His feet barely touch the ground

Celebrity visages are common on business signboards in Kigoma, nearly always musicians or at the very least "musicians." It adds a certain kind of character, even if you're not entirely certain which character it is.

This mural is an example of why the celebrity image works. "Where is Ally's?" I have been asked. "Up the hill on the right. Look for Michael Jackson. Their chapati is great."

Michael had a number of visages over the years, but I think Ally's chose well.

May he dance in peace.

A little something tropical

A Tropical boubou in fact.

These birds are responsible for one of the sounds I enjoy waking to the most. They have a number of calls including duets with other boubous. But the strangest call of all is the electrical sound caught in the clip below (listen carefully before the "bou"). Also, notice how quickly the colors change; the sun wastes no time rising in the tropics.



I have been offline for several weeks now and will be offline again for several more. But I am collecting stories, jotting them in notebooks and look forward to sharing them with you the first of August. Please check back then.

Thanks for continuing to visit Live from Kigoma. I am grateful to be able to share special moments with you here.

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Since I have been home in the US on vacation over the past few weeks, I have been amazed by the number of acronyms I have and have not been eating.

MSG has been joined in the rank-and-vile by GMO, BGH and - according to the Ruby Red Grapefruit juice Lee bought last night - HFCS. I had to check the ingredients list to confirm my suspicion: yep, only sugar, no high-fructose corn syrup.

Since when was it acceptable to eat things that didn't have vowels?

In Kigoma, we don't so much think of food as acronyms. For one thing, vegetables have lots of vowels (nyanya = tomato). For another, the most likely acronym to touch our food is DDT, and it's best not to think about that.

Americans' obsession with uniform foods with impeccable complexions is gloriously lacking in Kigoma Market. Brown flecks add character, and most wash off. If necessary, squishy bits can be sliced away.

I have enjoyed pushing a cart through the aisles of US grocery stores and the sense of déjà vu experienced at most produce displays, like a horror film in which dozens of copies of someone appears and you're not sure which is the human and which the android clones. "Of the three dozen apples on display, each of which look completely identical, which is the real apple?," you may ponder.

Then a fine mist descends and you've forgotten why you've come to the market at all, suddenly reaching for an armful of waterlogged romaine.

I will return to Tanzania next week with foods squirrelled away in my suitcase. As always, I will miss the Pacific Northwest's BGH-free cheese and organic wines. But as for fruits and vegetables, I look forward to eating food that is a little less superficial - where the color of a tomato runs more than skin deep.

Just hold the DDT, please.

Road deconstruction

And you thought your job was tough.

I recently heard the unmistakable hearkening of the end of the world: the sound of a flood and an earthquake all rolled into one. I ran to the window but the source had flown down Kibirizi Road too fast. All I saw was Stella staring at me with that “is the door locked?” sort of look.

So I returned to my business as usual and a bit later the sound came flooding back.

This time I made it to the window in time to see a pickup truck hauling down the road with two men standing in the back holding onto a big mess of rebar which they were dragging noisily behind them. The only reason I can think to drive multiple times down a road dragging rebar is to resurface it. And if you have seen Tanzania's roads in the wet season, you can understand the virtue of this.

But it was a good reminder for me, and perhaps a good reminder for all of us: when I next think my job is tough, at least I am not holding onto a bundle of quivering reinforcing bars while standing in the back of a pickup truck which is flying down the road at break-arm speed.

Unfathomable

There is a topic I have avoided covering here due to my struggles to find the words to do so. The topic is one I first learned about through a vague story in a local paper, followed by sullen conversations with friends and colleagues to learn more - without wanting to learn too much.

While I have searched for the right words, the Economist wrote many last week regarding the ghastly killings of a highly marginalized and easily identifiable segment of Tanzania's human population: albinos. To view that article, click here. No login required.

As an aside, I recently heard of an albino who stole a cell-phone out of a man's hand and ran. The man wanted to chase the thief and recover his phone, but feared he would be linked with this sick underground trade, and decided to buy a new phone instead.

...but somebody's gotta do it

My kitchen might qualify again under US health codes, but it hasn’t been easy.

There have been two recent bouts of waterlessness in my neighborhood which inspired challenging questions, such as: do I take a shower or flush the toilet or wash two sinks full of dishes? Because with one bucket of water - brought by a guy on a bicycle – I can't do all three.

Usually the dishes lose, and in that respect, the biomass lying-in-wait in my kitchen wins.

I know all about roaches. I know their infinite forms and varieties. I've seen them squished between bills dispensed by the ATM, scurrying inside a ball cap I removed from my head, hidden like Where's Waldo in more meals than I'd like remember, and once a tiny one was in a sealed package of bubblegum (figure that one out), proving their limitless ingenuity.

Just last night I let my cat play with an elephantine specimen which lumbered out of the shower drain. Stella has so few toys to play with.

So while I was not necessarily surprised that two species helped clean the dishes, I was surprised by their quantity – the sheer magnitude of their forces.

One species was long, thin and pinkish - somehow shrimp-like, but with wings. The other black-brown and pyknic, peppercornesque. Both now dead.

As men laid pipe on the lawn to fix the pump, I gathered my supplies: anti-bacterial soap, trash bucket and a large kitchen sponge I received as a birthday present last year (which I had saved for a special occasion such as this). I tried to divine assistance like the commercials where Mr. Clean jumps off the bottle and mops the floor in one, big S-shaped streak. But clearly I was going to be doing this alone. I rolled-up my sleeves and stood at the ready. When I heard air, then the water, gurgling in the pipes, I got to work.

I soon found the bugs' secret lair and annihilated it in a progrom I call "shock-and-eww." Confident about the thoroughness of my cleaning, I returned to food preparation at home. And when we lost water the next week, well, I repeated the whole process over again.

I sometimes forget that in Kigoma you're never alone. I walked into my kitchen the other night and discovered a noisome odor that could only be one thing: dinosaur poo. More specifically, the white, liquidy guano too often secreted in our attic by Monty, the non-pet resident monitor lizard (who hasn't paid a shilling toward rent).

So I checked the ceiling and there it was: the telltale white stain situated over the drying rack next to the sink, the dishes from which I had just stowed in the cupboards.

So what sponge does one use to clean monitor lizard poo off otherwise clean dishes? If I ever find the dish it landed on, I'll be sure to let you know.

Vegetarian gold

For those who love adventures, the Kigoma market is a necessary destination. It is designed something like a pyramid inside, or perhaps as illogically nonlinear as a hieroglyphic: a network of tight, tortuous passageways flanked by stalls where people sell wares. They try to get your attention and you pause briefly to smile and make eye contact before returning to the task at hand: survival.

Wooden boards give way, roaches scurry and men dash toward you with weighty bags on their necks. Laundry dries over tomatoes, holes are notched into a pile of rice for a board game, and water drips from the edge of a tin roof which stops just over the walkway.

The placement of each foot requires the analysis of where a foot currently isn’t, the general direction you are trying to head and which dangers (nails, gaps in the platform, a stream of unidentifiable fluids) pose the highest threats.

Sometimes you choose wisely. And on other occasions, you hope for the best.

As with any labyrinth, each twist seems to take you further from your intended destination. But once you figure out the sequence of lefts and rights, you can find the heart of the market: replete with monstrous avocados, piles of passion fruits, pineapples dangling on strings and circular mounds of peas, which are sold by the handful, like abstract stipple art.

Sometimes, buried within this assortment a treasure can be found. The vegetarian’s equivalent of gold: massive carrots. Or rather, the assemblage of many carrots into one awe-inspiring mass.

24-karat gold? Try 24-carrot goldmine!

The transaction is quick. You slip the carrot into your bag and begin the odyssey out. Right then left then left then right… or was it right then left then right then right?

And what if a giant boulder seals-off the market’s exit before you escape? Of course that never happens, but it never seems totally out of the realm of possibilities, either - because in the Kigoma market, you are never quite sure what will happen next.

As for the other rule of adventure stories (falling in love with an eastern European or Soviet adversary), well, for now the carrots will do.

Frank Sinatra sings a new tune (again)

It sometimes seems that nearly everything is possible in Tanzania.

A friend of mine recently needed to fly last-minute to Dar and had no money. We took her to the airport and I shook the guy’s hand and promised him money for the ticket by the afternoon if he put her on the morning flight.

He consented, and in the second after, I wondered where else a handshake can substitute a plane ticket.

But my housemates and I recently learned something else which, quite Frankly, we didn't see coming.

I took our cat Stella (nee Frank Sinatra) to Dar on a trip synchronized with her theoretical fertility, so that she could be spayed and we could avoid the radical genesis of inbred progeny, which seemed a given. But as it turns out, the cat we originally thought a he and later deemed a she is a he after all. At least for now.

Poor Frank Sinatra. So misunderstood.

I am sure showbiz is full of mistaken identities and (at least historically) genders, but for those of us in small town Kigoma, it has been entertaining.

As for Stella, well, he's now a little more tenor than base.

Rain, rain fly away

Last weekend, Dar es Salaam was subjected to long, drizzly rains interspersed with cloudbursts which even drove an Oregonian like me to covered patios. Traffic moved at a snail's pace, each vehicle taking turns to cross the intermittent pools straddling the road. A cemetery was marked by a solitary cross rising above the waterline. A driveway snaking its way to a presumably well-off house looked like a river, eddies and all.

That night, after drying off, I sat on a friend's couch reading a book about adventures and misadventures of anthropologists and ecologists in Tanzania. I heard a faint flutter of sound behind me and turned to see 30-40 termites around the light I was reading by, a modest affair to be sure. Then I noticed termites flying around a safety light outside, looking remarkably like snow - climbing and falling - as they fluttered around the beam; rather apposite given the Holiday carols I was playing at the time.

As I returned to my book, something struck me. I had been hearing the sound of rain for thirty minutes or more, but as I looked at the termites outside, there was no sign of rain.

I turned the music down. What was that sound?

I did what many in Tanzania have done before me. I put my book down, ventured into the foyer and braced myself for the inevitable.

Hundreds, perhaps a thousand inch-long termites swarmed the back porch light, and many had made their way through the ill-fitted glass doors to the inside; termites swarmed in column inside and out.

I skittered around the storm to get up the staircase and switch-off my bedroom light, wanting to avoid a similar swarm there.

As I returned to my book, the drone of the termites subsided, and again I became aware of a new sound: this time of the pounding surf of the Indian Ocean.

Or so I hoped...

Finders keepers

I became aware of this issue last night: click here for the conservation finance article, or here for the source article in the Washington Post, which notes (as a friend told me last night) that following a similar deal elsewhere, Hadzabe men were arrested for hunting the land on which their ancestors have hunted for perhaps tens of thousands of years.

If the UAE royal family is reading this: have a heart for the Hadzabe.