Volcanoes National Park

After confronting the worst of Rwanda at the Kigali Memorial Center, we decided it was time to get out of town and see another part of the country. Known as the Land of a Thousand Hills, nowhere is this more evident than in the northwest along the border with Congo and Uganda, where a chain of jungle-clad volcanoes (some still active, like the one that swallowed the town of Goma in a lava flow in 2002) rises up from the fertile valleys to heights of 14,000 feet.

To get there, we took a brand new Toyota Coaster bus on a two-hour trip that wound dizzyingly along high mountain roads. Called the Virunga Express (after the mountain chain) we were amazed that these buses left every half hour on the dot. Chalk it up to the population density or the billions of dollars in foreign aid, but we were shocked – timetables aren’t as reliable even in New York’s Grand Central!

The landscape became greener and more luxuriant as we reached Ruhengeri, with picturesque small farms dotting the hillsides. We also noticed an increase in signs along the side of the road. We asked people what the signs meant, and they explained, “Rwandans, stop the ideology of genocide.” Ruhengeri was a Hutu stronghold in 1994; maybe that’s why so many signs are there today.

When we went to bed, Anette wasn’t feeling well and had a fever (we’d been on the road for two weeks now) but we hoped that after taking some NyQuil and having a good night’s sleep she’d be ready to climb the volcano. In the morning when we reached the ranger station we saw a swarm of white tourists swathed in expensive gear, all of whom were going to see the gorillas, at $500 per person. We picked up three young travelers, who like ourselves didn’t have that kind of money and just wanted to climb a volcano.

The five of us got out at the base of Mt. Bisoke, whose top was hidden in the clouds. Blue-leafed trees stood out magically against the deep green of the jungle vegetation, stone walls lined the farmers’ fields, and cows, sheep and goats grazed the hillsides. “Amahoro,” we greeted the farmers and their children in Kinyarwanda. “Amahoro,” they said back to us with a smile.

We met up with our guide and a Rwandan army soldier who would accompany us with his AK-47. The soldiers conduct regular anti-poaching patrols, but are also there for our safety in case we meet an angry silverback gorilla, forest elephant or buffalo. It was a bit unnerving to look at this cadre of soldiers dressed in camo, faces of steel, holding their AKs, and wonder what they must have done during the genocide.

As we began to climb, the vegetation absolutely engulfed us. The trail was narrow and muddy, and as we brushed aside leaves bigger than our heads, we noticed that our skin began to sting. Nettles and other poisonous plants were all over, vines and moss were hanging from every branch, bushes exploded in all directions, beautiful flowers accented the green with splashes of yellow, white, purple, orange.

It was the perfect gorilla habitat, but unfortunately we saw only saw their droppings. We passed a trail leading to the grave of Diane Fossey, the American biologist who lived in these mountains to study the gorillas and was killed for her anti-poaching efforts. We stopped to breathe the fresh mountain air, looking out over the farms now tiny below us.

After an hour of steep, muddy climbing, Anette turned to me and said she didn’t think she could go on; after being with fever for the last few days, she felt exhausted and not up to climbing. We rested, rallied our spirits, and she continued to trudge on despite her total fatigue. 45 minutes later, she stopped again, but our traveling companions helped motivate her and again she found the strength to continue.

The next time she stopped, I told her to remember her grandmother, who endured freezing winter fishing trips from Norway to Iceland in the 1950s, and that her strength ran in Anette’s blood. Sadly, when we came back to Kigali the next day, we got a phone call telling us that Martha Kyvik had passed away at the age of 100. So on her grandmother’s last day on earth, Anette, despite her extreme exhaustion, found the strength to climb an 11,000 foot volcano. Coincidence?

As we reached the top of the volcano, a cold, wet wind blew through the jungle, chilling us to the bone. When we broke out on top, at 11,000 feet, the sun came out as if to congratulate us, and we sat for fifteen minutes devouring bread, cheese and meat as we stared down into the gorgeous crater lake. In the distance we saw a snow-covered peak. I later read that in November 1993, several teenage girls were abducted and killed high up the slopes of that mountain; one in a series of massacres leading up to the awful climax.

Already caked in mud up to our knees from the ascent, the mud would become the real enemy on our descent. Each of us slipped several times, and I landed flat on my back more than once. We have never been muddier in all our lives. We sank into a profound sleep that night, and when we returned to our Kigali hotel the next day, we gave our shoes, socks and pants a proper bath.

Post-genocide Rwanda

Tall buildings, shining glass windows, perfectly paved roads, a profusion of signs for clothing stores, sports stores, travel agencies, restaurants…are we in my hometown of Bethesda, Maryland, or is this really downtown Kigali 14 years after the genocide?

As we pulled into the central bus station, a huge outdoor area jammed with buses, minivans, motorcycles and taxis, we saw masses of people walking four and five abreast in all directions – it was as crowded as Manhattan during rush hour. There are 10 million people in Rwanda, but the country is about the size of Rhode Island, which makes for some cramped living. Much of it is mountainous, so the population is concentrated in urban centers like Kigali, Gitarama and Butare, a fact that made it easier for the genocidaires to kill a million people in 100 days in the rainy season of 1994.

At first glance, Kigali’s modern infrastructure belies its recent history – you would never think that these streets were witness to some of the most horrific acts of violence and brutality the world has ever seen. We walked around the city for two whole days marveling at the cleanliness, the newness, the apparent wealth of people, stores and businesses. We saw groups of white tourists being hounded by the ever-present trinket sellers. We saw plenty of cars with bumper stickers that said, “Rwanda is You and Me.”

Taking our cue from the locals, we breakfasted each day on thick green fish soup and read the morning papers. Then we noticed a pattern: genocide is always in the headlines. Even after 14 years, it is still the dominant issue in Rwandan society. Traditional courts called “gacaca” have been set up all over the country, but scarily, there are more than a few stories of gacaca witnesses disappearing and turning up dead weeks later.

Surreal to think that the people sitting next to us at breakfast, at lunch, on the bus, walking by us on the streets, had experienced - and quite possibly participated in - the killing. Bumper sticker slogans aside, what feelings they must still harbor for those who killed their family members, or for those they killed?

On our third day in Rwanda, we steeled ourselves for a visit to the Kigali Memorial Center, completed in 2004 with money from the Aegis Foundation. We didn’t go right away because we didn’t want the genocide to overwhelm our experience of the Rwandan people, but in some ways, the genocide is why we came. The Memorial Center is located at the foot of one of Kigali’s many hills, surrounded by mass graves and beautifully landscaped gardens with roses and fountains.

We took a cab, and when we asked the cabbie what he thought of the memorial he began to shake with nervousness. We didn’t understand all of his broken Swahili, but he seemed to say that the evil on display in the memorial center was still alive and well in Rwanda today. What must it be like for him to drive a steady stream of white tourists to stare at the unthinkable crimes committed by his own people against each other?

The first thing that struck us as we entered the dark hallways was that the written language of the exhibit was Kinyarwanda, with French and English in smaller letters near the floor. We had to get down on our knees to read some of the captions, but we were glad that the museum made the choice to put Kinyarwanda first, for it is most importantly a memorial for Rwandans, not for tourists, so that future generations of Rwandans will never forget, and never repeat the atrocities.

The exhibit begins with ancient Rwandan history, leads into colonialism when the Belgians exacerbated the split between Hutu and Tutsi, then documents the buildup in 1993 of the racist propaganda, inflammatory radio broadcasts of RTLM, the first massacres, and the pleas of the UN commander to the world that were repeatedly denied.

Then the genocide: terrible picture of corpses, copies of the identity cards that condemned people to death, actual weapons – machetes, clubs, knives, guns – still stained with blood, videos of the killings, interviews with survivors. We walked in silence, overwhelmed, angry, heartsick.

Finally we went upstairs, where the exhibit ends with the hall of children: life-sized pictures of beautiful children in the last photo ever taken of them. Below the picture, a small plaque states their name, their families’ memories of them, their favorite food, favorite toys, and then, the way they died…

“Hacked with a machete. Age 6.”
“Buried alive in a pit latrine. Age 4.”
“Thrown against a wall. Age 2 months.”
“Raped and shot in front of her family. Age 11.”

This was my breaking point. Looking at the smiling faces of the children and trying to connect those faces with their incomprehensible means of death, I slumped against a wall and began crying. Anette picked me up and we went out together into the garden with its mass graves, looking out onto the city where just yesterday, streets were rivers of blood and dogs and rats feasted on the bodies of the dead.

Obama: The Reaction in Tanzania

Living without a television for 15 months has been wonderful in so many ways, but on election night, what we wanted more than anything else was to be back in America glued to the tube. Instead, we settled for text messages.

The first one came from Jake at 5:30am TZ time: “It looks like Obama is going to win:-)” An hour later from my parents: “Obama has won! McCain hasn’t conceded yet, but it’s a given – hallelujah!” An hour later, a text from our Ugandan friend Vinbro who has been talking excitedly with us about the election for over a year now: “McCain has thrown in the towel! Were you watching??”

I had to reply that no, we weren’t watching because we don’t have a TV. But just as we were beginning to feel like history was passing us by, Jake called from the early morning streets of Washington, DC. The noise was so loud I could barely hear his voice, but he was able to tell us that Obama had kicked McCain’s ass, won 330+ electoral votes and all the swing states, and everybody was celebrating his incredible victory and the end of Bush’s Reign of Terror.

Ecstatic, we donned the apparel that Jake had brought for us when he visited in June: a t-shirt with Obama’s face framed in a big O of stars and stripes, and an Obama pin. As we walked down the hill to work, people looked at the t-shirt smiling and we told them the great news.

At work, our colleagues were thrilled for us and we laughed at a catchy Obama reggae song playing on the local radio station. We brought them our copy of “Maisha ya Barack Obama,” (The Life of Barack Obama) written in Swahili by our Tanzanian journalist friend, Maggid Mjengwa, on sale for a dollar on street corners in Iringa. They were eager to read it and to be inspired, saying that Obama is a man who can make anybody – even the poor and the downtrodden – believe that they can succeed.

The texts and phone calls kept coming throughout the morning: Musa Kwanga, a local pastor who helped us bring SODIS to the villages; Zebedayo, a good friend and teacher at Idodi Secondary School; Bahati, another teacher who transferred to the southern city of Mbeya and we haven’t heard from in half a year; Sammy, a young artist from Dar Es Salaam who we met at the Bagamoyo Music Festival.

All of them called - some using their last shillings of credit - to say congratulations and to express their happiness for me, for Americans, for Tanzanians, for the world. It was deeply moving to receive these personal calls on behalf of Obama - it made me feel like he was a close family member - and to see how the force of Obama’s personality has reached as far as the remote villages of Iringa. Later, when we read his speech, we realized that the line, “to all those huddled around radios in forgotten corners of the world,” applies as much to Iringa as to anywhere else.


After work we stopped in at a local eatery and the waitress, who knows us well, complimented us on the t-shirt and asked if we could get her one. The shirt continued to draw attention, with people stopping us on the street to share their happiness and shake our hands. When we saw a man with his own Obama shirt, we had to stop and congratulate him. He had been waiting for this day to get a big silk screen of Obama with the slogan “Change We Need” on his second-hand shirt. Singing Obama’s praises, he pumped our hands vigorously and told us, “This is a man of unity. If they start fighting again in Kenya, Obama will come and end it and they will listen to him!”

We then headed down a side street because I wanted to see a man who, when repairing my flip-flops one day, talked earnestly with me about American politics as we sat in the hot sun and he threaded his needle through the thin rubber of my broken footwear.
He was sitting with a couple of friends on his shoemaker’s bench by the side of the road, and as we approached he said to them with pride, “I told you that my American friend would come see me today!”

A few meters down the road, a teenage girl came running up to us and said she just wanted to look at the Obama shirt. She then broke into a freestyle rap about Obama as she walked beside us and told us she was going to begin studying in our favorite Tanzanian town, Bagamoyo, at the College of Arts.

Our last stop in town before climbing the hill to go home was to see a family that owns a crafts store. The daughter, Upendo (the most common Tanzanian name for women, it means love) saw me and told a customer in the store, “This is the guy who told me that if Obama loses he won’t go back to America!” Upendo’s mother congratulated us warmly and said Obama gives her great hope because she feels that America will succeed now, and if America succeeds, then Tanzania will also succeed.

We never did find a working television; although we wandered around our neighborhood all evening knocking on friends’ doors, we were foiled by strong winds that scrambled satellite signals and then caused a total blackout. So we ended the day by listening to Obama’s speech on our neighbor’s laptop. They had downloaded it from the net, and as we sat there listening to his voice coming through the speakers, I imagined families huddled around the radio listening to FDR’s fireside chats during the Depression.

Now, 70 years later, a man whose name means blessing in Swahili, and who has eaten ugali with his grandmother in his ancestral African village, is the president-elect of the United States of America. Come on, say it with me, “Yes we can.”

FORS Fieldwork

Dear Readers,

Apologies for the month-long silence, but we’ve been busy moving into a new house, planning our wedding, doing fieldwork with FORS, and going to Bagamoyo last week for a great music festival. Before we continue our East Africa travelogue, here’s a description of what we’re up to these days…

After traveling all of East Africa, we came back to Iringa appreciating it for what it is: a productive regional capital with four universities, plenty of government jobs and a booming central market. It was all the more shocking, therefore, when on our first trip to the field with FORS, we drove just 70 kilometers outside of Iringa town and encountered some of the most desperate living conditions we’ve seen in all of East Africa.

As we descended into the Pawaga valley everything looked like the barren deserts of the Sudan: flat plains that should have been covered in grass were a wasteland of brown earth, and all the bushes and trees were bare. We stopped to eat under the meager shade of a thorny tree, and as we sweated and swatted the flies away hoping for a breath of wind to relieve the heat, we wondered how people out here survive from day to day. The answer for many is pastoralism: tribes like the Sukuma, Gogo, Mang’ati and Maasai keep thousands of cattle, goats and sheep and graze them everywhere, but this destroys the topsoil and leaves nothing but brown dust.

Desolate as this landscape was, it couldn’t have prepared us for the sad state of the biggest of Pawaga’s 13 primary schools. It is located in a village with no water source, so donkey carts trudge four hours to the river and back every day. There are 800 students at the school, and on a good day, five teachers – you do the math. Most classrooms don’t have desks, so 70-100 students sit together on the floor, but as there are no visible routines and no educational resources, there is little reason for them to sit in class at all.

The result is that students mill about the schoolyard all day long in their ragged, dirty uniforms and teachers teach when they feel like it, which isn’t often. Pushing and hitting each other with abandon, the students ran to meet our Land Rover and crowded around to stare at the two wazungu. Our Tanzanian colleague told them to go back to class but they just stood there as if she had been speaking Norwegian.

On this round of school visits, our task was to evaluate students’ knowledge of weather.
To find out what the youngest ones (grades 1-3) knew about the weather, we planned a couple of games: one is to pinch your nose for a minute to see what happens when humans don’t have air to breathe, and the other is to release a balloon to understand that wind is air that’s on the move.

When you enter a Tanzanian primary school classroom, all the students rise together to greet you, hands to their foreheads in a show of respect, and shout “Goooood mooooooorning teeeeeacha!! Hooow aaare yoouuu?!!” If you ask them to sit down, they respond in chorus, “Weee aaare sitting doooown nooow, thaaaank youuuu.”

At first, this might seem like an impressive display of classroom management and student engagement, but it’s really just blind obedience. When it comes to creative thinking and freedom of expression, few dare to speak. This is why FORS tries to introduce interactive games and participatory learning.

When Anette and I stood together in front of this particular class of second graders, they were so excited that they couldn’t keep still or quiet. They were so eager for adult attention that they forgot their obedience. Of course, the color of our skin and the sound of our non-native Swahili spoke louder than anything we were trying to say, but it was clear that these students were not used to following rules and listening to instructions.

There was, however, a bright spot: we decided to lead the students in a rendition of the catchy chorus of the FORS film “Water is Life,” which they had seen in April of this year. With all the students clapping in unison, we sang the chorus several times and were delighted to see that the students knew all the words.

As we drove away full of conflicting emotions about our experience, we were all venting our frustration, talking loudly over each other as the Land Rover bounced along the dusty road. This is the nature of our work with FORS; the goal is to improve the quality of environmental education in these village primary schools, but school itself is an alien concept from an alien culture.

This point was illustrated for us the other day by a 75-year-old man who still remembers what his British teachers used to tell him when he was a schoolboy in colonial Tanganyika: “What an Englishman doesn’t know isn’t worth knowing.” Forced on Tanzania by its colonizers then abruptly abandoned at independence, the public education system has languished like a hippo out of water ever since, growing more and more bloated as national enrollment increases while teacher training, pay and resources remain unconscionably insufficient.

If there’s anything we’ve learned from our 15 months in Tanzania, it’s that change here takes a long time, much longer than we wazungu tend to expect. So, if we measure progress by the Swahili saying “pole pole ndio mwendo,” (slowly, slowly is indeed the way) then maybe it’s safe to say that FORS is making a difference even in the most difficult of its 24 schools.

Bujumbura to Kigali

The whole time we were in Burundi we didn’t realize we were an hour behind TZ, so when we woke up to our phone alarms at 6:30am to take the bus to Rwanda, it was really 5:30am. A fortuitous oversight, because we arrived at the bus station way too early and so met an incredible man named Negro, driver of the New Yahoo! Express to Kigali.

Negro (pronounced like the Spanish) has a magnetic personality: he is compelling, convincing, and ultimately irresistible. His eyes bulge out when he looks at you and the intensity of his stare and earnestness in his voice command you to listen. His demeanor – the way he walks, his gestures – are effused with power and control. This is a man who knows what he wants and how to get it, and he is exceedingly proud of his job as driver.

After helping us choose the best seats and good-naturedly posing for a picture for my African bus collage in the predawn light, Negro invited us to breakfast at everyone’s favorite Bujumbura café: Boulangerie Trianon. After breakfast we set off on our six-hour trip and Negro put on the first of many cassettes, all of which were excellent, from American country to French folk to Tanzanian Bongo Flava to Burundian gospel. He constantly joked with the passengers, shouting out friendly barbs and bugging his eyes out at them in the rear view mirror, drawing many a laugh. He spoke sometimes in Kirundi but more often in Kiswahili flavored with French.

As we climbed the gorgeous green mountains north of Bujumbura, Anette and I were awestruck at the scenery – endless huge-leafed banana groves, jungle-like vegetation creeping over the houses, and at the higher elevations, blue-leafed trees fluttering like aspen. The houses seemed sturdier and the people a bit wealthier than those we saw along Lake Tanganyika on our drive with Yusto. A difficult life of backbreaking labor, indeed, but a feeling that the people of these mountains belonged in this setting, like Sherpas to the Himalayas.

Overladen bikes struggled uphill or sped downhill past us, and groups of women walked along the road in brilliantly colored fabrics, looking much more like the “waswahili” women of the Tanzanian coast than the city girls of Bujumbura who dress in European fashions. They were the quintessential picture of Africa, carrying everything imaginable on their heads: baskets of cotton, bunches of bananas, bundles of firewood, four-foot stacks of Africa-red bricks, huge bails of newly cut grass, all with a hoe held over their shoulder and a baby slung on their backs. We felt like we were seeing an Africa untouched by time, here in the middle of the continent where few wazungu tread.

We crossed into Rwanda under strict security and Negro told us to put our camera away because people here are still sensitive to outsiders taking pictures. As we stood in the long line waiting for our visas, Negro came up to us and asked for our passports, then disappeared into the Rwandan immigration office. Five minutes later he reappeared with a big grin on his face and handed us our newly stamped passports.

We were now driving on the best highway we’d been on in Africa: perfectly paved and signed, painted with center and side lines and even adorned with curbed sidewalks (a very Western notion) in places. The hills of Rwanda looked much like Burundi, but the stone and brick houses even wealthier, with terra cotta tiled roofs that could have been Italy. Bright billboards sponsored by USAid and the EU dotted the road, attesting to Rwanda’s progress since 1994. It is clear that many countries, in their guilt, have given hundreds of millions of dollars to Rwanda since the genocide.

We stopped for a 15-minute break and Negro took us to a local eatery where we had our first taste of manioc ugali. Ugali is the staple food of East Africa, usually made from boiled corn flour. We found the manioc version much stickier than the corn, but ate happily while Negro fussed over us, making sure we used the proper right hand technique to scoop up chunks of ugali, and ordering the kitchen staff to cut our meat into bite-sized pieces. Just like at breakfast, he refused to let us pay.

Shortly after lunch the Rwandan police stopped our bus and two other vehicles on a downhill slope. The officer insisted on giving us a ticket but he let the two trucks go, piquing Negro’s anger. The two began to argue in loud Kinyrarwanda and Negro became furious when the officer wouldn’t rescind the ticket, so he promised to have him reprimanded. The officer cheekily replied, “no problem, no problem,” in English, and then a female officer who had joined the scene said something that clearly crossed a cultural line. Negro immediately opened his door to get out and confront her, and all the passengers defended him by yelling at her and banging their hands against the windows.

Indignant, Negro drove off with his ticket, but he soon veered off the road to the local police station, where he parked his bus and went to set things straight. At first we were skeptical, thinking it was just going to be a futile battle of egos, but upon reflection we realized that Negro was doing something that took a lot of courage: standing up to the system because he felt he had been wronged.

It took an hour and a half of waiting in the hot mid-afternoon sun, but nobody complained; we sensed that everyone respected Negro as much as we did. When he came back and triumphantly took his place in the driver’s seat, explaining how he had made the officers so afraid that their skin changed color and they rescinded the ticket, everyone roared with laughter and applauded his efforts.

For the next hour as he barreled down the highway with one hand on the wheel and one hand gesticulating wildly, eyes bugging out in the rear view mirror, Negro boisterously recounted the events while the passengers shouted out their approval and delight. And so we reached Kigali with one less African policeman comfortable in his corruption, thanks to the magnetism of a man named Negro.

Tourists & Thieves

One of the best things about being in Burundi was the feeling that we were exploring a country that few white people ever go to. There is only one tourist shop in all of Bujumbura, and as there are no organized groups of young white travelers or old white retirees, there are no street peddlers who make a living by selling kitschy African trinkets. Due to the lack of tourism, petty thieves haven’t had a chance to hone their pickpocketing skills, something that we discovered on our first walk around Bujumbura’s central market.

Despite the density of people at the market, we wandered through the crowds with ease; no one was pushing or shoving. There was obviously an order to the chaos, so when a man suddenly ran right into my chest and didn’t apologize, I knew something was up. I kept my eye on him as he ran back past us and waited dancing (yes, dancing) on the corner until we came by. As soon as he closed in again, three of his friends appeared out of nowhere and tried to grab us, so I immediately pushed the lead guy backwards with my forearm. Surprisingly, this was enough to dissuade all four of them, and they took off running down the street.

More amused than flustered, we reflected that things might not have gone so well had one of them had a knife, so we resolved to avoid physical contact if thieves approached us again. Sure enough, an hour later, the same scenario began to unfold. This time I acted earlier - I cursed the approaching thief to his face and told him to get lost. While this succeeded in avoiding physical contact, Anette thought my methods too crude, and rightfully so: the F-word is understood all over the world, and a two-meter tall white man shouting it in the streets of Bujumbura is sure to attract more unwanted attention.

By this time, the word was definitely out that two white people were walking around and around the market just begging to be robbed, so we began to make our way back to the hotel for lunch. Before we got there, a few more thieves decided to try their luck…

Two guys came up alongside us as two others snuck up behind. We stopped as soon as we felt their presence and the two from behind kept walking past us. The two beside us, however, stopped as if on cue and simultaneously rested a leg on a cement block, pretending to watch life go by. They looked like hapless FBI agents who had just been caught tailing Tony Soprano, so I walked up to them and greeted them loudly in Kirundi, but got no answer, just downcast eyes. Then I said “Amahoro muhira?” (How is everyone at home?) and one man reluctantly turned his face to me and answered. Then I asked him in Swahili, “Are you a thief?” and he answered hurriedly, “No, no, I’m not a thief.” And that was the end of that comedy.

After lunch we took a walk in a different part of town and were no longer troubled by thieves. However, we became furious when we passed a sign for an NGO that proclaimed: “Providing hope to the hopeless.” As we stood in the street venting to each other about the hopelessness of such organizations, a taxi drove by with the word “nigger” (not “nigga”) emblazoned proudly across its windshield. It was one of those moments that catches you off guard because it is so unexpected and so culturally wrong by your parameters, and it is the unfathomable icing on the cake in a day full of thieves, poverty and thoughts of why Africa is the way it is and what exactly we’re doing here.

Yes, we’ve seen plenty of pirated Chinese 50-in-1 DVDs with titles like “Black American Nigga Money Films 2008” and the odd “Nigga Kutz” barbershop, but this was the first “er” spelling of the offensive word we’d seen. For a white teacher who spent a full week in his Spanish class facilitating a student debate about the use of the N-word, it made me upset, but I know from conversations with many Africans that they don’t understand why it’s offensive. For them, it’s just another piece of American pop culture to be imitated, but for me, it can never be separated from the hatred and violence of American history and the ongoing struggle of Black America.

In the next five minutes after seeing the car, at least five people shouted out “mzungu,” as if to test our acceptance of this quasi-racial term that so often feels derogatory to us. Usually we just ignore it because we know it’s just curiosity, but on some days you just want to scream at people and tell them to stop treating you differently because you look different. It is, I think, one of the most important lessons for white people living in Africa: to know what it’s like to be a minority, and to realize that no matter how well you learn the language and culture, you will always be seen as different.

Burundian Cuisine

For all the evils of colonialism that survive to this day in Africa, we seem to have found at least one positive byproduct in Burundi – its cuisine. In Tanzania, ruled first by the Germans and then the British, it is impossible to get a good Western meal. Great Indian food is everywhere but it gets old after a few months. Burundi, however, was placed under Belgian rule after the German defeat in WWI, and the legacy of French-Belgian cooking can still be tasted, especially in Bujumbura.

After Yusto helped us check into our downtown hotel, we consulted our guidebook and decided on an upscale restaurant on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. I ordered brochette (kebab – a national favorite) and Anette, fillet mignon. The beef, accompanied by perfect pommes frites, was tender and divinely flavored, our first taste of home in over a year. We could just as well have been sitting at a gourmet café on the banks of the Seine, and we shuddered to think of all the mouthfuls of chewy grey cow we’d stomached in our first year in Tanzania.

We stayed late in the warm night air digesting our meal and staring out over the black lake. When we went to leave, the two guards at the entrance of the restaurant were reluctant to walk down the road to find a cab for us. They confirmed what our guidebook said: Bujumbura nights are still ruled by thieves and armed gangs. Despite numerous police patrols, most Burundians don’t walk around after dark in the capital. Although the guards didn’t seem too happy about it, they agreed that they were less likely to get jumped than we were, so one of them kindly got us a cab.

When we woke up early the next morning, the smell of fresh bread was wafting through our open window. Just like in the old Looney Tunes cartoons, our noses pricked up and led us out of bed and downstairs towards the smell. Sure enough, local hot spot Boulangerie Trianon was right next door, and we sat down in a cozy cafeteria filled with Burundian men starting off their morning as they always do: with a personal pitcher of local coffee, fresh croissants, and omelettes a foot in diameter.

It was as if we had woken up in Heaven. Our breakfast for the past year has been terrible instant coffee and Corn Flakes, the only cereal available in Iringa. With gusto we tucked into our chocolate croissants and enormous omelettes filled with cheese, onions, and real bacon! Anette was thrilled that the fresh bread almost equaled Norwegian standards; quite a compliment considering that even the specialty bakeries in Berkeley didn’t measure up. We took our sweet time savoring the aroma and taste of the strong coffee, and walked out into the early morning with happy stomachs.

The only thing lacking at breakfast was a local newspaper. In Tanzania, the media, while not 100% free, is nonetheless prolific: there are dozens of newspapers in Swahili for sale on every street corner in every town. Most urban Tanzanians, especially men, read the papers every day. In Bujumbura, though, newspapers are nowhere to be seen. The lack of local media (in French or Kirundi) is certainly a consequence of the war - as with other industries, publishing is some 20 years behind the rest of East Africa. We finally found a deli that sold a couple of dailies, but it wasn’t the newspapers that we’ll remember...

The first thing you see as you walk into this corner store deli are two huge refrigerated glass cases containing an incredible selection of meats and cheeses, and shelves lined with mouth-watering snacks and chocolates. Again, we’ve never seen anything like it in Tanzania, and it could have been Paris or Seville or Whole Foods Market, Anytown, USA. Much of the meat and cheese was imported from Europe, but Burundians have clearly developed a taste for the stuff. We visited the deli four times in two days, and each time we drank a cup of fresh local yogurt to refresh ourselves in the heat of the day.

Arriving in Bujumbura

The road to Bujumbura drops from the mountainous border down to the shores of beautiful Lake Tanganyika, humid and ringed with fat palms and leafy banana trees. As we continued through the verdant landscape I asked Yusto about the war, and he proudly but solemnly launched into a Burundian history lesson in Swahili, pointing out hilltop forests where rebels used to hide and shoot at people farther down the mountain, explaining how whole classrooms of Hutu children were taken out of school by the army and made to lie on the road, where they were then run over by trucks.

He told us that in Burundi the Hutus were the primary victims of post-independence violence, but now they’ve gained political power, whereas the reverse is true in Rwanda. Interestingly, he referred to himself as “Mrundi,” putting national unity before tribalism. When I asked Yusto how he survived the war, he told us that he fled to Kigoma for a year in 1993 but didn’t like the lack of freedom and the discrimination he felt as a refugee, so he came back and gritted it out with his wife and nine children. Once a bomb fell just 30 meters from their house, but Yusto says you just get used to it.

As we drove, we saw groups of soldiers in army fatigues sitting along the road armed with AK-47s, watching out for robbers and rebels. We also saw the striking Burundian flag, but it was not nearly as prominent a white flag displaying an eagle clutching a rifle and a leafy branch in his talons. Yusto explained that this is the party flag of the new president, Pierre Nkurunziza, and the rifle and branch represent his time in the jungle, when he and his men ate nothing but manioc for ten years.

In his eagerness to tell us about his country, especially his palm oil export business, Yusto literally screamed in my ear throughout most of our trip. He was obviously a successful businessman; he had a five-inch thick wad of bills on the dashboard that he dipped into to buy necessities like fruit, fish and milk, all of which he shared generously with us. Personal relationships are the bedrock of African culture, and Yusto clearly values his: he must have stopped along the road every fifteen minutes or so to greet friends and talk at leisure with them. He taught us how to greet people in Kirundi by saying “Amahoro,” which always elicited laughter and excitement from the locals.

The poverty, however, was some of the worst we’ve seen in our travels throughout Africa and Latin America. The roadside villages were a constant procession of filth, dilapidation and hunger. Beggars crowded our windows each time we stopped, an old man with elephantiasis of the feet stretched out his arms in a plea for us to take pity on his grotesqueness, and a young boy tried to shake Anette’s hand…here is how she experienced it:

“My first impression of Burundi was surprisingly good, nothing like what I expected after reading the ominous warnings of the US and Norwegian embassies. The gorgeous landscape with high mountains, dense green vegetation and big banana trees was a real contrast from Iringa and Kigoma in the dry season. But in the middle of it all was poverty, much more desperate than what we’ve seen until now in Africa. Dirty children, hovels for homes and stores. When we were passing through a slum-like area with muddy roads and people with ragged clothing, Yusto stopped to buy some fruit.

I was absorbed in watching the fruit transaction and didn’t notice that a little hand had pushed its way through the open window where I sat. When I turned my head I saw right into the face of a small boy with sad eyes. Hoping to get him to smile a bit, I grabbed one of his fingers that was resting on the window and pressed gently. That was when I noticed that the finger I had grabbed was as good as dead, like a rag doll’s hand. The boy’s wrist was a stump and his hand just hung there like useless skin. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of that dead hand hanging from the end of a moving arm.”

At dusk we finally reached the outskirts of Bujumbura and realized that if we had been on public transport, we would never have made it to the city before dark. Yusto - just like all the Tanzanians who took it upon themselves to be our guides and caretakers - drove us right to a hotel in the center of town and got out to make sure that the manager gave us a good room for the night. We thanked him sincerely for all his kindness and then went to eat dinner and celebrate our arrival in this alluring country.

The Burundian Border

Heading north from Kigoma the hills rose higher and the villagers we picked up along the way to the border only spoke Kiha (a tribal language similar to Burundi’s national language, Kirundi). As usual, the camaraderie was jovial despite the claustrophobia and we made friends on our short journey, including a teenager named Shabani from the DRC who was leaving his Tanzanian refugee camp for a week to go see his mother in Burundi.

The daladala dropped us off at the border, a desolate road that snakes its way along a 2000m high ridgeline, and we were grateful that Shabani walked with us through the silent landscape. All we knew about Burundi was that our governments warned against visiting and rebels had bombed the capital in May. We were prepared, though: we had split up our money, stuffed it into socks, bras, and waistbands, and agreed that if the rebels took our passports we would get new ones at our embassies.

The silence at the border was the first sign that Burundi is unlike any other country we’ve visited. At every other African border we’ve crossed (Morocco, Senegal, Gambia, Zambia, Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya) hordes of money-changers, petty thieves, tour guides and sellers of odds and ends make their living. These border towns have lives and economies of their own; they feed off the constant stream of cars, trucks and people who cross every day. But Burundi’s borders are eerily still, cut off from the rest of Africa by mountains, lakes and a recurrent civil war that began in the early ‘60s and ended with a tenuous peace agreement in 2006.

Shabani walked with us to the “old bandas,” where our passports were first checked, but the official border post had been moved during the war so we hopped on another bus to get there. The 20-minute ride took us past a repatriation camp, a gated compound with a gleaming corrugated metal fence surrounding the UNHCR and Red Cross offices, and cookie cutter tin houses for the refugees outside the fence.

Burundians were the first refugees to come to Tanzania in large numbers. This was in 1972, during a particularly violent wave of Hutu-Tutsi killings that left 200,000 dead in just three months. As the conflict continued to flare up throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, hundreds of thousands of Burundians fled to Tanzania, and this, combined with the influx of Congolese in the 1990s, has given Tanzania the distinction of hosting more refugees than any other African country. Just this week, however, the Tanzanian government made a historic decision to grant citizenship to 76,000 Burundian refugees who have been living in Tanzania for almost four decades.

Shabani was at first denied entry into Burundi, but the guards said with a big smile that he could pass if his white friends paid $10 on his behalf. Not willing to support corruption, and sure our friend could handle himself, we left him and walked to the middle of town to catch a bus. At the bus station people stopped what they were doing, stared, and then they stared some more. It felt good to find a place in Africa where white people aren’t a common sight. There is no tourism in Burundi as yet - the only wazungu are Belgian and French aid workers who travel by plane or expensive Land Cruiser.

Proud as we were to be entering the country via local transport, we began to worry when we found out that there were no more buses going the 150km to Bujumbura. Extreme height and whiteness, however, come in handy in such situations: I soon flagged down a smallish red SUV and scored a ride from a wealthy Burundian businessman named Yusto. Shabani had at this point made it past the border guards, so we reciprocated his earlier kindness by getting him a seat in Yusto’s car.

Five minutes into our trip a man and his young son whizzed by us on a heavily loaded bicycle, going way too fast and out of control down a steep mountain highway. Yusto suddenly pulled over, stopped the car and covered his eyes. Sure enough, the bike fishtailed violently and the man jumped off while his son was thrown to the cement. Yusto, hands still over his eyes, asked us, “Did he die? Did he die?” but miraculously both were apparenty unhurt. Yusto then got out of the car and began screaming at the man, berating him for having been so careless with his child on such a dangerous road.

It was a harsh reminder that these are the risks poverty forces people to take: to ride an ancient bike heavily loaded down a steep mountain road with your child on the back, forced to transport whatever you can however you can to get a few thousand francs a day to survive.

Crossing Tanzania, Part Five

We knew we were close. Our flashlight-guided ride the night before had brought us to within a couple hundred kilometers of Kigoma, so we slept late, had a leisurely breakfast of tea, toast and eggs, then walked up the red road past the purple jacarandas and earthen buildings with dust-caked tin roofs to the daladala station. It was now more than 50 hours since we boarded our first bus in Dar.

As the morning sunlight filtered in through the windows of our bus, young men struggled to stuff huge bags of cornmeal behind our seats and another man clutched a frightened chicken in his lap. We struck up a conversation with the woman sitting in front of us and noticed that her Swahili was flavored with French. She told us how she fled her native Burundi 15 years ago after her entire family had been killed in the war, and had made her living at odd jobs in Tanzania, in and out of refugee camps, ever since.

What could we say? She was clearly still in pain, so we gently shifted the subject. As we started our journey other passengers engaged us in conversation, curious to know what we were doing here. One man was so thrilled that we spoke Swahili that he bought a bunch of bananas and handed us two. Later he gave us two guava melons so we thanked him and shared our peanuts.

Each time we stopped along the side of the road, rural villagers, especially women and children, called to each other to come see the wazungu in the daladala. We beckoned to them, saying, “come and greet us!” at which point they hid behind each other giggling and urging the bravest one to run up to our bus.

The trip - although we had been told two hours and it turned out to be four - was a pleasant one thanks to the camaraderie among the passengers. However, our daladala was small and low to the road and we were eating dust the whole way. Another disadvantage of the low carriage was that we felt the bumps more acutely – the last 100 km or so to Kigoma proved to be the worst of the whole three-day trip. The daladala shook with such ferocity that we struggled to stay in our seats: our ears and our backsides ached from the relentless rattling of old, thin metal.

Ten kilometers outside of town a miracle happened: we met paved road for the first time in two days. It was a bit of cruel irony; I mean, really, why even bother to pave the last 10km? When we pulled into the daladala station covered in red dust, our Burundian mama called us a cab and got in to make sure we found our way to a decent guesthouse. Again, the selfless kindness and care for others that characterizes African society.

We stayed in Kigoma for five days, and every day we ate fresh “mgebuka” from Lake Tanganyika, quite possibly the world’s tastiest fish. Roasted whole, I even ate the tail and head - eyes and jawbone included - because it’s just that good. I also killed a four-foot long snake (yes, it was poisonous) with the help of a couple of Tanzanian employees of our guesthouse. The snake slithered into the room next to ours (thank God I saw it) and we spent about 20 minutes darting in and out of the room, throwing bricks and poking with long sticks, to roust the snake from his hiding place before one well-placed slide of a long metal pole severed his body against the concrete wall.

And so ended our traverse of Tanzania. Our East African adventure was just beginning, though: unknown Burundi was waiting just beyond the mountains.

Crossing Tanzania, Part Four

Somehow the interminable trip from Kahama to Kibondo ended and we got off the bus promising each other that this was enough for today; even though it was still light out, we’d sleep in this dusty waystation and try our luck with a new vehicle tomorrow morning. But our friend, the woman with the baby, urged us to take the last daladala going south to Kasulu, where the guest houses were cleaner and our chances of getting to Kigoma better.

Another decision to make. As we stood at the door of the daladala trying to imagine how uncomfortable we’d be in those cramped seats, one of the car park hustlers behind us just wouldn’t stop shouting “mzungu.” He obviously wanted our attention, so I whirled around and in my fastest Swahili, said, “Look! Look! My skin is different than yours! How clever you are to notice the difference!” Not expecting to hear Swahili, the man was stunned, and the gang of hustlers around him burst into laughter and began making fun of him for having been told off by an mzungu.

At that point we decided to trust our “mama” and get on the daladala with her. Wanting to sit as comfortably as possible, we squished into the wide front seat next to the driver. This is I dicey strategy at best. Yes, you’re away from the revolving door of passengers standing over you with armpits in your face, but if the bus crashes, you’re the first to fly through the windshield. There was no seatbelt, but again, there was no other option so we took our chances.

A piece of metal was protruding through the seat so painfully that I grabbed a shirt out of my bag and stuffed it under my ass to relieve the pain. I was seated diagonally, backpack on my lap, trying to give Anette room so she wouldn’t interfere with the driver as he changed gears. We set off down the road wondering how long the trip would last and how long we’d be able to sit like this.

As the sun began to set behind the mountains marking the border with Burundi, we noticed that our driver had yet to turn his headlights on. I asked him once why he was waiting, and I didn’t fully understand his answer. Five minutes later, with darkness rapidly enveloping the road, I asked him again and this time I understood – the headlights were broken.

Great. Just what we needed after six hours stuffed in the back of Ally’s Express like cattle, guarded by civilians with AK-47s. Again our minds started racing through the possibilities, and again none of the outcomes were good. Amazingly, as complete darkness fell, our driver still managed to navigate every pothole in the road. A veteran of this route, he literally could have driven it in his sleep.

It was then we noticed that the farther into Tanzania we went, and the smaller and more dangerous the transport became, the stronger grew the camaraderie among the passengers. At the start of this particular journey we overheard our fellow travelers remarking on the oddity of seeing white people on a bus in this part of the country. One who had heard me tell off the hustler explained to the others that these wazungu could speak Swahili. Upon hearing this I turned around and replied, “Even Kihehe!” Kihehe is the tribal language of Iringa, and the whole bus burst into laughter when they heard me say this. From then on we were the objects of their affection as they traded banter with us and about us, exploding into fits of mirth as we rolled on into the night.

After two hours of driving in total darkness without headlights we reached our first village, only discernible by dim kerosene lamps lined up along the side of the road.
We should have known that no one in the village was going to fix our headlights, but we also should have known that the world’s economy has grown to such an extent that cheap goods from China somehow make their way to remote villages in western Tanzania.

The solution? Our driver bought two flashlights and rigged them to the underside of our bus with rope! Fragile though they seemed hanging from the beat-up bumper, they made a world of difference in the inky night. The flashlights stayed on despite all the bumps and potholes, and two hours later we arrived in Kasulu.

A final appreciation to our Tanzanian traveling companions: the mama who had taken us under her wing that morning had been forced to stand for six hours in the nightmarishly crowded aisle on Ally’s Express. When we arrived in Kasulu, her hometown, at 10pm, she lifted the most enormous suitcase onto her head as if it were nothing and walked down the road, baby wrapped tightly to her back, to show us the best guesthouse in town.

Crossing Tanzania, Part Three

Bladders finally relieved, our next task was to find a way from Kahama to Kigoma. One of the women who had traveled with us from Dar was also going to Kigoma, so we asked if she could help us get on the right bus. Baby wrapped tightly to her back, she threaded her way through the hustlers, singled one out, and within minutes procured tickets for all three of us on a bus going to Kibondo, another town we’d never heard of.

We killed a few hours drinking coffee and watching the town of Kahama wake up, then at 11am we got on our new bus, Ally’s Express. Unfortunately, we were given the last two seats in the bus; Anette against the window in the way back corner, and me with my knees at my ears trying to give her some leg room. “Shouldn’t be that bad,” we thought, as we settled in for the six-hour ride.

We had now reached the wilds of western Tanzania, a place that has little to do with the bustle and modernity of Dar Es Salaam. There were no more paved roads, and within an hour our clothes, hair and backpacks were coated in a thick layer of red dust.

As we labored along the bumpy road, Ally’s Express kept stopping to pick up person after person, bag after bag, until the aisle of the bus was completely filled with standing passengers. It was now midday, the sun was hot, we were all sweaty and dusty, and the smells were overpowering (most Africans don’t wear deodorant). Our legs were cramped, we were thirsty but we couldn’t drink too much because then we’d have to pee, and anyway it was now impossible to get out of the bus. We were trapped.

There must have been 50 people standing squashed against each other in the aisle. All we could see was a sea of bodies. Our fellow passengers in the back began to protest, yelling out, “we’re human beings, not cattle!” each time the conductor ordered people to squish farther down the aisle to let more people on board. The road was sharply crowned due to erosion, and every time we veered to the side to add more passengers, it felt like we were hanging upside down from an amusement park ride.

The bus was now so heavy we were sure it would tip over, and our minds began racing with scenarios of how we would get out in such an event. All the scenarios ended in our grisly death, either from the impact of the bus hitting the ground or from being trampled as people tried to get out. This was as close to panic as we wanted to get - a few more hours and both of us would have gotten claustrophobia for life. We swore to each other that after this trip, we would never again willingly put ourselves in this type of situation.

Sure, we feel that we gain respect from the locals by traveling as they do, and it gives us a truer perspective of Tanzanian life, but the fact is that we have a choice because of our wealth, and that will always make us different. Why, then, were we choosing to put ourselves in this dangerous position? Well, in this case, there was simply no other way to get to Kigoma. Our tickets on the direct bus had been sold away in Dar, and now we were in the middle of remote western Tanzania with no other choice than to make it by the only available means.

To make matters worse, at our next stop we saw several men in civilian clothes carrying AK-47s, of whom two boarded our bus. Considering how uncomfortable we already felt, this was enough to put us over the edge. We asked our fellow travelers and found out the men were guards who protected buses on this stretch of road. “Protect buses from what?” we asked. “Ambush and robbery,” came the reply.

Turns out we were about to pass by three Burundian refugee camps, and according to local Tanzanians, people in these camps often raid local villages. Whether or not this was simply uninformed prejudice, it only added to our growing panic. Already trapped in the way back of the bus surrounded by hundreds of bodies, we were now looking at the barrel of an AK-47 silhouetted against the windshield and wondering what could be lurking in the dense bush beyond.

Crossing Tanzania, Part Two

The first several hours were fine. We left Dar at about 7am and reached Dodoma, ostensibly the administrative capital of the country, before noon. The paved road disintegrated soon thereafter and we lurched off the main road to follow a wide sandy track that paralleled it. We saw several bulldozers and backhoes and assumed it was just a small detour due to roadwork, but then we saw the Chinese foremen in their hard hats and SUVs and realized this was a major development project. For anyone who doesn’t know, China is building Africa’s roads. On some street corners in Dar there are now more Chinese than Arabs or Indians, a historical first.

Turns out that this project has been underway for five years but not a single section of the planned 300km of tarmac has been laid. The sandy side-road has become the main road, and our driver treated it as such, rollicking along at 120 kmph over its numerous humps and depressions. We were seated a bit too far back in the bus, and thus were thrown skywards every time we hit a peak or valley. At times it got out of hand, and all the passengers in the back, after a collective gasp and pitch forward, started screaming at the driver to slow down. It was hot and dusty, which meant that the dust poured steadily through the windows and made it hard to breathe. It was a desolate countryside devoid of villages, which meant no way to buy water, which we were now out of.

After an eternity of hanging on hard to the seats around us, gritting our teeth because of the dust and the constant jarring of our bones, and dreaming of a drink of water, we reached paved road again and were ecstatic. We were now more than halfway to Kigoma, it was still light out, and we hadn’t experienced any major trouble yet…

KABOOM!! WHHSSSSHHHH RUMBLE RUMBLE RUMBLE!! All of the sudden smoke started pouring in the windows as the bus listed heavily to the left, and a Swahili woman sitting to our left shot up out of her seat and began yelling in a terrified voice, “YESU! YESU! YESU!” (Jesus, Jesus, Jesus).

The poor woman had obviously had a bad experience with a blowout on a bus before, and she was shaking and crying uncontrollably, head buried in her kanga when we finally ground to a halt a few second later. Her traveling companion tried to console her, as did other passengers, but she just sat there until everyone had gotten off the bus to wait for the drivers to change the tire.

Another truth of African life: if you want to drive a vehicle here, you must be able to fix that vehicle. We have come to have great respect for the drivers and conductors who are almost always able to fix these ageing machines by any means and with any parts necessary. We always enjoy these moments of camaraderie on long travels; everyone gets off, several male passengers often help change the tire, others look on, legs are stretched, bladders are emptied, and we are all together on the red earth in the middle of the bush, the huge sky overhead and emptiness and silence surrounding us. Tanzania has 40 million people, but it sure doesn’t feel like it when you break down in places like this, somewhere between Dodoma and nowhere.

Just before dusk the new tire was safely in place, the old shredded one now sharing space with the luggage, and we rumbled on into the night. At about 10pm, after 15 hours of driving, we stopped for the night in Nzega, a small junction close to our final destination. We wanted to keep an eye on our backpacks and keep our seats, so instead of finding a room in a guesthouse we lathered up with bug spray and settled in for what little sleep we could get on the hard, narrow seats.

At about 3am we were awakened by loud, agitated voices. We soon learned that one of our conductors had been attacked by a band of thieves with metal pipes as he was walking outside the bus. We heard our driver swearing revenge, but we simply put our heads back down as he sped off, knowing it would be a fruitless search. The hours between 3 and 6am were a blur of alternate attempts at finding the thieves, going to the police for help, and going to the hospital. Fortunately our conductor was not seriously hurt, and with his wounds dressed we drove out of Nzega before dawn.

You might think that was the last little twist on this first leg of our journey, but no. When I woke up again at dawn I had to pee terribly, but as usual I was at the mercy of the long journey and the few planned stops. I waited in agony for about half an hour, but the bus never stopped for more than 30 seconds to let people on or off. When we stopped near a gas station and someone had some bags to offload, I took my chance.

Standing outside in the bright early morning sun, back to my fellow passengers but conscious of their eyes (and those of the gas station employees, whose wall I was about to pee on) I got stage fright. I tried my best, but I knew the clock was ticking because this wasn’t a planned bathroom stop. Everyone was waiting for me, and I had to go so badly that it was just too much pressure – literally – so I zipped up without having relieved myself and jumped back on the bus hoping no one noticed how silly I had been.

When I sat back down I confided to Anette how much pain I was in, and she suggested that the old empty bottle trick might be my only way out. For the next 15 minutes or so I flip-flopped frenetically in my mind: “take out the bottle…jump off again…take out the bottle…jump off again.” Having already lost once to stage fright, I finally grabbed the bottle and went to the back row of the bus. I had just unzipped my pants and unscrewed the bottle cap and was waiting for relief when an old man in the front of the bus got up and began walking towards the back. Anette turned around and shot me a knowing glance, and I confirmed with my eyes that yes, I had already begun trying to pee.

There was nothing she could do to stop the man, so I chucked the bottle (which hadn’t yet begun to fill) and quickly covered my pants with my shirt because I didn’t have time to zip up before he sat down next to me. Damn African curiosity! Why of all moments did this man have to choose now to strike up a conversation with the conspicuously tall white man on his bus?

Africans are generally starved for exposure to the outside world, especially personal contact with foreigners, so many of them are overenthusiastic in their dealings with white people. We’ve gotten used to smiling politely, answering their many questions, and hoping for a turn of events to give us an excuse to get away. This time there was no escape. There was nothing to do suck it up, ignore my bladder (for a second time) and engage the man in polite conversation. Anette, meanwhile, was doing all she could to not turn around and burst into peals of laughter at my plight and my forced politeness.

It was 7am, for Chrissakes. Who the hell starts a conversation with a stranger at 7am after having spent a sleepless night on a bus?!! Fortunately it was only about fifteen more minutes until Kahama, and I somehow made it without being rude to my new friend and peeing all over the two of us. When we finally rolled to a stop in Kahama - 24 hours after beginning our trip in Dar - I raced to the public pay “toilet” (hole in the ground) and relieved myself, then stepped out into the morning sun to hug Anette as we congratulated each other on what we thought would be the most difficult leg of our journey.

Crossing Tanzania, Part One

We arrived at Dar’s central bus station well before daybreak, eager to get a good seat and stuff our backpacks into the overhead compartments for the two-day long trip across Tanzania to Kigoma, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. It is a fabled African traverse, plied for centuries by Zanzibari traders seeking ivory and slaves for export to the Middle East and beyond.

A century and a half ago Dr. David Livingstone began his many journeys along the route, making Ujiji, Kigoma’s southern neighbor, his home during his decades-long search for the source of Nile. In 1871 reporter Henry Morton Stanley, on a rescue mission financed by London’s Herald newspaper, trekked with his army of porters for eight months from the coast to reach Ujiji, where he finally found the old explorer and uttered those famous words, “Dr. Livingtone, I presume?”

In the early 1900s, the Germans built a railroad from Dar Es Salaam to Kigoma; a straight shot of about 1200km, it tamed the wild route and opened up increased trade with Central Africa. Although the trains run as slowly today as they did a hundred years ago, it’s still the best way to get to Kigoma, but as our luck would have it the train was booked until August.

We had heard from friends that there are no direct buses to Kigoma, but upon inquiry we discovered there is in fact one company: aptly-named Adventure. Their “direct” service follows a circuitous route that winds north to just shy of Lake Victoria before diving south again to follow the border with Burundi, adding some 400km to the trip.

With no other way of crossing Tanzania in less than a week (one can fly nowadays, but where’s the fun in that?) we reserved our seats on Adventure days in advance to make sure we would get there. Too bad we forgot the cardinal rule of long-distance African travel…

“Majina?”
“Alex and Anita.”

We watched as the conductor’s finger traced the list of passengers and didn’t find our names, and then it became clear – despite multiple assurances that we could pay on the morning of the trip, the man who took our reservations a week earlier had sold our spots because we hadn’t paid the money up front. Panic began to set in; we had just killed a week in Dar waiting for a permit that never came, and now we were all packed up with no place to go! How stupid could we have been?!!

The first streaks of dawn splashed some color onto the scene: two mzungu travelers looking like confused tourists with their two backpacks each, eyes searching the sea of giant buses for some sign of what to do next, surrounded by a yelling, tugging, jostling crush of the unsavory young men who make their livings at African bus stations.

In Africa, if someone (especially an mzungu) needs something, a crowd of three, six, then ten or twelve men will immediately materialize and each man will begin shouting his advice, pulling at your arm and assuring you of the best deal, the best price, the best bus, etc. Dealing with these men can actually be a lot of fun if you have the right attitude, but it is rarely pleasant, and especially not at 6 in the morning.

In the middle of our growing crowd and its chaos, with half-drunk men grabbing our arms and trying to lead us off in different directions, we looked at each other and felt overwhelmed and defeated. So when someone told us there was another company going most of the way to Kigoma, we took a chance and followed him through the crowd to a hulking old bus that was quickly filling up with passengers.

We talked to the conductor and he explained that he was going to Kahama. We had no idea where Kahama was, but he assured us that it was more than halfway to Kigoma, and that we should be able to get a series of minibuses from there to our final destination. Again we looked at each other and were forced to make a decision. “OK, let’s do it.” We paid the money, stuffed our backpacks into the shelf above our heads and sat down flustered and uncertain about the journey ahead.

Normally we like to take the best buses possible; we avoid the death traps, the ones that are too old, too overloaded or have a reputation for reckless driving, and we always try to get decently comfortable seats. It’s usually not a problem; we’ve learned that transport in Africa doesn’t have to be a nightmare, even for my 6’6” frame. But on that morning, as we felt the iron bars of our backrests jabbing our bones through the worn felt of the ripped cushions, we knew we were in for a long, uncomfortable ride.

East Africa Around

Dear Readers,

We have just returned to Iringa sick with fever and exhaustion, but elated and in awe of all we’ve seen and learned after a month of travel throughout East Africa. Our original plan for July was to work in a Congolese refugee camp in Western Tanzania, but we were denied the entry permit by a surly government official who was unmoved by our charming personalities:-)

This sudden blow to our plans left us wondering what to do with the rest of the month, so we decided to take our grand tour of East Africa’s 5 countries, which we had been planning for next spring. In the coming weeks we will try to edit our journals into coherent narratives to share with all of you. Here’s a quick preview:

We traveled in a giant circle beginning and ending in Dar Es Salaam, covering some 3000 kilometers in 23 days, and spending a total of 130 hours on African buses, the insides of which we never want to see again in our lifetime. We learned how to greet in 3 new languages: Kirundi, Kinyarwanda, and Luganda, and used our Kiswahili everywhere we went.

We read the US State Department warnings about travel to Burundi, but decided to go anyway and were well rewarded - the most dangerous thing that happened to us was not rebel attacks, but comically inept thieves following us around the market of Bujumbura.

We saw the physical and emotional scars of the Rwandan people 14 years after the genocide, which the glimmering modern buildings of a rebuilt Kigali cannot hide. We scaled an 11,000 foot volcano thick with jungle vegetation, and in so doing became intimately acquainted with mud.

We saw the most incredible live performance of African music and dance by the Ugandan National Dance Troupe, and were surrounded by music day and night throughout our stay in vibrant Kampala.

We experienced a Nairobi that few tourists ever see, staying with friends in a humble suburb and visiting a second-hand clothing market deep within a labyrinth of the dirtiest, muddiest, most trash-strewn streets we’ve ever seen.

All these sights, sounds, smells, tastes and conversations have given us a new understanding of Tanzania, or “T-Zed,” as other East Africans call it, in its regional context. Tired though we are, the trip was the perfect way to culminate our first year in Africa. Stay tuned for more…

Picking Corn

June is harvest month here in Iringa, so today Anette and I put our hands to good use by picking corn, a first for both of us. Planted by hand just before the December rains, the corn matured in March but has since turned brittle brown and yellow. I had been wondering why people hadn’t harvested the ears before now, so this week I asked the woman who bakes our bread and lives on a good-sized shamba next to my school. She told me that for making ugali, the Tanzanian staple food, it’s best to wait until the corn has dried before you pick it. When she told me that she was going to start her harvest this weekend, I asked if we could lend a hand.

This morning when we arrived she was already out picking corn, so her seven year-old son led us through the rows of stalks to the far end of the shamba where a group of people were working, talking and laughing together. A sister and some other relatives had come into town for the harvest, and they were all happy (if a bit surprised at seeing wazungu - white people - in the shamba) to have two extra pairs of hands to help out.

Picking corn is not nearly as difficult as the preparation for planting corn, so we learned quickly. We were each given a small, flat stick and shown how to use it to cut open the dry leaves encasing the ears of corn. After opening the leaves all we had to do was twist the ear until it came off, then toss it into one of several piles scattered among the rows. Within five minutes we had learned the Kiswahili words for stalk and row, and we kept smiling at each other thinking how good it felt to have the sun on our necks and our hands busy with something other than a laptop.

We chatted with those nearest to us as we worked our way down one row and up the next, exchanging information about farming methods in our respective cultures. Everyone was shocked to hear that we harvest most of our corn by machine in America; they understood how tractors could prepare the land and do the planting, but to do the harvesting, too?! “What a life!” they exclaimed.

After about an hour and a half, our friend recognized that our pace had slowed considerably, so she invited us to take a break when we came to the end of our row. As we walked back to her house she showed us bean, pumpkin and potato plants growing happily at random throughout the cornfield. For the next couple of hours we sat and talked with her while waiting for the midday meal.

During this time, of course, the others continued their work in the field. The housegirl (Tanzanian term for domestic help) stopped picking corn so that she could prepare our food, and immediately after serving us she traipsed back out into the shamba (not having eaten) to help the others bring in the day’s harvest. So as we sat comfortably drinking our tea and digesting our meal, the others were walking back to the house with 50 to 70 kilo bags of corn on their heads.

I’ve accepted that I’ll never be able to carry heavy things on my head, and that most African women are stronger than I’ll ever be, but my hope is that by simply pitching in we at least gain a bit more respect from the locals. We also become familiar with the details and the cycles of life in Tanzania. For example, we’ve enjoyed eating ugali with our hands ever since we came here, but today we learned about the whole process of how it goes from the stalk to our stomachs.

When the heavy bags of corn are brought to the house, they are beaten with sticks to break the kernels off the ears. A pesticide is then applied to keep the insects away and the bags are brought periodically to the local mill, where it costs 800 Tanzanian Shillings, or about 75 cents, to grind a 20 Liter bucket of kernels into flour. The flour is then taken as needed for ugali, which is made by boiling the flour slowly until it all sticks together and forms the distinctive big white ball that accompanies almost every meal here. Fittingly, we left the shamba with an invitation to eat the ugali that will be made from the corn we picked today.

One Last Field Trip

On Friday I took twelve of my middle school students to Ruaha National Park for the culmination of our semester-long research project on Ruaha ecosystems. As on all field trips I’ve led, I was quite nervous before and during the trip but tried my best not to show it to the kids. Not until we were a few minutes from home yesterday did I relax and think to myself, “Wow, we made it!”

On previous field trips I’ve never had to worry about my students getting eaten by lions, but nonetheless, there is always an element of anxiety when removing students from the confines of the schoolyard and becoming surrogate parent to a group of teenagers. Despite the headaches of planning and permission slips, these trips are highlights of the school year for both students and teachers. For example, all I remember about 8th grade is that we went to Williamsburg and several romances blossomed and wilted all in the same weekend. Oh, I also remember it was the year I started doing poorly in math.

As a teacher at Berkeley High, my first field trip was a short outing to see “Calivera,” an exhibition of Mexicali Day of the Dead altars. As my 6th period class descended the escalators of the Berkeley BART station to ride the train a few stops south to the Oakland Museum, I was convinced that they were going to rebel and escape to San Francisco, leaving me to call their parents and send out various search parties. To my relief, the only student who went missing showed up later with a good explanation.

On May Day 2007, a colleague and I carried out our ambitious and slightly crazy idea of taking all 60 of our freshmen to an immigrant rights rally in San Francisco. Amazingly no one got lost, and we had an incredible day that included a walking tour of the Mission District murals, which tell the story of the Latino experience from the pre-Colombian era to the present day. What my students probably remember most is chasing each other around Mission Dolores Park before the rally.

When I came to Tanzania to teach in a small international school I imagined peace and quiet - a welcome change from the craziness of American public schools. I didn’t think my field trips would be as adventurous, but it turns out that bringing 12 students 120 kilometers over a very rocky road and sleeping overnight in the bush is just as challenging as taking 60 kids to and from SF on the BART.

Food, for example, is a minor detail of American field trips because we can buy it everywhere. But in Tanzania, there’s no stopping at Subway or McDonald’s. My boss and I had to go the Iringa market to buy 5 kilos of rice, 3 kilos of peas, 3 kilos of potatoes and assorted veggies and fruit so that the students would have food on the trip. When we arrived at our campsite, I had to use my not-yet-there Swahili to arrange for a “mama” to cook our food, and of course we haggled for a quarter of an hour over the price. But these are the details and differences that make Tanzania so endearing.

With the food arranged, my mind stopped running through all the possible scenarios of what could go wrong, and as we set out on our afternoon game drive I focused in on the faces of my students as they waited for their first glimpse of Africa’s famous animals. Surprisingly, four of my students had never been to Ruaha (or any other national park) so I was excited to share in their first experience of this incredible wilderness. “Look, the giraffe is eating an acacia tree!” exclaimed one of my students. “Yes!” I thought to myself, “they’ve actually understood my lessons on species interaction and food chains.”

On our first drive we saw elephants, buffalo, impala, zebra, hippos and crocs, but the highlight was coming around a corner and meeting two huge bull giraffes standing with their bodies pressed against each other, heads side by side. I’d never seen this before, and I wondered what they were doing. All of the sudden they both stumbled and the bushes shook, and I thought they were being attacked by a pride of lions. In the next instant, one giraffe quickly swiveled his head and swung it like a hammer, smashing it into the neck of his rival.

The sound of the impact was frightful, and we all sat with our mouths open and hearts beating fast, awestruck witnesses to a rarely seen behavior. Fatigued by their efforts, the two bulls stood breathing heavily for about half a minute, and then they began again. Their necks were elastic as pulled toffee, but their skulls pounded against their bodies with thunderous force. It was a moment none of us will soon forget – we were 10 feet away.

Our only “complaint” as we went to bed was that we hadn’t seen any cats, but as luck would have it we heard that distinctive roar close to our camp as dawn broke, and sure enough we encountered a pride of 20 lions on our early morning drive. As my students can now attest, there is nothing quite like seeing your first lion.

When we pulled into the school driveway yesterday, I felt a great sense of relief. The students were exhausted from the excitement and the long, dusty ride back home, and so was I. Reflecting on all the field trips I’ve taken in the past few years, I realize that all the planning, logistics and temporary parenthood have been well worth it.