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 # 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 # 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.

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.

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? 

Ode to Tanzanian Transportation

If you've ever had the unique pleasure of taking public transportation in Africa, you will appreciate this first (and so far only) attempt at poetry, based upon the most horrific 10-hour bus ride I ever experienced.

For journeys to places remote and afar

            Lushoto, Iringa, Dodoma and Dar

It's a motor coach or passenger bus you will need

But there's anguish and suffering ahead so take heed

If you see "express" or "luxury" as part of the name

Beware for it's just part of an elaborate game

They doth protest too much, here's a word to the wise

Be prepared in advance know their tricks and their lies

If the coach is "express" it means a stop every minute

If the bus is a "luxury" there’re three hundred passengers in it

There is no timetable, the prices they refuse to relate

Your ability to haggle will settle the rate

If they tell you the bus will leave straightaway

You'll sit there for hours they don't mind the delay

If they promise the bus will arrive at seven

You have just as much chance you'll turn up in heaven

If the bench will fit two they'll squeeze in some more

And suddenly your seat is now perfect for four 

It's the typical journey I've described thus far

But the trip I took yesterday was pure misery from Dar

I sat next to a man in business attire 

I had no notion, no clue my situation was dire

It struck without warning like a nighttime criminal

This was nothing imagined, not close to subliminal

My senses assaulted I needed to heave

Oh my God this man reeks, I just want to leave

With unwashed body, his whiff steadily wafted

Against my will and my wishes my lungs continually quaffed it

For relief my head hung out the window for hours

My body contorted, my mind filled with sorrows

I stewed and simmered in the man's sickening smell

Light a candle for me for I'm surely in hell

The Pare Mountains like a blanket folded over the land

The green sisal spiked out o’ the red sand

Snow-capped Kili in the distance behind billowing cloud

Obscured almost hidden as if covered by shroud

But the beautiful scenery graced not my eye

For the only thought in my head was “I hope that I die”

The trip went on and on and into the night

The blackness outside was a mind-numbing sight

They could strap me to the roof, it'd be better up there

At least there'd be stars and the moon and fresh air

The man left at Moshi an hour before my trip ended 

But his presence prolonged, the aroma suspended

And then it was over I had somehow come through

I looked at the world as if it were new

And if I should expire with a blemish on my soul

Whether it's now in my youth or when I'm quite old

I'll go to my death without trepidation or fear

Because I know Dante's hell, it's called luxury here   

The Hair Saloon or Ali’s Magic

           I've been at war with my hair ever since childhood.  Fiber optics uses cable thicker than my hair.  Even on the best of days with top-of-the-line salon products, my shoulder-length bottle-blonde do resembles wilted hay.  I don’t have bad hair days.  I have a bad hair life.  But, the life-long battle with my locks escalated to the global thermal nuclear level the year I volunteered in Tanzania.

            When I first walked through my new neighborhood in Tanzania, one of the poorest in Arusha, I was surprised to see a building, more like a ramshackle hut with a corrugated tin roof that advertised itself as the “International Hair Cutting Saloon.” At first I thought “saloon” was a simple spelling mistake, but I soon discovered that there were “hair saloons” all over Arusha.

            What could this mean?  And why did the hair saloon in my neighborhood advertise itself as “international?” Could I expect to see jet setters flying into town to get their hair styled while swilling mugs of cold beer or downing shots of whisky?  Like the Wild Wild West would there be gunfights over saloon girls who doubled as hair stylists?

            Every day on the way to my volunteer job I walked by The International Hair Cutting Saloon.  I’d strain to catch a glimpse of what was going on inside this curious establishment but was sorely disappointed.  Nothing ever happened.  I never saw a single customer exit or enter the entire year.  Even the mangy dogs lying in front of the saloon day after day didn't do anything.  They didn't move when a car drove by or when a person approached them on foot.  It was as if the wards of all the animal hospitals in the world got together their most hopeless and unhealthy dogs and released them here to live out their lives in front of the hair saloon.  I imagined Humane Society officials visiting Arusha, bursting into tears and then falling into a deep depression at the sight of these pitiful creatures.

            As the months went on the hard water, equatorial sun and lack of conditioning had reduced my hair to a state of disaster.  My split ends had reached stratospheric levels, nearly to my scalp, which unfortunately had done nothing to add volume.  I could no longer ignore the state of my tresses that were now the consistency of corn husks.  But The International Hair Cutting Saloon was certainly nothing like the chic salons I was used to visiting in the States.

            And then I heard of Ali, the self-proclaimed “European trained hair stylist.” I had yet to secure an appointment with Ali, who was apparently famous in the way of Cher and Madonna, by first name only, as he was booked up for weeks at a time.

            I soon learned that Ali, who was of Indian descent but had grown up in Tanzania, was infamous not just in the town of Arusha, but throughout Tanzania among the ex-pats.  Shortly before seeing him I’d met some American missionaries who worked several hundred kilometers south of Arusha.  They were in town to buy supplies, eat pizza and get haircuts.

            “Are you going to Ali?” I asked them.

            “Who else?” they answered.

            “What is he like?” I asked.  “Is he good?”

            “He’s okay but a bit of a character,” said one of the female missionaries. “You’ll see.”

            By the time the day for my appointment had finally arrived, I was so panicked I almost backed out.  I’ve always been nervous when trying a new hairdresser, but I especially anxious about getting my hair cut in a developing country by a “bit of a character.”

            Ali looked like the type of stylist one might see in a horror movie about hair salons.  He had unruly tufts of black hair jutting out at all angles from his head, an intense, somewhat maniacal gaze and was wielding a large pair of cutting shears.  He took one look at my hair and practically fainted.  Naturally, the subject of conditioning came up. 

            “Castor oil,” said Ali as he began cutting my hair. “That’s the key.”

            I looked confused.

            “You know, the stuff that makes you shit,” he added.

            “Oh right.  How much do I use?”

            “One teaspoon,” said Ali.  “Or one tablespoon.  And you mix it with olive oil, the same amount.”

            “All right,” I replied feeling anything but.

            “But for God’s sake don’t use too much or you’ll never get it out!”

            “So, is it a teaspoon or a tablespoon each of castor and olive oil?”

            “That’s what I said,” Ali replied, sounding perturbed.

            Ali snipped away in silence for several moments.  Maybe I should’ve gotten up the nerve to try the International Hair Cutting Saloon after all?

            “And, about twenty minutes before rinsing, put an egg on your hair,” he added.

            “A whole egg?”

            “Absolutely.”

            “Why an egg?”

            “It will help get the oil out,” he said.

            It sounded like I might have to have my head shaved if this didn't work but then again, Ali seemed to be taking care of that already with his furious clipping.  With no mirror to see what was going on, I could only judge how much hair he was chopping off by the increasingly large mounds of it piling up on the floor.

            “Or, just use egg whites,” Ali said.  “And take a lemon with you into the shower and squirt that on your hair too, that will really help to rinse it out.”

            How about if I add some romaine lettuce, Parmesan cheese and a few croutons while I’m at it Ali?

            I left with far less hair than I’d arrived, but the haircut itself was decent enough.  Although I had six months left in Tanzania I never was brave enough to try Ali’s hair conditioning recipe.  But if anyone reading this is, I recommend that you hold the anchovies.

Air Maybe or Is It Normal To Experience Frequent Brushes of Death While in Africa?

Not only did I have to run for my life from a herd of 50 elephants (please see my last post), I had a near brush with death on Air Tanzania. 

Normally, the simple act of boarding an airplane would not be considered adventure travel. But flying, like all forms of transportation in the developing world, is notoriously dangerous for the simple reason that there are no rules to follow. If airplane maintenance schedules do exist, there is no guarantee that they’re adhered to with any sort of regularity, or at all for that matter. So there is little comfort in taking a flight with Air Tanzania, an airline so unreliable and precarious that Tanzanians themselves refer to it as "Air Labda," Swahilit for "Air Maybe."

I was on my way to Dar es Salaam via Kilimanjaro International Airport with Moyo and Eunice, co-workers from the African Wildlife Foundation in Arusha, where I was working as a volunteer. The three of us were securely seat-belted in a row near the rear of the plane as it rumbled down the runway, gaining speed for take-off.

Suddenly, I heard a loud pop! The pilot quickly slammed on the brakes triggering an earsplitting noise of grinding gears and metal parts that sounded as though a pack of rabid hyenas had attacked the engine and was gnawing it to shreds.

But we kept going; the plane refused to stop.

I clutched onto my arm rests in a white-knuckled death-grip preparing for our certain demise when we barreled through the barbed wire barrier at the end of the runway, took a nosedive into the bottomless trench beyond and burst into flames.

After what seemed like an impossible amount of time and a miraculously generous length of runway, we did stop. All of the passengers looked around at each other in the absolute silence that usually follows near disaster, where seconds seem like minutes. “Whew, we made it!” I remember thinking.

But then the cabin filled with the acrid smell of smoke and I saw flames shooting out from underneath one of the wings. The engine was on fire! Everyone on board was no doubt gripped by the same terrifying thought—our plane was nanoseconds away from exploding.

The steward seized the intercom and began shrieking as if his testicles had unexpectedly been clamped in a vice, "Evacuate! Evacuate! Evacuate!"

Utter pandemonium erupted.

People crammed into the aisles, pushing and shoving and climbing over each other to get out. The strap of my purse was caught on something under the seat. I yanked at it for what seemed like an eternity until it broke free. But then, as I turned to the aisle, I was faced with a solid mass of African men and women, who proved more difficult to push past than wall of granite.

After finally squeezing my way into the aisle, my near hysteria increased when I saw that I was going to have to slide down the chute to escape.

Like a disembodied voice in a dream that sounds very far away, I heard someone shouting, "Shoes! Shoes!” What about my shoes? Only later did I find out that we were supposed to take off our shoes before going down the chute. I hopped down. My skirt slid up beyond my waist and the friction between the rubber and my bare skin scraped my legs and behind raw. I hit the tarmac and ran like the wind, trying to put as much distance as possible between myself and the ticking time bomb behind me.

Moyo, Eunice and I met up far out in the field. The three of us stood there breathing heavily, too stunned to speak. As I turned back toward the plane, I saw hundreds of papers floating in the breeze along with shoes, books, purses, briefcases, and hats scattered everywhere on the runway.

There's nothing like a brush with death to pull people together. When we arrived back in the waiting room of the airport, it was a celebration. Families and friends were huddled together wearing relieved smiles. Sworn enemies were hugging and kissing one other. Well, I’m not positive about that, but my supervisor Eunice and I, not exactly on warm and friendly terms before this, were now clasped arm and arm recounting our getaway down the chute.

“Can you believe, our skirts slid up to our waists?” said Eunice in a voice all giggly and girlish, a woman normally about as giggly and girlish as a sumo wrestler.

The passengers who were seated in the middle of the plane were the ones that had really gotten the raw end of the deal. They had been forced to de-plane via the wings, by jumping twenty feet onto the tarmac. Several were injured, including one man who suffered a broken leg and sprained spine.

One family with a tiny infant and toddler was having a joyous reunion, extraordinary under the circumstances since the wife had grabbed the toddler, but the husband had jumped off the plane alone, leaving the baby behind to die in the explosion or be rescued by a passing good Samaritan. If I were his wife, I would've been searching for the nearest lawyer to initiate divorce proceedings, but I suppose some people are more forgiving than others.

Of course all of this could have been avoided. Personally, I blame the steward. What happened to that calm, cool demeanor that airline employees are supposed to maintain under any and all circumstances? Where was that droning voice that normally puts everyone to sleep, who could’ve made an announcement like, "Ladies and gentlemen, we're experiencing a few mechanical problems, so if you would calmly proceed to the nearest exit …"?

Later that night, safely back in Arusha, I told my housemates Katie and Stacy about my harrowing experience. Apparently, I’d failed to adequately express the true terror I’d felt since Stacy's reaction was, "Wow! You got to slide down the chute! Cool! I've always wanted to do that."

"Was it fun?" Katie asked.

"Not really. It was actually very terrified…" I started to explain.

"Good old Air Labda," said Stacy.