Peterborough Pictures

Camp fire at orientation; digging organic potatoes; Andrea playing vintage Risk at mid-term camp; JP snowing an unfortunate friend; Sean pulling Sally on the scating rink.

Peterborough Pictures

Colin presenting Steven Lewis with a giant chocolate chip cookie at Flemming Colledge; jack-o-lantern carving at halloween; street hockey tournament; canoing on the Otanabee River; Frank in his cowboy hat at our welcome party.

Peterborough Pictures

Pow-wow at Randy's Ojibwa reserve; our team at our mid-term camp; the Catholic cathedral that Jackson attended on Sundays; Hoyce and Deborah volunteering at an organic farm near Peterborough; Jackson, Tegemeo, Rahel, Deborah, Saomu and Suzan during our orientation camp.

Missive #9: The Mountain and the Island

March 15th, 2010

Salaam alaikum,

February began with our Dada Anna’s seventh birthday, which brought all of the Magole residents and many others to our house to celebrate. We ate cake together and her parents gave speeches. Birthdays seem to come in twos around here, and the following week was my counterpart Jackson’s nineteenth. After secretively plotting amongst the whole group and host family, we snuck everyone over for a potluck party. We feasted, danced, socialized, and Jacob, Jackson and I delivered speeches.
Our EAD group – Deborah, Sally, Jackson and I – presented our first Educational Activity Day on the topic of Economy. We traveled to the Canadian High Commission where we were given a sleep-inducing lecture on Tanzanian economic trends by a economist from Winnipeg, and a much more interesting talk about recent policies by a local Tanzanian employee. We then learned about the community of Chamazi’s economy from Jackson and Deborah’s research, and had everyone go on a scavenger hunt around the business district of Dar es Salaam. We then returned to UVIKIUTA for a game in which everyone was divided into four groups, each with an imaginary country with unique natural, demographic, financial and infrastructure resources and handicaps. Each team had to discuss amongst and between themselves about how to create a strong economy under the given circumstances, linked with their neighboring countries, in a moral way which aided the advancement of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. The following EAD, concentrating on Social Services, took us to a government school. The organizers of the EAD had expected a meeting with a class and its teacher, but they got more than they had bargained for. The entire student population was splayed out before us in their white and purple uniforms, their prefects, head boy and head girl in one formal row and the teachers in another, all ready to engage in a discussion with the Canadian emissaries concerning the challenges facing the development of their school. After the initial awkwardness it became a very interesting and inspiring discussion.
I have been very surprised at my remarkable good health since I’ve been here. I expected at least some stomach issues due to unfamiliar food at first, but even that has not been a problem. The warmer climate has even removed my usual back and joint pain and stiffness. I am a lucky one, though. Since mid-January Tegemeo and I are the only ones who have not been to the hospital with one ailment or another, such as malaria, typhoid, scabies, back pain, urinary tract infection, coughs, or mysterious cases of excessive vomiting and diarrhea, among others. I have only had to take two days off of work in the whole Tanzanian phase due to minor sicknesses, which I think may have been cases of malaria which were just suppressed almost entirely by my medication. If many of the night-time mosquitoes here have malaria, then it is hardly surprising that it is so common. In our first nights of sleeping here we quickly learned not to touch the nets that we sleep under – any flesh in contact with it is quickly given a thick coating of bites which we first mistook as a strange rash until we realized the truth of it and were surprised that we had any blood left for ourselves.
On the 10th of February Sean, Deborah, Sally and I slept over at UVIKIUTA in order to get up early the following morning to leave for Moshi in northern Tanzania. Sally had received a request from her former university, Mount Allison, to make a presentation to the students of the Moshi International School, and our supervisors had given those of us who wished to come permission to accompany her. Sean’s alarm awoke he and I at 3:30 am in Frank and Scott’s house’s spare bedroom. We pulled ourselves out of bed into the pre-dawn blackness and stumbled over to Hoyce’s house where we ate a hushed breakfast. The bus arrived to take us to the station soon after and the driver found that he had no reverse gear, meaning that we had to push the bus out of the driveway. “It wouldn’t be a morning in Chamazi if we didn’t have to push-start one vehicle or another,” Sean reminded us. Reverse gear or none, we headed off to the main bus station in Dar where we found our bus, a Sai Baba Express. After long hours amongst hundreds of idling and revving buses sitting and waiting in the station (despite the high cost of gas here, most people haven’t figured out that it’s financially and environmentally beneficial to turn off unused engines) we eventually headed underway as the sky slowly brightened. We were soon driving through the outer reaches of Dar es Salaam, passing into amazing and ever-changing landscape. City blended into village into wilderness into farm land. Eventually we were looking out over the vast expanse of the Serengeti Plains, the ocean of grassland reaching a shore of alien-looking sisal plantations that extended towards it from the highway. Amidst the sea of flat vastness would rise unexpected sheer mountains, sometimes dim in the distance, sometimes towering in rocky crags directly over the road. Apart from the many short stops that we made to allow local farmers and salesmen attempt to sell wares to the passengers through the bus windows, we made one lunch stop-over a little over half way. At the end of the eight hour trip we arrived near Moshi and were dropped on the roadside where Hoyce’s brother, Job, waited to welcome us. Having grown up nearby, Job still lived in his home town and had invited us to stay at his house. We crammed into a couple of cars and he took us to his home, an apparently solidly middle class complex of buildings for the whole family, their guests, and small household staff. All were there to welcome us profusely, including many of Hoyce’s relatives. We were shown our rooms and set about strategising how we could fit six boys into the two double beds and remaining space. In the end we concluded that, since Colin and Tegemeo were to be staying with Tegemeo’s uncle, the rest of us could make do by pushing the two beds together, sleep three on them, and take some cushions from the living-room sofa for the fourth person to lay on the floor. We agreed to rotate nightly so that each of us could have a turn in both the cushy and less desirable locations.
After settling ourselves in we went to explore Moshi town before dinner. Renowned as Tanzania’s cleanest city, Moshi is a haven for tourists en route to a safari to Mount Kilimanjaro, the Serengeti, or Ngorongoro Crater. This was evident by the number of wazungu and expensive stores and cafes pandering to them. As the sun neared the horizon the curtain of cloud that had covered us parted slightly and the imposing bulk of Mount Kilimanjaro was unveiled to us. I was stunned by its sheer enormity, having expected it to see it only as a distant presence. There are times when I don’t want to take out a camera – either because it is inappropriate, unsafe, or degrading of the experience – but the image of which will never be erased from my memory. I think that the sight of the towering white minarets of the mosque on the slope on which Moshi is perched, with the omnipresence of the mountain dominating the skyline behind them, is one such memory.
The next day we went on a day trip to Arusha. Job kindly took us to the bus station, but when a man heard Job wish us a good time in Arusha he said “You are going to Arusha? This bus, quickly!” and he grabbed Deborah’s bag and headed off. Sean and Deborah chased him and made him give back the bag on the promise that we would take his bus, and he got in a pushing and shouting match with the other bus conductors who were trying as hard to haggle us onto their buses. It was a relief to get underway. I sat between a man in a suit and a pair of maasai in their traditional kitenge as we drove alternately through rainforest, scoured by deep stream gorges, and ox- or donkey-ploughed farmland dotted with mud huts and termite mounds. Upon our arrival in Arusha we were set upon by another throng of men attempting to fill their buses. “Bus to Moshi, come quick!” “We just came from Moshi.” “No you didn’t, come quick!”
We went to the crafts market, frequented by tourists. I had very little money and was aware that everything was much more expensive than in Bagamoyo, where it was mostly made, and was thus only going because the group was, although most were merely for the sake of looking. Although there was the occasional cordial shop-owner, who probably overheard me bemoaning my lack of money, most would stop at no end to make a sale. Some would put you on a guilt-trip, annoy persistently, or would physically bar the way out of the stall. Thankful to be away from the market, we went on a hike up a nearby hill with a local guide. We walked through the city, passing a huge new glass sky-scraping hotel and the UN International Court for the Tribunal of the Rwandan Genocide, and we were soon on the outskirts of town. Soon we were on a dirt road between cement shop-buildings which slowly gave way to ever thinner clusters of mud huts nestled amidst beautiful gardens where children played. The road angled steeply as we started our assent of the hill, and we soon jutted off on a side-path that was even steeper. As climbed the extraordinary scenery laid itself out below us in a broad map. Arusha was a hardly noticeable exception in the sea of lush green vegetation that spread over rolling hills to fade into the distance. Occasional farms and huts scattered across the scene, noticeable from the plumes of smoke where fields were being burned off. Mountains spurred up in the distance, the most noticeable being the three summits of the broad walls of Ngorongoro Crater, the discovery site of the oldest evidence of humanity’s existence. As we neared the top of the hill (our guide told it was too small to have a name, albeit bigger than most of the so-called “mountains” in Victoria – Sean dubbed it Kilimanjunior in sympathy) we began to come across farms and gardens hewn out of the forest. Our guide spoke with an elderly maasai man who welcomed us into his tiny dark wattle and daub boma where he, his two wives, several children, and livestock lived. He was very welcoming, but his wives did not seem to agree with our presence and were adamant that we take no pictures except of specific things which we asked permission to. One was sorting maize kernels on a mat on the ground of the boma complex, while the other was tending to the livestock who were out of the field. All of the children were out either at school or tending the cattle who were out grazing. We descended back down into Arusha and took the bus back to Moshi in the evening.
The next morning the sky was clear and Scott, JP, Andrea, Sally, Edith, MJ and I went out at 6 o’clock to see Mt. Kilimanjaro, much clearer than it had been before. The snow at the huge mountain’s crest stood out starkly, reflecting the sunrise that trickled slowly down the slopes to illuminate their details long before the sun showed its face to us bellow. That day the others went off to hike to a waterfall and I chose to stay behind to do my own exploration. Jordan, Job’s young son who had very good English, happily employed my help in turning the chicken-yard into a jury-rigged tennis court. We dug holes in the dirt with a hoe, planted some sticks in them, and tied a rope between them as a net. Then we hit Jordan’s little rubber rugby ball back and forth over our “net” with a dead electric mosquito-swatter and a piece of wood as rackets. When that grew tiring we up-rooted the tennis court and converted it into a soccer field for a game with much collateral hitting of chickens. That game ended when I accidentally kicked the ball over the wall of the compound and Jordan had to run and get it, scraping his knees on the wall as he climbed back over it. We then went to the huge market which had materialized just around the corner. We went to it, passing a joyous church service, and wandered amongst the amazing variety of wares: fruit, spices, coffee, vegetables, fish, soap, kitchen wares, kangas, kitenge, knives, knife sharpeners, coconuts, baskets, mats and much more… People were very friendly and prices were good as they had no expectation to serve anyone but the locals. Sean and Andrea purchased things for a weighty gift basket which we presented to Job and his extended family the following morning before our departure, thanking them for their warm hospitality and delicious bountiful meals. We headed back to Dar watching “The Gods Must Be Crazy” on the bus television while we passed through scenes very similar to those in the movie. We arrived back in Magole only slightly late for our Sunday evening potluck, then collapsed into our beds.
A mere two days of work and an EAD stood between that trip and our next – this time to the island of Zanzibar. Sean and I met at Sally’s house at 4:30 in the morning where she prepared us a filling breakfast of oatmeal which reminded us of home. The bus arrived and took us to the ferry in Posta where we waited until the gates were opened and we joined the throng rushing for the best places on the boat. The three-hour trip, infamous as being rough and sea-sickness inducing, was neither and we had a very comfortable passage. We pulled into harbour where many fishing boats, dhows, and an ugly cruise ship were moored, disembarked along with many tourists, locals, and crates of baby chickens, and had our passports stamped as we passed customs into the semi-autonomous region of Zanzibar. We ate a cheap lunch which was typical of an average Swahili meal except for the addition of samosas and the flat Arabic nam bread. We met our guide, Ali, who took us to our modest (only by way of price and comparison – we were delighted) hotel, a former mansion in Stone Town.
As we entered Stone Town my jaw dropped. Many of the cobbled allies were just wide enough for me to hold my arms straight out, and most were only slightly wider. All of the towering buildings were of Arabic or Indian architecture, the magnificently carved double-doors studded with bronze, the shuttered windows going up four or more stories. After the Zanzibari Revolution, Ali told us, when the Omani and Hindi aristocracy who had formerly lived in Stone Town had been driven out and back where they came from, Zanzibar fell under a Communist government which granted the former mansions to common people and artisans whose descendants still live in them today. As ancient as the town felt, it was certainly bustling with life. Although there is a very prominent tourist district, most of Stone Town is still occupied by local shops and residences. Bicycles weave through the streets with huge baskets of fresh baked bread, street-side stall owners haggle with their customers, people meet one another and stand and talk, veiled women in long dresses bear baskets on their heads, crowds of white-robed men gather around virtuosic games of bao, boys in shops crafted beautiful brass-bound mahogany boxes and chests, groceries from the market are put into baskets that are lowered with a rope from a fourth story window and hauled up to save stair-climbing, and children dart through the narrow labyrinth of alleyways in excited games of tag, or ride bicycles or play cricket in the wider courtyards. I thought to myself that this fantasyland would probably be a very fun place to have ones childhood. When the call to prayer began sounding from all of the many mosques, the streets were suddenly abandoned and the experience changed entirely. Then we wandered through empty streets with the wailing Arabic prayers resounding in our ears, only glancing sights of people – kneeling bare foot on prayer mats, facing Mecca – through the open doors of the mosques.
We went by several of the sights: the spice market, Freddie Mercury’s (of “Queen”) childhood home, the old fortress where we had unfortunately just missed a big music festival, and ended at the “House of Wonders”, the former Sultanate palace which has been converted to a museum. So called because it was the first building in Zanzibar to have electric power in the mid-1800’s, the House of Wonders boasted not only electric lighting but also an elevator which saved a trip up the huge but beautifully carved staircases to the five stories that each have balconies out into the central courtyard and the outer sea-side air. The view from the top story (not even the top of the clock tower) is impressive, and on a clear day one can see to Bagamoyo. In front of the palace, between it and the Indian Ocean, are the Floroudani Gardens which flocks of tourists and locals descend upon in the evening to purchase food in all of its varieties from the vendors who set up stalls. “Jambo, sir, welcome, how are you this evening? Would you care to see what I have here? This is [insert name – Mr. Happy, Mohammed the Fisherman, or some such tourist snagging equivalent], he has very fresh food – see the colour? We have lobster crab marlin tuna barracuda shark prawns snapper and kingfish, chapatti nam breadfruit and chips. Now sir, we offer you the freshest food at the finest prices so what would you like…?” and on and on it goes at every stall. The food is good, and we sample much of it before filling ourselves for about 4000 tsh (about $3.80, if one defeats the temptation of the sin of gluttony and moderates one’s seafood consumption). We then loll around and digest, and I converse in Kiswahili to the best of my abilities with the local people around us while trying to avoid the notice of the fly-catchers and drug-dealers. We then walk back down the moon-shadowed allies between tall crenelated walls to our hotel and climb the winding uneven steps to our rooms. Colin and I shared a room with a pair of double doors and windows out into the vibrant ally bellow. When there was water and electricity (that is, when the generator was on: Zanzibar was in the middle of a long period with no electricity and even diesel supplies were beginning to run low) we even had a shower and a flushing toilet, and sometimes a light to use them by.
After a fitful night’s sleep under our square mosquito nets with a fan on (mmm… resource intensiveness!) we went up to the roof-top for breakfast where there was a view of the surrounding buildings and alleys. They had cereal and not-hot milk there! You can tell where there have been Westerners… We then went off for a tour of a shade-grown spice farm in the junglely area just past Bububu (named after the sound of the railway that runs through there). We were shown many different spices and fruits which we learned about, including nutmeg, cardamom, cinnamon, cocoa, lemongrass, starfruit, pampelmouse, durian, jackfruit, cloves, coconuts, and many others. We then were shown the dome-vaulted bath house of a long-ago Sultan's queen before going to a beach. There we descended into a cave – by a recently built stairway – which had been used as a slave prison after the trade had become illegal due to the pressuring of the British. Prior to the stair's construction, when it was in use by the slavers, people had to be lowered down into the oxygen-scarce depths by rope. Once inside, the cave was huge. There was a fresh water spring lower down and the darkness stretched far beyond it: according to our guide it went on for miles where there were crocodile-inhabited streams and large spiders and millipedes. We saw many of the latter. When we started to pant in the thin air we realized how so many slaves could have suffocated to death, packed in such dense numbers. Climbing back out into the light and plentiful oxygen, we went down the path through the makita coral to the white beach graced by beautiful rock formations, dhows, and outrigger canoes where we swam before returning to Stone Town.
The following day the rest of the group headed off to visit a forest inhabited by the unique Columbus Monkeys, found only on Zanzibar. I, however, being conscious of my budget and interested in getting away from the tourist-oriented side of the town, chose to remain behind and do my own exploration. I left my camera, backpack and wallet behind, pocketed enough money for a humble lunch, and wore the most inconspicuous clothes that I had. I knew it would be impossible to be mistaken for a local, but I wanted to appear as open and exceptable to the locals as I could. I was successful beyond my expectations. I wandered, setting myself locations to try to find amidst the labyrinth of buildings, taking the most interesting and least touristy looking routes and getting hopelessly but blissfully lost. I stopped to watch children playing and to chat with occasional people. Generally when one walks past a tourist shop the owner will call out “Jambo”, the greeting reserved only for foreigners, and demand their attention with shouts of “Rafiki! My friend, welcome to my shop! Looking and touching is free, hakuna matata.” When one replies as though the caller had said the proper Kiswahili word of “hujambo”, and responds correctly with “sijambo” the caller will pretend to be astounded and say “Oh, my friend, you speak Swahili!” On this occasion, however, I was very surprised when almost no shop-owners called out to me. One, a dread-locked guy from Dar sitting with a maasai warrior and a turbaned Indian, called me over but with a sincere invitation to sit and talk, curious about where I was coming from, what I was doing in Tanzania, and very interested in the Chamazi Community Library where I was working. After a long conversation I continued on. Only one other shop-owner sought my attention, and I cordially accepted his welcome but he instructed me to return when I had money. As I walked away it struck me that I had never said or done anything to indicate to him that I had no money. I later asked Frank about this: “Can you tell if I have money on me or not?” I asked. “Sure,” he replied. “How?” “The way you walk, man. People walk a different way when they have money, whether they know it or not.”
As I walked between a white mosque and a set of residential manors, an elderly hook-nosed Arab, wearing a cylindrical cap, a white robe, a white mustache-less beard and heavy eyebrows over suspicious eyes called me over to where he was standing on a chair, wiring in a door-bell to the ornately carved frame of his door. With him stood an intelligent-looking boy with sharp, clean features who seemed embarrassed but long-suffering of his grandfather. “You,” the old man said, discarding the common formal greetings, “where are you from?” “Canada,” I replied, abashed but happy for the summons. “Canada is a very good country. Very good salaries. Zanzibar has many problems. Like right now – we have no electricity! Zanzibar was the centre of Africa before the Omani left. Zanzibar was a very good country, too, but now the Africans have the way of things and we have no electricity.” A passing african, also in muslim garb, passed by and laughed, earning a scowl from the man. “Canada has its problems too,” I pleaded, but realized that even though I'd been able to cope with such inconveniences as lack of electricity I had no right as a transient to rebuke his statement. “Now the Omani are gone and we no longer have a Sultanate,” he continued as though I hadn't said anything, then added in a surge of progressiveness, “a president is better than a sultan I suppose.” “Is your family Omani?” I inquired, hoping to change the topic. “Yes! My great-grandparents came from Oman. They were Omani, my grandparents were Omani, my parents were Omani, I am Omani, my children and my grandchildren are all Omani. Oman is a very good country, like Canada. I was there last year, I have family there. There are many mosques near here,” he informed me, changing the subject yet again and pointing in the direction of the four nearest ones, calling them by name and denomination. “Do you know Salt Lake City?” his grandson asked me, “in the United States? My cousin is studying there.” A middle aged woman in a black dress and headscarf whose eyes, voice and bearing resonated with proud confidence and intelligence arrived with three laughing little children and spoke about me with the man in Kiswahili before turning to me, greeting me respectfully, and asking me to confirm everything that the old man had told her about me. “Get inside,” he told her when we had finished, and she complied in her own good time, smiling gently up at him on his stool. He finished installing the door-bell and tested it, cocking his head and listening before yelling up to someone on the fourth or fifth story to ask if they could hear it. “We speak four languages in this house.” He counted them off on the fingers of his hand. “Kiswahili, English, Arabic and Hindi. Four.” I eventually left him to his task saying “Salaam alaikum” (peace be on you). “That's Arabic,” he informed me before responding. “Alaikum salaam.” (Peace be on you too)
I ate a lunch of nam and samosas from a street-side vendor for 900 tsh and walked on to a bustling square where I stopped to watch a group of men playing a highly complex game of Indian bao. “Alaikum salaam,” one of the players responded to my greeting with a raised eyebrow. “Ninapenda kutecheza bao,” I said (I enjoy playing bao). “Ndio? Ka. (Yes? Sit.) You will play the next game,” he said bluntly. Their experienced virtuosity was astounding – one played could calculate when the other's turn would end well before it was over and he would begin his own turn, making my attempt to decipher the rules of this complicated version futile. When they were down to the last three of their unplayed seeds they would fling them with a flick of the wrist to have them fly up and land effortlessly in the intended holes of the large finely crafted wooden board. They talked amongst themselves in Kiswahili about me, and I understood most of it until I added a statement in their own language, then they changed the subject and accepted me friendlily. After over an hour of watching and chatting with them I bid them farewell, thankful that the masters had forgotten my challenge to play.
When I met up with the group again at the hotel they excitedly told me about their experience with the Columbus Monkeys which were very tame, even though they were not offered food, and would even sit on JP's lap. We ate again at the Gardens, packed, and headed back to Dar es Salaam the following day. Again the ferry trip was very smooth and we took daladalas back to Mbagala and then UVIKIUTA. Colin and I got on one daladala after asking “Unaenda Mbande?” (Are you going to Mbande?) and the conductor calling “Ndio, saizi.” (Yes, right now.) So we hopped on board, but the faithless conductor emptied his daladala at Chamazi market, a long walk from UVIKIUTA. Another man from the daladala was in an argument with the conductor, and he later came over to us and said that he had been berating the man for having cheated us and he helped us to catch another daladala. Sean, Sally and I got back to Magole just in time for our communal potluck, then went to bed.
The following Wednesday was Deborah, Sally, Jackson and my last EAD. Focused on history, we had an elder medicine man who had lived his entire life in Chamazi come to talk to us about the community's history, changes he had seen in his lifetime, and the traditions of his profession. We then went to the National Museum in Kivukoni, I leading everyone on a very round-about route to get there. There everyone divided into four teams focusing on four of the major influencing cultures of Tanzania’s history – Native Africans, Arabians, Germans and British – and did a scavenger hunt around the museum to piece together ideas related to their culture and to the MDGs.
On the 25th a representative from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) visited to see UVIKIUTA and our CWY team, both of which were heavily funded by the agency. In lieu of a projector to do a slideshow, we had all drawn pictures of our favorite or most interesting time in the exchange and showed and explained them to her, after we had all feasted on a huge honorary lunch. She was staying at Dar's fanciest hotel, and CIDA's budget for her week-long visit was almost equal to that of our three-month exchange.
After work on Friday I learned that Ben was leaving for Germany the following day and needed a bunch of promotional materials, so I worked from 8 till 6 on Saturday to edit them and copy them to fifty-five CDs. I might have been resentful, but Ben is such a marvelous person to work for, even when he's stressed and grumpy, that I was happy to be of service. After that I had to wait two more hours for a ride to Magole, and in the meantime I helped MJ, JP and Scott roust a chicken out of Scott's house. “It was, like, just wandering casually by on the porch, then it, like, suddenly turns and darts into the house,” Scott explained. We chased it around until MJ finally caught it and unexpectedly thrust it in JP's face with a yell, making him scream and leap back and all of us laughed. “Tabernac!” he panted, looking as though he'd almost had a heart-attack.
Jackson arranged a football (soccer) match for the following day, CWY vs. UVIKIUTA. Norbert made a hilarious referee, spoofing a professional with hyperbolas severity except when he danced to the cheering girl's songs. Some great shows of virtuosity were displayed, such as when Tegemeo did a backwards flip-kick to save the ball from going off-side and landed heavily on his back in the dirt, only for the ball to go off-side anyways. No thanks to our Canadian players, the CWY team made a resounding victory and great fun was had by all.
I am very glad that I am here in my capacity as a volunteer rather than as a tourist, but I have realized that Tanzania seems to have it all: culture, wildlife, beaches, stability, people, prices, and amazing natural and historical wonders. Although I am not at all under the illusion that I know this country, I have now seen parts of the North, the East, and the South which is rarely penetrated by whites. My expectations are exceeded.
I have one last Missive on its way following this one, concerning the conclusion of our program, our parting and our return to Canada. May all be well with you and yours.

Rafiki yako,

Bradley A. Clements
Chamazi, Tanzania

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

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!

Arrived Safely

Just a quick email to let you know that we arrived safely in Dar es Salaam on the 11th.
Having an absolutly amazing experience! Reminds me a lot of the South Pacific, although the people and animals are a little different. I think some of the Canadians are rightfully getting sick of hearing me say "in the South Pacific...." The food, people and environment in UVIKIUTA - where we are right now - is beautiful. We're leaving for a three-week work-camp in Lindi early tomorrow morning (until Jan. 2). We'll be working on building a school in the mornings and teaching children sports and English in the afternoons when it's hotter. Apparently there's a 99% Muslim population there, and I'[m looking forward to wearing one of those long white robes. The heat is often quite nice, although it's sometimes too much. Some of the Canadians are really suffering from it. Went to the beach and museum a couple of days ago. Showers are with buckets, we fetch our water, laundry is by hand, and toilets are squatts, but we're pretty well used to that by now. Usually wake up around 5 am to the sound of cocks crowing, dogs howling, secatas chirping, and Muslims being called to prayer from a local minaret, and we go to bed in the dormatories under our mosquito nets around 9:30 pm. I'm at an internet cafe now with Sean, Edith, Andrea, Suzan and Rahel. We transfered on a pair of cramed (by deffinition) daladalas. As Sarah says, "a glass of water can become full, but a daladala can't." Getting used to being called "mzungu" (white person), but Sally (who's Asian) is having a harder time with that. Internet is cheap here (1000 tsh an hour), when I can get to it. The place where we are is owned by a friend of Rahel's, so she re-impursed my time when my email wouldn't come up. Don't know how much I'll be able to email in Lindi. Anyways, lots happening, and when there isn't we stay entertained by watching the monkeys or playing with the little boys (Alpha and Ima). I'll try to get you an official Missive on schedule, but that depends on whether or not there's easy computer access in Lindi. My Kiswahili is really improoving. Love to hear from you!
Rafiki yako,

Bradley