Missive #8: Bwagamoyo

February 26th, 2010

"There is always something new out of Africa..."
Pliny the Younger


Mambo!

The chalk-drawn bao-board in the open dining area of the Mtwero work camp in Lindi was my first destination after rolling out from under my mosquito net and showering in the open-air palm frond shower stalls. Any hope of an early game was thwarted though, by the quantity of packing, cleaning, and carrying that had to be done on the morning of our departure. Hoyse had informed us the previous night that our booked bus to Dar es Salaam had broken down and that we would be traveling instead on two separate buses. It so happened that the Tanzanians had been put on a smaller, earlier bus, and we Canadians, along with Hoyse and Mariam on another. So we saw our counterparts off, wishing them "safari njema", and settled in to wait for our own bus. We constructed lean-toos with our luggage and kangas, and I scratched a new bao board on the little strip of sidewalk, collected the seventy-two pebbles, and challenged Edith to a tournament. When we boarded our own bus, ruefully breaking off our game, we found that our booked seats had been taken by the people from the back, so we peacefully accepted the seats in the rear (resisting the urge to make some inappropriate comment about Rosa Parks...). We sped happily along over the spectacular African vistas and picture-book villages splayed out in the valleys bellow us, with only some amusing bounciness to warn us of what was to come when the paved road ended and we set off along the rough dirt track. When we did I understood the foresight of those who had stolen our seats... We bashed over the uneven, uncompleted road so that we flew several feet above our seats to have our tail-bones come jarring back down, our spines ram up into our skulls, and our ribs accordion. Julie borrowed my rope belt to tie Edith and Sally's seat in place, which had broken loose. The seat in front of theirs, however, was beyond our help and it collapsed into their laps with its occupant placidly ignoring the fact that she was now sitting on the floor. Jimmy, our Irish friend from the work camp who was traveling with us, also had his seat come loose and Andrea behind him had to hold it in place while Sean masterfully held her new ebony tea set intact on his lap. Next to her, my seat slowly drifted forward and Scott's in front of me came back until my legs were rather stuck between them. "This could conceivably be worse," I commented cheerily between stifled grunts of pain. "So could sodomy," Sean retorted, "but congratulations on your sunny out-look." After two hours of this we finally returned to a paved road, although our aching bodies still felt every little bump. We had no right to complain, however, as we learned shortly afterward when Hoyse received a call on her cell saying that our counterpart's bus had broken down twice and that they were now faced with finding themselves a place to stay the night and some form of transport into Dar the following day. As for us, we arrived mostly in one piece (even if the bus didn't) in Mbagala where we gratefully devoured ice-cream cones from a bicycle stand and chicken shishkabobs from a street-side grill for 100 tsh (about $0.09) each. We then somehow crammed ourselves, our luggage, and three weeks worth of work camp supplies into the UVIKIUTA bus to go to Chamazi. When we unloaded at UVIKIUTA our host fathers were there to welcome us, including mine, a beaming man named Jacob. We hugged and greeted one another, then those of us who were going to live at with families in UVIKIUTA unloaded, and those of us going to the Mgola Eco-Village (Sean, Sally and I) headed off about five minutes further down the road.
The sun was just falling into a smooth wash of pale orange extending into a deeper one before fading into a rich ultramarine as we arrived among the young trees and seven houses of Mgola. Jacob helped me to carry Jackson's and my own luggage to the house where I met his shy six-year-old daughter, Anna, and his wife, Mary, a Chaga from Kilimanjaro. They welcomed me and proudly gave me a tour of their house which they had only occupied for three months. I was very pleased with our room, which comfortably held our two large beds (almost as long as me, and almost square) on which I could stretch out if I lay diagonally and put something over my feet where they touched the mosquito net (which was blessedly lacking in holes). The bathroom was inside the house, right across from our room, and had a squat toilet and a drain and buckets for showers, and all together I had a new spring in my step. Jacob explained that the solar panels and water tank for the eco-village had not yet been installed, so our only light at night came from kerosene and battery fueled lamps, and our water had to be pulled up and carried from the near-by wells. Imagine my surprise when I saw a bottle of Canadian maple syrup on the table! I asked, and was told that it had been left by previous CWY participants. Jacob himself had been a volunteer with CWY about five years ago, in North Bay, Ontario. Mary knew how to make “pancakes” which, although they tasted the same and were quite good, were flat and rubbery. A few weeks later I made some, and my proposal to add baking powder sent Mary’s eyebrows halfway up her forehead. “It’s what we do in Canada,” I explained quickly, hoping not to be banished from the kitchen where men traditionally had not right to be. She accepted, and when Jackson saw the result he exclaimed “Wow, big chapatti!”
After I’d finished occupying the new room we all went over to Sylvester, Rosie and Peter’s house – where Deborah and Sally were staying – for the weekly rotational Sunday evening communal potluck. Sylvester had his diesel generator running to power the lights and TV, on which a preacher and his translator were vigorously hollering out a passionate sermon.
The next morning, after waking up from a solid night’s sleep, I headed into Dar es Salaam with Sean, Sally and Adolphina, the Tanzanian volunteer from the Lindi work camp who was now working as a maid in her uncle Julius’ house. We walked through the fields and the village to Mbande market where we caught a daladala through Mbagala to Posta. Getting onto the Posta daladala was a violent affair at rush-hour with everyone pushing and elbowing to get seats. In the midst of the press I looked down and saw someone’s hand in my pocket and spun around yelling “hey!” The man was already running, but there had been nothing worth stealing in my pocket anyways. Once in Posta we went to the Barklay’s Bank, a huge building surrounded by tourists and businesspeople of all races. We then went to the post office, the internet café, and the YWCA where we ate lunch before returning to the eco-village. By the time we got back our counterparts had already arrived after a very long trip, and Jackson was chatting with Mary who came from the same tribe and had a similar dialect as her mother tongue.
The following day we went into UVIKIUTA to be introduced to our work placements. Having been away from the group for a single day seemed like a long time after not having been separated for almost a month. Ben gave us a tour, first showing us around the environment-focused work placements. He outlined a history of Chamazi, the name of the village which was in a local dialect of the Kiswahili words “chai maji” meaning “tea water” after the colour of the river on which the village depended. He explained how the quality of the water and the eco-system of the river had suffered due to deforestation along the banks, the use of fertilizers on farms which extended right down to the water, intentional and unintentional damming, and pollution caused by recent practices such as washing cars next to the river. Now the river which was once swift-moving and bounteous in life was stagnant and covered in oxygen-leaching vegetation. Despite the sadness of that, I felt inspired and hopeful because at least some of the challenges presented here I could see obtainable solutions for and paths of action that I and others could take to improve the situation considerably, something uncommon in most environmental issues that I had previously faced. We were then shown the office and library where Deborah and I would be working, meeting our hip and well-dressed twenty-three year-old supervisor Boven. Many books had been donated and a special building had been built for the library to-be. The entire group then came out to the eco-village for the first time to see the tree nursery and composting work that the people posted there would be working on. After lunch we went to the final work placement – Suzan and Sally’s – the Yatima Group Trust Fund orphanage in Chamazi who we had raised money for in Peterborough. The many children of all ages came and sat on our laps on the steps of one of the buildings as a staff member spoke to us about the organization, then clung to our hands as we were given a tour of the huge property and its farms and dormitories. We then played sports and games with the kids who were very skilled and enthusiastic and who we had to pry ourselves away from when it was time for us to leave.
Following that we began our work. On an average weekday, Jackson and I would get up at 6 o’clock in the morning, roll out from under our mosquito nets, tie them up, make our beds, and get dressed. We then carry water from the wells, I going first to the closer well – past Hoyce and Ben’s future houses – to the edge of the forest where I avoid the giant centipedes in my bare feet as I go down into the watering hole. I do this circuit two or three times, carrying two 10 or 20 litre buckets at a time, to fill the big bucket in the bathroom to flush the toilet with. I then go to the further well, near Sylvester’s house, where I hope that there will be water left to pull up with a bucket on the end of a rope. The first time I threw it down I could imagine the rope pulling free of my hand and that I would have to climb down to get it, triggering my Dad’s voice in my head saying “What’d you do that for, you dork?!” Needless to say, I never dropped it. Once I’ve filled the buckets I carry them back and shower with a kibobo (a small pail) over the drain, then have chai. Chai often consists of tea or milo with mandazi, bread, chapatti, buns, or – when we’re very lucky – vitumbua, and oranges or mangoes. Jackson told me that Mary was very happy when I said that I prefer mandazi and vitumbua to bread, because they are cheaper, and I considered it a definite win-win scenario although I was maybe winning a little more. After chai we inevitably leave late, pushing Julius’ big blue truck until it stubbornly decides to start, then we all pile into the back and bounce down the dirt road to UVIKIUTA, passing UVIKIUTA’s conservation area and the desolation of the sand mines which surround it. Deborah and I then go to the office and say “Mambo” and “Mzuka” to Boven and set to work dusting and sweeping the offices. Once that is done we continue with whatever project we happen to be working on at the time. Sometimes we are summarizing and feeding volunteer registration and evaluation forms into the computer, sometimes proofreading documents which are sent to volunteers and partner organizations, and sometimes labeling, cataloguing, stamping, sorting and shelving the more than five hundred books in the Chamazi Community Library’s current collection. Despite the disproportionate quantity of Christian books, there is also a good number of philosophy, sociology, science, history, literature and story books. These include many withdrawn from the Vancouver Island Regional Library, the Grater Vancouver Public Library and the Trinity Western University library, such my own Science 9 textbook and book of Renaissance history, plus names such as C.S. Lewis, Naomi Kline, Craig Kielburger, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, Plutarch, Tacticus, Herodotus, Cervantes, Theucydides, Marcus Aurelius, Galen, Hypocrates, Machiavelli, Darwin, Hobbs, Marx, Micheal de Montaign, Shakespeare, and others. I’ve been reading several books borrowed from the library and from other participants: Jack Whyte’s Dream of Eagles series, the fourth, fifth and sixth books; Tacticus’ Histories, which I had not finished in Peterborough; “Collapse” by Jared Diamond, which I was very engaged by until I lent it to another participant; a book on basic philosophy; and “Me to We: Turning Self-Help on its Head” by Craig and Marc Kielburger, which I would highly recommend. We met the former CWY participant who had helped to found the library, Sarah from Comox, B.C., when she dropped by to deliver some more materials en route from Egypt via Tanga, where she was visiting her boyfriend, to Uganda where she was working with another library project. Although we may arrive late for our 8 am start, Deborah and I generally take a fraction of our two hour lunch break and work past our technical ending time at 5 pm. We then wait awhile for the truck to pick us up, hanging out on someone’s porch or at the nearby bar where we gratefully drink cold pineapple juice or Stoney Tangawizi and eat donuts or half-cakes. When the truck is available it picks up us Mgola residents and takes us home. Once there Jackson and I are back at work carrying water and helping Mary to prepare dinner. Work in the kitchen began with washing dishes, and I have graduated to cutting ingredients, stirring, and eventually to preparing and cooking dishes. When those chores are done we shower and enjoy Mary’s amazing Swahili cooking together, listening to the Kiswahili news on the little battery-powered radio, then Jackson and I converse as we sit on the floor and wash the dishes in basins. We then read or relax on the porch under the brilliant light of the sky-full of stars, or, if there is even the slightest crescent of it showing, the glow of the moon which is bright enough to cast a shadow even before the light of the sun has left the sky. We turn in between 9 and 10 pm and sleep fitfully. Generally there is a blessed cooling breeze that blows through Mgola. Our room is on the lee of the house, but when a storm rolls in, heralded by distant flashes of lightning in the evening, the wind swings 180o and howls in through our window. The rain falls in deafening torrents on the metal roof, but we are happy because we can put the water buckets under the eaves and don’t have to walk to the wells the following morning.
On Wednesdays we have our Educational Activity Days, which tend to be much more interesting and imaginative now that we have very limited access to PowerPoint and Wikipedia. One such EAD, focused on arts, took us to the wattle and daub home of George – a gentle-voiced artist with a limp and a smile that took up his entire face – in Mbande. He taught us how to make kitenge using the batiki and sewn tie-die techniques. On weekends we have free time to run errands into town, hand wash our laundry, do more intensive chores, hang out, relax, have our communal Sunday evening potluck, and go to church. Entering the Lutheran church at UVIKIUTA, converted from the hall where Deborah and I often work during the week, with the choir singing and drumming, is like ascending a stairway into heaven. The preacher, although his sermons are solely in Kiswahili, has a sense of humor which transcends language barriers and makes even me laugh, although I may not know at what.
Our routines are solid enough that I can write of them thus simply, but there is always enough deviation to keep us on our toes. On Andrea’s birthday, for example, I witnessed a solar eclipse for the first time. Looking cautiously through my fingers and sunglasses I watched the disc of the sun wane into a crescent. When I arrived at work I found Boven with a little bird he’d found on the ground. We perched it on a roll of masking tape where it sat tamely blinking until it flew to the window sill and out and away. An exploring black-faced monkey later entered through another window and was surprised by our presence. He leapt back out of the window, but remained to play peek-a-boo over the sill. To celebrate Andrea’s birthday we went to a place near Mbande for kitimoto, slow-fried pork and plantains served on a communal platter in the middle of a table. In the card that the entire group signed I poked fun at her about someone who’d inaccurately guessed her age in Peterborough: “Happy Birthday – nineteen, isn’t it?” She paid me back the following week on my birthday, again at Kitimoto, writing in a card with a picture of a caribou in a sauna (a word play on the Kiswahili welcome “Karibu Sana”): “To think that just yesterday I would have resented being mistaken for someone your age. Now we can be resentful together. P.S. Aren’t nineteen year-olds annoying? Yeah.”
Near the beginning of our time with Jacob and Mary, just before Anna began her first day at school, Jacob suggested that Anna, Jackson and I each plant a tree seedling in front of the porch for him and Mary to remember us by when we were no longer with them. The trees, he said, would be of medium size once they were fully grown, and would bear beautiful flowers throughout the year. We did so, and they have been growing swiftly under our care.
Although many of us Canadians generally resent going into the city for any but practical purposes, we sometimes like to explore. On one such occasion some of our counterparts took a group of us into Kariako, a very culturally diverse shopping district. We wandered through the market, our senses bombarded by the clashing smells, sounds and colours – fish, spices, hand-made kitchen-wares, and more... We gleefully discovered an ice cream store and succumbed to temptation. A group of elderly maasai – tattooed, toothless and toga-ed, wearing an abundance of jewelry, including huge ornaments in their massively elongated ear-lobes – sold us beadwork. Then, trying to look nonchalant rather than awe-struck, we went to the Shoprite – a grocery store nigh on identical to any in Canada – and we experienced a preview of the culture-shock that we are bound to encounter when we return home. Jackson and I went on another occasion to visit his Babu (grand-uncle) who was in hospital with some health problem. The private hospital was beautiful, far beyond what one would expect in Canada, but the prices were staggering.
On another weekend when the surf was up we took another trip to the beach and body-surfed until we were quite pickled with salt water. Counter-intuitively, Sean from Winnipeg and MJ from Montreal were by far the best body-surfers, and the rest of us became their disciples.
At the end of the month we headed to Bagamoyo, north of Dar es Salaam, for our mid-term camp. After a few hours of driving we entered through a tunnel of trees with a welcoming statue of Jesus Christ at its end, arriving at our accommodations in a specialty school located amongst the over one hundred year old mission buildings and cathedral. There we moved in two to a room, with a bunk-bed each, in two four-room complexes which each had a moldy shower (with a showerhead!) and toilet stall. There was also a western-style washroom building, better than what one might expect to find in a Canadian mall. We visited the museum inside the old mission house, the spire of the old cathedral where Dr. Livingstone’s body rested for a night en route back to Great Britain, the 200 year-old baobob tree, and the newer, hundred year-old, cathedral. Bagamoyo had been a primary slave-trading town of the Omani Sultanate, shipping slaves from the interior to Zanzibar after the fall of the city-state of Kilwa to the Portuguese. We took a tour of several significant historical sights, and my jaw dropped as we entered the narrow streets hemmed in by ancient Arabic houses in stages of repair varying between ruins and complete restoration, all with intricately carved symbolic doors. Passing through this scene with the guide’s words about dhows, ivory, Zanzibar, spices, sultans and slaves echoing in my ears, I felt as though I had just stepped into a childhood storybook. We explored the old fortress and slave house, its crenellated walls still standing imposingly. There we saw the rooms in which slaves were held, forty to a cubicle-like dormitory with a tiny hole in the wall for air, if not for light. We then drove down the Indian Ocean coast to the ruins of Kaole, Kilwa’s trading partner which had declined after the conquest of its co-dependant. There we saw the sight of the former mosque with its well of sacred water, and the burial grounds of the city’s nobility. Many of the tombs boasted detailed stone-work, and some had towering spires over them. One pyramid-topped tomb was said to be that of a sorceress descendant of Mohammed, and is a pilgrimage destination to this day. Our next stop was a crocodile farm, where the fearsome reptiles were raised for their meat and hides. We saw them at all stages of their growth, from tiny babies which one wouldn’t mind having as a pet to imposing giants who could swallow me without bothering to chew.
The name Bagamoyo, a corruption of the earlier “Bwagamoyo”, means “throw down your heart”. This took on different meanings for different people who arrived in Bagamoyo: for slaves shipped through there it signified the place where their hearts were crushed into suppression and where the anguish of their forced march from their homes and families and of their impending auction into a life of labor forced them to leave their heart behind. For the slavers an arrival in Bagamoyo meant that they had successfully completed a long journey and that they were soon to make a profit, so they threw the worries from their hearts and celebrated. One phrase; two radically different connotations. We threw down our hearts in another way during our mid-term discussions about our experiences in the program. Jackson and I talked of how we had developed over the course of the program, reading our goals as we had written at the beginning and analyzing how close we had come to accomplishing them. Afterwards we had to tell the group what we had deduced about each other. “Jackson seems to have achieved all of his goals,” I reported, “he hoped to share his culture, learn about Canada, and improve his language skills, and he has done all of those over the course of the program so far. He has also learned through his experience in Canada and with Canadians, and especially through his work in the Brock St. Mission in Peterborough, that not all white people are rich, as he once believed. Now he is trying to convince his fellow Africans who have not been overseas of this, that people struggle everywhere, that nothing is a simple case of give or take, but he is having difficulty. There are always achievements and always failures, but as far as Jackson’s goals go, he can say that he has succeeded.”
“I appreciate that guy so much,” Jackson said, “that Bradley, because he wants so much to learn about African culture, and he do. And also, I appreciate because he wants to learn Kiswahili. Up to now he knows so much Kiswahili. And also, in this program, he wants to decide for sure what he wants to study in the college, but up to now he is not sure yet, but he still wants to study the anth-ro-po-logy…? Yeah, that one. But now he knows that he will follow his heart and go to the way that God wants him to go.”
The next day Scott, MJ and I, the three broke adventurers, wandered around the Old Town of Bagamoyo together while others went shopping. My God. I never knew that such a place existed outside of imagination and story-books. We wandered slack-jawed through the cobbled streets hemmed by ancient buildings, many still inhabited today. We went down to the crenellated walls of the former German customs house on the beach where lateen-rigged dhows were beached, and we could as well have been in the 19th, 18th or 17th century. Friendly people came to talk to us, somehow aware that we had no money and thus talking as truly interesting people rather than as salesmen. “You know,” I said to Scott, “I had written off the possibility of anything being truly ‘ideal’ some time ago. But, I don’t know, within the past months I may have changed that verdict…” There is always something new to be found I suppose…
Sorry these letters have come to be so late – computer access is limited and schedules are busy. I hope that all is well with you, and I look forward to hearing from you all again!
Kwaheri!

Bradley A. Clements
Chamazi, Tanzania