Journey: Tanzania

Almost Done

2008-11-18T01:18:00.000-08:00

My final day in Africa is November 23rd. I am so excited to finally go back to the Western world. Thus, the blog is almost done. I will try to get Robyn to post some thoughts. Then, maybe I will too. I need some time to gain a better perspective though. By the time I get on the airplane, I will have been here one day longer than 10 months. Simply put, the longest, toughest, most frustrating months of my life. But, I lived through it. (Knocking on wood) I have avoided any major illnesses or any seriously uncomfortable situations. I paid no bribes. I only had to jump out of a moving bus plummeting down a mountain with no brakes once.

I am really anxious to see everybody. I can't wait to eat a medium rare steak, have soft serve ice cream, and watch Comedy Central.

I am on my way back home!!

2008 Election

2008-11-04T23:13:00.000-08:00

It is 1:30 AM in Tanzania. I am sitting in my house staring at the TV, wishing I were in the United States for this historical occasion. This could be a true turning point for America. I took a three-hour nap so I could stay up late to watch the election results. It is tough because TZ is eight hours in front of the Eastern Time zone. Staying up through the night is the only way to watch the election results as they come in. I would have a tough time sleeping anyway since I am so excited.

I am mainly watching CNN, but am switching to Aljazeera every so often (actually a really good news organization, regardless of the demonization of the network in the States). A storm just passed through, cutting off the satellite feed. All I had was black screen. It only lasted about 15 minutes, but I really realized how far away I am. I wish I were back in America, sharing in this experience with my family and friends. We are witnessing a special moment in history

There is one thing that people back in the States will not be able to appreciate-how invested the rest of the world is in this election. They are truly excited at the possibility that Barack will win. I know the US media has pointed out on ocassion that Barack would win a global election by a landslide, but it really amazing how much people are drawn to him. They see him as a shining example of change. He is a force. If elected, the view of the America is instantly elevated a majority of the world. This is a good thing--a great thing coming off eight years of disillusionment with Bush/Cheney.

This makes me proud to be an America. The world is involved and invested with the election. I am proud that there is a real possibility that we will elect a black man for the POTUS. This is an extremely powerful example of the American dream, and the world is watching. They are hoping that this happens, because it signals that anything is possible. It signals that America is sorry and apologizing for Bush. That America is ready to engage the world again. Electing Barack is the key to repairing our image around the globe. God, I hope he wins.

5:38 AM Obama just was projected to win Ohio!!!! He now has 194 electoral votes, with California worth 55, Obama only needs 21 more votes. We are so close to a historical moment! I am breathing much, much easier.

7:00 AM CNN just called it for Barack!! A New Day!!!! I cried.

7:30ish AM A thunderstorm hit Bagamoyo and knocked out the satellite feed again, right in the middle of McCain’s concession speech. I missed Barack’s speech. I am sad that I couldn’t see the crowd’s response when he first walked out onto the stage. I am sure it was electric.

So I walked into work in the pouring rain with the biggest smile on my face, grinning like an absolute fool. All my co-workers were very happy with what happened. When they saw me, they all got big grins on their faces, shook my hand and congratulated me. I have never felt prouder to be an American than at this time—being congratulated by Tanzanians that we Americans stepped up and made the right choice or our nations' future. God Bless the USA!!!

That's How We Dhow It.

2008-10-13T04:23:00.000-07:00

I had fun yesterday. Why, you might ask? Well, it is because I went sailing in a dhow. A dhow is a traditional coastal Tanzanian boat used for fishing and for transport of people and goods to and from Zanzibar, which is about 3 to 4 hours from Bagamoyo with a good wind. The dhow we went out on was probably identical to the ships that have sailed the waters of the Indian Ocean for past couple of centuries. The only modern conveniences on our boat were the nylon ropes, the plastic water containers and the bucket used to bail out the steady flow of seawater from the bottom of the boat. Everything else on this boat was old school--like 1800's old school.

We decided to head out on a dhow earlier in the week, because as inhabitants of Bagamoyo, it would be disgraceful to never have ridden in one. I texted a co-worker asked him if he could hook us up. My friend seems to know everything and everybody you would ever need to know in Bagamoyo, so within 30 minutes, he had deposited a semi-high dhow captain on my doorstep. He casually said, “[Insert name here] is a dhow captain. He will take you out. He said 80 dollars, but you can deal with him. Good-bye.” Ummm...okay. Luckily, the bargaining went well. Usually the process starts off with him offering a price anywhere from 2 to 5 times the “correct” price, and then you spend the next five to ten minutes talking about how poor he is and why he thinks I crap 200 dollars worth of gold bullion after every meal. Not this time though. I said firmly, “We are not paying 80 dollars. We will pay you 50,000 TZ shillings. You know that is good money.” He stared at me glassy-eyed and slowly said, “Okay”. Great. It is wonderful bargaining with a high-on, he was so happy. I should have offered him ten thousand and Snickers bar (sadly, I had no Snickers bar). We then spent the next ten minutes agreeing to meet him in three hours, at 1 PM.

To my “surprise” he showed up an hour early, but was content to hang out with our guard on the swing. When 1 rolled around we headed down to the fish market to where all the dhows were parked. As they didn’t have a dingy to pick us up (how rude!!),so we swam out to the boat. After getting dragged aboard, we met the crew of this love boat. It was four young gentlemen: the captain, a dude wearing only spandex shorts, a red-shirted dude, and a guy I named “the hashish guy” (who appeared to have just walked out of a opium den and/or hash house). Awesome. So they then proceeded to run around the boat moving sandbags, pulling on ropes and shouting while trying to get the sail up and get the boat moving. It took so long and looked so disorganized that I could have sworn they were on something. They finally hoisted the sail and off we went. To reward themselves for a job well done, the red-shirted dude (with soon to be matching red-eyes) and Mr. Hashish decided to fire one up—or three--over the next two hours. I didn’t think it was possible to hot box a dhow, but they gave it their best effort. I figured that they functioned moderately well when baked to high heaven, as I am sure that they didn’t spend their money on their wardrobe or going to the opera. Reassuringly, shore was only a mile away if we capsized, so we relaxed into the ride.

The trip was pleasant and uneventful. I was trying to imagine what the shoreline would have looked like over 130 years ago when Morton Stanley was coming over from Zanzibar on his quest to find Dr. David Livingstone. It was hard to do, not because the coast has been developed, but because nearly all the trees along the coast have been cut down (likely for firewood). Ahh well, it was nice to be out on the ocean, smelling the breeze and enjoying the views.

After making a big loop around the area, we pulled back into port in one piece. Even though I hadn’t raised I finger during the entire trip, I was ready for a nap. We thanked the crew, jumped off the boat into the ocean and swam back to shore. Overall, not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

MNF or TNF

2008-09-26T04:43:00.000-07:00

Being over in Africa has deprived me of most American sports. Contrary of what Americans think, the rest of the world really doesn't care about our sports--it likes soccer, lots and lots of soccer-with a bit of rugby and cricket thrown in for good measure. So our house Bagamoyo has a TV, and this TV is hooked up to satellite service. Luckily we have ESPN, but it is the foreign/South African version. For some reason, the Africans seem to love fishing, hunting, indy and stock-car racing, drag racing, soccer, pool, and poker as they are the majority of programing. I mean seriously, I have to watch drag-racing over basketball? Really?Though, on special occasions, they show some pro baseball and pro football.

To get my fix of football (don't care too much about baseball), I can watch both Sunday and Monday night games. But since I am not going to tune in a 3:00AM to watch it live, I have the pleasure of watching it tape delayed at 5 PM the following day. So Monday Night Football now becomes Tuesday Night Football. The only draw back is deftly avoiding the score on the internet all Tuesday. Ahh well, I think I can make the sacrifice for a small piece of Americana. I only wish that I could watch it with a good old American beer like Budweiser-oh wait-nevermind, they Belgian now. Okay, I guess a Kili or a Tusker will do just fine. Pass the unsalted Cassava chips please!

Getting Old

2008-09-07T23:43:00.001-07:00

When reading the title of this blog entry, you might have though it would be about getting old in Africa; after all, Robyn did just turn 30! Well, as much as I would like to talk about how many more wrinkles or gray hairs I have since moving to Africa, this blog is about something else. This "something else" is the word Muzungu, or more accurately, the use of Muzungu directed towards me. It is getting really, REALLY old.

The word means something like "white person" and is usually not outwardly hostile or derogatory, which is the only good thing about this word. When almost every individual under 16 years old calls out, “Muzungu! Muzungu!” when you walk by, the novelty wears off—fast. They say it with a smile on their faces, they shout it out from 100 yards away, and they say it behind my back. I think it is one of the first words they learn (I am not kidding). It would be understandable if the Tanzanians in Bagamoyo or Dar rarely saw white people, but this is simply not the case. I didn’t realize that we (white people) were that interesting as to warrant the announcing of our presence so that everyone in the nearby vicinity knows that a white person is walking through the town.

I have been trying to think of a way to describe this experience to you all. It is not like getting called “nerd” or “jock” or “cracker”—those are too negative. It is more like every young person (and a few adults) you walk by at the mall, super market, or restaurant calls out your home state, “Michigan” or “California”. It is not offensive, you don’t feel threatened, and when little kids say it, it is even kind of cute. But imagine that being your identifier to everybody in town for the rest of life. And this nickname is not your own; everybody shouts it out towards all your friends and family. Over time, it moves from being funny to being really annoying.

I recently read a blog entry from my cousin Jon who is a Peace Corp worker in Mali, where he writes that he gets called “taubab” frequently, so it appears that this phenomenon is not unique to Tanzania. That’s nice. Oh well, I am not going to change the culture, so guess I just have to grin and bear it for now. However, I am beginning to learn new ways to respond, as ignoring it just makes them shout it louder. Nothing mean or derogatory, but I say it with enough fake enthusiasm and sarcasm that that the older ones get the message that I don’t appreciate the word. Regardless, life continues to be good here in Bagamoyo, though it is about time for another adventure.

Fresh Prince of Bagamoyo

2008-08-26T02:18:00.000-07:00

Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith stopped by the lab today. Will is going to be a spokesperson for Malaria No More, an international non-profit to fight malaria through distribution of mosquito bed nets and other activities. They brought them here for a briefing about malaria and to get some video footage before they head off on their holiday. So Brandt and I were just sitting out on the porch with our laptops, they walked out to admire our ocean view and were whisked off for their hospital tour. We played it cool so we didn't talk to them. Although I'm kind of regretting that now. It's not everyday that you get to meet Will Smith in Tanzania. Oh well. It was still better than any celeb sighting I ever had in the 2.5 years I was in Santa Barbara. The IHI communication guy got some nice photos- in spite of the insistence of Will's entourage that no photos were to be taken. Hopefully Brandt will be able to get his hands on one or two eventually.

This blog has been hijacked! (actually, hijasoned)

2008-08-20T22:04:00.000-07:00

If you fear awesomeness, don't click here:

Birthday in the Bush

2008-08-13T04:02:00.000-07:00

I had a spectacular 30th birthday extravagenza! Friday was a Tanzanian national holiday, Nane Nane, which conveniently made a long weekend getaway possible for the employed members of our Dar family (Cathryn, Chris and Nicole). We packed up Chris’s Land Rover (which was celebrating it’s 20th birthday this very weekend) until after midnight Thursday night. After a few hours sleep, Chris, Nicole, Cathryn and Brena (California’s latest emigrant to Tanzania) headed up to Saadani National Park. Brandt and I stayed behind to pick up Jeff and Gabi, two friends from Santa Barbara, who were flying in for a 5 week holiday in Tanzania. They were total troopers- from a 30+ hour flight straight to the bush for 4 days without a shower! Saadani is Tanzania’s newest national park unique for having both wildlife and beach all in the same park. Chris, who (a la Boogie) recently nicknamed himself The Kingpin, came through with the connections and got us permission to camp at the site of a future lodge that he and Cathryn will eventually be landscaping and saved us $20 per person per night(!!) on camping fees inside the park. The Santa Barbara crew rolled up in the afternoon to find the Land Rover unpacked and equipped with a cooler of cold beers ready to go for a game drive. We jumped right out of Nicole’s car and hopped onto the top of the Land Rover (there is a benefit to the completely lack of traffic laws in Tanzania) and headed off to the park. The game viewing wasn’t spectacular but we did manage to spot a lot of baboons, a few giraffes and a variety of hoofed critters.

We returned to “lodge” to find our path blocked by 15 Tanzanians unloading huge sacks of charcoal from a truck and carrying them to the sea for transport by dhow (traditional Swahili sailboat) to Zanzibar- a fairly suspicious activity to be going on in an isolated village that happens to be completely surrounded by a national park. Charcoal is the only source of fuel available to the average Tanzanian and it takes 4kg of wood to make 1kg of charcoal. The resulting deforestation is a huge and growing problem over here.

We enjoyed a delicious Braai (South African for BBQ) for dinner and chatted by the fire. Chris got us all going with a tall tale that when he went in to pay our park fees, the officials were concerned that we weren’t camping at an official campsite with an armed guard and that once we put the fire out and went to bed we shouldn’t get out of our tents for any reasons because there would be lions and hyena around. Poor Gabi. Brandt and I already had her worried about their belonging with our (true) tales of thieving and now Chris had her thinking she could become lion food if she had to pee. Welcome to Africa. We managed to work out that he was kidding before we went to bed so no one lost any sleep. I have to admit, I was strangely disappointed that there wouldn’t be lions roaming through our campsite. Saturday morning we were up early and off to a nearby safari lodge for a morning river safari. We cruised up the Wami River checking out hippos, crocs and loads of birds including the apparently rare and uniquely vegetarian palm nut vulture. This information also came from Chris and so needs to be verified by a credible source. The river was great! The only disappointing aspect being that we paid $40 each for what was advertised as a half day river cruise but was only 90 minutes on the water. Oh well. Africa Wins Again.

After lunch we went on another game drive on overgrown “roads” through beautiful countryside. There were signs of wildlife everywhere- matted trails through the grass, tracks in mud and lots of droppings but the grass was tall and we didn’t spot much. Up until recently this area was a game reserve with a huge poaching problem so the animals there are not as cooperative as they are in Serengeti where they know people and vehicles are not a threat. We did spot some giraffes and warthogs and the grande finale was a few elephants heading off into the bush as we were heading back to camp. I even got my birthday spanking in the form of a tree branch to the head while we were cruising around- I guess that's what I get for sitting on top of a Land Rover and looking the other direction.

Sunday morning we had a champagne birthday breakfast. My mom, always over the top when it comes to a party, mailed Jeff 4 packages of birthday loot to bring over to Tanzania. The birthday party was in full effect complete with Tanzanian and American presents and me decked out like a fool! Thanks again Mom for all the party favors.

Then it was time for Chris, Nicole and Brena to head back to Dar for work on Monday while the rest of us went out to the beach for a relaxing afternoon on the warm Indian Ocean. Monday morning it was time to break down and pack up camp. The Land Rover was fully loaded when Cathryn went to start it up. The battery was dead. Ahead of where it was parked there was a very very gradual and short slope to the mangrove-lined creek. If we could push it out of the sand it was currently parked in and get it rolling down the “slope” maybe Cathryn could pop start it. It was a pretty big IF. The four of us couldn’t budge the thing. We called over the 3 villagers that had been serving as our watch guards for the weekend. Nothing. Jeff dug out the sand from in front of the wheels and we advanced the car as far as he dug. With my new Swahili skills, I’d been acting as our spokesperson for the weekend. I asked them to bring more friends to help push. With I don’t know how many people, we got the car crawling down the “slope”. Jeff looked at me- there’s no way this is fast enough. I agreed. Cathryn rapidly running out of ground yells when do I try? Ummm…now? The Land Rover made a pathetic noise- this isn’t going to happen and then it miraculously reved to life. Birthday wish come true! We shouted and celebrated with high fives all around as Cathryn carefully navigated the grass trying not to stall the thing. We piled into the truck, gave a bag of candy to the villagers that helped us (wrappers immediately littering the ground) and were off.

The last task of the trip was getting Jeff and Gabi on a bus to Arusha so they could go on their tour-operated safari to the big parks. I assured them it’d be no problem flagging a bus down on the main road. We’d done it and we’d seen it done on every bus we’d been on and there are a lot of bus going between Arusha and Dar so I wasn't concerned. We get out to the main road and pulled over. The first few buses whizzed by without so much as slowing. Desperate for a shower and to sleep in a bed, Jeff and Gabi looked at me incredulously. Those buses were probably just full. Don’t worry, we’ll get one we confidently assured them. Sure enough, the next bus that came by pulled over. Let’s just say it was not one of the nicer buses I was hoping to get them on but it was going to Arusha and I didn’t want to take any chances waiting for another one. So in an unnecessary amount of hustle and bustle (the crazy mzungu had drawn a crowd from the village while standing on the side of the road trying to wave down buses), people were “helpfully” taking their bags and herding them chaotically into the bus as I negotiated the price with the ticket guy. Gabi looked back at me like a deer in headlights. It’s fine. Don’t worry, I shouted to her as I yelled the agreed upon price to Jeff. In a flash, they were gone. Brandt and I look at each other. They’ll be fine, right? Yeah, they’ll be fine. Back to the Land Rover- next stop, Bagamoyo.
After a shower and a nap, we rapped up my 30th birthday by unpacking the duffle bag of crap that we had had shipped (yay for www.CVS.com!!) or asked Jeff to buy and bring over to us. I’m sure it’s not normal to be sooo excited about deordorant, Kraft parmesean cheese and Hidden Valley Ranch dressing. We were so thrilled about all our American treasures that we arranged them up on the kitchen counter and took photos. Cathryn thought we had gone completely mad and maybe she’s right.

Birthday Girl!

2008-08-06T01:28:00.000-07:00

On August 11th, 2008 Robyn will be celebrating the big 3-0!! Make sure you drop her a quick note razing her about joining the over 29 crowd (and finally joining me in the wonderful 30-39 age bracket). Robyn won't be reading this blog for the next 5 or 6 days, because we will be heading up to Sadaani National Park for four days of camping with the hippos, crocodiles, monkeys, and lions. My job is to keep Robyn from stumbling into a croc pit or wandering into a lion's den.

Happy birthday baby!!!

Riverside Swahili School

2008-08-04T23:45:00.000-07:00

When Robyn and I first knew we were going to move to Tanzania, we decided to get the Rosetta Stone computer software program to learn some Swahili. Learning a bit of the language before hand would make the transition easier (how little did we know what was coming!!). We said we were going to practice three times a week. Well, three times a week rapidly declined into 3 times a month, and we showed up on Tanzania’s dirty doorstep (Dar) knowing how to say really useful things like the dog under the table and man and woman are walking. Since then, we’ve picked up some more practical bits and pieces and we were managing to get around on the dalas, give a cabby directions and buy fruit and vegetables the market, but that was about it.

At the end of June, knowing that the following two weeks were going to be slow at work, Robyn and I made plans to go to a Swahili school recommended by my Swiss co-worker. The language school is run by Tanzanians teachers and is affiliated with the Riverside Campsite, which located right on the Little Ruaha River about 20km outside Iringa. At $230/person/week for classes, 3 meals a day and a tented banda, the price was right and we were off on another journey. The experience was so refreshing, fun, enlightening that we decided to break this experience into a multi post blog on the surroundings, the people we met, and the trip home. This one pertains to the class stuff only.

The classes started at 8:10 am and went until 1:00PM, with a small chai (tea) break at 10:30AM. The teachers were used to teaching people who would be there least one month (missionary families stay for 4 months), so when Robyn and I showed up and said we wanted to learn as much as thy could cram into two week, they were kind of reluctant to accommodate us. This was a real problem at first-it wasn’t going to do us any good to take the first two weeks of a 4 month course. But after a couple of days realized that these Wamerikani (Americans) weren’t going to stop complaining and they gave in and adjusted.

I haven’t been to school in years and I guess my brain forgot what it was like to be pushed to its limit for 5 hours a day. I had a dull headache the whole time. I had so much stuff swimming around my head I could hear the water slosh. Regardless, I learned a ton. I hate to admit it, but Robyn rocked the house. She was a day or two ahead of me at all times. Even the teachers were impressed- asking her if she’d studied lingustics or something. I guess that that degree from Cornell might really mean something.

It was a great experience. Even though we had 5 teachers over ten days of class, all the teachers were great. They were friendly, patience, and knowledgeable. The patience is a necessary virtue, as they listen to foreigners butcher their native language 5 days a weeks, 50 weeks a year. I simply couldn’t do it without breaking multiple objects. So a big shout out to our teachers—Sayi, Mayi, Moshi, Ishmail, and Tunku. Extra props to Tunku, as he was the one who was stuck with us and taught us over the last four jam-packed days.

After two weeks at Riverside, I could proudly complete a 3rd grade level reading comprehension exercise and speak in simple sentences in past, present and future tenses! I still have a tough time understanding when a non-teacher speaks to me in Swahili, mostly because the words are slurred together and feel like they are coming at me at 100 mph. However, give me some time and practice, I will be an old pro.

Despite the obvious advantages of being able to function in the native language of the country I now live in, I think the best part about learning Swahili is that when Robyn and I are back in the States and we want to say something around other people and not have them know what we are talking about, we can bust out our sweet Swahili and say whatever we want. Slander in a foreign language—awesome!! Rafiki beware!

Geo-Science and Politics

2008-07-29T02:34:00.000-07:00

The purpose of the trek to Moshi was to attend the meeting launching the United Nation’s International Year of Planet Earth (IYPE) in Africa. Since I’m sure you haven’t heard of it, IYPE is essentially United Nation’s sponsored campaign to raise awareness of Earth Sciences around the world. A few of the Tanzanian scientists I’ve met were involved in planning the African kickoff event and they invited me to participate. The meeting was held at a nice lodge resort at the base of Mt. Meru, Tanzania’s second highest peak (see above picture). About 200 government officials, scientists, and students from all over Africa attended. The Opening (and mostly scientifically accurate) addresses were given by Tanzania’s current and former presidents along with statements from assorted UN officials. This was followed up by a polished performance of a song about saving the world by a group of Tanzanian school children. It was all very impressive….and made me feel like I had somehow passed into an alternative dimension because it in no way resembled the Tanzania that I know.

I’ll spare you the details of the meeting and just cut to the cocktail hour(s). Brandt came down from the more modest lodge up the road where we were staying for a fraction of the price. We sipped on wine and watched the entertainment- a band of bongo drum players followed by a pretty amazing acrobat act. Eventually, I started chatting to the guy next to me. He turned out to a parliamentary staffer who was accompanying a member of the parliament of Zambia, who arrived and joined us about 5 minutes later. Brandt and I had a fascinating geo-political conversation with them for over an hour which ended with them changing their accommodation to stay at the place we were staying and plans to have dinner the following night. When they left, we grazed our dinner from the various appetizer trays, mingled some more and had some interesting chats about (the lack of quality) education in Tanzania, (the lack of) women in science in Africa and everyone’s favorite- American politics. Many Tanzanians are suspicious about Bush’s 4 day visit here back in February (does he want to build a military base here? is there oil somewhere?). Suprisingly, they are perhaps even more skeptical of Barak Obama. You’d think as Africans they’d be excited about the possibility of a black, half-African man as president of the U.S. Nope. And why? We don’t really get many straight answers on that one but it seems to be just the simple fact that Barak’s father is Kenyan. Talk about missing the forest through the trees.

After the all-star parade of the first day of the meeting, the second day was…interesting, but not because any cutting edge science was being presented. Let’s just say, we were back to the good old Tanzania that I knew. Everybody wanted to make a speech, sound smart, and show off how much they know (which was very little) by rambling on in front of the microphone. The result was one million words spoken and zero chance of these words resulting in anything.

Following the gab-fest, dinner with Mr. Member of the Zambian Parliament and his very smart sidekick was great. Beyond the fact that Zambia is south of Tanzania, I didn’t know much about Zambia. It was fascinating to hear about the State of Africa from an actual African politician, especially considering many of the problems in Africa stem from or are exacerbated by the unabashed corruption that has plagued the governments on this continent. Just as we were getting into it, Debbie, the petite Zimbabwean owner of the lodge rolled up and joined the conversation. She almost immediately went after him for Zambia (and every other country) for doing nothing about Mugabe. You’ve (hopefully) heard something about the scam elections, the violence and the inflation. We’ve met a few Zimbabweans here and the tales we’ve heard are so unbelievable that we should write a post just about that at some point. For now, I’ll just say this- in the 1990s Zimbabwe had a population of 12 million people and produced enough food to feed 16 million. Today, Zimbabwe has a population of 8 million people and they only produce enough food to feed 4 million. The rest of Africa sits idly by as what was once one of the most prosperous nations in sub-Saharan Africa descends into violence and chaos. The Bush Administration, with all its rhetoric about defending and spreading democracy through the world also sees fit to do nothing. I, for one, find that suspicious.

It was funny watching this little women destroy this Member of Parliament on a variety of issues. It is sad that those who should run the country, those that could make a difference, are not the ones in office. Following this interesting discussion, the MP and his sidekick invited Brandt and I to Zambia and then headed off to bed. Something like this would never happen in the States, we don’t have the money to spend two hours over dinner talking politics to a Senator or Representative. Though, I don’t think a lot of Africans would have the same opportunity as we had.

Overall, the experience was a good one. I saw the president and ex-president of TZ talk, had dinner with a MP from Zambia, and had a good laugh at some of the posturing during the talks of the second day. Beats an average weekend at home.

Six month-aversary!

2008-07-23T07:28:00.000-07:00

We've officially survived 6 months in Tanzania! We're still malaria free but we will be celebrating the occasion with a ceremonial deworming. Yummy! In a way, it seems like we've been here a lot longer than that but I guess that's because it takes a week to do what can be done in an hour at home. It warps your sense of time. Anyway, to celebrate this great milestone, I thought I'd spruce up the blog with an interactive reader poll! I hope you all are as excited as I am! The first one is a big one. Brandt has begun the process of negotiating a contract to continue his work here while simultaneously applying for a couple of jobs back in the U.S. We've been living month to month in the best of times and day to day in the worst and our future is completely up in the air. We flip and flop on a daily basis on whether we want to stay or go. So we figured we might as well hear what our beloved family and friends have to say.

I also thought it was about time to change out the photo for one of us here in Tanzania. So now we have a self-portrait of us taken outside the little burger shack (and when I say shack I literally mean shack) that serves as Bagamoyo's take on McDonald's (it's not fast but it is real food so it's a good tradeoff I think). We've fallen about way behind on the blog but we're trying to get caught up and hopefully we'll have some posts up soon on our new life in sleepy Bagamoyo.

e-hugs,
Robyn

Arusha National Park

2008-07-20T07:58:00.000-07:00

Robyn had previously been on an amazing one day safari (“safari” in Kiswahili means trip or travels) while she was in Mwanza, so I was all excited for my first opportunity to see stuff in the wild that I had only seen in zoos or on the Discovery Channel. After talking to the one of the owners of the lodge we were staying at, we decided that we would do a one-day safari into Arusha National Park. While the park is quite small (we saw most of it in one day), it offered an opportunity for a walking safari. Now, most people think of an African safari as a rough and rugged adventure. Typically, it is rough because the roads are so bad and rugged because of the bathroom facilities (poop in a hole). However, the safari companies just drive you around all day in the back of a jeep or truck and feed you like a pig, so you are often in worse shape coming out of a game-watching safari vacation than going in. That isn’t to say that they are bad, because they are almost always awesome experiences. But, if you have a chance for a safe walking safari, take it, it is worth the extra 20 bucks and effort to set foot to ground over here. So, we signed up for a 4 hour walk with an armed park ranger.

We were excited as we had a sneak preview of the park earlier in week. Luckily, our lodge (Mt. Meru Lodge) was only a 15 minute walk from the entrance of the park. There is no fence around the park but there’s an archway marking the boundary. On one side there are houses, a school, crops, children playing- a completely human-dominated landscape. On the other side of the arch, there were thick bushes, trees and about 20 giraffe. It was awesome! Some were no further than 10 yards away from us. They would just stare at us while they chewed their cud—often for minutes at a time. They are amazing, and huge, creatures. We decided to plop down on the side of the dirt road and watch them watch us. We spotted a small hill along the border of the park and we climbed up for a better view. Town on the left, herd of giraffe on the right. One really big one walked into path we had taken so I had to walk directly at him when it was time to go and hope he moved out of our way. Now, giraffe are essentially little more than a cow with long necks, long legs, and pretty spots. They seem to be relatively dumb and harmless. However, when you are walking towards one that is over double your height and is four to five times your weight, it is a bit daunting.

We spent the next few days at a scientific meeting (more about that later) and on Saturday it was safari time! Robyn and I ate breakfast and then climbed into our pimped-out safari van and headed off. On our drive to the point where we would start our walking trek we saw giraffe, water buffalo (mean looking animals), wart hogs (super funny when they run), baboons, and blue monkeys. Nothing like Robyn’s Serengeti experience, but not bad for an early Saturday morning drive. We finally arrived at the ranger station, grabbed our pack lunch and headed up into the forests at the base of Mt Meru. The first thing we saw dart in front of us was a dik dik, which look like tiny, elvish deer about the size of a house cat. I didn't even know anything like this existed.

Well, we walked and walked and walked. I am not going to bore you with a step-by-step description, but I’ll list the highlights:

-Highlight #1--About 45 minutes in our hike, we heard a very loud snap in the forest off our right, like a small tree breaking in half. In the park, there are mountain elephants, and startling an elephant only means bad things. Our guide immediately side stepped, bolted his rifle, and told us wait. We waited in silence for a few, long minutes; my heart was pounding, ears straining for any noise, both hoping that an elephant would come rumbling out of the forest and hoping that no elephant was anywhere near us. We listened for a bit longer, then the culprit popped into view- colubus monkey. So we plunged into the thick forest to watch the colubus. We trekked a bit and then heard and saw these huge, beautiful, black and white, long-haired monkeys running and jumping through the tree canopy right over our heads. We were the only people around, so it was just us, the forest and the monkeys. It was incredible. They are apparently pretty shy as monkies go so this is why walking safaris are a must.

-Highlight#2--After about 2 hours, we came upon this really big, really interestingly shaped fig tree with a hole through the trunk so big that you could drive a truck through it. As we arrived, a troop of about 60 baboon showed up and all climbed up into the tree. Seeing 60 baboons hooting, hollering, and eating is overall pretty entertaining to watch. Figs rained down from the tree but luckily, Robyn and I avoided being pooped on.

-Highlight #3—After the baboons, the ranger got it in his mind to find us an elephant. We then spent the next hour tracking elephants. We were walking on paths through the forest and bush likely made by elephants, making sure to avoid stepping in the elephant dung. It is really intense to be walking in elephant footprints, it makes everything seem a bit more real. The guide was leading us quietly through the trail with his gun at the ready, periodically stopping to listen. Sadly we didn’t see any elephants, but it was a great time nonetheless.
After the walking part of the safari, we clambered back into our truck and saw the rest of the park. It was pretty, but saw nothing super interesting…

…Until we were heading out of the park. As dusk was settling in over the park, our driver saw it first. A leopard…about 30 yards ahead of us on the road. Our driver was excited as he has been doing safaris in the park for several years and this was only the second leopard he has seen. For the next 10 minutes, we slowly followed it; we would get to close, it would faint like it was heading for the bush, we would stop, then it would continue on. Awesome! The park was closing and we had to call it day soon. The leopard went up into the bush on the side of the dirt road. As we slowly drove past the spot where he/she had disappeared. We assumed she was gone, sick of being followed by our van. But there she was! Sitting just inside the weeds yards from our van. Holy shit! All I saw was its face and glowing yellow eyes staring at us. Robyn and I yelled at the driver to stop. We stopped about 8 yards beyond where it was hiding us. At first we said back up, but then realized that it could easily jump into the truck, so decided to stay put. After a few tense moments, it finally took off, and so did we. Overall, the safari was a great experience, we got to see things few people ever get to see. It is because of times like this that you fall in love with TZ.

Road Trip

2008-07-17T05:12:00.000-07:00

Robyn and I decided that I would meet her up in Moshi following her week of work up in Mwanza. She was going to fly to Moshi, I was going to take the bus. I am detailing this trip to give you a sense of how travel via public transport works over here. To any Tanzanian, my journey would be totally unremarkable. However to me, it was an immense pain in the ass (literally).

The buses for Moshi/Arusha typically leave from Dar between 7 and 10 AM each day. So I started my trip with a two hour dalla ride from Bagamoyo to Dar. I paid 1500 tsh ($1.30) for the 60 km trip. I definitely got what I paid for--I was cramped into the back seat, packed into a space over the left rear tire well, with my large backpack on my lap (and partly on the lap of guy next to me). It was an typical trip, down in just under two hours. I got to Dar, decompressed out of the dalla, and started my mile hike through mud and water holes that engulfed major portions of the side “road” that would bring me to the front steps of Chris and Cathyrn’s place. All of this was done in the dark.

I rolled into the haven of peace that is C and C’s house, unwound, and went to bed early since my day would start at 6 AM (which is very early for me). I awoke the next morning excited to get up to Moshi and see a new part of Tanzania. I walked out the door at 7 AM the next morning, and retraced my steps through the water obstacle course I conquered the previous night. As always, I got plenty of stares from locals, amazed as that a mzungu was actually walking and not taking a taxi or driving an SUV. I arrived at the dala dala hub of Mwenge and jumped on a dala for a short 20 minute trip to Ubungo to get a bus to Moshi.

So the dala stops about 100 meters outside of the bus station. Before my feet hit the ground, I was absolutely swarmed by people determined to help me find a bus. I knew this was coming, but it is still a bit overwhelming. Not really dangerous, just crazy. I just ignored them and plowed my way towards the station. As I got close, a woman in a uniform grabbed my left wrist. I told her twice to let go of me, but she obviously was trained in the ways of the Force to thwart attempts of getting her to release her vise-like grip. So she literally dragged my into a ticket office all the while fended off other people who wanted my business. So she succeeded in capturing her prey. However, she gave me a reasonable price (for a mzungu) of 17,000 tsh to get to Moshi, wrote me out a receipt, then sent me off with a runner who walked me to the bus. The bus supposedly left around 9:00, it was 8:30, so everything seemed to be on track.

Now, the bus station at Ubungo is complete chaos; buses, taxi, vendors, and travelers everywhere. The buses sit idling for hours, spewing noxious exhaust, as the operators try coerce anybody who drifts by to fill the seats so their bus can take off towards their various destinations. Here, you actually see bus line operators chasing other operators away from potential customers. It is a big, smelly, noisy chicken fight.

After sitting on the bus for 90 minutes waiting for it to fill up (apparently the departure time was just a guess), our bus finally took off. In 7 to 8 hours, I would be in Moshi. This is assuming no blowouts, breakdowns and/or accidents which are almost as frequent as mosquito bites.

As you have read previously, Tanzanians don’t exactly follow any rules while driving. Well, except for the “bigger car/truck/bus always wins” rule. So buses are one of the big boys on the TZ highways, and the drivers drive like it. Driving as fast as they can, potholes and speed limits be damned. They pass slower moving cars at will, often just squeaking back into the proper lane before careening headfirst into oncoming traffic. I find it best to never, never stare out the front window of the bus, it is simply too terrifying for your own good.

So I settled into my window seat and plugged into my I-pod. Over the next eight hours, the Tanzanian man seated next to me and I proceeded to get to know each in a very physically intimate way (at least to me). This middle-aged man decided to press his left shoulder, mid-section, hip, leg, and foot into my right shoulder, mid-section, hip, leg, and foot. If I shifted to put some air between us and regain my dignity, he would immediately shift to occupy said space. I don’t even hug Robyn this hard. I got annoyed and pressed back, but he never seemed to get the hint (btw, Tanzanians have a completely different idea of personal space than Americans). After the trip ended, I wondered if it was Tanzanian custom for him to ask my hand in marriage.

Anyway, over the first four hours we only stopped quickly for patrons to board the bus. At these stops, hoards of venders swarm the bus selling water, cashews, oranges, grilled ears of corn (presented on the end of coat hangers stuck into the end of a stick), gum, candy, bread, wooden spoons, newspapers, etc, etc, etc. It is crazy. This is how you mainly feed yourself over the course of the trip. To feel like a true local, just toss your trash out the window when you are done—you get extra points if you hit a chicken or a goat. Also, you must realize that there are very few opportunities to use the choo. We only stopped twice for bathroom breaks: once at a road-side food-stand area and another time when the bus just pulled over and people got off and ran off into the bushes (if you were a woman) or just pissed on the side of the road (if you were a man). Ahhhh..the joys of public transportation.

That about sums up a typical bus trip in Tanzania. I got to Moshi in one piece and feeling only slightly violated. We need to get a car!!!

Carnivory

2008-07-11T07:42:00.000-07:00

When I left for Tanzania, it had been over eleven years since I willing ate meat. The last few months in Santa Barbara I started practicing eating meat so that if I got into a culturally sensitive situation here I’d be able to do what needs to be done. By the time I left SB, I was choking down single bites of steak and sausage. The first couple of months here when we didn’t have a fridge it was pretty much all beans and rice at home. Then we went out to dinner at a Tanzanian restaurant with friends. The menu was beef, chicken, goat, ugali (a Tanzanian staple- flavorless corn mush), rice, and fried potatoes. I was officially off the wagon. I ordered the beef. I think Brandt may have written about this already, but meat isn’t really prepared the same here. At home, a cow would be butchered into different cuts of meat. In Tanzanian, they just take a big axe and dice up the carcass. It’s served well done in roughly cubed pieces that may contain bone, tendon, rubbery lard, whatever. In fact, the unofficial motto appears to me the tougher to chew, the better. So while I was very proud of myself for tackling the plate of meat on my own (see photo!), I ended up picking through to find the pieces that happened to be only meat and causally shoveled the rest onto Brandt’s plate.

My downward spiral hastened when we moved in with Chris and Cathryn. I think the average South African eats meat 7 times a day, which is impressive considering there are traditionally only 3 meals in a day. Let’s just say there was no need to ask “Where’s the beef?” when it came to dinner. But I did good. I even made a pretty good meatloaf for dinner when it was my turn to cook. Then I went to George’s and his housemate asked me to make sure the stew of chicken livers and other miscellaneous organs didn’t dry out or burn while they played racquetball. Ummm…ok. So I dutifully stirred and added water to the bloody, meaty stew. Fortunately, George realized that one would be over the line for me and didn’t even attempt to serve it to me. Not a problem since there were 3 other forms of meat on the menu. When I left Mwanza, I was running to get back on the old vegetarian wagon. My excursion to the dark side is officially over. Sorry Lynne. I tried. J

Serengeti...Wildlife...Finally!!

2008-06-24T05:08:00.001-07:00

Mwanza is less than two hours from the western gate of the Serengeti. Since I had only seen African wildlife from the train and bus on the Ifakara trip and George hadn’t ever been to the Serengeti even though he’s lived in Tanzania for 5 years, Cathryn, George and I anted up $200 each (!!) for a day trip into the famous park. The best time for wildlife viewing is early morning and early evening so to make sure we got the most out of our $600, the driver picked us up at George’s at 5am. We saw a beautiful sunrise over the plain on our way and by 7am were through the park gate. The roof of the land cruiser pops up so we can stand up inside and look around in all directions. We saw wildlife almost immediately- a few wildebeest that didn’t bother migrating to Kenya with the bulk of the herd mingling with zebra and gazelle on the right and a pair of ostrich on the left. We were cruising along slowly taking it all in when a cheetah strolled across the road about 25 yards in front of the truck and into the tall grass on the other side. He sat watching us with just his head peaking out for awhile and then stood up looked back at us and continued on his way. Cheetahs are endangered and not all that easy to see so our day was off to a good start.

A little ways up we say a huge giraffe that was almost completely black- a sign that he was old and looking for a mate. The day went on with barely a dull moment- warthogs trotting off with their tails pointing straight in the air, baboons with babies on their backs, monkeys, mongoose families, a jackal, and more types of herbivorous than I could ever remember. Cathryn was an incredible spotter- there’s this, look at that…she was on fire! Shortly before lunch, we pulled up to the Grumeti River to find hippos floating in a pool on the upstream side of a bend and huge crocs on the other side. After lunch besides the river, we found tree eating twigas (Swahili for giraffe), a lone elephant drinking and spraying water from his trunk out on the plain, and more zebras, antelope, wildebeest, Cape buffalo, storkes, etc. The wildlife was plentiful and because we entered through the less used western gate and it was the middle of the rainy season, the people were not. We passed a few other cars on the road but all our we had all our wildlife viewing experiences to ourselves. From what I’ve heard, this is not the norm in the Serengeti and other popular parks on the Tanzania safari circuit. However, there was one safari gem that was eluding us. We hadn’t seen any lions. I had been on the As the day went on, the only thing that was eluding us was lion. I had been on the lookout for lions all day but all I was managing to spot was dead logs and rocks. The driver headed towards some circling vultures and we found a heard of zebra with a hyena in front with a zebra leg hanging out of his mouth. The vultures, who were just as tall as the hyena when sitting up, were inching their way for a piece of the action.

As we were watching, the driver says, I think there are lions in that tree and he points to this bushy tree a ways off. I looked with my camera lens, George did the same with his even bigger lens and we both saw nothing but a bushy tree. He said he was pretty sure there’s a lioness with 6 cubs in the tree. Cathryn took the binoculars and also saw nothing. We thought he’s out of his mind. To prove his point, he turned the truck and drove towards the bush. Sure enough, out popped a lioness and two subadults (teenagers) and four cubs. We couldn’t believe it. The subadults led the cubs to a nearby bush with the mother kept an eye on us, grunting her dissatisfaction with our arrival. It was awesome to see (even though we probably shouldn’t have been disturbing them). After her family was relocated to another bush, she just sat looking out over the Serengeti in an idyllic safari scene.

On our way out of the park, Cathryn and George assured me that game viewing really doesn’t get much better than the day we had. But it wasn’t over yet, we came across a pack of bull elephants (George could tell they weren’t females somehow). Usually packs are all female and males are solitary but occasionally they form batchelor herds…yet another unique sight. They were tramping along right besides the road. Although we had seen a couple of elephants throughout the day, they had all been loners and at a distance. This pack was basically in a line marching down the side of the road. They were so big and surprisingly graceful for their size. It was a beautiful sight. The perfect end to a great day! It makes it all worth it.

Swahili bootcamp

2008-06-24T05:05:00.000-07:00

We're going to Swahili bootcamp in Iringa for a two weeks! I'm not sure if we'll have any internet access while we're there so there may not be new posts for awhile. We hope everyone is well and enjoying summer!

Good Times in Mwanza

2008-06-15T07:29:00.000-07:00

I was joined by friends from Dar for a getaway weekend in Mwanza. Here's Cathryn and I at the Hotel Tilipia, Mwanza's poshiest (and I think only) lakeside hotel/restaurant/bar.

Here's George and I on top of the boulders on Mwanza's Capri Point. George used to live with Chris and Cathryn in Dar but he recently moved to Mwanza to work for Goodyear selling gigantic tires for earthmovers to the mining companies near Mwanza. He now lives in an amazing house overlooking the lake. The sunset picture in the last post was taken from his deck.

And here's the group of us having Habachi dinner at the Tiliapia.
I love Mwanza!!

Science in the Bush: Lake Victoria

2008-06-11T07:36:00.000-07:00

With my research permit finally in hand, I booked a flight to Mwanza on the southern shore of Lake Victoria to join up with a graduate student I met at the University of Dar es Salaam that’s doing research complimentary to what I’m hoping to do. All the delays meant that I was able to make it out to the lake just in time for her last two days of data collection. Not what she and I had planned but at least enough for me to scope out the site and make a plan for next time. Mwanza is Tanzania’s 2nd largest city and the setting of a documentary film called Darwin’s Nightmare about the social impacts of the overseas exportation of Lake Victoria’s massive and nonnative Nile Perch and how it provides a cover for the illegal smuggling of weapons into Africa. My expectations for Mwanza were based on this film (which I highly recommend to all you Netflixers out there) and to put it plainly, I was a bit scarred to be venturing there on my own. In Darwin’s Nightmare, Mwanza was a helacious place filled with poverty, prostitutes and homeless street children. My fears weren’t assuaged when I asked Baraka, the student I was meeting, if she could book me a room where she was staying. Her response was “I don’t think it would be good for you to stay where I’m staying. It would be safer for you to stay in town.” Ummm…ok. So I booked myself a room at the Christmas Tree Hotel and hoped for the best. I headed to the airport the next day for my first AirTanzania flight. I’m told they usually run about 5 hours late which would have put me into Mwanza at midnight. Not good. Luckily we boarded on time and the only weird thing was that you had to stop and pickout your bags from the pile of checked bags strewn on the runway and put them on a cart to be loaded on the plane yourself. Apparently the baggage tags that clearly say MWZ for Mwanza are just decorations. Baggage retrieval on the other end was even more sketchy. The plane was a full (and surprisingly nice) 737 which must seat about 200 people. Baggage claim in Mwanza was a tiny room with 3 one meter square openings in the concrete wall which dudes shoved everyone’s bags through. It was pretty much mass chaos. After a few minutes in the baggage mosh pit, I decided a better strategy was to wait by the door and make sure no one was taking off with my bag. When the dust settled (literally), I got my bag and braced myself for Mwanza. Before we reached the city I got my first glimpse of Lake Victoria. I could immediately see why the British named it for their queen. Sparkling blue water as far as the eye can see with a lakeshore of rolling green hills covered by huge, round granite boulders stacked awkwardly on top of each other (kind of like Joshua Tree for those that have been). Then we crossed the bridge and entered the town. My first thought was am I still in Tanzania? Mwanza was perfect. Nicely paved roads with curbs and sidewalks! Brightly painted buildings, traffic circles and everyone calm driving following basic traffic laws, and no litter! This place is a well kept secret.

The next morning I headed down to the research station to go out on the lake. We loaded up gear into a long wooden boat with an outboard engine and cruised down Mwanza Gulf to Baraka’s field site near the mouth of the Isanga River. It was breathtaking- miles of virtually untouched hilly shoreline covered in these awesome rock formations. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera because I couldn’t risk getting it wet (which I would have for sure). Baraka is studying how nearshore plants filter and alter the quality of the water entering the lake from the river and the watershed. One of these plants is water hyacinth, which is native to South America and invasive in Lake Victoria. In the late 1990s, this plant, which grows in these huge floating mats, was choking almost all the bays and nearshore areas of the lake causing major problems with on-lake transportation, fishing, water in-takes, etc. It declined through the early 2000s and is now rebounding. My interest is in the affect of these plants on water flow into the lake. We got to the bay into which the river flows to find that a huge, island-sized mat of water hyacinth, papyrus and reeds growing 2 meters tall had floated across and completely blocked the entrance sometime in the last 2 days since Baraka was last there. We cruised to a tiny lakeside village where people probably subsist mostly by fishing and only access to the rest of the world via the lake and hired 3 dudes with machetes. We took them back to the site and they climbed up onto the mat and started hacking away at the plants to make a passage for our boat. Imagine cutting down shrubs with a machete while standing on air mattress that you float on in a swimming pool that’s covered with broken tree branches. When they got a chunk loose, they tied it up and we dragged it away with the boat. It took hours just to cut it down enough so that we could push and pull the boat across the top of the vegetation for 20 feet to the channel of open water on the other side of the mat. It was arduous work and these guys all cut up and soaking wet. We collected the samples, saw a baby crocodile and headed back out through the path to find another island of vegetation was closing up the bay further out. There was only a boat width left for us to pass through and just after we crossed out to the open water we watched this “island” move across and seal off the bay. If we had taken 2 minutes longer, they would have had to hack a path through this island too. Insane. We dropped the guys off at their village and stopped along the way back to research station to buy fresh Nile tilapia from local fisherman who were in some cases out fishing on nothing more than a few tree branches tied together with vines just big enough to sit on and only partially floating in this lake where there are massive Nile crocs. We arrived back at the research station just as the sun was starting to set. It was a great great day!!

Holy Bureaucracy Batman! (Part 3: The Bittersweet End)

2008-06-03T06:55:00.000-07:00

Like all epic stories, this one is a trilogy...With my stamped carbon copy bank deposit receipt in hand, I headed directly back to the accounting department at COSTECH. The accounting guy accepted by deposit receipt, pulled out his ledger and gave me a COSTECH receipt. I take that up to the clearance guy, he says ok, come back tomorrow and pick your research clearance. Victoriously, I leave COSTECH and head to Ardhi University where I’ve been trying to workout an alternative research collaboration since my original plans fell through to check on my immigration letter from them. Although I’d been making research plans with them for close to two months, they decide that they need for me to apply to be a student at the university, which amongst various forms and documents requires copies of my diplomas, before they can write me an immigration letter. Since my diplomas are in boxes in a storage space in California and therefore impossible to get to, I try to appease their bureaucracy, with copies of my transcripts from my B.S. and M.S. from my application file at UCSB. For three days, I went back and forth with variations on the fax number to Ardhi University with the administrative assistant at UCSB over email because the fax won’t go through and the 11 hour times change means we can have only one email exchange in a day (Brandt had exactly the same problem when he tried to have his transcripts faxed to IHRDC. Apparently the fax machines in the offices here are purely decorations). Finally she scanned and emailed them and I forwarded them on to the professor at Ardhi gently reminding him how urgently I needed that letter. When I arrive to pick up my letter, it’s this weird and very vague statement about my conditional acceptance to Ardhi University, pending the receipt of copies of my diplomas. Trying to hide my frustration, I explain that it is impossible for me to get copies of my diplomas and that my transcripts clearly state that I have received my degrees and say that the letter wasn’t really what I was expecting as it said nothing about the research project I had agreed to help with. He said well just try this one and if it doesn’t work, come back and I’ll write you another one. Great. So I take my letter, at least it had all sorts of official stamps on it which really seems to be the most important thing.
Meanwhile, I go back to COSTECH the next morning. A woman who works in the clearance guy’s office tells me he’ll be in a meeting all day today. Here’s your research clearance. It looks like it’s all ready but for some reason he didn’t sign in. You should come back tomorrow. I get the guys cell phone number so I can call him in the morning to make sure he’s there and on the second try I get my research clearance. With my letters, clearance, 5 passport photos, transcripts, financial guarantee, and $US 120 exchanged from shillings at an exchange bureau rather than the bank, I embark on the two dala journey to Dennis’s office. There I fill out the application form, in triplicate with carbon paper. I love that use of carbon paper is still alive and well in Tanzania. I think it faded out of existence in the U.S. when I was in elementary school. Meanwhile, Dennis drafts a letter on behalf of his boss who’s currently in the U.K. stating something about my affiliation with the local Rotary Club. Chaos breaks out when they can’t find the boss’s official stamp. I also love the stamping of everything. The only way it could be better is if they busted out wax seals for closing envelopes. Dennis asks me for my passport photos- I hope the background is blue he says. Fortunately it was, I think I may have lost it if I had to go get two more sets of photos made (they come in 4s and of course the application requires 5) because the background was the wrong color. In the end we assemble a file that is a half an inch thick which Dennis hands off to his sidekick Robert to take to the immigration office. At this point, I have 5 days left on my current visa. Don’t worry. No problem they tell me.
Done with Dar, I say bye to Cathryn and hop on the dala to beautiful Bagamoyo. I get up here to find that IHRDC has done almost nothing about Brandt’s residency permit. Four days tick by and I hear nothing. A bit panicked, I call Dennis. He tells me to bring my passport down and they’ll get me a month extension. I ask if he can get one from Brandt as well since all anyone at IHRDC does is tell him not to worry about it. In the end my residency permit came through about 4 days before the extension expired. Brandt is still waiting for his. It was probably a bit unnecessary for me to bore everyone with a trilogy but it consumed my life for 2 weeks and the ridiculous details of this story really illustrate what it takes to get anything and everything done in this country. There is no such thing as a simple task here. It’s all a journey.

Holy Bureaucracy Batman! (Part 2: The Bank)

2008-05-29T08:14:00.000-07:00

The saga continues....Yes, making a $300 deposit in a bank account is worthy of a blog post all by itself. It should be a simple and straightforward task. But not in Tanzania. For starters, I only have US$ 250 in cash and a $50 traverlers check. I go to the National Commerce Bank (NBC) branch in a nearby mall to make the deposit. I stand in a massive line for some ridiculous amount of time. No sorry we don’t take travelers checks and the ATMs have been down for 2 days so I can’t pull out any more Tanzanian shillings to convert into dollars. So I tell him just to deposit the $250 and I hope that COSTECH will accept the travelers check. One of my hundred dollar bills has a tiny tear in it (like someone stuck a tack through it at some point. The teller looks at the bill, looks at me and shakes his head. He runs all the bills through some machine that confirms that they are in fact U.S. currency and then tells me that he can’t accept the bill. I don’t even bother to argue. I take my money and leave. The next morning, I take a tiny piece of tape and tape the tiny tear back together, Cathryn lends me enough shillings to buy $50 and we go to different branch of NBC. I go to the teller line while Cathryn goes to customer service to deal with some issue she’s having with her account there. I get to the teller and I can’t hear a word she’s saying through the inch thick glass because they are blaring ABBA out of the speakers in the bank lobby. I tell her I can’t hear her because of the music and she just keeps talking in the same voice. So I proceed to tell her that I need to first buy fifty dollars and then deposit $300 into this account. She responds but I can’t hear her. I continue to tell her I can’t hear her until the teller next to her gets up and walks over turns done the music just enough so that if I strain I can hear the woman tell me that what I want to do is impossible. That’s right. Exchanging currency and making a deposit. Two very basic bank functions that are for some reason impossible. I go to customer service where I find Cathryn saying to the women there, “Do you know what NBC stands for? It stands for No Body Cares.” The response was a very literal, “No madame that’s not what it stands for. It stands for National Bank of Commerce.” I can see I’m in for it already. My attempts at attaining customer service were no better than Cathryn’s. However, I did learn that the music is blaring in celebration of customer appreciation week. Oh the irony. Moving on to the manager’s office, the first thing out of his mouth is they can’t help me because I don’t have an account there. Cathryn responds, “Well I do, at least for now but I’m going to close it because the service here is so bad.” At this, the manager says he’s got to go figure out what the exchange rate is (at the branch I was at yesterday they had it posted on the wall so I know I’m not making a completely off the wall request here). While the manager is doing that, one of the customer service women comes in and asks me why I didn’t just go to an exchange bureau somewhere and exchange the money before I came to the bank. Ummmmm…maybe because this is the bank and banks exchange currency! She leaves. The manager comes back with a print out with a horrible exchange rate. I think about arguing but really what’s the point. He tells me how much in shillings it will be for US$50 and sends me back to the teller line. I rejoin the disco party in the bank lobby and wait my turn. I’m lucky enough to get the same teller as last time. The manager brings her the exchange rate print out. I give her my shillings. While she does her thing, I fill out the deposit form which is three sheets with carbon paper slide in between and requires a ridiculous amount of my personal information. Then comes time to hand over the dollars. I slipped the torn and taped hundred in the middle of the other bills and crossed my fingers. She scanned them through her little machine. Tore off the bottom carbon copy, stamped, signed and dated it and hand it back to me. Mission accomplished. Sweet Success!

Holy Bureaucracy Batman! (Part 1: The Bribe)

2008-05-28T07:55:00.000-07:00

Today is a proud day for me. I am officially a Class C Resident of the United Republic Tanzania. I’d sing the Tanzanian national anthem if it knew it. Attaining this revered status was one of the most ridiculous and convoluted experiences of my life. Since I bailed on the jerk professor I had intended to work with, I couldn’t get my residency through the University of Dar es Salaam as planned. My scholarship is through Rotary International and one of the local Rotarians is conveniently the president of Toyota Tanzania. He told one of his HR people, Dennis, to help me get my residency permit. I would never ever have managed it on my own. So Brandt left for Bagamoyo and for two weeks, I ran around Dar like a chicken with my head cut off, taking dalas all over the city (as many as 5 in day) to round up all the paperwork. On the top of the list was my research clearance from the Tanzanian Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH). I had sent my research clearance application last October, 3 months before I left for Tanzania and heard nothing. My emails inquiring about the status of my clearance have all gone unanswered so I decided to just show up at the office to figure out what the deal was. The guy whose job it is to process research clearances for all foreign scientists claims he hasn’t received my application (or any of my emails and assured me I hadn’t sent any emails because he always responds to every email always). He sends me down to accounting to see if there is a record of my application fee. The accounting guy takes me to a woman who pulls out a ledger book and casually flips through the pages looking for my name. No computer. No electronic records. No way of knowing whether my application was received or not. I go back upstairs and ask if I bring all the application materials (including another $50 travelers check for application which is probably the reason the original application has magically disappeared), how long to get my clearance approved? It will take 3 months. I ask if there’s anyway to get it any sooner and he just smirks. I go home and forward the guy the emails that we had previously exchanged to jog his memory. I get no response. I go back to Dennis. He says he knows this guy. He paid him a $300 bribe less than a year ago to get research clearances for a group of students that came over to work in one of the regfugee camps. So Dennis gets on the phone with the guy and sets up a meeting for the next day. We have a little chat which is mostly this guy making up excuses for not doing his job. Then they send me out of the room to go (re)pay my $50 application fee. When I come back, Dennis is ready to go. All I have to do is go deposit $300 into the COSTECH bank account and bring back the receipt and my clearance will be ready to go. It was like magic!

Food and Capitalism

2008-05-23T04:15:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite Tanzanian street foods is sugar cane (miwa). The street venders buy a couple of full stalks (which can be six feet tall), then use machetes to flay off the hard husk and chop it into pieces as thick as a good steak and about the same diameter as an Oreo cookie. They then put five or six pieces into a small clear plastic bag and sell them for 100 tsh (9 cents!!). You bite off a chunk and chew and suck the sugar crystals from the woody pulp. After you are done chewing, you have a mouthful of dry wood-like fiber. If you want to fit in, you just casually spit out the remains onto the ground. When in Rome…

Other common street food is grilled quarter pieces of corn, peeled green oranges (the oranges are greenish yellow, so for the longest time I refused to get them because I thought that they were unripe and sour), handfulls of peanuts, hard-boiled eggs, and coconuts. Everything but the coconuts are 100 tsh (coconuts are 600-700), so they are all quite popular with the local Tanzanians. The results in that the vendors are everywhere, the roasted corn and orange venders are usually in the same place everyday, while the others just roam an area. It is capitalism in its most pure and basic form.

In fact, capitalism is in full effect in Tanzania, at least from my experience in Dar and Bagamoyo. Everybody is selling something. Though most people selling their stuff from a small duka (store), many just roam the streets with their wares in their hands. I have seen these portable, one-man stores selling kitchen wear, pillows, boot-legged DVD’s, women’s clothes, shoes, knifes, books, etc. The funniest two walking stores I have seen so far where the dude selling a balance--not balances--just one balance. I think this gentleman did not really understand his buying public. The other guy was carrying one coat rack (yes, a full coat rack), clothes hangers, and pillows. He just stood by the edge of the road looking like wished he was anywhere but where he was at that moment. I guess if they make one or two sales a day, they are okay.

Back to the small dukas, they line the streets everywhere. And the funny thing is that you will have three stores in row all selling the exact same thing. Then down the street, you’ll see three dukas all selling the same again. These stores are usually small; most are nothing more than a tin-roofed shack with no electricity. They really don’t advertise, other name a small name directly over the entrance. So you have to walk around looking into each store to often find what you want, but if you look hard enough, you can find anything. It is really interesting to see all the people all doing their thing, finding their niche, and making an honest living.

Skype Ready

2008-05-17T05:42:00.000-07:00

We are officially skype-able on the weekends!! The wireless internet at the lab where Brandt is working is super slow during the week when everyone is here but we just did a weekend test run with my mom and had crystal clear reception and video!! If you want to talk with us, our log in names are brandtph and robyn.smyth . I think we'll be online again tomorrow afternoon (morning in U.S.) Yay!!

Kwahari (Goodbye) Dar!!

2008-05-16T08:26:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the delay in getting this blog entry up. Robyn said that I had better do it soon, as I was creating a “blog-jam”. She thought she was pretty witty coming up with this play on words…ahhhh, the delusions of grandeur. Anyway, we finally moved out of Dar is a Slum. Hallelujah! We packed our bags a couple of weeks ago and moved 70 kilometers north to a sleepy town called Bagamoyo.

Bagamoyo, TZ is a small town located right along the coast. It is an old town that the Germans colonized in the late 19th century. Before that, it was a bustling port town where East African slaves where shipped to Zanzibar and then onto the Arabian Peninsula. However, over the past century, most of the buildings have decayed into ruins about town. The TZ government doesn’t allow them to be torn down; so many these beautiful buildings are derelict and falling apart. Though, this decay makes for an incredibly picturesque walk between home and work. Bagamoyo has money from tourism and the fishing industry, and I guess that a European company is building a pilot sugercane/biofuel plant just north of town, so the people here are relatively well off. In town, there are a couple of small art schools, a larger performing arts college, and the national TZ dance company. Because of this, the town has a very artsy feel to it. The other night, as I was strolling home around dusk, after stopping to watch some league soccer game (both teams had jerseys), I walked by the performing arts college's small auditorium and heard singing. They were putting on a free show—TZ rap, traditional music, free-form brass band jazz, etc. It was pretty incredible. I guess Africa isn’t so bad now!!!

So we have moved to a little paradise up the coast, but why? Well, I finally found a great volunteer opportunity with IHRDC (the same research group that we visited out in Ifakara). Traditionally, their focus is on all things malaria--epidemiology, surveillance, treatment options, control strategies, etc. However, they are currently planning on expanding into the other major public health diseases that are a huge problem in Africa, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis (TB). So, at the IHRDC’s Bagamoyo site, they are planning to construct a high containment laboratory (a BioSafety Level 3 lab, or BSL3 lab) to begin clinical trials of TB-related drugs and vaccines. They also want to expand into basic epidemiological research of TB and set up Masters and PhD level programs for TZ students. My role is to consult on setting up the lab, help in developing the research program, train new workers, and write grants. In the US, this would be a challenge, but here in Africa, it will be an adventure (to say the least). In exchange for my services, they've rented us a nice, clean, safe, furnished 2 bedroom cottage with a fridge, hot water and even air con. Just what we needed! So whereas we are gone from the source of pain, suffering, and humor than was Dar, I am sure that some of that void will be filled with stories from my work.

I think I should describe the working conditions for a bit, so you all have a mental framework for all future happenings. My “office” is directly looking out at the Indian Ocean (maybe 75 meters away). I feel the cool ocean breeze coming off the water, watch the smaller dhows (a traditional fishing boat from this region) come in late afternoon from fishing all morning. I believe that this is pretty much the nicest office one can have (Yes, even better than the lab back at UCSB). However, I say “office” because it is actually just a plastic chair, a rickety wooden table, and my lab-top. I move these items about the first floor of the building depending on sun placement, whether it is raining, and whether I need a power outlet. I often set up on a corner of the patio in the back. Luckily they have wireless. They are fixing up the second floor for offices, but they have been doing this for the past year. So even though they look like they are almost done, it may be a couple more months of my wall less office existence.

The research building in which we are going to set up the BSL3 lab is on the grounds of the Bagamoyo District Hospital. But, this hospital is nothing close to what we think of as a hospital in the US, or even in Dar. It is a set of 10 to 12 long, one-story, block-buildings set on about a 10 acre plot. There is one ambulance for the whole district (90,000 people). If you are sick and are staying in the ward, you have to have people bring you food, since the hospital does not provide it. So often a whole family sets up around the hospital grounds for the duration of the stay. It feels more like a camp for sick people. But instead of wood campfires, they burn medical waste—right by the road in an open fire pit. I recently saw the trash men picking up the remains using rubber gloves, masks, shovels and small plastic garbage bins. They were dumping it into the back of an open bed truck. Nice. Regardless of the above, it is not a dreary place, and people seem relatively calm and content.
So hopefully, the blog-jam has been cleared out and more blogs will come. So until next time, “safari salaama”.

Insane Traffic + Horrible Roads + Massive Rain = Total Mayhem

2008-05-11T12:21:00.000-07:00

So when they say rainy season, they’re not kidding. The rain comes down in sheets for hours at a time, sometimes multiple times a day, every day. The paved streets here are lined with open gutters that are about 3 feet deep and one foot wide. Before the rains started, they were about a third full with this festering, green, smelly water and, of course, various forms of trash. These are the city’s storm drains. With the first big rain, they immediately filled with the massive amounts of water pouring off the street, got clogged up by all the trash, overflowed, and flooded the streets. Brandt was with Chris in his Land Rover as he drove down a stretch of road close to two football field lengths that was flooded in at least 3 feet of water. There were teenage boys standing by to get paid to run through the water in front of the car to show you how deep it was. At a semi-dry high point mid-way through people were waiting to jump on the top of the truck to get a lift the rest of the way. So if you have a real SUV, and you know how to drive it, I guess this no problem. But many people are confused or delusional and they go driving their piece o’ crap sedan into the water, where it promptly stalls. And this is where it really gets interesting. The second a car is stopped for any reason, all the cars, trucks, daladalas drive directly up to it’s bumper door as if they are going to drive over/through the stopped vehicle. Unfortunately, the laws of physics still apply in Tanzania and it is not possible to drive through another solid object and so a massive traffic jam results. We have seen this over and over again. One night we were with Cathryn going to meet friends for dinner and we sat in a traffic jam for an hour and half. It was on one of the main roads going downtown. It’s one lane going each way and a third lane under construction. Cars are already driving in the half finished lane. As soon as the traffic stops moving, cars coming from behind start driving in the oncoming traffic lane. This is standard practice. That lane promptly filled up with a line of cars and came to halt so they they just started making more lanes on either side until there was a giant blob of traffic 5-6 cars wide all trying to drive down the one lane that goes in that direction. We inch along in the proper lane. Brandt who is sitting in the truck bed part of the car starts getting cranky starts yelling out the window asking the drivers of the growing blob of cars if they think they’re special. Obviously this is a rhetorical question because clearly they are all special because why else would they be driving on the wrong side of the road/in drainage ditch/through the yard of the business along the road. When we finally get to the intersection that was probably only a hundred yards away when the jam started, we find a six lane blob of cars from the other direction driving directly into the 6 lane blob from our direction, a bunch of overwhelmed, untrained traffic cops discussing the weather or something not very useful over their radios (I think I’m going to devote a separate post entirely to the traffic cop situation), and a couple of random dudes attempting to direct cars through the one car width space between a tree and the road along one side of the intersection. It was truly unbelievable. The dirt roads have become gigantic mud pits. We have to walk about a mile from Chris and Cathryn’s to get to a place where we can get a bus or taxi. It’s essentially an obstacle course. Three steps on that high patch of grass over there, then hop across the flowing stream on the rocks that someone kindly placed there, try to find some semi-solid mud to walk on over to the other edge to get around the foot deep, swimming pool sized puddle. It’s the closest I’ll ever come to being on Double Dare, the Nickolodean game show. The main difference is that the slime is brown instead of green and it smells gross. I’m seriously contemplating investing in some waders. They live behind these huge factories and there is some fluorescent purple stuff coming out of one of them and mixing with all the water on the street. I’m worried I’m going to start growing a sixth toe or something. And of course all the while, every local I walk past feels compelled to remind me that I’m mzungu (definitely not going to be forgetting that any time soon) and about a quarter of them ask me for money. Apparently the fact that I’m walking through the mud pit obstacle course is not enough of an indication that I don’t have a lot of money to spare.

Randomness...

2008-05-01T04:15:00.000-07:00

One thing that continues to amaze me as I walk around the streets is that there are shit-loads of chickens in this country. Everybody has a chicken (or ten). At least I think everyone has a chicken. They can be found rummaging through every garbage heap and random grass lot from here to Christmas, everywhere but in people's yards. I assume that people can identify their chickens quite easily like,“Mine is the dirty white one missing half her feathers, yours is the slightly less dirty white one missing half of her feathers.” I guess when they are ready for some kuku na ugali (chicken and a white, corn paste-like food that Tanzanians LOVE) they run out to the road/garbage heap and grab their chicken. Trust me, grain fed chicken has nothing on the garbage fed variety.

Less in number than the chickens, but similar in overall biomass, are the goats. You find them grazing everywhere, roaming (apparently ownerless) through the weeds and vacant lots. They stroll along, leisurely chewing on anything at head level or below. I have to be honest...I really, really want a goat. If we ever get a yard, the deal will go down, regardless of what of Robyn says. In fact, I think I’ll name the goat after her. Cool!

I'll be writing a blog about my new job and moving up to Bagamoyo soon. Also Robyn is visiting Lake Victoria (Mwanza) right now, and I'll be heading up to Arusha/Moshi to spend a week up there. It is close to Mt. Meru, Mt. Kilimanjaro, and the Serengeti. We will focus on the mountains for now and hopefully have some good pictures. Later.

Olympic-Sized Hype

2008-04-27T06:57:00.000-07:00

When Robyn and I got to Dar three years…I mean…months ago, one of the first things that caught our eyes while we were aimlessly wandering the streets of Dar were the giant billboards announcing that the Olympic torch would be passing through the glorious streets of Dar es Salaam on April 14th, 2008. At the time, we both thought this could be a really great cultural experience for us to check out. So, we put the date into our mental calendars.

As most of you know, over the past 3 months, China has been clamping down on the Tibetans, showing their true colors in Sudan, etc. As such, many Western countries are being called upon by their people to boycott these Olympics, and as manifestation of this anger, the torch relay has met with strong and physical demonstrations from London to San Francisco.

I recently learned a little history of the relay itself. It was stopped after the 1936 Berlin Olympics and was successfully revitalized for the 2004 Games in Athens, Greece. So this is only the second torch relay since WWII. For the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China decided that the torch would have a singular touchdown in all of Africa. Fortuitously, that location happened to be our home away from home--Dar is Aslum, Tanzania. As result of this honor, and President Bush’s recent unprecedented 4-day visit, Tanzania is experiencing a lot of national pride. It seems to Tanzanians that Tanzania finally matters to the rest of the world.

So a couple of days before the actual relay, the Chinese rolled into town all decked out in their newly acquired Olympic gear. The day before the event (Saturday), Robyn and I were helping some friends set up a ballroom for an annual drunk-fest, the Tanzanian Rugby Ball. The Rugby Ball was taking place in one of the nicest hotels in Dar, which the Chinese had obviously heard about, because they had set up camp right next to us. All Saturday afternoon, evening, night, and late night (they were still buzzing at 2 AM) swarms of eager Chinese were running around talking on cell phones, typing away on lab tops, writing stuff on various sized paper products, and having important-looking meetings. I was kind of amazed that they traveled with so many people (at least 200) and were working so frantically for simply running a torch two miles down a road. It seemed we were in store for something exciting.

Beyond the giant billboards that had been up for months, there was little information available about the actual event. We ended up having to get information on the time and the route from the American Embassy website. The relay was to start at the Tazara train station (the train-line we took out to Ifakara, which was constructed by the Chinese) at 1 PM and was to proceed 2 miles to the stadium where there was going to be some type of fancy ceremony starting around 3PM. Awesome! Our friend Luis picked us up and we headed down to the national stadium. Upon arriving at the stadium at about 2:20PM, we found hundreds of people milling about in a drizzling rain, but found nothing indicative that there was anything exciting about to happen. Although there had been no mention anywhere, you needed tickets to enter the stadium but how to get tickets was a complete mystery to everyone there. We only saw Chinese people entering the stadium. After a solid ten minutes of waiting and milling and wondering when something cool would happen, the police/troops rolled up to the scene. In the States, a similar scene would not fill me with any feeling other than apathy--“Okay, the cops are here. Whatever. Where's the torch?" Ummm…let’s just say that the cops in Tanzania give off a completely different “vibe” than your average American police officer (see pictures). They don’t exactly instill in you feelings like, “Wow, they obviously have everything under control”, and “Yes, I trust this wide-eyed, overwhelmed, undertrained 20 year old male to properly wield that grenade launcher/assault rifle”. In addition, there were too many of them that seemed ready to beat the shit out of someone for no reason. I also felt particularly exposed as a white man entirely surrounded by black people who were all 6 inches shorter than me (see picture). It was all a bit unnerving. This was definitely NOT the cultural experience I was expecting when we arrived.

The troops arrived in the back of a couple of beat-up old trucks, obviously having NO idea of what to do or where to stand. There were a couple of older, fatter cops who showed up a few minutes later and walked around like roosters pushing the troops into place. Then the "crowd control" began to take place. Instead of coolly and calmly telling the citizens that they had to move from a certain area, the cops seem to decide that a better way to get people to move was by driving a truck slowly and directly into the crowd. In addition to the threat of crushing injuries, the cops also use good old physical force. One older cop decided to move a particularly seedy-looking Robyn aside by grabbing her breast. So to avoid further groping, our group moved away from the stadium entrance to a less crowded spot 200 yards up the road. So we waited for 40 uneventful minutes. Finally some dude shows up in a brand-spanking new Olympic jogging outfit. It appeared that he would be carrying the torch for this leg (a couple hundred yards). Knowing Tanzania, he was either a: A) corrupt politician, B) corrupt businessman, or C) an old Tanzanian sport figure. I really didn’t care what he was, to me he was just some dude half-assedly stretching, hoping not to blow out his hammy jogging 200 yards. Olympic Fever—Catch It!!!

So we continued to wait and wait. Finally around the corner about 400 yards away, the torch caravan arrived. As I mentioned earlier, the torch relay was attacked by protestors recently, so the organizers (rightfully so) decided to increase the security around the runners. However, based on the fact that you literally have to punch a Tanzanian in the face just to get him to say something negative, I feel safe in saying they went overboard—way, WAYYYY overboard. You could barely see the torch- it looked like an oversize match that was about to go out- and you could not see the runner because there was a platoon of soliders jogging as a solid wall along either side of the road. The pictures below are an accurate representation of what every person, 8 feet and under, experienced as the torch mob passed by.

Sadly, the 2008 Beijing Olympic torch relay was an absolute joke, disappointment, waste of time, and embarrassment in every conceivable manner. Though this event was all those things and more, one thing it was not, was a surprise. After all, T.I.T.S! I just wish that it had been something special, something unique we saw while we were over here. But even more so, I felt bad for the Tanzanian who was hopefully expecting (and deserved) more than a poorly executed political PR campaign by the Chinese and Tanzanian governments. Though maybe they knew exactly what they were in for that day and just enjoyed being in the spotlight for that one Sunday afternoon.

Mmmmm....stuff from home

2008-04-22T10:29:00.000-07:00

A bunch of you have inquired about where to send us stuff here. We still don't a PO Box because we're still trying to figure everything out but Cathryn said we can use her PO Box. There is the distinct possibility that it will never get here so don't send anything valuable. Things like ripped DVDs, candy, magazines would be awesome! In the Newsweeks we are reading, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson are all the buzz. I think keeping the packages small will make them look less interesting. We've also heard the secret to success is to make the top layer tampons and/or pads. Apparently that really scares off would-be thieves and it's a bonus for me because tampons are hard to find and expensive here. Let us know if you send anything so we know to be on the lookout. The address is Robyn Smyth c/o Cathryn Morris P.O. Box 106028 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

We've got lots of good posts coming up...the Olympic torch relay, the ridiculous insanity of getting our residency permits and most importantly moving out of Dar. We'll try to put up more pictures. I really don't carry my camera around with me too much. I don't want it to get stolen before I go on safari. Very selfish I know. Anyway, stay tuned!

Where's the Love?

2008-04-21T01:08:00.000-07:00

We're starting to feel lonely and unloved again because hardly anyone has been posting comments even though the hit counter keeps counting. Where is the love people? Please send us some comments or emails about what's going on with you so that Brandt will stop crying himself to sleep at night. For this month, The Commentor of the Month Prize goes to Cris, representing the Cotter lab. We haven't decided what Commentor of the Month gets you but I'm pretty sure you don't want to miss out. e-Hugs all around!! Robyn and Brandt

Morning Mugging

2008-04-15T13:35:00.001-07:00

I was getting a lift to the bank with Cathryn today. She drives this South African version of an El Camino-it's low to the ground and like a car in the front but has a pickup bed with a cap in the back. The Middlebury womens' ultimate team used to sing this cheer about the El Camino...the front is like a car, the back is like a truck, the front is where you drive the back is....well anyway, Cathryn and Chris have an upstart landscaping business here in Dar and every morning she drives around and picks up her staff at the dala stops and delivers them to the work sites. So this morning I was along for the ride because it sucks walking along the flooded roads to catch the dala myself. The crew had just loaded themselves into the back and we were off to drop them at the site. We were stopped at an intersection, waiting to turn when a man ran up beside the car, reached through the open window and ripped Cathryn's gold locket from her neck. It happened so fast that by the time she screamed, the man was across the busy road and long gone. We have another friend, Luis, who is also from South Africa where crime is bad, and whenever we're in the car with him he's always telling us to put our bags or whatever on the floor. I've always complied but sort of felt he was being a bit paranoid. Apparently not. I can't believe something this actually happened. Cathryn drove on to the first site and when she got out othe car her hands where shaking and she showed me the huge red scratch marks at her neck where he grabbed at her. The necklace wasn't super valuable but it was a going away gift from a friend in South Africa, something to replace a similiar necklace from her mother that she had lost in an armed robbery in her apartment in Johannesburg shortly before moving to Tanzania. At the site, she told one of the guys that worked there what happened. He said that over the weekend someone grabbed a cell phone off someone at the very same intersection and the thief was caught by a mob of civilians and beaten to death. We don't know if that is true- I've heard tales of violent mob justice in this country but I have a hard time imagining the passive, non-confrontational Tanzanians beating someone to death over a cell phone. The whole incident really doesn't compute with me. I definitely scope out the scene and hold my bag tightly when I walk down the street but I haven't had any incidences or even seen anything that makes me think that could happen here.

So Cathryn said she thought she should go to the police station to report it. Not that she thought anything would be done about it, it certainly won't, but just for the sake of crime statistics. I've heard enough about the police and experienced enough of the bureaucracy to think that doing that would be a complete waste of time but I guess Cathryn is a better samaritan than I. She dropped me at the bank and went to the police station. So I got the rest of the story tonight when she got home. Really this part is just as crazy as the mugging itself. The woman at the station pulled out a blank piece of newsprint, got a ruler and made lines on the paper creating a form. She wrote up the headings with lines, wrote out by hand a statement about the government act of whatever that says who knows what and then questioned Cathryn about her personal information including her religion and marital status. She made some more lines and went to dictate Cathryn's statement. Cathryn asked if she could write it. No that is against procedure. So Cathryn started her statement, which the woman didn't take word for word but rather injected all sorts of qualifiers into the story. Cathryn said well I didn't say that and she said no this is procedure. This is how it get should be written. Having been in Tanzanian long enough to know a losing battle, she gives up and lets the woman write it out how ever she wants. That should be the end of it but apparently no. They must go to the scene of the crime! Cathryn asks why? Procedure. Way more patient that I would be, Cathryn drives a police officer to the scene of the crime in her car. He inquires about her religion...well specifically what kind of Christian are you? ...and her marital status along the way. He asks for her phone number. She says its on the form. No, he wants her phone number because he wants to take her out on a date. Isn't that nice. I'm pretty sure that falls into the category of sexual harrassment in the good old U.S. of A but anyway we are clearly not there. Absolutely nothing useful happens at the crime scene and the officer wants a ride back to the police station. She tells him to walk and gets on with her day.

This is the end...

2008-04-10T06:01:00.000-07:00

As you all know, our housing situation has been crazy to say the least. Well, we are now officially out of 432 Kinondoni Road. As with everything else that has happened to us here, there is grand ole tale accompanying the event.

It started out as a good day. Robyn and I headed off to meet with the head of the Ifakara research group that we visited two weeks ago. We went to talk about moving to and working at the station. The meeting was supposed to start at 11:00 AM, but he left us sitting outside his office until 11:40 AM. Near the end of our meeting, we heard the rumble of rain starting to fall. The average rainfall in March in Tanzania (the start of the rainy season) is about 15 inches. It was March 26th and we had gotten only a couple of inches of rain so far. Well, in the following four hours, the rain gods decided to get things back on track. Tropical rainstorms are awesome, so when I say it was raining, it was actually pouring water sheets of water.

After the meeting, Robyn and I stepped outside and decided to wait for the rain to subside so we could walk to the nearby daladala stop. So we waited, and waited, and waited. An hour passed by with absolutely no let up. We called a friend with a car to come pick us up. We went and got lunch and as we causally munched on pizza, the faucet continued to run and run. We finished, paid, and got dropped off at a dala stop about three miles from home. It was about 2:30 PM. We stood under a nearby tree as didn’t bring our umbrellas or raincoats…Oops!! The tree, however, provided no protection from the rain, and Robyn and I were soaked-to-the-bone, sopping wet when we stepped into the dala. Extreme moisture and overcrowding do not for a pleasant dala ride make. And yes, it was every bit as miserable as it sounds. About 100 yards into our trip home, the driver recognized that traffic was not moving, and decided to take a short cut through the back roads. Whereas the rain had slowed traffic to a standstill on all of the major paved roads, the pothole-riden, unpaved side streets where were far worse and even farther under water—at least two feet of milky brown, refuse-laden water in most places. The sewer system in Dar barely works on a dry day, but you throw three or four inches of water at the system over four hours and you get massive flooding. There was another significant contributor to the flooding in the streets…trash. Since everybody uses the streets, and especially the open stormwater canals, as trash bins, when the rains come hard and fast, the trash plugs up all the storm drains. Apparently this happens every year but everyone seems content to just let it happen. Well done people of Dar!

So our packed, damp, and smelly daladala was off to surf the back waterways of Dar. I fully expected the dala to get stuck and force us to walk through the flood waters. We turned a random corner to find a sedan stalled sideways across the middle of the road in 2 feet of water. Chaos reigned supreme as everyone decided that the flooding gave them the right to disobey every traffic rule ever invented by man and just drive straight towards the stalled car eliminating any possibility of getting it moved. So after 45 minutes of holding our breath, I was elated when we actually made it through the waterways to a main road about a half a mile from our house. Robyn and I jumped out and walked the rest of the way home; and in the process we seemed to give a lot of Tanzanians a good chuckle as they watched two totally soaked mzungu slosh their way trough the flooded streets.

We finally made it home at about 4:30 PM; three miles in two hours, I could have moon-walked to our house faster than that. We then opened the gate to our plot and found a wading pool of stormwater where the parking area used to be. We sloshed through and down the steps to the front door. As the door swung inwards, Robyn and I saw that a foot of brown sewer water was covering the floor of the entire house (see the beautiful color pictures). The water wasn’t pouring over the stairs into the house so we were surprised to see the flood inside. Turns out, the backed up drainage system was causing the water to pour into the house via the toilets. That’s right, the toilets. I cut the main power into the house knowing the wiring in the house is suspect at best. Robyn rushed to our bedroom to see if our computers, which we often leave on the floor, and her $1,200 camera, which was in a cupboard that sits on the floor, were okay. I walked into our other bedroom (the bloody rat room) and found that all of our clothing and our bags had been spared (Thank goodness!) because they weren’t on the ground. Robyn shouts that our computers are okay. We were sooo lucky, if our computers had been ruined, we would have probably headed back home to the States—the loss would have been too much. The camera’s case was wet but not yet saturated. We did lose a bunch of other electronic stuff—a hard-drive, battery charger, cables, etc. So we dug in and quickly and silently packed up all of our stuff trying not to think too much about what we were standing in. Checking the cupboards in the small room we don’t really use, I reached in to grab something dark. It was a rat. It seems fitting that they got in one more dig before we left. Without words ever being spoken, we knew that we were done living there. All jokes aside, living there was a horrible experience. It really cast a dark shadow over our first two and a half months in TZ. So to be completely honest, walking in and finding that our house was now without a doubt unlivable was not a huge blow, it was almost seemed like a sign that it was time for us to move on. So we called our friends, Chris and Cathryn and asked them if we could spend the night. They said, “Certainly!” We took the important stuff with us and put the rest of the bags in the highest points in the house. We then went outside to dig up a cab in the massive traffic jam. After hearing our story, they invited us to stay as long as we needed to figure out what to do next. We owe them a lot—really, we owe them our whole trip because without their hospitality, I think we would have given up. Thank you Chris and Cathyrn!!!

The next morning, I headed back to the house to get the rest of our stuff and found that our housemother had started to clean the house. I told her that we were leaving that day and not coming back. She was quite shaken, as she is almost part of the house and is employed by who ever rents the house. We signed a six-month contract, so she thought she had six months of guaranteed work. She promised me she’d clean it all up and that it was fine to come back but there was no freaking way. We felt bad, but we had to do what was right for us. We paid her an extra half a month’s pay and gave her a bunch of household goods. I think she understood that we just could not live there and be happy.
So now we are out of the hellhole known as 432 Kinondoni Road. We don’t miss it and won’t even say “goodbye”, because there was nothing “good” about it. Hopefully this is a turning point of our time over here and we only have better things ahead.

Beach House Test

2008-04-04T03:07:00.000-07:00

After Ifakara, it was seriously depressing to be back “home” in Dar. The guy that we needed to follow up with about the visit to Ifakara was out of town for a week so nothing but more waiting on that front. We only had to last a week before we could get away again. One of our friends knows a guy that’s building a 5 star beach lodge for a British architect about 30km south of Dar. It isn’t done yet but the guy wanted to get some feedback so we got to go stay there for a fraction of what it will cost when it’s completed. There were 6 of us and we had the whole place to ourselves. This is kind of experience is definitely a perk that comes with living here. You don't get these opportunities as a tourist. It was a beautiful house up on the hill with a boardwalk through mangroves down to the beach which we had all to ourselves. There was big deck out over the cliff where we sipped wine and watched the full moon rise out over the Indian Ocean. Brandt and I went snorkeling on the coral reef every day at low tide. We weren’t that far from Dar and the ocean there is disgusting so I really wasn’t expecting much but there were tons of life...fish, urchins, sea cucumbers, a hermit crab the size of my two hands and the real prize was the octopus. I was floating over the top of a coral head when this big bulbous thing scoots off and down the side. It took me a second to realize what it was. I swam around to the other side and the octopus had tucked his tentacles into a gap on the coral head and was changing his color and texture to blend in with its surroundings. We would have never been able to pick it out if we hadn’t seen it swim there. We just floated there and watched it scurry around. I know most of you are probably tuning in to be amused by our trials and tribulations but we do have our moments when it all seems worth it. The trick is making those moments come close enough together to get through the crap. Speaking of crap…check back soon for the next post...

Return to Dar is a-Slum

2008-04-03T08:02:00.000-07:00

We very reluctantly boarded the bus in Ifakara to return to Dar is a-Slum, as we are now fondly calling it. When we bought the tickets we got assigned two seats in a row of three. The bus filled up and no one sat next to us so we started to hope we’d get the extra seat to ourselves. Wrong. The largest Tanzanian woman we have ever seen squeezes herself into her seat and half of Brandt’s. Luckily he’s lost 20 pounds since we got here so he doesn’t really need a whole seat. Half an hour after the bus is supposed to depart, it starts up and drives about 4 blocks and stops again for another 20 minutes. We’re clearly in for a long trip. Tanya warned us that they would play loud music videos on the bus. I said, “Oh that’s ok, we’ve got our ipods.” She just smirked. For the first few hours it was blaring Tanzanian hip-hop. There is clearly one music video producer in Tanzania and he watched 15 minutes of MTV, developed his formula and then made 50 videos that were exactly the same. Male vocalist dressed like R. Kelly raps while woman in tight clothes stands next to him swaying from side to side, man chills with his gansta homies, woman shakes her ass, random English phrase such as “peace brothers” is shouted out as the video ends. I can’t really surf the web for the perfect video but a quick search on Q-Chillah, the one artist whose name I happened to remember produced this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0YWlzRVo-8 My connection isn’t fast enough to watch it so you’ll have to report back. So this went on for a couple of hours. And then it was Celine Dion time. Oh how they love that woman here. Now that she’s done in Vegas, she should really consider moving to Tanzania. I think they would consider granting her deity status. For the last few hours they busted out what must have been the Tanzanian old school stuff. Essentially the same bongo beat was used in each song, someone would sing a little in the beginning and then the background music would repeat for 5-10 minutes while they showed groups of people doing variations on 5 dance steps in very 80’s outfits. It is hilarious and my description really doesn’t do it justice. When, or should I say if, I get a good internet connection, I’m going to try and track down a clip on the internet somewhere. If I can’t find anything, you’ll have to wait for Brandt’s rendition when we get home. It’s awesome. He was voted best dancer in high school afterall. Aside from the sweet videos, we saw at least a dozen elephants chilling by the side of the road when the bus passed through the Mikumi National Park. We were practically hanging out the window to look at them and everyone else on the bus couldn’t have cared less. Can you imagine living in a place where elephants are “Eh, whatever.”?!?

The Insanity Of It All

2008-04-02T07:22:00.001-07:00

Hey all,

Sorry about not posting lately, we will be back in the next couple of days. Quickly, some words you will see in upcoming blogs: octopus, one, foot, of, sewer, water, house, rats, homeless, visas, corruption, bagamoyo, and (hopefully) job. Tanzania just keeps giving and giving...

River Cruise

2008-03-28T05:33:00.000-07:00

Now that Brandt has bored you with the science part of our trip, I thought I’d fill in some of the non-science details. After a day of touring research facilities, Tanya gathered up a crew of people and a case of Kilimanjaro beer and we headed down to the river for a canoe ride. The road out of town runs directly into the river. There’s a barely buoyant ferry that takes cars, people, bikes, chickens, cows, whatever across the river to the road on the other side. This is the only connection to the villages on the other side of the river. There are no bridges. To the side of the ferry there a small collection fisherman with their dugout canoes. We paid them a few thousand shillings and they took us for a sunset cruise. One fishman stood in the front and the other in the back and we sat four to a canoe in between. They used long wooden poles to drag the boat upstream through the tall grassy vegetation where the current is weaker. We were surrounded by the lush green river floodplain and looked out on blue mountains in the background. It was so peaceful. In the grass there were weaved birdnests hanging on the blades. Brandt was in the front of our canoe and the fisherman, trying to be a helpful ecotour guide, pick one of the blades of grass with a nest on it. Then he laughs and says mtoto, the Swahili word for child, and hands Brandt the blade with the nest. This is a word we know and sure enough when he peaks inside he finds a little baby bird which he promptly hands to me. Unsure what to do or say about it, I pass the bird back to Tanya. She’s horrified and starts and tells the guy that the baby has lost it’s mother. And the response is yeah, he’s lost his mother. Tanya try to stick the blade back in the water, not that it’s going to do any good. This bird is a definite gonner but the fisherman says no and takes the blade and nest back and sets it in the front of the boat. Tanya says they know that we’re interested in animals and nature and they think they’re helping. Apparently, a group of bird watchers came and they had these guys take them downriver to camp. They knew that the mzungu wanted to see birds so during the night they caught one and tied its legs to a stick stuck in the middle of the camp. They are honestly trying to be helpful but there’s a bit of a culture gap I guess you could say. One of the resident scientists happened to get up first and was able to liberate the bird before the guests woke up. We continued on to a sandbar where we pulled up for a rest before turning back downstream. The sky was starting to turn pink with the sunset and it was just getting more beautiful. The fisherman, accustomed to mzungu with cameras, wanted their photos taken. I was the only one with a camera so each in turn they struck a pose and I took their portraits, one of which is included below. They were really friendly and wanted to talk with us. They were very patient with our broken Swahili and tried to teach us words as they showed off what English words they knew. I would say this was one of our best interactions with Tanzanians since we got here. After the fisherman had time to finish a bear, we headed back to the ferry crossing. We were floating out in the middle of the river channel, enjoying the setting sun. Then we heard this big splash sound, I look to the left where the noise came from just in time to this huge wake in the water immediately next to the canoe. Tanya asks the fisherman what that was. Mamba he replies…Crocodile! I had just stopped swirling my fingers in the water on that side of the boat just prior to the splash. I don’t know if that drew his attention or if we just happened to come up upon him and he had submerge to swim under the boat. Either way, it was quickly getting dark and we were all of a sudden ready to not be in these rickety homemade canoes any longer. By the imprint of his body in the water, that croc wouldn’t have had any trouble getting himself some tasty dinner by tipping our boat over. Fortunately, that was our last wildlife interaction for the day and we made it back to shore just as it became fully dark.

Happy Easter

2008-03-25T02:15:00.000-07:00

Sorry we've fallen behind on our blog posts again. We've had trouble getting access to a decent internet connection again and then everything was closed down here from Thursday through yesterday day to celebrate Easter and a Muslim holiday. We'll try to get caught up again this week. I just sold out to The Man and added Ad Sense to our blog. We get money every time you click on the ad so if you want to contribute to the fund to get us living in a rat-free apartment, put those high speed internet connections to work!!

Science in the Bush

2008-03-25T02:12:00.000-07:00

As Robyn wrote in her last entry, we FINALLY got outside of Dar for a trip to a research station located in Ifakara. The research station is owned and operated by the Ifakara Health and Development Research Center (IHRDC). IHRDC is a Tanzanian non-governmental organization. It has offices and labs in DAR, Bagamoyo, and Ifakara. It get money from all types of funding agencies—The Gates Foundation, USAID, and the Swiss Tropical Institute to name a few. Most of the researchers are Tanzanians, as a main focus of IHRDC is development and strengthening of Tanzania’s ability to study and combat disease on its own with its own citizens. They focus mainly on malaria, ranging from lab and clinical work on vaccine development to field research on mosquito behavior to public health work. Overall, it is a really nice and very diverse organization.
Back in the States I had gotten in contact with the head of one of labs at IHRDC, and was invited out to see the facility and meet with the scientists. It took a long time to get things going once I got here but I was really excited to finally be able to do what I came over here to do. Now, I really had no idea what kind of lab facilities that they would have out in the heart of rural Tanzania. To have a properly outfitted lab (in the US) you needed -80oC and -20oC freezers, clean water, uninterrupted electricity, the ability to get supplies, reagents, etc. We just assume that all these will be present and readily available/accessible in the States. But here, who knows. Hell, here in the “modern” metropolis of Dar es Salaam, we experience water or electricity outages on a regular basis. It would have to be worse out there, right?
After a nine-hour train ride, Robyn and I arrived at the Ifaraka train station at about 5:30 on Monday evening and were greeted by a driver from the station. We threw our stuff and our selves into the back of a land cruiser and headed off to the guesthouse. The guesthouse was located on the grounds of the IHRDC campus and very close to the Regional hospital (St. Francis). It was beautiful: airy, light, and modern. Our room had air-conditioning (which we greedily used) and a TV! A bit of the West surrounded by beautiful, rural Africa.
Robyn and I spent the next three days being shown about the labs by Dr. Tanya Russell (a fantastic scientist and wonderful guide). The projects were interesting and varied. One project was looking at various natural fungi as potential biological alternatives to chemical insecticides which are sprayed in people’s homes, another project was testing different mixtures of chemicals that are found in human sweat to make powerful attractants for mosquitoes—all in hopes of building the ultimate mosquito trap. All the projects here are being pursued by young Tanzanian graduate students. These students would make any professor proud due to their enthusiasm and their knowledge. It was truly a pleasure to meet with them and ask them about their work.
As far as the physical infrastructure, it was better than a lot of labs in the US. Brand new equipment…PCR machines, microarray and FACS machines. Brightly lit white rooms with good benches and computers everywhere. Truly impressive considering that one can get to Ifakara via one train (8-9 hours) or one highway (8 hours). Ordering supplies is a bit tough (no next-day deliveries), but I guess you just order everything at once and you order a lot. They recently bought most of the equipment and are currently in the process of expanding their research interests to utilize the great facilities.
The time spent at the labs was great, but my most memorable experience was the time we went spent out in the field. Robyn and I were invited to go out to a village (about an hour away) where IHRDC was currently collecting mosquitoes. Actually, that is a bit of a simplistic description of the project. For the past three months and for the next twenty-one, IHRDC researchers are going out and collecting mosquitoes every Monday-Friday from 6 abodes per night in each of two villages. A group of five to six Tanzanians, some scientists and some helpers, go out to six houses at dusk and set up mosquito traps. The houses are randomly chosen and thus randomly placed, so it takes several hours to drive and walk to them all. One hut took us over 20 minutes of serious mud-running to get to. With any vehicle less than our Toyota land cruiser and our experienced driver, everybody would have been knee-deep in black mud trying to push the truck out to solid ground (most likely unsuccessfully). After setting traps in the six homes, we got some food-- fish and rice for me, beans and rice for Robyn. After dinner, we got a warm beer at the only bar in the village center, and then back to our small room (a twin bed and a small table) in a house with no running water for some sleep. We got up at 6:30 AM the next morning and headed out to recollect the traps.
After retrieving the traps, we grabbed a quick and sparse breakfast, after which the work really begins. For any of you who are bored with your jobs, just imagine doing the following 4-5 days a week, every week, for two years straight. The researchers then have to count and categorize every mosquito (species, male or females, has it fed, etc.), along with several tests for a certain number of mosquitoes in each trap. During the dry seasons, they said they catch between 5 and 60 mosquitoes per trap per night. However, the wet season recently started and that is bad news for the humans. The traps we saw had well over 1000 mosquitoes each! Just think that each and every one of those 1000 mosquitoes is looking to take a drink from you--in a single night. It makes our nightly ritual of sealing our room back in Dar seem quite pathetic in hindsight. One of the field researchers (a fisherman who was taught to be an entomology field hand about twenty years ago) said that in his house several years ago, researchers counted the highest number of mosquitoes ever recorded in a single room. That number? 6000!!!! When asked about where the house was, Jefferths replied, “Over there. Down that road.” Someone then asked, “Is it still there?” “No”, Jefferths replied, “It fell down”. Well good riddance I say! I now understand why this region was named “Ifakara” and is roughly translated as “Valley of Death”.
After just one night and day in the field, Robyn and I said our thank-yous and our good-byes to the group and headed back to our outpost of comfort while the others stayed behind to continue their daily ritual. Regardless of the mind-numbing repetition, this work is incredibly important. So here’s to them!
Sadly, we left Friday morning on a bus back to Dar. Overall, it was the best week we have had in Africa--we learned a lot, and saw things few ever get to see. We talked science, met Swiss doctors working in the HIV clinic in town, rode in narrow wood canoes up the river (and almost hit a crocodile on our way back in), and were welcomed into rural Tanzanians mud huts which where no more than a jail cell in size. And in every encounter we had, the Tanzanians where friendly, courteous, and happy. This is what I was looking for in Africa. I really hope we get the opportunity go back.

Africa Found!

2008-03-17T01:07:00.000-07:00

You may not have realized it was lost, but it has been missing entirely from our lives in Dar. Bright and early Monday morning, we took an air pollution-laden, traffic jam packed taxi ride to the Tazara train station. For approximately $10 each, we bought first class tickets to Ifakara, Tanzania and we finally found the Africa we all know from National Geographic and PBS nature shows. We knew it was out there but it has made all the difference in our morale to see it with our own two eyes. Ifakara is a village about 250 miles southwest of Dar. It took us 9 hours to get here on an aging train that stopped at every village along the way. The landscape turned endlessly green immediately upon leaving Dar. The rolling hills and pastures of corn and banana trees were accompanied by small clusters of homes made of mud or locally kilned mud bricks and roofed by grass thatch or tin. The villages were uncannily spaced exactly 20 minutes apart. At each stop, the train was welcomed by a horde of local villagers selling hardboiled eggs, chicken legs, grilled ears of corn, fried bananas, peanuts, essentially whatever they had for food in the village. First class consisted of one or two cars at the very end of the train that had 6 compartments with bunks for sleeping four and a small table by the window. The crowd of vendors clustered at the front end of the train where the coach class cars were jammed full of people. Although few vendors made it down our way, we were “welcomed” by small groups of boys that would stand outside the window and shout for soap (they’d learned that people in first class were given small soap bars upon boarding the train), empty water bottles and money. I threw out one of our bars to a small, unhappy looking child at the first stop. Without saying thank you or having any reaction to the soap at all, he immediately began demanding money as he scowled up at me. It was really awkward and made me wish I had never given him the soap. It’s distressing that children have been trained to beg at the train when they should be in school. After the first stop, we slid into the cabin when they approached to try and avoid the situation as best we could.

On route, the train passed through the northern part of the Selous Game Reserve. My mantra leading up to the trip was that I just wanted was to see was one giraffe--just one single giraffe. As we entered the game reserve, the endless green shifted from crops to natural vegetation- grassland dotted with shrubs and trees. The first wildlife came in the form of what we think were impala and other species of ungulates. Our adrenaline kicked in and we starred fixated out the window wondering what more we’d see. Just as Brandt said he wanted to check the map to see where we were but didn’t want to take the chance that he’d miss something, the wildlife was upon us…a couple of giraffes standing awkwardly by a stand of tall trees a few hundred yards off, a herd of zebra stampeding away from the train, followed by a herd of wildebeest. It all came so quickly it was hard to take it in and then we came upon a single giraffe that seemed to have just noticed there was a huge loud train going by. He was really close and he was trying to run away but it looked like he was having to run in an arc rather than directly away to keep from wiping out due to the weight of his head which was being left behind by his legs. I have never seen anything like it ever. It seemed to move in slow motion, both awkward and graceful at the same time. Our eyes remained fixed out the window for the rest of the trip through the reserve. We spotted several more giraffe, these incredibly large vultures, some warthogs off in the distance, and a back end view of a yellow baboon (which I thought was a lion at first from the color) quite close to the tracks. The train-by view of all these animals was so awesome, I can only imagine what it will be like when we go on safari and get to take our time to really watch it all. At the train stop for the reserve, what we assume were rangers, dressed in green fatigues and armed with huge rifles, boarded the train. As they were picking up their packs, some one from the compartment next to us dropped two foil tin containers and some plastic utensils out the window into the vegetation bordering (apparently the need to litter goes unimpeded everywhere and at all times). One of the rangers that was helping load luggage spotted it and marched over yelling at the guy, picked up the trash and demanded that the man take it back into the train. Tanzanians are notoriously non-confrontational, so I think culturally this was a big deal. I was so happy to see a Tanzanian taking on the littering that I cheered him on, saying “very good” to him in my pathetic Swahili. He smiled broadly up at me and welcomed me back to the reserve. Cynically, Brandt said he expected to see the tin come back out the window shortly after we pulled away but as far as we know it never did. One small step in the enormous battle to save Tanzania from burying itself in a continuous layer of garbage. After the game reserve, the landscape shifted back to agriculture. In the flat expanse of the Kilombero valley nestled between the Uluguru and Udzungwa mountains (see photo), it was rice paddy interrupted occasionally by sugar cane and corn as we approached our destination. Ifakara is the main village in the valley is famous for its rice and its massive mosquito density (Brandt read that they had once counted 6,000 mosquitos inside a single room house). This latter feature has made it a hot spot for malaria research. We’re hoping the outcome of this visit will be an opportunity for Brandt to work for the Ifakara Health Research and Development Center and the end of days in Dar. Fingers crossed everyone.

Mosquito Watch: The Movie

2008-03-11T06:26:00.000-07:00

I came home sick from the university the other day (intestinal distress is extra unpleasant in the bathrooms there) and I started watching “The Making of The Big Lebowski” (yes, the DVD situation is already that bad…I always assumed no one ever watches the version of the movie with voiceover from the cast and director but I’m positive we’ll get there and we’ll be sure to let you know how that goes). So anyway, inspired by the genius that is the Coen Brothers, I set out to test out the famous movie editing features of Brandt’s new Mac. We’ve made a few video clips during Robert Neville time (none those kinds of videos so no need to go there). They’re all me interviewing Brandt except this little gem that was written, directed, produced and staring me (well, my voice anyway) with a cameo by Brandt. Enjoy!

P.S. Let us know if you can’t view it. I’m not sure what format is best. This one can be played in Quicktime. UPDATE: the movie is too large to upload right now; we are working on a solution. Sorry!!

Dirty and Clean at the Same Time

2008-03-07T00:36:00.000-08:00

As you all know (well, those who have read all our blog entries), I’ve never set foot one onto soil in a developing country. Little did I know, at least here in Dar, that the soil was mostly covered in garbage. Everywhere you look-- plastic bottles, newspaper, mango pits, coconut shells, coke bottle caps, plastic bags, etc. Trash covers every area we have been to in the city, rich or poor. When you walk down the street, if someone in front you has a wrapper in their hands--thwip--on the ground it goes. Done drinking that delicious warm bottled water, “I guess I’ll just throw it down right here on the dirt path along the road, good a place as any”. While at first it appalled me to see people living surrounded by garbage (though, oddly and surprisingly, the streets don’t really smell aside from the toxic amount of air pollution), after living here for a while, you come to realize that it is ingrained in the culture of the city. They don’t seem to see it as disgusting, it is just something to walk over and ignore. Playing a hand in this mess (literally), is the city’s sanitation department. Really, waste pick-up is almost non-existent in most areas. The government just doesn’t have the money. There are the occasional places where the trash is in a higher concentration and resembles a pile. I don’t know if these sites are official. But every couple of days, plus or minus a couple of days, some guys in a large rickety flat bed truck roll by and pick up about 90% of the pile. The rest just sits there and gets kicked and blown all over the area.

Whereas the streets are trashed and the dirt is actually dirty, the average Tanzanian we see walking or taking the daladala to work are immaculately clean. The women are all wearing spotless, colorful wraps or very nice long skirts and blouses. The men often wear dress pants and long sleeve dress shirts that look like they just came off the dry-cleaner’s hangers. Honestly, you’d think some of these guys were execs at fortune 500 companies. To keep your leather shoes clean, there is a small stall every fifty yards on the main roads where you can get your shoes polished. I have never been able to keep whites as white as the Tanzanians do, and here in Dar, we live in a dirt bowl surrounded by trash and everybody does laundry by hand. The cleanliness of individuals also extends to their cars, we constantly see drivers washing their taxis anywhere they can get water—be it a faucet or a random puddle along side the road. Rarely do we see a dirty car driving down these dusty streets.

It has been really interesting to see the strong juxtaposition of the maintenance of the individual and their possessions and the maintenance their city and environment. We’ll post some good trash pictures soon!!

T.I.T.S.

2008-03-04T03:19:00.000-08:00

Although we're still spending 5 nights a week Robert Nevilled in our room, we have made friends with a group of ex-pats (mostly South Africans but with a few other nationalities mixed in) that give us a reason to escape from the house of horrors one or two nights a week. Many of them are born and raised in Africa and they are a wealth of knowledge on how to get by here. They've also taught us some catchy acronyms like T.I.T.S. - This Is Tanzania Stupid and A.W.A - Africa Wins Again. They apply to all the whacky encounters we have, like the fact that no merchant, (especially the taxi drivers) ever has any change for any amount no matter what. We once had to pay $10 for a $3 cab ride because the guy insisted he had no change--A.W.A!!. Or when Brandt went to meet the guy he thought he was going to work for here at a time they set up 3 days earlier, to then walk into his office and find that the guy had left Dar for Morogoro and would be back in a week. Or when the power goes out for 5 hours just because it rained a little, we can't get mad because T.I.T.S. Or when eating at a nice tourist resort in Zanzibar results in two weeks of unstoppable "intestinal distress" to use Brandt's euphemism -A.W.A. These acronyms can be used at twice a day simply because T.I.T.S!!! Anyway, here's a happy photo of us with some of the new friends at the birthday party we went to last weekend. It ain't all bad.

P.S. Post more comments when you read the blog! We get excited to see people's responses and then we cry when there are none. Quit slacking (everyone that's not J)!!

The Magically-Disappearing, Mortally Wounded Rat

2008-02-29T07:02:00.000-08:00

This tale begins as on a night not unlike our other nights in our little house of horrors: beans and rice for dinner, locking down of the house, hunting and destroying rogue mosquitos, etc. But this night had a nice “surprise” in store for us. Robyn asked me to go get another bed sheet from the closet in other room, so I got up, unlocked our door, kicked aside the clothing which serves as our “crack under the door mosquito barricade”, walked down the hall and opened the door to the other bedroom. Now, in our house, we have only two light bulbs for three bedrooms and the kitchen so the other bedroom was really dark. The only light piercing the murky blackness was the hallway light over my shoulder. Upon opening the door, I immediately noticed that one window was wide open and there were several dark streaks on the wall under the window frame. I froze. My first thoughts were that these streaks were some kind of worm or insect invading our house. So I shuffled back to our room and snatched my headlamp so I could get a better look at the mysterious substance/markings. As I got about three feet from the wall, I saw that a medium sized hole had been gnawed through our two screens, and the unknown substance on the wall was blood. Holy shit!! I stumble backwards out of the room. I slam and lock the door (like rats can unlock doors). I tell Robyn the situation and she reacts with a, “Well, that is kind of scary, but at this point not that shocking” look on her face. So we pass the next 4 hours trying to focus on the bright side- how much everybody back at home was going to love this story. Luckily, we made it through the night with no further rat incidents. We did, unfortunately, have to sleep with our bedroom windows closed making it extra hot.

Morning dawns anew…with courage (Sorry, I’ve been reading too much J.R.R. Tolkein). Around 8 AM the next morning, I roll out of bed to let our housekeeper into the house. I am dressed in nothing but shorts and sporting a wicked case of bed head. A true sight to behold! I say to her, “Karibu” (Welcome) and, “Asabuhi” (Morning), she enters the house. As she is putting her stuff down in the hallway, I go grab a broom and a large knife from the kitchen. I jog out into the hallway and shove the broom into her hands and start adamantly pointing at the door to the other bedroom with an eight-inch knife in my hand. To make this whole moment even more surreal, you must understand that Mama speaks little English, and I speak very little Swahili. This poor little old Tanzanian woman has a look of absolute bewilderment on her face as she is wondering why we are getting ready to attack a harmless door. Next, I unlock the door and shove it open. I enter first, slowly. Mama, with the broom is watching my back. I don’t see any rats, dead or alive, on the floor, so I step aside and point adamantly at her the bloodied wall and hole in the screen. She, then realizing why we are armed for combat, just steps past me nonchalantly with an “ahhh” and starts shoving the broom under the bed! I mean, this rat may be rabid and mortally wounded and having Mama flushing it at my 85% naked body was not in my morning plans. Mama behaved as if this situation is a everyday thing. Though for all I know (and pray isn’t), bloody rats chewing through screens are a normal occurrence around here.

Well, Mama and I finish searching the room and, GLADLY, find no rat. With the all clear given, I investigate the bloodstains on the wall more closely. Through forensics learned by watching reruns of CSI, I was able to recreate the bloody rat’s movement about the room. It seems that the rat chewed through the screens, bleeding on the wall under the screen. It then climbed up the curtains (blood on the curtains), then ambled across the curtain rod (blood on curtain rod and wall), jumped over to the air conditioner (blood), walked across the unit, and then jumped over to the paneling on the wall over the bed (more blood). After this most epic of leaps, the blood trails stops abruptly. But alas, no body was found. This fact was slightly disturbing. Was the rat bleeding its way into or out of the room? Looks like we’ll never know. And here we thought mosquitos were our biggest foe. So who’s coming to visit? We have two open rooms….

Two-headed Mzungu Monster

2008-02-28T03:09:00.000-08:00

Mzungu is the Swahili version of gringo (aka white person). For the first few weeks we were here, Brandt and I went literally everywhere together making us a two-headed mzungu monster. I remember the first time we separated. We had been exploring the city by foot all day and I had blisters on my feet so when we got off the daladala, I went directly home while Brandt picked up water. It was an amazingly refreshing twenty minutes, but anyway, back to the whole mzungu thing. It's not that there are no white people around...we recently heard a statistic that there are 23,000 South African living in Dar but we seem to be rare enough in the places we venture that most small Tanzanian children can't help but gawk at us. Some won't take their eyes off us for an entire dala ride. The elementary school aged kids also take an interest. Some times this comes in the form of saying Good Morning (no matter what time of day it is) or How are youuu? One time it even seemed to be a dare amongst a group of 10 year olds. They all quietly walked by us then the last one stopped right in front of us, looked up, said good morning and then immediately ran like hell to catch up with his gaggle of friends all hysterically laughing. It was super cute. More commonly, they just yell mzungu at us. We walk by a lot of kids on the way to the university all very keen to tell us we're mzungu. We've even heard it shouted loudly from passing school buses on more than one occasion. I decided one day that I could also play master of the obvious so when the inevitable mzungu call came. I responded by saying watoto, the Swahili word for children. I thought I was being funny. They thought I was being weird and they just starred blankly back at us like the two headed mzungu monster that we are. Oh well.

We're Baaaack

2008-02-26T01:30:00.000-08:00

Hi Everyone! Sorry the posts dried up there for awhile. The last few times we tried to get online there were power issues and horrible connections. Then Jon and Liz returned to Dar from their safari. (For those of you who thought our blog would be filled with beautiful photos of African wildlife, I picked out one of Liz's safari photos just for you.) We went with them to Zanzibar for a much needed beach getaway. Now we're back in our home sweet home and Jon and Liz have abandoned us (boo!!) to go back to their normal lives. We have a lot to catch you up on so I'm going to try to post every day this week....

Karibu Dubya

2008-02-26T01:15:00.000-08:00

I don’t know what kind of coverage it got back in the States, but George W. Bush’s week long tour of Africa included 4 days in Tanzania. Considering Bush doesn’t seem to go anywhere besides Crawford for that long, it was a pretty big deal. Not only was his smirking face on the cover of every newspaper for days leading up to his arrival, they also put up these giant banners with a very photoshopped, young-looking Bush all over the city. They say things like Welcome His Excellency President George W. Bush. We Cherish Good Governance or We Cherish Democracy. There are others that say things like Thank You George W. Bush for Fighting Malaria (or HIV/Aids or for the Millenium Challenge Account). These ones give the impression that George is personally donating the funding for these initiatives. We pretty much can’t go anywhere with out passing by at least 5 of these banners, even now over a week later. The upside of Bush’s visit is that all the trash lining the main streets downtown has been cleaned up. It was a dramatic change. We thoroughly enjoyed strolling the clean streets but I can’t help but wonder how long they will remain unlittered (given that the concept of throwing garbage in trashcans rather than the street is nonexistent, it probably won’t be long). There was a lot of buzz about Bush’s visit but from what we could tell it was positive. It’s pleasant change to be in a foreign country where people actually like our government. Although it’s kind of strange to see the American flag lining the streets when our daily experiences make it abundantly clear we’re not in Kansas or any of the other 49 states anymore.

The day Bush was to arrive we made the one hour, two daladala trek up to the university. I had gone up two days prior to find that the power was going to be out for at least the rest of the day and had to turn around and go home. So I was pretty antsy for internet on this particular day. Amongst my many emails was one from the American Embassy. I expected it to be another update about the situation in Kenya but for the first time since we registered with the embassy, this one was pertinent to us. Muslim Protest March of George Bush’s visit. Start time: less than 2 hours from when I was reading the email. Route: right down our freakin’ street. Awesome. So we frantically try to get in our internet essentials before hurrying back to get inside our house before the march gets there. Of course, frantically and hurrying need to be interpreted relative to Tanzania. There’s certainly no quick checking anything on the internet here and maybe I was imagining it but the connection seemed extra painfully slow that day. There’s also no hurrying when it comes to getting anywhere by vehicle on the massively congested roads. Fortunately, we were saved from having to decide to tear ourselves away from the internet because the power went out, again, about 15 minutes later.

By now the suspense must be killing you. Did we make it home in time? Or were we mobbed in a giant anti-American march? Brandt, having previously walked to our house from downtown because the daladalas were simply too full at rush hour for him to squeeze himself in, estimated it would take the protesters an hour to get from their starting point to our house. We were safely inside in time. In fact, it was so long before we heard anything outside that we were starting to wonder if the march was actually happening. But eventually we heard the steady beat of a

bass drum, followed by chanting and then the march arrived. We watched through a gap in our front gate. First came the men- marching, chanting, carrying signs. They were followed by the women, covered from head to toe in spite of the heat and long route through the city. I’m not a good judge of numbers, but maybe 2,000-3,000 people went by peaceful exercising their freedom to assemble.

We Are Legend

2008-02-25T00:45:00.000-08:00

Most of you are probably familiar with the movie I am Legend that came out at Christmas time so you’ll have an idea of what we mean when we say We are Legend but really our experience is much more like the less well known book (Flatt and Steve- this one is for you!). Everyday at 6:10 pm the alarm on Brandt’s watch goes off. We have deemed this Robert Neville time (after the I am Legend main character) and it’s the time when the mosquitos start emerging. We seal up lock our doors to the outside (this involves many sliding bolts and unfortunately seals off main flow of air through our stifling house). We finish our dinner of beans and rice and then lock ourselves into our bedroom where we’ve duct taped plastic over the broken air conditioner. We cover the crack at the bottom of the door with whatever dirty clothes are around and begin our search for rogue mosquitos. We violently squash all that we find, leaving their carcasses on our walls and ceilings like heads on spikes on the wall of a medieval castle. So far this tactic hasn’t proven a useful deterrent but it makes us feeling like we’re winning and so the practice will continue. By about 7 pm we’re done with the security measures and then we have to figure out what to do besides stare at each other until we’re tired enough to go to sleep. Luckily, we have a fan to keep us from roasting to death. The fan’s name is Francis, he our friend and the best $30 we’ve spent in Tanzania—and yes, we are slowly descending into madness.
At this point in his story, Robert Neville begins intoxicating himself to try and drown out the sounds of the screaming vampires outside. In our story, what we need to drown out is the sounds of this dingy “bar” that just outside our front door. During the day, it seems a harmless place—a few patrons enjoying a Coke, or some chispi (French fries), maybe a beer or two. However, once the sun sets, and about 10 PM rolls around, the music starts—loudly. After two weeks, we can now be certain that they have precisely two mix CDs. One is African and the other is 80s ballads--“Well its no sacrifice, no sacrifiiiice, it no sacrifice…” , and “Lady in Reeedddd…”, Elton John, Toni Braxton, Celine Dion…all the classics from K-tel. They prefer the American mix about 2:1. Awesome. Our only wish is that we had brought some blank CDs with us so we could burn them a Phil Collins mix. I think they’d love it. There is one noise that breaks through the tunes…the sound of creatures scampering across our ceiling. There’s on that makes a loud banging sound on the tin roof. It scared the crap out of me the first time but we’ve since identified this noise as crows. The other is a bit more disconcerting since it is not on the roof but rather scurring across our not entirely solid looking ceiling. Gauged by the speed at which it traverses the ceiling of our room, we’re voting (hoping) it’s a feral, non rabid cat. It just sounds too big to be a rat (that’s what we keep telling ourselves anyway). So mosquito proofing we’ve got down but we haven’t come up with any ideas of how to reinforce our ceiling. Suggestions welcome.

There’s one last element to life on Kinondoni Road that fits with the We are Legend theme. Everyone from the guy who lives in the little 2 room house out back, to the woman down the street who sold us Francis the Fan, to the few random Tanzanians that have approached us on the street all seem to agree that it’s very very strange that we would live in this neighborhood. They sort of look at us with some combination of incredulity/astonishment/disbelief and then ask really? One guy even came right out and said we shouldn’t live here that we should live on the peninsula with the rest of “our people.” We're not really sure what to make of these comments/looks but the opinion that we are strange and don't belong here appears to be unanimous. So while we feel we’re accomplishing very little with our days, at least we can say we’re attempting to integrate and well on our way to memorizing sixteen sweet 80’s ballads. Let’s all just hope that we don't meet the same end as our beloved Robert Neville.

Tanzanian Hooch

2008-02-25T00:32:00.000-08:00

What is the favorite drink of poor American ex-pats living in a shack in Dar es Salaam? Well, that would be Konyagi and Tang. More specifically, Konyagi and WARM Tang since we don’t have a fridge. And it tastes exactly as delicious and refreshing as it sounds.

See, Konyagi is a popular Tanzanian alcohol served with Coke or Krest (a slightly flavored soda water). It is popular because it is cheap…really cheap. 3000 tsh ($2.65) for half a liter of 35% alcoholic fun.

What is Konyagi? Well, if one reads the ingredient list on the back of the bottle, Konyagi is “”FINE SPIRIT, KONYAGI FLAVOUR, DE-IONISED WATER”. Two things about that list: number one, there is nothing “fine” about Konyagi...at all, and number two, we have no idea what gives Konyagi its “KONYAGI FLAVOUR” , which is best described as cheap, watered down vodka mixed with cheaper gin.

So, next time any of you are out a at bar and looking for a new drink to impress all your friends...order a Konyagi and warm Tang—The Official Drink of poor American ex-pats that lock themselves in their bedroom every night™.

The Hood

2008-02-13T02:45:00.001-08:00

Here's a picture of the end of our street, Kinondoni Road, taken from a tall office building at the end. You can't see our house but I don't really want to bust the camera out on street level. Our friend Jon and his wife passed through last week on there way to safari and he GPSed the house so hopefully he'll put us up on Google Earth when he gets back to the States. I also added a picture of Brandt in the mosquito net to the Mosquito Hunter post. I'm just testing out the blog features. The next chapter of the house drama is coming soon (hopefully tomorrow) and it's a good one!

Brandt's Initial Thoughts

2008-02-12T02:52:00.000-08:00

While both Robyn and I have been enjoying the rollercoaster ride that is life in Dar es Salaam, Robyn thus far has been our scribe, our Ozymandias. Well, it is finally time for me to write down some observations and thoughts about this crazy time. First off, my perspective going into and throughout these first few weeks, is quite different from Robyn’s. Why? Simply, it is our backgrounds. Robyn spent a year in Cochabamba, Bolivia when she was 17 and did a semester in Venezuela when she was in college. She had, through those experiences, a real idea of what it was like to live in a culture that is totally different from your own. She knew what it felt like when everyone around you spoke a language (and at a pace) that you can barely understand. She understood about the pace of life; that it could be hectic, frustrating, simple, and laidback, and on many occasions, all four at the same time. I, however, knew nothing, except that eating fish in an alley “restaurant” in Hong Kong leaves you with…ummm...intestinal distress.

So, Robyn was kind of ready for this. I thought I was ready for this. I knew it would be “Hard” and “Challenging”. But knowing that something is going to be “Hard” and “Challenging” and actually living “Hard” and “Challenging” are two separate beasts. One sounds adventurous, the other kind of sucks.

However, I am still alive and kicking. Here is a short list of things I never thought I would be doing at 37 years of age (or ever):

speaking a bit of Swahili (Mwanamume amevaa shati mmoja meusi. The man is wearing one black shirt.),

riding the daladalas all over the city,

learning to live without a refrigerator,

drinking Tanzanian beer on the Indian Ocean, and

living in a house with one million ants, 2 cockroaches (the size of mini-snicker’s bars), a feral cat who occupies the space above our bedroom, and our greatest enemy--the harbingers of ill things--the mosquitos.

At twenty one days in and counting, I find myself settling in and realizing that it is tough, but doable. I am forced to be patient, which according to Robyn (and to the absolute lack of shock to those who know me well) is just one of the many reasons why this will be a great experience for me. Well, so far it has been an experience all right--I am still waiting for the great part though.

Upfront, Cash Only

2008-02-08T04:29:00.000-08:00

As far as we can tell, credit cards, checks and the whole concept of monthly billing don’t really exist here. We learned last week that cell phones are all pre-pay. You buy the phone and a chip that corresponds to a certain cellular company (there are at least 4 to choose from) and then you buy these scratch off cards from the corresponding company and load money onto your phone. Calling is kind of expensive but texting is cheap (even overseas if anyone wants to text us!!) and receiving calls is free (even from overseas if anyone wants to call us!!). The scratch off cards are literally sold by anyone that sells anything anywhere. So long as you have cash, reloading is no problem. And if you want to change companies, you just get a new chip for your phone. Just the other day we learned that you can get wireless internet by essentially the same process. You buy a card for your computer from a cellular company, loaded it up with money and then it deducts value for every byte of data your transfer. Electricity in your house is the same. There are little offices around where you pay cash in exchange for a card that you insert into a box at home to allow the lights to turn on. You can even watch you pre-paid kWatts tick down (more on this particular topic to come from Brandt). This is different than what we’re used to but by no means an unreasonable approach paying for your use of a service. However, this approach is kind of pretty weird when it comes to rent. Apparently, it’s standard to pay 6 months and sometimes even a whole year of rent in cash upfront. I think this is insane. The largest denomination bill that exists is 10,000 Tanzanian shillings (Tsh). This is a little less than $10. So the 2.4 million Tsh for the six months rent plus the fee for the guy amounted to one huge brick o’ cash. To us, the transaction felt more like a sketchy drug deal from a Hollywood movie than the paying of rent. Brandt was Tubbs to my Crocket. We rolled up with our cash wad stashed in our backpack feeling very skeptical of the whole thing. We enter the house and they indicate that we should sit down. The “guy” sits quietly on a chair in the corner seeming like the body guard. The women tells us we have to wait for her son. He’s bringing “the contract.” There are other people around and we’re not really sure who they are or why they are there but they all talk to each other rapidly in Swahili. Yes, this is exactly how it goes down in the movies and we are clearly the goofy white people that are way WAY out of their league. After a brief eternity, the son (he’s supposedly a doctor) shows up. Sorry, no contract. How about we just write up some bullshit on a piece of paper, you give us all your money and we’ll sign the real contract tomorrow? Hmmm…suspicious. Are we getting scammed? It’s a definite possibility. The son starts writing the bullshit contract. He asks his mother his mother a question in in Swahili. The answer we understood to be the agreed upon price and he responds with a smirk. Increasingly skeptical, I say we’ll give you half the money now and half the money tomorrow. Sure. No problem. Whatever you want. But of course that means we have to leave the house and go back out into the big scary world and walk down the insane street and get on the insane bus. We could be mugged at any moment and have all the money stolen. Yes, we’re in real pickle now. The son gives Brandt his cell number. Brandt calls it and the phone rings. Well that’s good but all he needs is a new chip to change the phone number so how much security is that really? We casually try whispering to each other. Brandt, with his Midwestern wholesomeness, says he thinks it’s ok to give them all the money. I’m skeptical but am I just being paranoid? In the end, the thought of taking the half wad o’ cash with us seems worse and so we give it all to them and hope for the best.

Thanks!!!

2008-02-06T23:02:00.000-08:00

Thanks for all the encouragement and well wishes we got in response to our first postings!! It was soooo great to hear from so many of you! I’m not sure I can email back everyone individually right away but please do keep emails and comments coming. We’ll do our best to keep up the entertainment value here on the blog. I do want to state for the record that I’m not exaggerating for comic effect. This is the real deal. We miss you all more than you know!

The Apartment Search

2008-02-06T22:58:00.000-08:00

Our primary mission when we arrived was to find an apartment. Apparently, the way one finds an apartment in Dar is to find “a guy” that knows where the open apartments are and you pick him up and he directs you to them in exchange for one months rent. We can’t really afford this but we’re told by the professor and the grad students that there are no posted listings and you don’t really have a choice. It’s all further complicated by the fact that very few places around here have actual addresses: mail is delivered exclusively to P.O. Boxes and navigation is mostly by placemark. The professor got a “guy” and he showed us an apartment in the neighborhood behind the guest house on our first day in town. It was an immaculate, furnished and air conditioned 2 bedroom apartment for US$ 450/month but an hour from downtown in the boondocks isn’t exactly what we had in mind. We explain that we’d like to be somewhere closer to the city center, the professor acts like this is somehow strange but presumably translates this to “the guy” (he literally refers to him only as “the guy”) and he says he’ll look. A couple of days go by and we hear nothing from the professor or his guy. We try the internet. 99% of what we find are expensive beach villas on the peninsula north east of the city (where all the white people live but we’ll get to that later). The exception is one “real estate agency” that had a couple of vague postings in the in between area we wanted with more reasonable prices (listed in Tanzanian shillings rather than U.S. dollars- looking back this may have been the first warning sign). Encouraged, I call. The person on the other end attempts to speak English to me but I have almost no idea what he’s saying so he hangs up on me. An hour later, someone calls back and wants us to meet at his office but says the location so fast I can’t make it out at all. I try to explain that we don’t really know where anything is but that’s not really getting through so I say I’ll have the professor call him for us. Monday, six days after our arrival, we see the professor for the first time since the first day. He checks in with his “guy”- he’s still looking (ummm….yeah right). I ask him to call my guy and the next thing I know, we’re off. We drive the 3 miles half way into town to pick up the new “guy”. We pull into a petrol station and wait. The guy shows up, jumps into the back of the professor’s SUV, starts up a lively dialogue in Swahilli. We just sit cluelessly in our seats with perma-grins on our faces. No one bothers to tell us this guys name or anything that’s going on. We’re not even asked what we’re looking for. He takes us to see one small house and one apartment both of which are under construction and will supposedly be ready in two weeks (oh and there’s also this bridge for sale…). There also way down these twisting dirt “side streets” that I really don’t see myself walking down by myself or at night. It took two hours to see those two places but we’ve driven no more than 10 miles. All the main paved roads are so congested with cars and pedestrians and all the side streets are dirt with potholes so big they could swallow a small Honda so either way you’re driving 5 mph. The guy continues to make phone calls while going back and forth with the professor in Swahili. We were told we were going to see two places so we’re thinking that was it. When the car pulls up to the side of a busy street and stops, we both start saying bye as the guy gets out. He looks at us weird, then the professor turns off the car and also gets. Apparently we’re not done. We hope out on a bustling road packed with cars, people and shops but not a major roadway. The professor tells us the bridge is down the road which means we’re not too far from the bus route we’ve been taking to and from the city and just inland from the Pennisula with the beaches and all the white people. So in terms of location, this seems good. The people renting the house are Tanzanians that have been living in Norway for the last 20 years. It’s run down but as a field biologist and a student traveling around South America, I’ve stayed in worse. They tell us that two English people used to live here so that’s also encouraging. The professor even negotiates them down slightly on the price into our range. However, Brandt wants nothing to do with this place and is giving me some serious eyeball action while we’re all “talking” things out. Unfortunately, it’s taken over 3 hours to look at these 3 places and without saying so explicitly, we get the impression that the professor won’t be shuttling us around to look at any more places. To make matters worse, the women renting the place is leaving for her house somewhere else tomorrow in the morning and she wants 6 months rent paid in full (!!!!) that afternoon if we’re going to take it plus the fee for the guy. We get back in the car with the professor who clearly thinks this is exactly what we’re looking for. Brandt’s still giving me the death stare so I make the excuse that we couldn’t possibly pull out that much money with our ATM card in an afternoon. But that was a big fat backfire. He asks how much we think we can get out and then drives to the bank prepared to loan us the rest. Faced with offending him and being homeless, the apartment decision has evidently been made. Super. The good news, this place is great blog material. The bad news, this place is great blog material. Stay tuned. This is only the beginning.

The Journey Begins

2008-02-04T04:24:00.001-08:00

To all our friends and family who thought we were crazy…turns out you were right. So much has happened in the first 2 weeks. I’ve been writing blog entries but we haven’t had much internet access so I haven’t been able to post anything yet. Here are some tidbits from the first few days. We’ll try and get it all caught up ASAP.

Arrival Shock

2008-02-04T04:23:00.000-08:00

Hello Tanzania!!! After all the plotting and planning, we are finally here! First impressions: it’s hot, it’s crowded and it’s so dusty that dusty doesn’t really describe it. The sweating began the second we get off the plane and it was only 7am. The professor from the University of Dar es Salaam that I’ll be working with greeted us at the airport and shuttled us to a guest house near the university. The main road from the airport was clogged with cars. On both sides, there’s a dirt shoulder as wide as a regular road equally packed with people walk and selling all sorts of stuff. Our first day in Tanzania was particularly rough for poor Brandt. I don’t know if it was the heat or the stress or what but his brain was definitely not firing on all cylinders. His first act in Tanzania was to “steal” someone else’s luggage. Unfortunately, I didn’t catch his mistake until we arrived at the guest house 25 km from the airport. We rushed back and I was interrogated by airport security- they didn’t want to let me back into the airport and then by the baggage people- apparently I seem like the type to steal things out of people’s luggage and then return it to the airport. In the end, I recovered my bag and all was (pretty much) forgiven.
Back at the guest house we decided to go for a stroll to check out the neighborhood. The guest house itself is a large and relatively modern house with a wall around the outside. It has running water supplied from these huge black tanks (I think). It’s not potable (and is slightly brownish at times) and is only warmed by the sun. The guest house is set back from the main road going to the University along a rough dirt road the winds through a neighborhood where other large gated houses are intermingled with small, tin roofed, one or two roomed homes. As we walked along the dirt road, we passed by many people, some carrying jugs (often on their heads) on their way to or from the communal water tap used by those who don’t have running water. The water taps seems to be a gathering place for women and children. It was along this walk where a Tanzanian stranger first spoke to us. Unfortunately these first words weren’t hello or welcome. They were “zip your flies man” (with sweet African accent). Yup, that’s right. Brandt had been strolling along, smiling at all the small children (who can’t seem to help staring at us anyway) with his fly down. As if we weren’t weird enough. We continue on our way, now fully zipped, and a car comes cruising down the path towards us. Brandt, concerned that we were walking on the wrong side of the “road” (Tanzania is a former British colony so they drive on the left but that’s irrelevant in this case because the road is a foot path that’s only one car wide) literally jumps in front of the car to get to the other side of the path. This causes the car to screech to a halt and squeeze between the two of us. Yeah so we’re definitely off to a good start here, making a good impression and really blending in with the locals.

Journey to (and from) the Center of the City (Day 2)

2008-02-04T04:21:00.000-08:00

The guest house is located in what seem to be the suburbs of Dar es Salaam. The professor is encouraging us to find an apartment in this neighborhood but Brandt and I aren’t really suburb people. Before we make any decisions, we need to check out downtown Dar. With some rough directions from a Finnish student staying at the guest house, we set out on our journey to take the Daladala to the city center. The Daladala are very colorful and dilapidated minibuses where just about every square inch of interior space (and sometimes exterior space outside the open sliding door) is occupied by a human body part. Unfortunately, we can’t get directly to the city center from where we are so not only do we have to get on one of these things, but we have to figure out how to transfer to a different one some place we’re told is called Mwenge. We stand on the street corner in front of the fancy mall trying to figure out how it works. Each daladala has two names painted on the front of the bus denoting the two stops it loops between. We wait until we hear the dude who hangs out the sliding door and collects the money to call out Mwenge and we cram ourselves in. The ride to Mwenge is brief but we disembark to total chaos. There are people weaving in between buses and buses weaving in between people and other buses. We tell the money dude we want to go to Posta (the downtown Post Office stop) and he points off into the distance and we enter the crowd. We find the Posta bus and we’re on our way. The university is about 5 miles from the city center. It takes an hour (!!!) to get there on the traffic clogged roads. The air quality is so bad my eyes burns and my throat tingles. The city center is bustling. Capitalism on the small scale is in it’s full blown glory here. People are roaming around selling everything from belts to socks to you name it. We wonder around the crowed streets, get some food, check email and before we know it it’s almost 5 and we head back to the bus stop. There are hordes of people waiting for the daladala. Knowing we’re going to get way over charged because we know nothing about the going rates, we opt for a taxi. This was without a doubt the most insane car ride of our life. The cars were at a complete standstill on the road heading out of the city. This was irrelevant to our cab driver. He drove down the shoulder, the dirt path in front of shops and at times the lane for the oncoming traffic. Pedestrians were quickly stepping out of the way of this horn-honking, Tanzanian Jeff Gordon. Oddly, everybody just took this in seeming madness in stride. No yells or obscene gestures or even dirty looks. It was pretty much Crazy Taxi (I think that’s the name of the video game) come to life. Since we made it back alive, it was worth every penny of the $15 we paid the guy. I can’t imagine how unbearable the bus ride would have been in that traffic.

Boogie the Mosquito Hunter

2008-02-04T04:20:00.001-08:00

As many of you know, Brandt spent 4 years researching surface proteins that could potentially be used in the development of a malaria vaccine when he was at the National Institutes of Health. He’s hoping to get involved with more applied aspects of malaria research while here in Tanzania but for moment he is battling malaria one mosquito at a time. Despite the screened windows, our room at the guest house is a mosquito sieve. Brandt has been dutifully patrolling our room and the adjoining bathroom every night before we get ready for bed. He hunts down and curses out each individual mosquito in an attempt to prolong our malaria-free time in Tanzania. We are finding ourselves exhausted in the early evenings- probably some combination of the heat and the sensory overload and there’s nothing to do outside our room except getting eaten by mosquitos so we’ve been going to bed pretty early. Unfortunately, we’ve both been finding ourselves wide awake in the middle of the night. We think it’s the jet lag but the sleeping conditions are definitely not helping. Back home, Brandt and I jockey for space in our queen size bed. Here we’re sleeping on what seems to be the world’s smallest double bed walled in by our mosquito net and it’s 87 degrees and humid. (Thanks again Mom for the travel clock thermometer combo- it really helps to know just how hot and miserable we are). So we’re spending hours every night lying awake, held captive in our weaved prison. Quite frankly, it’s starting to make me a bit batty (think Jack in “The Shining”). In spite of our sophisticated mosquito control efforts, we’re still waking up with bites. We’ve found a few inside the net in the morning plus the we seem to get hit when we rest any body part against the net when we are sleeping. This is why when is finally purchase a net, we’ll treat it with insecticide—then those mosquitos that hangout on the net will die, die, die. I seem to be tastier than Brandt, my bites out number his two to one. With each new bite Brandt recalculates the completely made up odds that I now have malaria (he’s says I’m at 7% now). Time will tell.

Don't Stop Believin’

2007-12-29T09:28:00.000-08:00

This is actually happening.