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.”
No comments:
Post a Comment