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.