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.