Habari Za Safari

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Greetings!

It's all about greetings here in Tanzania. Though spoken in Kiswahili, it's common and even essential to ask a string of greetings when you meet a friend, stranger or family member in any context. The particular variety of greeting can come in just about any shape or size, pertaining to any subject of your choosing: How are you? (fine) What's the news with work? (good) What's the news of the day? (clean) What's the news of the afternoon? (fresh) are you cool? (cool) You are welcome (thank you). It's just one part of the warm and welcoming culture here in Tanzania that makes it easy for anyone - even a mzungu like me - to feel at home.

I’ve been so warmly welcomed here in Tanzania that sometimes I actually need to remind myself that I'm not at home and that I’m actually halfway across the globe in the midst of what could possibly be the longest and farthest trip away from home in my lifetime. I’m guessing that it’s partly since I’ve been relatively sedentary these past few months that it’s easy to forget “I’m traveling.” So what I really want to do is take some time out and look back on the trip to date. I've now been outside the USA for more than six months, split about evenly between India and Tanzania. So I thought I would focus this blog entry not on my routine here with JGI, but more on the whole trip to date, which brings me to the most relevant Kiswahili greeting for the moment: Habari Za Safari? (how was the trip?). Though asked as a question, those three words would translate literally as the statement: News of the journey ... Habari za Safari. So with that in mind ladies and gentlemen, let’s have a look back, shall we?


India

Wow


Can I just stop there or do I need to go on?

India is home to such a wide diversity of people, food, languages, cultures, geographies, customs and histories, that it’s hard to sum up what India actually is. Nonetheless, its various manifestations are strongly bound together creating a unique place like nowhere else on earth. As one friend put it before I left, and very accurately I might add, “In India you just feel so much, each and every day.” And it’s true. You feel happiness and excitement, you see natural wonders and beautiful artwork, you meet extremely welcoming and friendly people, you eat great food, GREAT FOOD, you hear great music, you witness living history and lifestyles that have persisted for thousands of years, you see oceans, mountains and forests, and you are (as a westerner at least) exposed to entirely different paradigms of religion, worldview and philosophy. But those are just the good parts, and therefore only half the story.

There are equal and opposite bad parts that you are forced to address as well. The place is a modern country, yet it is a developing country. The massive amount of people living in poverty is so disheartening I don’t even have the words to describe it. There is traffic, pollution, there are touts trying to rip you off, you will get lost, you will get on the most crowded, hot, disgusting buses and trains in your life. You will see sick people. Most likely, you will get violently ill yourself at one point while traveling. Some of the sick people you see may actually be dying, and you are able to witness public cremations of dead bodies in certain locations. You will be exposed to an overt and fully institutionalized racist and classist caste system. And if you move around like I did, you will come to know a new meaning of the word exhaustion. (refer to the image in the bottom right of the photo mosaic above)

Yes, it’s good and it’s bad, but that’s the point. I was able to see so many things and feel so many emotions across every conceivable spectrum. It was definitely not “vacation,” or if it was, only in parts. Your cares don’t melt away by putting life on hold, as you are instead overwhelmed by it. Of course, during some of those less-than-favorite moments, I didn’t exactly share the same point of view I have now. It has taken a fair amount of time to let the experiences settle in order for me to understand the value of the whole India experience.

The specifics have been detailed in previous entries, but if I may, some of the experiences and/or places that have emerged as the highlights in my mind:
Himalaya, unquestionably majestic; Merangarh Fort in Jodhpur; Jaisalmer Fort and Camel Safari; Varanasi; Bandavgarh National Park (Tiger Safari); Kochin; Thanjavur; Mahaballapuram; Goa; Mumbai.

Yes, I know that’s a long list if I’m only attempting to list the cream of the crop. But remember for three months I barely stayed in any place longer than four days (that’s also my excuse for why so many images in the mosaic above are from India as opposed to Tanzania. As yet, I’ve just had more time to visit more places there in comparison to my time here). But to add emphasis to the list above, let me add this perspective. On November 6th I went to see the Taj Mahal. Without question it was one of the greatest and most interesting days I’ve ever had as a traveler. It is way up there as a must-see in a lifetime kind of thing, and I couldn’t imagine my India trip without it. Yet it didn’t make the highlight reel. Got the picture? That’s India.


Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

The three months here in Dar have been a completely separate and distinct experience when compared to India, and not just due to the fact I’ve once again relocated continents. Here, my life is a hybrid blend of home life and travel. For one, I’m volunteering with a relatively standard work schedule with most of my time spent between our office and our house. Though roommates tend to come and go through an always open and revolving door, the setting is a very stable one. I have internet access at home. I have a mobile phone. I have friends and coworkers that I see nearly everyday. I go running on the beach and play basketball on the weekends. But it’s still a world apart.

Despite the stability, I am challenged on a near daily basis as I attempt to be a productive volunteer in another culture. Thanks to widespread English in secondary schools, the language barrier is the least of my concerns. How about transportation? Sometimes school visits require me to standing hunched over in a dala dala (minivan) filled with more than 15 people in blazing heat and thick humidity, going over potholed roads to visit one of the many schools with members in our environment-focused Roots & Shoots clubs. Sometimes the standstill traffic on two-lane roads is so bad, it takes an hour or more just to make the commute.

But the biggest adjustments are around the concepts of time and productivity. I’m just not sure they exist here. I mentioned in a previous blog about the loose interpretation of timeliness, but there’s also little concern for being productive. I don’t want this to be misread as an accusation of people being lazy. I just mean that - seen through my westerner’s eyes - the culture is so relaxed that there’s virtually no pressure or concern about driving projects forward, or at least not in the way in we which emphasize it at home. If something doesn’t get done today, it can always get done tomorrow.

For example, we’re trying to create a newsletter for all the Roots & Shoots members in Dar es Salaam. Because of my undergraduate experience in journalism, I was named the editor-in-chief of this first issue. We held a meeting, a number of otherwise motivated and active students volunteered to write stories and seemed completely on board and inspired. Story deadline: Friday, April 20th. But when our group met on the afternoon in question, not a single person had anything to turn in. Okay, no big deal … this is, after all, an extracurricular volunteer role for the students, who have many other priorities in their lives, most of which justifiably take precedence. So we bumped the deadline back, not to the following Monday, but to the next Wednesday. Again the deadline arrived. Again, no stories. I finally received my first copy on Saturday, two articles to be exact, and there are about five more which are still outstanding.

I’m no longer frustrated by this kind of thing, but it’s challenging nonetheless. I learned a long time ago that I need to readjust my expectations, especially in the case of those which originate from my own cultural background and are not congruent with the style in Tanzania. The challenge I speak of is mainly on two fronts: first, to find small and achievable goals on which I can hang my hat to feel like I’m having any sort of impact here. But more gravely, when faced with macro-level societal problems here - extreme poverty, widespread HIV/AIDS, government corruption, lack of modern infrastructure, environmental degradation and a severe lack of education on all fronts - it can be very, very hard to negotiate through this culture and identify solutions. There are multitudes of dedicated and passionate, hard-working people - Africans and otherwise - who have dedicating their careers and lives to addressing these societal issues. I can assure you, lots of us are trying, and I should probably just seek to find comfort in that alone. I think I’ll stick with wise words from my grandmother (I’m sure you’ve heard them as well). If at first you don’t succeed … try, try, try again.

Up until now, most of my blog entries have been written through the eyes of someone wearing rose colored glasses. I tend to focus on the bright side when painting the picture for you (and for me). And it’s that other side of the coin that I wanted to document in this reflection. So even though my six months have been absolutely incredible learning experiences, they have been equally full of sadness, loneliness, frustration and anger … just like everyday life, surprise! Thankfully, I had no false expectations that this would be more fun or easier than going through the day to day at home. I knew that lots of the time it would be even harder.


So What Does it all Mean?
Six months into the journey, it’s still a bit hard for me to compare the two places accurately. The challenges in Tanzania are mainly based on trying to accomplish work in a foreign culture and make some sort of attempts at contributing to the community, whereas in India, I was free to make my own schedule and visit the places which were of interest to me with no regard for any other concerns. I think it would be unfair to juxtapose these two places against one another without noting the different contexts from which I have seen them. Perhaps in June, after I take off on another long traveling holiday to new and exciting places. I’ll get back to you on that one!

So instead of comparing experiences between places, I would rather just look back on the experience to date as a whole. It’s been so incredibly unique that I wonder what took me so long to decide to take the leap. After all, I had planned to travel upon completion of my graduate school program, but that was over two years ago. It’s true that I grew completely attached to the friends and community I have in Seattle and Bainbridge, not to mention my lifelong friends and family spread across the country that I won’t get to visit with for a long while. Looking back now I can also admit to being scared to get on that plane all alone. But from here, that feeling seems so distant a memory it’s hard to know what I was so worried about. It is so easy to look back from this side of the decision and know deep down that it was, and it is still, so right.

On that note, I’d like to mention a few of the more unique connections/experiences that have resulted from the travels that would have otherwise not come to fruition by staying at home. If nothing else, it helps me to avert attention from the equally unique connections/experiences that would be taking place if I had stayed home, chief among them, meeting a slew of newborn babies who’ve entered the world recently, as well as a number of weddings of very close friends that I have to miss.

New friends!
With the exception of Adam and Dev, everyone I’ve spent time with in the last six months has been someone I had never previously met, and lots of these new friends hail from all over the globe: Australia, Holland, England (including Jane Goodall!), Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, Malaysia, India and Tanzania. Of course there are many Americans I’ve gotten to know as well, some of which have been friends-of-friends from back in the states. But there’s also one person I’ve met who now occupies a very special place in my heart (you know who you are) and our paths were not likely to have crossed outside of Tanzania.

To Asia With Love
The most out-of-left-field, didn’t-see-it-coming experience has been the opportunity to publish some of these very blog entries in a travel book about Northern India! In late February, I received an email via this blog site with the subject: Looking for writers for a book on India Even before opening the message I was absolutely thrilled, but at the same time nervous. The thought of a publisher reading my off-the-cuff and completely unedited blog content (even though I always use perfectly cromulent words) was akin to the feeling of having someone walk into the bathroom when you’re sitting on the can. I should know. It’s happened twice since moving to Tanzania (you also know who you are).

The message was from a journalist in New Delhi who came across my blog somehow - in her words, “it was magic” - and asked to reprint the story about my Tiger Safari as well as the funny piece I wrote about traffic in India, called “Horn Please.” So I took the opportunity to clean up the writing, and afterwards she invited me to write the epilogue to the book, which we’re just finishing up this week. It’s been a very fun project to work on and I’m looking forward to opportunities that come in the future.

That said, I’ve also had the rude awakening in regards to travel writing as far as compensation goes. Not that I’m complaining, I had so much fun writing the piece for the epilogue that the experience alone was worth the time and effort. But let’s just say I’m not making any plans to quit my day job. On the other hand, my day job is a volunteer position in which I’m actually paying to work, so I’m just coming at this from the wrong angle altogether (cut to image of a cartoon David with thought bubble … Maybe I should’ve signed up for that personal finance 101 class back in college).

I had hoped to share epilogue in the place of this blog, but I need to wait for the book to be published first. Instead, I'll just let you know that has to do with a mosaic of images from India, which is what inspired me to create the two photo collages attached to this blog. The second one will make sense if you actually read all the way to the bottom of this long-winded thing.

Anyway, the book is going to be put out by an independent publisher based in San Francisco, Things Asian Press as part of its new series of travel books, To Asia With Love. The first in the series was about SE Asia, this second book is about North India, with plans for East, South and West India books to follow, to which I’m also hoping to contribute. It kind of feels like I’ve been signed to a major label and all of you reading this can say you were along for the ride when I was just an indie artist. Except for that whole paycheck thing … I’ll have to work on that. My first idea for a subsequent book is to re-tell my four-days playing the roll of “cousin Dinesh,” to Dev and Prashant Patel as we eat our way through the food-filled neighborhoods of Mumbai and I learn about all things boiled, fried, pickled and spiced. With chutney.


The Colts Won the Superbowl
Clearly, this event is inextricably linked to my journey. For the colts to require 23 years in Indianapolis before winning a superbowl only to reach the seemingly unattainable goal within a few months of my departure …it’s just too ironic to be coincidence and is therefore a clear sign from the football gods aimed to test my faith in their existence. However, despite this sign I’m not prepared to make any correlative statements about the fate(s) of the Indiana Hoosiers or Pacers. Apparently the basketball gods are still pissed at something we Hoosiers have done to spite them.


The End (of part one)
So that’s about everything I wanted to get on paper, or online, about the past six months. It only took about five pages (I still need to work on brevity with the written word). I’m remain excited for the next seven months as well, though I’m mostly focused on the coming two. We have some exciting projects going on in May that I hope will actually come to fruition before I leave Dar. Then in June I’m going to be joined by friends from the USA to travel all around Tanzania (and parts of Uganda) visiting a number of national parks famous worldwide for abundant wildlife and unique geographies. Stay tuned.



Back to the Beginning
I’ve been keeping track of most of my days in a large format, leather bound moleskin notebook (it’s only large for moleskin, otherwise it’s nice and portable) which is a weekly calendar/planner that began July 1, 2006 and lasts for 18 months through December 31, 2007. It also includes a world map, passport and travel info, world time zones, international dialing codes, distances (km) between major global cities, temperature conversions, measure and conversions (length, area, capacity, volume, temp, weight and speed), international shirt and shoe sizes, timetables, a ruler, and of course, the famous back pocket, which any moleskin lover most definitely appreciates. It’s unquestionably my favorite calendar/planner of all time.

Despite the fact that my last six months of travel have been on the west side of the Pacific Ocean, I actually consider the start of this huge safari as July, 2006, nearly a year ago, when I left Washington (and at times, the USA) with a group of friends to take a six-week journey by ferry along the British Columbia Coast and up to Southeast Alaska.

Though I would return home to live and work on Bainbridge Island afterward, it was only for seven-weeks before I boarded a plain to Asia, during which most of my thoughts (only outside of work hours, I promise!) were entirely focused on preparing for the trip ahead.

Backtracking just a little … by April of last year (2006), I knew that I was going to be volunteering with Roots & Shoots in Tanzania (at the time, Uganda was only a consideration) but the pre-East Africa leg was wide open. I wanted to head west from Seattle and return to Asia, but to where exactly … Japan? China? India? Two out of three? I finally made up my mind in July, just days before leaving for Alaska, when I discovered that NOLS was offering an alumni course to go trekking the Indian Himalaya from late October to early November 2006. The deal was sealed and I made the reservation the day before leaving town on the ferry.

So it’s actually last summer’s journey that I consider to be the very, very beginning of the story and it was one of the most fun trips I’ve ever taken in my life. First of all, I left Washington with four great friends, ranging from one who I’ve known since kindergarten as well as three more from IU. Ironically, they didn’t really know one another (except for a brother/sister combo) so I was the common link.


The trip was unique on so many levels. For one, the group of friends was fantastic. Two, the scenery was splendid (does it get better than the Pacific Northwest in july and august? Blue skies, blue waters, blue ice, lush rainforests, steep fjords, mountains, whales, eagles, glaciers, ravens, seals, salmon, sea lions, orcas and bears? … I don’t think so. Not to mention, in the context of scenery, the amazing artwork, architecture and totems of the Native American/First Nations cultures of the Northwest!) The ferry was the most fun mode of transport I’ve ever used (mainly because of the amount of people we met over many days on the water), the book I read was great (The Brothers K, by David James Duncan) and the scenery was splendid. Yes, I said scenery twice. It was that good!

All in all, the trip was a series of seven distinct camping trips, each one 3-5 days in duration, in Washington, British Columbia and Alaska: 1. Quinalt Rainforest/Enchanted Valley of Olympic National Park, WA; 2. Alaska State Ferry from Bellingham, WA along BC Canada Coast to Skagway, AK; 3. Wrangell, AK and Stikine River; Chilkoot Pass Trail from Skagway AK, USA to Lake Bennett, BC, Canada; 4. Mendenhall Glacier, Juneau, Mt. Roberts and Tracy Arm (Juneau) AK; 5. Sea kayaking for three days in Berner’s Bay north of Juneau, AK, where the photo on this blog’s homepage was taken; 6. Admiralty Island, AK; 7. West Coast Trail from Port Renfrew to Sooke, Vancouver Island, BC, Canada (this one with two other friends).

I didn’t take a single photograph on that trip, mainly because I didn’t own a camera at the time. Fortunately other’s did. Here’s one album - and here’s another one from the West Coast Trail that’s on my usual photo site. And when I returned home from Alaska, one of my first item’s of business was to start this blog. I didn’t publish any text, but my first action was to make this map of my trip to Alaska. Looking at it now, I see that it’s a bit muddled with crisscrossing route lines between the way points, but you can actually check the box to de-select them and clear up the view. As always, zoom in on specific locations for more detail.

In addition to my consideration of BC/Alaska as the beginning of this long adventure, it’s also fitting because of the unique 18 month span of my calendar, virtually starting with my trip to Alaska and ending with my final scheduled day of volunteering with JGI in East Africa. I also have a feeling that years from now, when I look at the black leather binding of this planner as it rests on my bookshelf (wherever that may be!?), it’s going to bring forth a wellspring of emotion like no other. And those first months were just as precious as everything that’s followed.

Perhaps more relevant to the topic at hand, it was also during that trip that I received an email from JGI outlining my itinerary for 2007: starting in Dar es Salaam, TZ to volunteer for four-and-a-half months, followed by a month of travel (coming in June) before moving to Entebbe Uganda for the duration of the year. So even as I sit here in my (well, I guess it’s Jane’s) house in Dar es Salaam, my mind still manages to find a way back to the internet café in Ketchikan, Alaska when I first read about the news of my trip.

Habari Za Safari?
Nzuri Sana!




How many of you have actually read this far? Yikes!

Now, how many of you got the reference to “cromulent words” without following the link? I’m guessing dave in mexico and rubes in new york. Anyone else?

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Photos

the beginning
(another mosaic)

Comments

[Cousin Jacqui]

Thanks!
David, we're so proud of you! (Grandma Amy beamed when telling me what you were up to.) Although the negatives seem overwhelming at times, remember that everything you do spreads ripples, not only where you are locally, but also back here at home. Your words alone inspire many, many others to action. Be safe and keep passing on the goodness!