A Season in Moshi

NYTimes: The Will Not to Power, but to Self-Understanding http://nyti.ms/g8tzcM

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 16:33:10 +0300

NYTimes: The Will Not to Power, but to Self-Understanding http://nyti.ms/g8tzcM

I love dessert.

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 11:04:00 +0300

He added slyly, “Now, this is a benefit to the chef, because if I do apple and cinnamon and you don’t like it you think there’s something wrong with me, but if I do apple and asafetida and you don’t like it there’s something wrong with you.” He laughed briefly, professionally. “The development of a pastry chef is not the development of techniques. It is the slow, careful development of a catalogue of savors and flavors, which you can develop the way you develop muscles. There is a logic in every dessert worth eating. Consider the logic of white peach and rich cheese. We must be conditioned not by sight but only by flavor, the tongue, the nose, and the feel in the mouth.” He went on placidly, “It is to avoid these errors that we do so much of our teaching and learning blindfolded.”

(Gopnik, of course)

Perks of working at Lilly Library include exploring the audio...

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 10:11:50 +0300

Perks of working at Lilly Library include exploring the audio collection. Recently acquired: Caedmon’s Dubliners, Poetry Collection, and The William Faulkner Audio Collection. Also: “Writers Speak” (Terry Gross interviewing David Sedaris, Stephen King, Maurice Sendak, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, John Updike, Joyce Johnson, Fran Lebowitz, Billy Collins, Richard Price, and David Rakoff.)

Other perks: I have a Nook checked out for the entirety of break. Still not sure if I like it.

The old Saturday hangout. Impala Hotel, Shanty Town, Moshi.

Sat, 11 Dec 2010 00:41:01 +0300

The old Saturday hangout. Impala Hotel, Shanty Town, Moshi.

My old street. Finally able to upload a few of these from my...

Sat, 11 Dec 2010 00:34:07 +0300

My old street. Finally able to upload a few of these from my phone. Yay Nairobi!

So that was it

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 11:57:00 +0300

I should have taken a photo or something. I should have cried through one or two of my hardest goodbyes. I should have had an anxious, restless night and woken long before the anxious pounding of my taxi driver upon my gate. But I did none of these things.

I’ve just been happy. It’s all so beautiful and while there are dozens more descriptive words that one really suffices. I drove away smiling, thinking what a lovely chapter this has been, how I’ll always remember it so fondly, how it may have changed me or redirected me in ways I can’t yet see. But whether it has or hasn’t, whether or not I photographed enough memories or properly christened my goodbyes with heartfelt tears, it was lovely and it was true and it is gone forever.

When you leave something like this you never really can come back and everyone knows that. But in another sense you wouldn’t want to stay forever because it will all change anyways and you can’t every get your hands on that demon called Time. He’s unfaithful and a menace, playing with our hearts, forever handing over days when we want hours and seconds when we want years. In many ways he’s the god of the West, one that, along with Nature, we have managed to conquer only in part and have often been shocked by unanticipated effects of conquering that part. In just a few days I’ll have such a stronger grasp of him, of Time, or so I will think. In other ways I have lived far from his own grasp these last 6 months.

There was rain last night, roaring, pelting, invasive rain. The first rain I saw in Moshi was several months after I had arrived. Then it came every week or so, never for more than an hour and always followed by sun. But last night I heard thunder, I had rain slipping through my uncloseable windows and felt a chill whose touch I have long evaded. I guess this was the official arrival of the rainy season, but I couldn’t help thinking it was also quite a pompous farewell.

I swam into town and sat alone one last time at my favorite cafe. Scrawling out the second to last chapter of my Swahili book I spooned off the froth of my last Union Cafe macchiato (or machiato as they say there) and hardly noticed the electric lights flickering threateningly as they so often do. But the umeme stayed on and I found a taxi home, the home I had transformed back into a house earlier that day. It was late and I was waking early so I didn’t bother to dirty the clean sheets but donned my neck pillow and fell asleep just after choosing an old playlist from an old friend.

I guess I forgot to say goodbye to the Moshi Jenny, the girl you have known in bits and starts, someone whom somebody halfway across the world has known much better, and of course the constant part of her, the soul if you will, has known the best. She was partly made up of a place and in other part people and youth and ideals. I think we’re all made up of those things, more than something isolated and individualistically unique. I wonder who you are today, who you’ve been these past few months if you read this. I wonder what people make up your community, what places and things and beliefs.

I think the season in Moshi has ended, though in other ways it will go on for awhile and in yet other ways it will go on forever. I’m not as melancholy as I sound. It’s both a fault and a blessing but I’m ever eager for the next thing, ever pushing for tomorrow. I can hardly wait for “A Season in Durham,” or many seasons at that. So while I’m still in short sleeves, flip flops, and batik capris I’ll sign off.

reading/watching

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 19:03:00 +0300

I’m still trying to catch up on books I should have already read and movies I should have seen. Of course this is a futile and endless pursuit, but while I’ve still the time I press on…

Currently reading this. An interesting transition after finishing This Side of Paradise.

Apparently a big hit in the UK. Cute portrayal of clashing cultures.

One of those hauntingly beautiful films about art and the life that comes with being good at it.

Bizarre Spanish film about what love is…and is not.

On the agenda for tomorrow night. Excited to see this with Sara Morrocchi, resident Italian friend. (“You haven’t seen this!!” Yes, I know…I’m at risk of losing my English advisor).

Saw this with Sara on Saturday. Meryl Streep remains stunning.

Grace Kelly is beautiful.

while i still remember

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 18:36:00 +0300

The tapping always starts around 5:30am. The sound is identical to the clanging of my gate’s lock from the outside so it took me a few weeks to get over thinking that someone was knocking to get in. It wouldn’t have taken so long if it hadn’t in fact been someone knocking to get in half the time, but between Tabitha, Happy, and my landlord I get woken up by that clanging gate every few days. The rest of the time it’s a neighbor’s gate or some mechanical apparatus at one of the workshops in the neighborhood. I’m lucky to be the type that falls back to sleep as fast as I wake (or ten times faster) but I pause long enough to throw back the stuffy mosquito net that has become more symbolic than practical. I really should close that flap that always comes open, but with a week and a half left in Moshi there’s not much point now. So I throw it off and if it has rained overnight as it often does in this short rainy season I’m cool enough by this point to slip under the sheets I otherwise sleep on top of.

The later and more times I allow myself to fall back asleep the more drowsy and pessimistic I become. I know this without a doubt and yet if the clanging’s not too loud, the crack in my curtains not too big, and my commitments not too quickly approaching I’ll sleep in as late as 9am, as I did this morning. Seven months ago that could have been an early morning with just enough sleep to get me through the day. Nowadays it’s more than enough and I habitually regret the days that start after 7:30am. Best of all are the ones I manage to start early enough to be outside before the crowds that characterize these streets. If I find myself running up Lema road at 7am, beating the sun even if the mountain is beating me, I’m instantly infused with an optimism and satisfaction that defines and carries the day.

When Mom was here she pointed out that the kind of concrete floors I have are hip in modern American homes. Young city dwellers are pulling out carpets and tearing up hardwood floors to get to that warehouse look. Hip it may be but it still feels odd having to constantly wear shoes in the house to keep the dirt off my feet, or daily mopping it’s cold surface bending over and dragging a wet towel in Tanzanian fashion. So I slip on my Maasai shoes, fashioned out of old tires and popular for every reason except their recycled content, pull back that thick blue curtain, twist and tie up my mosquito net, and step into the morning. I think the definition of indoors and outdoors is something that characterizes America. The houses here are more permeable structures good for keeping out rains and defining space. But everything from lizards and cockroaches to sunlight and breezes are as prevalent here as on the other side of the threshold.

I’m constantly aware of using basic utilities like water and electricity. Mostly just because they’re so unpredictable but also because this is the first time I’ve seen monthly water and electiricty bills. Compared to other costs here they’re not cheap, but I expect my electrical bill will be low this month due to all the outages. Some of my neighbors say lack of basic utilities is part of the aftermath of the elections. I guess our area didn’t muster as much support for the incumbent as was expected of us. Now we pay for it by lighting candles and cooking with charcoal and gas.

I love my house. It’s one of those places you dream of when you imagine yourself tucked away on some coast or wine country. A little nook, ten minutes walk from bustling cafes and a town with almost everything you need to support an ideal expat life. I say almost because Tanzania suffers from a inexplicable and insufferable lack of good cheese. Cows are abundant. Fresh milk flows from every corner of the town. But don’t ask for cheese. For awhile I mused over the perfect opportunity to come be the first cheesemaker in this beautiful area. Then I discovered the Tanzanian’s passion for Tanzanian and only Tanzanian food. And that does not include cheese. There are certainly dying children in this country. But I can also cite numerous examples of Tanzanian friends turning down the best and most expensive cuisine in town in favor of rice, beans, dried fish, ugali, and fried, fried, fried everything.

Back to my house. You see when most people think of living some quaint expat life they think Paris or Tuscany. That’s all well and good if you’re prepared to exhale Euros and fend off the fast-paced Western life that has come to infect even the Tuscan sun. But come to Moshi and you can have it all. My two bedroom flat includes a dining room, living room, open hall, heated shower (quite a luxury here), kitchen, sunporch, and patio covered by grape vines. For this luxury I pay about $150 a month, which would have been $75 a month had my roommate turned out to be antoher paying tenant and not two Tanzanian girlfriends. Spend one evenin with us and you’d laugh at the idea of trading their humor and company for $75.

Sure, the walk to town is down a crowded street with a coffin carpenter on the right, a coffee processing plant on the left, and a stream used for washing everything from naked grown bodies to stolen goods running under the road. But this is my neighborhood and three months in you could show up and ask for the mzungu girl and they’d show you my direction. On your way to my house you’d pass the local men lounging and drinking at the duka next door. Every now and then they shun off boys pestering me for money or following me for more biological reasons. That’s less embarrassing than when they clap for me as I finish a morning run. But it’s good to know I’m part of the neighborhood now and I’ll miss the little town feel that is most of Moshi to me now.

These memories have been typed over a few days, several power outages, and many macchiatos. Whiffs of what will soon be the gone-by days of my gap-semester in Moshi. They say you’re never the same after something like this, but I’m not sure that’s true. I think I’ve broadened my ability to communicate, taken on nuances of expression that broaden my ability to relate and narrate but that have done little to change the person and beliefs at the core of that expression. If it’s true that, as Christians believe, we’re all made in God’s image then there’s a wealth of holy pictures out there and these last six months have broadened my understanding of who that God is and what He looks like.

I’m trying not to think about leaving. I’m always better at it than I think I will be and that’s often disturbing. With all likelihood I’ll spend the next week and a half mourning my departure but my takeoff will leave behind most of that and before I know it I’ll be on to the next thing, trying to remind myself to think back on these sunny, restful, vibrantly colored days. I imagine I’ll think on them in the darkest times, when I’m up all night working on an English paper or a library night shift, when friends are frenzied and rushing around without a second to spare, when I’m that way too.

A Tanzanian boy once begged me to tell him if I thought his country would ever be like America. I started in my usual way, rejecting the premise of his query, asking him why Tanzanians so often see America as the ultimate destination. But when he persisted I thought about it. I finally told him that I thought Tanzania could one day be “Western” but that while we could celebrate parts of that metamorphoses we would have to mourn so much of what he was blind to see that he loved about his country. In many ways this country, his country, has a paradoxical relationship with the West. It’s hard for me to re-imagine my most memorable Moshi scenes in the context of a Westernized society. Community is possible here in ways I will soon forget are possible. And yet so many of those that make up my community remain back in the West and so it is to them that I will return, and happily at that. I’ll thrive on caffeine, progress, and good cheese once again. But somewhere in another dimension I’ll rest in Moshi and I hope that every now and then that Moshi girl will permeate the one back in Durham.

I think I don't want to leave

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 12:50:07 +0300

Walking from The Hot Bread Shop down to the new Union Cafe this morning as I scanned the passersby, acknowledging some with a quick Mambo-Poa-Vipi, I realized I separate wigs from weaved or natural hair without a seconds’ thought. Not what I came here to learn, not exactly, but one of the thousand tiny pieces of this culture now forever a little piece of me.

Yesterday was my last Hash in Moshi, at least for awhile. Sitting outside two huge white greenhouses (yes, I see the discontinuity there), as the sun went down over a few friends, some Mandazi and some warm African beer, it occured to me that these passionate Hashers are an odd bunch. If you don’t know the Hash, it started in Malaysia or Indonesia or somewhere like that some years ago and has spread like fire around the globe, a British idea to start with and some odd combination of hiking and drinking depending on which city you’re in. Until the internet became what it is, the Hash was strictly word of mouth though well-traveled expats seem to have a 6th sense for finding it. Moshi has at least 2 couples that met on a Hash. In fact one of those couples started it here, after meeting at a Hash in Phili (he’s European, raised in TZ, she’s American) and had a Hash wedding in Greece. Apparently this is common -they’ve been to a number of Hash weddings. We had a smaller group yesterday after this Hash had been advertised as a 4-hour wade/swim/rock-hop through a gorge 30 min towards Moshi. And spectacular it was - I spent the whole day feeling like I was in the Amazon with blue water rushing by, huge boulders making paths for the water, and vines with monkeys hanging all around the cavernous rock walls to our left and right. For all the beauty there was an equal amount of wiping out and I woke up this morning feeling like I’d been in a gang fight. But I’ll miss the Hash (though I hear there’s a great one in Durham, if you only know where to look).

I finally managed to take some photos on my phone so here’s a few snapshots of life in Moshi:

A favorite cafe (I was actually trying to document this red, silk shirt).

The smaller of Kili’s 2 peaks, Mawenzi

Kibo on the left. My house is down the street.

This church has 24hr worship.

Available at our local photo printing store. Trying to decide which one to get.

My girls, walking back to school from our party at my house.

"What would you do if you left college?” asked Monsignor. “Don’t know...."

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 19:30:00 +0300

““What would you do if you left college?” asked Monsignor.
“Don’t know. I’d like to travel, but of course this tiresome war prevents that. Anyways, mother would hate not having me graduate. I’m just at sea. Kerry Holiday wants me to go over with him and join the Lafayette Esquadrille.”
“You know you wouldn’t like to go.”
“Sometimes I would—to-night I’d go in a second.”
“Well, you’d have to be very much more tired of life than I think you are. I know you.”
“I’m afraid you do,” agreed Amory reluctantly. “It just seemed an easy way out of everything—when I think of another useless, draggy year.”
“Yes, I know; but to tell you the truth, I’m not worried about you; you seem to me to be progressing perfectly naturally.”
“No,” Amory objected. “I’ve lost half my personality in a year.”
“Not a bit of it!” scoffed Monsignor. “You’ve lost a great amount of vanity and that’s all.”
“Lordy! I feel, anyway, as if I’d gone through another fifth form at St. Regis’s.”
“No.” Monsignor shook his head. “That was a misfortune; this has been a good thing. Whatever worth while comes to you, won’t be through the channels you were searching last year.”
“What could be more unprofitable than my present lack of pep?”
“Perhaps in itself … but you’re developing. This has given you time to think and you’re casting off a lot of your old luggage about success and the superman and all. People like us can’t adopt whole theories, as you did. If we can do the next thing, and have an hour a day to think in, we can accomplish marvels, but as far as any high-handed scheme of blind dominance is concerned—we’d just make asses of ourselves.”
“But, Monsignor, I can’t do the next thing.”
“Amory, between you and me, I have only just learned to do it myself. I can do the one hundred things beyond the next thing, but I stub my toe on that, just as you stubbed your toe on mathematics this fall.”
“Why do we have to do the next thing? It never seems the sort of thing I should do.”
“We have to do it because we’re not personalities, but personages.”
“That’s a good line—what do you mean?”
“A personality is what you thought you were, what this Kerry and Sloane you tell me of evidently are. Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on—I’ve seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides ‘the next thing.’ Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he’s done. He’s a bar on which a thousand things have been hung—glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them.””

- This Side of Paradise. Fitzgerald.

Ode to Moshi

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 17:35:00 +0300

I haven’t written anything here in a long time. I’ve been busy and traveling some, but there’s more to it I think. I have a friend in town for a week who diligently journals each day. I’ve tried that many times and even wondered if this blog would be something like that back when I created it, but it’s just not me. For one thing I’m not the diligent type. There’s also nothing that appeals to me when I think of recording a log of what happens each day. Add some personal insight and throw in a few jokes and it’s more up my alley, but I still find myself silent.

Audience is another aspect of it. Some people blog for themselves, others know or think they know exactly who their audience is. Others blog in hope of finding an audience, maybe in hope of finding some like-minded souls out there in the endless paths that traverse through the internet. For some it’s a form of expression, even artistic expression. They write edible prose and toss it out to see who will bite or simply because it’s delicious and they know it. Others are testing out their abilities. Maybe there are some who write without a thought of why they’re doing it, or for whom. I don’t know where I find myself amidst this crowd.

Every few days when I step into the blogosphere I feel late. I scan through the current dialogue and while it’s not hard to catch on to what’s being said, it’s much harder to find a voice, living where I do and experiencing what I’m experiencing. Living in Africa keeps me a few steps from this interconnected dialogue and the source of its voices. The lives of most of the people who utilize Tumblr, Twitter, and the like feel increasingly and impressively relevant while I find myself increasingly irrelevant. Before you check out of this pity party I should admit that each day here makes me less enamored by these “relevant” things.

And yet there’s a link. If I find myself falling disinterested with chatter and news from back home, I’m more aware than ever and more attracted than before to the deeper things that lie beneath the loquaciousness. It’s cool that beauty is still beauty, that art transcends relevance, and that even amidst the most sophisticated dialogue I can hear the same tones and feel the same longings that I experience in broken Swahili dialogue with friends in Moshi.

So I won’t give you a log of my week, nor bore you with a Swahili lesson or give you African recipes. I’ll tell you this: my life is overflowing with the things we seek in whatever dialogue we take part in. My life is surrounded by beauty in ways I haven’t seen it before, and yet you get the same shivers whether you gaze at the Blue Ridge Parkway or a road lined with blooming Jacaranda trees. Pain still feels the same. Though business my cloak us back home in the West, there are just as many cloaks here. People here are running from loneliness about as fast as they do back home too.

I’ll miss Moshi when I come home in a month. I’ll miss it a lot. I’ll romanticize about the days I woke up to birds chirping, forgetting about the rooster that cawed all through the nights. I’ll dream of walking everywhere again, unhindered by hurry, accompanied by a thousand others. I probably won’t think about the smell of some streets, the relentless sun, or the hecklers who attach themselves to me like fleas. I’ll remember having my own house and how a few visitors quickly turned into a constant stream of guests that became close friends. I’ll forget how much I missed friends back home. As for now the sun is setting and I have an hour to walk into town, to a beautiful new cafe with wood-fired pizza where the manager invited me to come help design the menu and teach the staff to cook. I’ll go home from there with a few friends and the girls from my English class, now close friends, will probably knock on my gate around 8pm and ask to sleepover. I’ll get eaten alive by mosquitoes tonight, but wake up excited about all the things I have planned for the day, never once considering the word “busy.” Yeah, life is good here. It’s good back home too. And that’s because good and beauty aren’t tied to a place or a people and that’s a cool thing. You’ve got some knocking at your door right now, or on your other internet tab, or in the person next to you. Go celebrate that, however you will.

"Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them..."

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 12:31:00 +0300

“Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now.”

- Hemingway, “Snows of Kilimanjaro” (appropriate, I know)

Photo

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:17:11 +0300

one for the books

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 12:50:47 +0300

or at least the blogs.

(This first part was written a week ago. Then I got too tired to finish and couldn’t think about the trip again until today).

It´s 4.57am here in Moshi and I haven´t even considered sleeping tonight. For one thing, my roommate went on a 2-day safari and left her computer and internet stick. For another, I just survived the worst five and a half days of traveling that I hope to ever experience and I´m still reveling in the novelty of all things warm and cozy, peaceful and organized, quiet and calm. (Excluding the nocturnal rooster next door).

I could tell you all about Uganda and rafting the Nile or Rwanda and the Genocide Museum and the little village town of Shyira where I spent a few days. But you can Google that stuff. Or maybe I´ll add it someday when I´m bored. For now I´m going to tell you what you can’t read about on the internet - if only I could have when deciding to travel back to Moshi via the southern route. What I read on a few travel blogs was that it´s a fairly nice 2-day journey that goes along some bumpy roads but also opens a window to the heart of Tanzanian village life. I guess those people didn´t shower with the local women, bruise their tailbones off-roading due to road construction, get held at the border, etc. Nor did it take them almost 6 days.

(Kigali)

Kigali was resplendent and I wanted every minute of it I could have. I also wanted to be back in Moshi by Saturday night if possible, Sunday afternoon at the latest. So Thursday morning I woke early, got a moto-taxi into town, grabbed some coffee and a view, my last, of the hilly and clean city, just waking. I headed to the post office to drop off a bunch of letters I´d written on buses during the past 2 weeks. Ten letters, in fact, and substantial ones at that. Letters are fun. So I got to the bus stand around 8.30am or so and asked about buses heading to Kahama, the halfway point.

Buses for Kahama all leave Kigali around 5.30am. When I learned that I should have stolen another day in my favorite African city and come back the next morning.

That is not what I did. Eager for adventure and over-confident that I could fanagle my way back home, I found a minibus headed to the border and hopped on. Three hours later I was the only one still on and the only one left at the border when the bus turned back to Kigali.

Three months in Tanzania has made me ever cautious of scams, bribes, pickpockets, and the like. But my first night here as I rolled into the Kilimanjaro airport I was not so cautious. When the immigration office asked me for $100 to secure the 6 month visa I wanted, I gave it to them and never checked to see what they gave me. Thursday afternoon the Tanzanian immigration office at the Rwandan border wasn´t so blind. My visa was clearly expired with no hope of renewal. It stated that I had paid $50, but luckily the printer had a glitch and typed over that a bit so it kind of looked like $500. I was the only one at this border besides the truck drivers coming in and out, so for a couple hours I sat abnormally calm for a Mzungu and let them grow increasingly aware that I was not going to bribe them. So they “worked on it,” took a coffee break, “worked on it,” took a coffee break. And finally I ended up with a new 3 month visa, no extra charge. That doesn’t usually happen.

Then again not much of what happened to me usually happens because tourists don´t usually village hop through central Tanzania. Giddy to have my visa without paying out an extra shilling, I sprung out of the office, walked a few kilometers to the gate, and looked around for transport. I was lucky to find a motorcyclist who took me over an hour down the road to the nearest village. It wouldn´t have been such a long ride if we hadn´t turned off the engine for every downhill, but it was pretty enough and I didn´t mind. I did start to mind the fact that I had a dead cell phone, about $10, and no idea where we were actually going. But I couldn’t change any of that, not this far into my foolishness, so I tried to enjoy the view.

The next town, Benako I think, was smaller than any village I´d been to yet. Little did I know it was a fairly big town for this part of the country. Well I found some food and then started haggling for taxi prices to take me the rest of the way to Kahama. No one in the village really spoke English, a trend I would see continue for most of the trip. It soon became clear that I was not getting to Kahama that night, despite all my pleas including my offer to pay twice the usual taxi fee as well as pay for the driver to stay in a guest house that night. They said it was 6 hours away and already way too late to go there. I turned down a few guys who yelled at me to get in their cars, saying they were headed to Kahama. Something about the unnatural level of ire turned me off. Good thing, since I was later informed those guys weren’t headed to Kahama at all. I finally settled for a taxi to the next biggest town, one slightly bigger than Benako, and headed off.

The next town was another hour or so away. As we rolled into the bus stand it was around 5pm and I hopped off and headed straight for the nearest Guest House, the only one I saw. It turned out to be full, but they sent me off with 2 ladies. I thought they were employees of the first guest house, taking me somewhere with vacancy. When we got there they asked if there were rooms available and when there were we went in to see one. As we entered the room, they put their stuff on one double bed and indicated I should take the other. Oh, so I´m sharing this room with you two? Ok, I thought, this is what I came for, right?

(Ok that was the part I wrote last week. I’ll try and finish up now.)

My two new roommates ended up showing me some genuine southern hospitality, which apparently applies in Tanzania the same way it does in the U.S. Well not exactly the same way…

We spent 2 hours at the bus stand trying to find a ticket from this little village back to Moshi (for the following day). It turned out to be impossible, given that the only bus going all the way to Moshi leaves Kahama each morning at 6am. I began to see that leaving Kigali after I’d missed the non-stop bus to Kahama had left me forever chasing the next ride home. I was left hopping place to place on whatever transportation I could find. I was also pretty short on cash since I hadn’t changed money at the border (the worst exchange rate in the country) thinking there would be a Forex or ATM down the road somewhere. Ha.

I settled on a bus ticket to Kahama, supposedly a 4 hour ride from this village. By then it was around 8pm so I offered to buy the women some dinner to thank them for their help. We went to the only restaurant in town, a local place at the bus stand that was serving rice, fish heads, and tomato puree. I had rice. Dinner for all three of us cost $2.50. I started to walk back to the guesthouse when a boy about my age walked up. One of the women introduced him as her brother. She was about 60, he was about 25. Later I pressed him on this and he clarified that he was the son of one of her friends who lived in the town. It was obvious this woman had called him to come meet me, and while I’ve made it my policy to refuse to go to dive bars with random Tanzanian men, it felt like a huge cultural faux-pas to say no so I insisted that all of us go, and we did. An hour later I was getting too tired to keep trying to communicate in Swahili (none of these people spoke English) - I’d been up since 6am and had to get up at 5am the next day. I thanked them and tried to head back when they steered me towards yet another bar where I had to meet every man in the bar, hear his name and profession, and make small talk for yet another hour. The clear guest of honor, besides myself, was the man who introduced himself as working for the TRA (Tanzanian Revenue Authority, equivalent to the IRA) and paused for everyone to oohh and ahhh.

I finally did manage to get back to the guesthouse with one of the women. She immediately stripped down and jumped in the shower. I decided to call it a night and lay down on the bed, wrapping myself up in a Maasai blanket I’d brought. Something must have been wrong with the shower because soon there were 2 guesthouse staff in the shower with her and after that the other woman showed up with 2 other men who pulled some chairs up and started chatting with me with no indication that they noticed I was in bed half asleep. At that point I tried to remember that the current state of misery was directly proportional to how funny this would be in the future. I’m not sure it helped, but I did manage to fall asleep.

Around 3:30am I’m woken up by one of the women saying “Check the time! Check the time!” I shot up, thinking maybe I’d missed the bus, and checked the time. Nope. Definitely 3:30am. Confused, I went back to sleep. 2 minutes later: “Check the time! Check the time!” Still 3:32am. I was getting a little annoyed. I tried to explain to her not to worry, that I’d set an alarm that would go off in about 2 hours, and that she shouldn’t lose sleep over me. Five minutes later it was clear that I was not going to get any more sleep, as I had to keep checking the time every 2 minutes. The women told me I should bathe, so I jumped in the icy cold shower, re-dressed in the least dirty clothes I could find from my pile of very, very dirty clothes. At that point it was no later than 4am so I lay back down, only to have the women turn the light on and sit on the side of their bed staring at me. I gave up and sat up, staring back at them and trying to make whatever small talk I could muster at 4am in Swahili. Over an hour later we all three walked to the bus stand, where I found my “bus” waiting - a dala-dala sure to have more than 30 people in it’s 14 person vehicle by the time we reached Kahama 4 hours later. Except it was 6 hours later and I hadn’t thought to buy a seat for my luggage so my legs had lost all blood flow, my hair was permanently dreadlocked from pane-less windows and copious dust, and my iPod was almost dead (there was going to be no reading on these roads).

(Kahama)

Kahama proved to be the biggest town I’d see before Arusha. I found an ATM, the highlight of the day, and started asking around for buses headed the last 6 hours home (well, to Arusha at least). I had money but no bus - apparently they all left at, yes you guessed it, 6am. So then I started asking for transport to the next village, thinking I’d village hop as far as I could instead of trying to entertain myself in Kahama for another 12 hours. I found a pretty nice bus headed to the next town, 4 hours away, and took it. That bus seemed like Air Force One. I paid an arm and a leg for the four hour journey, which actually only took four hours, but in Tanzania that’s only about $12. I got free water, soda, and cookies, a padded seat with room for my luggage, and the seats were 2x2 - unheard of in TZ.

(Singidda)

When I rolled into Singidda around 4pm I found no buses going anywhere else that day, but I did manage to get an $8 ticket to Arusha leaving the next morning at - yes, 6am. The bus stand was about a mile from town so I checked into the only guesthouse near the bus stand and headed to town to try and find internet. I was at the internet cafe for no less than 10 minutes when it stopped working, but in the flood of people leaving I met a few peace corps volunteers who would prove to be the best thing that had happened to me since Kigali. They invited me to dinner, where I heard about the villages they lived in and the conference they were running in Singidda this week. We stayed at the restaurant/bar til about 10pm then headed to the talent show that was the grand finale of the conference some other volunteers had organized. The show started at 7pm, so getting there around 10:30pm we managed to catch the last hour and a half. I’m learning African time.

After the show, and the dance party that followed the show, we headed back to the place we’d had dinner and hung out til it closed and then hung out longer with the manager and staff. Around 2am we debated bouldering the huge rock formations that crowned the town, but opted for heading back to our guesthouses. One of the girls came with me, looking for a hot shower and being on the same bus as me the next day.

The next day. Oh that day. The six hours, my final leg of this long long journey, turned into 10.5 hours during which we flirted with the new tarmac road being built, glowing so beautifully smooth and black right next to the awful dirt road we were on. Bumps were so bad that every 10 minutes I’d hit my head on the ceiling above me, that part where the reading lights and air conditioning are found (not that either of those worked here). Reading was again impossible, not that I didn’t try. My new friend managed to get her bag back from the guy who had stolen it from under her seat, so that was lucky. When I got to Arusha that evening I headed straight for my favorite cafe, then straight for my friend Chelsea’s house. All my Arusha friends managed to come over and we had a great night sharing stories (they’d been in Nairobi) and making fun of Jenny’s foolishness.

So there you have it. Never, ever travel from Kigali to Arusha via Kahama. Or never travel with me, at least.

(Unfortunately none of these pictures are my own.)

Summer plans

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 18:02:11 +0300

Summer plans:

This is probably a long shot, but I’m throwing out my plans for summer 2011 in case any of you feel inspired to join me.

Bike and Build is an annual cross-country bike trip for 18 to 25 year olds. There are 8 routes and one group of 30 for each route. Each participant has to raise $4000 to cover costs of food, lodging, getting your bike, etc. And some of that money is also donated to affordable housing. Except for the 4 leaders who organize the whole shabang and each get paid $1750. No experience necessary for either position, rider or leader. It takes 8 weeks to get across the country, including about 1 off-day per week when you stop to help build a house.

People who do this LOVE it. Like they get Cameron Crazy passionate about it. Seems like just about the sweetest way to make $1750 and have a great summer. Join me?

Photo

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 18:38:54 +0300

"It was the students at Duke who convinced me to bring the The Sopranos into the classroom. It was a..."

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 09:53:02 +0300

“

It was the students at Duke who convinced me to bring the The Sopranos into the classroom. It was a student (Joo-Young Chang in fact, a sophomore, from Seoul Korea!) whose essay on The Sopranos was judged the single best essay of the year in English. And it was the students and I, together, in the classroom, who found ourselves not only analyzing the artistry of serial television but discovering how great works return the favor, analyzing us. If Shakespeare were alive today, I swear it, he would be the writer-in-chief for West Wing (Aaron Sorkin), Deadwood (David Milch), or The Wire (whose David Simon just won a MacArthur genius grant).

It is not just lasting exemplars of pop media that interest our students however. As my long-time colleague Victor Strandberg will attest, there is also an appetite for returning to the major works of the American canon, those novels you read in high school, those too difficult for high school, and those you never got around to. So the students come to us in droves–committed majors, non-majors, and those still wondering. They want to encounter American literature at its best because, like Emerson, they want to be surprised out of their complacency, to read deeply and fully not just access & sample, Google-style. The Mystery of the Text, the Virtuosity of Reading, Literature as Equipment for Everyday Life: that’s what they come looking for, and we find they are willing to receive it, to make it, to get smart with it, to pass it forward.

”

- Tom Ferraro (my favorite professor, advisor, and a giant of a teacher), speaking at a Founder’s Day dinner last night, and basically proving why he just won the school’s most prestigious teaching award. (via bzcohen)

Photo

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 09:50:19 +0300

SPOT

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 18:57:05 +0300

SPOT:

Every day or so I get an email from ¨no reply¨ with the subject line: SPOT. Surprisingly, perhaps, this has nothing to do with Gossip Girl. I have to admit that, although I faithfully checked these emails for the first few weeks, I slacked off a bit just glancing every now and then until about a month ago. Around that time these SPOTS became more exciting because they were getting closer and closer to their final destination.

Now youŕe confused (and my keyboard has no apostrophe). Letś back up about a year and a half.

Around May 2009 my older brother Teddy graduated from Wake Forest. He had been very lucky in at least two ways. First of all, he had witnessed the era of Chris Brown, the only WF baller I can name other than Muggsy Bogues. Secondly, he had a conversion of sorts and switched from an Econ major to one in English. So anyways graduation rolled around and, maybe as a side effect of that second piece of luck, he announced he was heading off to Alaska to work on a fishing ferry for a few months. And I guess it was in Alaska that he got the AT bug and came back to announce that, after recovering from a long-postponed ACL surgery, he would embark on a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail. (In other words, the whole thing).

After one of the fastest ACL recoveries known to man (about 4 months, I think), after drying pounds and pounds of food and preparing a pyramid of boxes in our garage (labeled and ready to be shipped off to each drop), he set out. People ask me if he went by himself, but from what Teddy has told us no one hikes the AT by themselves. It is supposedly the most social trail out there and on a thru-hike you tend to know the people 2 days ahead and behind you. He also took his new dog, Cooper.

I’ll spare you the details of his last 6 months on the trail, but really only because I don´t know them. I did manage to squeeze in 1 day of hiking with him somewhere in the frenzy between Duke graduation and my emminent departure for Tanzania. Bad planning and an attempt to get back in time for our younger brotherś high school graduation left us 1 day and 26 miles. I should admit that this was my doing. I´m stubborn when it comes to, well most anything, and I wanted to make it to a certain town. We made it, and as I hobbled down the street after that marathon (literally) of a hike, I tried to walk normally in an effort to avoid the policemen looking like they were going to arrest me for public drunkenness at 10pm in that little Virginian town.

By this point I think 26mi, at least in Virginia (the Northern part of the trail is notoriously difficult), is a normal dayś hike for Teddy and his buds. I should also mention that no one on the trail goes by their given name. Ever. No one knew who I was looking for when I asked for Teddy (he often hiked 15-20min ahead). Due to his inability to shake college sleeping habits, he was immediately dubbed ¨Rip van Winkle,¨ which was quickly shortened to Rip. Had a black bear gotten the best of him, I would have petitioned to have his epitaph say: ¨RIP RIP.¨

So back to the SPOTs. Among a bunch of random pre-trail REI purchases was a SPOT. It´s a real simple device that looks kind of like a little easy button. You set it up beforehand so that whenever you press the button and send out a SPOT it goes out as an email of your GPS coordinates to everyone who might care. When I was hiking with him, we ended up bringing back a trail friend, who sent a SPOT from Durham to a confused group of family and friends back home. I overheard Teddy and his friend laughing about mailing their SPOTs around to places like Vegas, asking someone to push the button on the other end. (This is their only form of trail communication). Unfortunately that never transpired.

If the link works for the general public you should be able to click it and see where he is as of today. Looks to me like it is about 15 miles from Katahdin Falls, the grand finale. (You have to click terrain to see Katahdin). We have an embarrassing amount of family meeting him at the finish so he is sure to be mortified when he should be elated. Oh well. His following weekend in NYC should make up for all that, as well as give him a good bit of culture shock.

So congratulations, Teddy.

snapshot

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 22:35:00 +0300

there’s a line here at Red Chillis, backpacker oasis of Kampala. it’s a line that’s forming behind me as i type my musings away into cyberspace. and the great thing is that it doesn’t seem to mind.

i met this soldier on the street today. casually sitting outside a restaurant with his buddy, bedecked in a duke-blue and white camo oufit. “nice color, right?” he says to us. what do you say to that, when he’s holding an AK-47? “nice gun” my travelmate says, only to have the soldier shoot back at him with a smirk and without a stutter: “yeah, you know what the AK stands for.” and rob did. now i can’t remember, so any macho or hyper-culturally literate reader is rolling their eyes. something russian. alex kalachnakov. ish. then we walked on.

speaking of duke blue, they really do hate us - you know that? 2 weeks ago i go on a spur-of-the-moment safari with 4 random germans and an old British woman. we’re nearing the end of a long day in a national park with a bunch of wild animals when we come upon a car full of people standing up out the roof (a common thing). what’s not so common is the UNC shirt jeering at me in that baby blue that so badly wanted to be royal but never made it that far. or else got watered down. anyways my mouth opens before i can stop it and i yell out “Go Duke!” what else can you do? i actually thought it would be a bonding moment. i haven’t run across any north carolinians in 3 months and here’s one, possibly several. but immediately 5 angry tourists turn on me, shooting me down with a waterfall of “shhhhhhhh!!!” they choose their baboons over their school pride. i can tell you that much. shame shame.

other tidbits. let’s see.

lunch with an austrian couple, although she’s not so sure she’s austrian since she spent her first 10 years in paris. we meet after an hour or two watching the international tribunal for the rwandan genocide, me tuning to channel 1 for english, the other 2 on channel 2 for french. of course we go to lunch - we’re 3 foreigners in arusha. and over lunch i hear about their 2 months in geneva, her with an unpaid internship at the U.N., he supporting the 2 playing online poker. in fact they’ve made it around the world on his online poker. we exchange info in hopes of me helping her sort out questions about grad school in the U.S. he never finished high school. they met at the horse races, where she works on sunday. a 2.5hr lunch and we separate, forever i’m sure.

now i’m traveling with 3 others, the victims of a note i pinned in moshi’s coffee shop. something like: “uganda? rwanda? looking for travel partners headed that way sometime soon.” there’s a couple who met while traveling in nepal. they kept traveling. that was 8 months ago. they’ll still be traveling in 4 months, but then they plan to settle in thailand. they’re almost my age. and the other guy we picked up on the bus. an NYU alum of 1 year, headquartered in zambia with a constant travel path through tanzania, kenya, uganda, rwanda, burundi, as he sets up businesses for his organization. a New York salary in an African country, he says. all his friends live in queens. no brooklyn, no LES he assures me. “they’re a real certain type.”

now the line’s not so docile. this girl’s getting restless. probably a boy on the other end waiting to hear from her. and with any luck i’ll be rafting the nile in 10 hours so i should dig up a swimsuit and pack up my stuff.

it’s a fun time here.