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.