I’m moving, not on to better things, but kind of across to different things – the first installment of the blog I was actually asked to write is up. You can find it and future blogs at http://glimpse.org/accounts/facebook_1234710216/profile/ , and I’ll also be posting travel tips for all you potential travelers, and eventually writing a feature story and an “ethical dilemma” piece. Feel free to read and comment and all that bongo flava (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bongo_Flava – it sounds like reggaeton). The blog that I have instead foisted upon everyone (aka this one) will continue in limited measure as well. For instance, I will write in it today!
One of the things that’s been hardest to explain about East Africa is how funny everything is. If the adage/thoroughly scientifically proven theory that laughter lengthens your life applies to me, I’ve laughed enough in the past couple of months to add a couple more onto my life, which I will then hopefully spend in East Africa, whereupon I will laugh more, prolonging my life further, and on and on until I am immortal and fluent in Swahili (it’s a good plan). But yes, it’s funny, and it’s hard to explain why, but a lot it humor has to do with surprise, or apparent incongruence, and that strange kind of culture shock that happens when you come across something familiar stuck into an entirely different context, more culture-squirting-lapel-flower than actual culture shock, and suddenly both the familiar thing and the context are new and newly hilarious.
For instance, when people in the US donate their clothes to Goodwill, large bundles of them end up on the East African coast, and then in markets and along the sides of roads, and then on the bodies of people who belong to demographics they were not originally intended for, which is why you may be walking through Karatu one afternoon and get sidestepped by a very stately Iraqw mama, leading two children, balancing a bucket of bananas on her head (no hands), and wearing a pink t-shirt that has “Grandpa’s Little Princess” spelled out on it in rhinestones. Or my new friend Samuel, a 19 year old shopowner in Mto wa Mbu, who walks around like he’s all that in sunglasses, a knit cap in Rastafarian colors, and a dark green girl’s softball jersey that has the Wendy’s logo on the front and “Martha - #9” on the back. These guys don’t read English, and the clothes are affordable and fit them, and if I start getting into whether it’s sad or undignified or any of these things in my head, it all seems too big to tackle. But initially it’s just funny. Our translator, Lazaro, tells me that everyone helps each other out; that if he sees someone in a shirt that person probably wouldn’t wear if he or she could read it, he lets them know. But the other day his fellow guide, also fluent in spoken and written English, was wearing a shirt that said “Call Me Major Trouble” with little cartoony army hats, the kind you’d see on an annoying 9-year-old pushing over the cocktail weenie display in a department store in the US . . . the implications of globalization are wide and weird. But yes, they make us laugh all the time.
The best way to sum it up is probably with the story of something that happened to us several weeks ago, and that we’ve since been using as a metaphor for East Africa in general. It was a non-program day, slightly into the academic period set aside for our directed research projects, and we decided to drive down Kilimamoja (First Hill, aka the big hill our campsite is set on top of) and climb back up it through the woods. So we piled into the cruisers, as always, and took off down the road, past beautiful flamingo-tinged Lake Manyara (no, really! from far off, the lake is literally rosy with flamingos) and the favorite hangout of Hominid, the Wildlife Ecology DR’s mascot, who walks on his back legs due to a shoulder injury. We didn’t see Hominid (I’ve still never seen him) but we saw a bunch of other baboons, and heard wahoos and grunts and aggression calls and all sort of other noises (my tentmate, Chelsea, studied baboon vocalizations for her DR, so I could probably pass for a baboon at this point if we were going only by sound).
We hiked up through baboon territory, over injurious boulders, past friendly Maasai and their shy goats, and under a cloud-heavy sky, until we got to the top of the steepest part. There we rested and looked at the view
(the view, being taken in by Jen)
and scrambled up to the actual highest point, a termite mound positioned right in the middle of things (we contemplated crushing it to look for snakes, but then we remembered that we’re conservationists).
(Our guide, Festo, on the termite mound)
Then we took off again, this time across flat ground, towards the farmlands right outside of our campsite.
We’ve been to a lot of farmlands this semester, and they all tend to look similar – boma, livestock, children, and around it all acres of fields in various stages of growth or decay or ruination by wildlife. We were expecting more of the same. So we were rather surprised when we rounded a corner to find a boma, livestock, children, acres of fields, and a state-of-the-art green felt pool table surrounded by Maasai men with their game faces on.
(here's what it looked like when Lia played)
The Maasai were in purple and red robes. The pool table was on uneven ground, and so propped up on one side by two metal bowls. There were women gathered around laughing, and some of the children were playing on a big motorcycle cocked on its kickstand just outside the thorny gate of the boma.
Naturally we had to join in. We didn’t know the Swahili for pool, but luckily it’s a sport that’s fairly easily mimed. Each of us took turns, and we were good sports when the other team sunk the eight ball before they were supposed to and quietly replaced it on the table. After all, they’d somehow gotten the table to the top of a cliff – they were probably allowed to use it however they wanted. At some point, a case of sodas appeared, seemingly out of the humid air. So we handed them around, and toasted, and rechalked the cues (with cubes whittled out of schoolroom chalk), and watched one boy try to rev up the motorcycle without a key. After what seemed an appropriate amount of time, we waved baadaye and moved on, through a tunnel of tall maize stalks and back to camp.
(Here we go!)
So. That’s Tanzania. A great big beautiful oxymoron. A pool table smack in the middle of one of the most beautiful natural landscapes known to the whole wide planet, and a bunch of people right next to it who are so friendly that they consider your very presence in their home cause for a celebratory Fanta. I left that pool table with the sense that some very fundamental truths about the world had been redefined for me, that things were somehow much more and less simple than I’d previously realized . . . when I leave the country tomorrow, I expect I’ll feel the same.
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