The Nairobi Fly

Last week-end Samantha and I went camping out over Monduli, about one and a half hours drive from home. It is a real feat here (around Arusha) to go out into the bush and camp without being found by some wandering Maasai. And one Maasai inevitably means many, many more. And amongst them all will be the local village “mkuu”, or boss. And the mkuu will charge you a camping fee, which is usually a small sum (although they start incredibly high, and you negotiate down). Then the mkuu calls the anti-poaching ranger, who will bring you a couple of local Maasai watchmen that you are “strongly advised” to hire for the night, as there are plenty of hyenas and leopards around. Anyway, the flow of humanity rarely stems for the duration of your camp out. This time, though, we drove off the road and down deep into a valley. I think that we were down wind from the Maasai boma, as we could hear their cattle bells, but miraculously no-one came looking for us. We spent a night out in the bush with some friends completely undisturbed.

Undisturbed, that is, except by a Nairobi Fly. This little bastard is not a fly at all, but a small beetle. It is one of those animals, like the honey bee, that has a form of defense that entails it losing its own life. Hmmmmm…. it’s like a warning to not mess with its kind, but not a defense that offers the individual much comfort. Anyway, the Nairobi Fly has an abdomen full of a terrific acid that, when you smash him or her against your arm, spreads all over your skin and causes your flesh to begin to bubble up and do all of the horrific things that you would expect from a bug bite in the tropics. I must have had one of these flies land of my arm during the night, because when I woke in the morning I had a pretty bad rash in the crook of my elbow. In the last three of four days it has continued to mature, and I won’t go into any sort of detail. It is certainly not as bad as you are imagining, but it is definitely an uncomfortable ailment. If you are the gory kind, here is a picture of the damage a Nairobi Fly can do (this one is not mine!) It is also fascinating to watch the battle between my immune system and this acid play itself out on my very own arm. I am well on the road to recovery now, so rest easy. Samantha, my wife, is now seven months pregnant. She is doing wonderfully, and wanted me to add at the end of this post that she has been in no way affected by the Nairobi Fly, and that she is in excellent health. Understandably, our family tends to worry about a pregnant Samantha when they read about our life on the Dark Continent.

Song Of Those Who Died In Vain - Primo Levi

Song Of Those Who Died In Vain (1985)

Sit down and bargain
All you like, grizzled old foxes.
We’ll wall you up in a splendid palace
With food, wine, good beds and a good fire
Provided that you discuss, negotiate
For our and your children’s lives.
May all the wisdom of the universe
Converge to bless your minds
And guide you in the maze.
But outside in the cold we will be waiting for you,
The army of those who died in vain,
We of the Marne, of Montecassino,
Treblinka, Dresden and Hiroshima.
And with us will be
The leprous and the people with trachoma,
The Disappeared Ones of Buenos Aires,
Dead Cambodians and dying Ethiopians,
The Prague negotiators,
The bled-dry of Calcutta
The innocents slaughtered in Bologna.
Heaven help you if you come out disagreeing:
You’ll be clutched tight in our embrace.
We are invincible because we are the conquered,
Invulnerable because already dead;
We laugh at your missiles.
Sit down and bargain
Until your tongues are dry.
If the havoc and the shame continue
We’ll drown you in our putrefaction.

Primo Levi died 20 years ago on the 11th of April. This posting inspired by The Rootless Cosmopolitan.

Martin Strel

This article on the BBC website is amazing. This Slovenian marathon swimmer, Martin Strel, who defines himself as “just a regular common guy who just has higher goals than usual” managed to swim the length of the Amazon. Piranhas, you say? Well, as long as he remembered to rub his wetsuit down with creams and gasoline (to cover his smell) and his team chummed the other side of his boat with meat and blood, the pesky little carnivires seemed to stay away. As he motored towards the ocean, his biggest concern was that his team were dropping like flies from terrible tropical diseases. If you want to feel a little more mediocre than usual, read this one.

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.

Zanzibar 2006

Pak Punjab, cricket, and samosa chaad.

My friend David recently sent me a picture of the Pak Punjab, on the South East corner of Third Street and Second Avenue. It is one of the handful of cabbie eateries in the area. We used to go there for plates of samosas smashed up and covered with lentil curry and salad (”Eek samosa chaad.” if you want to impress with your Urdu). A buck and a quarter and you were stuffed to the gills, although I cannot guarantee that price nowadays. Anyway, I got to thinking about how I used to talk to the Pakistani guys there about cricket. My cricket knowledge at the time consisted of a faded recollection of the teams that played when I was at school, Javed Miandad, Sunil Gavaskar, Clive Lloyd, and the magical Viv Richards, to name some of the superstars. The Pakistani cab drivers would humor me, after all, it would be like me walking into a sports store today and telling the guy in the tennis department “What about Borg, hey? He’s sure cleaning up at Wimbledon!”. These days, my passion (?) for cricket has been re-ignited, and I when I saw David’s photo of the Pak Punjab it occurred to me that there are sure to be some long faces and some fiery debate at the Pak Punjab these days. Pakistan were ousted from the World Cup by the Irish, and their coach was subsequently found murdered in his hotel room. If you do drop in for a samosa chaad, and you can’t resist engaging in some cricket banter, be sensitive. At least India were also bundled out early. That might be your only viable angle of discussion.

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.

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!