Enjoy the Ride

I am sitting on the back of a piki piki--Tanzania’s motorcycle version of a local taxi--sitting sidesaddle in my Konga wrap skirt as we zig zag through the mud huts into town. The night sky is huge and open above, a warm breeze blowing in my face, as we bump up and down over ruts and garbage down the dirt paths of the village. Leaning this way and that with the bike, dodging pedestrians, running cats, bikes who all yield hurriedly when they hear our motor coming. As we emerge from the huts and hit a stretch of open road, the driver says something in kiswahili that I took to mean “hold on”. I do. He revs the engine as the moon makes its grand spotlight entrance from behind a cloud and the sky catches fire with light. Even though I know we aren’t going that fast, for a moment it feels like 100 miles an hour, the dust kicks up and my skirt flies back in the wind. Dark palm trees shiver in the absolving breeze and the thatch roofs border the horizon. The motor mumbles loudly in my ears and I’m thinking - this is so totally awesome.

A Night Walk

The moon full through inky palm leaves and its halo washing half the sky in soapy wash. The dirt streets were empty but shadows were everywhere. Only a few electric light burns, and the town shuffles quietly in total, faceless darkness. Along the roadside, candles burn in rows illuminating ghostly midnight wares for sale--coconut moonshine,  piles of yellow mangoes, tall dark wood carvings-- like small, smoking shrines to the dead carrying Kiswahili prayers in silence to a white-haired moon or burying them in the ash of the burning garbage beside their hut houses. An all hallows eve glow flickers from gas lamps  in dark windows. Shadowy figures move behind dark storefronts, peering out or walking into the street behind us as we move along. The air was stale with smoke from extinguished cooking fires and pyres of burning plastic. All the sunny childrens’ voices and faces are gone from the dirt paths between the houses and without them, swathed in darkness, the colorful town has turned pale on its side in surrender to a very black, uncertain African night.

Back to School

I am walking the long, wide stretch of sand from the teachers quarters to our whitewashed classroom full of primary school kids. Tall palm and other fruit trees line the edges with finger-thin trunks, swaying their leafy tops like the kids do during a song. Two high school kids in their white and maroon uniforms walk by, with a “hello Madam” as they pass. The usual stream of sweat passes down my back and the sun slices through the tree leaves, scattering any oasis of midday shade.   

Our kids are well behaved for the most part, which is suprising given that we don’t know much Kiswahili and have to teach in feeble English, most of which is lost on them. Giddy at the lack of sternness, structure and harsh discipline in our classes (as is often customary in African classes) the kids get distracted quite often, but in the event they can keep their seats they sincerely try hard, searching us with their big dark eyes. They are often quite shy when it comes to being called to answer a question they usually don’t understand in English, but after one gets called up to the board to try an exercise they all are up waving their hands anxious to be called, crying “Madam, teacha, teacha, pick me, teacha!” Some of them know so little English, most of our teaching is done by pointing and imitation. But they are smart, one of them so smart he ends up doing cartwheels and talking to himself in the back during most of the lessons because he finishes so early. Even we have a hard time keeping him busy and preventing him from yelling out the answers for all the other kids.

Their favorite game is duck duck goose. You should see the way they run and flop in the hot sand, grinning these big, garish grins when they get picked. We teachers get selected as goose more often than not, I think because the kids get a huge kick out of outrunning a figure of authority in total silliness. When we do, we always try to pick the silent little ones, heads down who don’t ever expect to get picked. Many of the kids wear the same clothes everyday, or alternate two outfits, and almost all of them look like they are straight out of a goodwill box - gaudy, lacey lime-green eighties dresses with broken zippers, oversized red turtlenecks in the blistering heat, old adidas T-shirts with stretched out necks. Its a reminder of how special an education can be in a little African town like this. The kids are completely and refreshingly unhindered by it and are too smart, energetic and generally joyous to evoke much pity or any other unproductive, well-manipulated first world responses. There is no toilet paper in the bathroom, which is customary in these areas (there is a reason it is polite to only eat with your right hand and rude to use your left). The food is beans and rice or ugali (refined corn flour mixed with water and fluffed) virtually every day of the week for the students. But as far as schools go, this is a luxurious one by local standards, particularly given the fact that there is a working library, a computer lab and mzungu management prohibits the teachers from hitting the children.

Almost a week deep, I knew I’d reach a few points of distinct panic and it seems I’ve hit a pretty good one. The heat in our bedroom soars at night without a cross breeze, augmented now that we are condemned to our bed nets after deciding to go off the malaria medication to save our livers some grief and also to seal off our beds from the nightly jaunt of the cockroaches. But we are paying for it in sweat (lots of it) and sleep, respectively.  The beans, rice and fried food that completely dominate the diet here go from novel to a total nutrient-deficient drag in no time at all. And with a house of 10 people sleeping in three rooms and a room full of primary kids, the pure lack of alone time has been enough to land me smack dap in my first silent breakdown.
And here is that voice in your head, the one you’ve been running from all your life. Telling you you’re way behind on your Kiswahili, you’re not a good teacher, you’re not flexible enough, you cant get comfortable walking in town, you don’t know your way home, you are too overwhelmed by the smells of the markets and the dust and the “mzungus!” shouted at you, if you can’t cool off you are going to scream, why did you come here, what were you trying to prove and why are you so bad at it?? Like a child, standing in the street with dust in her eyes.

The kids make the breakdowns worth having. Watching them try hard and having them run up to your legs and their “teacha, teacha!”s. They are so much work and sometimes you want to send them all home at noon and wash your hands of their shouts, and pushing and backtalk. But somewhere along the way I got bitten by the bug and I somehow look forward to seeing them every day. They make feeling so scared easier to forget.

Midnight Suprise

As most people who have traveled will tell you, its all about flexibility. Sort of like a microcausm of life overall, and generally that means what you expect out of life going constantly awry. Especially when you live in a third world country, every morning is a new roll of the dice. It’s soon you learn that your guts bring you far, but that they only show you the way so you can lose your way. And from there, your only hope is those who will stop for a moment in the heat and help you alongside of a long and dusty road. Get your work done while the power is on. Be as useful as you can when you are needed, because most of the time you aren’t. Enjoy a breeze as you would a very large bonus - with triumph you know cannot last and thus not worth worrying once its spent.

We live in a small room in the school founder’s home with our friends Sylvie and Ian. It has two twin beds and is in the rain shadow of the house, tucked away from the hot breeze coming off of the sea.  Its surprising how fast our fickle bodies forgot the iron chill of new york when we left and got straight to lamenting and carrying on to us about the unforgiving heat--only letting us wring out from the sweat in thin dreams between sleeping and waking. But we adjusted quickly with the help of our new friends and it amazed us how long just a few days felt as they boiled off one by one. I liked to think of it as summer camp. Except we were the only ones who could fly home after a  few months had past.

One night as we all lay dreaming sweetly on our soupy foam mattresses, just around 5am, a flying cockroach roughly the size of Texas landed on Sylvie’s arm. She gasped only slightly and shot up in bed, and after just a small ruckus we reached a sleepy consensus not to turn on the lights - that this was most likely a rogue roach that simply lost his way and most certainly not an assault on our little American camp. More than rattled, I lay in the dark attempting to convince my mind to relax and not loose its head. This was Africa after all. Calm down and go back to sleep, you ridiculous girl. A hiccup, a fluke, an nonpoisonous wrinkle in the fabric of your trip. For God’s sake, chill out and go back to sleep!

Right around the part where I was counting my breaths and forcing my way into meditation, a roach arguably the size of Oklahoma (or certainly Kansas at best) flew onto my cheek with a flutter of its huge papery wings. By my estimation, it took me approximately one fourth of a second to be on my feet on the bed, whimpering and carrying on like an old lady. We were under siege! The lights came on and these unnaturally overgrown, inky brown, wiggling roaches seemed to be perched on every wall, flanking our small beds and ready to run us right out of town.

Ian killed the few we could see with a flip flop and we had no choice but to settle back down to sleep, leaving the lights on. Something had to be done. We’d been sleeping without mosquito nets in order to let in the thin breeze from the ceiling fan. But between the mosquito bites and now the brigade of cockroaches, the nets went back up. I had stupidly ordered Scott and I single nets from REI, thinking we would be in dorm beds. Silly me. The nets were small for even one person, and draped hot mesh all over your head all night. We figured we manage with one. And as we all settled in to bed the following evening into the nuclear night air, scott and I realized how grossly we had underestimated this set up. The net was inches from our face and draped heavy and black over our bodies - not much good for preventing bites. Not only that, but as we squeezed in close together, the net had a greenhouse effect and I thought for sure we would smother each other to death in the heat. As we lay there panting like hot dogs on the grill, it was one o those moments when you were deciding whether to laugh or cry. I chose the former and pretty soon I was in stitches with giggling. What a hilarious, silly sight! All laughing aside, we barely made it through the night with only our pure and unabashed dislike for large cockroaches to keep us from jumping ship and tearing down the net for a breath of fresh air. It was the longest I’ve ever held my breath - for a whole nine hours! Judging from the cool, collected and capable travellers that surround us, its unclear if we were really cut out for this. Two sweaty, plucky city kids want to go on holiday in an African village and end up sweating bullets and holding in travellers diarrhea huddled under a single mosquito net to escape some night roaches. I don’t have to be African to find that just totally, friggin hilarious.

In the Bag: Arrival in Bagamoyo

We have arrived. Down the hot and dusty roads. Past both laughing and stormy faces. Under a scowling hot sun. And what a landing it was!

After an overnight flight to Nairobi and a bright, hot little puddle jump, we arrived in Dar at 9am in the morning. The sun was low but already molten and we sweat through our clothes before we even reached customs. After securing our Visas in a slow-moving, craggy little customs office, we finally walked out into a blistering, swaying Tanzanian morning.

I had not been feeling well the last 12 hours of flying and turned up weak and a little worse for the wear. We had been introduced via email to a friend of a friend who we had been told would greet us at the airport. As we arrived reluctantly prepared to venture a try at Kiswahili to negotiate on an inflated mzungu price for a  cab, our new friend was waiting smiling at the doors. We were so glad to see his friendly face we almost fell all over each other. Over 30 hours of travel dissipated instantly into euphoria as he drove us through Dar, dodging skirted jaywalkers carrying bananas on their heads, bicycle carts, old buses or “dala dalas” full to the brim with glistening faces and severe eyes. Our friend Omar spoke in a slow and lovely accent, explaining every sight as we passed , and we all laughed out loud at the crazy Tanzanian drivers, listless policemen and throngs of people  casually crossing the road without hurry or apology. We arrived at his house, a beautiful, sandy-colored home with a leafy garden, a spacious white interior and…air conditioning! We sunk into comfortable chairs with glasses of clean cold water thinking we had died and gone to heaven. A fan cast its steady, beating shadow across the white walls. Omar was having breakfast prepared for us. I thought for sure I was the luckiest person alive.

Omar, a native Tanzanian, a stranger when we arrived, became an instant friend. He had an unassuming sense of humor and extensive knowledge about just about everything in Tanzania. He insisted kindly on driving us all the way to our destination, coastal Bagamoyo, along with his brother in law to be who was visiting. As we drove the paved but ribbed road up the coast, our unslept eyes could hardly absorb all the things we saw. If only every snapshot could live forever in my mind. Shanty markets with full wooden walls stacked with fruit, fabrics, and other wares. Buckets upon buckes of newly ripened mangoes for a dollar or two a bucket. Children running joyously in bare feet in citrus colored dust. Dark faces and long bodies lounging in the shade of doorways watching the traffic roll by. Tattered sheets for doors waving in the hot breeze. Men at work in the sun hammering, sawing, whittling or hauling goods in the sun. Each side of the highway was like a cut right down the middle of an isolated, bustling African village, with giant mansions belgoing to foreigners and a few very wealthy locals looming empty in the background.

When we at last arrived in Bagamoyo, we set out to find out village school, Nianjema. To do this, Omar would simply flag someone down from the car window every half mile or so and ask, after an extensive greeting in Swahili, their take on directions to the school. Many renditions, corrections, beautiful Swahili words and small detours later, the car bumped down the dirt road to the school past curious eyes.

Almost steaming in the heat of the afternoon, the school was a series of small white buildings around an open courtyard. A few school elders lounged on the stairway. They knew little of our arrival and so we were glad to find Sylvie and Ian, our starcrossed friends who had been at the school for four months, in a classroom doorway. Ian and I had gone to high school together, and by seeing a random, chance posting on facebook about the school, had discovered a few months earlier that we and our significant others were going to volunteer at the same little school in Africa. Sylvie and Ian had helped us prepare by email and their blog posts, and they would prove to be great friends and vital resourcse for introducing us to African life. Sometimes, when you decide to dive a bit to deep into a pool where you cant see the bottom, life appreciates the gesture and throws you a lifeline. They were unmistakably ours.

We got settled into the home of the school’s founder, Charlie in the spare room with Sylvie and Ian. The house is cement and white, with open screen windows, whirring fans and small lizards legging their way up the walls outside. After a good 20 minutes of starting at each other blankly and sweating in the living room, Sylvie and Ian took us down the twisting path into town for some mango juice.

In African villages, the paths wind right through and all around people’s homes and dust yards. Some can afford cooler cement block houses but most are outside of their mud huts with thatch roofs cooking over a small fire. After a few days, we have begun to get used to the spectacle that we cause every time we travel anywhere down these paths, past peeping eyes, children’s laughs and a wide variety of faces, greetings, and grunts. Most often, the children will up from their play and get to peeping with wide eyes, jumping up and down chanting “Mzungu! Mzungu! Mzungu!” (meaning, white person). We respond with smiles and  “Mambo” (whats going on), and the local reply is “”Poa” (cool). “Mzungu!”’s will come flying at us, even from unseen children shouting from windows. The adults will address us politely with Swahili hellos and sometimes Karibu, welcome or you are welcome here. Some glower at us, some mutter insults in Swahili or jest at us . But every time, even badly disguised in local Konga skirts or mumus we are much like the traveling circus!

Over the last few days , Ian and Sylvie have shown us African life. Scott and I have struggled to adjust to the heat, which never leaves you with a dry brow or a cool morning in the height of the African summer. But we are beginning to manage and with Ian and Sylvie’s wonderful guidance, we have been doused in African language, culture and comings and goings. We visited the beach, ate at local huts, drank Tanzanian beer, lounged out on the porch in the evenings with the mango trees rustling to our conversation. Yesterday, they took us for lunch at the home of an African family, who graciously cooked rice, beef and beans for us, prompting and helping us through our Swahili. Ian and Sylvie’s Swahili is quite good after their months here and they have learned fast. Scott and I on the other hand just stared blankly and smiling at the mother, who spoke no English but spoke to us kindly and repeated her questions slowly for us, allowing us to repeat every syllable, while her children translated in English. We ate with our hands of course, although occasionally forgetting to only eat with our right hands as is customary. They were patient with our awkward Swahili greetings, asked us things about where we were from and poked fun of us good naturedly. We took pictures of all of us together in the living room and Scott taught one of the sons to use the camera, which he took to like a pro and wanted to carry it around proudly with it around his neck.  “This day, I like it very much.“ The father said, patting us on the backs and telling us not to bother calling before we come visit, as we are always welcome there. Their son was one of the students at the school and Sylvie and Ian finished showing him how to send an email on their laptop out in the yard under a thatch hut. A small crowd of village children gathered, most of them not knowing what they were looking at but patiently gawking at the small computer screen and squeezing in to see.
After the computer lesson, the father asked if we would like a walk to the beach. Of course we could not refuse and so in lines of two or three we wound our way through the villages and down to the beach, each member of the family paired with one of us in engaging conversation. As I chatted with the son who was a student of Nianjema in slow English, he reminded me softly when a pikipiki (a motorcycle) would approach us to get off far to the left on the small dirt roads as the pikipikis have priority and can be very dangerous to pedestrians. His younger brother who was about five walked spritely in between us as we walked away from the setting sun. He had not learned English, so he could not understand me but I occasionally addressed him anyway, just to see him smile at me happily, satisfied to walk with us attentively into this cooling African afternoon. I heard Scott talking about Africa behind me with the father. We twisted and turned on paths through the village that we might never feel comfortable enough to venture by ourselves, and from time to time I thought we were going to walk right through the cooking fire of one of the neighbors. The locals watched silently as we passed, the Maela family and their Mzungu friends. As we got closer to the sea you could feel it in the breeze, lifting the heat off of your skin just enough for you to notice, and the palm trees thickened, edged with the setting sun. The older son and I continued our conversation as we neared the beach, with the youngest in between us. Just when I had forgotten the heat and realized how special this afternoon was, the youngest reached up and took my hand - and held it, with arm stretched up above his little head as I was much taller than him, all the way to the sea.

Into the Arms of Amsterdam.

Have you ever seen the Disney cartoon Mulan? Where the heroine decides to join the Chinese army in place of her father, masquerading as a man? I feel a little like she might on her first day, waking up before boot camp begins. "Day...One."

My bags are packed, my blackberry is back in New York, and it took me way longer than it should have to figure out the captain was speaking dutch and that I wasn't simply unable to comprehend my native language.

I'm almost off the map, baby. I've turned off the spiggot of my life. And now its just about taking it as it comes - straight up, on the rocks.

Our first overnight flight is behind us and we will soon wait for the second in the Amsterdam airport for about 9 hours. I fared pretty well, thanks to my right hand man, Tylenol PM. Scott, who is wearing that sleep-deprived, wide-eye swim goggles look, not so much. Getting ready for landing, we are heading into one of those pocky, perturbing patches of turbulence that, when strong enough to send a massive jetliner skating erratically on atmospheric ice, often leaves you gripped and negotiating with God for more than a few seconds.  And after you hit clear, open air once again on the other side, you feel like the idiot who hit the deck in a nice restaurant at the sound of a champagne bottle popping close by. Especially judging from the undisturbed eyemasks of the frequent international passengers around you. Hehe - why no, I was certainly not terrified for my life just then (teeth could cut a dinner plate). Sinking lower in my chair...


But the sun is up (although wearing very gray, wet clothes) and the day is in full swing in Amsterdam. Never have I had such an appreciation for having a partner along on a well-planned wandering off like this trip (and we are about to wander quite far)--especially a partner of such patience and brevity in times of squalor. Without him, I might have talked myself convincingly out of this at the gate, or worse yet, slept through all of my free meals on the plane. This morning, I have decided that there is truly no one better to have along in a prickly patch than Scott. And I get the feeling things are about to get prickly. That is of course if I live through this next microcell on our way in for a landing.

The Get Out of Town Countdown....

No wonder how long you wait for something, it still comes right up on you like a bedecked Christmas party guest you thought for sure wouldn’t show. But you knew it was coming. You planned it with mind-numbing care, you nursed it from a seedling over coffee, you budgeted for all its possible pitfalls, and you gave it all kinds of impertinent names with arm-candy adjectives like “grand”, “eye-opening” and “life-defining”. But even so, even slowly, it has prowled up on your plans as if uninvited, ready to spread its feathers, one at a time, and give you the adventure you asked for.

The day is fast approaching, with a signature New York City snowstorm precariously greasing its tracks. When my flight arrived at a frost-flecked La Guardia, flanked in dirty but determined snow drifts, I surprised myself by feeling nothing but displacement. Otherwise known as anxiety masked in pure confusion and denial. Six months worth of clothing, emergency medication, good luck charms, my own weight in feminine products and quick-dry-just-about-everything made the final cut and were rolled into a big red backpack. In true mammalian self-preservationist fashion, I spent the final days in Colorado obsessively labeling already labeled over-the-counter medication and counting the number of poisonous snake species in each country rather than telling my supportive friends and family how much I honored their presence in my life and how every word they said would hang in my head once I had crossed the border. My parents pasted over any fear or doubt they knew my hawk heart would be looking for and waved me goodbye, casually and quickly, with a “you’ll be fine” hug. My siblings saluted from their parting posts and in their own ways gave me the greatest gift of their unfaltering confidence. My friends turned up at every turn to tip their hat to a trip they knew would bring me back transformed, wholeheartedly willing to accept whatever version of me came back in my place. Meanwhile, I nobly focused most of my last week’s energy mentally bemoaning the small child howling behind me, squawking about hidden foreign conversion fees and fussing over the percentage of germs that competing hand sanitizers claim to eliminate. And all this, I have concluded, is what takes me successfully to the brink. Without it, I might flounder in those last days of comfort and familiarity, until I am flayed out over the things I might (and I will) miss - a rat asleep in a puddle of sweet wine.

Soon, its to the trenches… to the truth or to the trails that will lead us head-on toward the unexpected.