The Bus Stops at Every Baobab Tree: Dispatches from a Volunteer in Tanzania (Post # 9) (July 1999 - July 2000)

I feel like a bovine headed for the slaughterhouse. I’m on my way to Ng’iresi Village, about seven kilometers outside of Arusha on the slopes of Mt. Meru. Am I in a taxi? A Land Rover, perhaps? A bus you say? How about a daladala? No, not even a dreaded daladala. I’m standing with Nancy and my twelve fellow volunteers in the back of a pick-up truck. Like cattle, we’re stuck in-between metal bars criss-crossed over the top of the bed of the truck. This truck is currently speeding down the Nairobi-Moshi road, darting in and out of traffic. Exhaust fumes coat our throats and sinuses as we cling to the bars to avoid being thrown from the truck. Although this is a common form of transportation in Arusha, everyone, and I do mean everyone on the side of the road stops in mid-whatever-they’re-doing, and stares, open-mouthed, as if they’ve seen a ghost (more like fourteen ghosts).

We turn off the main highway and drive up the long dirt road to Mr. Loti’s farm. His stone house is high above a valley that stretches for miles out to the Serengeti and beyond. The yard surrounding his home is bursting with red and yellow flowering shrubs, lush green grass, flowering trees and a large gazebo with a vine-thatched roof set with coffee, tea and biscuits. It makes the perfect setting for an Agatha Christie mystery. Fourteen near-strangers, each lured to this charming locale on the pretense of a cultural tourism program when one by one we disappear until… But we are served tea and then everything goes to shit, manure that is. Loti takes us to see his biogas system.

The farm is quite remarkable because it is almost completely self-sufficient. He uses biogas (methane gas also sometimes called sewage gas), created by the decomposition of cow manure, to power his stove and all the electricity inside his house. Any manure left over is used as fertilizer. No pesticides contaminate the potatoes, maize, carrots and beans grown on his four acres of farmland. Loti removes the manhole-sized lid and proudly shows off his digester tank, the place where the cow pies and bacteria swim together for a few weeks to make beautiful methane gas. We dutifully gather round and peer inside. Happily, I can’t see or smell anything.

Biogas is an energy-efficient marvel for a farm with no TV, stereo, computer, hair dryer, refrigerator, toaster, washer or dryer. Loti’s setup provides just enough wattage for the stove, a few light bulbs and a lamp or two that creates a muted nightclub atmosphere inside his living room.

After touring Loti’s farm, we explore the village. All of the inhabitants of Ng’iresi village are farmers and members of the Wa-arusha tribe. The Wa-arushas are Maasai who’ve turned away from pastoralism to agriculture to support themselves. Most of the villagers live in dome-shaped thatched huts known as bomas. Little boys run through the dirt barefoot. Strings of laundry drying in the sun connect one boma to the next-door neighbor’s. Little girls carry small bundles on their heads, preparing for the heavier burdens that will come later as they mature and grow stronger. Palm fronds are everywhere, perfectly framing the village as if they’d each been carefully placed by movie grips to achieve the perfect semi-tropical African village movie scene.

Our first stop is to the traditional healer. Traditional healers or medicine men are serious business in Tanzania. In villages where the nearest Western-trained doctor may be hundreds of kilometers away, this is the doctor. But even when a conventional medical doctor is available, the pull of tradition often wins out. Many Tanzanians prefer a traditional healer to a medical doctor.

Using local herbs, trees and grasses to make their medicines, healers profess to have cures and treatments for everything from the common cold to uterine cancer to AIDS. The profession is handed down from father to son. Before the healer dies, he chooses one of his sons to take over for him and then initiates him into the inner sanctum of his secret remedies. One of this healer’s sons is here, watching, learning and wearing a T-shirt that says, "Be safe, sleep with a firefighter."

The healer speaks in Swahili. Our guide translates medical conditions and disease names as best he can. A huge group of children gather round, motionless as stone pillars, with wide-eyed wonderment. They’re watching the healer, not us, which speaks volumes about the respect and admiration a traditional healer commands.

The day is hot; the sun so intense it beats down like a hammer. It is directly overhead so shadows follow only in tiny slivers clinging to the heels of our shoes. Rivulets of sweat trickle down our faces as we sit in a circle around the healer, at his feet. The healer is oblivious to the heat. In fact, he seems to be on a special mission to raise his body temperature to the highest point possible. He’s dressed in a baby-doll pink wool long-sleeved sweater.  The shirt collar of a matching long-sleeved pink shirt pokes out from underneath. A pink and white-striped wool ski hat with a jaunty pink poof of a pompon completely envelopes his head, chin and neck. Both the sweater and ski hat appear to be woven with the type of prickly wool that feels like swarms of fire ants are crawling over your skin, bad enough when you skin is cool and dry, but in the heat? I don't even want to think about it. Defying the laws of nature, the healer manages to not break a sweat even though every few minutes he vigorously rattles tree branches and tufts of grass near our faces as his pink pompom flops about.

Kim, sitting next to me, is drenched in sweat. Her brown curly locks are glued to her forehead and cheeks. Her T-shirt clings to her back in big sweaty patches.

“Are you hot?” I whisper.

She looks at me as if I’m blind and maybe a little stupid since nothing could be more apparent.

“It’s winter here,” I say. “Winter!”

Kim who hails from Toronto, knows exactly what I’m saying. How in the world will we survive the summer? We’re turning into puddles of goo in short-sleeved cotton T-shirts. I have visions of desert cartoons of ragged men crawling through the sand in search of a drop of water.

“I’m sure we’ll get used to this,” she says, not sounding sure at all. 

The Bus Stops at Every Baobab Tree: Dispatches from a Volunteer in Tanzania (Post # 8) (July 1999 - July 2000)

Flip-Flops and Chapatis

  Nancy and I are going into town to buy a few necessities. We catch our usual daladala but the main road into town is closed so our daladala takes a side road. “Road” is a generous description for what more closely resembles a dirt path pitted with large rocks, concrete blocks and potholes large enough to be explored by spelunkers.  Four-wheel drive all-terrain vehicles, hummers or better yet army tanks should be the only vehicles allowed to navigate them, but daladalas are tough. We zigzag directly into the path of oncoming traffic to avoid potholes, but there is no danger of a head-on collision since the top speed is about five miles per hour.  But sometimes the van plunges into holes so deep that many times I am sure we’ll tip over.

           Even under the best of circumstances there is no such thing as a “quick trip” into town. First, you have to outfit yourself as if preparing for a long difficult journey, such as crossing the Saharan desert on foot. You need to slather yourself with sun protection. Next, you need to bring boiled tap water or be prepared to buy water in town. At nearly a dollar a bottle, it gets expensive. Proper clothing is essential; legs must be covered with pants or preferably long skirts so the largely Muslim population is not offended. Then of course there’s money. If you don’t bring enough you’re out of luck because you can’t just pop your ATM card into the cash machine since they don’t exist here.

I bring a lot of cash with me because you never know what you’re going to see that you need. “Big money” here is 5,000 Tanzanian Shillings, about $7. Passing a 10,000 note, the largest currency note, at places like the market or anywhere in our neighborhood is impossible. It’d be like trying to buy a gumball with a $100 bill.

           Like food and water flip-flops are essential. Everyone wears them from little children to mzee's ambling gingerly with their canes around the neighborhood. It's the only thing we wear at home and most of the people in our neighborhood wear them all the time, even in the winter. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the President of Tanzania wears them in the privacy of the Presidential Palace.

           When I first started wearing flip-flops I was indifferent to them. I appreciated the simplicity of flipping them on and off and they kept my feet clean but that was as far as it went. As time went on, their innate charms called out to me. I found myself walking by carts bursting with different styled pairs and longing for the ones I thought were "cute" like I used to do with $300 designer Italian shoes on Michigan Avenue when I lived in Chicago. I'm worried that I may become the Imelda Marcos of the flip-flop world. But, at roughly $1 a pair, at least it won’t require an enormous capital outlay.

     I approach the flip-flop salesman with his cart overflowing with flops of all sizes, colors and shapes. After searching through the piles for a right and a left that match, I find a lovely pair of pink and red, leopard print flops, and the bargaining begins.

                             “How much?” I ask.

                             “2,000” says the flip-flop vendor.     

“No, 700.” 

           Haggling over prices in the market is mandatory. As a foreigner, I’m usually 

treated to the very special welcome to Tanzania price, which is two to five times 

what an item “should” cost. I know that Nancy paid 700 shillings for a pair of flip-flops last week.  

                            “1,500.”

                            “No, 700” I reply in a firmer tone of voice.

                            “1,000.”

                             “No, 700.”

No response from the salesman. My response is to walk away. This is a sure-fire method of getting a favorable reply.

  “Sister, what you pay?” he says as I turn away. I’m not sure if all women are referred to as “sister” or if just foreign women are called that. Or maybe it’s just me and I suddenly have lots of brothers I didn’t know about living right here in Arusha.

    We finally settle on 800, but that isn’t the end. I hand him my 1,000-shilling note and he hands me 100 shillings in change. I hold out my hand and give him a look like “Nice try.” He grudgingly hands over another 100 shillings.

          I end up spending 6,800 shillings and feel like Donald Trump: 2,500 for a long-sleeved sweater ($3.25); 2,400 for 2 big Nestle Crunch bars (a 4-day chocolate supply); 1,000 for lunch (a falafel sandwich and cappuccino) and 800 for flip-flops.

          Nancy and I return home to a Chapti-making lesson given by Fatima in our kitchen. If you need to gain weight quickly eat chaptis. Ingredients:  a bag of white flour, 3 1/2 cups of water and salt. Mix together and roll out with flour. Add one teaspoon of oil to the top and spread it with a spoon. Roll into a ball and then into a croissant shape and add more oil. Roll out again until flat like a pancake and fry with lots of oil. Despite the fact that Fatima uses something called “Chicken Fry” oil that congeals to the consistency of dried Elmer’s glue, they’re sinfully delicious when eaten warm from the frying pan and impossible to resist. If I continue to eat these I'll be rolling home myself in a year, looking like a big doughy white chapati.

The Bus Stops at Every Baobab Tree: Dispatches from a Volunteer in Tanzania (Post # 7) (July 1999 - July 2000)

The Chicken Dinner That Never Was

We have divided up into teams of two, taking turns to cook dinners in the evenings for our group. Somehow, I got paired up with cheerless Andrew. Twice divorced with two grown children, he’d been an accountant for twenty-two years. At fifty-four he was the only volunteer older than me. I think Andrew forgot how to smile years ago.  He speaks deliberately as if each word he utters has been carefully weighed and considered ahead of time. His too-thin frame reminds me of Tibetan ascetics who live in the mountains surviving on berries, roots and goat milk—men who willingly choose their austere, cheerless existences and half-starve themselves to achieve a higher state of being. Let’s just say, Andrew is not the warm and fuzzy type.

After nearly a week of vegetarian meals—vegetables in tomato sauce, vegetables and rice in tomato sauce or vegetables and beans in tomato sauce—we are ready for some meat. I’d seen several butcher shops around town, but each had a fly-encrusted side of beef hanging in the open-air window, slowly roasting under the equatorial sun. Needless to say, we are not going to patronize those stores. That leaves just one choice—buying a live chicken from the market. Deciding to purchase a live chicken that will somehow be transformed into a meal by two people whose entire previous experience with chicken consists of pre-packaged boneless breasts, is a little like choosing to climb Mount Everest as your first mountain-climbing experience. But we are determined to bring home the bacon for our fellow volunteers.

Our plan is simple: go to the market, pick out a chicken and then have the chicken salesman do the dirty work by executing the poor little buzzard. Then we’ll take it home, pluck it, cut it up and cook it. Sounds simple right?

We make our way to the market. My job is to take photos of this event for posterity. Price is not a problem. You can purchase a live chicken for a couple dollars. We find the live chicken section of the market, but immediately reach our first hurdle. Exactly how does one choose the right chicken? Do you pry open its beak to look at…well…what? Do you lift its tail feathers and look into its chicken nether regions? Is that even allowed? I could just imagine the headline in the Arusha Times, the local English newspaper:  “American Volunteers Expelled From Country, Branded As Chicken Perverts” or “Poking Chicken Privates Lands Two Americans In The Pokey.”

Of course I’m having these debates in my own head. Andrew is taking this all very seriously—too seriously. I’m snapping pictures as if recording the first lunar space landing and he is staring morosely at chicken after chicken the salesman pulls out of the cages. The whole thing falls apart when the chicken salesman gets frustrated and finally waves us away because it is apparent that we can’t make a decision. Secretly, I’m relieved.

We make a vegetarian dinner of vegetables, rice and beans in tomato sauce.

After diner the evening talk turns to one of Tom’s favorite subjects.

“Did I tell you guys about the time I got giardia in Nicaragua? It was toooo-ta-ly awful. I had the shits for weeks. I lost thirty pounds…”

At least he waited until after dinner to share this. I leave and go upstairs to read.

The Bus Stops at Every Baobab Tree: Dispatches from a Volunteer in Tanzania (Post # 6) (July 1999 - July 2000)

 We live in a duplex, next to our landlords who live on one side and rent the other side to Visions in Action volunteers. Just outside our house is the public bathroom and neighborhood garbage pit. Garbage pickup is non-existent in this part of town so trash is burned and then dumped into the big hole in the ground, excavated for that purpose. Barefoot children run and play in the garbage pit alongside a pack of hungry dogs scavenging for scraps.

Just down the way from the rusted skeletal remains of two cars, which children climb on like jungle gyms, is the baridi duka. We named it the "cold shop" because once, early in the year, we were able to buy cold beer there. The name stuck despite the fact that cold beer is rarely available and usually, the only brand we can find that is cold is Safari, a weak watered-down brew with a strange aftertaste. We preferred Castle, Kilimanjaro or Tusker. The baridi duka always has customers waiting at the screened window for the serious woman who runs it. In the mornings, it's crowded with school children in golf course green uniforms buying pencils, notepads and mandazi, deep-fried donuts. I'm usually there for fresh eggs and I often see customers come up to the window to buy one or two cigarettes at a time or bring an empty Coca-Cola glass bottle to be filled with kerosene.

            Theresa and I duck our heads as we walk through the red gate into the dirt yard of our home. The electricity is out. I know this when I see Fatima outside the house bent over a boiling pot above a wood fire. She straightens and her small mouth turns upward into the vaguest of smiles.

"Hello JoAnn and Teresa," she greets us.

She’s one of the most solemn eighteen-year-olds I’ve ever met. Her sand-toned skin and straight nose are from her Indian father. Fatima’s dainty features bear no resemblance to her Tanzanian mother, a large boisterous woman who is frankly intimidating, at times. The neighborhood children call her "mama mchafu" or rough woman. Diane, a volunteer from California, respectfully calls her Mama Abbas, which sounds a little like “Mama Bossy” if said quickly. Abbas is the first name of her oldest son, which is the customary way to address mothers in Tanzania.

Mixed marriages of any kind are rare, but a marriage between an Indian and Tanzanian is extraordinary. Typically, these groups don't associate other than by necessity. Indians own most of the businesses in town, the grocery and liquor stores, video and electronics stores, and restaurants. Tanzanians and tourists are their customers.

This is not only a mixed race family, but a mixed religion family. Mama Abbas is Catholic but Fatima chooses to follow Islam, her father’s religion. I often see Fatima sitting in her Muslim robes below crucifixes and pictures of Jesus hanging on the living room walls.

The oldest son, Abbas, is here for the winter school break but will be leaving soon to start his second year as an Engineering student at the University of Dar es Salaam. Fatima has just finished high school. She must take a year off and will spend it working in a bakery in town. She hopes to go to medical school next year to become a gynecologist. Azim is the sulky sixteen-year-old bad boy of the family, the kind who mouths off and gets into trouble all the time. Azim is periodically assigned the labor-intensive task of milking their five cows at five a.m. every morning and every evening at dusk. Sameer, the baby at twelve, is first in his class in school getting all A's, except for a C in Swahili, a subject he refuses to study.

Each side of the house has four large bedrooms and three bathrooms. We are living in luxury compared to the average Tanzanian, but our house reminds me of an above-ground bomb shelter.  The inside is floor-to-ceiling concrete. There is no carpet, tile, rugs or linoleum; everything is gunmetal gray except for the walls, which are painted white. There are no shower stalls in the bathrooms, just shower heads and an area next to the toilet with a drain in the floor. There is a water heater so we can take hot showers, provided the electricity doesn't go out. But since the electricity goes out all the time, anywhere from a couple minutes to days at a time, cold showers are common. All of the windows have burglar bars but no screens, which I can’t understand since malaria is an enormous problem. 

We have a refrigerator, a small stove with two burners and a microwave-sized oven. When the electricity is out we use kerosene stoves. A twelve-foot high fence surrounds the house to prevent burglary. The yard is dirt surrounded by bougainvillea bushes.  Chickens and stray cats are running everywhere. The upstairs balcony where I spend many hours reading and offers a view of Mount Meru, Africa’s fifth tallest mountain at just under 15,000 feet.

Theresa and I walk into the kitchen and tell everyone about trying cassava.

“Watch out for that stuff, its poison,” said Tom.

“Poison, what do you mean?” asked Theresa.

“It’s loaded with cyanide,” said Tom. “It builds up in your system and the next thing you know you’re paralyzed.  Konzo disease. Usually hits women and kids. Saw it in Mozambique. One minute they’re fine, the next, they can’t stand. Have to hobble around on sticks with their legs dragging behind them, poor useless cripples for the rest of their lives.”

Cassava is a root vegetable and staple for 500 million people. Called yucca or manioc in other parts of the world, it can be dangerous if not properly processed through boiling, grating, pounding into mash, fermenting and sun-drying, which removes the toxic cyanide. Konzo disease, which does tend to strike women and children more than men, usually is found only in rural, famine or drought-stricken parts of Tanzania, Zaire and Mozambique where the processing time is reduced so the cyanide isn’t properly removed. But, in the town of Arusha, there is little threat that the cassava hasn’t been processed correctly. Unfortunately, I didn’t know any of this standing in the kitchen listening to our resident doomsday expert.  I didn’t have cassava again for the rest of the year.   

The Bus Stops at Every Baobab Tree: Dispatches from a Volunteer in Tanzania (Post # 5) (July 1999 - July 2000)

          To describe a daladala with mere words is really not possible. Sardine can on four wheels with an engine is a feeble description; it doesn’t bring to life any of the subtleties of the actual daladala experience. In a minivan where, at most, nine people including the driver would be safely and comfortably seat-belted in the U.S., there are eighteen people jam-packed into our van with no seat belts in sight. I’m “seated” next to the sliding door that is sometimes closed at high speeds, but often remains open as the daladala doorman (it’s always a he) hangs out and searches for more passengers. When he spots a prospective customer, he raps on the roof for the driver to stop.  My nostrils are assaulted by the smell of body odor—deodorant is a luxury that most people can’t afford. The vehicle repeatedly careens forward and then stops suddenly. I have no more than four inches of the edge of a seat and four men are draped over and around me, each of us hanging on for dear life.  All of the passengers move in a synchronous forward and backwards lurch—a spasmodic, abstract dance.

Our daladala heads north out of town on the Nairobi-Moshi road, so-named because it is the only road leading to Nairobi to the north and Moshi to the east.  The driver slows down only for the few well-placed, speed bumps, which are the only things preventing daily mass bloodshed on the roads. Depending upon the number of stops, which are unlimited and unpredictable if there's a willing customer with 100 shillings (13 cents), we reach Sakina in about fifteen minutes. There is the landmark pointed out by Nancy on our first day in Arusha: a large Coca-Cola billboard sign with "Sakina” in black bold letters on the bottom. I don’t know what “Sakina” means, I only know that this is our stop.

Sakina, my neighborhood, is behind the Azimio compound where men working for the army and their families live for free. There is no driving inside the Azimio compound but then there are no roads or car owners either. The compound is walled-off and the gate is locked at 10 p.m. every night. The quickest route to our house is to go through the center of Azimio. 

Teresa and I walk up a rocky, uneven dirt path and within moments we hear a childish chorus of "Mzungu" or "Good morning teacher" that doesn’t stop. As we walk, I can’t help but notice that the lower third of my body is coated in dust—a silky sand-colored grime the consistency of sifted flour.

“Mzungu, Mzungu, Mzungu…” The chanting is incessant. Technically, it means “European person” in Swahili, nothing derogatory or racist, but it bothers me.

 Theresa seems to be oblivious to it. She smiles, her brown eyes warm and friendly and says a hearty “Jambo” (hello) to everyone we meet. Theresa is the kind of person I’ve always wanted to be—calm, thoughtful, and patient. She is solid goodness---no hidden agendas, no skeletons in the closet, and completely non-judgmental. Pretty much the opposite of me.

I’d met Theresa at O’Hare airport just before we caught our first flight to London and then to Dar es Salaam. Somehow, Theresa recognized me from the blurred black and white photos of the thirteen Tanzania 1999 Visions in Action Volunteers sent to us a few weeks ago. As we sat in the departure lounge, just minutes away from boarding, the realization that I was about to set off on a yearlong adventure caused me to regress. For I moment, I was back in grade school. I had a sudden childish impulse to ask her "Do you want to be my friend?"

The lack of indoor plumbing brings life in Tanzania to the great outdoors. Mothers are doubled over bathing their children in plastic washtubs; naked toddlers squat into metal pots that double as chamber pots; grown men brush their teeth spitting the chalky froth onto the dirt pathway just in front of us; others stroll to the public bathhouse in broad daylight, clad only in a towel. Women must bath in the dead of night since I never caught sight of them near the bathhouse.

                A child happily splashing in the water freezes at the sight of us. Imagine a stone-age tribe from Papua New Guinea, dressed in loin clothes, carrying spears and covered in war paint bursting into your living room one evening and you get the idea. The mother points to us and says "Mzungu" as we pass.

Homes appear haphazardly at odd angles, like a giant Monopoly board that has been bumped. But we are a very long way from Park Place and Boardwalk.  Most are nothing more than one or two room concrete-blocked sheds or a shack consisting of rotting boards held together with rusty nails and dried mud, roofed with a flat sheet of corrugated tin.  Like flags, curtains flutter in each doorway, providing a thin veneer of privacy, only a stone's throw from the neighbor's curtained door waving back across the path.  Mother hens with their chicks in tow, like a toy train run back and forth, are late for mysterious barnyard appointments. Bicyclists ringing their bells whip by and red-cloaked Maasai herding goats or cows and using their spears as walking sticks have the right of way. The only thing to do is to step off the path, hopefully in time, and wait until they pass.

The path opens up into small plots of maize and beans tended by women and teenaged girls. The women brought the water from the stream some distance away in jerry cans weighing twenty kilos, balanced perfectly on their heads, without spilling a drop.

Little dukas selling everything from eggs to kerosene to beer are everywhere. Old men sit on benches outside these dukas leaning on their canes. I will see them in the mornings when I leave for work and they will still be there in the afternoons when I return. And there are young men with them, also sitting, doing nothing. Women’s lib hasn’t quite caught up with the economic realities of the developing world. Women are responsible not just for housework, raising the children and cooking the meals, but also fetching the water and firewood for cooking, cultivating the crops and selling vegetables to earn a few extra shillings.

We’ve been walking along the dirt path now for ten minutes when we come to the cassava lady who is always just outside the gate leading out of Azimio and into our neighborhood of Sakina. A wizened woman shriveled inside her bright yellow and pink print dress with a green scarf covering her head, sits on a tiny bench. In front of her is a pot that looks like a wok, sizzling with deep-frying cassava, cut into pieces the size of large carrots. We’re feeling adventurous so we each buy a piece. The woman gives us a huge, nearly toothless smile. Neighborhood men and boys gather round and stare. One of the men says something to the cassava woman and they laugh. Arusha is a tourist town because it’s the jumping-off point for safaris to the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater, but tourists don’t go to Azimio or Sakina. We are probably the first foreigners who have purchased cassava from her.

“This tastes like a French fry,” says Theresa after it has cooled enough to take a bite.

I agree but thinking of French fries makes me homesick.

We pass through a gate the size of a door onto the crest of a small hill. To the southwest, far beyond the outskirts of Arusha, are bell-shaped bluish hills rolling away into the African plains. I like to imagine I'm looking right into the heart of the Serengeti and somewhere out there is a lion on the hunt or a hyena tending her cubs.

The Bus Stops at Every Baobab Tree: Dispatches from a Volunteer in Tanzania (Post # 4) (July 1999 - July 2000)

           Taking a walk down the streets of Arusha feels like entering a den of thieves. Think of the scene in Casablanca where a pickpocket is lifting a man's wallet as he’s warning the unsuspecting victim about would-be thieves. Nancy gathered us together last night for a safety talk.  The general thrust of her talk was simple.  Thieves target foreigners because even the “poorest,” Africa-on-a-shoestring twenty-something traveler has more money in his or her pockets than the average Tanzanian earns in a year.  Nancy warned us that they can slit open your pack with a razor blade, steal your money and passport and have caught the next flight to Ouagadougou before you’ve looked down and discovered your loss. Nancy advised us to wear our backpacks in front of our bodies, with our arms wrapped around them. I'm more than willing to look like a paranoid tourist to avoid becoming a victim of a crime (although this quickly wears off in the coming weeks when I realize Nancy exaggerated just a bit.)

Arusha has a few shops such as we know them at home, most located on the main drag, Sokoine, named after a former Prime Minister of Tanzania who died in a car accident in 1984 under mysterious circumstances. I never learned the details, but this little fact stuck with me the entire year and always made my trip down this street seem slightly more thrilling than all the rest.

            The shops range in size from a generous walk-in closet to about half the size of a typical gas-n-go mart. Theresa, a teacher from Chicago and I find an iron at one of these stores and then, armed with our buying guide, decide to head to the central vegetable and fruit market

“The market,” four-square blocks around, is where the real shopping is done in Arusha.  Some vendors have stalls but most squat on the ground with their produce in front of them. Every pile of green peppers, tomatoes, carrots, pineapples and mangoes screams, “I’m mouth-watering fresh, organic, bursting with flavor and vitamins, not to mention cheap.  Buy me!”  It puts to shame our waxy, unripe, chemical-laden produce that’s picked well before it’s ripe. 

I buy an avocado, huge and guacamole-ready, and a steal at thirteen cents.  After I hand the seller the money, the boy next to her offers me a plastic bag.  Thinking I’m in a giant outdoor supermarket and given my experiences as a North American, naturally I assume the bag is free.  I quickly learned that nothing is free here.  The kid chases us down the street asking for money.  I think he’s trying to charge me for the avocado again so I refuse to pay him.

After we lose the plastic bag kid, something I felt terrible about when I learn that the bags are fifty shillings or about eight cents each (but not on the buying guide) we decide not to push our luck and return home.

This is no simple task since, like children allowed to cross the street for the first time without an adult, we are attempting to take a daladala on our own, without Nancy’s help. We are only a couple blocks from the daladala stand but have no way of knowing this. We have a map with only the main streets named and I have no sense of direction in this new town. Every side street looks identical—a few splashes of red Coca-Cola signs on dark ramshackle wood storefronts leaning against two-story buildings. Everywhere are rectangular institutional gray concrete buildings with barred windows, the type that blighted towns across America in the fifties and sixties, all covered in a thick layer of dust.

A woman selling bananas comes to our rescue. She carries bunches of them in a sombrero-sized woven basket on her head, perfectly balanced. Like Carmen Miranda on a catwalk, the market ladies gracefully glide over the muddy, potholed streets of Arusha. She guides us through the maze of unnamed streets for several minutes, chattering non-stop in Swahili, oblivious to the kilos of produce on her head and the blank looks on our faces. Since Theresa and I know the same ten words of Swahili, numbers one through ten, not the most helpful words to know in times like these, I’m not quite sure how we manage to communicate that we are lost and are looking for a daladala to Sakina. At least we are able to express our thanks by buying some bananas from her. 

The Bus Stops at Every Baobab Tree: Dispatches from a Volunteer in Tanzania (Post # 3)

“I’ve got orientation schedules, an Arusha guide and price lists for each of you,” says Nancy who passes out the papers to all thirteen volunteers. I have a feeling Nancy changed the subject on purpose. Some of the volunteers, not me mind you, are starting to look a little panicked.

The Arusha guide, a small booklet called “Little Big Town, your guide to people, places, events in Arusha,” is full of advertisements from town businesses and services—the Mambo Jazz Café, car hires to Nairobi, Kase bookstores, the Discovery club sports bar, Dolly’s Patisserie and “Subscribe today to TV Burudani!”  A list of restaurants is included, offering a variety to revile that available at home: French, Indian, Italian, Chinese and Ethiopian. It also contains a map and guide to current entertainment like disco dancing at the Colobus Club, Step Reebok at the Noble Fitness Centre, and French movies at Le Jacaranda hotel.  The guide promises that Arusha, with a population of 250,000, is quickly becoming “cosmopolitan.”

Cosmopolitan? Discos? French restaurants? Pay TV? This isn’t the volunteer experience I’d expected. It isn’t the life I’d be living in either. This is the Arusha that caters to the wealthy ex-pats working for well-funded NGO’s (non-governmental organizations) and the United Nations employees working at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, not the low-budget Visions in Action volunteers who plan to live on a $50 a month stipend.

“Price lists? What is this for?” I ask looking at the “Buying Guide for the Markets” sheet that Nancy handed out.

“This is how much you’re supposed to pay for stuff at the market,” she says. “It will help with your bargaining.”

The list has prices and the Swahili words for dozens of fruits and vegetables. For example, “Green pepper is 50 to 100 shillings per pile of three.” At 800 shillings to the dollar that comes out to less than three cents per pepper. “Pineapples 500-700 shillings each; passion fruit 200-400 shillings per kilo; mangoes 50-100 shillings each; papaya 200-300 shillings each; eggplant 150 shillings for three, and so on. The raspberries alone warrant a warning: “raspberries 400 shillings per bag, available from the raspberry man, but don’t pay more!!”

 Two exclamation points!! Why? Is the raspberry man an infamous rip-off artist trying to squeeze an extra 50 or 100 shillings out of unsuspecting foreigners who don't possess the official Buying Guide for the Markets? I’ll have to keep my eye out for this guy.

According to the Orientation schedule, every spare second over the next month is programmed: Swahili lessons—four hours per day; lectures on safety, health, the environment, education, history and current events every afternoon. Some days, field trips are scheduled to places with names like “Mkombozi,” “Marangu” and “N’giretsi;” During the final week each of us will have job interviews for the volunteer placements we hope to land, and home-stays with a Tanzanian family.  I get that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, the same as when I schedule my annual dental and gynecological check-ups. I know it’s good for me, I know it’s something I have to do, I may learn some important information, but if I could bribe God or sell my soul to the devil to get out of it I would in an instant.

Eventually, we each drift to our rooms. It has been a long day, starting with the ten-hour bus ride from Dar es Salaam to Arusha.

My last lucid thought after I give up trying to read, before falling into a fitful but dreamless sleep, is that I’ve been declared insane, triggered by an anti-malarial medication overdose. I'm driven off in a white ice cream truck to the institutional grounds in a straitjacket, where I spend the rest of my days in a heavily medicated state. 

***

It’s eight a.m. Monday morning (four p.m. in Milwaukee my mind automatically calculates). We are in a room above the main post office, across from the Clock Tower at the center of town for our first of twenty Swahili lessons that we’ll have over the next month.

Swahili is the most widely spoken language in Africa, with 50 million speakers in ten countries, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, eastern and northern Zaire, northern Malawi, northern Mozambique, northern Zambia and the Somali Republic. After World War I the League of Nations made Tanzania, then called Tanganyika, into a British mandate. As part of this legacy, English is taught in Tanzania schools.  But because the vast majority of Tanzanians receive no education beyond primary school, they speak only Swahili. In other words, if I want to eat or get a ride on local transportation and buy food in the markets, I need to learn at least the basics of Swahili.

Mr. Kimaro, a short, slight, be-speckled man in his fifties, with a smile that never leaves his face, has been teaching Swahili to foreigners for years—adult foreigners. Which confuses me since this morning around 10 a.m. as the jet lag began creeping in and our faces sagged into a numbed daze, he has us stand up next to our desks that are arranged in a square facing the blackboard, and sing a child’s song to learn our numbers, “moja, mbili, tatu, nne, tano, sita, saba, nane, tisa, kumi.” Kimaro’s eyes dance in delight at our correct pronunciation of the numbers. Swahili is easy to learn for Westerners except for the double consonants he warns us. We sing our new numbers, over and over, until they began to sink in.

I try to imagine a friend from home opening the door to this scene, fourteen Caucasian men and women and the leader of this curious group, one thin Tanzanian, all of us singing, clapping, tapping and bobbing our heads like Stevie Wonder, with unintelligible sounds emanating from our mouths and goofy smiles on our faces. I can only suppose they would have thought the worst; that in just three days we’d fallen prey to the Tanzanian equivalent of the Hare Krishna’s and are in serious need of deprogramming.