Nyumbani Sweet Nyumbani

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Nyumbani* sweet nyumbani....

We made it back to the salty coast of Tanzania last Friday night and set out immediately afterwards for the music festival in Zanzibar (complicated little island just off the coast) that had started Thursday. Kidude was playing and she is a legend here. Approximately 87 years old, but no one can be sure, including her, with an amazing voice. She was the star of the whole event and the main reason we went straight there. It is now Tuesday, we're back on the mainland and we still havent heard her! I'll tell you why...

It all started when we left Kigoma - kicking and screaming - we loved it there. The lake was perfect. The people so kind and open and fun. The projects exciting and inspiring. Anton told us to stay if we wanted. It's just as easy as that. No real reason to go back after all. I mean, he made that decision 34 years ago and that's how a Scotsman speaks Tanzanian Swahili like a local... We were very tempted... but the train lured us with it's septic smell mixed with drying fish.. mmmm! And we were off, a mere 5 hours behind schedule on our way to Tabora in the center of Tanzania to visit with R&S clubs, talk with teachers, do our V&V project and spend time with our friend James, the regional secretary of R&S Tabora.

We arrived in Tabora later that same day, fed on the train and ready for resting. James picked us up in a cab and we went to the Conference Center in Tabora built by Swedes and run by the local Pentacostal Church. Everyone there was very very very nice. We stayed for 7 days and for some reason, every single day, one or more of the four of us was sick. Poor Erik, though, caught the brunt of it. I will spare you the details of his specific aliments, but lets just say... well... poor poor Erik. It was on the fifth day that I made him go to the hospital and check for malaria. He wanted to wait another day because he says I teased him for checking too much in the past... Not true!...

Erik had malaria. We got advice on meds from a friend who gets it two or three times a year and went straigt for his usual cocktail. A disaster. We discovered Erik has an allergy to sulfur in the meds. That was a rough night at the Guest House. We took some a g type photos of him to lighten the mood. He was in some pain. Luckily about 12 hours later he was feeling a lot better and we switched the drugs.

Now, Tabora is very pretty. Lots of life. Green green green and wet. It's the rainy season there and the rice paddies are thriving and the roads are not. It's very much like a small town... in Alabama. Replete with attitudes and xenophobia. From the experiences we had with strangers inthis town, you'd think we'd done something terrible to offend them all. But really, I think that you just need a lot more than a week to warm them up. Frankly, I was pretty surprised about how we were recieved. Our friends were beyond awesome. We love J and his family and the R&S people. They were all 100% fabulous. Oh, and the pharmacist. Everyone else, not sure what was up! Including the nurse who wouldnt give Erik his results and the other one who told Gena that if Erik switched meds he'd overdose with such disgust... Don't worry, we talked with the nice pharmacist and he said that that lady must have been high.

So, we switched Erik's meds and high-tailed to Dodoma, the capital of Tanzania. But not before we met some cool kids and were able to do the project with six of them. Four primary school kids who's English and ability to switch back and forth from Swahili was humiliating! Amazing! I was very impressed and their recordings are very good. Though, like all kids I've met who are 9 to 13, in any country, seems that strangers are still strange and it takes a while to loosen up, so... this has prompted me to get more serious about changing the project when we deal with younger kids going forward.

The two young ladies we worked with from the Secondary School were a dream. I wish we could have stayed for them and to work with more of their classmates. We've ended up with more boys than girls for V&V and Tabora Girls School would have been a good place to start to balance it out. Maybe next time...

Back to the train to Dodoma... We called our friend G at midnight, sitting on the floor in the train station waiting for the train. Which had been "coming in 10 minutes" for the past 4 hours. Midnight is a good time for us to call you jokers on the East Coast. We get you in the middle of your afternoon, just in the middle of your full tummy from lunch time when you probably arent that productive anyway for about 30 minutes to an hour of digestion.... well, that's how it is for me at the desk jobs anyway. We called him to remind him that we were still alive and kicking even though no one had heard from us in weeks... Internet was painful in Tabora and intermittent everywhere outside of DSM. There were whole families full on camping out waiting for the train. Prepared for the wait, over 50 people covered every foot of the concrete floor with their bodies, old men and women curled up with babies and covered with ever color of kanga. The effect was this undulating faceless floor of mounded bodies... sprinkled with grass bags of foods and more colorful fabrics holding more foods... sugar cane in two to three foot long stalks poking out and all angles of piles, bundles of bananas and pineapples, bags of salt - a big industry in a close by town, among old suitcases. The young men and who I assumed were fathers or uncles of the sleeping masses were crowded along the walls near the ticket office sitting on bags and standing talking and telling jokes. Some of the younger teenage kids teased the big wazungu (us). And when Erik walked away, more than a couple of the guys were more bold at making comments and being a bit rude. Nothing terrible, but enough to remind us of what it might be like to travel without a 6'3" broad shoulder man on our side. Tanzania is really very very safe. So please don't think that we felt unsafe. It's just that something funny happens when us girls wear pants in some places. Or when we do things that ladies just don't do here, like talk to other men, not in our families. There is some sort of wall that we pass through when we do some things and then it's something that some - very few, luckily - feel like they can draw more attention to, but pointing and talking and then - some times - give disapproving looks. I'm not going to lie. It hits a nerve. Nobody likes to feel like they cant do what they want. But everybody knows that traveling women have it much harder than travelling men. We three girls traveling with the Ginga Ninja (a new nickname for Erik given by a friend on the program), were not imagining it. As soon as the Ninja comes back, there is silence and the same guys look away and pretend they were talking about something else! It's wild. Not just at the train station.

Back to Erik. He was feeling better when the train finally came and we settled into our sleeper car around 1 am for the 12 hour trip, but we still arrived ragged and miserable in Dodoma. There, I put my princess foot down and guided my big sick man to the nearest hotel with hot water and checked in. We had a nice relaxing night, ate Chinese food at the restaurant downstairs, and slept a lot in a comfortable bed. One thing that malaria patients need a lot of is sleep. It tricks you into thinking you are all better, then you do something dumb, like go snorkling in Zanzibar, and it all comes back! That's later...

We had a lovely visit from our friend's family and played with their little daughter in the yard outside of the hotel. Just enough air for Erik and then back to bed. We wish we had more energy to spend with them, by this time, I was having some smaller challenges and desparately needed sleep, too.

The next day, we took the bus to Dar. We'd forgotten about the heat.

As the bus descended to the coast, the air got thicker and the wind actually heated us up. Erik kept his face out of the window the whole time to stave off the nausea, but all in all, a safe and quick trip. Erik was steadily improving.

That night, we feed Erik pizza and lasagna and put him to bed after his meds. So nice to be back in Dar...

This is where we get silly. We thought the greatest thing to do would be to stick with our plan to go to Zanzibar for the festival. I mean, we'd made it east on time after all and it's just a short 2 hour boat ride away, right? We'll mostly right. We got a great place to stay for cheap and we'll see some friends we hadn't seen in a while and stuck to the plan. Erik swore he was feeling better and there was color in his face, so we went ahead.

We got to ZNZ at 10am after a 7am ferry ride, ate well at the Stone Town Cafe which feels like it could be in Connecticut. The food is reliable and very good - perfect for Erik's tender tummy. Then we tried to rent motorcycles. Luckily, we couldn't. Erik, though, ran all around town trying to work it out, running himself down in the process. This wasnt evident until time to go listen to music and both E+I conked out early.

Zanzibar is complicated. Stone Town is the main old city on Zanzibar's main bigger island (name escapes me). The streets are narrow and shaded by towering Swahili buildings which is an architectual style mixed from Indian, Arab, East African tribes and Portuguese influences. The result is other worldly. Old palaces where the Omans used to live, the large open courtyard houses where the moneyied families lived for generations and still do even after the revolution on the island pushed many of them out. I wont really try to describe it right now. I wont do it justice. There's just too much.

With the festival, there were hundreds of Wazungu. And even with this influx, E+I managed to offend someone by having a faux punching match on the street. A man drove up and reprimanded Erik and wouldnt look at me. We'd forgotten for moment that we were still in ZNZ where 99% of the people are Muslim. This aspect so pervades everything that when we went to the Italian place across the street from the apartment we rented, the Italian proprietor offered us "Italian Coke" or "Italian Sprite" when our companion asked for wine. She then said in a very low voice that it is of good Italian quality, but we cannot call it wine here. People get very upset and we dont want to flaunt it. Our delicious chianti came in a cold single serving coke bottle.

After a good night's sleep we decided to try the snorkling. This put Erik's tummy through way too much and we ended up back home early and resting for the afternoon. We hit the music for an hour and then dinner and then bed.

But all in all, the extra sleep he got in ZNZ helped.

We're back in DSM after a hellish ferry ride home that luckily wasnt too tardy, and seemed to take a record little time file with a little incident with the police before we left. While docked, our ferry was hit by a much larger boat. The gangplank leading to our boat was ripped in half and a part of the bumper to the ferry was torn off. It wasnt too bad. But really loud and sounded scarier than it was. No one was hurt. After leaving the dock in an effort to run from the offending boat, the ferry having cleared its path came back around and docked and waited for the police. We still dont know what happened, but it could have been in part due to the rough seas that we became more acquainted with later.

It must have been a sight to see, about an hour and a half into the journey, about 6 Wazungu girls hanging over the back railing emptying their tummies into the huge boat wake. We'd taken the fast ferry back with all the performers from the festival the night before and unfortunately only got to talk very little to them while hanging over the back railing. E+I spent a lot of time back there - not talking. The boat seemed to careen over 12 foot swells and barrel down the other side. Sometimes, taking on swells broadside. Not fun after a while...

This next part seems silly, but I feel like I should mention it. It was after all, the second collision of the day that we were involved in.

Boarding the boat we ran into a group of six Italians we had met clear across the country in Kigoma two weeks earlier. An eclectic bunch that seems to center around a 65 year old thick set Italian man with long grey hair with the most amazing SLR. He's constantly taking pictures and telling stories in Italian about how his grandmother had done whatever it was that we were talking about or something like that. The Italian girl who translates said that he rarely makes sense in Italian, so not to worry and that I was probably better off without a translation. We loved him! The other five Italians ladies were just about as different from eachother as you could get. Among them a pretty 29 year old accountant, another a heavy set teacher in her 40's, another a chain-smoking thin-as-thin-can-be-without-being-unsafe artist with long blond hair. Everyone just so much fun even though only 2.5 of them speak any English at all. Anyway, we docked together and after discovering they were staying not far from us in Mikocheni, we contracted a van to take all nine of us. Me, E, G (our historian friend who is a constant companion and a real force! We love her), and the six Italians.

On the way home, we hit traffic. So many cars sneaking ahead everywhere. Road rage everywhere, but no one very going fast enough to do any real damage. When the roads are as atrocious as they are in Dar, and traffic as unsustainable as it is, there is no real need for speed limits. Our driver, Jafir - a really sweet guy from Dar that was helping me practice my Swahili and telling me about his family, decides to do us a favor. He swings out into the other lane and passes about 15 cars. I did not ask for this and I think it's terrible mostly, but Erik was tired and hungry (though not miserable) and I wanted to get him fed and home asap, so part of me was thankful.

Just as we were trying to edge our way back into legitamit traffic, two police officers walking up the other side of the road, one with a shotgun and the other with a billy club, come running up. A whole scene ensued. They made the van stop in mid-cutting-someone-off. This made that someone slowly ram his reinforced SUV grill into the side of van. It was a gentle dent, but still metal on metal, never a calming sound. The cops are yelling something to Jafir, he's saying that his Wazungus made him do it, because we were really late to something and things were serious. The cops made a big fuss and Jafir said something to the effect of, "give a brother a break man. These guys were riding me." And then it looked like they'd let us go, bc as soon as there was room, Jafir started driving again after letting the guy with the grill move ahead. Then, suddenly, the cops - now in the rear view mirror - go from talking to eachother to booking it down the street after us. That was fun. Some more yelling. Some more what sounded to me like smooth talking from Jafir and then before we knew it, one of the jokers opened the sliding door (part of me was relieved it still worked form that mini-collision) and then pushed into a seat next to the Italians (I was on E's lap in front), clumsily manoeuvering his large gun in his lap so that it finally ended up facing up. Strange thing was that he was apologizing to the Italians for pushing when he finally sat.

While this irritating kid with a gun was pushing into the car, Jafir told me - in a whisper - not to be afraid that these guys were full of it. That calmed me. In actuality, I was too tired to be worried anyway and from my experience with these jerks, I never seem to have any fear or respect for them or even think these jerks have ammo in their guns. I am not so dumb as to test it, I just have a feeling. Mostly, we were all so tired from that boat trip that I dreaded the thought of having to pile out of this thing and find another cab for everyone and hang around with Jafir in the middle of the night until they let him go. And I didnt want to pay a bribe.

With this possibly armed kid in the van and everyone still very quiet and non-responsive (E started to say something like "wtf", but then thought better of it.). We turned the van around and out of traffic. As we were turning, the headlights swung over the US Embassy's entrance. Strangely, I felt a little better. Then we headed back up the road about 100 yards, turned into a parking lot and the cop told Jafir to stop. There was more back and forth and then unexplicably, the guys' tone changed and they turned concilliatory. Then we saw we were in the lot to the police station. Then, the guys just walked away, we backed up the van and started back on our way. Very very wierd.

Jafir's excited and understandably quick Swahili version of the story had to be repeated to me a couple times - slower each time. When I finally got it, I repeated it in excited a quick English to the Italians and had to repeat that version a couple times. Here it is, roughly: Apparently, these idiots had just started walking back from checking in with the guards at the US embassy where they been smoking - probably something funny - and drinking a bit. When they saw us, they thought, here is an opportunity... What Jafir did was so minor in terms of traffic law here, that he knew these cops were just trying to scare the Wazungu into giving beer money. After trying to appeal to their sense, Jafir had called them on their bluff to bring us to the station and told them that it was up to them what they wanted to do, but biy would we would make a stink in the newspapers and the TV if we werent able to go home. He alluded to the fact that the police chief would wonder why they'd delayed such a group of people right across from their embassy when all they had to do was notify the embassy and there would be a world of trouble. And more to that effect.

In the end, they meekly asked Jafir for some money to let us go, but Jafir told them that he didn't have any. I didnt even catch the request in the quick and crazy Swahili flying around my tired head. But apparently the overt request only happened after they were defeated in the parking lot and obviously not going to waste their boss' time with for fear of real trouble. They looked a bit like dogs with their tails between their legs when they headed towards the police station empty handed.

We were on our way and relieved. And I was impressed with all of us that not a one tried to get involved. We tipped Jafir well.

So... we are home in Dar. Planning our next trips, but for now, we stay put for a few weeks. We aren's slated to leave the coast again until the 25th.

Our dear friends are coming to visit on the 20th to the 23rd and we have a lot of goodness planned for them !! There will be photos on this blog to report on all activities.

Dar is wonderful, when close to a fan or in the shade of course - man is it hot! We look forward to resting off the last two weeks or so of travel and malaria and various other aliments here in JG's house. Erik is watching a movie as I type this in the next room and he's drinking lots of fluids. He is forbidden to work or leave the house for anything in the middle of the day for the nexy 8 days, at least. He looks better, but we're doing another malaria test tonight, now that he's finished the regime of meds to be sure we got it. I vow to be a better nurse and not let him do anything even if he wants to.

Of course, Erik has a good sense of humor about the sickness and though he's moving slowly, he is still his lovable happy Erik self! If anyone wants to call him, you can email me for the number. I am sure he'd love to hear from you guys!!



*Nyumbani means "at/in/by one's house" or "home"

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Comments

[Kristie and family]

Quite an adventure!
Wow! Your mini "vacation" was quite an adventure! We are so happy Erik is on the mend, and you have saints above looking out for your bouts with germs, waves, and zealous policemen. Keep up the great work with the kids -- we love the pictures and the travel blog. Love to you both, Kristie and family. (wanted to call on New Year's, but the X-mas call cost $138!! So, Happy New Year! :-)