All hyperbole aside, I can safely say that visiting Tanzania was truly unique from anything I have experienced before. Maybe it was because everything was such a drastic opposite of what I had grown so used to during my time in safe, efficient, and shy Japan. Not to say that Tanzania isn’t safe, but any place is an automatic raised sense of awareness now after living in Japan, especially any place new. In terms of efficiency and shyness, let’s just say that things move at a much more relaxed pace, and you’ll never meet so many people so eager to say hello to you. Two weeks in the country wasn’t nearly enough time for me to really learn the way of life or get to know the people, but jumping right into and navigating through this friendly and welcoming culture allowed me to get pretty close in the short time I had.
And just in case context isn't enough, "mambo?" is the equivalent of something like "what's up?" in Kiswahili, the main language spoken in Tanzania (English is used in business and higher education) and pretty much everyone uses it to greet each other casually, friends and strangers alike.
I actually created a fully-captioned album showing little bits of everything I did in Iringa in order. Since I’m going to talk about the whole trip in one email, I won’t sugarcoat it, it’s going to be long. If you don’t feel like reading it all, you can just look at the pictures for the short version! (the links for them are at the bottom). I won’t write too much about what I did (mountain biking, camping, teaching, SAFARI, just to name a few) because the pictures do a better job of showing that, but I will write about things I saw and felt that I found interesting and some of my thoughts on them.
I went to visit Adam, my boyfriend of about two years, in Iringa, a town tucked away in the beautiful southern highlands of the country. He is working at Iringa International School (IIS) as an English, History, and Humanities teacher for the year. The principal even let me teach a few art classes while I was there. Most of Tanzania is pretty hot and humid, but up in the hills, the climate usually remains a perfect 84 and sunny during the day and 66 and clear at night with barely a trace of humidity (that’s 29 and 18 degrees for you metric folks). The time I visited happened to be the tail-end of their “rainy season”. I use that term lightly because after experiencing rainy seasons in Japan (overcast and steady rain for weeks), this weather was pretty dry in comparison (nice for most of the day with maybe a downpour for an hour or two in the morning or evening). But even this was enough to have the hillsides green and the amazing varieties of trees and flowers beautifully in bloom.
The journey there was one of the more grueling ones, even though the time change was only a jump eight hours ahead of Boston time. A chronological list is probably the best way to tell it:
-6.5 hour flight from Boston to London on Sunday evening at 7:30.
-Arrived at 6am on Monday, London time (1am Boston time) and started my 11-hour layover in the city. (Only about 4 real hours in the city with the travel time and the airport time. I tried to sleep as much as I could on the flight to offset the jump ahead in time but there’s only so much you can doze off in an American Airlines economy seat.)
-9 hour flight from London to Dar Es Salaam (Dar), Tanzania at 6pm London time (British Airways economy is much more comfortable with individual TVs!)
-Arrived in Dar at 6am on Tuesday, Tanzania time (3am London time)
-A sweaty and bumpy 9-hour bus ride over dirt roads and tarmac, through villages and a national park, past fields and up steep slopes from Dar to Iringa with only one 10-min breakdown in the middle which was extremely lucky so I was told repeatedly by the locals
-Arrived in Iringa at 7pm on Tuesday
Total travel time: 43 hours.
I know trying to read all that is probably making your head spin so the point is, I got there and I was exhausted and pretty dirty.
Adam lives in a gated and guarded flat (apartment) complex in a quieter part of town, but just a short walk from main streets. Many expats live in this type of housing, but the majority of locals make their homes in basic one or two room bungalows made of mud, concrete, or brick with thatched roofs, especially those in the villages outside of town. Screened and glass windows are rarities in these types of houses. Each village also seemed to have its own small plots of farming land along with some livestock, and the few houses that bordered the main roads doubled as small produce stands and convenience stores.
In the center of Iringa is the farmer’s market. Ohh the market, with its endless piles of every vegetable and fruit imaginable, mounds of spice varieties, beans, rice, and live chickens waiting to be killed and plucked. Everything in this market looked delicious and I wouldn’t have minded going there every day for fresh ingredients for dinner. The vendors sitting in the middle of these piles were friendly in the bargaining process and often included an extra little something as a gift if they liked you.
The butcher shops were a little more suspect for me, even being used to hanging-COOKED-meat butcher shops in Chinatowns. These were just one-room establishments with a window facing the road where the butcher took orders. Behind him would be huge slabs of raw carcasses hanging from the ceiling or lined up on the floor, all unrefrigerated and teaming with flies. Should someone order something, they would use bloody machetes and knives to hack pieces off to weigh on the scale. My stomach is pretty strong, but not that strong and I wanted to avoid any extra one-on-one time with the toilet while I was there so I politely declined their invitations to try their meat and opted for the frozen chickens in the shops.
Their version of a supermarket is basically a single 20x10ft room lined with various non perishables, some made in TZ and some imported from the UK, Australia, or India. Most other types of shops along the dirt roads are just alcoves lined with shelves, many of which sell essentially the same things.
Tanzania is heavily influenced by the Muslim faith but many other religions are practiced as well. It has a large population of Indians, Middle Easterners, and Europeans, from descendents of long family lines to those there on business endeavors and so the food options deliciously reflect these multicultural backgrounds.
As for daily life in Iringa, you learn to live and be happy with less and to make your own fun. There are no bright lights, arcades, cinemas, or shopping malls and for that, it felt like a relief from constant noise and stimulation. ‘Less is more’ definitely applies here, for me at least. It was really nice to get outside and explore, meet people, read, write, sketch, and study. There isn’t much to do around town after dark and it’s not a good idea for a girl to walk around alone at night anyway, but the laid back evenings were just as good. Here are a few things that we have and take for granted in developed countries yet wasn’t so awful, you could even say nice for some, to be without in Iringa:
-There are no bright lights, arcades, cinemas, shopping malls. (Great!)
-Adam didn’t have a TV, but even if he did, a satellite dish is required for anything in English. Tanzanian soap operas are only good for a laugh at terrible acting and trigger-happy tacky sound effects. Five minutes of that is plenty enough and I had to endure three hours of it while waiting at the bus station in Dar.
-Internet is a pretty interesting process as well. Instead of paying for a subscription to unlimited bandwidth as we are all used to, you buy gigabytes of it as you would purchase a prepaid calling card. It’s transferred to your home modem and deducted as you transfer bytes using the web. This pretty much rules out any kind of streaming video or large downloads because those will eat up the bandwidth for the month quick.
-Hot water needs to be switched on and takes a few hours for the tank to fully heat up. Any water that goes into your body ie. toothbrushing, veggie washing, and drinking needs to be from the purified water tank. Adam kept bottles of it by the sink in the bathroom.
-Machines. Or lack thereof. Almost everything is done by hand here. Vacuums, kitchen appliances, dishwashers, washing machines, and dryers are few and far in between. Adam and his flatmate, Elizabeth, have a housekeeper named Rehema who inexpensively comes three days a week to clean, do laundry, and cook dinner. And boy can she cook! In the two weeks I was privileged enough to eat her food, she made chapati, cheeseburgers, cinnamon buns, and various Tanzanian meat, veggie, and rice dishes, all from scratch including the hamburger buns!
The locals here have been living this simpler way of life (even more so than what I described) for ages but I have never met a friendlier group of people who seemed so content with so little. Of course, the conditions of life here on the other hand, also mean more vulnerability to disease, sickness, and starvation. On a few occasions, some kids followed us around the market area begging for food or money as we being foreign, were automatically associated with being rich as well. We gave them fruit and bought them some milk for which they were extremely grateful and waved happily and emphatically goodbye to us when we walked away. Malaria is always a risk though less so in the higher-elevation highlands (we had mosquito nets and daily malaria medication anyway) as are food and water-borne illnesses. I was required to have all my routine vaccinations as well as those for malaria, hepatitis A&B, seasonal flu, H1N1, typhoid, and yellow fever before I left. Also, the Iringa district has the highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the country. Maybe on the inside, there is suffering and hardship, things I wasn’t able to see in my very short time there, but everyone I met on the streets and in the markets was never too busy or hardened to crack a wide smile and positively answer back when I said “Mambo!” The children were especially friendly and their open curiosity was a breath of fresh air.
A short little story about these good people:
We took a bike trip to a campsite about 10km outside Iringa town and on the way home, I got a flat in my front tire (not uncommon on these dirt roads). We stopped in a village by the road to see if we could get some help with the tube or with a pump. The few men hanging around the front were happy to try and help but could only find a rusty old pump to try to get a little air back in to hopefully get me back to Iringa. They took turns trying to pump and little by little, more people came around from the inner section to watch. I guess they don’t get white boys and Asian girls with flat bicycle tires from leisure riding visiting their village too often because by the time they did what they could with the tire, a good 20 people had come out to catch a glimpse of the “action.” After more smiles and thank you’s and about 40 cents of gratitude money exchanged, we went on our way again. With some speedy riding and some hitchhiking with a friendly pick up truck (bikes in the bed, Adam and I up front with the driver, and the two other guys who had been riding in there now hanging off each side, standing on the foot steps) up the giant, narrow hill to town, we made it back with no more issues at all.
I didn’t leave Tanzania completely unscathed as my stomach has been acting up and generally uncomfortable for a week since my last day in the country. It’s nothing serious though and a small price to pay for the great experience. Two weeks is much too short and I would definitely go back in a heartbeat--my visa is for multiple entry...
As for my volunteer position in Chile, my departure date has been March 16 for awhile but with everything going on after the earthquake, my program has put us on hold until they can sort it all out down there. So as of right now, we are in a wait and see situation. Hopefully, we’ll find out soon!
Sorry for the longest email in history and good on you if you actually made it down here. There was just a lot to talk about.
As a reward, here are the links to my photo albums:
London Four-Hour Speed Tour
http://www.facebook.com/al
Karibu Tanzania!
http://www.facebook.com/al
Those albums had a picture capacity so I also have my Google Picasa website. I haven’t loaded the pictures on there yet but when I do, there will probably be a few more that I left out of the albums above but no captions on these sadly.
http://picasaweb.google.co
¡Muchos besos y feliz primavera!
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