Siku Mbaya

I know I put up a post not all that long ago. However, I wrote that post a few weeks ago...and a few days later...I had a bad day. How bad a day? Let’s begin at the beginning, transported, as it were, by the magic of imagination...

I am in Iringa, my banking town. It is Saturday. I am headed to Dar Es Salaam, the largest city in country, Sunday morning. My ticket is for 6am, on an overcrowded bus through the mountains. Why 6am, you ask? Because it was cheaper. And while my friends and I were planning on going out...I guess I planned on sleeping on the bus. Which I did. Just not on the bus I planned. Here we go.

In Iringa there is a large rock. I believe it’s called Gongilanga...we call it Pride Rock...and every time we go up there we mock and scorn the first mshamba (redneck) to shout out, “one day son, all of this will be yours”. If there is a more beautiful place to watch the sunset, I’ve never seen it. On Saturday we went up there around 6pm or so, had a nice hike, watched the sunset, and came back down. Thus began what was really a wonderful night. We stopped by a bar on the way back down the hill to have a quick drink. I should mention at this point that I was out with my friends from my region, who were all in town for a final meeting to close out our Girls Conference. There were also a bunch of new volunteers in town who had not yet sworn in and who had just finished a one-week shadow. We get to catch up like this maybe every other month or so, and it’s always great to see a lot of people after weeks in the village living by ourselves.

We all went out to dinner that night, which in and of itself is always an adventure. Most Tanzanian restaurants only pack one or two ovens...charcoal ovens. So when we show up en masse, like a dozen or so, our food sometimes takes about two hours to arrive. This is not a huge problem, as the place has a balcony that overlooks Iringa. It is one of the only mzungu (white person) places in town, so it usually attracts an interesting crowd. That night we met a bunch of English women in town for a month or two to work at an orphanage. I also played my first few games of Tanzanian 8-ball (you get two shots after scratching...weird), lost 2 and won 2. Food arrived, we ate, we laughed, and we left...to go dancing.

Discos. Fun places. Places of joy, loud music, moving lights...and prostitutes. Can’t speak for their primary talents, but I’ve watched them on the dance floor. Wanaweza (they can bring it). The disco is always an interesting scene. Nobody is too impressed by me, but when the female volunteers show up, there’s always a stir. I end up doing a lot of pass-blocking for my friends (gotta watch the blind sides). But tonight the crowd is fairly tame, and there are a whole lot of us, which is always more fun. The DJ also plays a lot of American music, for which we are eternally grateful. Another volunteer and I try a swing-dance lift...she hits the deck. We try again...no luck. Third time’s the charm...and she’s up!

We stay till about two in the morning, and then we go to get some food...and things take a turn. There is a Tanzanian cafeteria open 24/7 (civilization has arrived!), and we are able to get some rice and beans. And as we are sitting at the table, thanking Mungu (God) for late night food, one of my friends has a bright little idea. The next time he has a bright little idea, I’m going to beat him over the head with a fimbo (stick), strap him to a kitanda (bed), and gag him with a parachichi (avocado). But tonight he’s got an idea. And he’s going to convince all of us of it.

Back to the rock.

This, in and of itself, is a horrible idea. It is 2am. It is cold. And the rock is on top of a mountain. Mountains are high. There is a road, but it’s awful, and cars can’t make it that far up. To add injury to insult, a strange thing has happened. Over the last couple years, at random times, my ankles will sort of sprain themselves. I could literally be sitting still, doing nothing, and all of a sudden my left foot is the size of a nanasi (pineapple). Which is exactly what has happened while we are eating late night food. It isn’t too bad at the start, which is why I get in the cab. But by the time we get out, I am walking like a pirate. Everybody else beats me up the rock, but I do make it. And, to my deranged buddy’s credit, it is beautiful, looking over the city, asleep in the moonlight. Of course, having reached the top, all of my friends follow the city’s example, and fall asleep. I would love to, but at this point my ankle is screaming in pain. A smarter man would wait for his friends to wake up, and deal with the pain. But a smarter man would have been in bed by 10pm to get up for a 6am bus. So he’s not here to help us, is he?

I get up and climb back down the rock. I reason (accurately, I still maintain) that my friends will awake, call me, and since they each have two working legs, catch up with me rather quickly. All of this works right up to the point where my friends get lost, walk through a backyard, and end up wandering the wrong way on the main highway. They still catch a cab before I do...because there ain’t no justice. I head for the aforementioned bar where we got a quick drink earlier in the night, figuring that even though it is 3am, there may still be cabs. Again, sound theory fails me. Because I have forgotten to account for a couple of things: 1. that the bar is about two miles away down a loose gravel road, and 2. that I have one working leg. Count ‘em Jim, one. But the hill won’t walk itself. Here we go.

I won’t bore you with the details. It hurt, a lot. There were dogs, and they barked, and when I reached the end of one fence, another one took up the call. I would have been pretty easy to track. I think about stopping, and then realizing my bus leaves in two hours...I don’t.

I am reminded of Chaucer in ‘Knight’s Tale’. To trudge: the slow, weary, depressing yet determined walk of a man who has nothing left in life except the impulse to simply soldier on. Amen brother.

I eventually reach flat ground, and supercharge myself up to about 2 miles an hour. I get to the bar. It is, of course, closed and abandoned. Except no! There is a lonely looking dude sitting outside, in front of a grill. There’s nothing on the grill, but I’m in no position to pry. Can he call me a taxi? Maybe. It is, at this point 4:30 in the morning. The walk has taken some time. He says the cab is coming. I sit in pain. I ask him to call again. Still coming. More pain. I get up to go. Cab shows up. I try not to kiss the cabbie. I succeed. The night, such as it was, is drawing to a close. I stumble/limp into my room at 5am. My alarm is set for 5:30am. So I do what only a true idiot, who has learned nothing that life has tried to teach him, would do. I go to sleep. Will be easy to get up in a half hour, right? And if I don’t, my roommate will surely wake me in plenty of time to catch the 6am bus, which he also is riding. Right?

I wake up at 6:20. Because Fate thinks she’s funny. I call my friend. Yes, she’s on the bus. Yes...it has left. Did my roommate try to wake me? Nope, that didn’t happen. Okay then. I won’t cry. Big boys don’t. Just gonna check out, hurry up to the bus stand, and see if the company will give me a discounted ticket. Of course, when I check out, my roommate also hasn’t paid his half of the room. So that’s fun. Who likes money anyway? I limp up to the bus stand. They will give me another ticket, for an extra 10,000 shillings. Swell. All this money was just driving me crazy anyway. I get on the bus, extremely excited about a 9 hour drive, by myself, on a hard seat, on a pretty awful road. Thankfully I can’t manage to stay conscious for more than about two hours of the whole trip. Luckily, when I arrive, I can sort of walk. I’m so excited by this fact that I waltz off the bus, completely forgetting the plastic bag with all my toiletries. Cuz who likes to be clean? Finally, against all odds, have fought through all manner of obstacles, I reach my hotel in Dar. I am ready to shower, change, weep for a while, then eat a horse, dead or alive. I get to the desk, ready to be presented with the keys to my sanity. What’s that you say? There’s no reservation. Didn’t my friend make one? Apparently not. It is at this point that I realize that I’ve lost my toiletries bag. It is at this point that I begin retracing all the decisions in my life that led me to this moment. It is, at this point, that I collapse in a corner, begin to suck on my thumb, and wait for someone else to make it better.

I had a day like this once. It was funnier, and less painful. I left New York in the morning in the van I needed to return. Got pulled over for speeding in New Jersey. As a result, I missed my train. Grand. Saw my parents, had lunch with a buddy. My parents drove me for the next train. It pulled out as we pulled in. Grander. My parents now drove me back to New Jersey (like breaking back into Alcatraz), and put me on the platform in plenty of time for the next train. It arrived, and I got on. And it promptly started going west. New York was east. Four hours or so later, I got off the subway in New York. A four hour journey had taken eleven. When I got off the subway, for the first (and hopefully last) time in my life, I bend down and kissed the New York sidewalk (if you have since kissed these lips, I apologize). That day was annoying, but it was funny. This day, in Tanzania, was painful. It was long and it was embarrassing. And after my thumb was removed from my mouth, after I was placed into a room, and after I had taken the most needed shower in the history of man, the first thing I thought of was all of you. Because while this day long, painful, and embarrassing, that does not mean it cannot be funny. All that’s needed to turn an awful experience into a funny story is a willing audience. So now, as always, I salute you, dear readers. Before, all I had was a sore bottom, no shampoo, and a series of regrets. Now, I’ve got a story.

Given Days

So...breasts. There are many of them in the world, they’re all around me, and they’re often out. Not like people go running around naked or anything like that. But nursing children has gotta be done, there ain’t no formula....and the women here are, as a rule, rather charitably endowed. Which means that during conversations, or even meetings, one of the most important skills for a Peace Corps Volunteer to cultivate is the ability to maintain eye contact...no matter what. It’s gotten to the point that Cirque du Soleil could be performing naked behind whoever I’m talking with. I might not be listening, but I’m looking you in the eye.

Legs, on the other hand, are a horse of a different color. Tanzanian women do not show their legs. Not their knees, not their upper calves. Doesn’t happen. And you just kind of get used to that. Then all of a sudden your boy is back in the United States, where the Bill of Rights specifically allows for the showing of as much upper thigh as possible. Not only is he back in the United States of Amazing, but he’s at a water park. Where people where bathing suits. And suddenly the eye contact skills come in handy once again. Not that I was ogling around ogling like a degenerate (maybe a little), but more that I had to fight the urge to tell half of the people I passed by that, for the sake of communal decency, they needed to cover up. Now. There were no Victorian bathing costumes handy, or I would have been slinging those babies like it was 1799.

Have been noticing a weird dichotomy in Tanzania. My work takes me into town fairly often. When I say town, I generally mean Mafinga or Iringa. Mafinga has maybe 50,000 people, Iringa maybe double that. Both have electricity, running water, TVs in most houses, a couple halfway decent restaurants, and a ton of bars. These people don’t grow corn. They buy it. Now most of the people who live in town either came from rural villages, or have family who still live there, or both. They travel vijijini (to the villages) pretty often, they know how to swing a jembe (hoe), and they respect the rural life, even though they don’t really want to live porini (in the wild). But not all. The weirdest thing has happened to me a few times. I’ve had Tanzanians, people who were born, bred, and have lived their entire lives in cities or bigger towns, absolutely bust a gut laughing when I tell them I live in a village. What do you use for electricity, they ask? I don’t have any, I say. How do you get your water, they ask? I carry it. Then they start laughing. They make jokes. How will you call us? Do you have cell service? Or do you have to climb a tree?

No. No trees involved. Thanks.

It IS funny. I get it. I come from a fairly developed nation, and the notion of me sitting outside, hand-scrubbing me civvies, still makes me laugh, even though I do it every Thursday. But this isn’t my country. It’s theirs. And the rural life is a foreign concept to them. So is the poverty. There’s this huge and growing disconnect between rural and urban Tanzania. 50% of rural households are designated as living in poverty, compared to 38% urban. 85% of the country’s poor live in rural areas. Health care is also far worse in the villages. So is education. So, oddly enough, are taxes. Rural Tanzanians pay a ton more taxes (for schools, water systems, road services, construction of village buildings, etc.), mostly because they are much easier to find then their cosmopolitan brethren. Tanzania had 8 million people 50 years ago. Now there are more than 40 million people, and a greater and greater number are moving into town every year (urban growth rate is 5%, rural is 2%). There was even a Tanzanian television show called Maisha Plus (Life...Plus) where they sent 10 urbanites off to live in the villages for a few weeks or months, and it was hilarious, because none of them had any idea what the hell to do (Paris, Nicole, anyone?). Development is good in a lot of ways. A good education, water, light, roads, none of these are bad things. But when I, who have lived here for 14 months, have seen and experienced a side of Tanzania that some Tanzanians are unwilling to acknowledge...I see a problem. When villagers who earn well under $2 a day are being governed exclusively by people with Landcruisers and refrigerators...I see a disconnect.

If you ever want an interesting look at a part of the world not all that far from me, read What is the What, by David Eggers. It’s written pamoja (together) with a Sudanese man, Valentino Achak Deng, who had to flee his country in the 80’s because of the widespread slaughter of Southern Sudanese by the North (this is, of course, ongoing, but we’ll set that aside for the moment). He paints a beautiful picture of rural Sudan, and he talks about an argument that gets right to the heart of the problem that a lot of development workers have. One rich man in his village buys a shiny, shiny, shiny, new bicycle. Nobody has ever seen anything this beautiful. Men are ready to divorce their wives and marry it (kidding). But then a debate breaks out in the community. The bicycle is covered in plastic wrap for transport. Many men in the village don’t want the owner to remove the plastic wrapping. Because then...the bicycle will get dirty. Whereas if we don’t remove the plastic...the plastic gets dirty.

This isn’t me being funny. There are plenty of bicycles I’ve seen in Tanzania with the plastic wrapping still on, where it’s been for years. It’s tied up somehow in this belief that if the thing itself is never tarnished, it’s still perfect. Even if it looks horrible. And I get it. I got a new pair of running shoes for Christmas, and I took a picture of them, before I ran them into the ground. And my villagers don’t have cameras. But where we get into trouble is when this desire to preserve the perfection of things overrides the desire to use them. Another story (this is third hand, so the details might be a bit sketch): an aid organization, in another country, gives a village school a set of colored pencils and a coloring book for each student. The organization comes back a couple years later, and one of the reps who was there for the last giveaway asks if the kids liked using the coloring sets. The head teacher of the school smiles, nods, and leads the aid worker to the storage room, where we find, of course, all the coloring sets sitting, unused, in their original wrappers. We are saving them for a special day, he says. For kesho (tomorrow), maybe? But kesho never comes.

Would like to close this post with a little bit about a particular Tanzanian phrase that always strikes me deeply. Two or three times, when I have heard a friend talk about the death of someone close to them, they have said, “Mungu alimpenda mno”, or “nilimpenda sana, lakini Mungu alimpenda zaidi”. “God loved him/her too much” or “I loved him very much, but God loved him more”. One of my very best friends said that to me a few days ago, before going to the funeral of one of her old friends. There is something beautiful, I think, about death being treated like that, like a going home. We only have so many years, so many days, so many hours. And then they’re gone. I’m not sure what I believe. I didn’t come here to learn about faith, and yet faith is what more and more of my writings are about. Likewise, I didn’t come here to find my purpose, and yet the question following me every day is: what will I do with my given days? This time, this job, this side of life, have meant more to me than I can ever express in these many meager words. But it’s halfway over. Every new day is another step down the hill, not up it. But down the hill towards what?