Blog Update: Villages, Gunshots and a weekend with Masai

It’s been a hell of a month.

A few weeks ago I went to Arusha for the weekend to see friends and get out of Moshi and while two of us were eating dinner one night two gunshots went off. The first about 75 feet away; the second closer to 20. All the other tourists around us just carried on la-dee-dah like nothing was wrong. I especially liked how a worker at the restaurant just said “oh it’s just the neighbor making sure everyone knows he has a gun.” Sure. To make a long story short, we got home fine but lied down in the back seat to be sure. The cab driver, like most Tanzanians, just kept telling us “no worries,” and my favorite “everyone has a gun in Arusha, it’s so easy!”

*Amani Update*

I also got the chance a little while back to go on a home visit with a social worker and a fourteen-year-old boy at Amani I’m very close with. His family lives two villages or so down the road from Amani, near Bonite, the Coca-Cola bottling plantation. I love seeing the Coca-Cola staff buses along the roads in Moshi since the bus is so ancient it’s a miracle it’s not falling apart, trailing in pieces. I have to say though Coca-Cola really is ingenius. When small shacks/shops decide to sell their products they give them printed signs of the shop’s name in exchange. Plus the transportation among other things. They really have it down. Anyways, it seemed like this village was really built around this bottling plant, which is pretty much out in the sticks. The area is pretty poor- mostly mud huts- and from what I’ve heard there’s a good amount of street kids and alcoholism. When we went to see the boy’s house (mud hut), his parents were absent since his father was at work and his mom was at a funeral (very typical here). We did see instead the mother of a child out on the street who I know who used to be at Amani about four months ago. It was pretty heart breaking since she was clearly drunk so early in the morning and hadn’t seen her son in so long. Her son is a great little artist and addicted to drugs. Since the parents weren’t there we went to visit the little brother at primary school. Because we were in the bush, at one point I looked behind me at the school and literally saw one hundred kids behind me chanting “Mzungu! Mzungu!” which means foreigner or white person. It’s probably the closest I’ll ever come to feeling like a Rolling Stone, and I’m pretty okay with that.

On the walk back the little brother kept saying “tunaenda wote?” or “are we all going back?” It was clear he’d really missed his older brother and wanted to come visit him which isn’t really done. Although of course the following weekend he showed up at Amani to play with bicycles and the next day his father angrily took him back. Unfortunately, I’m sure he was beaten since that’s what’s done here. This entire country is silently crying out for anything resembling a movement against domestic violence. There really is nothing and nowhere anyone can go when they are abused. The police are pretty worthless other than anything outside of bribes, which isn’t fair to say, but it’s mostly true.

By the time we got back the mother had returned (by the way the whole walk back the social worker was trying to get me to agree to marry him- not fun). The mother is blind from years of cooking over smoky fires and from what I can tell can only see shades of light and shapes. She was angry we had brought her son back since before he left he was going down to the river to help fisherman clean fish to sell to make some money for himself and his younger brother since the father was using his money on pombe (beer). This of course brought the boy to tears. The father came home around lunch and in typical Tanzanian fashion the two told the social worker that there are no problems at home. Ten minutes later they were yelling at each other so I took the kids to get a soda. In retaliation the mother stopped cooking for the husband, who refused to give her money to support herself for her disobedience. There were really hard any possessions in the house other some buckets and coals for a fire so I’m really hoping my little friend isn’t being reunified anytime soon without financial assistance and some much needed family counseling. The whole process was really interesting since really, this is what I want to learn about and eventually do.

A lot of the kids behavior has been really erratic lately. They love me one hour, they hate me the next. Many are pissed that I’m leaving them and I don’t blame them. They’re entitled. It must be confusing since I’ve been here close to a year.

There are a few new children this week, although one I’m pretty sure will leave soon. He’s got that look in his eye and it’s easy to see. The littlest one is pretty adorable and in love with the tiny keyboard we received as a donation recently. Personally, I want to chuck that thing out the window. It’s got prerecorded songs like “Jingle Bells” and….oh, wait, one other (!) and the kids love to listen to it on repeat and pretend they’re playing the songs. It was pretty heartbreaking today since I was standing over him and noticed a scar on his arm beneath his t-shirt line. As I pulled up the t-shirt sleeve I saw a cigarette burn (on a child less than ten years old), and four letters including K and L written out on his arm. The terrible part about it was the letters were scars from burns, and he tried to convince me he did it to himself when he can’t write. Whoever this child’s father was essentially branded him as a form of punishment. I’m continually shocked and disgusted on new levels of what humans can do to humans; what adults can do to children.

One of the best parts of my week are Thursday mornings when I go pick up two wonderful kids called Kalisti and Zainabu at a special needs school the next village over. I think they really love that they get to show off their school and have someone come pick them up since people don’t really do that here with kids. Even preschool kids make the long walk alone. Zain has pretty intense ADD sometimes, and let me tell you, they don’t sell daily drugs for that here. She is one slap happy child truly living on her own planet. I call it “The Zai Show” or “The Hurricane.” Anyways, I really love them and walking down the village road alongside the banana trees and the skinny stream and the wandering chickens to go get them is always so fun.

*Lake Natron*

After hearing of Amani’s death last week, I really needed to get away for the weekend and be distracted. Of course, I have still been thinking about him every day and really feel like it wasn’t properly explained to the kids. It’s difficult since they truly are so much more used to death here. It is much much more commonplace. His picture was taken off the website and it’s sort of just not being talked about.

My wonderful friend Anna’s mom and brother (plus girlfriend) are visiting her this week so I decided to go with them this past weekend to Lake Natron. If you’ve seen “Out of Africa,” Lake Natron is mentioned when Meryl Streep’s character ventures with her own safari party to go meet her husband, although it never actually shows the lake. Anna’s boyfriend (Josh) is Tanzania and was able to rent a large SUV for the six of us to drive out there. Of course when we got the car, it turned out the back seat was missing so yours truly sat in the trunk for six hours. It actually wasn’t too bad and I felt like I was in the womb being rocked to sleep on the backcountry road haha…yes, I know that sounds weird. On the way out there the car kept stopping and Josh would have to start it again, and the car was tilting a lot since the road was so crappy, which made Anna’s family less than pleased. Maybe it’s because I’m so used to terrible buses in this country or because I was clueless spacing out in the back, but it seemed like a pretty decent ride. Along the way Masai (kids mostly) kept appearing from across the desert asking us for water, which we had since we brought a few boxes of our own.

The drought that’s going on in this part of the world right now is incredible. I can’t tell you how desperate people were for water and I have never seen so many dying cows in my life. Masai depend on cows for their life and it is said that Masai believe all the cows in the world are their own. It was grim to see half decayed carcasses and cows that weren’t getting up to go to the bathroom, who according to Masai we met, would die the same day or the next. I don’t know how people are living out there, but it’s incredible.

The camp we stayed at was an oasis in the desert with trees and grass, right near an active volcano. We each stayed in a stand up tent with beds inside and lantern light. It was beautiful to wake up in the morning and see goats and sheeps and donkeys grazing on the camp grounds. The bathrooms reminded me of the Flintstones since the sinks were made of rock and the showers were rock covered by Masai blankets. There was a small sort of restaurant open to the elements, all run by Masai.

We took a short walking safari (only a few hours) from the camp ground through dried lava ash, across a river through the Masai bomas (villages) and finally to the lake. It felt so special to be able to walk in Masai country and see things like the bush they use (or the branches) to brush their teeth. The lake was beautiful and filled with pink flamingoes who shy fairly easily away from people. Because of the drought, the lake is much smaller than normal and the salt in the water was drying out the mud. At some point I felt like I was walking across a brownie, sort of crispy on the top and fudgy inside.

That same day we hiked up a canyon through a river to a waterfall. On the way back baboons were crawling up the hills like something out of “The Wizard of Oz” and there was a massive dust storm that at first made us think the volcano might be erupting and then just made me feel like I was traveling in north Africa. The waterfall was very picturesque and reminded me of “Swiss Family Robinson” since you had to lift yourself into one waterfall and then you could walk back to others hidden from plain view. At the end we were able to slide down a rock (a mini water slide) which was more than beautiful.

This all sounds fine and lovely until you hear about what a pain in the keister it was to come home. On the way to the campsite (the first day) we were running on empty for forty minutes or so and just made it in before night fall. Because we were out in no man’s land we had to buy gas through a deal with villagers and I’m pretty sure something was fishy with those forty-five liters of petrol….possibly diluted or dirty. Needless to say, the car broke down two hours outside of Lake Natron on the return trip, in the middle of endless desert. Josh tried fixing the car but I could tell nothing was gonna help this lemon. Luckily since there is only one road to Natron some safari cars passed us and tried to help. Of course, they all had clients and couldn’t really help us for long, and instead told us they’d radio for help. Stupidly not one safari car had a SAT phone which I sort of thought was necessary for trips like those. Eventually an ancient safari car from the 50s or 60s was driving our way and agreed to tow us…..10 kilometers in about an hour…to the next village. By the time we got there I really had to pee and this Masai chick flipped out at me and wanted to charge me a ridiculous amount for using the building that said “toilet.” We then had to pay since the rental car we were ditching was next to her house and she was talking about destroying it in retaliation. Honestly. I also forgot to mention that when we were stranded in the desert for hours Masai came out of nowhere (who did NOT speak Swahili) and were pinching our skin and looking at us like we were total aliens. Eventually I shut my door since I felt like I was on display at the zoo and the started drawing pictures in the dirt on our car. Back in the village, I convinced Josh we ditch this piece of crap rental car and pay these two Tanz dudes to take us to Mtu Mbu- Mosquito River- a village 2 to 3 hours away where there is cell-phone service and paved roads. We all climbed in the trunk of the hollowed out ancient safari car and made the slow crawl back to Mtu Mbu, were we had to get yet another lift to Arusha, at which point it started pouring out of nowhere. The good news is were alive and back in Moshi and we’ve survived.