'Tis the season

I have to admit, the Holiday Season takes on new meaning here, in a place with so many silent nights, midnights clear and redeeming graces, not to mention little boys drumming.

As is our custom, I have spent a lot of time thinking about all that I have to be grateful for this year. This is a very short list of the many wonderful things that have made me smile on my walks into work in the morning:

- My Mom, for being so supportive, accessible and understanding when I do stupid things
- Former coworkers for urging me to keep a website (nee "blog") while in Tanzania
- Brian H, my dear friend, for buying me this site, which I am having such a wonderful time keeping updated
- Live from Kigoma readers, wherever you are, for your kind and encouraging messages (Martina, are you out there?)
- Monty, the monitor lizard in my ceiling whose presence never ceases to comfort me
- Snakes, for not biting me
- Lake Tanganyika, for being the best place I have found yet to watch the sun set
- The birds whose serenades calm me at the office - sometimes it seems the more tense I get, the louder and more beautiful they sing
- and the many wonderful family members and friends who write to me - both emails and real mail - to make me feel like I'm really not so far away at all.

So, with my stocking hung on my closet with care, I am poised to have a wonderful Holiday in the little (or not so little) town of Dar es Salaam (which rather fortuitously means "city of peace"). And as I watch stars shine above the highest boughs, you can bet I'll be having a very merry little Christmas, in part thanks to you.

And as for my Christmas Wish? Well, I'm already living here.

The long road home

Moments before we got stuck in the mud

While it took us about 11.5 hours to reach Katavi on our way down, it somehow only took 8.5 hours on the way back, and I have the welts on my bum to prove it. I guess there are advantages to having Spanish men drive when there are Spanish women in the other vehicle. We flew with such velocity that when we hit pockets of mud it would cover our vehicle, causing us to drive blindly until the wipers could clear our view.

Ryszard Kapuściński once wrote this about the Serengeti:

“…As if one were witnessing the birth of the world, that precise moment when the earth and sky already exist, as do water, plants, and wild animals, but not yet Adam and Eve. It is this world barely born, the world without mankind and hence also without sin, that one can imagine one is seeing here.”

When I first read this passage, I circled it in my copy of The Shadow of the Sun, thinking it was one of the most beautiful and original observations I had read about nature.

Beautiful it is, but I realized on the road to Katavi just how naturally this cascade of thoughts can fill your mind in unspoiled landscapes. Our road was often the only sign of civilization, and it winded through seemingly endless woodlands, with vistas hiding tantalizingly behind the trees. And then occasionally the trees would break and a valley would spread at our feet, with tree canopies extending as far as the eye could see. There were mammoth rocks, patches of grassland, and at their banks, the Malagarasi River.

This world “barely born” seems perfectly without sin. In the presence of this landscape, one can imagine any number of the continent’s stories coming to life: Karen Blixen soaring in Dennis Finch Hatton’s airplane and saying “Yes, I see;” humankind waking to stretch its first legs; unimaginable beings from times gone by lifting their heads at waterholes to roar at the sun. It was overwhelming to see that this landscape still exists; it was an Africa that I thought - and feared - survived in books alone.

I learned last week that there are plans to significantly improve this road, perhaps even pave it. In fact, we had seen evidence of this in the piles of gravel and road crews we occasionally encountered on our journey. This is in addition to plans to create and pave yet another road that will slice through the ecosystem.

I fear what this new chapter will bring for the landscape. After all it has seen – climate changes, species come and gone, the tectonic shifts – I wonder what the knell of the diesel engines will bring.

As we drove home, I thought about what it will mean if humanity returns to the land that once cradled it. Have we learned our lessons, or will we simply bring our sins back to the land from which we came?

World without sin

A funny thing happened on the way to the post office

I once explained the interior of the post office to a friend: high ceilings with eucalyptus-trunk scaffolding and piles of boxes and mail everywhere, stacked high on desks and floors, in wooden sorting containers and falling off of shelves. It looked to me more like the set of a situation comedy than an actual place of work. As my friend said, "it sounds like the type of place you would find Lucy and Ethel looking frantically for a box for Rickie," and honestly, I can't think of a better way to describe it.

One time I went there to get a package and they invited me to help dig through the wooden sorting containers to look for it. We couldn't find my package on that trip, but we found one for a colleague of mine. "May I take it to him?" "Sure!" they said.

This morning I stopped by, knowing that my packages from Mom and Lee for the Holidays should have arrived by now. And there they were, just on the other side of the wire cage of the package room. "Ipo!" I exlaimed. "They're here!"

"Yes, but to pick-up your packages," they explained, "you need to go to your office and get the receipts, and then bring them back to us." "Hakuna matata," I said, no problem.

Unfortunately, at my office, there were no receipts to be found. I dug around for a while before heading back to the Post Office. "Hamna receipti," I said in Swinglish. "Labda hapa?" Maybe they're here? They dug around for a while before issuing new receipts. See, that wasn't so hard, I thought.

Now for step two: "Take these receipts to the Port Authority," they said, "and bring back a customs officer with you." Caveat lector: the men at the post office did not speak English, at least not with me, so it's possible that I misunderstood them, but I thought the instructions were pretty clear and I hopped in a taxi and headed to the Port, where my driver stopped at the railroad tracks as if they were a brick wall. I walked into the Port where I was greeted by five men sitting outside talking amiably. Surely one of these men could help me.

"No, you need to go to the Tanzanian Revenue Office," I was told, "first floor. We just do customs for export goods; they do imports." Well that makes sense. So I walked back across the railroad tracks, hopped into the taxi and headed to TRA, my cabbie grinning the whole way.

The first floor at TRA told me to go to the second floor, where I found people jamming to the same music on the radio as my cabbie. The customs guy was there, available, friendly and potentially helpful. Finally, a stroke of luck! He stared at my receipts and explained that he could not help me, at least not on Thursdays. He handles packages on Mondays and Fridays, between eleven and one. "Come back tomorrow," he said, "that's Friday."

So after going from the post office to my office to the post office again to the port and then to TRA, I was now hopping back in the taxi to return to my office empty-handed, wishing someone would have explained all of this to me a little earlier in the day. But I guess in situations like this, what is one man's misfortune is a cab driver's good luck.

Don't eat me - I'm a vegetarian

Four trees

When I took Hunter’s Safety, they taught me not to point a weapon at anybody. I was therefore surprised when our guide in Katavi National Park climbed clumsily into the back of our vehicle with the barrel of his Russian Kalashnikov riffle swiveling in all directions, at various moments steadying on me and my fellow passengers.

“Are we going hunting?” I asked with casual American sarcasm. “No, this is for the walking safari,” he said. I took this to mean that he understood that the only way I would be getting out of the vehicle while in the park was at gunpoint.

Or so I thought. But before I knew it, I was piling out of the Land Cruiser and onto a plain full of hippos and other creatures that are faster than me. I tightened my shoelaces and tried not to show fear - not sure if hippos can sense fear like everyone says, but pretty sure my Spanish friends could.

In front of us was a river. Beyond the river were a hundred hippos at least. "Isn't that the creature everyone says is the number one killer in Africa?" one friend asked. "They sure run fast," another observed. I swallowed hard.

But between us and the hippos was something far more disconcerting: about a dozen crocodiles fought in the water below the embankment on which we stood, a couple less than ten feet away. “Boy, I have to stand back pretty far to get a good shot with this telephoto lens,” I said, beginning my retreat. Our guard pulled out his camera phone, snapped a few shots and texted them to his friends. I took it upon myself to be responsible and alert of our surroundings, checking all 360 degrees for danger and occasionally the sky above.

We were scheduled to take a longer walking safari that evening - you know, the time when most predators wake-up and start hunting. By this point, I was a little skeptical that our guard wouldn't pull-out his cellphone instead of his Kalashnikov if lions began to circle. I decided to have a heart-to-heart with him out back. “I think we should have a second guard tonight, you know, it’s a big group.” “Nah, we don’t need it.” “But don’t you ultimately think that’s up to us to decide? We’re willing to pay the extra $10 for another guide.” “Nah, I’ve done this before, we’ll be fine.”

He couldn’t be persuaded, his ego bolstered by his second-hand riffle which, if maintained as well as the National Park's bandas, would be more useful for hitting the animals with than shooting them.

The walking safari that evening really was lovely. There is something about the Tanzanian landscape that you can only experience on foot: the aromas, the crunch of the grass under your feet, and the bugs you would never see from the seat of your car. I was totally enchanted. And somehow the whole experience felt relatively safe, in part due to the fact that our guide had us walk no closer than 100 meters to the forest, so that we could see the animals charging toward us in the seconds before they attacked. “Walking near the forest can be dangerous,” he said, “very dangerous.” I was happy to see him taking such precautions.

And then it started raining. And soon thereafter, it started pouring. “Follow me!” he said, running toward the trees, throwing all precautions and rules aside. It was suddenly every man for himself in the rain. He led us along the edge of the forest, and this led us to a road which led into the forest, which then led us to our vehicles, into which we quickly piled.

Unfortunately, we weren’t the only ones who wanted in from the rain. Tsetse flies filled our Land Cruisers, and somehow managed to cling to the outside of the vehicles as we careened through the forest. They bit us on exposed skin and also through our shirts. We were smacking the windows and swatting the air furiously. “It’s like a horror movie,” one friend said. “Tell the guide to start shooting at them,” another suggested. “He says he only has five bullets,” yet another replied. Oh great, now he tells us.

Every moment of the trip was incredible. The bandas in which we slept were in the National Park, and I would wake to the sounds of hyenas howling and hippos munching grass nearby. And that is the best part of any safari: you never know what you will see or hear and when. You can turn a corner and bam: there are fifteen elephants. But around the next corner, there may be nothing at all. And you can go hours without seeing anything, only to wake in the night to find that the wildlife has found you.

Hippo at dawn

Morning stroll

Herd of hippos

It's hard to believe they can get so big by primarily eating grass

Before the rains came

A beautiful metallic scarab (dung) beetle goes on the defense after
a friend flicked it off a backpack

Pretty bird

Now you see why their necks are so long

Relic of the dry season

A spotted hyena spots us

Crocodiles having a good time, crocodile-style

Crocodile food

Can you find the chameleon?

Eye of the crocodile

On the road again

This time tomorrow I will probably be in a Land Rover stuck in the mud somewhere between Kigoma and Mpanda. Some friends and I are taking a road trip to Katavi National Park, one of the most biodiversity-rich regions in East Africa (or so I'm told). Think of the Serengeti, but without all the people. Katavi gets about 80 visitors per year, so my seven friends and I will represent about ten percent of the annual visitors to the Park. As my very Swiss friend who is organizing the trip said, "the Chief Park Warden is expecting us."

But to enjoy the splendor of the park, we have to get there first. The other 72 people who visited the park this year probably got there by plane, on a trip organized by one of the luxury safari companies that caters to the superriche. It's not the type of place one typically gets to by car. It is 350 kilometers south (i.e., away from everything) of Kigoma, and this time of year, most of the roads are probably mud. Picture driving from Salem, Oregon to Seattle - or DC to New York - through lakes of mud or, when the road is dry, over potholes that resemble the surface of the moon, without seeing another car on the road the whole way. That is what I am told our road trip will be like tomorrow, with few signs of humanity (hamlets, schools or mosques) until we reach Mpanda, which is near our destination. And instead of the three or four hours my friends and I budgeted for our trips from DC to NY, we are budgeting 12 hours for a similar distance tomorrow, and part of me wonders if this estimate isn't a little foolhardy.

One friend has joked that if we get a flat, we will draw straws on who replaces the tire and who gets to watch for lions from the safety of the vehicle. We joke, but at this point, I'd rather get a flat out there than on Interstate 95. We'll see if I'm still saying that next week...

A new (cleaner) era

The tyrannical rule of the coffee mug is over.

For the past four months, I have bathed by pouring water over myself using a coffee mug and a pale of water heated-up over the stove or a kerosene burner. In truth, it is relatively easy to adjust to this morning ritual, and ultimately it enables me to use only the amount of water I need. If I am running late, I do a small pail; if I have enough time to wait, I can do a medium-sized one. The strategy works pretty well, although I’ll be the first to admit that I sometimes run out of water or energy or time before I wash my feet.

But for the last week I have been squeaky-clean. I got our water heater fixed, and as long as I am willing to swap fuses around before turning anything on (exchanging the fuse for the lamps with the one for the cooker when I need to cook, or swapping the refrigerator fuse with the water heater before I want to shower), hot water is able to magically appear out of my taps. The red dot on my faucets that once meant “Stop, no water here,” now means “Careful, it’s hot!"

So now I can use my mug for the purpose it was intended: coffee.

Take Plenty Fluids

I am going to ignore the old adage that if you don’t have anything good to say that you should keep your blog to yourself.

I have spent much of the past 36 hours in bed and nearly-comatose – feeling like a fish in the market, with my mouth agape and my eyes glazed over and staring in the direction of my closet door.

I went to the hospital last night to see what was wrong. “Pole kwa umeme,” the doctor said, apologizing for the lack of electricity in his office.

“Hamna shaka.” I explained my symptoms: dizziness to the point of nearly fainting, fatigue, loss of appetite, nausea, muscle pain, and a sharp but brief headache. He sent me off for a malaria test – and fair enough, the symptoms and geography fit – but I was a little surprised by his diagnosis when I returned to his office with the negative test results.

“You have an upper respiratory infection,” he said to me, writing out a prescription accordingly.

“Hunh?” I thought he must have me confused with another patient, the light being so poor and all.

“An upper respiratory infection.”

“Based on what, the fact that I don’t have malaria?”

“It’s the signs in the air,” he said.

“But my primary symptoms are dizziness and lethargy. Don’t you think you should check my blood pressure or something?” He was resistant to the idea, but eventually stepped out of his office, searched for a key and for someone to retrieve the pressure cuff from wherever it was stashed.

You see, this hospital looks quite nice from the outside. But I was beginning to realize that was the best vantage point from which to view it. Inside, bloody gauze was stuck to the floor, and the “hazardous waste container” was a bed pan sitting on a counter, where I saw a used needle get tossed in and promptly bounce to the floor. A roach near my foot appeared to be having a seizure, lying on his back and looking in worse shape than I had been in earlier that day. Then it occurred to me that perhaps he, too, had an upper respiratory infection.

A nurse returned with a pressure cuff and sat down to administer the test. “100 over 60,” she said.

“That's below my personal average," I told the Doctor, "So what would cause such a sudden drop in blood pressure like this, besides an upper respiratory infection?”

“Anxiety,” he said.

“But the most anxious I have felt all day has been in your office. Is there anything else it could be?”

“Maybe somebody is punishing you.”

“Punishing me?”

“Punishing you,” he repeated ominously, looking at me with great meaning, almost accusatory and threatening. Does my Doctor really believe in witchcraft, I wondered. “Daktari nyngeni ipo?” Is there another doctor here? He smiled back. I tried a different tact: “can sodium – ‘chumvi’ – affect blood pressure?” After all, before the attack all I had eaten was a chapati laced with salt.

“Umm," he said looking around the room, "I don’t know.” Then he had a flash of genius: “you should drink water,” he said, crossing-off the respiratory-related prescription and writing instead “Take Plenty Fluids.” So while we still weren’t sure what the root of my problem was, we seemed to have the answer: water.

Later that night, I had fevers which ping-ponged between 97.7 and 101 degrees, shivering at one moment and baking the next. And while drinking water probably helped, it didn't seem able to adequately counteract whatever ailed me.

I laid in bed, wishing the cell network would work so I could call Dr. Mom to get her advice on how to lower the fever and increase the blood pressure. But the network was down, as was our power. I laid in bed sweating in the dark, feeling powerless myself.

Flash in the night

Deep in the night there was a distant flash of light that I only peripherally registered while tossing in my sleep. Seconds later, a wind burst into my room, dampening my face and knocking both of my windows off their moorings, thrashing them against the house.

The accompanying rain was so dense and penetrating as to be maddening – pure sheets of rain created a cacophony of sound that was disorienting. The kind of rain that, when it was over, would leave behind a silence that would make one feel alone in the world.

Lightening struck bright and close, filling my room with light; at times seeming to ripple along the belly of the clouds directly above my house, casting shadows one way in my room and then the next. At others, light entered opposite windows with simultaneous flashes, presumably filling the cloud hanging over my house with a deadly glow.

Thunder boomed ominously, as though bombs were exploding above; this same thunder only moments before had sounded like a cannon nearby, and before that like a distant riffle. In my experience, lightening is often muted by thunder, but now they happened simultaneously, somewhere over the tin roof of my house.

And just as the storm entered through one window, it passed through my room and kept on going, stretching out over the lake, and I feared for the fishermen as I watched their lamps flicker nervously on the horizon.

Chameleon break

I have had a lot of great coffee breaks in my time, but none of them compare with the break I had this afternoon.

My roommate entered the room with a copy of A Field Guide to the Reptiles of East Africa in his hand. “I hate to bother, but there is a magnificent chameleon in the tree outside.” I dropped everything.

I don’t know what I expected. I guess I thought he would be bright green and yellow and red and blue, with an arched back, a curled tail and flicking at bugs with its massively-long tongue. But he was none of those things. He was elongated like any other lizard, moving adeptly among the branches with a black body and bright green splotches – his coloration approximately the inverse of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream. He climb down the tree toward us, and I moved in to get a better look.

On closer inspection, he was everything I had hoped he would be. His large barnacle-like eyes swivel totally independent of one another and in a full 180 degrees, so that you can stand under him and one eye will look down at you while the other jumps from one place to the next, then he’ll switch and stare at you with the other eye and continue to search with the first.

But the most exciting thing about him was his paws. They are shaped like a clasp, grabbing branches like a mitten - reminding me more of a sock-puppet or a Muppet than anything I would have expected to find in nature. His jerky marionette-like movements and the serrated skin along his back and throat only added to his Muppetesqueness.

My roommate, a biologist by vocation, suggested we pull down the branch and extract him from the tree so that we could identify him. I didn’t disagree.

The little creature hissed, opening his mouth wide and flaying his colorful ear-flaps like a creature from Jurassic times. And then the light-show began - it hastily turned yellow with a brown stripe, and later light green with aqua-blue ear-flaps, then bright green all over, then light green with dark green freckles. He morphed sometimes while staying stationary, and other times to change to his new surroundings as he crawled along the dirt or climbed up pant legs and cement walls or onto the palm frond we fetched that purpose.

Finally on the palm frond, he rested and took the famous chameleon shape - a shape which despite its purpose to camouflage gives the lizard's identity away immediately. He arched his back, coiled his tail and bowed gently in the breeze like a leaf.

My roommate identified the chameleon not as the mint-chocolate-chip-barnacle-muppet variety, but rather as the flap-necked chameleon (click here for photos).

Once our scientific inquiry was complete, we released it back into the tree from whence he came. He quickly climbed back into the tree, climbing higher and higher, and rapidly changing his color back to the mint-chocolate-chip pattern that camouflages him so well in that tree.

I looked down to ask my roommate a question, and when I looked back up, I couldn’t find the chameleon anywhere.

Powerful

Two of the eight generators in Kigoma continue to limp along, making the evenings exceptionally dark here – unless you live in my part of town.

At a neighborhood meeting last Friday, my neighbors and I met to revisit how effective the generator has been for our neighborhood, and whether the restricted number of hours is enough to give us an adequate supply of water. One of my neighbors mentioned that she thought someone had visited the power company to find out why our neighborhood was so powerless when, it was implied, so many people in our neighborhood are seemingly powerful.

“That doesn’t seem fair,” I said, “we already have a generator.” Many people in town can’t afford these contraptions. Shouldn’t the priority for power go to the people who are totally without, rather than those who have a generator but would prefer to save money on fuel?

For the past couple of nights, we have had power nearly every hour that I have been home – and apparently throughout the night as well. This morning my front porch was scattered with the carnage of bugs that had been attracted to our porch light during the night.

The divide between the haves and the have-nots is always underscored in times of scarcity; times when the haves can afford to pay a premium to access what is left of a resource. Perhaps I am oversensitive to the idea of my neighborhood getting what one friend said is “our fair share.” But I am terrified at the thought that one of my neighbors might have greased a palm to help ensure that we get more than our fair share, because there is nothing fair about that.

I curled-up to read a book last night at ten o’clock, guilt-ridden at the thought of the many families that had spent the evening without the light from a single bulb, while lights blazed in every room in my neighborhood; feeling a little ashamed that I lived in an area that has so many provisions and yet seems so unprepared for shortages; but knowing that at any moment I, too, could be hurled back into the dark.

Indicator species

tableau of cicada and spider

By some accounts, the wet season began on Sunday. Perhaps the best indicator of this is the huge influx of insects we had in my house on Friday night – if not in quantity, then certainly in size.

The evening began with me sitting down to a bowl of curry I had made while watching a favorite HBO series of mine. I was about to take a bite when I realized that something large and very loud was spiraling in the air toward me. I jumped up, ran into my room and shut the door behind me, listening as the creature – an unidentified flying insect (UFI) – ricocheted off walls, the ceiling and light fixtures. I cautiously stepped out of my room with Raid in hand once the racket stopped, searching the walls, floor and every surface for the creature from the deep.

At about the same time, my roommate came home (bless him), and we searched the house together. “What did it look like again?” “It was about this big [exaggerated size] and he looked like he needed to go back to flight school.” “Oh my God!” my roommate exclaimed. He had just found a gargantuan spider on our floor.

When I take pictures of insects, I should have to worry about whether the red-eye reduction is on or not. Suffice it to say that this spider was large, hairy and had compound eyes that seemed to follow you wherever you went.

I called it a night soon thereafter, retiring to my room with candle in hand, realizing that the UFI had never actually been captured. I put laundry in my closet, folding the tolerably dirty shirts and placed them on a shelf. Then I heard the sound again, the sound of the UFI. And this time it seemed to be in my room.

There are moments in life when you want to disappear so bad that you think it is almost possible – when you think “God, if you’re out there, beam me up, pronto.” This was one of those moments.

I grabbed my flashlight and walked around the bed, not able to see anything with my flashlight through my mosquito net. Then I realized the sound was coming from outside. And there it was. My UFI bouncing off the screen, looking like a giant flying pinecone with beady red eyes. Bounce, bounce, bounce. I realized that there was only one reason he wanted in, and that was because of my lights. I blew-out my candle, turned-off my flashlight and crawled under my mosquito net, comforted by the false hope that nothing could get in there with me.

The UFI turned out to be a cicada; my roommate somehow trapped the one indoors after I went to bed, and we released the spider and cicada together the following morning.

“Should I release them here?” he asked while standing on our front porch. “Maybe a little further,” I said.

Prison Bar

At first I thought the sign “No Photography. Prison Property.” was just a clever marketing gimmick. It took me a couple of trips to Prison Bar to figure out that it is actually adjacent to the local prison.

This establishment is a short walk from my office, and it is positioned right on the lake, making it one of the few places in town that you can enjoy a sundowner while watching the sun set behind the hills of Congo (and behind the prisoners sneaking into boats in the more immediate foreground).

The local spectacles include: pied kingfisher hovering above the water before diving in for their evening dagaa; bats swarming between you and your friends to catch bugs by the lakeside; the fishermen’s boats forming a line of lights on the nighttime horizon; the occasional prisoner in the moonlight; and oh, the stars.

These sights more than makeup for the sub-optimal service, limited beverage selection and the shall we say "creative" choo (toilet), which is simply an area of sand that is demarcated by bamboo walls on 3.5 sides.

Here is how it ranks (on a scale of one to five bananas, five bananas being the highest):

Sunsets:

Service

Sanitary latrine

Proximity to prison

Endless supply of Konyagi (a Tanzanian spirit)


The place has become one of my favorite after-work hangouts; enjoying a beer at sunset often seems the best way of ending another day in paradise.

Swimming among the stars

The bigger the rocks, the better the snorkeling

This is one of my favorite places in the world. It is about three hours by boat from where I live, but the sights and sounds are worth the effort it takes to get there.

On the night this photo was taken, the moon rose late but the milky way was so bright it nearly cast a shadow. I floated in the lake and watched as the universe circled above me, feeling like I was floating through space, as stars fell through the sky around me and only the occasional flash of lighting would bring me back to earth. I felt like I was floating through the heavens above, but instead I was floating in heaven on earth.

I live for the moments in life that I am totally humbled by the beauty of nature; few moments in my life rival the one I had that night.

Powerless

Sorry to have kept you in the dark over the past couple of weeks, but you see I have been in the dark, too. There has been a scarcity of power recently, which means a scarcity of many other things: internet, foods requiring refrigeration and water, to name a few. To make matters worse, our town is running out of soda and beer. In other words, we have a crisis on our hands.

But you wouldn’t know it by walking past the Tanzanian energy company. I strolled by last week and saw more activity happening outside - in the form of guards slouching against the fence and laughing - than appeared to be happening inside. Six of the eight generators for our town stopped working earlier this month, and while spare parts exist, they don’t exist in Tanzania, and rumors suggest that it will take months rather than weeks to fix them.

The guards are ostensibly protecting the Power Company from some sort of attack, but I couldn’t help but wonder who is working on the inside to protect the machines from their most recent fate: negligence. What’s the point of guarding something that isn't maintained adequately to ensure that it's worth protecting?

I suddenly understood why the guards were laughing.

I am lucky (well, relatively speaking). My neighborhood met and agreed to pay exorbitant sums of money to keep a generator working for eight hours per day for the houses on our patch of the hillside. But what about everybody else? Water is already scarce in our town, and without power to keep water pumps pumping, people are having to venture further and further to get their water. Many people are now venturing into my backyard to fill their buckets, emptying the tank for my neighborhood which is being filled by the generator my neighbors and I are paying to run. (I just don’t have the heart to stop them; everybody needs water.)

For me, the major inconvenience is an increase in the number of bugs that fly into my hair when I write by candlelight at night. But for many people this isn’t just a matter of comfort, it is a matter of safety and public health.

I hope when the spare parts arrive from Holland there is an instruction guide that will show the Power Company how to maintain the equipment they have. Because the next time these old machines breakdown, there may not be spare parts to fix them.

The people have spoken

And I kind of almost listened.

Here is what you said you wanted to see on "Live from Kigoma:"

I will try to keep this in mind while drafting entries in the months ahead.

It goes without saying that my first priority during my time here is my job. But I have greatly enjoyed taking advantage of life experiences as time has permitted, and I have equally enjoyed writing-up those experiences both for my future reference and for posting here in case anyone else is interested in reading them.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for your comments and your emails. And thank you for joining me - in a way - on this fantastic adventure.

Birds and the bee(tle)s

This beetle landed on my knee the other night. If I were to tell you I acted calmly about it, I'd be lying.

To my relief, he wasn't interested in me at all, but rather in the lady beetle elsewhere on the floor of our friend's house. We brought the two beetles together and I watched with three biologists as sparks flew and nature-did-as-nature-does. I knew the birds and the bees really do all the things we say they do. But beetles? For some reason I was surprised to find that they reproduce just like everything else.

Storm brewing

eye of the storm

I rolled-up my pant legs and waded out to the public boat. As I climbed the ladder I thought to myself "this isn't so bad." I had heard horror stories of public boats filled to the brim with people and bags of beans and rice and sinking under their weight before reaching their destination. But the boat I hopped into was respectably full. Bags were piled evenly on each side of the boat, and there were only as many people as there were places to put them.

Forty minutes later, however, we were still piling in passengers and supplies headed for all points north in Lake Tanganyika, the boat rocking to port and starboard as bags were unevenly loaded and distributed. Men wrestled on the boat's beams while women nestled among bags of grain. Children beat sugarcane against bolts to get to the juice and pulp inside.

When I boarded the boat I could see seeds in the bottom which had spilled on a previous voyage; by the time we pulled anchor, I couldn't see the bottom of the boat at all. There must have been at least 100 of us aboard by the time we swayed into Kibirizi Bay. A man at the front of the boat gestured frantically to the boat's driver - who was positioned blindly in the boat's stern - to keep us from hitting anything on our way to open water.

In Tanzania, the adventure is not only in your destination but also in how you get there.

I was grateful to have company on the return trip. My roommate, a mutual friend and I piled into a boat full of park staff headed to Kigoma for the Eid celebration. On the way back to town, we encountered a minor squall - clouds swirling and threatening rain. We stretched two tarps - one stamped "UNICEF" and the other "UNHCR" - over the boat, and we huddled in the diffused light underneath.

It was incredible to experience a storm - even a relatively light one - under those conditions. To feel the rain through the tarps on our backs, to hear the thunder and feel the movement of the boat, and to have that information be so incongruous with the visual images of people rocking between wood planks and tarp. The boat's jockeying seemed impossible, a trick of the mind. How can we be moving, my brain seemed to ponder, when there doesn't seem to be anything moving relative to us?

The rains clapped against the tarp, accompanied by occasional flashes of lightening and thunder that sounded like a pressure drum. Still we huddled, unable to see where we were going. Then the water stiffened and we were back in the bay. The boat spun around, and we were home.

the water taxi

The day the rains came

I woke-up at 6:50 this morning to rain pounding outside the wood frame of my windows. By 6:57, it was over. It was a warning to us all of the rains to come.

Last night my friends and I enjoyed the view of the clouds in this photo rising high into the sky behind the hills of Kigoma, like a curtain rising before the wet season spectacle begins. The natural world seems to be restless with anticipation; the birds are chirping louder, the greens are growing taller and sprouting flowers, the cicadas vibrate with a deafening frequency. I, too, am filled with anticipation, wondering what I will find when the curtain rises.

Precious cargo

We had already picked-up a number of people and bags of fish on our three-hour journey from Sunuka to Kigoma, but as we rounded the top of a hill just after crossing the Malagarasi River, we were asked to transport something I could have never expected.

I saw six men carrying a wooden platform with a colorful wooden mat. I recognized the design immediately, having seen it used in several funerals near Kigoma. Her name was Asea and she had suffered complications in childbirth. “Could we take her to town?” her brother asked. Men reorganized luggage in the back of the flatbed truck and laid her over bags and backpacks, putting her head in the lap of a mama who would accompany us to town. Other men – mostly those already on our convoy – piled in the back, offering no comforts to Asea or the mama, and holding as tightly to their social roles as they did to the side of the truck as we sped our way to Kigoma – two hours away – only slowing for military road blocks.

In the double-cab of the pick-up truck, the driver started shouting about something. A mother riding with us began yelling back. The guard we had in the front seat – to protect us from rebels and bandits – just sat there, his semi-automatic weapon bouncing between his legs as we bumped our way down the road. The children looked around, stared at me, smiled. I wondered if I was the only one in the car who remembered the precious cargo we were carrying in the back.

I found myself getting angry at the circumstances - that medical care is so poor in rural areas that women die unnecessarily from maladies that could otherwise be cured; that the roads are so bad it is difficult to get someone the urgent medical care they need. I had met a young man earlier that very day who had pointed out the Doctor in his town to me, commenting that the man had traded the town’s medicine for beer. I was suddenly angry at that Doctor, too, even though he had nothing to do with this woman. And I also found myself saddened that community had piled Asea into the back of our truck without so much as a kiss on her cheek, a last grasp of her hand or a whispered goodbye.

Once we reached the hospital, a Doctor met us at our truck and suggested we drive around to the back. We then carried Asea’s body into the postmortem wing of the hospital and laid her on a white-tiled table where Doctors hoped to save the precious cargo she was carrying – the baby she still had inside.

“OK, Robert, let’s go home,” the driver said to me cheerfully as we walked out of the postmortem room. I nodded my head quietly; and as I buckled my seatbelt, I looked back into the hospital where Asea was finally resting, wondering under what circumstances the local attitudes toward death became so blithe.

Trip to Mahale

chimp in a tree

Most tourists who visit Mahale National Park comment on two things: the pristine nature of the park, and how difficult it is to access. The savvy traveler understands the correlation between the two.

Some say Mahale National Park is one of the most secluded forests in the world. There are no roads to reach it, and the park can only be accessed by boat, foot or a chartered flight. As a result, it tends to be a destination for the superrich and the superadventerous. Not fitting into either of those categories, I decided to give the Park a try anyway.

There are between 500 and 700 chimps in Mahale National Park, and more still in the surrounding areas. Given the park's size and the relatively low human population density in the ecosystem around the Park, conservationists have an exciting opportunity to protect the landscape and the species who dwell there before irreversible damage is done.

I love chimps, and it was important for me to trek chimps in this forest, and I did so without delay upon arrival. Hiking the forests of Mahale was an experience I shall never forget (especially my knees), and I soaked in the sights and sounds I found there - including warthogs, giant bees, flowering vines and a friendly lesbian couple I found in the middle of nowhere (they had a guide, but from what I could tell they were mostly telling him where to go).

But I have to say one of the most rewarding experiences at Mahale wasn't in Mahale at all, but rather in the shallow waters off its coast. I have been snorkeling in three other areas of Lake Tanganyika and have yet to find a place that isn't host to a variety of colorful and exciting fish of the "cichlid" variety. But off Mahale I saw fish unlike any I had seen before.

There were tiny blue and green and peach fish that followed me wherever I went (sensing my vegetarian doctrines, I assume), a fish with giraffe-patterned fins and bright blue lips, a darkly iridescent fish with bright yellow dots on the tip of fins that trail beneath it like bait on a fishing line, and to my shock two giant cichlids as long as my torso and nearly as wide.

The fish have funny habbits. Some of them rush up to rocks and "kiss" them, thereby eating the algae that grows there. Another was digging a hole by gulping-up sand and spitting it onto the rim of the nest it was building. Others were territorial and seemed to be fighting over property rights or females or rugby scores. It was incredible to be able to see fish doing all the things you expect fish to do: eat, swim, fight, build a nest. Little dramas seemed to be playing-out wherever I looked.

I had a great time in the lake and was thrilled to be able to share that afternoon with two colleagues from a partner NGO. It was truly an experience to remember, and one I intend to repeat.

a performance artist putting on a show

a vine wrapped around a tree

The Liemba

The Liemba at dawn

The trip was off to an auspicious beginning when the crew of the Liemba started playing the Titanic theme song shortly before we steamed our way out of the Kigoma harbor; although after twelve hours of Celine Dion, Westlife and what one friend calls "Tanzanian hip-bumping music," the sudden sinking of our ship was the least of my concerns.

I was excited about traveling on the Liemba because it is such an unlikely scrap of history. The Liemba (nee Graf von Gotzen) was Germany's secret weapon in the first naval battle of World War I - a battle which occurred, oddly enough, in Lake Tanganyika.

The battle over Lake Tanganyika was a fight for the strategic control over central Africa. In the book Mimi and TouTou Go Forth, Giles Foden explains that the Germans needed to maintain their control over German East Africa (now Tanzania) to ensure that they had a supply of boh cotton (previously imported from America and Britain) and exportable goods such as tobacco, tea and spices to generate revenue for their Imperial government and to fund its wars (not to mention the manpower they could ship to Europe to fight in the trenches for the Germans).

Hearing reports of a German steamer on the Lake (the reports were actually about a smaller vessel, called the Hedwig), the British sent two small armed motor boats (the HMS Mimi and HMS Toutou, French for "meow" and "woof-woof") to sink the Hedwig, which they did in a bay just north of Kigoma. But once the British troops saw the Liemba, it sounds like they tucked their tales and ran, and attempted to gain control of German East Africa by land instead.

If this theme sounds familiar to you, it's probably because you saw the film The African Queen. In the film, Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn wind their way down rivers to reach the lake, where they plan to sink a ship called the "Louisa" - a story based on the British hunt for the Hedwig, and their surprising discovery of the Liemba once they arrived. I have been told that the beautiful ship they find at the end of the film is in fact the Liemba herself, but it has been years since I have seen the film, so I cannot verify this.

In real life, the Liemba has sunk twice. First it was scuttled by the Germans in the mouth of the Malagarasi River after the Hedwig was sunk; they oiled-up the metal parts and hid the ship at the bottom of the lake, intending to reclaim it after they won the war.

The second sinking was an accident: it slipped under the currents while in port during a storm. Winston Churchill ordered that it be resurrected, and it has been operating ever since.

Today when people talk about the Liemba, they talk less about its ascent through the annals of history and more about the descent taken by passengers when disembarking the boat. Because the lake is so shallow near the shore, when the Liemba reaches most ports of call (with the exception of Kigoma and two other major cities with ports), it is simply parked in the lake where small wooden boats swarm its hatches and people jump in and out of boats, tossing luggage and parcels and children about, and bartering over the price to get back to land. It is a chaotic scene with the ship's horn serving as the starting pistol: people yell, push and jump from the Liemba into the smaller boats and from smaller boats into the Liemba. I watched anxiously at the first stop, knowing that the next morning it would be my turn to jump.

Any discomfort or anxiety I felt about my chosen method of travel quickly melted away as I enjoyed one of the most beautiful sunrises I have ever seen while clutching the Liemba's railing. As the National Parks boat I had boarded pulled away, I stared back at the Liemba, thinking about the incredible role she has played in history and all of the exciting battles and excursions she has made over the years; grateful to have been able to join her on one of her many voyages.

A fishing boat at sunrise - an incredible view from the Liemba

License to swat

I am not a very violent person by nature. But this weekend I found a deadly contraption that even I can love: a mosquito racket.

This little invention takes two AA batteries and turns them into a tractor beam of destruction for the little critters that bite me in the night. The package reads:

“Once the mosquito get in touch with the swatter net, it certainly will not be able to escape, it may be either drawn into the inner net or fastened by static force…and it will eventually get...zapped immediately.”

I took that as a license to swat.

So with my radio blaring, I harnessed my inner-Martina and swatted my way from one end of the house to the other. Unfortunately, in the first half hour the only thing I managed to electrocute was myself, and I had to pin mosquitoes against the window in order to get them later in the evening (I surprised even myself by being as inept with a mosquito racket as I am with a tennis racket; something I didn’t know was possible).

So while it may seem a “backhanded” thing to do, brandishing the mosquito racket is a great way to relieve stress, get exercise, prepare for my inevitable doubles match when Martina is next in town, and improving the health of me and my neighbors - perhaps even saving lives.

So maybe I don't have what it takes on the grass court, but the moves I am making around the house are improving health standards and - who knows - maybe even increasing the life expectancy in Kigoma (of people, not mosquitoes). I would like to see Roger Federer make the same case for his game.

Squall line

If you liked the cumulonimbus cloud I posted on September 10, check out the one above from Saturday night. This double-anvil cloud system was likely full of ice crystals at the top - hard to believe given how hot it was that day. There are still so many sights and sounds that I am getting accustomed to here, but I don't think I will ever tire of seeing clouds like these.