“Where do you come from then?” asked the woman sitting next to me on Kenya Airways flight KQ484 from Nairobi to Dar es Salaam.
“Oh, I am from Chicago. In the United States.” Maybe I had that in the wrong order. I felt dumb stuttering out “In the United States” at the end for clarity’s sake, and the feeling was amplified by my awkward and overt politeness. Assuming that everyone knows of my hometown seems to be congruent with a stereotypical American arrogance, even if it is the third largest city in what is by most measurements the world’s most powerful country. I should answer “The US,” and then be more specific if asked. Or spend less time thinking about such idiocy.
“Ah, yeah, yeah. Mmm, mhmm.” I thought maybe her yogurt cup from the cart was especially delicious.
“How about you?”
“The UK. You know, Britain. Yeah.” Yes, I did know, what with the distinct accent and all. I felt oddly scrutinized. “What will you do in Dar?”
As I had been practicing in my head how I would dilute the truth slightly in my visa application, I said, “Visit a friend. And hopefully get out and see some other parts of Tanzania. I am very excited! And You?”
“Oh, I’m an apostle, you know.” No, I did not know. I thought you had to be dead and depicted by Caravaggio with a halo to be an apostle. I figured I had better look that one up. She continued, “We’ve got a church that seats three thousand. I’ll just kind of go and encourage them,” and paused before drawing out a long, indulgent “Yeahhh,” seeming to expect some particular sort of response. Congratulations, maybe.
“Nice,” I offered, only a little ashamed at suddenly sounding discourteous to this woman who, if only in appearance, so recalled my own grandmother.
“Yeah, then I’ll go and just, you know, sort of do some other missionary work. Are you a Christian then?”
I could appreciate that she wanted to get a jump on her other missionary work and considered giving a hand by replying, “No, I am way too adulterously gay of a murderer for that kind of thing,” but settled in the name of kneejerk decency for, “Oh, no, I don’t really identify with any one religion.”
“Oh, yeah, well you see, when you give yourself entirely over to Jesus,” she descended to explain, “Your selfish heart will be completely replaced by brilliant, shining light and love and it is the greatest thing that will ever happen to you.” This approach struck me as not the most diplomatic. I thought that if I were God I would have urged her, when she was out there pushing My word, to transition with a bit more subtlety.
“Aha.”
She continued to cite examples of the Lord’s many righteous moves and jukes in Africa, including entirely healing a man in her congregation of HIV, until she was satisfied she had clearly and unequivocally proved him to be. I was admittedly on unfamiliar ground here but said I thought science probably had some explanations worthy of consideration for a lot of such things.
“No. There are none.”
“Ah.”
When the plane landed, I was incredulous as she began to squeeze between me and my upright tray table (“Excuse me, do you think I could just…?” “Well, uh, I can’t really…until…”) as well as my other neighbor in the aisle seat before nearly clawing over the shoulders of the rest of the passengers. It was obviously in order to be first in line for visa processing.
The lady appeared next to me once more as we waited for our applications to be reviewed. She noted, somehow both sheepishly and as though she had known all along, “It’s not a queue. It’s just done randomly.”
I don’t think she chalked me up a convert.
Hashim Sambodja would say to me later in Ulelingombe, “I believe people convert to Christianity because of poverty and misery. They want a miracle. They want a cheap solution. I tell people, ‘If you want a miracle, you must be prepared to work for it.’” This resonates!
I may not have come so close to Jesus 35,000 above Africa if my Royal Deutsch Airlines flight had not been late leaving Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam the day before. The comically inefficient security procedures were mainly to blame. This of course caused me to miss my scheduled flight into Dar, which was alright as the airline provided me with hotel and transportation vouchers and a seat on the flight in the morning.
Weary from the twenty consecutive hours of travel behind me but propelled to animation by the sheer voltage of this new place, I stumbled through visa processing and out onto the nighttime street to find the booth of the car service that would bring me to the hotel named on the voucher: The Panari Hotel. The driver was very kind, and seemed to be vicariously excited at my maiden sortie into his beloved stomping grounds of Nairobi. He said that when Barrack Obama was elected president all of Kenya celebrated-mostly for his dead father, of course. When we arrived I thanked him and apologized profusely for having no Kenyan shillings for a tip, which he assured me would be taken care of by his company.
As I shouldered my bag from the back seat I saw thin clouds of bugs swarming around the yellow lights on the buildings and hustled up the front stairs, instinctually paranoid of malarial mosquitoes. In addition to foregoing any of the traditional inoculations (yellow fever, dengue, hepatitis A and B, tetanus, et cetera, as none are required to enter Tanzania from the US) I had decided not to take malaria pills. They are said to cause Homer Simpson-like night terrors, and I was told that Ulelingombe, the place where I would first reside, was at an elevation above typical mosquito habitat.
I checked in to the hotel, feeling grateful that everyone had spoken such impressive English. I made a note: Learn Swahili. Got it. A beaming door man in a bright red jacket and shiny black pants sprang ahead of me to push the elevator button. It took a minute of messing around after entering my room and dropping my bags in the dark to figure out that the key card had to be inserted in a slot in the wall for the electricity to operate. I dug this clever avoidance of wasteful energy consumption. Go to the source. Now lit I saw the décor of the room: furniture and mirrored, curvilinear oddities, vaguely Art Deco and shining, garishly printed fabrics on the bed and walls, predominantly black and white. It was where Beetlejuice would take a hooker. I loved it.
Nearly unable to think through my fatigue I unpacked my laptop and headed back to the lobby to purchase some Wi-Fi time at the front desk. I would call ahead using Skype to let my contact in Dar es Salaam know I was delayed. It seemed like the hotel’s entire staff was on duty, with no one to cater to but me. I had a meal from a buffet, unconcerned with how long it had been sitting there and not even really aware of what it was, and in a humming, insulated stupor finally went to crash.
I had a breakfast of unidentified fruit, strange sausages and hardboiled eggs, all spectacular, next to a group of eight or nine men whose nationality I couldn’t quite place. They didn’t display the affluence I associate with people who come to be carted around on safaris. That was about it for speculative curiosity after five hours of sleep. A grinning attendant with hands clasped timidly sidled up to tell me that my car had arrived and I started down the stairs.
At the airport, I sat in the check-in area waiting for my boarding pass due to some “small problem”, according to the unhurried and indifferent Kenyan woman behind the counter whose mass of tight oil-black braids formed a gleaming crown that loomed around her head. I looked up from my book at the sound of people sitting in the chairs around me and saw that it was the group I had seen at breakfast. The one who took the seat next to me carried an air of leadership and wore enough denim to put a small family in jeans.
I sensed peripherally that he purposefully held his passport so that I could read the cover, and saw that they were from the Philippines. I had barely taken my own passport from under my book and placed it so that it could be seen when he asked eagerly, “You’re American?”
It turned out that they were a crew of tradesman; he an engineer, the rest carpenters, welders and electricians. They worked on contract building out mining sites and camps in different parts of Africa. They were on their way to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They worked three month shifts and then returned home to Manila for two weeks. This site would house over 500 workers. I was staggered by this number, and tried to envision such bedlam in a Congolese jungle. I told him that I also was headed to a mining site with a current total of about 20 workers.
He laughed at this puny sum, probably imagining a threadbare local operation. Then he looked perplexed and said, “You don’t see many Americans going out to the bush to work.”
“No,” I agreed, “I haven’t met any myself,” and wondered what in the hell I would find.
Outside the airport in Dar cabbies relentlessly offered me rides. I would turn one down and two more would take his place. There were at least thirty of them, mostly sitting on benches bullshitting with each other. When one of them finally secured a fare the rest derided him jokingly, most likely to remind him what a sightless quadriplegic of a driver he was and condemning the reprehensible injustice that he would be the one to get it. I talked with some of them for a while and smoked in the thick humidity, flexing my fingers and finding them pleasantly unfrozen. I used one of their cell phones to call to say I had arrived, and then hauled my bags through the concrete pavilion to the curb and waited for my ride.
I was received warmly by my father’s partner and his driver Pius, and was relieved to chuck my bags into the back of the truck and to gain some distance from the herding and waiting of airports. I was not, however, prepared for the horrendous driving conditions on the thoroughfares of Tanzania.
There are hardly any lines to distinguish between lanes though drivers recognize at least three in each direction. They hurtle forth with little thought of what is ahead and absolutely none of what is to either side or behind, slaloming between obstacles as though a catastrophic collision would clean itself up, vehicles would repair themselves, fleshy sacks of shattered bones would again take the shapes of the bodies they once were and everyone would give it another shot. Pedestrians watch intently for a big enough gap in traffic and then dart out into the street. Mysterious major intersections materialize causing swift and complete coronary failure of the roadway, and annoyed drivers who are able will not hesitate, as motorcyclists do at all times, to pull onto the area that could be considered a sidewalk and continue forward until they can reenter the street. Cyclists are unaware of or choose to ignore entirely the constant threat of massive impact from behind that would make soundless, marrowy accordions of their spinal columns. Driver protocol when one is spotted is to lay on the horn and assume he will veer off of the road in time, without reducing speed or changing course in the slightest. It is an arena for the the reflexive and the courageous.
There is a fantastic variety of vehicles on the road that rivals as spectacle the country’s renowned biodiversity. The ubiquitous dala dalas, or privately operated buses, are the way that most people get around and are always packed completely to the gills, with limbs and heads and baskets dangling from the windows. They each have a uniquely colorful paintjob and a word or phrase decaled in huge, often glittery letters across the top of the windshield. Land Rovers with snorkels and four-door, four wheel drive pickups abound, as they are essential to venture into some of the city’s unkempt, rubble-strewn neighborhoods, let alone into the bush. Petroleum trucks always have the word “Danger” printed across the back in English, sometimes in ornate cursive lettering, and that many of them are permitted to operate in their filthy, dented, rattling condition gives pause for thought. In fact many large trucks of all kinds leak fluids, spew gray black smoke from places other than exhaust pipes and lack body panels, mud flaps, fenders and bumpers. Some lean and teeter from broken or missing leaf springs like a gutshot elephant not yet fallen on his front knees, careening across the plain. Passengers and stowaways in cargo beds cling for all their worth to frames and roll cages. Underneath scurry the three wheeled motorized rickshaws like tiny clown ambulances, fitting where they can.
I spent no more than twenty minutes at the mining company offices in the Export Processing Zone in Dar when I went back out to run errands for the next day’s trip to Kilosa with Pius and Nurdin. Nurdin’s role in the company is invaluable and multifaceted; manager, supervisor, coordinator, translator and cultural liaison, guide for uninitiated Americans. We went to a steel and mineral factory to replenish stores of material used in processing copper ore, and then to what was advertised as a hardware store by the sign on the front (a bird’s nest of a room, the walls adorned with a cluttered but indisputably practical medley of tools, kitchen implements, a few toys and other items, and another area with five sheets of gypsum board and a stack of chainsaw-milled lumber) for a couple burlap sacks of rusty 20 penny nails and fasteners for corrugated metal roof panels.
Then it was to the YMCA restaurant for lunch, where they thankfully do food better than they do afterschool programs in Evanston, Illinois. I washed my hands in the hot water trickling from the miniature spigot on the steel and brass water container at the beginning of the food line. There is one in every foodservice establishment here. Much ceremony is made of hand washing before and after meals. You would find something similar in every home, likely in the form of a bowl of water passed around at the table, as traditional Tanzanian food is eaten fingers to mouth. I wolfed white rice, beans, a few chunks of beef in a red broth, sautéed spinach and a banana and I was transformed. I told myself that the nine hour difference in time between here and home had no effect, and for the moment the straps on the leaden bedroll cinched too tightly behind my forehead were loosened. We made a stop for smokes (Portsman, a Tanzanian brand, in an orange soft pack with a circularly framed image of a horse’s head wearing a bridle and bit; what significance this has I cannot say, especially as I’ve seen not a single horse and don’t believe there are any here) and another for automotive paint and some quick cold drinks (they had Cokes, I had Mirinda, lemon ambrosia) and our errands were complete. We dropped some things off at the warehouse, where some trucks, arc welding equipment and a few Atlas Copco compressors are stored, and returned to the office. I watched out the window in open-chopped awe.
After lunch the next day, the bed loaded with supplies and my bags stuffed with me in the second row of seats in the Ford Ranger pickup (this four door version, bearing no resemblance to the ones with which I am familiar, needs desperately to be available in the United States), we left for Kilosa.
I was elated to get tarmac at 130 kilometers per hour between me and Dar es Salaam. Billboards for Airtel cell phones and half-completed and abandoned concrete structures slowly gave way to coastal range quilted with corn fields, tree limb framed clay houses-rich, dusty red-with thatch roofs and clusters of tall palms with yellowgreen leaves like the wings of a tropical Icarus. Thistly, deep green brush prevailed as groundcover, staking claim to the horizon. I have learned very quickly not to grab a plant without first inspecting it carefully, as most species have hidden fish hooks for thorns. Sprawling markets had tables piled with shoes and clothes, hanging textiles and baskets and untold metric shit-tons of other assorted goods. Amongst the vibrant but low gear commotion grazed the goats and pecked the chickens, behaving and regarded as pedestrians in their own right.
Furniture makers displayed their completed pieces at the roadside, where they also worked boards with hand tools either at makeshift benches or on the ground. A few ancient stationary machines- planers, jointers, bandsaws, lathes, some obviously the mutated results of various machines vivisected together-could be seen protruding from the open fronts of shops. There were beds with upward curving headboards, apparently all pattern routed from one grandmaster template passed from shop to shop, and bookcases of the same glowing, varnished orange-brown wood. Krenov would have called its grain structure “rowed”, but I have yet to identify it. Near most shops sat huge stacks of hand and chainsaw-milled lumber (I have trouble envisioning big horizontal bandsaws out here) with signs that read in bold, black, hand painted block letters “TIMBER FOR SALE”. Hand milling lumber is what it sounds like, though I’ve not yet seen it done here: two guys, each working one end of long flexible rip saws, tear through logs for dimensioned lumber. Sometimes the log is suspended over a pit with a guy standing on top and the other in the pit and the saw is worked vertically. It is an unfathomable type of work, so primitive by today’s standards but so necessary and admirable.
At one point we came upon a bad accident that looked like it had occurred a couple of hours before. Two buses lay in the ditches on opposite sides of the road about thirty yards apart, both upside down and completely mangled. There were tree branches scattered in the road for another 100 yards. Survivors picked solemnly through the wreckage. I think that out of respect no one slowed down to gawk. Judging by the degree of annihilation not everyone walked away. I looked forward tensely and sent a telepathic message to Pius to keep it between the lines.
Eventually we came within sight of the mountains. The transition from the tiered and rolling coastal range was subtle, and they appeared at first as occasional hazy mounds of coal. But once we came around a bend and were confronted by the first sheer, tree and scree covered pitch, we were surrounded. The Uluguru Mountains. Immense, verdant, soft topped peaks rose on both sides, those to the south of us more distant, like goliath sleeping hippopotamuses covered in neon algae. Each successive ridge faded to a grayer shade of green until the last appeared transparently golden. I felt as though I had waited to be here for longer than I knew. I had learned through studying maps that this route would take us through these mountains, but I never found any photographs so was forced to rely on imagination. My urge to climb in them made my feet and legs twitch restlessly. My companions were amused at my reaction and all the questions I asked. I imagined them shitting their pants in disbelief at the base of the Sears Tower and laughed.
We stopped in Morogoro in the heart, or more accurately in the left femoral artery of the mountains, at a restaurant on a stretching slate patio set far back in from the side road we had taken. The only structure was a lumbering umbrella of an open sided grass thatch roof. Nurdin spoke quickly to the server who wore a Serengeti Beer t-shirt two sizes too big for his fruit bat frame. He asked me if wali nyama-rice and beef-would be ok, as it was what could be prepared fastest. He’d done this haul too many times for it to be adventure it was for me and he wanted to get back on the road. I said it was, and couldn’t think of a time when it would not be. As we waited another guy showed up and sat down, a truck driver for the company who would ride with us to Kilosa. Lunch came steaming and snapping in shallow stone bowls straight from the fire with plates of rice, lime, pili pili-hot peppers- and a club soda in a clear beer bottle. I will remember that meal, so unremarkable to Nurdin and Pius, for the rest of my life.
After another hour or so of driving we turned at a sign reading “KILOSA”. The pavement ended and would not begin again. We had been on the road for four hours at mostly high speed and were only about a third of the way there.
The red clay road to Kilosa was smooth at some points, and at these Peus would do around 40 miles per hour as villagers dived into the tall grass, but mostly deeply rutted and washed out. Sunken muddy holes spanning half the width of the road generally made speeds above ten or fifteen miles per hour impossible. It was slow, jerky going, but with all there was to see I didn’t mind. It was like a much longer and more purposeful version of all the four wheeling on fire breaks and logging roads I had done in Northern California with Mauricio and David. I imagined that they would be as awestruck as I was at the landscape and Pius’s artfully fluid handling of the truck.
The passing landscape’s trancelike hold was broken by the sudden slowing of the truck. I looked forward to see a large green bus in the road. We skirted it to the right and as we passed it I could see that for fifty yards ahead the road disappeared under a rushing coffee-and-cream colored river. We laughed, because no one had a better idea. A few figures could be seen wading towards us from the other side along the highpoint of the ground underneath the water, pants rolled up and holding their shoes, submerged to the knees. The new member of our group had hopped out as soon as we stopped and was calling questions to them in Kiswahili and they yelled their responses. I waited to see what Pius decided to do.
So, we began to pull forward into the water. I thought for a moment and then stopped Pius and asked him to back onto the road again so that I could climb onto the supplies in the bed and ride on top. Grinning and with my camera out I thumped on the cab and we were off into the water again. I considered that the engine had no snorkel and the water was deeper than it appeared and was doubtful for a moment that we had a prayer of making it across, but shrugged and held on. Two figures dumped down the stairs from the green bus with engine parts in their hands and ran into our wake laughing. When they caught up they tossed the parts in and climbed onto the bumper. The three of us laughed and I asked if I could take some pictures and they agreed.
We reached a narrow patch of land halfway across and, emboldened, plunged into the second, faster moving section of the ford. I think everyone knew it would happen. Just ten yards short of the bank the entire left side of the truck abruptly submerged. It leaned so that I was sure it would tip. I climbed to the high side of the bed. Pius gave it gas for a moment in vain, spraying water up and back, but it was clear that we weren’t going anywhere. The left side of the car was under up to the door handles. I put my camera back in the case on my belt. The two passengers grabbed their car parts and carried them to shore and the new passenger took off his shoes and climbed out of the back window. I took my shoes off as well and leaned over to toss them into the cab, only to see about 18 inches of water where my feet had been. I leaned to the high side and tucked them in with my bag, hoping my computer was still dry, and jumped into the river. I wondered briefly, white boy from the suburbs that I am, if I needed to worry about crocodiles or infections, but didn’t want to ask and reveal my ignorance. I was past the point of being able to do anything about it anyhow, and the water felt good in the heat. I figured if these guys were in it there was no reason that I shouldn’t be.
I hadn’t seen the crowd gather to watch us flounder. I also hadn’t realized that another big bus, painted as if by the Merry Pranksters in swirling, psychedelic patterns, laid twisted and high-centered into the brush a ways up the road. At least thirty people stood talking and laughing and watching the proceedings. One was a tall, chubby Massai wearing the typical red cloth and dagger on his belt and talking on a cell phone. I smiled and waved and said “Jambo” (“Hello”, one of about four Kiswahili words in my vocabulary at the time) to the group and turned to wade back out to the truck. Some returned the greeting, but most just looked and chuckled and probably wondered what in the hell I was doing there, standing in the mud in my bare feet. Pius had climbed out the window and Nurdin had taken the wheel. The next thing I knew, as I lit a smoke and headed to the tailgate to unload with Pius to relieve the weight, at least ten members of the audience splashed in behind me. In a matter of minutes we had the truck unloaded and then we were lined along the deep end, rocking the tuck back and forth as Nudin accelerated. Everybody strained and laughed. Finally both front wheels grabbed purchase and the truck lurched up onto the shore.
Nurdin negotiated with the self appointed spokesman for the group of helpers and paid him what looked like Tsh10,000, or about seven and a half dollars. With the show over, the crowd followed behind our truck back towards their bus, and we pulled up the road to bail the water out of the cab and repack. A tractor, painted olive drab and operated by a uniformed soldier, was chained off to the bus and preparing to pull it back to level ground. I climbed into the front this time at Pius’ insistence, feet caked with heavy red mud-that felt kiln hardened when it dried-and pants soaked, and we continued forth. Ten minutes later we heard a pop and then air escaping from a tire. Heads shook at what we hoped was the cap to the afternoon’s events, the tire was changed and we jumped back in the truck to try again. Minor technical difficulty.
An hour and a half later we pulled into Kilosa. The small town square that greeted us was bordered by lines of dim, dilapidated shops and people watching us pull in, no one in a hurry. A few guys worked under a bus up on blocks in the center of the square. We dropped the punctured tire off with an acquaintance of Nurdin’s and headed toward the company’s rented house.
We pulled up to the house, a surprisingly large, comfortable three bedroom structure given the 70 dollar monthly rental cost. I shook hands with five other company employees who were sitting on the narrow concrete front porch, including Willie, a heavy equipment operator and Noel, who I was introduced to as camp manager at Ulelingombe. He seems to me to be a general crew leader whose main responsibilities include arranging and overseeing the transportation of equipment and materials from the staging area of the house in Kilosa to the camp, as well as deciding what workers should be stationed where depending on what there is to be done. Presiding over the assembly with passive but still radiant venerability was the Colonel. The Colonel is a retired Tanzanian Air Force Colonel who is head of security for the mining company. His history in the military also gives him diplomatic pull with local officials. I decided without telling anyone that he would here forth be my uncle.
After trading stories I was shown inside to a room just inside the front door, small and square with the same unpainted concrete floors as the rest of the house. We set up a mosquito net over the pad on the floor and went through the house towards the back. In the living room the aluminum-sided foam core panels and some of the steel structural elements of the prefabricated housing intended for Ulelingombe were stacked to the ceiling. Through a door at the far side was a littered interior courtyard, off of which were located the shower room and toilet.
Toilets here, of course, are holes in the ground. This one was in a room roughly four by six feet with seven foot ceilings. The floors are perpetually wet; one hopes from watery, paperless ass wiping (I brought my own paper, as it is certainly never supplied, though I have trouble imaging exactly how it is done otherwise. I am so curious in fact that I may have to ask for a dry-run demonstration sometime) and not carelessly sprayed piss, especially when wearing just sandals. To take a shit you squat and aim for the hole. To take a piss you aim for the hole. In both cases you strive to minimize spray. It is a very simple system devoid of any frills, though a bit of a shock for one accustomed to the surgically white, sensually curved porcelain thrones of the western world, with their thoughtfully contoured fold-up seats, which in retrospect, as I squat, seem so inviting as to giggle and blush at the opportunity to cordially cup the butt. A rainwater collection system installed at the house, consisting of a tank on legs fed by gutters along the back side of the roof, allowed this particular one to flush. And during especially torrential periods of rain I was told that cold showers under a single trickling stream could be had in the room next door.
A side door from the courtyard opened on a path along the house to the backyard, which the landlord had allowed the company to level into a broad dirt pad for storing equipment. Maniacal red ants had the run of the whole pad and the dirt alley beyond, and as I talked with Noel and some of the other workers I shifted spots to avoid being infiltrated. Half a snake lay in a dip in the alley, barely recognizable for the horde of ants that worked to drag it underground. Parked in back were a bulldozer, a grader and a tractor trailer about 40 feet long and sunken into the ground a bit by the rain. It’s metal cargo compartment had been cut down low enough to make it a flatbed. On the flatbed sat a standard black shipping container and a new Airstream trailer. The Airstream was a model called the “Basecamp”; a short, slick, two-person unit that looked like a 50’s streamline toaster with curved, tinted windows. Luxurious anywhere, especially here. Someone decided it was imperative that it be offloaded from the truck that night. For the next couple hours machines were shuffled and the truck was towed from place and enough ground was pushed up to the back of it to pull the Airstream straight off with a chain hooked to the dozer. It had been dark for an hour already when cleaned up to go get dinner in town.
Kilosa is quite unfortunately situated. It lies in a tight, furrowed valley that serves as a funnel for all the water pouring from the surrounding mountains. The year before many people had been displaced, their homes destroyed by flooding. Most of the water is channeled out by the river that runs through town but there is still ample standing water and this, coupled with the low altitude and humidity, make for ideal mosquito habitat. Malaria is probably the most frequently treated ailment at the local clinic (which is equipped for this purpose and not much else). Despite the heat I wore long sleeves. Here and there I threw in a casual, mosquito related questions. Noel and Nurdin seemed to get a kick out of my nervousness, and where I had hoped for reassurance they chose to let me stew. I would likely have done the same. The fact is that mosquitoes are there, and I had had the opportunity to take the pills. Bite prevention is the best cure for malaria, and while no preventative measure can provide any guarantees, I had some good ones in effect: coils, nets, long sleeves, catlike slapping reflexes. I moved on. It isn’t fatal anyhow.
We had dinner in an open-front restaurant with plastic picnic tables and chairs. I ate rice and beans and half a fried chicken with about a quarter the meat on it that one the same size at home would have had. It liked that this was because it had surely been butchered in the yard behind the joint that very evening, and while it clearly didn’t have the diet it would have chosen for itself given its druthers, at least it wasn’t grown on a shelf. Back at the house I dove under the mosquito net and read for a bit-The Sunlight Dialogues by John Gardener- and then lamped out.
I was awakened before dawn with sudden certainty that Hitler lived and had learned to speak Swahili. A tyrannical voice droned, blasting quavering treble through blown out speakers and I thought that martial law had been declared, or else some sort of anti-American kill squad had arrived and was now flushing me from cover. I learned later that it was the daily Muslim call to prayer. Praise Allah, with equal intensity at all hours. The room was gradually illuminated as the voice began to chant with melancholy vibrato. I stared at the ceiling.
I stuffed my sleeping bag and packed my castile soap and towel. We added some corrugated metal sheets and a green steel cot frame from the house to our load, saluted the Colonel and the others and rolled down the hill to town. Breakfast, at the same restaurant as the night before, was a thin omelet with onions and tomatoes, and chapati-homemade wheat flour tortilla-like things. They make me think of burritos and I like them, but always feel a bit cheated because they never have anything on them. Spectacular grinds nonetheless. I bought some smokes (Tsh1,200 a pack, less than a dollar, need to quit, I’ll get right on that) and a case of water and we swung south out of town.
The road conditions deteriorated the further we went. If the area felt remote before, it now seemed like the uncharted topography of a distant planet. My amazement at the little truck’s capability was renewed each time we climbed another set of deeply rutted switchbacks over a saddle between two peaks and skidded down the other side. We went through villages where whole families tilled by hand fields of rich brown soil that would make an Iowa corn farmer weep. The woodsmoke from cooking fires in the clay huts was as bittersweet as caramelized shallots, and it reminded me of burn piles in the rainy season in Northern California. Brushfire has a strikingly similar aroma no matter where you are or what you burn.
We stopped in the middle of the road in a village and Noel haggled at a farmer’s counter with the girl there, wrapped head to ankles in bright blue, yellow and red fabric. He got back in with a sack of tomatoes. Produce here was organic before the word had meaning in English, let alone before it came into vogue in the western world; since the advent of agriculture. Maybe farmers here would use pesticides and chemical fertilizers if they were available, but to see the welfare of their crops you (or I, uneducated on the matter) would be at a loss to identify a need.
We only got stuck one more time, front left tire slipped and bound up in a crevice. It was that, or take it too far to the right and too close to the edge of a gnarly drop. The path of least resistance, the crisis most easily averted, the devil we figured we knew. Nobody was rolling the fucking thing back up the hill, that much was clear. Somebody dug some and the rest lifted and we got it out. We gained altitude. It was a feeling -thinner, cooler air, bluer sky, muffled sound. One patch of maize on the bevel of a chisel- tipped pitch appeared a mirage. And too much work to get to. Those guys have balls.
I vaguely heard Nurdin’s voice as we came over a ridge, ‘That down below there is Ulelingombe’, as I nodded off. Three quarters asleep, my limp neck kinked back and forth as we descended. I dreamed that I had resigned myself to a purgatorial lifetime of riding knees cramped in the back of a truck on rocky dirt paths. There must be worse. I awoke sometime later to the opening of the camp gates.
It is Friday, April 8th and I am back in Dar es Salaam. I had to come 12 hours back to see a doctor. Peace of mind alone can justify the cost of healthcare, especially when it is this cheap.
It is a chore to keep up with this nonsense, but I enjoy it. I will continue with what happened in and around camp next. I may have enough to post some before I go back up, but if not, (and I hope not, because I want to go as soon as possible) then in the by and by.
posted by George @ 3:33 AM
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