Kuuliza si ujinga

(read the entry after this one first--this is part 2)


DAY 2: BABATI TO DODOMA

I woke up that morning on a tight schedule. If there are no delays, it takes three hours to get from Babati to Kondoa, and five to get from Kondoa to Dodoma. Eight hours total, if there are no delays. I needed to get to Dodoma by 4 to catch a car to my friend’s site. My thoughts: get on a bus at 7 am. Kondoa by 10 am. Dodoma by 3 pm. Mungu akipenda, God willing, I’ll be in time to catch the car at 4 pm. And if the normal Tanzanian delays catch up with me? Well…I won’t think about that yet.

Things began well. I awoke at 5:30 am and went to eat breakfast. The missionaries were not yet up, but we’d discussed my plans the night before, and they’d left out cereal, a bowl, and a spoon. Cereal! This is a food that doesn’t exist in rural Tanzania, and is only available in expensive imported boxes in the cities. I happily downed two bowls of cereal with milk. Then (with the family’s two dogs nipping at my ankles and setting off my fear of dogs), I shouldered my bags and walked out into the streets of Babati.

For my whole life, I have had a terrible sense of direction. I consistently walk out of classrooms, offices, and bathrooms and turn the wrong way. That morning was no exception. I walked for ten minutes before I saw someone else, and when I did, I prompty asked if I was going the right way. The answer? Definitely not. I turned around and went back the way I’d come.

6:45 am. 6:50 am. I looked worriedly at my watch, afraid I’d miss the 7 am bus and be stuck in town until 8. But that day, Mungu was on my side, and things worked out. I arrived at the bus stand in time to buy one of the last three tickets for the 7 am bus to Kondoa. And by 7:15 am, we were on our way.

Bumpety bump, bumpety bump. Since I’d bought one of the last tickets, I was in the very back of the bus. What this means is that each time we went over a bump, I was temporarily in the air. I’d be talking with my neighbor, then WHEE!, our butts would bump out of our seats and then plop back down.

My neighbor: Are you afraid of Osama bin Laden?

Me: Not really. I don’t see the point in being afraid of things I have no control over. For example, this bus is going rather quickly, and it’s possible it could get into a crash. But I have no control over it, therefore I don’t see a point in worrying about it.

(Superstitious side of self: what if by mentioning this I cause a crash?)

No fears, the bus did make it safely to Kondoa, and there was no sign of Osama on the road. Although there was a store called the “George Bush shop” in Kondoa. But I neither entered to George Bush shop, nor even stopped to go to the bathroom. For the second time that day, I barely made a connection. I hopped directly from my bus out of Babati to the nearly full 10:30 bus to Dodoma. And by 10:45 am, we were on our way south.

Bumpety bump, bumpety bump. I spent the first 15 minutes wondering if we’d even make it out of Kondoa. The bus looked like it’d been welded together and could fall apart at the slightest tap. The bumpiness came from the bus itself as much as from the road. Bumpety bump, bumpety bump. Should I have taken another bus? Will we break down in the middle of nowhere? Questions bounced around in my head, but after a few more bumps, they bounced out. I have no control over this. Worrying about it isn’t going to help. Sit calmly, look out the window, and hope for the best.

And the land out the window was…empty. Not empty in terms of plants, but in terms of people. There was low scrub forest, hills, giant boulders. But there was none of what I’ve grown used to seeing in Tanzania: huts, stores, cornfields, cows…signs of people. There was no one on the road, not one guy carrying a bag of charcoal on his bike, not one small child herding cows. There were no huts, no stores, no fields. We were passing through true wilderness. If there were people there, they were well-hidden. Thirty minutes passed between when we left Kondoa and when I finally saw a hut. It was a single hut, with a small cornfield nearby and a few cows. But it was enough to make me heave a sigh of relief. There are people in this world after all. It’s not an endless, empty land.

The bus continued to make its way over the dirt road, slow but steady. It wasn’t as empty as it had been, but it certainly wasn’t populated. We’d pass occasional groups of huts and even villages, but there were long, long stretches of empty land between them. And the area was one of the poorest I’ve yet seen in the country. Most of the villages consisted simply of dirt huts in the desert, with no electricity or water. There were few if any schools in the area. And the closest paved road—and most likely the closest hospital as well—was many, many hours away.
We stopped at one of the main villages along the road to pick up passengers. People ran to the window, selling food. Peanuts! Mishkaki (spiced barbecued beef)! Water! Ndege!

Ndege?

The ndege seller was holding a pot of what looked to be small pieces of meat. But there was something odd about them: despite being so small, they didn’t looked like they’d been cut.

I asked the passenger in front of me what ndege was.

“They’re small wild birds, which they catch and then cook.”

Hmm. Makes sense. Ndege means bird, and wild birds were one of the few resources in the area. But this was the first time I had ever heard of wild birds being eaten in Tanzania, and certainly the first time I’d seen them for sale.

I bought some peanuts, deciding to leave the ndege for another time. The bus continued on its way. I counted the kilometers on the signs for Dodoma: 150 km left, 100 km, 50 km, 20 km. Somewhere around 10 km from Dodoma, we hit paved road. But the bus was in such bad condition that it continued to feel just as bumpy.

10 km, 9 km, 8 km, 7 km. 6.5 km. 6 km. 5.5 km.

It’s common for things to seem very, very slow as one approaches a long-desired goal. In the case of the bus, this was made worse by the fact that many of the passengers wanted to be let off at the outskirts of the city. We stopped to let people off. They spent five minutes finding the bags they’d stowed in the compartment beneath the bus, and the next five minutes either chatting with or arguing with the conductor. Finally, finally, we started moving again. Five minutes later we stopped and repeated the whole procedure.

I spent a lot of time staring at my watch. And tapping my feet in impatience. And listening to my heart pound. 3:20 pm. 3:30. 3:45. Will I really get there by 4?

At 3:50 pm, we pulled into the bus station. By 3:55, I was on a taxi headed toward the stand for the cars to my friend’s village. By 4:05, I was at the stand, chatting with the driver of the village car.

“When’s the car leaving?”

“Around 4:30.”

I sat down to a meal of chipsi (french fries) and soda with a sigh of relief.

And in typical Tanzanian style, we didn’t actually leave until 5 pm. And then, we circled around the area for 15 minutes before finally heading south on the road to the village. I stood in the back of a crowded pick-up truck, talking with a student about American culture and male and female gender roles, ignoring the ravings of the drunken conductor, and feeling more elated and relieved than I had felt in a long time. Sixteen hours of bumpy dirt roads, two cars and four buses, and somehow, in a land of delays and broken-down buses, I had made it. Nashukuru. It’s proof of one of my theories about Tanzania. In the middle of a journey or project, things often seem to be wrong, even utterly and hopelessly wrong. Yet, in some magical and inexplicable way, they usually do work out.