Kigoma and the Return

---

We had a few hours to kill in Kigoma because it was too early for dinner and few people wanted to go to Ujiji to see where Stanley met Livingstone. We therefore went to the central market. I was expecting something similar to Mwanza. After all, Kigoma's 30,000 people are as strategically placfed as Mwanza's 500,000. Just joking, but I thought Kigoma would have a smaller version of Mwanza's market. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Kigoma's market, in my opinon, is a real stereotypical "African" market.

Kigoma Central Market is a cramped space, less than a quarter of an American city block, surrounded on the outside by real stores with entrances on the street. One enters through a small alley between two stores and passes through an interesting room with long tables. I could not find its purpose. Finally, one enters the narrow walkways of the market.

You can buy anything in the market. We first walked through the mitumba section. Surprisingly, the clothing was much cleaner and much nicer than equivalent shops in Dar and Mwanza. A little further along we found khangas, kitenges, and other really nice pieces of cloth. I was going to wait until I returend to Dar next week to buy some but the price was less than half here and there was no need to negotiate. They gave us the local price right-off-the-bat!

I kept walking and came to some video stores. I know it's probably piracy, but I really wanted to get something Tanzanian, like the dozens of movies on one disk. Dan already got "40 Denzel Washington Movies" (more like 20...all movies were cut in half) and so I bought 18 classics (really only 15 because 3 were divided in half). Included on the DVD are:

* The Gods Must Be Crazy
* Tamango
* Ten Canoes
* Beat the Drum
* Out of Africa
* Sometimes in April
* Catch a Fire
* Shottas
* Amistad
* City of God
* Tsotsi
* My Brother
* Life Support
* Monster's Ball
* G

The thing connecting all of these movies is Africa...or black people. Hey, I think it's better than the collection that was called "Leonardo diCaprio vs. Tom Hanks" and other similarly ridiculous collection titles. I look forward to watching these movies.

The market still had more (if you can believe it!) - produce section, chicken section (all alive) and a spice/starch section. For being in such a small space, this market had a lot of stuff. I was very impressed. But what impressed me more were the people. None of the shopkeepers harassed us to go into their store or gave us absolutely ridiculous prices. As Ryan phrased it, "We weren't ATMs, we were customers." Nobody screamed wazungu at us and the one lady who did say "Karibu mzungu" said it in a tone that was soft so that Mzungu could have been my name. Maybe it's the lack of tourists, but Kigoma is definitely an amazing city.

After the market we went to dinner at Kigoma's fanciest hotel, the Kigoma Hilltop Hotel. Even though it was fancy (they had real zebras on the lawns), I only paid TSh 10,000 ($8.62). Ridiculous. The food was fantastic and made me miss good American food again. It seems that every good meal I eat in Tanzania has that effect on me.

The ride back to Mwanza was long but made me realize why I love Georgetown and spending time with Georgetown people. We discussed the impact of building tarmac roads in Tanzania and especially the paving of the main highways. It is much more than just access to goods and services; the dirt roads have negative consequences that extend much further. For example, every car that passes stirs up a lot of dust which the people walking on the road constantly breathe. We had problems after 12 hours in a landcruiser! That's one health issue. Another is that the clothes people wear get dirty nearly instantly, so why should they spend so much time washing them? Even laundry hanging out to dry can get dusty if a car goes by too fast. This significantly affects hygiene. Paving them could be the way to great improvements in Tanzania. Just one thing at a time....

---

Comments

[Elizabeth]

dvd regions...
You do know that Africa is on a different DVD region code from the US, right ? Thus it is possible that your dvds won't work here in the US--your laptop can switch regions a certain number of times but then eventually it'll get locked into a region code and you can't unlock it...Just warning you...