CHAPTER 1 Getting It Done. Crossing Tanzania in a 30 Foot Truck

11/8/15: My jouney across Tz  in the truck with 2 drivers was epic. Never will forget it. A big diverse country. very poor and full of contrast. I know, sounds like a travel brochure or geography book , but so true.  I will try to write in my blog about the trip but there were so many events. Most of all I feel like I closed the case on the shipping container. And for that I feel much better. In my life I feel like I have a weakness or deficiency or inability to get things done.  “ Get it done” is one of my secret mantras. So hard to come to closure some times. That must be why I like work at MMC. Its easier to ‘get it done “ there.  Certainly easier then at home and way easier then here.  So it seems  very ironic that I find myself in maybe the worst place in the world to get ANYTHING done….Sub Saharian Africa!!

What is wrong with me?  Is this my destiny?  Or am I just Catholic masochistic?

   Anyway the loading at Caritas in Dar es Salaam was hilarious.  I hired 8 workers  to unload the container , separate and pack the truck.  Then pack the stuff we didn’t take back  to Rulenge into the container. It was boiling!!  After lots of back and forth  ( just hilarious) I agreed to pay them 200,000 Tsh.  About $100.  For 8 guys that’s $12 for a days work in the sun…..it was boiling!  Whats the min hourly wage in US?  Turns out the container is in a toxic waste dump behind Caritas. Not Love Canal but…    There were about 100 fifty gallon drums full of oily tar. There was a slow glacier of tar leaking from a drum near the container. Everyone avoided it like dog shit but as the day went on and the temp got way over 30 degrees that glacier of tar started to move closer. Soon somebody stepped in it.   These guys don’t wear shoes or some have flip flops. Then it was everywhere! In the path of moving boxes and equipment. Soon it was on our stuff. Then one of the guys slipped in it!  I will have toxic tar on the bottom of my hiking boots for the next few weeks.  Anyway I found some cut up 4x8 plywood and tried to keep it to a minimum…impossible.

  As the afternoon went on and it got even hotter, more and more boxes got opened to see what was in them and make a decision: bring or leave.

I began to notice more and more workers were wearing winter hats and some had gloves. Like the kind of clothing you might find in Vermont! Some of the guys had sweaters on!! It had to be 35 degrees in the sun!     That was the day I learned that even a very black African can get a sunburn!

Next chapter: we all (3) spend the night sleeping in the truck.

Hope to get pictures and more story web permitting.

Miss you all tons. Exhausted and a little scared at times but having a blast.   Larry

in the land of the firsts

10/20/14

IN THE LAND OF THE FIRSTS

Yesterday before I left my home for Rulenge.

 I  opened a loaf of bread

which I keep wrapped meticulously tight

and tied to a sting stretched across my kitchen

to keep insects and mice out.

Before I opened it I noticed there was

a fly INSIDE the bag.

How did a fly get inside the bag?

 Unless of course

 it didn’t get in there…….

as in, maybe...

it’s always been in there. 

Then I thought of the life cycle of the house fly.

  I realized there could only be

ONE ANSWER

My bread has maggots in it!

 That was a first

Only in Africa….. the land of first

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.

Bihar Haircut

  My Bihar Haircut; My hair was getting a long. It was definitly the longest hair in Biharamulo man or woman. Many women wear wigs but underneath its shaved.   I was going to have it cut before I left for Africa but never got to it. Then I sort of rationalized it all by thinking it would be better  and cheaper to get my hair cut in Mwnza. Then we ran out of time in Mwanza and here I am.

  So I asked my friend Ahmed, whom I have known since 2008 for the best place to get my hair cut and he showed me a place across the market square from his shop. Its behind the American flag, he said. Sure enough there was an American flag hanging as a curtain covering the entance to this shop. Writen above it was “Standard Hair Cutting”.

You have to understand there are no real stores in Bihar. Just wooden stalls that have been improvised over and over. I guess it like some old new england farm houses with multiple additions over the years but on a different scale. That is no doors no windows and there is nothing that qualifies as quaint here.

I ducked down and slid  the flag to the side. Inside it was dark but there an was electric light behind a second flag, this one of Tanzania. So I step forward and ducked again and slid the Tanzanian flag to the side and entered the barber shop. The room was dark , lit by a single  low wattage florescent bulb hanging by a wire from the ceiling. There was one “barber chair”, 2 benches, 3 customers and one barber; the only one standing. I think they were as shocked as I was.  Beside my friend Jerry Morton I am the only white man around. And I am quessing I am the first white man to ever to stand inside “Standard Hair Cutting”  We hit it off OK considering between the 2 of us the barber and I shared a vocabulary of about 50 words. Luckily there was a little kid in the chair who was just finishing up and he spoke pretty good english.

I explained I wanted 2 ½ cm off all around. There was a lot of discussion by everyone in rapid swahili about what that meant and how, exactly to do it.

 Finally the barber who was left handed, and acted it, made a few passes with his scissors and comb. A few cuts later and it was obvious he was over his head and out of control. My new friend the 12 yr old student translator let him know right away, before me, that that was not right. But the damage was already done. Everyone was talking and gesticulating now and the barber is losing face and getting frustrated. While the Swahili hair cutting referees are cutting up the barber and my mzungu hair I am looking in the old stained mirror realizing a few mortor holes have been chopped out of my hair.

Finally I gained control of the conversation and show him what I want. Coomb up, grab a clump of hair 3 or 4 fingers off the scalp and with the the scissors in the  other hand cut all the hair  sticking out that is  longer then those 4 fingers. Then all the hair is the same length. And that is how they do it at home. After lots of examples ( I have cut my own hair before). He gets the idea, but that’s all. He needs lots of practice….maybe on grass or hay. But not on me.  I  look like a hyena on bad chemotherapy.

  I give up and realizing I cant leave in this condition I point to the electric razor. The barber smiles, now this is a tool he knows how to use!  We agree to an attachement that cuts longer then a shave. In no time at all I am shorn!. My hair is ½ inch long all around. It has never been this short since I was 5. Everyone is happy. The hair cut referees all nod in approval. I now have an african hair cut ( very short) with mzungu hair. Not exactly what I had in mind but better then looking like my hair was falling out in clumps and great for this climate. I pay the barber 2000 Tz Shillings ( about $1.30)  and walk out into the African sunlight wondering what a sunburn on the top of my head is going  feel like.

WHAT IT'S LIKE OUT THERE.