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?