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. 

The Bus Stops at Every Baobab Tree: Dispatches from a Volunteer in Tanzania (Post # 2)

          Six months ago, I’d decided it was now or never. And now that now is here, I suddenly wish I’d chosen never. Of course I don’t have to stay. It’s not like I’ve been conscripted into the French Foreign Legion. If I quit, I wouldn’t have to move to Canada and assume a new identity.  “Volunteer” means voluntary, right?

I’ve been in Tanzania for one day and I’m already losing it.  Maybe it’s the anti-malarial medication? I’ve been taking it for three weeks now. According to Tom, a volunteer headed to Mwanza, that’s plenty of time for the side effects to set in.

“She had this crazed look on her face,” said Tom, earlier tonight after dinner about someone who had taken the same brand I’m taking. “Half the time she couldn’t even remember her name. Then one day she tried to slit her wrists with a panga.  They had to strap her to a gurney and airlift her to Europe. I wouldn’t take that crap if you paid me a million dollars. It’s tooootally poison.” Tom had spent time working with refugees in Mozambique a few years ago. The poor woman he was referring to was one the development workers at his camp.

 Tom held court from a woven mat on the living room floor with his arm around his wife Katrina.  They looked like two al dente strands of spaghetti curled up together cross-legged on the floor. The two of them together couldn’t weigh more than one of my thighs. From the looks of it, they’d each suffered more than a few bouts of tropical disease.

 “But surely that has to be an isolated incident,” I said, thinking that I hadn’t heard the words “side” or “effect” and certainly not the word “poison” come out of my doctor’s mouth when she’d prescribed a year’s worth of anti-malarial medication to the tune of $400.

“Then there was Charlie in Zimbabwe,” Tom continued, ignoring my question. “It started with nightmares, and then he turned paranoid.  Started hearing voices. After a while all he could do was lay in his cot, balled up under his mosquito net, and blubber like a baby.”

Tom explained to everyone that he and Katrina thought of this as their life—“this” being development work. For them it was not just a career, but a lifestyle. They’d been in Zanzibar for the last month taking intensive Swahili lessons.  At the Dar es Salaam airport, they sauntered up to us, having just gotten off the ferry from Zanzibar.  In the coastal breeze their jeans lapped fluidly over their thin hips. Despite only a month in the country, they'd already assumed the air of bored ex-pats. They were so relaxed and laid back it was as if they had never had a worry or responsibility to speak of in their lives. At first, I attributed their utter mellowness to their tropical island stay, but as I got to know them over the next few weeks, I discovered this was how they always were.

“But what if you get malaria?” I asked Tom.

“I’ve already had it a couple times,” he said with a hint of pride in his voice.  “First time was the worst. Mozambique, 1998. Three weeks of night sweats and puking my guts out. I lost twenty-five pounds. But the severity of the symptoms lessens each time you get it.  It won’t be bad at all the next time around,” he said smiling. He was positively gleeful.

The next time?  If he lost another five pounds he’d no longer be visible to the naked eye.

“Well I’m taking it, I’m not worried,” said Kim. Kim, a twenty-five-year old with freckled Irish looks, is a chemical engineer from Toronto. I’d never met any actual chemists before Kim.  I’ve always put scientists on an Olympian pedestal since chemistry in my life has only meant an abysmal four-credit C-, bringing my G.P.A. down to the atomic weight of zero. Kim seems far from the stereotypical pocket-protector nerd that can pas de deux her way around the periodic table, but can’t manage a conversation with the mailman about the weather. If cool Madame Curie was taking anti-malarial medicine, that was good enough for me.

The Bus Stops at Every Baobab Tree: Dispatches from a Volunteer in Tanzania (Post # 1)

Hello everyone, I was a volunteer in Arusha, Tanzania from July 1999 to July 2000. I kept a journal while I was there, which I'm going to share in excerpts on my blog. Thanks for visiting!

Chapter One: My Lips Are Turning Blue

               My last weekend in the United States, I went hiking in the Colorado Rockies over the Fourth of July holiday.  I’d stayed in a tent for three nights, did not shower, slept on the ground, endured dozens of mosquito bites and hiked for hours each day at elevations ranging from 7,000 to 11,000 feet, all while carrying thirty-five pounds of gear on my back.  Some people might consider that “roughing it.”  I’d considered that roughing it.  That is, until I spent my first night in Arusha, Tanzania.

The electricity has been out for several hours. I’m wearing nearly all of the clothes I’ve brought for the next year, and I’m doing my best to cover my body with a British Airways blanket, which is about the size of a generous hand towel. I’m wearing a “coal miner” headlamp strapped to my head because the candlelight coming from the candles stuck in Coca Cola and vinegar bottles on the table next to my bed, give off less light than a firefly at one hundred paces.  I’m attempting to read, but can’t because my hands are shaking uncontrollably and I can no longer turn the pages of my book.

Coming from the frigid hinterlands of Wisconsin, I recognized these symptoms as the first stages of hypothermia.  Alright, I don’t really come from the “hinterlands” but my hometown of Milwaukee does get very cold in the winter.  Unless I had taken the wrong flight yesterday, I shouldn’t be anywhere near the frigid hinterlands of anywhere.  Arusha is within spitting distance of the equator, but here I am freezing my rear end off.  How is this possible?

Tripled up in a bedroom with Sally and Nancy for the next two weeks, I examine my temporary roommates.  They look warm, comfortable and snug in their sleeping bags. They are having no problems reading their books.

“JoAnn, didn’t you get my e-mail last week?” Nancy asks.  “Hey, your lips are turning blue.”

Nancy, our volunteer guru for the next month, was the coordinator hired by Visions in Action, the volunteer organization that has sent me here, along with twelve other volunteers. Her job is to guide us through orientation and job interviews until she returns to the U.S., the apron strings are cut and we start our real volunteer work.

“What e-mail?” I ask.

“I told everyone to bring their sleeping bags since it drops down to the fifties at night,” Nancy replies.

That is the fifties with no central heat, storm windows or R-40 insulation. Tanzania is south of the equator so it is the dead of winter.  Arusha town sits at just over 3,700 feet elevation. This might have had something to do with the low temperatures, but the equator is right over that hill.  What is six degrees south in a potential longitudinal range of three hundred sixty?  Equator is supposed to mean sweltering tropics; Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn sweating buckets on the African Queen, but nonetheless, despite all the humidity and perspiration-stained clothing, managing to fall madly in love.

When I’d met Nancy earlier that day just outside of customs at the Dar es Salaam airport, I loved her honeyed Georgia drawl, but noted immediately that she didn’t look a day over nineteen.  (She is actually twenty-three.)  She sports shoulder-length dreadlocks and has a nose ring.

Sally, a twenty-two year old volunteer from California with waist-length pale blond straight hair, has classic, California girl looks and with her athletic build she gives the impression of having just stepped off a surfboard after landing a nine-foot swell off Half Moon Bay.

Sally is one of four volunteers in our group headed to Moshi town, about fifty miles to the east of Arusha, after our month-long orientation.  I am one of five volunteers assigned to stay in Arusha. The house we are in will be my home for the next year. The other four volunteers in our group face a two-day bus ride to their final destination, Mwanza, a malaria-cursed port city on Lake Victoria in northwestern Tanzania.

Moshi is known as the “gateway to the roof of Africa” because supposedly it is at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro. I say supposedly because you cannot actually see Kilimanjaro from Moshi except on rare and special occasions. Kilimanjaro is very high strung and moody and only shows herself during certain times of the year. When one happens to be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of her, usually it is only a partial view of the top, the base or the middle, rarely the whole. But even an incomplete look at Africa’s highest mountain is breathtaking. I saw Kili earlier today, on our ten-hour bus ride from Dar. All of a sudden there she was on the blue horizon; the flat, snow-covered top seemed to float on the gray clouds that completely obscured the base of the mountain. I took this as a good omen for the next year.

Year. A year is a very long time. I suddenly wonder if I will make it? In fact, I am beginning to wonder what I’m doing here in the first place. I don’t know a soul on the entire continent, I’m freezing to death and I’m sharing a room with two women nearly half my age. And, did I mention I am sharing a room? 

Mother Natures’ Lesser Half

I wrote this while I was still living in Milwaukee. I feel beyond fortune to live within driving distance of this gorgeous vista taken just last week from Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park.  Hope you enjoy this tongue-in-cheek essay about National Parks, which are near and dear to my heart.

In planning this year’s summer vacation it has come squarely to my attention that there are serious inequities in this country.  I’m not speaking of gender bias, racial discrimination or the widening economic and social gaps between the rich and poor.  Yes, these are deeply troubling, but a simple glance at a U.S. map will reveal injustices of far greater latitude and longitude.

It seems as though certain states have been inordinately blessed with the riches of nature, while others lag far behind like the ugly duckling stepsister, wobbling Quasimodo-like through life, trying to get by on personality alone.  From sea to shining sea, Mother Nature’s partiality and favoritism is sorely evident.

According to Wikipedia (the source for all knowledge) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_parks_of_the_United_States there are 59 national parks in the United States.  But shockingly, only twenty-seven states and two U.S. territories share in this fruit of plenty.  Simple arithmetic would seem to dictate that one park be assigned to each state, and, with nine left over, divide them equally among the territories (Puerto Rico has no National Parks!) Among the twenty-five have-not states, given the cold shoulder by Mother Nature, many must make do with inferior millenniums-after-the-fact attempts to rectify these gross disparities, through man-made consolation prizes in the form of national military parks, battlefields, historic sites and monuments.

For example, Connecticut, along with a half dozen other states, shares the Appalachian National Scenic Trail and also shares a National Heritage Corridor (whatever that is) with Massachusetts.  But, unfortunate Connecticut can claim only one place of pilgrimage of its own:  the Weir Farm, a National Historic Site designated in 1990 for one of America’s earliest impressionist painters who summered there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  But is the farm of a dead artist really supposed to keep Connecticut happy in comparison to say, the Grand Canyon, or the mystical vision of the granite face of California’s Half Dome?

Then again, perhaps Johnny-come-lately Connecticut should count itself fortunate compared to Delaware, the only state in the union that has absolutely nothing!  Delaware is no doubt extraordinarily embarrassed, as it should be.  On the other hand, everyone knows that Mother Nature created Delaware as the perfect location for businesses to incorporate.  Too much beauty and splendor or history in that state, and the next thing you know the stock market is taking a nose-dive. But even among the halves, some must make do with tiny slices of the pie of National Park glory.  Should we begrudge Idaho their small sliver of Yellowstone, America’s first national park, when that state must share it with Montana and Wyoming?  This hardly seems fair given that Montana has splendorous Glacier National Park all to itself and Wyoming shares its magnificent Grand Teton National Park with no one.

But exactly what kind of behind the scenes pork barrel politicking went on when Mother Nature decided that California would get nine national parks, Alaska eight, and Utah five, while Illinois must be satisfied with an odd historic trail or two and the Lincoln Home National Historic Site, and only then because of an accident of birth? Likewise, can Kansas in America’s heartland truly be contented with its amber waves of grain and its Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve when it knows deep down inside that this could never come close to National Park material?

I ask you, is this fair? What was Mother Nature thinking?

New York no doubt feels fortunate to have its gorgeous Fire Island National Seashore, as does my home state Wisconsin with our Apostle Islands National Lakeshore on Lake Superior. And yet, I can’t help but feel a certain sense of inferiority since for reasons unknown, these shores weren’t quite good enough to achieve National Park status.

Don’t cry for us California and Alaska.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  I’ve decided to forego this year’s summer road trip.  Instead I’m going to spend my vacation in the safety and comfort of my lovely Milwaukee backyard while I enjoy the bustling wildlife antics of the common gray squirrel and the breathtaking views of the newly built addition to my neighbor’s bungalow.

Mombasa or Bust: Part II

With two hours to kill, Katie and I walked in circles around the courtyard of the Tanga bus station, since there was nothing else to do. We later learned from a Tanzanian passenger that the bus station vendors had nicknamed each of us. Katie, a Canadian of Irish heritage with curly hair and freckles, was named “beer girl” presumably for a Guinness beer T-shirt she wore. My shoulder-length blonde hair was clipped into a ponytail and I was dressed modestly in an ankle-length skirt and a long-sleeved blouse, but was mysteriously branded "woman of the night."

We boarded the second bus at the appointed departure time. The bus remained motionless for an hour and forty minutes.  During that time, vendors pressed against the bus, shouting into the open windows in the hopes of making a few shillings. I had a choice almost as varied as the selection offered by my favorite grocer back home, without moving from my seat: peanuts, cashews, hardboiled eggs, vegetable or beef samosas, soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, mangos, bananas, oranges, combs, mirrors, and hair curlers.

But the strangest item of all was a single tan-colored brassiere tacked to a board by its strap, hanging limp like a dead fish among the other sundry items for sale. Did this aspiring undergarment salesman really hope to make a sale of a bra through a bus window?

“Sir, is that a B or a C cup?”

The bus finally left and stopped a minute later at the petrol station. After fueling, we returned to the bus station. After thirty minutes we left again and drove to a private residence in town. This seemed to be a normal layover since all of the passengers immediately exited to stretch and have a smoke. There, we waited for another thirty minutes while one of the passengers packed his luggage. We drove from the passenger’s home and returned directly to the Tanga bus station. I was now feeling as though I’d entered the Tanga, Tanzania episode of The Twilight Zone. 

              We finally left the station for a third time and stopped at a nearby ice cream shop to pick up more passengers where an American and Dutch man boarded. As the American passed us, his first words were, "Are you enjoying this never-ending nightmare?"  They’d had a far worse journey having left Dar-es-Salaam early that morning, but along the way their bus had broken down.  They’d been stranded on the roadside for hours without food or water. I gave them my cashews, which they immediately devoured.

Finally, on our way once again, our second “express, non-stop” bus to Mombasa stopped repeatedly at tiny villages along the way. No one boarded, but at every village the driver yelled out to ask if so-and-so friend of his was there. At each village, a chorus of voices rang out in unison, “Hayupo” (Swahili for he's not here) and we continued on.

Other than kerosene lamps and flickering candlelight, there was nothing to see in the night so dark it was like traveling through a black hole. I dozed at times, but deep sleep eluded me. Anyone who has traveled in East Africa knows that the condition of the roads is frightful because they are pockmarked every few meters with potholes the size of small craters. And, because it's so dark, the driver often misses them.                 There's nothing like going 80 k.p.h. over a massive pothole. Many times during the ride, I was jolted from a light slumber as I hurled to the ceiling and then plummeted back down into my seat. Under the circumstances, I think I should have been entitled to a fifty percent refund on my bus fare since I was out of my seat, for at least half the trip, but I didn’t think it would be worth the time for a four-dollar reimbursement.

              Just before the border crossing into Kenya, a torrential rain broke.  The parched ground was suddenly flooded with an inch of water. The Kenyan customs officer, an underpaid, bored bureaucrat in a crisp white uniform, chose this opportune time to search our luggage. All of the passengers on the bus dragged or carried their luggage, fifty feet through the muddy deluge, to the customs building. After a superficial glance at the contents of our drenched luggage, the customs official was apparently satisfied that no contraband was present after all and we were allowed to return to the bus through the downpour. I'm fairly certain that if someone chose to smuggle drugs or perhaps a cache of arms across an international border, they wouldn’t leave them lying on top of their luggage!

              We finally arrived in Mombasa at the stroke of midnight with only moments to spare to catch the last ferry of the night into the city.  A promised twelve-hour trip had taken eighteen hours, about the time it would’ve taken to fly from Tanzania to New York. Fortunately, Katie and I were able to enlist the help of our fellow male passengers in misery, who gallantly accompanied us by taxi to a guesthouse, where we spent a safe and uneventful night before heading to the beach the next day.

Mombasa or Bust (Part I)

 “Whatever you do, don’t arrive in Mombasa after dark!”

We had every intention of heeding this warning, made repeatedly by Kenyan friends in the know.  But bus travel in East Africa is infamous for its unreliability, so it was almost assured that we’d arrive in Mombasa at the worst possible hour.

My housemate Katie and I were halfway through a one-year volunteer program in Arusha, Tanzania. We’d planned to meet some Kenyan friends on the beach in Mombasa for the New Year holiday, but our travel options from Arusha were limited. Air travel, given our budgets, was out of the question.  Because we’d waited until the last moment to make travel arrangements our first choice, taking the shuttle to Nairobi and then the overnight Nairobi – Mombasa train, was no longer available as the first and second-class compartments had been booked for weeks. We were left with only one grim alternative, the Simba Express Luxury Coach.

My first clue that the coach would be neither express nor luxury was of course the name.  In Tanzania, the “express” buses are usually the slowest. The “luxury” buses are typically rusting hulks, teeming with masses of humanity that pitch to and fro across Africa, like toddlers learning to walk.

As a veteran of six months of excruciating bus trips within Tanzania, I’d learned that all is fair in love and bus ticket sales.  Exaggeration, if not outright lying, is a standard business practice.  So when the ticket salesman at the central bus station in Arusha assured us that we'd have ample leg room in our reserved front seats, that the bus was direct to Mombasa, it was scheduled to arrive no later than six in the evening, and it was “non-stop,”I knew enough not to believe him. I faced our journey with the forbidding resignation of one confronted with months of painful dental procedures.

My seat was a single at the very front of the bus. Katie was directly behind me. Every square inch of the bus, including what would have been my “ample leg room,” was packed with people, luggage and provisions from the market: bunches of bananas, bags of oranges and plums, baskets piled with carrots and tomatoes and plastic totes containing half-suffocated chickens.

Children were made to stand in the aisles while their mothers and fathers perched on the luggage rack, to my right. A certain numbing rhythm developed as a child swayed, every few seconds, into my right shoulder. The ageless woman seated opposite me periodically gummed an orange. Her mouth puckered like a fish as she spat the seeds around the child, across my lap, and through the open window to my left. Most, but not quite all of the seeds escaped out of the window. Whenever a seed landed on me, the woman simply smiled, exposing her few remaining slanted yellowing teeth rooted in her brown gums.

I turned to the scenery. Mount Kilimanjaro was hidden that day, but as we traveled east from Moshi, I saw the southern Pare Mountains appear suddenly from the arid plains like a sleeping giant blanketed in green. This made me think of sleeping, which I’d desperately tried, but it proved impossible.

Along the way, we stopped at every village, mud hut, cattle dip, baobab tree, termite mound and watering hole. At every stop, streams of passengers boarded and a few got off. The reason for the number of stops is simple. Our “luxury coach” was the only local transportation available for the thousands of rural residents who used it to visit relatives and to go to the market.

It took eight hours to cover the two hundred sixty miles between Arusha and Tanga, a port city on Tanzania’s coast, where Katie and I learned that our direct-non-stop-to-Mombasa luxury bus, had terminated its journey. The bus driver informed us that a second "express, non-stop" bus was scheduled to depart in just two hours and arrive in Mombasa at 8 p.m. With over one hundred miles to go, arriving before dark was now impossible.

Extreme Penny-Pinching

I can still picture my mother spending long hours at the kitchen table scouring the Sunday newspaper, not for the latest news, but for bargains.  This was in the late-sixties—before double coupon bonus days, midnight madness and weekend blowout sales. It was the dull age of retailing when one might see a “half-yearly” or “Lincoln’s Birthday” sale, but for the most part you were lucky if Gimbels Department Store had foundations at 17 ½ percent off.

Mom would sneak a cigarette or two late at night, a habit she’d successfully kept hidden until I was in high school, and pour over the advertisements like a bookie adjusting her point spreads.  Her total absorption burned holes through the vinyl gingham red-checked tablecloth. 

No household item escaped my mother’s frugality. Plastic bags of all types became valued pieces of luggage.  They were washed, dried and re-used again and again until the synthetic fibers finally disintegrated and were given a proper burial in our trash bin.

On special nights out I’d often catch mom spelunking inside a nearly empty tube of lipstick with a bobby pin. “The tube is almost half full,” she’d say.

My two brothers, sandwiched between two older and two younger sisters, had to endure the worst of mom’s thriftiness; wearing hand-me-down leotards from their big sisters under their pants in the cold winter months.  Under duress, my brothers donned thick, stretchy tights of the type worn by Robin Hood and Superman, but in girlish pinks and yellows.  It might have worked if only it had been several years later when Joe Namath made pantyhose for men seem GQ. To this day, it’s a taboo subject at family gatherings.  If anyone wants to bring an immediate flush of embarrassment to my brothers and send them into an emotional tailspin, just mention the word “leotard.”

There were no trips to the barbershop for my brothers.  Haircuts for them were more like hair divestitures; their heads were shaved, military style.  Mom would sit them down on a chair in the backyard, throw a towel over their shoulders and shear their heads practically down to the bone.

I’d add to their misery by rubbing my hands over their freshly-shorn, sandpapered skulls saying, “Women go wild!”

            But my sisters and I also suffered my mother’s tonsorial mutilations.  Every few weeks mom would have us sit on chairs in the kitchen with the linoleum floor lined with newspapers.  She would pull out scotch tape to secure our perfectly straight hair across our foreheads to trim our bangs.  It never did the trick. Year after year of childhood photos show our bangs slanting upwards, on a twenty-degree angle, giving each of us a vaguely extraterrestrial, Mr. Spock-type look.

There was no reason to buy new rain boots when our old leaky boots could be made weatherproof through mom’s ingenious re-use of Wonder bread bags.  Of course she meant well, she wanted our feet to be warm and dry when we got to school.  But what she didn’t foresee was the horrible cloakroom scene when the boots came off and we were left wearing the bags.  With the ensuing taunting from classmates at the unmistakable primary red, yellow and blue Wonder balloons covering our shoes, it’s a wonder none of my siblings or I were humiliated into a lifetime of intensive psychotherapy.

We six bread-bag-footed children of Vulcan bangs and buzz cuts and unisex leotards skipped through our childhoods believing this was all perfectly normal.  And then one day I discovered that my mom was different.  It could’ve been the time I learned that our daily treat of baked cakes and cookies made from scratch, always waiting for us after school on the kitchen table, was special because other mothers made theirs from something called mixes.  Or perhaps it was when I found out that no other mothers in our neighborhood made soap out of lye and pig’s lard from the hog my father had slaughtered each year. (We lived in the city.)

I’d like to say I’ve completely escaped mom’s legacy of exuberant prudence, but as Cokie Roberts wrote, “We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters.”  How true.  I’m just like her. I can’t seem to throw out a plastic bag to save my life. 

Co-Ed Naked Spa Hopping

            My friend Diane and I were spending two weeks traveling around Japan, which included a jaunt to the southern island of Kyushu where Beppu is located.  Beppu is a geo-thermal wonderland of natural hot mineral springs.  Billows of steam rise everywhere, giving the town an atmosphere of a giant outdoor sauna or a film noir movie set.  We had already spent several days in Beppu experiencing the wonderful variety of available tourist attractions.  We had been buried in 140 degree sand up to our necks, had enjoyed several mineral baths that claimed therapeutic properties ranging from improving one’s complexion to healing arthritis, and had toured around the “hells” of Beppu, which are boiling ponds ranging in color from vermilion to sky blue.

It was our last day and we had just hours left before our train departed to Tokyo.  I felt we had “done” Beppu, but soon learned that Beppu was not “done” with us. 

While taking our final stroll around town, we came upon another spa that Diane wanted to try.  I had immediate reservations since this resort was not mentioned in my guidebook and all of the signs were in Japanese, leading me to believe this was “off the beaten track” for tourists.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I believe the best part of traveling happens spontaneously and I love the adventure of having “non-touristy, local” experiences.  But when it comes to exposing my body, I’m extra cautious.   

“Come on.  We’re fourteen time zones away from everyone we know,” Diane argued.  She had a point.  Completely ignoring my gut that was shouting, “Don’t do it!” always a mistake, we entered the building.  

We disrobed in the locker room and entered a communal indoor mud bath. Luxuriating in the slick mud with other women, we moved back and forth between the hotter and cooler areas of the bath until we had had enough. We rinsed off under a cold shower and just before stepping outside, one of the attendants grabbed onto my arm.  She urgently tried to tell me something that was obviously very important.  But my ignorance of the language and inability to decipher Japanese charades had rendered her communiqué impossible to interpret.

So it was that Diane and I, two fairly well-endowed women, stepped outside, naked as the day we were born, whereupon we made three crucial discoveries: we were the only Gaijin (foreigners) at the spa, the resort was co-ed, and the two of us were missing one small, but essential item.  Every Japanese person we encountered, and 99.9 percent of them were of the male persuasion, was holding a small hand towel the size of a wash cloth, over his genitals.

Diane and I were not just naked. We were beyond naked. We were Über-naked.

Had we missed the warning sign in the locker room: “Please remember, don’t shame Buddha, all of the Shinto deities and the memory of hundreds of generations of your ancestors by stepping outside without your little washcloth?”  Or perhaps there was no sign because the Japanese are born holding these tiny cloths as they exit the birth canal?

Desperate to cover ourselves, Diane and I crisscrossed our arms over our bodies.  With our hands hovering ineffectively over our nether regions, we darted to the nearest hot spring for cover.  The dark gray, mineral-laden water conveniently covered our nudity, and thankfully, we were alone. 

But not for long.

Apparently, word of the two, too-naked, big-breasted American women, had spread like wildfire throughout the spa.  Suddenly, dozens of extraordinarily friendly men, also unclothed, but of course with the obligatory washcloths, joined us in our pool.  I did my best to fend off the many overtures from these interlopers who floated dangerously into my personal space, trying to chat us up.  The Japanese love nothing more than to practice English, but the last thing I wanted to do was encourage naked fraternizing. 

After a few minutes, I noticed that I had begun sweating profusely from the intense heat. After fifteen minutes, I felt nauseous.

I knew that I had to get out of this bubbling caldron, but escaping would have required climbing up a three-foot ladder to exit the pool, thereby providing a front-row view of that to which only gynecologists and lovers should be privy. My mind, which was now melting along with the rest of me, struggled to reason that I was thousands of miles from home, and the chance that I would ever see any of these men again was infinitesimally small.  But I couldn’t bear the thought of baring my undercarriage, free of charge, to this rapt group of strangers.  Diane agreed, so the two of us waited it out with a steely determination that would have impressed any prisoner of war.

One by one, our fan club left, and finally, we were alone, once again.  We quickly made our getaway. Like two boiled lobsters plucked from a pot, steam rose off our crimson bodies, as we climbed out and once again scurried for cover to the nearest pool.

And so it went.

We spent the rest of the afternoon sprinting from one hot spring to another until we came to the last one of the day.  Divided into three sections, each about the length and width of a bathtub, Diane and I chose adjacent pools.  As we stretched out, we discovered that the water was only a few inches deep, so our entire torsos were completely exposed to the air. 

We sat up and struggled to reposition ourselves to find some cover.  A moment later, a man in a deep pool next to ours who had witnessed our thrashing, floated over to us, stuck his foot out of the water and pointed at it.  It took only a moment to realize that Diane and I were lying in the footbaths—a fitting end, I suppose, to an altogether much too naked and humiliating day.

 Please visit my website www.joannhornak.com where you can sign up to win a free copy of my second novel, A Delicate Bond.

Three Cheers for the Plague

            For those of you planning your first trip to the developing world, you will undoubtedly be advised by a well-meaning healthcare professional to visit the International Travelers Clinic.  Here is my advice.  Don’t do it.  Trust me, when it comes to tropical diseases, ignorance is bliss.

At the clinic, I was deluged with inoculations, pills and warnings about the many health hazards awaiting me should I be so foolish in Tanzania, as to perhaps, eat something, drink water, go swimming, have sex or be in the wrong place at the wrong time, which in the developing world, is just about anywhere, anytime.

I left the clinic loaded down with paperwork about "health precautions" and "disease risk summaries" for East Africa that I made the mistake of actually reading.

Diseases carried by insects included yellow fever, which is endemic, dengue fever, and trypanosomiasis or African sleeping sickness, caused by the bite of a tsetse fly and fatal if left untreated. I made a mental note to pack a few more long-sleeved shirts.

Next was filariasis, something I'd never heard of, which is "prevalent" in East Africa, not a good sign. Also listed was leishmaniasis, both "cutaneous" and "visceral." While I was completely unfamiliar with leishmaniasis, I was equally concerned that I didn’t know what cutaneous or visceral meant.

Onchocerciasis or river blindness is “epidemic” in parts of East Africa. No problem, I just wouldn't plunge into any rivers. But then I learned that just being near flowing water is all it takes if one is unlucky enough to be bitten by an infected female black fly. I decided I would do well to avoid rivers and streams.

The food and waterborne illnesses category was also disturbing. The fact that the food and waterborne diseases were all "highly endemic" was not comforting in the least, since there was an excellent chance in the coming year that I would be eating food and drinking water. These included the "usual" diarrheal diseases, giardiasis, typhoid fever, cholera, viral hepatitis and something called echinococcosis. To be helpful, the handout explained that echinococcosis is also known as hydatid disease. Of course, the famous hydatid disease, that certainly clarified things.

Then I came to malaria. I remember thinking that malaria wouldn't be so bad to catch but then I learned that it’s a leading cause of death in Africa and kills roughly one million people each year worldwide. Malaria turned out to be nothing to trifle with, which is why I decided to spend $400 on mefloquine despite anecdotal warnings of side effects such as "debilitating neuropsychiatric adverse events" and "suicidal ideations". 

Dracunculiasis was next. Described as "widespread", I immediately wondered how something I'd never heard, something that no doubt involved vampire bats sucking on the necks of unwitting foreigners, could possibly be "widespread?"  I didn't want to think about it so I moved on, but I wasn't quite through with the medieval diseases.

The next disease jumped off the page at me, "plague." Wait a minute. This couldn't actually be The Plague, the kind carried by infected rats, causing inflamed armpits and groins, with corpses hauled away by the cartload by toothless, hunchbacked men through dark alleys to nameless mass graves, could it? Is it possible the travel doctors at the clinic threw this one in as a sick joke?

The plague is a bacterial infection, cured by antibiotics if caught early, but somehow this disease sounded the worst. Imagine calling home:

"Hi Mom. Oh yeah, things are just great here in Tanzania except, well, I have, um…I have the plague."

I'd never live it down. My fifteen minutes of fame would never end. I'd inspire dread and repulse every person I'd ever meet for the rest of my life. Forevermore I'd be known as the person who'd had the Black Death and lived.

The final catchall category, "other hazards", as if enough hadn't already been mentioned, included HIV, measles, leprosy, elephantiasis, diphtheria, polio, influenza, parasitic worm infections, meningococcal meningitis, tuberculosis, schistosomiasis and trachoma.

Good Lord, what sort of Dark Ages nightmare was I plunging myself into?

Grasping for any faint ray of light at the end of a long, dark, disease-ridden tunnel, I took great reassurance in the fact that I didn’t see the Ebola virus listed anywhere. Besides, I'd already sold my house and taken a one-year leave of absence from my job so it was too late to back out of my volunteer commitment.

So in the spirit of fearless explorer Dr. David Livingston, I gambled away any hope for longevity and got on the plane.  But little did I know that I was to learn of yet another disease that was missing from the reams of paperwork I'd scrutinized before leaving.

The third day in country, our group of thirteen volunteers, eleven Americans, one Brit and one Canadian, still dazed from jet lag, attended a health lecture given by a Tanzanian doctor.  Much of the talk concerned malaria and the other diseases I’d already read about, but then the doctor’s talk shifted to what I’d previously believed to be a mundane subject, washing clothes.

The doctor explained that when washed clothes are hung outside to dry, something I would likely do since clothes dryers in Tanzania are mighty scarce and I hadn't brought enough clean clothes to last for 365 days, then, something very bad happens. An insect, never specifically identified, lays eggs inside the clothes. When the clothes are worn, the larva burrows into your skin and forms pus-filled pustules that can ulcerate and become gangrenous at which point that exceedingly unlucky body part falls off or rots away until amputated.

As Dr. Doom was describing this little journey through pestilence and perdition, I looked around the room. Our thirteen faces had changed from masks of polite boredom to utter horror. So assuming I didn't catch a fatal illness, which was suddenly looking quite attractive, the best I could hope for was to return home a hideously pockmarked shell of my former self.

 The doctor kept talking but I was no longer listening. I was thinking about catching the next flight home. But then, almost as an afterthought, he waited until the end of his lecture to tell us that simply ironing clothes kills the little wadudus (bugs) dead. I bought an iron within the hour.

As the year turned out, I had never been healthier, succumbing to just one case of the common cold, certainly nothing to call home about. Perhaps just one bout of the plague wouldn't have been so bad after all?