Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
...sike!
Yeah, yeah, I know I said I'd update you all about what the hell I did in Malawi after March or so, but... head trauma (LOOPHOLE BITCHES!). That being said I do have a lot of free time nowadays so eventually I'll fill in the gaps.
Love,
Seth
Love,
Seth
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Coming Soon...
More Super Sink bus failing.
I've got one more week here working at UNC Project, then I'm off to Tanzania to meet my families (both American and Tanzanian), visit Mugumu again, and then off to Zanzibar, and finally back to Malawi for a week and a half before finally coming home at the end of July. Big ol' blog post coming soon on what's been up the past couple of months since I haven't updated in a loooong time.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Spirit Animal, Ping Pong, Mad Shiskebabs
Had a ballin' Saturday. Started off with a hike up Nkoma mountain. Took us a while to figure out where a trail starts on the mountain, but the last place we got directions from had a dog of this caliber:
He led the way through the maize maze and did the entire 2 hour hike with us.
There was one point where we had to climb up a big steep rock and we all thought there was no way he could make it. He backed up a couple paces and owned it in one bound.
Here's where we stopped. Beautiful views:
That's Z, an ENT surgeon who has been visiting for a week with Carol Shores and a surgery resident named Jessica. Their good company has also brought good weather. Seems like rainy season decided to pause just for them.
Returning back to the guest house, I put the finishing touches on the ping pong table I've been building:
As requested, here's a photo of me with the table, in the Sauconys, eating a cookie. Thanks pops:
We then prepared and barbecued up a ton of shiskebabs:
It was a good day.
He led the way through the maize maze and did the entire 2 hour hike with us.
There was one point where we had to climb up a big steep rock and we all thought there was no way he could make it. He backed up a couple paces and owned it in one bound.
Here's where we stopped. Beautiful views:
That's Z, an ENT surgeon who has been visiting for a week with Carol Shores and a surgery resident named Jessica. Their good company has also brought good weather. Seems like rainy season decided to pause just for them.
Returning back to the guest house, I put the finishing touches on the ping pong table I've been building:
As requested, here's a photo of me with the table, in the Sauconys, eating a cookie. Thanks pops:
We then prepared and barbecued up a ton of shiskebabs:
It was a good day.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Homecoming & Kilimanjaro
The day after Christmas, Kemi and I took a bus to Bunda, where most of his mother’s side of the family resides. We had stopped by here on our way back from Dar es Salaam in 2006, when I had tried (and failed) to get a teaching license from the Ministry of Education. I had almost completely forgotten about this part of my 2006 trip, I guess because we only spent a day and half there and I didn’t write in my journal about it, but it all came flooding back as soon as I arrived at aunt Ester’s house and we settled down for a meal I had been looking forward to all day.
Kemi informed me that night that he planned on visiting his mother’s grave the next day. I asked him if it would be okay if I joined him and he agreed. We spent the early afternoon the next day visiting another aunt’s house and her family, and when we returned to Ester’s Kemi got the terrible news that his relatives did not know exactly where in the graveyard his mother was buried. I suggested that he still try and find it, and that even if he couldn’t find the exact plot he would still be near her and be able to sit and speak to her. We set off shortly thereafter, walking to the outskirts of the town, then slowly ascending a hill into rolling farmland.
The graveyard was neither marked nor enclosed, and consisted of about 30 graves, some with concrete slabs and crosses, but most modest mounds of earth with long dead flowers and arranged stones signifying their presence. Kemi’s mother was buried in one of these modest graves and sadly we were unable to find it. I left him alone for a bit to be with his thoughts and noticed that some of the farmland was creeping into the graveyard, with at least one grave converted into tilled ground. Returning home from our high vantage point we could see a large swath of Lake Victoria in the distance, with a radiant sunset providing a beautiful ending to a relatively bitter trip.
The next day was homecoming, something I had been looking forward to for almost 4 years. Walking to the Emanuel’s house from the bus station, Mugumu looked pretty similar to how I had left it:
Upon entering the house, however, things were very different. The house was far more barren than when I had last lived there. The goats, generator, bicycles, motorcycles, television, VCR, and much cooking equipment were gone. The largest bedroom in the house, which I had been given when I lived there, now housed two beds where four to five of the family members slept. The wardrobe where I had stored my clothing and books was now moved into the central area where it housed cooking equipment. The family was indeed worse off financially then when I lived with them in 2006, but I realized that the biggest factors for such perception of discrepancy were the ends the family had gone to 4 years ago in making sure I lived comfortably, and the general state of ignorance my 18 year old self was in, entranced by the incredible shift my life had taken.
While it seems trivial, something that affected me was the fact that their neighbors, who owned the land in the front yard of their house, had taken it back and made them grow a barrier of shrubs. This meant that to leave the house to get to town we had to go through the back yard. I had considered the road leading from the front yard to have been “my block”, only using the road leading from the backyard when I headed towards the library, or, later, to Kisangura Secondary (when I was given permission to teach there). We were now the only house on the block without access to the “front yard road”, and walking along the “back yard road” I would rarely be able to see and greet any of the neighbors, and couldn’t use any of the shortcuts I had learned to get to various points in town.
But forget all that. This was all trumped by the immense joy that was being back with my African family. And there they are:
Standing outside the back door to the house, from left to right, Kemi, Kadada, Doto, Emanuel (back row), Jenny, Jackie (front row). Kulwa, Doto’s twin, was staying with relatives in Mwanza for his school break, and I was sad to miss him (I’ll see him when I return in July). There was a new addition to the family, Emanuel’s second granddaughter, Ester:
Here are all the chilluns together (Doto, Jackie, Jenny, Ester):
There was another new face, Twaribu, Emanuel’s son with another woman (didn’t get the full story, but Kemi told me that while his mother was angry, she still stuck by Emanuel’s side):
Homeboy was hilarious. He’s an aspiring artist and rap/R&B singer, with one of the best musical monikers I’ve ever heard: Cathode Hood aka Q Lean Star. When we meet again, my Western friends, I’ll play you a video I took of him singing his sure to be hit, “If You Want Me Shorty, I Need To Know.”
My main crew during my week in Mugumu consisted of Kemi, Twaribu, and my friend Emanuel. Here’s a pic of me and Emanuel at his house with his 1984 jeep:
I had a hell of a time tooling around in the backwoods around Mugumu with this thing. The gears are really shot, you have the pump the brakes ridiculously hard to slow down, and you can’t turn the steering wheel until you get above about 10 mph, making backing up in tight spaces quite an adventure. We drove it out to a newly constructed dam sculpted out of the natural landscape about 15 km out of Mugumu, and to Enyamai Primary School, the English-Medium boarding school I taught at, which has since moved about 10 km out of Mugumu.
I also got to hang out with my good friend Fredrich, a local artist I befriended and would practice drawing with:
In 2006 he made me a stamp of approval: a stamp that says “Seth Congdon Approves”. This time around I got him to make me a stamp of disapproval: a stamp that says “DERP”. For instance, Super Sink Bus Services gets the DERP stamp (see previous entry):
It took us a couple of days to procure some bicycles but we finally made it out to Kisangura Secondary School. The students were on break so I had free reign to check out my old place of employment.
The corrupt headmaster during my brief tenure there had thankfully been transferred. His replacement seems like a stand up fella. Here the two of us are:
There were a number of new structures, and the school had expanded quite a bit, with three or four sections now for each form (grade). A dormitory for orphaned girls had been built and was being utilized, and another was being constructed. The school now had a meeting hall, which also housed a kitchen. I asked if the students were now getting food (when I taught there all they got was a cup of tea, while the teachers got a cup of tea and two pieces of chapati), and the headmaster smiled and said no.
I was very excited to check out the recently built science laboratory.
Most government schools don't have the funds to build and stock a laboratory, and thus the majority of Tanzania's students automatically fail the practical portion of the terminal exams (which determine if students get funding to go for further education). While Kisangura now had one itself, there turned out to not be a Biology or Chemistry teacher at the school, so the lab was not in use anyway. I thought to myself, if only these were the conditions the school was in when I arrived to teach four years ago. A headmaster who actually would allow me to teach there, science positions open, and a laboratory waiting to be piloted. A great opportunity exists here if anyone out there is interested.
The lab had a good amount of textbooks (though most were from the '80s and early '90s):
A decent selection of chemicals, glassware, and other equipment:
A hand crank centrifuge!!
...and even some microscopes:
After we had rounded the campus we retired to the headmaster's office, where he took a small strip of paper and wrote a note for me: "check with .... project, I think they are misusing your funds". I asked if he could explain further, but he said he could not. I wasn't able to stay long enough in Mugumu to really get any facts, just speculation and hearsay, but it seems that to a much, much smaller degree than before, some funds are still being pocketed. It disappointed me but I can't say I was very surprised.
Back in town a local duka la dawa (medicine shop) was offering some interesting products:
"Sure being a virgin is lame, but with Xtreme Virginity Herbal Soap you can turn that '16 Candles' virginity into 'Teeth' virginity! (warning: may not actually cause vagina dentata)"
And likethat (finger snap) my time in Mugumu was up. I'll be returning for a week with my ma and Will in early July, though.
Kemi and I embarked on our fateful bus ride to Arusha (see previous entry) and we said goodbye for a week the next day when I hopped off our bus at Moshi, while he continued on back to Dar es Salaam, where I would be joining him after I got down from climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro.
I met up with my four roommates who had all been doing some traveling of their own and we set off on what was probably the hardest physical (and for some portions mental) task I've ever done. My apologies, but sitting here more than a month and a half after I got down, without any journal entries to refer back to, my description is gonna be somewhat skeletal (a combination of work becoming more busy and a horrible show called Lost sinking its teeth into me has led to a prolonged procrastination from finishing this entry). My photos start when we got to the campground on the second day:
To fill in the gap: the first day was about an 8 hour climb up a pretty steep path that cut through rain forest in a light rain, not too bad. We left the rain forest at the beginning of the second day and took a less vertical route through moorland with some brief rock scrambling.
The only views we got of Mt. Meru during our climb was at the second campground, but the sky cleared just in time for us to witness a gorgeous sunset light it up:
Day 3 we moved out of moorland into alpine desert, and it started to snow. We made our way to a large volcanic rock formation called the Lava Tower:
For almost the entire hike that day it was either hailing, snowing, or raining. Finally at the end of the day's hike the rain let up, and our harsh surroundings gave way to a valley filled with miniature water falls and these tropical looking plants:
At the bottom of the valley was Barranco camp. Here's a picture of Frede, our fearless leader, outside our food tent there:
The sky that night was very clear and you could see the lights of Moshi in one direction and the top of the mountain in the other:
It turned out we were climbing the mountain at the same time as a host of celebrities including Jessica Biel, Santigold, Lupe Fiasco and Emile Hirsch. They were filming a documentary for MTV trying to promote clean drinking water, check it out: www.summitonthesummit.com. They're looking all shiny and airbrushed in an obviously fake pic of them at the peak. They and their crew numbered 45 and they had 240 porters. We heard from one of the people on their crew that the porters had to run up and down the mountain everyday to get them random items that they requested.
We discovered this all on the fourth day when we had to climb up the side of a big cliff called the Barranco wall, and there was a huge traffic jam cause of all their porters and them. It should have taken us like an hour to scale the wall but it took us almost 2. To commemorate the ordeal we made up a song: "240 porters on the wall, 240 porters, one gets sent down to get an espresso machine/TiVO/ manicure set etc. etc., 239 porters on the wall..."
After reaching the top of the wall it was still a long hike to base camp. Upon arrival we found ourselves in a depressing place. Out of all the camp sites, it was by far the most in disrepair:
Save for some mosses and lichens, nothing grew here. We nicknamed the terrain "alpine wasteland". The soldiers unfortunate enough to have to work at the ranger station there sat around chain smoking and getting wasted on Konyagi sachets all day. I think the thing that most impacted me, though, was the ever present layer of mist, which thinned and thickened throughout the day, but mostly thickened:
After we got down from the peak, in an incredibly exhausted state, the mist was so thick we couldn't find our tents. Before deep despair set in we were able to find them, though. When the mist thinned and I could actually see my surroundings it reminded me very much of the surface of Mars:
The ascent to the peak began at 12 midnight (we had an early dinner and got to sleep around 7 PM). When I say this climb was probably the hardest physical task I've ever done, this ascent accounts for 95% of that statement. It was an incredibly and relentlessly steep, freezing cold march for almost six hours straight. As we got near to the end of it, and it looked like some of us were rapidly losing the energy and motivation to continue the porters and guides around us burst out into rounds of spirited chants that I'm sure saved a few of us. I seemed to be an exception in our group, as I had not started to feel any effects of altitude sickness, and I seemed to be the only one with a powerful thirst who drank lots of water and took lots of pee breaks. We finally reached the top of the incredibly steep portion of the ascent, Stella Point, just as the sun was first starting to rise:
From Stella Point it was just about a 20 minute stroll along an easy incline to the peak, and I hopped around, full of energy somehow, taking tons of photos (I'll get them up on facebook soon enough).
Thankfully it was very crowded at the top, so no one was tempted to try this
Here's Emilia, Charles & I at the peak:
On the way back from the peak the sun had fully risen, and the views were breathtaking:
The descent was just as steep as the ascent, and you had to act like you were skiing as you skidded down to avoid taking a nasty tumble:
Once we had gotten past Stella Point, and the climbing became much easier, I foolishly stopped drinking water frequently, and on the way down I finally started to get a pounding headache. Three bowls from a huge pot of delicious stew back at base camp saved me.
That's all folks!
Kemi informed me that night that he planned on visiting his mother’s grave the next day. I asked him if it would be okay if I joined him and he agreed. We spent the early afternoon the next day visiting another aunt’s house and her family, and when we returned to Ester’s Kemi got the terrible news that his relatives did not know exactly where in the graveyard his mother was buried. I suggested that he still try and find it, and that even if he couldn’t find the exact plot he would still be near her and be able to sit and speak to her. We set off shortly thereafter, walking to the outskirts of the town, then slowly ascending a hill into rolling farmland.
The graveyard was neither marked nor enclosed, and consisted of about 30 graves, some with concrete slabs and crosses, but most modest mounds of earth with long dead flowers and arranged stones signifying their presence. Kemi’s mother was buried in one of these modest graves and sadly we were unable to find it. I left him alone for a bit to be with his thoughts and noticed that some of the farmland was creeping into the graveyard, with at least one grave converted into tilled ground. Returning home from our high vantage point we could see a large swath of Lake Victoria in the distance, with a radiant sunset providing a beautiful ending to a relatively bitter trip.
The next day was homecoming, something I had been looking forward to for almost 4 years. Walking to the Emanuel’s house from the bus station, Mugumu looked pretty similar to how I had left it:
Upon entering the house, however, things were very different. The house was far more barren than when I had last lived there. The goats, generator, bicycles, motorcycles, television, VCR, and much cooking equipment were gone. The largest bedroom in the house, which I had been given when I lived there, now housed two beds where four to five of the family members slept. The wardrobe where I had stored my clothing and books was now moved into the central area where it housed cooking equipment. The family was indeed worse off financially then when I lived with them in 2006, but I realized that the biggest factors for such perception of discrepancy were the ends the family had gone to 4 years ago in making sure I lived comfortably, and the general state of ignorance my 18 year old self was in, entranced by the incredible shift my life had taken.
While it seems trivial, something that affected me was the fact that their neighbors, who owned the land in the front yard of their house, had taken it back and made them grow a barrier of shrubs. This meant that to leave the house to get to town we had to go through the back yard. I had considered the road leading from the front yard to have been “my block”, only using the road leading from the backyard when I headed towards the library, or, later, to Kisangura Secondary (when I was given permission to teach there). We were now the only house on the block without access to the “front yard road”, and walking along the “back yard road” I would rarely be able to see and greet any of the neighbors, and couldn’t use any of the shortcuts I had learned to get to various points in town.
But forget all that. This was all trumped by the immense joy that was being back with my African family. And there they are:
Standing outside the back door to the house, from left to right, Kemi, Kadada, Doto, Emanuel (back row), Jenny, Jackie (front row). Kulwa, Doto’s twin, was staying with relatives in Mwanza for his school break, and I was sad to miss him (I’ll see him when I return in July). There was a new addition to the family, Emanuel’s second granddaughter, Ester:
Here are all the chilluns together (Doto, Jackie, Jenny, Ester):
There was another new face, Twaribu, Emanuel’s son with another woman (didn’t get the full story, but Kemi told me that while his mother was angry, she still stuck by Emanuel’s side):
Homeboy was hilarious. He’s an aspiring artist and rap/R&B singer, with one of the best musical monikers I’ve ever heard: Cathode Hood aka Q Lean Star. When we meet again, my Western friends, I’ll play you a video I took of him singing his sure to be hit, “If You Want Me Shorty, I Need To Know.”
My main crew during my week in Mugumu consisted of Kemi, Twaribu, and my friend Emanuel. Here’s a pic of me and Emanuel at his house with his 1984 jeep:
I had a hell of a time tooling around in the backwoods around Mugumu with this thing. The gears are really shot, you have the pump the brakes ridiculously hard to slow down, and you can’t turn the steering wheel until you get above about 10 mph, making backing up in tight spaces quite an adventure. We drove it out to a newly constructed dam sculpted out of the natural landscape about 15 km out of Mugumu, and to Enyamai Primary School, the English-Medium boarding school I taught at, which has since moved about 10 km out of Mugumu.
I also got to hang out with my good friend Fredrich, a local artist I befriended and would practice drawing with:
In 2006 he made me a stamp of approval: a stamp that says “Seth Congdon Approves”. This time around I got him to make me a stamp of disapproval: a stamp that says “DERP”. For instance, Super Sink Bus Services gets the DERP stamp (see previous entry):
It took us a couple of days to procure some bicycles but we finally made it out to Kisangura Secondary School. The students were on break so I had free reign to check out my old place of employment.
The corrupt headmaster during my brief tenure there had thankfully been transferred. His replacement seems like a stand up fella. Here the two of us are:
There were a number of new structures, and the school had expanded quite a bit, with three or four sections now for each form (grade). A dormitory for orphaned girls had been built and was being utilized, and another was being constructed. The school now had a meeting hall, which also housed a kitchen. I asked if the students were now getting food (when I taught there all they got was a cup of tea, while the teachers got a cup of tea and two pieces of chapati), and the headmaster smiled and said no.
I was very excited to check out the recently built science laboratory.
Most government schools don't have the funds to build and stock a laboratory, and thus the majority of Tanzania's students automatically fail the practical portion of the terminal exams (which determine if students get funding to go for further education). While Kisangura now had one itself, there turned out to not be a Biology or Chemistry teacher at the school, so the lab was not in use anyway. I thought to myself, if only these were the conditions the school was in when I arrived to teach four years ago. A headmaster who actually would allow me to teach there, science positions open, and a laboratory waiting to be piloted. A great opportunity exists here if anyone out there is interested.
The lab had a good amount of textbooks (though most were from the '80s and early '90s):
A decent selection of chemicals, glassware, and other equipment:
A hand crank centrifuge!!
...and even some microscopes:
After we had rounded the campus we retired to the headmaster's office, where he took a small strip of paper and wrote a note for me: "check with .... project, I think they are misusing your funds". I asked if he could explain further, but he said he could not. I wasn't able to stay long enough in Mugumu to really get any facts, just speculation and hearsay, but it seems that to a much, much smaller degree than before, some funds are still being pocketed. It disappointed me but I can't say I was very surprised.
Back in town a local duka la dawa (medicine shop) was offering some interesting products:
"Sure being a virgin is lame, but with Xtreme Virginity Herbal Soap you can turn that '16 Candles' virginity into 'Teeth' virginity! (warning: may not actually cause vagina dentata)"
And likethat (finger snap)
Kemi and I embarked on our fateful bus ride to Arusha (see previous entry) and we said goodbye for a week the next day when I hopped off our bus at Moshi, while he continued on back to Dar es Salaam, where I would be joining him after I got down from climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro.
I met up with my four roommates who had all been doing some traveling of their own and we set off on what was probably the hardest physical (and for some portions mental) task I've ever done. My apologies, but sitting here more than a month and a half after I got down, without any journal entries to refer back to, my description is gonna be somewhat skeletal (a combination of work becoming more busy and a horrible show called Lost sinking its teeth into me has led to a prolonged procrastination from finishing this entry). My photos start when we got to the campground on the second day:
To fill in the gap: the first day was about an 8 hour climb up a pretty steep path that cut through rain forest in a light rain, not too bad. We left the rain forest at the beginning of the second day and took a less vertical route through moorland with some brief rock scrambling.The only views we got of Mt. Meru during our climb was at the second campground, but the sky cleared just in time for us to witness a gorgeous sunset light it up:
Day 3 we moved out of moorland into alpine desert, and it started to snow. We made our way to a large volcanic rock formation called the Lava Tower:
For almost the entire hike that day it was either hailing, snowing, or raining. Finally at the end of the day's hike the rain let up, and our harsh surroundings gave way to a valley filled with miniature water falls and these tropical looking plants:
At the bottom of the valley was Barranco camp. Here's a picture of Frede, our fearless leader, outside our food tent there:
The sky that night was very clear and you could see the lights of Moshi in one direction and the top of the mountain in the other:
It turned out we were climbing the mountain at the same time as a host of celebrities including Jessica Biel, Santigold, Lupe Fiasco and Emile Hirsch. They were filming a documentary for MTV trying to promote clean drinking water, check it out: www.summitonthesummit.com. They're looking all shiny and airbrushed in an obviously fake pic of them at the peak. They and their crew numbered 45 and they had 240 porters. We heard from one of the people on their crew that the porters had to run up and down the mountain everyday to get them random items that they requested.
We discovered this all on the fourth day when we had to climb up the side of a big cliff called the Barranco wall, and there was a huge traffic jam cause of all their porters and them. It should have taken us like an hour to scale the wall but it took us almost 2. To commemorate the ordeal we made up a song: "240 porters on the wall, 240 porters, one gets sent down to get an espresso machine/TiVO/ manicure set etc. etc., 239 porters on the wall..."
After reaching the top of the wall it was still a long hike to base camp. Upon arrival we found ourselves in a depressing place. Out of all the camp sites, it was by far the most in disrepair:
Save for some mosses and lichens, nothing grew here. We nicknamed the terrain "alpine wasteland". The soldiers unfortunate enough to have to work at the ranger station there sat around chain smoking and getting wasted on Konyagi sachets all day. I think the thing that most impacted me, though, was the ever present layer of mist, which thinned and thickened throughout the day, but mostly thickened:
After we got down from the peak, in an incredibly exhausted state, the mist was so thick we couldn't find our tents. Before deep despair set in we were able to find them, though. When the mist thinned and I could actually see my surroundings it reminded me very much of the surface of Mars:
The ascent to the peak began at 12 midnight (we had an early dinner and got to sleep around 7 PM). When I say this climb was probably the hardest physical task I've ever done, this ascent accounts for 95% of that statement. It was an incredibly and relentlessly steep, freezing cold march for almost six hours straight. As we got near to the end of it, and it looked like some of us were rapidly losing the energy and motivation to continue the porters and guides around us burst out into rounds of spirited chants that I'm sure saved a few of us. I seemed to be an exception in our group, as I had not started to feel any effects of altitude sickness, and I seemed to be the only one with a powerful thirst who drank lots of water and took lots of pee breaks. We finally reached the top of the incredibly steep portion of the ascent, Stella Point, just as the sun was first starting to rise:
From Stella Point it was just about a 20 minute stroll along an easy incline to the peak, and I hopped around, full of energy somehow, taking tons of photos (I'll get them up on facebook soon enough).
Thankfully it was very crowded at the top, so no one was tempted to try this
Here's Emilia, Charles & I at the peak:
On the way back from the peak the sun had fully risen, and the views were breathtaking:
The descent was just as steep as the ascent, and you had to act like you were skiing as you skidded down to avoid taking a nasty tumble:
Once we had gotten past Stella Point, and the climbing became much easier, I foolishly stopped drinking water frequently, and on the way down I finally started to get a pounding headache. Three bowls from a huge pot of delicious stew back at base camp saved me.
That's all folks!
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Bus Mishaps, Slummin' Christmas, Sorcery
I had a great vacation, but to keep the costs down I traveled everywhere by bus. I ended up spending a little over a fifth of the vacation, about 120 hrs, on buses. Two of my numerous bus rides are worth relating.
For some reason the bus from Mugumu to Arusha didn’t come to Mugumu, so to catch it Kemi (my brother from the family and travel companion for most of the vacation) and I had to hop on the back of a packed lorry for an hour and a half to Nata. At least on the lorry we had seats. At Nata we found the bus so full we could barely squeeze into the packed aisle.
Shortly after entering the Serengeti the bus screeched to a halt. For some reason there was a rushing river where the road ahead was supposed to be. We were told it would take maybe 3 hours for the flooding water to die down. About 45 mins later a Safari Jeep came along and nonchalantly headed right into the river, submerging in the water almost halfway up it’s windows, and popped out on the other side with what looked like relative ease. The bus driver and his assistant were convinced, and announced we would be following suit. With a bus as crowded as this one, if we tipped over almost everyone would drown or be crushed in the mad rush to escape. Me and Kemi were pretty close to the door at the front so I told myself we had a good chance of making it, even though we probably didn’t. The bus pulled through just fine, though, and I thus discerned before I started my Kili climb that my climbing backpack was indeed waterproof.
As we were exiting the Serengeti the bus had to pass through a gate, and had at least it’s width and a half worth of room to do so. For some reason this wasn’t enough and the driver plowed right into a side of the gate, shattering three windows and popping a tire.
We arrived in Arusha that night without any further problems and while waiting to get our luggage from under the bus the worst pickpocket I’ve ever seen tried to fleece me. With a small shove and a “toka mwizi!” he scrammed.
What was to be my final bus ride from Dar es Salaam to Lilongwe ended up involving 7 different vehicles and taking 42 hours. We left Dar at 6 AM and arrived at the border around 2 AM the next morning, where we all caught a little shuteye until 6 AM when the border would open. Some of my fellow passengers had kindly informed the four wazungu (myself and three chicks from UC Santa Cruz I met on the bus) that we spend most of the day going through customs at the border, because so many people traveled to Dar to pick up goods that aren’t available in Malawi. I could believe it seeing how packed the bus was with luggage. We four vanilla faces decided we’d leave the bus and cross the border ourselves and find further transport once crossing into Malawi.
We breezed through immigration and customs, none of our bags were so much as glanced at. We quickly found a taxi that would take us to Karonga for a great price (less than 3 bucks each for an hour taxi ride). There we also easily got on a nice sized minibus with plenty of room, which would take me to Mzuzu, dropping the girls off on the way near Livingstonia. The girls must have been good luck because as soon as they hopped off the bus problems began to arise. The minibus gave out and I had to get on a much smaller one w/o any seat for me for the final 2 hours to Mzuzu.
There I was ushered to a bus that would take me the rest of the way to Lilongwe. I should have known better than to get on a bus called “Super Sink,” for that’s what my expectations of it did as soon as we got going. The bus shuddered and hobbled up hills. About 200 km from Lilongwe the gear system got jammed and it took about an hour to get it working again. With the bus’s metallic guts hanging out (the bus driver and his assistant didn’t want to maneuver the gear apparatus back into its compartment under the floor lest it break again) we limped about another 50 km before the bus crapped out for good. Instead of sleeping another night on a bus I decided to flag down another bus and made it to Lilongwe by 1 AM. Whew!
For the first week of my trip I stayed in Maili Moja, a small district about a 40 min minibus ride from Dar es Salaam. Soldiers and their families primarily populate the place because rent is cheap (soldiers are paid roughly $100 per month) and it is close to an army base. Described by its residents as a slum, it’s a small neighborhood of one and two room houses with pit toilets and shacks for bathing shared by about 6 families each. It was a stark change from the relatively luxurious accommodations I enjoy in Lilongwe, but Kemi and I were being put up for free, so I was happy.
We stayed with a cousin of his who’s a soldier, Sam, Sam’s wife Happiness, and their 1 month-old son Josephat.
There had never been a white person staying in Maili Moja on a regular basis as far back as anyone I spoke to could remember, and the first week was a crash course in relearning Kiswahili. During the day Kemi & I would take minibuses into Dar and visit friends, do errands, or go to the beach north of the city.
For Christmas we prepared a duck and pilau (pretty much dirty rice) and Sam bought a bunch of beer. Some of his friends came over and we spent the day drinking and watching a televised variety show by some megachuch.
One of the segments must have been stock footage because it was an American family with haircuts straight out of the 80’s gathered around a grand piano singing Christmas songs.
The young son in the green sweater performed a song with his sister where he busted some serious rhymes about Jesus.
The mother was especially horrifying.
Later in the day I was told we were taking the baby Josephat out for his first trip outside of the housing complex. The destination turned out to be a rowdy outdoor bar, certainly no place for a child. Sam’s a nice guy but not the sharpest tool in the shed.
I found out from Kemi later in the trip that Sam had taken out a loan of about $1,000 from the bank to start up a little general shop in Maili Moja that his wife could operate while taking care of the baby. Some people got wind of how much money he had and got to him before he could invest it. They told Sam that they knew a way that he could triple that money using magic. Sam went along with it. They took him out into the woods and divided the money up into three equal sized piles, and then sandwiched the piles between piles of equally thick paper. They then sprinkled “magic” powder on the paper and wrapped the whole bundle up in banana leaves and buried it underground. The claim was that the powder would transform the paper into genuine bills. They stayed in the forest throughout the night whispering “spells” and at some point Sam must have dozed off because they switched the bundle out for a decoy. When morning came they dug it up and told Sam the magic still needed a couple of hours to work and so he should wait until he got home to open the bundle. Of course they were long gone when he did open it and discovered he’d been swindled.
While Sam was exceedingly credulous it should be noted that magic and sorcery are widely believed to exist to most Tanzanians. Kemi told me a story from when he was in Primary School about how a classmate of his stole a duck from an old man. The senior came to his school and warned that if the culprit didn’t come forward within 5 days he couldn’t be blamed for what happened. No one admitted guilt and 5 days later the children were outside on break and suddenly the sky became very dark and cloudy. Lightning started to flash and a bolt killed two students. No one knew if either of the students was the one who stole the duck but hearing a firsthand account like this makes it hard not to believe that this was a supernatural occurrence. Unless of course it was a false memory, perhaps a story Kemi had heard as a child.
Speaking of wacky shit and time limits, I found out more details about the death of Samuel Rachau, the super evil guy who was the main culprit in stealing vast amounts of funds sent to Kisangura Secondary School (see two entries ago). I had known that he had died in 2007 but I found out that he had gone to the headmaster of Kisangura Primary School (which also receives funds raised by New York Quarterly Meeting) and tried to get him to pocket funds and share them with him. The headmaster refused and Rachau gave his typical threat of using sorcery to harm him if he didn’t comply. Rachau said he had one week, the headmaster replied, “Oh yeah, you have three days!” On the third day, Rachau died.
Spoooooky.
Anyhow, that’s part 1 of my vacation. Tune in soon for stories from my homecoming to Mugumu and the Mt. Kilimanjaro climb (spoiler: we made it to the top)
For some reason the bus from Mugumu to Arusha didn’t come to Mugumu, so to catch it Kemi (my brother from the family and travel companion for most of the vacation) and I had to hop on the back of a packed lorry for an hour and a half to Nata. At least on the lorry we had seats. At Nata we found the bus so full we could barely squeeze into the packed aisle.
Shortly after entering the Serengeti the bus screeched to a halt. For some reason there was a rushing river where the road ahead was supposed to be. We were told it would take maybe 3 hours for the flooding water to die down. About 45 mins later a Safari Jeep came along and nonchalantly headed right into the river, submerging in the water almost halfway up it’s windows, and popped out on the other side with what looked like relative ease. The bus driver and his assistant were convinced, and announced we would be following suit. With a bus as crowded as this one, if we tipped over almost everyone would drown or be crushed in the mad rush to escape. Me and Kemi were pretty close to the door at the front so I told myself we had a good chance of making it, even though we probably didn’t. The bus pulled through just fine, though, and I thus discerned before I started my Kili climb that my climbing backpack was indeed waterproof.
As we were exiting the Serengeti the bus had to pass through a gate, and had at least it’s width and a half worth of room to do so. For some reason this wasn’t enough and the driver plowed right into a side of the gate, shattering three windows and popping a tire.
We arrived in Arusha that night without any further problems and while waiting to get our luggage from under the bus the worst pickpocket I’ve ever seen tried to fleece me. With a small shove and a “toka mwizi!” he scrammed.
What was to be my final bus ride from Dar es Salaam to Lilongwe ended up involving 7 different vehicles and taking 42 hours. We left Dar at 6 AM and arrived at the border around 2 AM the next morning, where we all caught a little shuteye until 6 AM when the border would open. Some of my fellow passengers had kindly informed the four wazungu (myself and three chicks from UC Santa Cruz I met on the bus) that we spend most of the day going through customs at the border, because so many people traveled to Dar to pick up goods that aren’t available in Malawi. I could believe it seeing how packed the bus was with luggage. We four vanilla faces decided we’d leave the bus and cross the border ourselves and find further transport once crossing into Malawi.
We breezed through immigration and customs, none of our bags were so much as glanced at. We quickly found a taxi that would take us to Karonga for a great price (less than 3 bucks each for an hour taxi ride). There we also easily got on a nice sized minibus with plenty of room, which would take me to Mzuzu, dropping the girls off on the way near Livingstonia. The girls must have been good luck because as soon as they hopped off the bus problems began to arise. The minibus gave out and I had to get on a much smaller one w/o any seat for me for the final 2 hours to Mzuzu.
There I was ushered to a bus that would take me the rest of the way to Lilongwe. I should have known better than to get on a bus called “Super Sink,” for that’s what my expectations of it did as soon as we got going. The bus shuddered and hobbled up hills. About 200 km from Lilongwe the gear system got jammed and it took about an hour to get it working again. With the bus’s metallic guts hanging out (the bus driver and his assistant didn’t want to maneuver the gear apparatus back into its compartment under the floor lest it break again) we limped about another 50 km before the bus crapped out for good. Instead of sleeping another night on a bus I decided to flag down another bus and made it to Lilongwe by 1 AM. Whew!
For the first week of my trip I stayed in Maili Moja, a small district about a 40 min minibus ride from Dar es Salaam. Soldiers and their families primarily populate the place because rent is cheap (soldiers are paid roughly $100 per month) and it is close to an army base. Described by its residents as a slum, it’s a small neighborhood of one and two room houses with pit toilets and shacks for bathing shared by about 6 families each. It was a stark change from the relatively luxurious accommodations I enjoy in Lilongwe, but Kemi and I were being put up for free, so I was happy.
We stayed with a cousin of his who’s a soldier, Sam, Sam’s wife Happiness, and their 1 month-old son Josephat.
(Happiness, Sam, Kemi & I with Josephat)
There had never been a white person staying in Maili Moja on a regular basis as far back as anyone I spoke to could remember, and the first week was a crash course in relearning Kiswahili. During the day Kemi & I would take minibuses into Dar and visit friends, do errands, or go to the beach north of the city.
For Christmas we prepared a duck and pilau (pretty much dirty rice) and Sam bought a bunch of beer. Some of his friends came over and we spent the day drinking and watching a televised variety show by some megachuch.
One of the segments must have been stock footage because it was an American family with haircuts straight out of the 80’s gathered around a grand piano singing Christmas songs.
The young son in the green sweater performed a song with his sister where he busted some serious rhymes about Jesus.
The mother was especially horrifying.
Later in the day I was told we were taking the baby Josephat out for his first trip outside of the housing complex. The destination turned out to be a rowdy outdoor bar, certainly no place for a child. Sam’s a nice guy but not the sharpest tool in the shed.
I found out from Kemi later in the trip that Sam had taken out a loan of about $1,000 from the bank to start up a little general shop in Maili Moja that his wife could operate while taking care of the baby. Some people got wind of how much money he had and got to him before he could invest it. They told Sam that they knew a way that he could triple that money using magic. Sam went along with it. They took him out into the woods and divided the money up into three equal sized piles, and then sandwiched the piles between piles of equally thick paper. They then sprinkled “magic” powder on the paper and wrapped the whole bundle up in banana leaves and buried it underground. The claim was that the powder would transform the paper into genuine bills. They stayed in the forest throughout the night whispering “spells” and at some point Sam must have dozed off because they switched the bundle out for a decoy. When morning came they dug it up and told Sam the magic still needed a couple of hours to work and so he should wait until he got home to open the bundle. Of course they were long gone when he did open it and discovered he’d been swindled.
While Sam was exceedingly credulous it should be noted that magic and sorcery are widely believed to exist to most Tanzanians. Kemi told me a story from when he was in Primary School about how a classmate of his stole a duck from an old man. The senior came to his school and warned that if the culprit didn’t come forward within 5 days he couldn’t be blamed for what happened. No one admitted guilt and 5 days later the children were outside on break and suddenly the sky became very dark and cloudy. Lightning started to flash and a bolt killed two students. No one knew if either of the students was the one who stole the duck but hearing a firsthand account like this makes it hard not to believe that this was a supernatural occurrence. Unless of course it was a false memory, perhaps a story Kemi had heard as a child.
Speaking of wacky shit and time limits, I found out more details about the death of Samuel Rachau, the super evil guy who was the main culprit in stealing vast amounts of funds sent to Kisangura Secondary School (see two entries ago). I had known that he had died in 2007 but I found out that he had gone to the headmaster of Kisangura Primary School (which also receives funds raised by New York Quarterly Meeting) and tried to get him to pocket funds and share them with him. The headmaster refused and Rachau gave his typical threat of using sorcery to harm him if he didn’t comply. Rachau said he had one week, the headmaster replied, “Oh yeah, you have three days!” On the third day, Rachau died.
Spoooooky.
Anyhow, that’s part 1 of my vacation. Tune in soon for stories from my homecoming to Mugumu and the Mt. Kilimanjaro climb (spoiler: we made it to the top)
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