ON THE ROAD IN EAST AFRICA

10/19/14  or....19/10/2014:   ON THE ROAD IN EAST AFRICA 

    It is pitch dark, there are no streetlights outside and inside there are no interior lights. We are rambling along, up and down steep pitches with hairpin turns. The headlights outline a rutted, rain soaked, red clay road until thick fog banks appear and suddenly turn the visibility to gray out zero. At times I am afraid we will tip over being so top heavy. Suddenly I feel something move  onto the top of my foot and then not move. It just sits there. I cannot see my feet. I think of Snakes on a Plane…….this is Africa after all so maybe its Snakes on a Bus.

   I am traveling  on the Rulenge to Ngara to Biharamulo bus route in the mountains of western Tanzania near the Rwandian border. Its 5:00 am and the bus driver appears obsessed with not being late for the next stop. Some turns are too sharp and he has to back up the giant bus, grinding gears and doing 3-point turns on the edge of darkness. My fellow passengers include about 50 people, maybe 10 chickens and 2 goats.

  I’m sure I’m not the only one awake but I wonder, like I often do in Africa, if I’m the only one worried.  Worried about surviving this hairy bus ride and even more worried, at this moment, about what is on my foot.  It is definitely alive. I pull my phone out of my pocket, turn on the light and peer down to the floor. Cuddled between my feet is a hen. She appears completely at home nesting between my shoes. She, like everyone else on the bus, besides me, seems to have complete faith in the bus driver. And now she appears to have chosen me as her traveling partner!

    I smile, breaking my anxiety. A healthy distraction from this bus ride from hell. I look at the man next to me. A featureless black face, asleep, his body rolling with the rhythms of the road. I think we are all brothers traveling on this bus. But I am the only brother whose face reflects light…which makes me not a brother.

   It will start to get light in an hour, another dark African night will end and a new equatorial day will begin. It is the “short” rain season and its planting time. But right now, winding down this mountain road, its dark, cold and wet, about 60 degrees……and maybe scarier then it seems.

    And while this bus ride will take me from one place to another, travelling in Africa takes me to destinations that are far more then just geographic. It’s not just two places on a map connected by a muddy road. Traveling by bus in Africa takes you to a new place, a better understanding of what we are…as people. Rent a car, hire a driver and your trip will be geographic only. Ride a bus and you are “in” the scene.

     Only when you are in the scene will you find that these people are different. Different in a beautiful, innocent , almost harmless way. Is it just Tanzania? Or is it just Kagera?   Yesterday one of the doctors I work with joked the scary thing about Ebola is it doesn’t just kill the patient, it kills the doctor, the nurse and the patient!  And then he laughed out load!  This laughing in the face of adversity is so characteristic. When a hurricane comes to the Outer Banks of North Carolina we prepare and then evacuate. When Ebola comes to Africa we laugh about it and let our indifference be expressed as “ hakuna shida”, no problem. When Ebola comes to the US and kills one person we tweek out, we demonstrate in front of the White House, we call for a Congressional investigation and declare the CDC incompetent.

   Come to Africa America!  One death? That happens every hour here. That is the reality. People are busy trying to stay alive here today. They are more interested in getting food and water for their kids then demonstrating in front of their White House.

   So while the people sleep on the scary bus ride in the dark and the hen nests peacefully between my feet on the way to becoming someone’s dinner tonight I ask myself for the hundredth time “what is this Africa place?  And why am I the only one worried?

    The bus is Africa; the road is Ebola. The chicken will definitely die and has “no worries”. The sleeping people on the bus are just that… sleeping.

Will the road kill us? Probably not and that is why I am the only one worried. Africans, especially poor Africans, like the ones on this bus have too much to worry about today and can’t afford to worry about the challenges around the next corner or further down the road. There are many roads Africa can choose to travel. Hopefully this bus will be traveling a safer road tomorrow.