Missive #7: Keribu Sana!

January 14, 2010

Mambo!

On December 9th, a snowstorm hit Peterborough. The snow came down heavily and blanketed the world, and thunder rolled ominously. Jackson and I were doing the last of our packing, and I helped Randy shovel the driveway and steps. At 1 o’clock we bid goodbye to Wendy and Randy with whom we had enjoyably spent the past three months, and took a ride with Patricia, MJ and Sarah to the Canadian Canoe Museum where we met our bus to go to Toronto and bid goodbye to Peterborough and all of our friends and host families there. We were leaving ourselves four hours of travel time to get to Pearson Airport, but the roads were clear and we made good time.
After checking our baggage, eating an expensive dinner, and going through security we boarded our flight to London which left on time – the winter storm warning had been canceled for Toronto. As the plane lifted off from the runway, we felt North America fall away beneath us, and I bid her farewell for the following three months… I listened to Bruchner, Haydn, Verdi, and the Beatle’s “Rubber Soul” album as we crossed the Atlantic. I became more and more excited as Europe, the stage of so many of my interests, grew closer. We passed over Ireland, then Cornwall and by dawn we were circling London preparing to land in Heathrow Airport. The plane touched down and we descended the stairs to the tarmac and my first contact with the Old World. We took a tram, which drove on the left side of the road, to the terminal, then began the eight-hour wait for our flight to Dar es Salaam. We became used to pence and pounds, and attempted to sleep in awkward positions on the seats which seemed to be designed specifically to thwart people from resting on them. When our flight gate was announced we took the subway to the terminal and boarded our flight along with many Kiswahili speakers. Again, I got next to no sleep, making for a total of less than two hours over the almost three-day trip. My anticipation escalated as we flew over Paris, Turin, the Mediterranean, Sahara, Nile, Nairobi, within sight of Kilimanjaro, and over the Serengeti plains.
We landed in Dar es Salaam amid towering coconut palms and flocks of white cranes, and disembarked into the upper 30’s degree heat. The Julius Nyerre International Airport was fairly simply built of cement bricks with hand-painted signs. After checking through customs and waiting for our baggage, we headed outside where a throng of people had gathered to greet their arriving friends and family in a chorus of yelled Kiswahili. A group of people from UVIKIUTA were there to meet us, including a brightly dressed elderly woman who carried a cake which said "Welcome, Hoyse" on it. They shook our hands and greeted us with a warm "Keribu", and there were a few excited screams of delight as some of the Tanzanian participant's friends and relatives appeared. Eventually we were all together in a group, huddled like sheep amid the pack of prospective porters, money-changers, salesmen, and pick-pockets. We piled our luggage precariously high on a little pick-up truck and loaded into a little bus to take us to UVIKIUTA centre in Chamazi. Our eyes were pasted wide to the scenes around us as we wove through the packed vehicles of all shapes and sizes of the Dar es Salaam traffic. Bicycles rode swiftly along the roadsides stacked as tall as their riders with pallets of eggs, women draped in brilliantly coloured cangas walked with tall buckets balanced on their heads, chickens and goats grazed under trees, and water-sellers crowded around the cars and buses whenever they stopped, calling "maji, maji!" and making suggestive sucking noises with their lips. As we continued further out of town the industries fortified with walls topped with broken glass gave way to roofless cement-block houses being undermined by the erosion of the hard, red earth. We passed through markets, close-packed with buyers, sellers and any description of wares. Beautiful hand-made wooden furniture and bed fames lined the streets in areas, being advertised by their craftsmen. Everywhere there were people - lots and lots of people, some walking on errands, some hawking wares, but many simply standing. We were stopped twice by police, once because some of our luggage had fallen off of the little truck. When the trees became more and the people slightly less, we passed a small sign welcoming us to Chamazi and pulled into UVIKIUTA centre. This area was vegetated by mango, jackfruit, and a variety of palm trees which were home to many black-faced monkeys who stopped and stared at our passing. We broke into a chorus of "Wewe ni nani jama" and "Jambo bwana" as we pulled up to a big open building over a bridge from a lily pond where a big group of people had gathered to welcome us. Our Tanzanian counterparts sang our names as we descended into the hugs and handshakes and sincere grins of welcome. Chai (breakfast) was already laid out for us, and we were surprised to learn that it was still early in the morning. We were then shown to our dormitories, the boys being in the house of a man named Julius and his children, nestled amidst palms and a giant cactus. We each had a bunk-bed with a mattress, sheet and mosquito net, and there was a common room with some sofas.
We spent the following week being oriented to Tanzania, UVIKIUTA, the work we would be doing, and the goals of various organizations including the UN Millennium Development Goals with Executive Chairman Ben Mongi. Ben is deeply interesting, wise, and lovably cheerful, and I enjoyed our time working with him. He has an outlook on culture and sustainability and life in general which is very inspiring. “People think we are crazy for saving land for monkeys,” he laughed, “’You are planting fruit trees for monkeys?! Why not use the land for yourself?’ Because monkeys have the right to live and eat too! People say ‘why are you worried about saving the snakes? They are dangerous!’ Yes they are dangerous, but only because we make them so, by destroying their habitat. Which is more dangerous: snakes or people? We are! We are the dangerous ones!”
For our meals we enjoyed the amazing Tanzanian cuisine, including ugali (thick flour goo), vegetable sauces, pilau (rice flavored with a masala spice mix), chipati (like an Indian roti – ranging from very good to spectacular), mandazi (deep-fried wheat bun with ginger flavouring), meat stew (read "gristle-and-bone stew" - it's still great), mango, pineapple, banana, and kitumbua (like mandazi but made of rice - alikened to the upper regions of heaven). Other aspects of daily life differed from what we Canadians had ever experienced, such as the carrying of water from the tap outside for showers, which were done with a small bucket called a kibobo, doing laundry by hand, walking to the communal squatting toilets which were the night-time haunts of mobs of cockroaches, and having to sleep under mosquito nets. We Canadians were shown just how luxuriously and resource-intensively we lived at home, but I adapted happily and quickly.
We went into Dar a few times, cramming into already crammed daladalas (basically a minibus transit - as the saying goes, a cup of water can become full, but there is always room in a daladala). We would transfer from Mbagala market to the post office in downtown Dar, selecting our daladala by the cries of the conductors: "Mbagalabagalabagala", "Poosta-postaposta", "Chimaziii, chimazi!"
Whenever we had nothing else to do we were entertained watching the capering families of monkeys with their tiny and incredibly cute babies who often clung to their parent’s stomachs, or by playing with the village kids. Joel’s son Alpha and Ben’s son Ima were deffinatly the alpha duo, and we played with them often. We’d kick a ball around for a while until Ima would announce “nimechoka,” I’d reply “na mimi pia,” and we’d collapse onto the porch, where we’d rest for about two seconds before he’d be re-invigorated and leap to his feet yelling “piga piga!”
Each morning we were awakened at around 5:30 by a cacophony of Muslim calls to prayer layered over the crowing of cocks layered over the howling of dogs layered over the songs of exotic birds layered over the constant drone of sacatas. Naps during the day were often interrupted by the families of monkeys “playing football” on the corrugated metal roof, to quote Sarah. One such morning I went for a short walk with Frank to watch the sun rise over the palm groves. Afterwards I joined Sean in an amusing and embarrassing exercise session on the veranda which involved many awkward and difficult positions and painted the words “crazy wazungu” on the faces of all of the locals who saw us. We then had the privilege of being blatant tourists, visiting the village museum and beach. The museum was very interesting, being outdoors with many houses authentic to those of many of the tribes across Tanzania. Norbert made a very knowledgeable tour-guide, having been taught by his grandmother about the traditional houses, ways of life, and medicinal plants. I found that many aspects of natural building, including some which I had not expected such as living roofs and solar design, were traditional here. After lunch we headed off through the traffic jam onto a ferry to the other side of the harbour where we continued on to the beach. It was a long, hot and tiring trip, but thoroughly worth it when we raced down the white sand into the extraordinarily warm Indian Ocean. After a long swim we went beach-combing, found a recently-beached puffer fish, ate ice-cream, and I brought Nivanuatu sand-drawings to the soft silver sand of East Africa.
After an amazing first week we got up at around 3:30 am and headed into Dar to catch our bus to our first work-camp in Lindi, to the south. The bus was decorated with drapery, had comfortable seats, offered various refreshments, and blared Indian and Middle Eastern music, but it became less luxurious when we reached the area where the only road was still under construction and we had to bounce slowly over the off-road track, passing mud-hut villages and patches of jungle. We stopped once for lunch in a village where people crowded around the bus to sell fish, eggs, and other fly-surrounded wares. Eventually we were back on a paved road and in sight of the Indian Ocean, and the bus stopped and let us out on a flat, lightly vegetated stretch of land between cob villages, and a group of friendly UVIKIUTA members were there to meet and welcome us, including the camp leader, Joel (Alpha’s dad!), for whom I gained a great respect and friendship. Another work camp of international volunteers was already there, including people from Italy, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, the US, Canada, and Tanzania. We moved into our dormitories, packed our thin mattresses together slave-ship fashion, and hung our mosquito nets. We were impressed by the sit-on flush toilets, right next door to our room, even if we had to fill them with buckets from the tap near the out-door kitchen. I signed up many times for duty in the make-shift kitchen, set up under a tree with a counter and tarp shelter on a frame of lashed wooden poles, helping Mariam and cheerful Dina prepare delicious meals over the charcoal braziers. Each evening, after finishing dinner and washing dishes, we enjoyed a cultural night presented by members of the different countries represented in our group. Many of them were very good, consisting of music, traditional foods, maps, and lectures about different aspects of the country. The Canadian culture night, however – modesty aside – blew all of the others out of the water. Sean narrated and played the soundtrack on his guitar for a play of Canadian history staring Scott as a drunk John A., Andrea and JP as high-fiving soldiers (“And they’re back from WWI! Don’t get too comfortable, though, WWII is right around the corner: bye! Bang… bang… landmine… landmine… They should be back by now… Oh, looks like they’ve won again! We’re good at world wars!”), Sally as a First Nations woman, Colin and I as snobby European explorers (“Noice twees… Noise wesouses…”), and Edith and Andrea as the first legally married same-sex couple.
We spent a few days getting used to the new area, then spent the weekend on a trip to Kiliwa. The trip was another hot and tiring one, with five of us crammed into four small seats. After several hours a tire, the one right next to my seat, blew out with a bang like a shot gun and we stopped in a village of thatch-roofed cob huts to jack the bus up and replace the tire. Once again, though, the trip was thoroughly worth it when we reached our destination: we found that we each had accommodation in our own or a shared hut with massive beds! Colin and I shared a cabin, but each had our own room and bathroom. In retrospect, it probably would have looked pretty poor had we come as tourists directly from Canada, but after our recent humbling experiences we basked gratefully in the lap of luxury. After a beautiful night’s sleep we loaded into the bus and headed down to the beach to board an open motor boat to Kiliwa Island. We pulled up on the beach which stretched between a mangrove swamp and the ruins of an Arabic fortress, on which a number of dhows were beached and over which looked cliffs supporting ancient bricks, thatched shelters, and local children who watched us wade ashore. We walked down the beach, stepping over the dhows’ anchor cables, to the 16th Century Omani fortress with triangular crenellations and a wooden Arabesque over the studded gate in the Middle Eastern fashion, and a round tower which had been added during the Portuguese occupation. The fortress had once been the guard-post and prison of a wealthy trading port, the name “Kiliwa” meaning “the place of abundant things” because almost any product could be purchased there. It was now under the protection and restoration of UNESCO. We entered through a postern in the main gate and walked down the narrow corridor hemmed in by high walls: I imagined trying to force an entrance here without welcome if the place were in repair and garrisoned with Arabic bowmen, and shuddered at what my mind’s eye saw. We then continued on to the domed and colonnaded ruins of a huge mosque, host to a gigantic 500 year-old boa tree. As I entered the forest of columns and canopy of domes of the 11th Century place of worship, it occurred to me that this was the oldest building I had ever entered. Our local guide explained to us that the octagonally-based domes, now home to hanging bats, symbolized the seven days which Allah had created, and the eighth which began when one entered the mosque and was re-born. Kiliwa had been the home of the East African Sultanate for a time, and the Sultan had his own room of worship within the mosque, which had, until about two hundred years ago, been the largest in Africa. We then continued to the Sultan’s palace, a huge ruin once surrounded by a gigantic fortifying wall which had been a century in the making. Despite the size of the once-two-storied palace, the individual rooms were small because the floor and roof beams had been made of round-wood mangrove trunks due to their imperviousness to termite infestation. We continued across the flat of a dried lake and through a grove of massive ancient boas to the 16th Century Sultanate cemetery, then through the cob, coral-block and thatch village, inhabited by starring children, brightly dressed singing and dancing women, and men in white robes and cylindrical hats. We boarded the boat and sped back to the mainland, passing crowded lanteen-sailed dhows making a good clip in the opposite direction. I was fortunate to see a massive (I’m sorry, I’m starting to run out of adjectives for big things) King Fish, at least as long as my arm, propel itself powerfully out of the water and about twenty feet in the air before plummeting spectacularly to a great splash which most of us saw.
The next morning we had breakfast at the nearby restaurant and headed off to see the hippopotami of the mangrove swamps of Kiliwa Island on the same boat as before. We saw some white cranes and fiddler crabs, and eventually came in sight of the splashing, ear-wiggling hippos lounging in the water. We sat and watched them sit and watch us from a distance for a little while, then headed back, rather sun-burned, and some of us slightly disappointed. However, as we were puttering out of the delta, a mass of air-bubbles surfaced beneath the boat and, looking back, I saw a huge hippo surface in a splash behind us before sinking again quickly. I called to the others to look, but they were too slow and claimed that I was joking or seeing things. Some of us later went swimming at the beach while others went snorkeling.
After an amazing weekend we headed back to Mtwero, ready to pay for our time of rest and tourism with grueling work. On our first day of digging the school foundation Sean and I, the two lankiest guys on the team, wore our matching “wife-beater” undershirts. “I hope I’m still dreaming…” Scott said when he saw us. “Are you drunk?” said MJ. “Are you sure of what you’re wearing?” asked Tegemeo. We made amazing progress on the foundation trench, and within a few minutes of starting the sweat was running off of us in torrents. And, in that heat, I realized just how refreshing sweat can actually be. After four hours of hard work we drug ourselves off for our lunch break and ate ravenously. Thanks to the four-hour rest afterwards, we were able to then go to the village school to play with the kids. As we neared the village after a half-hour walk, the kids started coming out of the wood-work to join us, clinging to our hands and laughing and chattering to us in Kiswahili and their mother tongues, unknowing or uncaring that we couldn’t understand them. As we neared the school field the ants became thick upon the ground, enlivened by the recent rains, and painfully bit our sandaled feet. I joined Jimmy, Kotoro, Sean and Scott with the 14 – 16 and 11 – 13 year old groups. Jimmy – from Ireland – taught them hurling and Gaelic football, and they were natural pros at soccer, which they call football. Even Sean and Scott, impressive players in my inexperienced eyes, were ashamed of their skills in the face of these critical teens. The girls, who generally excluded themselves from football, seemed a lot less egotistic but no less skilled or competitive in their favorite sport of netball. We also taught them other games, such as “Stella-ella o-la”, a clapping game which we couldn’t remember the nonsense words to so replaced with Kiswahili names of fruit and numbers.
We went into Lindi town to visit two different HIV/AIDS organizations, one of which was funded by CIDA, and learned about the work that they did in Lindi region though Frank’s translations. We went into Lindi several other times, making the 15 or 20 minute drive in the backs of a trio of different coloured three-wheeled bijajis. People in town knew as soon as they saw our white skin that we must be the same wazungu (foreigners) who were here building the school, and they profusely thanked and welcomed us in Kiswahili or broken English.
One night, after the moon had risen blood red, a thunder storm to rival even the worst that I had experienced in Australia rolled in. At three in the morning I was awoken by flashes of lightning which were blinding even inside the room, and incredibly long and loud rolls of thunder which brought images to my mind of mythological muscle-bound titans beating on gigantic timpani drums.
There were always masses of bugs, especially at night around the lights: huge moths, sacatas, hornets, beetles of all sizes and descriptions, large spiders and centipedes, and many others. Despite the malaria risk, mosquitoes were the least of the insects, in my opinion. One night there was all of a sudden a full-scale invasion of kombe-kombe: fat flying termite-like bugs which came in such large numbers that they obscured lights even from long distances. If you hit one, its flimsy wings would fall off, and when we swept in the morning we raked up piles of them under the light fixtures. The Tanzanians were delighted, however, as were the hundreds of swallows who showed up in the morning, both of whom loved to eat the easily-caught bugs. While they were generally eaten fresh, a large number of them were caught and kept in water for Dina to fry and serve with supper the next day. One evening after dinner I was sitting in the open dining area when something hit me on the back of my shoulder, and clung there despite my attempts to shake it off, until I looked over. I expected a big flying bug, but instead it was a grinning green gecko. I apologized to him and let him run around on my arms and back, until he leaped onto my cheek, fell to the floor, and ran away.
When Christmas Eve eventually rolled around, none of us Canadians were even slightly in the spirit. We tried singing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” and “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Raindeer” as we dug under the broiling sun, but that just didn’t cut it. Jackson, Tegemeo, Frank, Norbert, and our other Chaga participants, on the other hand were enthusiastic that we should partake in the traditional holiday festivities: the slaughtering and eating of a sacrificial goat. So, after work, they headed off together and bought a goat who was quickly dubbed “Roland”, after the Carolingian paladin from “The Song of Roland”. On Christmas morning I got up earlier than most to find Jackson running up to our room. “A hyena came in the night and ate our goat!” he told me, in a strange mix of excitement and disappointment, then added, “some men came and killed the hyena.” I took this information in stride and sleepily decided to give it more thought after a shower in the palm-frond shower stalls that were rigged up along the fence. I can’t complain too much about Jackson’s English, but I’m going to have to help him out a bit with his tenses: the men that had “came and killed the hyena” were in fact still chasing it. I heard the hollering and yelling and peeked through the space between two palm leaves to hear the feral panting of the hyena and see the huge spotted dog-like form of it bound about an arm’s length away, followed by a mob of club-wielding villagers. I saw the hyena pass just as close four times before hearing a gun-shot and a chorus of shouts that signaled the end of the chase. When I left the shower, the big hyena had been hauled up near the fence and a mob of people were looking at it. I felt bad for the animal, but knew that it had to be gotten rid of for the safety and well being of the locals. What followed, though, was absolutely un-necessary, and I turned when I saw the first man raise his club. The poor hyena was still alive and was clubbed thoroughly, although not fatally, and was finally burned, alive and yelping. We were sickened.
A few of the Canadian members of our team had seen the hyena when it arrived, around midnight, when they were hanging out on the porch. Sean, who was talking on the phone with his mom, saw it and exclaimed “Jesus Christ, it’s a gawd-damned jungle cat!”, a quote which has gone down in our program’s history. They all ran into the girl’s dorm room, and Edith slammed the door on Sean by accident and locked it!
Several of us went to church after breakfast, which I called “the Corrugated Iron Cathedral”, since that’s exactly what it was. After a two hour wait (the pastor was touring all of the local churches, as he was the only one available) we had an enjoyable service including a baptism of a baby, extraordinary singing and drumming, and a special thank you and welcome to us visiting volunteers by the church secretary, the only person present who had any English.
A new goat was found, and was being slaughtered just as we were walking off to wish the kids of Mtwero a Merry Christmas. JP excitedly begged permission to stay and help, but most of us were happy to escape. As the other group of volunteers was preparing to depart the following day, we had a farewell ceremony for them and gave the kids Christmas gifts. The second goat, Olivier, was very good, and we had festive soft drinks including my new obsession, Stoney Tangawizi ginger ale. After dinner a few of us went to the “disco”, an earth-floored palm-frond enclosure with the stars overhead and blaring music. I danced with the little kids, who were very good, and people of all ages and walks of life, including mother’s with babies on their backs and elderly people, danced around us. The next morning we bid our fellow volunteers farewell, except for Jimmy who was staying with us to the end, as they headed off for the bus, sorry never to have had the chance to see Kim and Sally, the two tae-kwon-do practitioners, spar together.
Our first Tanzanian EAD, focused on community and lead by the long-suffering Edith, Rahel, Andrea, Sarah and MJ, was very good and interesting, despite the beaurocracy with local policies that they had to endure in the preparation of it. We learned what I considered to be very valuable information about the community of Mtwero which helped me to fully realize the importance of the girl’s secondary school which we were working to build.
We continued our work as usual, only now taking the lead in the sports education with the children, until New Years. By our final day of work we had very nearly completed the school’s foundation trench. We rung in the 2010 under the bright red moon with another disco, this time at the work camp, and invited many of the locals. When midnight struck we sought out all of our friends and hugged them, wishing them a Happy New Year.
The next day we ate another festive goat (Charlemagne), and I got Frank and Norbert to teach me to play bao and was instantly addicted. Bao is a traditional Tanzanian game which can take a long time to play and Nyerre, Tanzania’s first President, used it to bring people together to discuss politics. “Why didn’t you teach us this game earlier?!” I asked Frank. “Because I had to wait until we finished working,” he exclaimed, “otherwise you wouldn’t go to work, you’d just stay and play bao!” I grudgingly broke off a game for our formal farewell, thank-you’s, and closure of our work camp, then went off to pack.
I must apologize for this letter being so late – computer access has been very limited here – and for it being so short and ill-organized. Had I had the time and computer access I could have written far more about the extraordinary experiences that I have had over the past month. Anyways, I’m just on a lunch break at work right now and Deborah – my new work-place counterpart, who would laugh if I told here this letter is too short – is impatient to get back to work (“Are you writing a letter or a book?”), so I’d better cut this off. Thanks so much, especially to those of you who financially, supportively and morally helped me to be here! My address for the next month will be: c/o UVIKIUTA, PO BOX 71373, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. We are now back in Chamazi with our host-families and work-placements – and I’ll tell you about all of that in my next Missive!

Yours truly,


Bradley A. Clements
Chamazi, Tanzania

P.S: CWY rocks! If you know anyone between 17 and 25, definatly recommend it to them!