I stopped on the street to help some Swedish girls who were holding a map and looking for the market. Since I had been there for a really long time, I felt qualified to give directions, so I pointed them down the right street and walked away with a knowing swagger. They didn’t rush back and ask me to feed them alcohol and join them for a midnight swim, so I kept walking, this time a bit faster.

At the hotel, after the deliciously anticipatory elevator ride to the top floor and a walk to a door that opened onto the best rooftop bar in the world, I was greeted by the bar manager who, strangely, happened to be waiting at the door. After a few greetings, I told him I was a teacher in a small village at the end of my term. He laughed, saying what a change it must have been to come to Stone Town from the village, and we had a long talk about the state of the education system in Tanzania, which we both agreed was in need of some help. After fifteen minutes, we were the best of friends. Then he gave me a free beer. Though there were no Swedish girls about, I proceeded to feed myself enough alcohol that I ended the night wandering happily down the maze of shadowy narrow alleys that ringed the hotel, heading nowhere in particular.

***

As I was walking to get lunch in Stone Town one morning earlier that week, the afternoon call to prayer sounded. Streets suddenly flooded with men, old and young, making their way to the mosques to pray. I watched as they removed their shoes and tossed them aside and went in to take their place, feeling both like a participant and an observer in this ritual. The call to prayer is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard, despite its daily intrusive presence at 5 am. When mosques on different sides of you begin and you can hear it coming from different places in all directions, like divine surround sound, it feels like the entire world quiets down to listen.

One night, I heard an Italian woman speaking fluent Swahili while holding a phone at an oblique angle so as not to disturb her coiffed hair. Later that night, as it got darker on the patio (in case it is not evident, I spent a large portion of my month in Stone Town at the rooftop bar ) I heard a Tanzanian tour guide speaking fluent German to a group of tourists. I watched the group in the gathering twilight while drinking a beer and smoking a knockoff Marlboro, trying to cultivate an aura of mystery and worldliness, and wondered what each was thinking about the other. The guide was animated and loud, the tourists reserved and guarded—but it was only 6 pm, so perhaps they had not started drinking yet.

On my walk home that night, a guy greeted me in English and walked with me for a bit, which might have seemed weird but for the aftereffects of the happy hour that I was still experiencing. I didn’t detect anything bad about him—he was friendly and well dressed, two criteria that a person must pass before I allow them to talk to me on the street. I come from a place where the only time people approach me in public is to tell me about my salvation or to ask for a handout, and most of the time the salvation people do both. It turned out the man grew up in Stone Town and moved to the suburbs outside Maryland eight years before. He proceeded to give me a short walking tour of his old neighborhood and all its sights and important places. In the way of anyone returned home after years away, he described, wistfully, how things had changed, and how living in America had made him miss Zanzibar. He then made sure I would walk home safely and avoid bad neighborhoods. He took his leave with a wave and a shouted goodbye as he disappeared down a side road. My days were filled with improbable encounters like these.

Compared to the kids in Mahenge who followed us at a distance and were generally curious, the kids in Stone Town were fearless and don’t care who you are. I was almost run down numerous times in dark, winding alleys by 2-year-olds who were on an urgent mission to get somewhere. The older kids had the practiced stare of New Yorkers who look at you without actually seeing you. With so many tourists making their way through from all parts of the world, I imagine these kids have witnessed the crazy dress and habits and skin markings of many more exotic people than pale old me.

At the night market in Forodhani Square, which was chief among the wonders of Stone Town, watching the groups of tourists wander around while getting solicited by every fast-talking food vendor became a fun game. It began before these groups entered the market—a friendly man in an apron met them on the sidewalk, about ten yards before the market actually began, and asked them how their night was in flawless English (or German, French, Dutch, or Spanish). He would then walk with them as they gaped and stared at table after table of gorgeously arranged comestibles of every imaginable variety, steering them subtly toward the table at which he worked. 

This was the best: he would hand each of them a paper plate, and begin pointing at various things on the table and passing them out, essentially locking them into a transaction before they knew what was happening. At his first word, his colleagues threw stacks of meat on the grill and began furiously shoveling bread and vegetables onto paper plates. “You wanna chicken? Okay, chicken, very good. How many? How many chicken? Okay, you wanna chappati bread, very soft? Okay, okay. How ‘bout a fish? Mussels? No good? Okay, salmon, tuna? Beef? We got corn, tomato, what? We got it all, man. No, don’t walk there, no, stay with me, best price, best price.” After a few very happy hours on the rooftop patio at Maru Maru, I was sufficiently confident enough to argue with the vendors, and ended up with a small mountain of grilled chicken on skewers, tomato salad, and chapatti bread on a paper plate soaked with delicious greases and oils of various extractions. One night, after exchanging a few Swahili greetings to differentiate myself from the tourists (like many people, my language skills increase after a few drinks), I made a friend, Isiah, who worked at a table with his family every night. We communicated happily in broken English and broken Swahili punctuated by a series of intricate handshakes and a few hugs. I told him my family was visiting later that week and he laughed, thinking I was making up stories. I visited his table every night that week and he greeted me like a long-lost brother. When my mom and sister arrived, I introduced them to Isiah, to prove the truth of my story. He hugged them and gave us all of our food, mountains of it, for half the price. I’d like to go back and see him someday. 

Every night at the night market, as unsuspecting tourists milled nervously about, not wanting to attract attention, I felt a small, cruel victory in watching them overpay for their food. I sat on a bench overlooking the blue-black ocean, multi-million-dollar yachts lit up like Christmas trees bobbing at anchor just offshore, and observed my small corner of the world. Stray cats brushed up against my legs, crying out piteously for food. Eventually they, like the guys who sold spices and paintings on the street, learned that I would not fall for their fast-talking ploys (“Same old story, you not buy because you know Swahili,” they would mutter), but came up to rub my legs anyway. ***

Do you ever have unexpected moments of reverie, the kind of nearly paralyzing daydreams that are so vivid and intense that you’re taken, momentarily, out of where you are and what you’re doing? These are not normal distractions, but the type of immersive thoughts that make you re-shelve your bananas in the mayonnaise aisle or sit idle at a red light as a stream of cars waits angrily behind you? They are intrusive and blessed moments that bring to mind scenarios so diametrically opposed to what you’re doing that it seems like someone pressed play on a television channel that has taken up temporary residence in your mind. I have moments where what I’m doing or where I’m standing are so entirely incongruous with what I’m thinking, or where I was a few years ago, that it’s almost physically staggering. This is the second effect of experiencing willful incongruities—they will never fade from your memory, no matter how deeply they are buried.

It’s the kind of thing that make me nod my head and grunt in appropriate places while carrying on a (probably important) conversation when I am suddenly mentally navigating the road home from Nawenge on a foggy Tuesday afternoon, walking with a fellow teacher and discussing the Teachers vs. Students soccer match, then watching a boda-boda driver nearly lose his head from his shoulders going around a sharp turn, only to get up, shake himself off, and carry on down the hill. You’ve had moments like these, yes? It’s spooky stuff, but magical and thrilling. These moments of memory are the joys of traveling. You can be both here and on the other side of the world simultaneously. You have traveled through time and space. You are alive and part of the world.

Nothing bothers me that much anymore. It might be a cliché to say I’ve gained a new perspective, but fuck it, I have. How could I possibly have a bad day when I know, without a doubt or a question, that I will have food in the fridge, hot water in the shower, fresh coffee in my cup, and absolutely no live chickens in my kitchen? I submit this to you: it is impossible. Sure, I get annoyed with politics on television and car payments and waiting in line at the grocery store and loud neighbors and crowded parking lots, but I know that I won’t get malaria or typhoid, I won’t have to walk to work up a mountain in the rain, water will pour out of my tap, I can find coffee on every corner, the lights will turn on when I want them to, and the demonic, possessed shrieks of a goat will not wake me up. If my neighbor’s shrieks wake me up, at least I can call the cops.

Again, not to hammer you with New Age faux-spiritualism, but I am a changed man. I have learned many lessons. I am much more patient than I ever was, less consumed by doubt and anxiety, and able to be in a moment, to enjoy it, even to relax in it, without worrying about how to proceed immediately to the next and the next and the unceasing next. 

I think I learned in Mahenge, during those endless weeks of confusion and chaos bordering on the absurd, that nothing really matters as much as I thought it did. There are the things that are truly important: food, shelter, water, maybe even electricity and cold beer. Then there are the things that don’t matter and will sort themselves out without any help from you or anyone else. These were positive lessons, and ones for which I am very thankful. I learned, finally, to let things go. I learned that chaos will always reign, but is sometimes more pleasurable than order. I learned that the world makes its own kind of sense. It was as if I had ridden a laborious, chugging train up a mountain, disembarked, stretched my legs, took a few deep breaths, and was finally able to survey things from a much greater height—to see them as they really are.

Form II students Nawenge Secondary School Kasita Seminary in the distance Mahenge, Tanzania October 2012

February 2013 Mahenge, Tanzania