Tigers on Kilimanjaro?

Late for school.

This is the sort of thing that I thought I would be writing about on my little blog.  The rains are here, the BIG rains, and the road down the mountain is worsening with every drop that falls.  A year and a half ago the president (Jakaya Kikwete, lest anyone out there should think that there is only one president in the world) was due to visit a church up the road from us, and so the road was graded beautifully.  Since then, no one of any importance has come by, and the road has suffered.  Add to the woeful state of the road the woeful cattle driving skills exhibited by the Maasai morani and the result was that we were late for school.  

 

Stormy, stormy weather in Ilboru.

Last night in the UK our friend and colleague Leebeth died after being very sick for a few months. She lived in Ilboru as well and was a neighbor of ours. We shall miss her very much. Last night it also stormed all night, and this morning Mount Meru was crowned with snow. Even the old timers here say that they have never seen the mountain like this. 

 

Signed

Samantha and I have signed contracts that will keep us here in Tanzania for another school year (until July 2009).  We will have the option of staying another year beyond that if we want to, but it seems likely that we will leave.  There are so many things about life here that I am very hesitant to give up, but there is always a bigger picture.  Samantha and I came here for the quality of life, as well as for the opportunity to put some money away.  Beginning in August our salaries will be cut by about 9%, and here inflation is at 9% and climbing.  The quality of life, in my opinion, is really excellent, but sooner or later we would like to start to tuck away a shilling or two.  All of this has brought a couple of things to the front of my mind.  One is that one and a half years is no time at all, and with a five-month-old baby, that time seems to pass even faster.  So I feel like we have to see as much of this country and its people as possible before we leave.  The second is that I start to become very excited about all of the experiences we will be able to cram into our time.  Two sides of the same coin, I guess.  So, in this frame of mind, at Christmas time we went to Lushoto…

 

The Rain

I am writing in the midst of a long thunderstorm that has been rumbling on for a couple of hours now. It rained last night, all night, and was gray and muggy all day. The sun made a fleeting appearance in the afternoon, but for most of the day the sky threatened to rain on us. We are in the short rains, but the season should be ending about now and they never really came as they should have. The wakulima, the farmers, are all complaining. Our night watchman Noel keeps me up to date with the mood in the village. He is a farmer as well, as pretty much everyone is. Tanzanians up the hill here all have a job and a small shamba (plot) that they work after their regular job hours.

As I write the rain has become stronger, pounding on the tin part of our roof (most of it is actually terracotta tiles; very Mediterranean, you might say…). From one perspective our life here is much the same as it ever was in New York. We work about 8 hours per day, come home and begin to live our domestic life. Our evenings are spent being completely consumed with our amazing little girl, and perhaps reading a few pages of a book. Sometimes we borrow DVD’s or watch some of the more obscure titles that Matt recommended to us. This does not leave so much time for sitting around and just experiencing Tanzania, and sometimes I panic at the thought of not experiencing it enough.

Then it rains like this, and we go outside onto the verandah and watch the sheets of water come down, smell the wet dust, and revel in the idea that the tree, vegetables and flower bushes and potted plants that we have planted will be creeping skyward as we sleep, green and vibrant in the morning when we get up. My anxiety about experiencing Tanzania fully begins to ebb away.

Of course, with rain comes shida (problems) with power. Right now, the music that has been playing in our living room has been replaced by the metronomic beeping of the UPS (Uninterrupted Power Source, essentially a big back-up battery) under my desk that feeds my computer in the darkness of a power cut. I get about 7 minutes more power, but I am going outside anyway. So that’s all. I’m done. When the pwer comes back and we have internet, I’ll post. It will be after Christmas by then, as we are leaving in the morning for Marangu. So Merry Christmas too, if you subscribe to that celebration. Otherwise, Jimmy, Brian, Steve, happy holidays etc. Usiku mwema. Good Night.

Mount Meru

The town of Arusha, where Samantha, Sofia and I live, lies in the shadow of Mount Meru. It is sort of considered to be Kilimanjaro’s forgotten sibling, although two the mountains are remarkably different. They are both volcanoes, but Meru is a much more craggy and serrated along its edges, steep and forbidding as opposed to Kilimanjaro’s gentle and infinitely long slopes. The summit of Mount Meru, known as Socialist peak, is about 1300 metres lower than the summit of Kilimanjaro. The students at school climb both mountains, and Meru is universally considered to be more intimidating for the kids, as it presents a formidable physical challenge, whereas Kili’s real challenge is the altitude. The side of Meru was blown off by a massive eruption some time ago (we are talking geological time, so I have no idea if it was “long ago” or “recently”).

We are in the short rains right now, but so far little rain has made it down to us. Every afternoon a massive storm roils and crackles over the top third of Meru, and we all run for cover before it comes rolling down over town. It never does, and when the storm finally clears up, there are streaks of snow around the summit of the mountain. An hour later the snow is gone. All this to explain that yesterday I was driving through town, contemplating another false alarm of rain, and I saw the peak of snow streaked Meru. It made me think about how impressive it is to live under this mountain. We drive around, we work, we walk through the shambas, everything we do takes place below Mount Meru, yet I only ever really look at it carefully once in a while. Therefore I dedicate this post to the mountain.

 

We Have Traffic Lights!

Although the Arusha Times has taken to calling them “traffic control lights”, they are your common variety traffic lights. Arusha’s population is growing rapidly, but not nearly as rapidly as the number of cars that crawl and clatter around town. The roads are not enough, and the traffic situation is getting worse all the time. Then, along came the raffic control lights. Apparently someone has paid a HUGE amount, to whom I do not know, in order to have the privilege of putting street lights and traffic lights in some areas of town. This unknown (to me) party has paid in order to install the lights because they will then own the advertising rights for every street light and traffic light for ever and ever (again, a guess). The lights all have an advertising board on them, ergo there is money to be made.

The one intersection in town where the lights are up and running is a a spectacle to behold. At first hundreds of people, nowadays only tens, gather to watch the lights working (as in the bulbs going on and off properly) and to revel in the chaos that ensues. The city decreed that only three of the four roads leading into the intersection deserved a traffic light. The fourth is a busy dust track that winds and bumps down Mount Meru from a town called Sanawari, running parallel to our own dusty track that runs down from Ilboru. Because it is not paved, the municipality decided that it does not get a light. They actually explained that one important issue was that they could not paint the necessary lanes onto a dust road. So the dozens of Dala Dalas (minibuses), taxis and carts that come down from Sanawari are left to carve their own path into the busy computerized intersection. The result? Bedlam. Pure, African bedlam, the best kind.

I urge you to read the article in the Arusha Times about the new traffic control lights. Of course you want to read about it all from an accredited news agency rather than believing everything that I write, but the Arusha Times delivers writing that is unique and from another time. A couple of quotes:

“They are playing with people’s lives. Had it not been for Traffic policemen who have been intervening, all day long, this junction would have been a pool of human blood,” said a woman who identified herself by the name of Mama Elisha.

A pedestrian, Melita Mollel said: “I’m surprised by the technology that threatens lives. It instructs you to cross the road but as soon as you start moving you’re surrounded by cars, all scrambling to knock you down.”

Keep reading the New York Times, the Corriere, the Repubblica. You won’t find stuff like this anywhere.

The fundi and the gari.

First off, let me introduce some vocabulary. Since there were no cars in Tanzania before the white man arrived (or anywhere else in the world at that time, for that matter), the car related vocabulary that developed in Kiswahili is all taken from English.

Hence:

Gari - Car
Mota - Motor
Pancha - (you can start to fill these in yourself)
Egzosti -
Betri -
Gia -
and on and on, finally arriving at the very best of them all,

Fanbelti -

Coming to Arusha meant investing quite a lot in a car. Many of the roads are simply dirt trails that have been expanded by cars travelling them. People who trade or live along these roads make their own speed-bumps (that I am thankful for) by piling huge mounds of dirt in the middle of the road overnight. Effective, although at times surprising. A dirt speed-bump on a dirt road is sometimes hard to spot at 6:50 in the morning whilst swerving to avoid a somnambulant stray dog. Then there are the roads as John Loudon McAdam might have imagined them, a smooth tarmac surface that is a pleasure to drive on. These range from superb (the highway that leads to the gates of Ngorongoro Crater) to appalling (most of the sidestreets of Arusha). The latter are jarring to drive on, as they are a patchwork of dirt, potholes, and random patches of old tarmac that appear out of the dust (or mud) and cause your car to pitch and shudder, all at 4 miles an hour. Taking all of the conditions of Arusha’s roads into account, as well as my own dreams of driving around Africa in a Land Rover and my wife’s desire to be in the biggest, safest car we could afford, we decided to buy a used Land Rover. The second reason carried far more weight than the other two reasons, this much I have to admit. We bought the Land Rover from a safari company that was changing to Toyota Land Cruisers. I think that there must be entire websites dedicated to the Land Cruiser/Land Rover discussion, so I won’t touch it…for now. In one swell $7000 USD swoop, my testosterone driven dreams were realised. I can picture myself at a cocktail party in twenty years, boring someone to tears with my story of living in Africa, pulling a creased photograph of the Land Rover out of my wallet and leaning towards my tormented guest and whispering, “They don’t make these any more, you know…”

That is where this story really begins. Having a car means having a fundi. In East Africa a fundi is any kind of craftsman, expert, worker, jack of all trades. Here fundis can repair anything, literally anything. Car mechanics tend to be the upper echelon of fundis. We were lucky to have Exaud recommended to us. He is the Land Rover fundi par excellence of Arusha, and is reliable and honest. These are both qualities seldom associated with mechanics in any part of the world. One day, after we had handed over our monthly quota to Exaud after he had finished working on the car, he broke the news to us. “Your Land Rover needs a …” I can’t remember the term that Exaud used, but essentially he meant that the whole engine needed to be rebuilt. I resisted as long as I could, belching clouds of white smoke all the way to school and back every day. Then a sequence of events sparked me into having a frank conversation with my wife. Firstly, we watched An Inconvenient Truth, and all through the film the image of cyclists and pedestrians disappearing into our apocalyptic cloud of exhaust haunted my conscience. Soon after that, one morning we were late for school and noticed that kids we taught were appearing from our trail of exhaust, and shaking their fists at us as the spluttered past us. So we got on-line and checked our bank balance, and after some simple calculations we called Exaud and gave him the go-ahead to do what he had to do.

And he did. Three days later Exaud and some of his friends were hoisting a completely rebuilt engine (all new except for the engine block and the cylinder head) back into the safety of the Land Rover’s chassis. I am about to take it out for a drive, so when I get back perhaps I will add a couple lines about the experience. Samantha and I are many, many Tanzanian shillings poorer, but Arusha’s air quality and our consciences are unfathomably richer.

The rains have arrived, timidly…

Mvua mkubwa atakudja - the big rains are coming…

I have been warned by the locals that the big rains are a week away. Abraham, our gardener, has taken the Land Rover, driven to his house, and cleaned out his cowshed of all the manure. We have a symbiotic relationship that way, Abraham and I. He gets to run some errands in the car, gets his cowshed cleaned out, and I get bags and bags of manure. He has urged me to plant stuff, manure it, and sit and watch the rains fall. And so we have done. We have recently planted a paw paw tree (papaya), two thorn trees, a flamboyant (flame tree), a jacaranda tree, a long hedge, and today, bougainvillea all along our fence.

When you buy the bougainvillea (a thorny hedge like bush that makes beautiful white, orange, red, or purple flowers) from Abraham’s friend, it is a 6 inch stick with a few budding leaves on it. Abraham promises me that with the combination of manure and rain, the plants will shoot up. And so we are waiting.

The water tower at the bottom of the garden is proving to be a real source of entertainment. It is fairly massive, rising forty feet into the sky. Water roars down the mountain, and keeps the tank perennially full. That way, should there be a problem, there is a huge reserve that can then be routed off to the politician’s houses etc. (follow standard script for African corruption from here). Lately, however, the tower has been erupting twice or three times every day. When it blows, water shoots another 20 feet into the sky, and hundreds of gallons of water pour over the sides of the tank, onto our recently planted bougainvillea hedge. The people walking up and down the hill just outside our gate run for their lives as the water crashes down around them. Who needs big rains when you live under the tower? Next week-end I will film all day every day in an effort to capture the eruption on film. It is every bit as epic as it sounds.