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