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.

We got the fever…

At the school that I teach at there are a couple of options for food at lunch time. The school canteen, which is run by a local businessman, where 2 days a week the food is great. Those are the two Indian food days. The businessman is Indian, and the Muttar Paneer and coconut beans and rice (not strictly Indian, I know) are great. 3,000 T-shillings (about $2.30) gets you a big tray, with fresh nan bread. The other option is the “local staff canteen”, which is situated at the top of the hill. There all of the Tanzanians eat, the gardeners, the cleaning staff, the ancillary classroom staff (paras), etc. It is one of the many examples of “separateness” that exist here. Anyway, this was about the food. Mama Bushiri, the head cook, has a set menu for each day of the week:

Monday: Beef stew with rice.
Tuesday: Ugali (staple polenta-like mush) with fish.
Wednesday: Rice pilau (sort of stewed beef again, but drier).
Thursday: Wali na choroko na marague na mchicha. Rice, beans, lentils, and spinach. This one is unbelievable. Everything is completely fresh and delicious.
Friday: I think they do something else with ugali, but I can’t remember.

Mama Bushiri charges only 1,000 T-shillilngs for her food. It is the best 80 cents you could ever spend. Except the fish day. I usually give that a miss. Lately, however, the outbreak of Rift Valley Fever (as deadly as it sounds) has forced the kitchen to replace all beef with fish. On Monday Samantha and I had fish stew with rice, and it was surprisingly good. The fish is fried whole, then chopped up. And so, until the Rift VAlley Fever clears up, we will be eating fish, it seems.

Tribe….village…

Sam is pregnant, so we went for a check up. The paperwork, oh the paperwork!

Water, fluoride, and charred goat bones.

Yesterday Samantha and received a visit from Professor Eli Dahi. He manufactures and sells filters that can take the fluoride, bacteria, and anything else hostile that might be in our water. Sam and I were excited, as we had been drinking cases of bottled water. It is not really the cost that worried us, but rather the fact that once empty the plastic bottles are dumped in a big hole in our back yard and then burned.

The area that we live in, the region of Arusha, is one of the many areas of Tanzania that experiences very high concentrations of fluoride in the water. The reasons are geological, and the results are quite dire for many Tanzanians. Fluoride, when ingested over years (especially in childhood), can effect one’s teeth and bones in a terribly crippling way. Many of the Tanzanians that one sees have teeth that are stained brown from their exposure to fluoride.

Prof. Dahi’s filters seemed like a voodoo ritual at first , but I found a reference to the exact same process in an African science journal. It is all based on raw goat bones that are charred and broken into small pieces. The kind professor supplies you with two plastic buckets that stack on top of one another. The top bucket has a small tube coming out of the bottom, and the bottom bucket has a similar tube that enters it at the top. When water leaves the top bucket, it flows out the tube and into a metal cylinder (the filter) that is filled with the charred goat bones. Once the water has percolated through the filter, it then flows into the lower bucket. A twist of the small tap on the bottom bucket provides you with fluoride free, clean drinking and cooking water. All for $90 US.

One of the few drawbacks is that the label on the whole thing shows the effects of fluoride on a person’s teeth, and the photo is very graphic. Every glass of water we pour we get a glimpse of the photo. A large part of Professor Eli’s work involved trying to educate the Tanzanian public about the dangers of fluoride, and graphic reminders serve their purpose.

Which brings me to the cost of living in Arusha. Sometimes things seem so affordable (usually when connected to the low cost of labor), but other times it seems so expensive (anything imported). That is for another post, perhaps.

Ilboru…the land of power and water.

Sam and I have been in Tanzania for over 5 months. There is so much involved with changing everything about one’s life, that I really don’t know where to start. When we arrived, the school driver dropped us off in a small compound of 5 identical very western brick houses. They were brand new, landscaped, and very secure. We were walled in by 12 foot cinderblock walls, that safely kept Africa at Bay. 4 of the 5 houses were occupied, 3 by Mzungus (whites), and 1 by a Korean family. My Kiswahili does not extend to what the nickname for a Korean person is. I do know that the watchman referred to Lee (the Korean neighbor) simply as mChina (the man from China). Anyway, we were fairly devastated, and we began a loooong process of lining up a subletter for our house, and finding a new house for ourselves. Being on both sides of the housing market at the same time is interesting. Here in Tanzania rent is often determined by newness as well as the quantity of Dubai-inspired garish golden fixtures (e.g. doorhandles and light fixtures) around the house.

Against all odds, we managed to line everything up, and hey presto, five months later, we live a ways up Mount Meru in a village called Ilboru. We now have a great house, with a huge garden for considerable less money. In Ilboru there is Africa everywhere we look, and we love it. Our house is also on the city’s main water line (see tower in our garden), which means that water is not a problem (it rarely is in Arusha, as it is very lush here), but more importantly, our power line is virtually uninterrupted. That is a true luxury, as Tanzania is in a real power crisis. I might add more to that later on. It is an interesting story. Anyway, we now have internet at home, so I hope to write some.

Good Night. Usiku mwema.

Marcello

Safi

Sam and I have been here in Arusha for a couple of months now.  My intention was to idle away the evenings writing my insights and thoughts, posting them on this blog. The reality has been that there are many obstacles that stand between a man and his computer life.  Namely power.  Tanzania is in a pretty dire power crisis.  The long and the short of it is that deforestation and drought have silted up an dried up the sources of hydro-electric power. I get most of my information from Matt, who keeps me posted from New York by reading the Arusha Times online.  So basically we are without power from 6 a.m. until about 7 p.m. every day, and then the power is extremely tentative.  Anything that relies on a constant sine wave of current is unlikely to happen.

I want to post some pictures that friends might be able to see, and perhaps soon I’ll be able to post more regularly.  Life here is in many ways very inspiring, and there are many things worth thinking about out loud.  I hope to get to some.  For the moment, here are some pictures:

The first lot are from our camping trip near Tarangire National Park, in a hunting concession.

          

Please ooooh and aaah at them, as they took hours to upload.  Jeff, you alone can appreciate the true labor involved.  Baadai.