Kuuliza si ujinga

It is nearly a year since the day I boarded a plane to Tanzania. A year since I came out of the airport into the humidity of Dar es Salaam, half-asleep, disoriented, and more than a little afraid. I remember walking into my room that night and feeling a sudden, overwhelming feeling of loneliness: I was alone in a room in a country I didn’t know, surrounded by people speaking a language I didn’t understand. I never stopped to ask myself, “Was my decision to come here wrong? Should I go back to the U.S.?” I never thought about running back to where I came from. But that first night, as I walked alone into my room, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of being utterly, completely alone.

I’m now on my way back to that same hotel, to meet the new trainees who will be arriving by plane in just a few days. I’ll be looking back in time, at the person I once was, as the trainees make their way to the hotel from the airport. It’s the perfect place to be on my year anniversary of arriving in Tanzania. And it leads me to look back and think, how have I changed since I’ve arrived here?

It’s a hard question for someone to answer for themselves, as change is slow and hard to measure while it’s happening. If you want a really good answer, you’ll have to come visit me and tell me how I’ve changed. All that said, though, here are some thoughts on life after a year in Tanzania:


1) Tanzania is home.

I rarely think about the country I left behind. I don’t think about TVs or paved roads, American food or reliable electricity sources. I have long ago stopped yearning for things which I can’t find here, and which after months of living here I have forgotten about anyway. Tanzania is now home. It’s normal for chickens and cows to be walking along the road beside me. It’s normal to pass women carrying baskets of bananas on their heads, small children walking by themselves, and school-children dressed in uniforms. It’s normal for greetings to be an important and daily part of life, for the public transportation to be crowded daladalas, for meals to be beans and rice or ugali and greens. I no longer feel the constant pressure one feels as a newcomer. Am I doing this right? Will I offend someone? Is this area safe to walk in? Does the guy next to me want to steal my phone? These and a thousand other little things used to put pressure on me. Now the pressure, if it comes, arises simply from daily life. I worry about things like whether I will teach my students enough of the syllabus before their exams, whether my neighbors are watering my garden while I’m traveling, and whether the ATM at the bank will be working when I reach town. Life in Tanzania is no longer daunting, yet neither is each event an adventure and each day a subject for an excited journal entry. After a year here, life in Tanzania is simply life.


2) Plans? What plans?

The bus is an hour late? No problem, I’ll sit here and read my book. Classes are canceled today, with no advance warning? Well, I guess I’ll sit in my office and correct exams, and maybe we can do that debate I scheduled for today later this week. I’m the type of person who likes to plan ahead and to know what’s coming next. Even now, after a year of having my plans foiled, I still write down what I want to do with my classes for the next two weeks, and I still have a grand, carefully-scheduled scheme in my mind. The difference is that I no longer expect this scheme to work. I write plans with the expectation that they will change. I walk to the school in the morning expecting to have to improvise and change my schedule at the last minute. I no longer worry about foiled lessons and destroyed schedules, nor do I blame myself for these problems. As a wise friend said, “Prepare for but neither worry about nor depend on what you expect from the future.” It’s a good way to live in Tanzania.


3) Learning to be assertive

I wasn’t particularly good at saying no in the U.S. You want me to help you with your chemistry homework? Well, I have a thesis due in two weeks and I’m way behind in all my other classes, but sure, I’ll help you. You want to borrow this book? Well, I kind of need it, but sure, as long as you give it back later.

I stayed reasonably sane in the U.S. despite being unable to refuse people, because people rarely asked me for things. Here, people ask for me things all the time. Can I borrow your watering can? Your camera? Your chemistry book? Can you leave the class you’re teaching to take a picture of me? My parents’ house is too far from the school, can I live in your house with you? I just met you, but can I marry you?

With a barrage of questions of this type, I quickly learned to say no. Drawing lines has been a little harder—I’m still deciding what I’m willing to lend out and what I’m not, who I’m willing to go out of my way for and who is definitely not worth the time and trouble. But while I’m still drawing lines, once the line is drawn, it stays there. No, I need to water my garden this afternoon. My camera batteries are dead. I need my chemistry book to write lesson plans. No way, I’m not leaving the forty students I’m teaching to take a picture of you. Sorry, I’d love to let you live in my house, but my organization doesn’t let me live with anyone else. And I suppose you could marry me…if you’re willing to cook, wash my clothes, learn fluent English, and give fifty cows to my father. Oh, and I should mention I have no intention of getting married soon, maybe you should come back in ten years with those cows.

If there’s any useful skill I’ll be taking back with me to the U.S., it’s the ability to say no when necessary. And to differentiate who I should say no to firmly and possibly rudely, and who is important/nice/friendly enough to say no to in a polite or humorous way.


4) The importance of relationships

I have always been an introspective person. In the U.S., this also meant I was a bit of a loner. I was perfectly happy spending hours by myself reading, writing, or simply thinking. I enjoyed the time I spent with my friends, but at the same time, I had no problem with being alone.

Tanzania has changed this. I have become good at being an extrovert. I can make small talk with the person next to me on the bus, and chat about anything from the school I teach at to the state of the local crops to American culture with neighbors who invite me to dinner. I have learned to make friends with a few words: to find out where people are from so I can greet them in their tribal language, or to find out where people have traveled and worked so I can make a connection with them based on places we have both been. I have a collection of phone numbers and e-mail addresses for Tanzanians I will probably never meet again—but who may prove helpful should I ever pass through their village. I have a wealth of stories of coincidences, from the guy on the computer next to me in Morogoro who knew a teacher that lives only a few houses down from me, to the guy on a bus seven hours from my village who had once been a student at my school.
It seems that I can't go anywhere in Tanzania without meeting either someone I know or someone who is a relative or friend of someone I know. Fairly amazing, considering that the population of the country is as large as that of California.

At the same time as I've become more extroverted, I've come to place a greater value on relationships. One of the main things we were taught during training is that Tanzanians place a greater value on relationships than on things like productivity, directness, and arriving places on time. This has become my view as well. I've learned to expect that a trip to the store to buy soap will take two hours, because I have to greet everyone on the way there and back. I stop by neighbors’ houses just to say hi and to exchange news. And while I won't give money to the drunken old men who sit around by the village stores, I will lend money to neighbors, or simply give them money in the case of weddings, funerals, and sick relatives.

As I've become more extroverted and more accustomed to having relationships with my neighbors, I've become worse at being alone. I'll find myself alone in my house for the first time in a while, and I'll simply think, now what? I've gone from being accustomed to spending my free time alone with a book or a pen, to having no idea what to do with myself when there's no one there to talk to.

Tanzania has taught be to how to start relationships with strangers, how to keep up relationships with neighbors, and, most importantly, how to treasure the relationships I have. I hope to take this skill back to America with me—and to learn to use it in a place where it is much harder to start conversations with strangers and much more challenging to keep up relationships with neighbors.


A last thought: Peace Corps volunteers often say that the days pass slowly, but the months pass quickly. This is very true. When I look back, the past year doesn't seem to have gone by in the blink of an eye, but it does seem to have gone by quickly. And, perhaps more strangely, it feels utterly and completely gone: the events seem so distant, so faded in my memory, that I wonder if I arrived here five years ago rather than one. As my second year in Tanzania begins, I have only one goal: to simply enjoy and make the best of each day, because before I know it, I'll be writing an entry like this again. And a blink of an eye later, whether or not I'm ready, I'll be on a plane home. So this year, I plan to simply take things slowly, do my best not to stress too much, and enjoy my life here while I can.

(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.

Take out a map of Tanzania, and look for two towns: Karatu and Dodoma. If you can't find Karatu, look for Arusha instead. Found them? Good. Now, tell me: what do you think would be the fastest route between these two places?

If you said 'Head straight south', your answer is logical...but wrong. The fastest way from Karatu to Dodoma is to go from Karatu to Moshi, Moshi to Morogoro, Morogoro to Dodoma. In other words, to go east, then south, then west again.

Why? Because that's where the paved roads are. The land between Karatu and Dodoma is sparsely settled and undeveloped. As a result, the roads are unpaved, and the buses that travel them are old and poorly-maintained. I have asked many Tanzanians, 'What about the road south to Dodoma?' The answer is always the same: Don't even think about it. Take the paved road through Arusha.

Sound attractive? I thought it did. So about a week ago, I forsook the paved road through Arusha, and hopped on a car headed for the bumpy southern road.

The plan was as follows:
Day 1: Karatu to Mbulu, Mbulu to Babati. A night staying with American missionaries in Babati.
Day 2: Babati to Kondoa, Kondoa to Dodoma, Dodoma to my friend's school. This was iffy, as I'd need to get to Dodoma by 4 pm to catch the car to his school, and Babati to Kondoa is 8 hours if everything goes as planned (and when does everything go as planned in rural Tanzania?).

DAY 1: KARATU TO BABATI

I awoke at 5:30 am with a plan to be at the main road waiting for a car by 7 am. As usual, Tanzania foiled my carefully-laid plans. It took longer than expected to get everything ready: to pack my bags, sweep my floor, and leave my house clean for me to come back to. It also took longer than expected to give neighbors my watering can and buckets so they could water my garden when I was gone. Greetings are important in Tanzania, you can’t hurry through them. And if your headmaster wants you to write a letter for him before you leave, well, you write it and arrive, with a sigh, at the road at 8:30.

I was headed toward the town of Mbulu. Of course, since I was headed toward Mbulu, all the cars that passed were going the other way. I finally got in an Mbulu-bound private car after over an hour of waiting, and reached Mbulu by noon.

A quick lunch and a glance around Mbulu: a quiet, forested town, too bad I’m in too much of a hurry to stay. I asked around the small bus stand for transport to Babati. “The Babati buses all left already, you could come back in the morning.” Umm, no, it’s necessary I reach Babati today. “Then take a Katesh bus and get off at Dereda.” I was pointed to a bus that already looked full. “Can you stand?” the conductor asked. “Um…sure.” I got on and crowded into the already-full aisle.

It was the first day of school vacation, and all the students were leaving their schools in town to go back to their home villages. Hence, a very crowded bus, but also a bus full of the people I’m most used to interacting with: students. The crowded, cramped four hour ride felt a little shorter due to conversations with my neighbors. I did eventually get a seat—with bags and a child on my lap—but was nevertheless very happy when we finally reached the town of Dereda, and I switched for a shorter, much less crowded bus to Babati.

Babati is not a big town. But it is the capital of its region, which means it has paved roads and electricity. We had views of the town’s namesake lake, Lake Babati, on the way in. And the town as a whole was much greener than I expected. Thanks to seeing the lake and the trees and to arriving successfully before dark, I was in a good mood as I got off the bus and started walking to the missionaries’ house.

A side note, in case you’re wondering, how did you meet missionaries? The short story is that another Peace Corps volunteer gave me their phone number. The longer story is that there’s a sort of network of Americans in Tanzania who welcome Peace Corps volunteers to their houses. Not everyone’s in it; there are plenty of Americans living in Tanzania who have no interest in hosting Peace Corps volunteers. But there are others who open their houses to us, and encourage us to pass on their phone numbers to our friends. The missionaries are in this group. Even though the Peace Corps philosophy is very, very different from the missionary philosophy, the shared experience of being foreigners in Tanzania is the same. We don’t meet with the intention of changing each other’s political or religious views, we simply meet to share stories of living here, and to give or take hospitality as it’s offered.

And so, I spent my evening in Babati in America. At least that’s what it felt like. The missionaries have four children, meaning that they wanted their house to be fairly American. A hot shower! Pizza and lemonade for dinner! Styrofoam plates! Children sitting on the floor, watching a movie! I went to bed feeling very thankful for the hospitality. Day one was a success, but I still had the bumpy roads and unknown territory of northern Dodoma region ahead of me.

(continued in the entry above this one)

It's been a while. Here's a quick update, hopefully to be followed by more detailed entries in the next few days.

1) Where am I now?
I'm in Morogoro, the city where I had my Peace Corps training. I'll be helping with the training of the new Peace Corps volunteers that will arrive this week. I'll be meeting them at the airport in Dar es Salaam, then heading with them to Morogoro for their first week of training.

2) Where have I been?
I took the 16 hour dirt road south from my site to Dodoma. It was interesting. Look on a map-I passed through Mbulu, spent a night in Babati, passed through Kondoa, and finally reached Dodoma. Details coming soon.

3) How's school?
Due to another teacher's absence, I was put in charge of running chemistry practicals. Practical 1: titration. Mouth pipetting is completely normal in Tanzania. Practical 2: Qualitative analysis. I had no idea how to do this myself until a week before the practical. Again, details coming soon.