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.