We, the people of Tanzania

The photos are of Wamaasai (the wa- prefix indicates multiple people in Swahili), but there are other tribes in the area.  Waarusha, Wameru, Wachaga. Arusha is a international city so there are people here from tribes all over including Europe and North America. Lots of Waminnesotans.

We, the people of Tanzania, are delightful.  I say "we" since I was born in Tanzania and claim membership in the Wasamba tribe. "Mimi ni Msamba," I say in Swahili.which uniformly generates laughter since the Wasamba are, of course, dark skinned and also short.  Since I am neither of those, my statement is absurd on the surface.  On a deeper level, I do feel a close connection to the Wasamba and Tanzanians in general which is why we are here.

Relationships are very important to Tanzanians. If on the way to a meeting, they meet a friend, they don't say, "Hi. Can't talk because I'm on my way to a meeting" like an American would do (at least I do). They will greet each other and take the time to inquire about how things are going, how the family, kids, work, etc. are going. This is accompanied by a triple handshake - palms, thumbs, palms and then might not let go of the handclasp while they are talking. This friend is important so the friendship and connecting to that friend is more important than being on time.

Debi insists that she can't learn a foreign language and thought that she could get by with eye contact and a smile in lieu of a verbal greeting.  Wrong.  People will greet her.  "Habari za asubuhi?"  "How are you this morning?" The obligatory answer even for sick people in the hospital is "nzuri,"  "good" in English.  If she doesn't respond correctly, they may repeat the greeting and then tell her in Swahili what her response is.  "Sema nzuri." "Say good." Everything comes to a halt until she says "nzuri." People must be greeted properly. People who are sick can say "nzuri" and then clarify what is wrong or tell you that things are not good by saying, "nzuri kidogo." "A little bit good."

Having to constantly haggle over prices in stores and the market drives most foreigners crazy. I, for one, want to pay a reasonable price and get on with my day like I would in the USA. "How much are the carrots?"  Where is the relationship there? It's nonexistent. Instead, you need to greet them and ask about how they are and how their day is going before getting around to inquiring about prices.  The initially stated price will be too high and needs to be rejected.  With further discussion, you arrive at a price you can both live with.  The problem is this takes time and often the difference is less than a dollar so you need to talk a long time to save a small amount of money. I am incorrigibly American so find this process excruciating. My claim to being Msamba is weakened.

As I travel down a road, I am constantly being greeted.  Children holler in English, "Good-a morning.  How are you?  I am fine." Adults also greet me, often in Swahili, which makes for a short conversation since I can't say much after the initial greeting. They will call out, "Habari za asubuhi. Pole na safari, mzee."  "How are you this morning? I'm sorry about your trip, old man." It is polite to show sympathy to a traveler.  It shows great respect to address a man as "old man." They are mistaking the increasing streaks of platinum blond in my brown hair as having gray hair so while I know they are being polite, it still sounds strange.  My Msamba-ness is stretching thin.

Tanzania the Beautiful

So far, I have blogged about the dramatic, smack-you-in-the-face differences in life here. All of that is related to Tanzania being on the low end of the wealth spectrum. (The rankings that I looked at used GDP as the measure. I suspect that GDP doesn't capture the woman sitting at the side of the road on a blanket selling tomatoes.) That is what you initially see so dramatically.  Under that veneer is another kind of wealth. Tanzania is wealthy in the beauty of the land and the beauty of the people.

Taking pictures of the people is complicated for multiple reasons (and no, they don't think taking their picture captures their soul) so I have a lot of animal pictures. Here are photos from my recent family reunion.  By happy circumstance, 5 of the 6 siblings were in Tanzania at the same time minus the post-operative one. One of our excursions was to Ngorongoro Crater National Park. We stayed in a luxury tent site where you sit around the campfire pictured here and tell about the last year The tents are these huge arrangements with king-sized beds. It's the dry season so the grass is brown except near water. While most herds are species specific, the wildebeest and zebra hang out together due to their symbiotic sensory relationship. The zebra have sharp eyes and act as the watchdogs, err, watchzebra. Cheetah are fast enough to easily catch a zebra or wildebeest, but once they catch one, they aren't big enough to take down anything older than a young calf. Cheetah are not into catch and release so they hunt gazelle and impala which are more bite-sized for them.  But we digress.  The zebra are on the lookout for African lion, King of the Jungle that doesn't actually live in the jungle. What wildebeest bring to the pairing isn't sight or brains (The guide characterized them as "no-brains.").  They do have a keen sense of smell and can lead the herd to where the water is.

A combination of instinct and the faint smell of distant water lead 1 1/2 - 2 million wildebeest and around 1/2 million zebra and other animals including carnivores on a 1,800 mile circuit from the southern Serengeti to southern Kenya and back.  The big pack is up north now so what we see in the crater are the nonmigrating wildebeest hanging out there - kind of like Americans retiring and moving to Florida.

Next time, the people.

The highway is better than the dirt roads. Sometimes.

Mt. Meru is in our backyard.  Almost 15,000 ft tall.

Driving down the main road (paved) through town is pretty good in the daytime.  Rush HOUR is from 6 to 7 PM.  Now it is just one lane each way, but it is just as much bumper to bumper as LA. Just on a smaller scale.  Right after rush hour, it gets dark and scary.  There are no street lights.  None.  So it is very dark. The center line and side lines are pretty much worn off so it is hard to see your lane well especially since many of the oncoming drivers want to see well so they drive with their high beams on. There are push carts sans lights or reflectors rolling along mostly on the shoulder.  They mix in with the pedestrians who are usually on the shoulder.  Every once in a while you see the lights of  an oncoming car blink which means that a dark-skinned, dark-clothed pedestrian has run across the road in front of that car and is now in your lane somewhere in the darkness. Maybe, hopefully, they are across or maybe they had to stop on the center line to wait for a clearing of the vehicles in your lane. Standing in the darkness in the road.

None of this is as big of a  problem as the pikipiki (motorcycles) that are passing you going both directions down the center line and going both directions on the shoulder. In the dark.They jam into any space that isn't physically occupied by a car.  They usually have headlights, but functioning tail lights are not a priority.  When they pass you at night, they disappear into the darkness.  You know they are out there somewhere.  You just can't see them. They also uniformly run red traffic lights and make turns from the wrong lane.

Pikipiki is an example of a Swahili word based on a sound.  Onomatopoeia for you English majors.  I know who you are out there.The motorcycle sounds like this - pikipikipikipikipikipiki. I was just in a town on the island of Zanzibar named Bububu.  There was a train station in the town so it was named after the sound a train makes going down the tracks.  Bububu, Bububu, Bububu. 

I don't care if they have a fun name.  I still don't like pikipiki. Quite a few of them are motorcycle-taxis.  Most of the drivers wear a helmet.  For the passengers, it is BYOH (Bring Your Own Helmet) so they don't wear helmets.

The Attack of the Mianzini

We were driving down to the highway. There were two roads we could use. One was a horrible, bumpy, narrow road. The other, Mianzini, was horrible, but less so. You need to understand that both are 1 to 2 lane roads full of ruts, potholes, speed bumps (Poor Debi gets motion sick even when I am driving 10 km/hr - that's about 7 mph for you metric impaired ones.)

It started out as the usual terrible road, then we got to where a bulldozer had deposited some boulders in the middle of the churned up road. No problem. Just drive around them as we are driving a four wheel drive Land Rover.  Then there were narrow strips of navigable loose dirt in  a morass of  tree stumps, boulders, deep trenches, and piles of dirt.  We were past the point-of-no-return so we followed where cars tracks lead us. At one point, we were in a deep, steep hole with the way out being a 45 degree left turn.  I was stuck and just killed the engine when I tried to lurch out of the hole. The vehicular spectacle drew a crowd so there where helpful people who pulled three large rocks out from in front of my tires, shooed the following car back from my rear bumper so I could get a minuscule run at it and corrected my tire angle.

We bounced out of the hole and across to the other side of the road where another driver was awaiting his turn to run the gauntlet. I swerved to the right just in time to avoid crunching into his door. Instead of smoothly going past, I planted the right front bumper against a stump.  The other driver pulled around behind me but couldn't get totally past me until I moved forward. I couldn't go forward or back.  The spectators jumped into action, got the other car out of my way, and coached me around the stump.  We scraped through other tight spots, finally getting to the highway. I vowed it would be a cold day in......  well, a cold day in Africa before I drove on Mianzini again. Mianzini means "in the bamboo trees," but should mean "in your worst nightmare."

Equatorial Africa is COLD

I was not expecting Arusha to be this cold.  We are 3.3 degrees south of the equator for crying out loud.  I did not expect it to be cold.  I have been here before and don't recall Arusha as being cold.  I recalled Ngorongoro Crater rim as being cold, but that is 7,500 ft and, of course, Kilimanjaro was cold at 19,343 ft.

Arusha is up at 4,500 ft on the foothills of Mt. Meru and it is "winter" here so daytime highs are just over 70 and it gets down to 50 at night.  I have to wear a fleece sweater to work where I switch to a white coat. I am just on the cold side all morning since we start hospital rounds with the hospital interior temperature being as low as 60.  Furnaces are pretty much non-existent here. The windows are these louvered arrangements that don't really close and are usually open anyhow for infection control purposes.  Gotta keep the wind blowing through the hospital to blow out the TB bugs.

We have traveled a bit at the lower elevations where it is warmer and dryer.  Somehow that feels more like Africa

Dirt Roads

The attached photo shows my commute to work. Yes, that is a one lane dirt road.  So far that hasn't been a problem since there is so little car traffic.  There are some motorcycles (pikipiki in Swahili) and lots of pedestrians. This road, to my surprise, is on Google Maps and is their recommended route from my house to Selian Hospital. The road is much rougher in most spots than what you see here.  It is the shorter way to the hospital and much more scenic than the highway.  Corn fields, banana groves and native forest.  Occasional glimpses of Mt. Meru.

The two dirt roads to the paved highway used to be just as rough, but the city recently graded both of them and widened one of them.  Both of them can be one lane roads due to narrow spots or cars parked on the road.  They are, for the most part, 1 to 2 lanes wide with the wider spots being filled in by parked vehicles and road side vendors. There are pedestrians on both sides and crossing the road and motorcycles going wherever they please at a high speed.  The result can be chaos.  People, push carts, and livestock block your path in addition to having to take turns going through the one lane parts.  Even the wider sections usually involve driving frighteningly close to the oncoming traffic on your right side (Yup, we drive on the left side of the road here.) and pedestrians, etc on the other. One swerves back and forth over the entire road whenever possible in order to drive over only the smaller rocks and potholes.  It is initially disconcerting to have the oncoming traffic swerve directly in front of you until you realize that they are just avoiding a pothole and will swerve back just in the nick of time to just barely miss you.  You need to know that this vehicular ballet tempo is adagio, not presto. Top speed is around 15 mph and usually the speed is under 10 or even 5 mph.

God Save the Queen.

Although her actual birthday is April 21, for some reason, the international birthday celebration for Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth was this weekend.  As we Tanzanians are part of the Commonwealth, we had a celebration here in Arusha although judging from this photo, we weren't wearing odd enough hats.. First was appetizers and drinks that were called Pimms. Very British, old chap. Then a wonderful picnic dinner.  There was live entertainment by local musicians who were all excellent. You haven't lived until you have heard the Beatles's I Want to Hold Your Hands sung with an African accent.  It was also a fund raiser to expand internet access for schools.  We bought two weekend getaways in the auction so I figure we put internet into several schools. We got weekends at what my sons would call kick-ass resorts. I would call them very nice resorts at a very nice price..  Google Four Seasons Safari Lodge.  We don't stay in places this nice. I think I could get used to this.