“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.
