Moves and Missionaries

A few days ago I began to write a post about the many things that have happened to me recently. It didn't take long before I realized I was meandering well beyond the point at which anyone would find the information entertaining. Anyone, that is, except a small subgroup of my readers who are obliged to find me entertaining and have a spectacularly high tolerance for inane detail. Which is to say, except my Family.

Therefore this post will work as follows. Those interested in a quick update, feel free to read through the initial segment, ignoring footnotes, and continue with your lives. Those interested in extra information should refer from the text to the Supplement, as directed.

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I have a home. I have a baisikeli. Not in that order.

Finding a new home has been a bit of an adventure. It has involved friends, hovels, and homes. Bikes, canadians and missionaries. Also not in that order.

As of Sunday past last, I was rather perturbed. After having seen a number of survivable but not attractive lodgings (1) thanks to my friend Issa (2), I had finally seen a room in a wholly livable little 3 bedroom home. The other two bedrooms were occupied by the Nursing Officer and the Laboratory Technician from one of our project Dispensaries (3). I was fully packed to move and working on organizing transportation when I was informed that I would not be able to move into the room. It turns out that the landlord was not comfortable with my moving in (4).

Still, I had planned all variety of shopping endeavors that day to allow for my move. I had priced beds (6), bicycles and other key home improvement equipment (7). While it was clear that certain acquisitions could now wait, I decided to buy a bike anyway (8).

I am now the owner of a lovely (Figure 1) bicycle. It's a Mountain Bike. This does not mean that the bike has gears -- only imported used European bikes have gears -- just that it has straight handlebars instead of the wide U-shaped cruiser handlebars. (9)

Note the lovely green coloration, the non-matching pedals (see future post) and the decals (figure 2).

It's a Nahaco Sport Bike. Sport! I'm so sporty when I ride it's ridiculous. At least I have to assume that's what the ruckus is about.

I bought the bike from a gentleman named Karim, who regretted not having any rooms available (10), but who referred me to Pastor Tim: "An American!"

Moments later I was in Arkansas. There were no rooms available in Arkansas, but there were Southern Baptist missionaries and sweet tea (11). Arkansas referred me to England, in the guise of Dr. Ruth (giggles intended), the brit doc who runs a clinic for the Anglican Church of Tabora.

The next evening I was picked up by Dr. Ruth and taken to her home for a feast of a dinner (12) attended by missionaries including but not confined to Tim and Kim (the Arkansans) (13), Dr. Ruth, Jill (14), and David, an elderly Anglican minister who needs to turn up his hearing aid, John (15), 3 twenty-something Canadians (16, eh?), me, and a Tanzanian named Gayo.

I'm living with Gayo (17). Here (Figure 3).


Coming soon -- Bicycle Maintenance and Home Improvement.

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(1) These rooms were Standard Tanzanian Rooms. I had seen two. These rooms were 10$ per month. Yes. 10$. One was medium-smallish, in a flat with three other rooms (each of which housed an entire Tanzanian family), with outdoor pit latrines that were also showers (which is to say that is where one would probably choose to pour water on themselves), and a kitchen that was a room where each family had their wood-charcoal burning stove (more of a glorified bucket). The other was "self-contained" in that it was quite small, but had a small closet with a western style toilet in it, and also a shower head and a hole in the floor which was obviously created with a sledge hammer for the purpose of drainage. The kitchen was the inner courtyard, also replete with wood stoves, and half flooded from the recent rains -- you had to walk across on a series of bricks, while ducking the many laundry lined at roughly ben-neck level. I wasn't excited about either, but was working on convincing myself that with a bit of furniture and a kerosene stove I would be fine.

(2) whom, because I had met and spoken with him on the street twice, is one of my best non-MVP Taboran friends. He's a tall gentleman, probably in his late 50s or early 60s, with the paunch of a man who has worked for years in the offices of the National Railway, and retired recently because of (likely cardiovascular) health reasons. For no reason other than hospitality and free time he took upon himself to find me a few rooms.

(3) basic clinics.

(4) something something contract they had signed something something person that the landlord had not met something something but the landlord lives 700km away something something = people are afraid of living with and/or being landlord to the white guy. (5)

(5) actually, even one of the landlords for the 10$-a-month rooms decided he could not offer it to me. HA!

(6) foam mattresses

(7) like kerosine stoves and mosquito nets.

(8) The city is set up such that the Market is on the opposite side of town from the project office. My hostel was close to the market, and the day I walked back from the office it took about an hour -- maybe 4km. I figured that if I ended up living near the market I would need the bike to get to work, but if I found a place near work I would need it to get to town.

(9) Like all bikes here it also has a sturdy luggage rack over the back tire for carrying charcoal, harvests, and friends (not always in that order and not always separately).

10) the Tanzanian-born muslim-Indian bicycle store owner. He actually did have a newly renovated storefront destined to be a photo studio, which he offered to rent to me, since its future tenants were delaying on their move. I declined. The store was located next to the Mohammed-Trans bus depot, which is actually just the lobby of and the area in front of an old movie theater. Karim's family owns the theater, and despite the collapsing roofing, and rows of moistening wooden chairs, one can imagine it formerly lit by nightly Bollywood films and attended by Tabora's considerable Indian population -- a population which swiftly dwindled a few decades ago when the country began to socialize the property of rich Indians. Out of considerable property holdings, Karim's family was left only with the theater (which, presumably, no one could figure out anything to do with and was worthless without it's Indian clientelle) and the corner apartment in one of the many buildings they owned (from which Karim is now awoken by Mohammed-Trans' daily engine maintenance).

11) Generally acknowledged to be more frightening than getting lost in the bush. My misgivings notwithstanding (they had CNN international on the TV, and I was terrified that politics would come up), like all children of god, they were spectacularly nice.

12) our phone conversation and the "why don't I pick you up for dinner tomorrow and we can discuss housing possibilities" didn't really prepare me for this....

13) Southern Baptist

14) Anglican

15) some denomination of Irishman, doing something that has to do with running the town dairy (I've found yogurt and cheese!) and other god-related business enterprises.

16) It actually turns out that they're here volunteering in an orphanage and are not missionaries. I didn't find this out until later, however, because I was afraid to ask and thereby bring up religion, abortion, premarital sex, contraception, George W., and other stories in search of redemption.

17) He is an IT (internet technology) guy, who went to University in Uganda, speaks excellent english, and has more electronics equipment in his room than the rest of Tabora. So far so good!

Totally Stoned.

The other day I saw a crowd gathered in the center of town. There was a throng around the gate of the National Bank Of Commerce (NBC), as well as those who had stopped to watch from various vantage points along the misshapen 5 way intersection.

I was walking with the project's new Agriculture and Environment Coordinator. He is as new to the project as I am, and is staying in the same hostel as I. Inasmuch as neither of us have a kitchen, we sometimes go out to get meals together. We had just eaten dinner at the "Nice Hotel." Hotel here just means restaurant. Few (none) of them have rooms for rent. I had Chapatti (almost a staple, given the country's long history of Indian Ocean trade), Chai (which here is just any tea), and some hard boiled eggs, since the beans weren't ready yet (bado = not ready, it's easy to remember because not having beans is bado).

Anyway. Manumbu asked a parked bicycle-taxi (these are just guys with regular bicycles, by the way--you sit on the little luggage platform above the rear tire) what was going on. It was a stoning. Well -- an attempted stoning. The presumptive criminal had fled to the protection of the NBC, which is gated and has security guards. And, indeed, as we looked we saw folks arriving with stones in hand and hunks of rock carried above their head.

I have actually read about this. When I was in Ghana I read the comedic autobiographical memoirs or Robert Sapolsky, a biology professor at Stanford renown for his quirkiness who has spent a considerable chunk of his life studying baboons in the Kenyan bush. I believe he said something like -- you haven't really travelled in east Africa until you've seen a thief stoned in the street.

Well, I don't know if this counts--whether I've really travelled in East Africa yet--because it was unclear if the thief was going to be expelled from the life-extending walls of the NBC or not, and we didn't wait around to find out.

So yeah. A stoning. It might have happened a few hundred meters behind me as I walked home, probably depending on whether the guards at the NBC decided they liked the guy or not. Or perhaps whether he could pay them off. If he was turned out, he would be killed.

You might take a moment to try to orient yourself to the socioeconomopolitico conditions, such as the ineffectuality of the police, or the traditional structure of rural African communities in which normative judgements (justice?) are decided by community committee (peers, elders and chiefs, though even chiefs often do not hold incontrovertible sway over the opinions of other elders or the community) and are doled out as such.

Still, what struck me is that, given these circumstances, random guy number 42 who lives in Tabora will stop on his way to market, or pull over his bicycle, pick up a stone and participate, perhaps with gusto, in the death of another community member.

Can you imagine actually casting a stone?

Could you watch?

What could you do?

Mambo!

That's like Swahili street for Jambo, which is like the informal way of saying Habari, which is like Hello. Hello!

I'm starting to settle in to my new Western Tanzania home fairly well. I'm still living in a hostel, which is mostly inconvenient for it's lack of kitchen access, but once I pass that hurdle it will all be on the up and up.

So I think it's time for the first of what might be an occasional series comparing the wonders of Tanzania and Ghana.

Things that are different about living in a small city in Western Tanzania, as compared with a village in Central Ghana, include:

More consistent electricity - it's only been out for about 2 of my 7 days here so far.

Easy access to beans - one of the first words I learned in Swahili was "maharagwe," and I haven't looked back since. Although Tanzanians don't immediately seem to grasp the idea that if they're eating beans, ugali (a cakey cassava/maize thing) AND meat, and I'm only eating beans and ugali, that I'll want relatively more beans. It's not that I just want to eat LESS. (Although who knows what motivates the crazy white guy who keeps running back and forth on the roads out of town and doesn't accept offers of bike-taxis, though he seems to be in some great hurry...)

An audience while running - more people to encourage me as I jog! They are cheering, right?

When you run up a hill here, which are generally smaller than their Ghanaian counterparts (though still tempting to those who like vistas), and topped with exposed boulders instead of dense forest and cocoa plantations, you might be greeted, not by confused cocoa farmers, but by a Tanzanian in full camouflage uniform who doesn't speak a word of English, but whose presence is nonetheless enough to indicate that this is some kind of militarily strategic 50 meter hillock just outside of town and please don't run here anymore. Asante! Well -- to be honest I've run up two such hills, and only met one such man, but I can only assume that 50% of the small hills in Western Tanzania are protected as such.

The water runs slightly tinted from my tap here. And it smells like lake water -- water plus dirt. But it could smell worse.

The constant motivation to learn the language - I never thought I'd say this, but it turns out that there is a relative excess of English in rural Ghana. In large part, it's that everyone in Ghana uses English numbers, which is enough to get you by in a lot of day-to-day activities, but it's also that West Africa lacks a unifying African language with which to communicate, and so, even internally, they sometimes use the English or French left to them by their colonizers. In East Africa, it's Swahili, Swahili and only Swahili. Not really, there are other local dialects too, but there sure isn't any English. I think I already know as much Swahili as I did Twi, although I'm not as functional with it.

The roads may be bad here, but that is made up for by the fact that Everything is a Road. In the Ghana village cluster there were few roads, and they were all in terrible conditions. Still, once couldn't help but drive along these roads because the alternative was wrapping your car around a huge tree. Here, the sandy soil and seasonal rain support at its densest, some well spaced little trees and various grasses and scrub brush. This means that when one is in the village cluster in the the project's safari-style land-cruiser (did you know that Safiri is the Swahili verb for Travel? Aaaahhhhh! Just blew your mind...), and you want to get from point A to randomly non-contiguous point B, you just ask a villager for directions and drive your beast of a car along the little footpaths that connect essentially most all points of any even minimal interest. It's fun! But don't open your window too much or you'll get slapped around by the vegetation.

In Ghana there was this cool little plant that would fold up its leaves if you blew on it or brushed it as you walked by. It grew like a weed along roadsides and footpaths. No one seemed as entertained by it as I was. Tanzania doesn't have those, but it does have random stands of Mint growing wild, and driving or running through them is always a pleasant olfactory experience.

I'm in the office right now on a Saturday morning because we're having some kind of diplomatic visit by the Japanese government this afternoon. Japan is a strong supporter of the Millennium Villages Project and it's initiatives in a number of countries. And a large Japanese corporation donated all the LLIN (Long-Lasting Insecticide-treated [anti-mosquito bed]Nets) for several village clusters, including this one. The former prime minister was supposed to be coming, although I'm told that his plans have changed. No one seems quite sure who is coming anymore, but I'm expecting to be entertained by a weekend of pointed cultural contrasts.

I haven't taken any pictures around here yet, so here's one from Reunion:
This is the view from the most recent lava flow (spring 2007, I think), still steaming. You can't see the baguettes and wine, but I promise, they were JUST off camera.