loose leaf life

of mozzarella and matooke

2011-08-19T09:30:00.003-06:00

what is african pizza?

it seems pizza has entered the Ugandan culinary imagination, if not yet its repertoire. on handpainted signs in front of restaurants, listed after 'african and fast foods' you can sometimes now find pizza, though you're unlikely to find it within. it's more common on the laserjet banners of upscale restaurants, whose menus may not boast the actual item, but whose color advertisements feature a slice being pulled by cheesy strands from a full pie, collaged with photos of ribs, curries, hamburgers, generally international things the restaurant may not actually serve. at other times, you find pizza listed on the menu (assuming you've found a menu at all), but will be repeatedly told it is not available.

there are a few reasons for this:
the first is that menus often seem to be more like five-year plans than statements of current availability: foods the restaurant wants to work up to, whether it's having rice, or dried fish, or luwombo [1], or the mysterious but desired entity Pizza.

another reason african pizza seems not yet to exist might be the difficulty of sourcing pizza's ingredients, especially cheese-- tomato sauce, while not common, could be made, and wheat flour, if not yeast, is readily available. but cheese--that ubiquitous, slightly salty or sweet rubbery meltable dairy substance beloved of the European-influenced, cheese is rare in Uganda, despite a thriving dairy industry (now and then advertised as diary products).

being rare, it is also expensive: while you can get a liter of milk for twenty cents, a big bag of sweetened yogurt for forty, rounds of cheese, typically only found in upscale grocery stores, go for at least five or six dollars, meaning having ingredients on hand to even conceivably make pizza involves a big expense, and risk if customers might not actually know or like pizza.

being both rare and expensive, it is not often eaten, and this is probably the biggest obstacle to pizza becoming an actuality in Ugandan mainstream food: the fact that many Ugandans don't actually like cheese when they try it--regular white cheese is received here something like bleu cheese is in america: by a select few.

on top of this is the challenge of baking. not the actual process, which is easily enough mastered, but the paucity of ovens in kitchens set up for steaming, boiling and frying. add these factors together, and you've got some real obstacles to overcome in bringing those pizzas from imagination to savory mouthfuls.

and yet it remains popular on menus, signs and advertisements around, Pizza, and is increasingly being actually served in very upscale restaurants in bigger Ugandan cities. how to account for this apparent mismatch between local palate, ingredients and methods, and a growing national imagination?

perhaps it is commercials for pizza hut and dominoes, seen between segments of bootlegged american TV shows, watched over and over in homes lucky enough to have TVs and DVD players. perhaps it is a legacy of Italian missionaries, like those who built the extremely-well-attended Catholic church in Gulu, having proseletyzed more than spiritual bread to the local masses. or perhaps it's a growing foreigner presence here, on whose longings a few entrepreneurs have capitalized, and on whose capitalization other entrepreneurs longing for at least the image of success have also capitalized: an image of culinary sophistication, of international mystique, of modernity. i think perhaps the real reason for pizza's appearance in Uganda is all, or none, of the above: it is our infectious old friend Capitalism.

is it working? is a regular Ugandan more likely to buy their plate of matooke, cassava and posho from a restaurant, or roadside stand even, advertising pizza? are the folks waiting for their bus to leave one of Kampala's taxi parks more likely to buy loaves of fried bread from wandering vendors if they are called pizza, despite little similarity to italian food? will pizza in time develop a Ugandan form, as the indian bread chapati has, being now a common sight in every village, toasted over a charcoal fire to be taken with morning tea, or combined with eggs as a 'rolex,' or chopped into beans as a 'kikomando'? will wealthier Ugandans wanting international flavor in their own lives, and able to afford it, begin cultivating a taste for pizza, sure that in time they will learn to love it as they do muchomo[2] and chips?

time and the fickle forces of culture, society and capitalism will tell. for the present, a foreigner in Uganda longing for a taste of home is more often than not in for disappointment, finding instead of sauce, cheese and crust the familiarly unsatisfying taste of capitalism in his mouth, in a restaurant (or nation) claiming to offer more.

[1] indvidual servings of meat, sometimes in peanut sauce, wrapped and steamed in banana leaves, typically served at celebrations

[2] grilled kabobs of meat common across East Africa. FOR A GOOD OVERVIEW OF THIS, see The East African, July 30th 2011.

the road to Juba

2011-08-05T08:37:00.002-06:00

was a minefield.

i mean, once, yes, it was mined, by the LRA. now it just rides like all the mines were set off. i'd gotten on Kampala Coach an hour before dawn, body wanting that last hour and a half of sleep, but between explosive lumps and holes in the road, the alcohol-sweat-and-smoke stink of the conductor asleep behind me, and the way our bus teetered on the edge of tipping sideways passing semi trucks on the narrow dirt road to Juba, sleep was the last thing on my mind.

i was rewarded with a sunrise to remember: the perfect red orb of the sun, filtered through low-hanging clouds, rising in the east next to an unnamed mountain and casting its first rays on the grass-thatched huts of another unknown village in the increasingly wilder north parts of Uganda.

i was on my way to South Sudan, a country not yet a month from independence, with not much purpose in my head but to see it, to try and litmus the spirit of weeks-old citizens, see what nations are like in the birthing.

my first taste of that was peculiarly disorganized: after the usual lazy chaos of ugandan emigration, and five kilometers of wilderness in which i imagined myself crossing a line on a map, we were made to file out of the bus, slide down a little path on the steep dirt side of the road to an unmarked house that was apparently immigration. people formed in three lines, apparently knowing what they were doing, and then we were made to wait in the sun, about 45 minutes, me wondering how long the bus was going to stay.

during this time, a South Sudanese soldier who was at least 6'7" (200cm?) had selected out the waiters who didn't actually have the 140 pounds (40USD) needed to enter the country, and herded them over to the veranda of a grass house with other glum-looking veranda-sitters, berating them in an English the rest of us wanted to find extremely amusing, and struggled not to, given his gun, our vulnerability, and his sheer size.

so the second taste of new nationhood was lingering militarism: after i'd made it inside the jammed immigration house, and to the front, a soldier was told to escort me to 'room 6,' without further explanation on my part. and i found, to my horror, that room 6 was outside, one half of a certain previously-mentioned grass house on whose veranda a few of my fellow bus riders now sat. on entering, little explanation was given for why i was there (though it seemed obvious i was there because i was white and my passport said United States of America), and i was told to go to a certain tin shack behind a goat tied to a tree and get my passport photocopied.

which i did, with 5 of the last 15 pounds i had changed, after paying the 140 at the earlier desk (without receipt). photocopy duly put in a large pile with other photocopies, i returned to the desk, where my details were copied from a form i'd filled into a less-detailed form, and my photos requested.

photos? back to the tin shed. ten pounds this time: i was dry. hopefully that's all that was needed.

it was--after a couple more desks in a couple more rooms, a few more forms, some fingerprints and a lot of nervous smiling on my part, i was done. the unhelpful part of being done was that i'd seen my bus pull out of the parking lot awhile back, and head down the road. i was stranded.

at least, it seemed that way, but other people told me it'd be there waiting, so i walked hurriedly down the road, chased by motorcycle taxis wanting my fare, and found it sitting a ways up, passengers leaning against the bus' shade. safe.

my third impression of South Sudan was it being more like i imagined Africa than i'd ever seen Uganda: from the border town on to Juba, in six hours of driving, there were very few towns, a scattering of grass-hut villages, and the rest was open African savannah, mountains at times rising lumpen in the distance, as though dropped from a heavenly scoop, silver thread of the nile twinkling in the distance. it was gorgeous.

the road was not always as gorgeous: though it was mainly better than roads are in Uganda, it at times broke into muddy rutted shifty dirt roads, bridges that looked unlikely to support our weight (and protested loudly at our passing), and leaning detours that again threatened to flop our bus on its side. i began calculating how many pounds of passenger i would have to breathe under, being in the window seat, if it did flop over; how long before i'd get to climb out the top. it didn't look pretty.

we were stopped two more times by immigration before reaching Juba, once for a perfunctory document check, and later for a more perfunctory recopying of the passport, which was again duly laid in a pile without an indication to the officials who'd sent us to the copy shack that we'd actually done it. disorganization.

waiting to cross the long bridge over the Nile to Juba town, to the left i saw a goat that'd climbed on the hood of a newish car, and appeared to be licking the bugs from the windsheild. this understandably being a funny sight, a lot of us looked over. on the other side of the bridge, our bus was stopped and a soldier boarded, demanding who had taken pictures. i was instantly afraid they'd take me, since i was white and actually had been taking a number of pictures, but they took someone else instead, who apparently had photographed the bridge. i was thenceforth too afraid of becoming a desaparecido to take any photos, til i literally saw my French friend Thierre photo a couple of soldiers on the roadside without repercussion, but i remain a touch afraid of the lingering militarism, which i take as the remnants of a nation that fought for years to get its independence.

my fourth impression, formed on the basis of billboards, banners and signposts festooning the streets, is of pride: everyone from Vivacell to the Islamic Council to Tusker Beer is congratulating South Sudan via signpost for its independence, thanking the martyrs (soldiers) because their 'blood has cemented our national foundation,' commemorating fallen leaders and generally being excited about July 9, 2011, the birthday of brand new South Sudan.

my fifth impression was of a rat warren, of everyone and their goats wanting to take advantage of me, and filth everywhere. but that was the taxi park, and another story.

trust, paper/violence and shady bus conductors

2011-08-05T08:02:00.002-06:00

when can you trust strangers?

Marlo Morgan, in her first book about the impromptu walkabout she took with aborigines of Australia, talks about life as a series of tests, which you are given over and over til you pass. this has seemed true to me, or at least a good metaphor for our, and particularly my, inexplicable experience. speaking in her terms, one of the tests i seem to be taking on this trip is how and when to trust people i don't know.

travel is a natural time for this to come up: you aren't familiar with the people or places around you, and often not even the language or culture that informs them: you are a stranger, or put the other way, all things are strange to you. this is part of the pleasure of travel-- the joy of discovering, coming to understand and even embrace different ways of living those universal aspects of human life we often assume can only be done and understood the ways people at home do.

we are also vulnerable in that discovery: to simple error, and to conscious manipulation by others who are reading to take advantage of our error. but mistrust and overprotectivity keep us from experiencing the very wonderful things we have come to experience--instead of following the little clues and hints that get dropped, you stick to what you know, spend too much, find yourself alone in your hotel room dreaming of home. so what to do--get taken advantage, or not take advantage of you get when traveling? let me tell you the particulars of my exams:

ever since i was abandoned by a bus i'd booked in Kigali last year, and saved miraculously by the folks at Kampala Coach, only to find their bus safer and nicer, i've held them in high regard--i trusted them. so there was no doubt in my mind who to take from Gulu (Uganda) to Juba (newly independent South Sudan): Kampala Coach. yet when i showed up at 6 am to board the bus for Juba, the attendant told me it was 50,000 instead of the 40 i'd been quoted the day before. he said this was for a nicer bus, etc., which i only half-bought. i talked him down to 45, then found when i was on the bus that my ticket only said 40: he'd pocketed the five, knowing and exploiting my innocence of the actual price. call it traveler's tax.

a ways past the border, in the rather unpopulated and wild interior of South Sudan, we came across a bus broken down in the middle of nowhere, and took on as many passengers as we had empty seats. these people were very grateful for the lift, and had promised to pay on arrival in Juba--only to find the conductor demanding money of them right there, or that they get off, this time without their bus or other people, in the middle of nowhere.

a long argument ensued, the mechanic getting involved on the side of reason and compassion, the new passengers feeling quite precarious, the conductor demanding unreasonable prices in other currencies they might have, people muddling through each others' half-known languages to defend their interests... and though i wasn't part of it, either as passenger or conductor (i was in the seat next to one of these people), i felt palpably how vulnerable these people were to the whim of the conductor (who smelled of alcohol and cigarettes, had been sleeping most of the trip, and wore his uniform shirt dirty and half-buttoned). how their trust had been in vain, how close he was to abandoning them in a unsafe situation over money, tens of dollars actually. and in feeling for then i wondered about myself, about any of the ticket-carrying passengers, how real our claim to passage to Juba was. whether the next time he came around to check tickets he wouldn't just rip mine up and demand money anew, knowing i more than anyone else here, by virtue of my skin color, would be good for it. i've been told that Uganda's long-time president once said, 'How can i who came by the gun be removed by paper?' how can i, who came by paper, stay except through more? fundamentally, paper (law, rules, order, respect, that is) is always only as good as the people who understand it, whereas violence is universal (and often the real underwrit of paper).

once in Juba, i found the taxi park to be (as usual) a den of thieves--all wanting my money in one way or another, many claiming to be advising me against other thieves in the process. all of this is familiar and unfazing in Uganda--but here, on top of the chaos of vans, buses, motorcycles, goat herds and humanity jostling each other on their way somewhere, the situation, the currency, many of the languages, and fundamentally the people were unknown to me. i at first felt everyone was telling me inflated prices for lodging (12 dollars instead of the 3 i'd been paying in Uganda, 100 dollars in a place that looked worth 25), til i realized everything in Juba is actually about three times the price of Uganda. so i spent about an hour refusing actually legitimate prices, honest vendors, feeling cheated, targeted for my apparent ethnicity--not trusting anyone.

and yet, in the end, you have to trust someone. you have to sleep somewhere at night. eat something. buy water, take a taxi, talk to someone, enjoy yourself in this place you've come so far to see. so, around the time i was feeling this, i let a Kenyan bus driver convince me to go for supper with him and his wife--and give me lots of that old advice on how to stay safe, who not to trust, what foods not to drink, etc. he seemed genuinely concerned for my welfare, and a nice guy, if not entirely logical in his thoughts/English abilities. we went to a dingy tin-walled place with decent-looking food, where he insisted i get an entire half a chicken for myself, with beans and bread, and i just followed along... only to find he wasn't eating, his wife only getting something small, and the other unexplained man with us not eating either. and that he wanted to hold my change for me til i was done eating.

only, when we were done eating, he wanted to take me somewhere else--we ended up in a bar, one of these classic taxi park bars that are playing Ugandan music too loud on old speakers, dark interiors with half-broken chairs facing a small tv set showing the accompanying music video, men nursing bottles of beer, not talking, likely having seen and heard those videos multiple times. they have always struck me as depressing and very uninteresting places, and in this instance i'd just lugged a 50-pound bag around looking for lodging after a hot and bumpy ten-hour bus ride, and was still wondering why he wasn't giving me my change back.

so i decided enough was enough, id given him the benefit of the doubt, and he remained doubtful. i demanded my change, and he led me back to the guesthouse first, where he was going to bring it, later, apparently (his English was not always intelligible). i demanded it then, there, and gradually the whole character of our relationship shed skins from him being an altruistic guide for me, the needy foreigner, to he just another person seeing in me money and wanting to use it, in this case to get money for drinking apparently. i had to lead him back to the bar, feeding his sense that i was still buying it just enough to get my change (i'd paid with a big bill; otherwise i would have just left him), then finally let him down/let him know we could only be friends, and that i could only trust him, if money wasn't involved. at which point he, like Justin, lost interest and left me.

to be honest, like Justin, i'd seen the signs. i actually don't really trust people who are very ready to give me advice on how to be safe, who to trust, etc.--because they are typically the ones ready to use me. but can i on that basis ignore everyone, assuming they just want to use me? there are always good people around, and they are usually the best part of travel, hearing from them about life. so despite my drinking partner Matthew back in Gulu saying 98% of people weren't going to get to heaven (which prompted me to mention Kenny going to heaven in the Southpark movie), maybe my skills at reading people just aren't good enough yet. it took most of an hour before i decided this Kenyan was using me, and even then it turned out he wasn't after my riches so much as someone to buy him beer. this, apparently, came from having had such a white friend earlier, whom he kept referring to as though i knew the man, though i kept reminding him i didn't.

so who can you trust, among strangers? no one? may be that is the safest answer. it is also the loneliest and least interesting: it would have left me in my room an hour after arriving, wondering if i'd been overcharged for lodging and the meager meal i was eating there alone. at other times, trusting people has led to great experiences and good friends--and part of both of those has been the leap of faith involved in saying 'i don't know you, but i will trust you.' on this trip, over and over, i have made that leap only to find i jumped into thin air, and had to catch myself in the way down. what lesson am i to learn from this? i don't think it is to trust no one. it also can't be to trust everyone, because then i would get taken for everything i own. so how do you know whom to trust? life is apparently asking me to answer, and will keep asking til i get it right, til i trust myself enough to choose the right person.

NB:
maybe it's life to choose for me, and me just to read the signs: wednesday night, trying to call a friend of a friend in Juba who wanted to host me, i had almost given up on asking people to use their phones (i offered to pay them in return), having met only with non-English speakers or those disinterested if i didn't want to change money. then without speaking a tall boy asked me the number, dialed it, and handed it to me. after talking, i tried to pay him, and he refused, his friend saying "He has given you his phone." i paid him instead in gratitude, a smile, and was on my way. am i innocent in feeling his one gift has counterbalanced all the attempted takings i've met with?

big f&%k off camera

2011-08-04T10:13:00.000-06:00

[this post involves a bad word.]

i finally own, as my friend Stacey would put it, a big fuck-off camera. before embarking on the peaceboat ride we took in 2007, Stacey bought a large and expensive camera, a Nikon maybe, a fuck-off camera, so named not only for its imposing size and apparent technological superiority, but also flagrant display of wealth in places where few can afford to have a camera at all. on top of this, add the typically intrusive, insensitive tourist's use of this to document 'the locals,' and you have a big fuck-off camera. as in the camera itself says 'fuck you' to the locals, because you have the money, and the power, and with that camera, you're using them.

Stacey went on to take gigabytes worth of pictures during the course of the trip, more than anyone had time to actually sort through (i've tried). on the voyage before that, the web writer also had a big fuck-off camera, a Canon i think, which she used judiciously for covering the activities of the boat. i had the opportunity to use it a couple of times, and was entranced: the flashing lights in the sight as the lens whirred into focus, the satisfying snap of each shot, the flash which snapped up cobra-like from the frame when needed, the bewildering array of buttons and dials on the back. more than anything, the shots she took were what got me: the pyramids of giza, sunset on the carribean, the jungles of sri lanka, all in vibrant, golden hues my few-hundred-dollar point-and-shoot couldn't come close to.

i've wanted one since. the point-and-shoot was finally stolen in Uganda, after two full trips around the earth and numerous private excursions to photogenic locations. in preparation for this trip to Africa, i decided enough was enough. i will not let the beautiful sights of my life go without at least attempted documentation. so i did it. i bought a big fuck-off camera.

and that is what it has felt like since: a large expensive middle finger to Uganda. so i am caught between wanting to document the things i see here, because i appreciate them, and not wanting to appear a totally unappreciative foreigner by pointing my big black camera at things (let alone people) and shooting them, for me and me alone to later relish, print out, show my friends, chuckle bourgeoisie chuckles about the backwardness of the dark continent. it is very much an unequal relationship, another sort of marx-inspired alienation.

to be clear, the inequality is not because of my camera. the inequality is because our global economic system is skewed towards countries like my own, at the expense of countries like Uganda. my camera is just a focal point for it, the shooting of pictures a moment when the economic disparities between me and my fellow human beings here becomes embarrassingly, or rudely, apparent--instead of the muted undertone it always is, that my ability to be here at all implies. owning it is also such a moment for me, because i am acutely aware how very much money this would be for a Ugandan, when sold, so though thieves are comparatively few in Uganda, i am paranoid about it being stolen, and consequently carry it at all times like a rich person clutching their wallet in the ghetto. it's embarrassing, but real.

what this has meant, beyond an extra-heavy bag (its not called a big fuck-off camera for nothing; it's big and heavy), is that i have a lot of photos of landscapes, of things, of plants, and few of people save in the background, where i'm hoping they'll be less likely to take offense. i am reluctant to raise the Canon's middle finger at the people i am trying to live and study with, and this reluctance has mostly won over my desire to remember the texture of a grandmother's face, the wonder of four adults and a baby on a single motorcycle, the beautiful people i meet everyday walking around Gulu town. the only exceptions to the rules are kids, for whom the world is not yet an economic reality, and a glance at the playback screen after the picture is taken is more than enough entertainment to justify the fact that i get to keep the image and they don't.

maybe a polaroid would be less of an inequality, if it could be made to take two photos at once, one for me and one for them. but it would also be grossly expensive and cumbersome to use. so i am photoing lizards, picturesque doorways, sunsets, blossoms, but not a lot of what actually drew me back to Uganda-- its brilliant, beautiful people. i guess the middle finger of my big fuck-off camera has proven true the expression that when you point one finger, four point back. the awkwardness of forced self-awareness, of facing my own privilege each time i want to capture something of the beauty i'm seeing, has been enough to keep me from pointing much. but it is still there, the unseen reality that actually makes all this so picturesque, because it's so different from the place where i come. we don't have handmade wood benches this polished from constant use. buildings that dilapidated from decades of use. technology that quaintly archaic still in parlance. and most of all, we don't have people like the people here, who have to do this kind of work this hard, who take the hand life has dealt them and manage to produce this much laughter and peace from it, whose faces tell stories faces at home never could. but i will not retell them, can't bring myself to distance and possibly offend the very people i am appreciating in the act of appreciating them. so i keep them like most Ugandans do, in memory, in a fondness that, lacking 10 megapixels of detail, makes up for it in detail a photo can never have: the story of how you got there, what you shared with this person, the sounds, smells, tastes you remember of that place, that day--all the (other) details that make up a life.

that's the best way to remember things anyway. no big fuck-off needed.

some moments crystallize

2011-07-31T03:08:00.003-06:00

walking up from the clothes vendors along the marsh, i pass an audio rental shop, blasting Aerosmith's song from Armaggedon from the speaker cabinets. and i don't know how to explain this to you[1], but some moments just crystallize--
i don't wanna close my eyes
ahead of me, the intersection opens on market stalls of tin sheets, motorcycles crossing in rivulets of dust, i take another step
i don't wanna fall asleep
and my mouth begins moving of its own along with the words, ladies in bright dresses caught in the wind midstep across the road
cause i'd miss you babe
and i feel, a grin spreading from corners of my mouth, each moment here is precious--realize again that it is a privilege to be here,
and i don't wanna miss a thing
that there is more to see than i can take in, white-breasted crows wheeling over the rusting chimney of a pork joint:
cuz even when i dream of you
that i have been thinking of this country, these people, carrying them like secrets a year and a half in my head, singing their songs
the sweetest dreams will never do
to myself--ahead a young boy in white shorts carries a plastic pail of sesame wafers on his shoulder, dodging cars across the street
cause i'd still miss you babe
and i feel myself at once here, now, and living in Boulder, in North Dakota, in Thailand, in Japan, passing through the thousand places i've passed through, right here
and i don't wanna miss a thing
how all they are all tied together--me, aerosmith, Gulu, and the young boy in white trousers with a pail of sesame wafers on his shoulder. i hurry after him, singing

[1] i am maybe one of the few of my generation not desensitized to the effect music on everyday life: i thought for a long time part of the lure of ipods, aside from commodity fetishism and novelty, was how a small wafer in your pocket could generate a wealth of soundtracks to take the edge off everyday life, to at least set the background of the ground you were moving through, something only you could hear. music is powerful: having a song in the background can suddenly imbue everything with meaning, emotion--but if it is on all the time, if you need your ipod to walk outside, i think it loses that charm, and becomes mere distraction, something to take you out of rather than add color to the place and time you are in.

boda stories, ch. 1

2011-07-28T23:19:00.001-06:00

i am the disappointer of boda (motorcycle taxi) men. Gulu is rife with them, leaning on their 100 or 150cc bikes at every corner, scanning the crowd for anyone in likely need of a ride.

i should be a prime example of such a person: most of the foreigners you see on the street are whizzing by on the back of boda, so its assumed i will want to do the same. i don't, usually--aside from a fear of falling over backwards and blacking out into nonexistence (helmets are rare), id rather walk, because i see more, can stop easier, greet people, explore the little things i see. that, and i usually don't have a particular place i'm going. so i am endlessly turning down offers for rides by boda drivers, disappointing hopes for a good fare every time.

so today i step out of the Montana Hotel with a bit of anticipation--not only do i have somewhere to go, but i need a boda to get there in time. within sight are four separate clusters of boda drivers. i raise my hand and not one but two bikes converge on me from opposite directions. i ask them to decide who takes me, not wanting to get involved, and they are polite but both obviously wanting the fare; i find out why on my ride out to the Boma Hotel.

after the usual greetings, me talking into his ear and he replying as he weaves through pedestrians, overloaded bicycles, asian cargo trucks and a host of expensive NGO SUVs, Vincent and i begin lamenting the current state of Uganda. it's too hot, there's no rain, food prices keep increasing, along with petrol, and passengers are getting less and less. it's always like this, he says, after an election: the public officials spend all the government's money on their election campaigns, and then everyone suffers for a few months because there's no money.

at this point we've passed the swampy area, and traffic slacks a bit as we round a deteriorating roundabout onto a dirt road. the worst thing, Vincent tells me, is that for drivers like him, who just rent bikes, they need to first make at least ten thousand shillings to give to the owner. everything above that is profit. fall below it too many times, and the owner will just rent the bike to someone else, and you're out the only work you've got.

i'm familiar with the system: a lot of teachers or low-level businessmen save up to buy motorcycles, then employ otherwise-redundant young men to drive them, for a guaranteed return every day. but today, Vincent tells me, and most days lately, he can't even make it to ten, so not only is the owner angry, Vincent works all day for nothing, leaning on his bike in the dust and heat and exhaust, scanning the road for potential passengers, making 500 or 1000 shillings at a time.

here's the moment of perspective for us first-worlders: the money he's trying to make, ten thousand shillings, it's four dollars. it's six in the evening, he's been working all day, and Vincent says he has 6000--he's made a little over two dollars all day, and unless he lies to his boss (which he can't do every day), he won't keep any of it.

i believe him: he's got no reason to lie, asks me for no more than the standard fare when i get off. i've seen how hungry these drivers are, how there are far too many for the amount of people needing rides. i give him something extra, wish him luck, and watch him head back the way we came, towards the next waiting spot, the next ride, the next fifty cents towards being able to buy supper tonight.

what i forgot

2011-07-28T03:49:00.004-06:00

was the value of soda:
not the 8 to 1500 shillings you'll pay for it at a store, but the cultural value--soda makes an occasion special. indicates a time for celebration. lends a meeting extra weight. turns a meal into a feast. the whole process is elaborate, is imbued with significance far beyond the suspension of sugar, water and chemicals ought to allow: there is ritual here. it is brought forth laid over on a clean bowl, paper-packaged straw beside. the server opens it, but leaves the half-bent bottlecap resting on the lid to indicate it's clean, it's fresh, this is your bottle of soda, to be taken at your leisure.
as a guest in Lukaya, and an old friend welcomed back, i have been treated to many a soda in the past week: when stopping by a friend's place, they will send a child away with quick Luganda, to return bearing soda, sometimes only one for me, if they can't afford to share the privilege; when i come over for a meal in the evening, either hot tea or a glass bottle of orange fanta is waiting for me; visiting a school i'm friendly with, the headmaster suddenly asks me, "please, what soda can you take?" for him, he's taking Mountain. dew, that is, which came to Uganda with much fanfare when last I was here, and still appears to be the hip choice--its glass bottles still bear fresh logos, not chipped and fading like the reused bottles of Coca-Cola, Stoney Tangawizi and Mirinda that have born the celebratory beverage for many a wedding, introduction, feast and special occasion.
in Uganda, soda is not a beverage, not to be taken when merely thirsty, save by the monetarily-privileged few. for the many, it is the mark of a special time, a celebration that comes rarely in a year.
unless you are an old friend from abroad coming visiting: then Christmas comes every day.

what i forgot was how to walk:
i found myself constantly coming up behind road/sidewalk/shoulder/path-blocking slow-walkers, wondering what my bad luck was, til i realized i was breaking the East African speed limit: what's the hurry?
i stayed here long enough last time to realize people don't walk slow because they've got nowhere to go, nothing to do (after all, Americans walk fast even when they don't have somewhere to go, something to do): they walk slow because it's hot. they walk slow because they might not have eaten in awhile. they walk slow because there is much to see, people to greet along the way. they walk slow because it isn't slow here--that's normal walking speed; it's me who's getting unnecessarily sweaty just to arrive somewhere sooner.
i was even joking with one of our kids, Namanda Grace, that we walk so fast in America, that there's no way she could catch me. Namanda is a little spunky, so she went on disagreeing with met, til we finally decided to end it in a walking race. well, i did end up outwalking her pretty severely... but that might have been culture, or it might have been her being 12 years old. i told her we'd try again next time i came back. anyway, since then i've remembered to slow it down a pace. what, after all, is the hurry? i wouldn't want to miss something.

what i forgot was that i am made of money:
i remembered all over again as strangers began randomly asking for money, sometimes half-joking in Luganda, sometimes in all seriousness, sure i had plenty to spare. then friends began asking, more discreetly, but also with much more compelling reasons. then my organization began asking, in roundabout ways. and i remembered all over again what it is to accept my own limits, to give what i can when i want, and to be able to say no in other cases, without being rude, feeling targeted, etc., but simply kindly from a place that knows i can't personally solve the world's problems, but i can personally make my own by giving more than i can afford. still, compared to Uganda, the bums in Boulder are nothing (though they often are more clever in asking), and i've had to remember again what it is to daily face poverty, instead of just noting it as an ongoing phenomenon over breakfast, reading the news.

what i forgot were the smells:
smell of charcoal, smell of truck exhaust on the highway, smell of mangoes, ripe or rotten, smell of food on the fire, dry clean smell of eucalyptus groves in the wind. i forgot the smell of friends, how i can individually distinguish many by their body odor, as im sometimes told friends in the states can distinguish me. the smell of african earth after a rain. the smell of a kerosene lantern on a night with no electricity. the smell of our kids, smell of our gardens, smell of Uganda.

what i forgot was the heat of the sun:
it didn't take long to remember.

what i forgot was how hard it is to get food:
when you are hungry midday but not ready to commit to the course-and-a-half of mainly starches that is a Ugandan restaurant meal: non-restaurant vendors are few, and they usually start cooking at dusk, serving after dark, so unless you have the facilities at home to cook, and some food there, you find yourself as i did, many times, wandering around wondering what i was going to eat. fortunately, the few ladies i knew who have fried cassava, sell avocadoes and tomatoes, or samosas at midday, were mostly still in their usual places, and i got by with a little help from my friends.

what i forgot was my bicycle:
the same 15-year-old specialized rockhopper i rode and carried through East Africa has been my friend Anthony's the last year and a half, and it was sitting unchanged in his courtyard, some local additions notwithstanding, when i first walked in and saw it there. i guess i have a sentimental attachment to my bicycles, as they've been my main form of transport the last ten years, and i tend to have just one or two for each country i live in. so seeing the old rockhopper was seeing my time in Uganda all over again. we spent another week together riding the dusty backroads of Lukaya town, another old friend among many.

what i forgot was Luganda:
how to greet, how to listen, how to intonate, how to barter, how to have a slow afternoon chat. but it all came back: i guess listening to those gospel songs and talking to myself in some obscure african language while riding my bike to school was all worth it. friends were as amazed as i was at how much i can still speak. in Gulu it's become my one proof that i am more than a clueless foreigner in Uganda, so long as I get a chance to speak it in a primarily-Lwo speaking district (remember, Uganda has around 44 languages in a country the size of Oregon state in the US).

what i forgot was that western culture in Uganda comes mostly as interpreted by China:
because we export very little to Africa, and China much, but people here as former European colonies want European-like things. with the influx of US media (our one mainly unfiltered import, though you'll often find crudely dubbed half-commentary half-translated versions of our movies instead of the originals), people now especially want the life of the United States--in this China has found a niche industry. the nice things, it manufactures and sends to Wal*mart. the knock-offs and flimsier versions of all those things, it sends to Africa, with less time spent on design, on marketing, on quality control, and on safety. yet these things are taken as commensurate with the things Ugandans see foreign people manipulating in the media, and so they are a measure of monetary sucess here, and treated very well, and sold in the most expensive stores in the capital city, and treasured as the signs of a life well lived, even if they remain on a shelf in the house unused, while the locally-produced, totally appropriate, typically-environmentally-friendly, durable and cheap goods are used, abused and replaced when needed as necessities but not niceties of life. for me, it is all foreign, but i'm in the special position of being expected to see something of home in China's marketing of Western life for an African audience.

what i forgot was how much i love this place:
but i am also remembering how much i wanted, after five and a half years abroad, to be back in my own country, and how true that still is, much as i enjoy a visit and spending a little time in a place i once lived. the US is still home, is still the place i can do the most, and ultimately will feel the happiest and most settled. so friends there, don't get worried i'm not coming back this time. and friends here, don't get worried i won't ever come back: the life i've lived so far has condemned or committed me to a consciousness that's split between a few different countries, a few different cultures, and will always need all of them, at least a little, to feel complete. so i have the feeling, much as i love my home in Boulder, that i will be back again.

facing poverty

2011-07-26T11:02:00.003-06:00

does need excuse dishonesty? can murderers change?

it's not easy, working with people in actual poverty, when you come from a position of relative wealth. it's not easy because there is no line between actual need, and the amount people in need think they can reasonably get from you. from me, that is: the inhabitant of the most developed country in the world, who spent five million shillings on the plane ticket alone, who owns both computer and camera, and likely a car... what are the small costs of Uganda to such a one?

i do not resist or deny this perspective: it is warranted. i am rich, by many standards (though not that of most people in my home society). people here are in real need: not only has Uganda been in a drought that's caused food prices to more than double, but this part of Uganda is still recovering from a 20-year civil war that destroyed a lot of traditional safety nets. into this need i drop, like a bloody piece of meat among unfed piranhas, then want to be friends with the people i find here, and expect them to help with my research out of the goodness of their hearts.

well, i understand at least that this is a little unreasonable. in Lukaya, i entered a similar situation willingly, saying that while i did not have money to give, i had time, skills, and connections, and for a year and a half, i did my best with these things to ameliorate the global economic inequalities that make me, a regular person in the states, a rich man to folks here. and i had to accept that all the people outside my organization, and many of those within, who asked me for monetary help were just beyond my means. i did what i could.

now in Gulu it's different: i am not here to be administrator of an organization, i've not come with a chunk of money to distribute, nor do i personally have such a chunk. as a matter of fact, i have borrowed money just to be here--but these are unknown details to people i meet on the ground, who see in me only excess/plenitude in a landscape of absence.

this is not the easiest situation in which to research.

and so i have already run in to problems, beyond the regular requests for money i get on the streets everywhere in Uganda. the first person i found willing to tell me about his experiences, and who seems in fact to have a fascinating and relevant story to tell, is also now fixed on getting some of my money for his own. this is James, the one written about in a previous blog. the day we met, he asked me kindly for help feeding his sick sister, and himself, because they had no money, hadn't eaten in days. i gave him the benefit of the doubt, and about six pounds of dry food. yesterday, we met up and he told me the outlines of the amazing life he's lived, a story which would take a couple more intensive interviews to really unravel, at least for my purposes.

at the end of it, James asks for another ten thousand shillings, to buy charcoal to cook the food with. now, this excuse seemed a little thin (i knew ten thousand was too much), but it didn't need to be thick: the context we both understood is that i am much richer than he, and for his help, i ought to help him a little.

is that wrong? maybe, not, really. but when i went to the hospital that night, only to find his sister alone, and after consulting a nurse learned shes not his sister at all, hasn't been fed for days (in Uganda its family members to feed and care for patients), and in fact has no family left in this world, then it started to seem wrong. he lied to me, repeatedly, even took me to see this sister, in order to get money out of me.

but how wrong is that? should i blame him for being hungry, and seeing in me a chance? i certainly dislike his use of someone innocent and actually much needier to get what he wanted out of me. i appreciated his participation in research, though from the start it smelled a little fishy, but now because i know he is at least in part manipulating me to get what he wants, i have to doubt the authenticity of everything he's said, believable and compelling as it is.

do i blame him for having had a hard life (being abducted by the LRA and forced to kill, and living in a refugee camp since escaping), and seeing in me a chance at equity? do i apply my own morals in saying he ought to have asked directly, and that equity cannot be taken by force, but only made when agreed on by all parties? or do i have compassion on his situation, forgive him for what he's done, keep working with him?

ultimately, i am planning to do none of these: i will rather tell him up front that money can't be part of our relationship, beyond maybe sharing lunch, and much as i want to hear the rest of his story, accept that this may mean he no longer wants to cooperate with me. i cant blame him for being money-focused in a situation of such need. what's sad is that ultimately i feel we are united by a noble purpose, and divided by another: that is, i want to understand his experience, and people like him, and share that understanding with the world through my research, ultimately bringing more international awareness and understanding to the area, and similar situations, hopefully preventing further conflicts from starting. i think he shares this desire with me. but we are divided by me wanting it to be purely that goodwill relationship of working on something good together, and him wanting it also to be a relationship in which he gets paid, and not even up front, but through trickery at that.

the part i didn't mention is that he used to command a platoon of two hundred child soldiers, and once presided over the massacre of an entire school, around five hundred people... so i'm a little nervous to confront him! and my anxiety stems directly from one of the central questions of my research, and, really, my life: how much can a person change? how much of character is permanent? how can we ever know if someone has been transformed, as born-again christians and former murderers may claim to be? how could they ever know, really?

i'm not sure these questions are ultimately answerable, except in the negative, in practice, or for oneself. i am meeting James at eleven tomorrow: i guess then i will know the answer, for one person at least.

is this the walk of a killer?

2011-07-24T11:28:00.002-06:00

following James down the broken cement tiles of Gulu market, rusted tin and black plastic roof overhanging crowded stalls, i kept my eyes down, watched his gait: a long lope in loose brown slacks and worn plastic sandals. was this how he learned to walk in the jungle, in the Sudanese desert, gun across his back, leading a platoon of child soldiers?

James was almost the first person i met when i stepped off the bus this morning in Gulu, a city in northern Uganda that for many years was the epicenter of a conflict between the party/army in power, the NRM, and the Lord's Resistance Army. the LRA was, or is (they're no longer in Uganda), a group of rebels notorious for abducting children and forcing them to become soldiers, sometimes inducting them by forcing them to commit atrocities.

i had no idea James had been connected with them: as i was taking my first steps into Gulu town, thinking of little more than finding a cheap place to stay and maybe an internet cafe, i noticed him walking next to me. he greeted me, and i responded, then tried the one word i know in the local language, a greeting. he was soon telling me he would teach me more Lwo, would like to take me to his community...

and alarm bells started going off in my head. by this time, a year and a half into africa, the bells are facially silent--i don't let on that i think i may have been targeted for a scam, any more than i look awkward and glance constantly to and fro when i arrive in a new place, like i would if i wanted everyone to think i was a clueless newcomer.

instead i walked with him, neither encouraging nor resisting his enthusiasm for a deeper relationship between us, until we came to a guesthouse, at which point i said i'd like to check it out, so he might as well continue on. he said instead he wanted to just tell me his story briefly. i assented, and in moments i was reading a hand-written letter explaining that he was from a nearby refugee camp, and had come to town with his little sister, who was coughing up blood, but their mother hadn't yet arrived, and they'd been two days without food. a sad story, i know, but also a likely one--the alarm bells continued clanging unabated. i try to mix this cynicism, born of experience, with some benefit of the doubt, born of hope, into a cocktail that takes the edge off my distrust without getting me totally duped. so i didn't immediately discount his likely story, but asked some questions.

it became] less likely and more interesting: he was not only living in the camps, but said he had been abducted by the LRA as a child, and had been made into a commander, before escaping with his company and undergoing rehabilitation through World Vision and settling in the camps. this so happens to make him exactly the kind of person i am interested in, the kind i came to Uganda to talk to this summer: after having researched a different topic that i was told was too politically volatile to safely research, i have been searching for a new topic to make my focus, and have come here on grant money from my university to test out different possibilities.

the best among these, in terms of fitting what i'm interested in (intersections of spirituality and conflict), and being specific (rather than just 'spirituality in Rwanda post-genocide' or 'spirituality overcoming ethnic violence in Burundi') is the rehabilitation of former child soldiers in northern Uganda, following the end of the war with the LRA. not only does the LRA's leader, Joseph Kony, claim to be possessed by spirits, i have been told the rehabilitation of children forced in the LRA to rape, maim and kill is also being done in religious contexts. so spiritual messages were used both to induce them to do terrible things, and to try and fit them back into a society in which such things are not allowed. im interested in exactly how both of those conversions took place, whether either of them were really successful, and basically hearing from kids and rehabilitation workers alike about how spirituality has played a part in what's happening here.

so here James falls into my lap, the moment i set foot in Gulu. or is his perfectly sad story, like so many others i've heard here ending in pleas for money, not totally true? mixing belief and doubt, i took the middle path with him: i said i'd buy some food for him and his sister, then we'd meet again tomorrow to talk. i think i am good at reading people, but they are not open books to me: looking into his eyes, i didn't know if the disturbance i read there was a former life of anarchy and violence, counseled into one peaceful enough to ask quietly for money in a desperate situation, or the more familiar young male disturbance of wanting to get ahead in a very difficult environment, and finally being ready to do things like lie and manipulate to make money.

so as we walked into the market to buy him some food, i kept my eyes on his step, wondering who he was and had been, really, and whether i was being duped or taking my first step into a project that might become my professional focus for years to come.

it's hard to say. he wanted to buy more food than id planned for, so i cut his ten pounds of maize flour to four, trying to keep the total cost under ten thousand shillings. after getting some beans and cooking oil, i left him at the entrance to the market, promising to meet tomorrow at the same place and time, for him to tell me his story, and also visit his younger sister in the hospital. i'm looking forward to it with antipathy and anticipation, born of still not knowing whether ill be helping some people who really deserve it, or just getting taken advantage of. i feel naked here without the disarming power of decent fluency in the local language, and also that i am now beyond my experience, in dealing with former child soldiers and a society that was for years terrorized by civil war. are the instincts ive built up around other people and places adequate or appropriate for people here? does war really change a person and place? how, and for how long?

whether meeting James was a lucky or unlucky coincidence remains to be seen; either way i believe it will bring me closer to answering my questions.

what i remembered

2011-07-22T10:17:00.002-06:00

of Uganda was burning pink sunsets, banana plants, ladies weaving mats in afternoon shade, the city crunch of people, cars, exhaust and waste, a myriad of jumbled two-year-old memories that together make a world separate in my mind from the others in which i've lived: africa. and now i've come back to that world, to see if and how it still exists.

much of what i remembered is still here: the sun still sets in a crimson gold flush, air thickening as the light sparkling slows, caught in dust and humidity and the collective exhalation of the billion plants and animals that make up this place, now including me.

my kids are still here too: the minute i crested the small rocky rise on the road that leads to the center, the kids i worked with for a year and a half were running, screaming my name (Uncle Levy, that is), arms wide, faces beaming. id wondered somehow if they'd remember me, really, or me them--whether the intervening year and a half had been more insulation between our feelings and reality could again be crossed... but after the initial crush of hugs and laughs and greetings rushed out in a jumble of languages, it was clear these were the same kids i'd known, worked with and worked for since november 2008. the reunion went on for days, as i kept finding more of our kids at the center, or resettled with families, others boarding at school, even two we brought back from the streets--and every minute was magic.

the food is as i remember it too: my first morning here, i had to walk into Entebbe town and get a heaping plate of it: steaming yellowish substance (matooke, steamed mashed local plantains), triangular white sticks (cassava), crescents of yellow squash (nsuju), and rice brown with seasonings and frighteningly crunchy from the occasional missed rock or clump of dirt. all of this seasoned with a third of fresh-caught tilapia in its own yellow broth. since then my friends have been spoiling me with home-cooked meals: slow-cooked beans with bitter eggplants or dried silver fish, white potatoes, meat in its own broth, spaghetti boiled with fried onions and tomatoes, smoked fish in peanut sauce, and variations thereof. on my own, i grabbed a couple of street food staples i'd been longing for, rolex (from 'rolled eggs,' fresh flat bread rolled up with an omelet, cabbage and tomatoes) and chikomando (deep-fried flat bread chopped up and mixed with beans, a local favorite made fresh nightly by Mr. Fire Base). the consensus is that America has been good to me--in other words, i've gained weight since leaving Uganda, but people were trying their level best to get me to 'increase' again, and i just may have!

the highways unfortunately remain true to recollection: permanently under construction, torn up and deteriorating in places, a series of bumps and near-misses as you careen past oncoming traffic. though to be fair, the main highway seems to have improved some: mainly in the run-up to elections, apparently. on the flipside, the backroads of Lukaya also remain basically unchanged: quiet, meandering, bright in afternoon sunlight or peaceful in light of stars and moon. i have a habit of remembering roads in places i've lived--the roads i drove often in nebraska, routes id bicycle to work in Japan, and the dusty red backroads of Lukaya i walked so many times chatting with friends.

the rest of Lukaya is much as i remembered it: a few more trees gone in the towering eucalyptus plantation behind town, the road toll taken down for rebuilding but mobs of white-coated vendors still there chasing cars, same ladies i knew working in the same crowded dark stores, everyone happy to see me again, me or maybe both of us amazed we remember each other after all that time.

the best refreshers of my memory were friends, all the people i knew and worked with the year and a half i was here. much as we've all grown older, some of us started families, changed life paths, etc., i couldn't help feeling no one has really changed: the special things i came to love in each person were still there, shining, making me grin. i guess we just go on being the people we are, learning some and adapting to our environment, but all the while expressing who we are and what we've experienced to date, how we are drawn to live life. i am grateful to have known so many people who do it with such grace, on both, on all sides of the water. more than anything else, they are the parts of life most worth remembering, and hardest to forget.

six hundred months to live

2011-01-31T13:23:00.002-07:00

today doing homework in the kitchen, i thought about having six months left to live. mike and his friend from WatchTower--they always come in pairs--had just been here to unsuccessfully proseletyze me, and talking to them id watched the snow, falling since morning, fall in thick tufts from the trees. going back to the reading i would be doing all day, 1970s feminist theory in anthropology, i thought about an email my dad had sent, about how they'd found a malignant spot of skin cancer behind his ear. chances are good it will be completely frozen off in the usual procedure, but he'd warned us all to get checked. the year and a half i lived in Uganda, i never wore sunscreen, and the back of my neck now itches some times, has large bumps on it. so i thought about if those bumps were cancer, if i'd waited too long to get them checked, if the cancer was even now spreading through my body. this morning i woke up and found a poem a friend had written to me on facebook about how much she valued our friendship, and recognized that i feel the same love. i imagined telling her i had six months to live, telling all my friends here, telling my family. thought then what i would be doing with my life, instead of reading this 1970s feminist anthropological theory--

probably spending more time with friends, with family, maybe editing some books i've half-written. going back to Japan, going back to Uganda, to Montana, to Nebraska, to all the places i lived and seeing the people i knew and love once more, not to say goodbye but to say thank you. i thought about taking my family with, if i could, to show them the parts of me they didn't yet know, my friends in other countries, so that all the important people in my life could meet and know each other before i die.

i wondered if i would try to make a child, if biology would take over and push me to recreate my combination of genes in harmony with some else's, maybe an ex-girlfriend still in love with me, if some of my last days of earth would paradoxically--or naturally--be spent trying to make more life.

snow on a the pile of firewood behind our kitchen was individual white blankets two inches high lining the top of rough bark, bottoms still dark brown, expressions of a life now gone, the nature of trees living and dead from which they'd been cut. three days ago my friend's two-and-a-half-year-old daughter had laid such a blanket on me, as we pretended to sleep, made painstakingly from torn squares of toilet paper. i realize how fortunate i am to not--so far as i know--have only six months to live. i probably have much more than that: ten, two hundred, five hundred... if i live to eighty, and i am twenty-nine, i have about six hundred months left to live. only six hundred. SHOULD i be making children? shouldn't i be spending more time with friends, with family, with all the people ive known and loved in life, making sure they know that i love them? should i really be sitting here reading 1970s feminist theory in anthropology?

i believe the answer to all these questions is yes, so long as what i do is guided by what i love, what i feel fulfilled in doing. i have been given and made a good life, three hundred and fifty months of it, and whether the months remaining are six or six hundred, they are gifts to be spent in gratitude. today doing homework in the kitchen i realized i have too many things to be grateful for, that my heart is still struggling to hold them all at once. even the opportunity to do this homework is one of them. smiling a quiet smile, letting this moment too into gratitude, i turn back to read.

the peace of mangos

2010-12-12T23:39:00.001-07:00

'emirembe ya miyembe' i say to Ivan,
who swings from a fruited mango tree
in the timeless summer of Uganda,
sticky green orb in hand.

i am not talking with him: i am under a blanket
in wintry Colorado, an ocean, a continent,
two hemispheres and the world's economy apart,
knowing that this is mango season.
imagining these african orphans i love
rolling ripe mangoes under palm til they juice,
biting a hole in the top to suck them dry--
swinging from trees, hanging fifty feet up the canopy
to toss the ripest to waiting hands below,
each day dispersing in little bands to find fruit,
to pick bare the closest trees, promising fruits
to those who have stayed behind, never as fresh
as those moments from the trees, sticky-sweet.
no need for worry now about how many beans, how much posho
each plate will get: the yellow bar is open.

this is the peace of mangoes, emirembe ya miyembe,
for which i am longing, just a piece--
alone instead, at home, dreaming of Africa.

nothing short of a miracle, maybe: my fifteen-minute anchor

2010-12-06T23:40:00.001-07:00

busyness. if i had to write life in the US in five words, this would be one of them: busyness. the bane of our existence, the bill of our subsistence, the heart of our existential angst. cell-phone-ringing-running-to-the-car-twelve-minutes-to-get-there-and-things-im-forgetting busyness.

it's something i learned to live without, to really mentally exorcise, during my time in Uganda. no more: like people with jobs and children or events to go to or hobbies to do or TV shows to watch or people whose jobs are so tedious/unpleasant that all the non-job time is needed just to recharge, i have joined the Great Stream of American Busy. my busyness is grad school, which makes few claims on my scheduled time, and massive claims--if i am to do it well--on my unscheduled time. that is, i only actually need to be in school about ten hours a week: five hours of classes, three hours helping a professor teach, two hours of office time. that's it. the real demand is reading--i probably spent 50 hours a week reading this semester, and the balance of time was synthesizing what i'd read into papers for class. and the insignificant balance of that time was spent doing the things i wanted, like spending time with others, or spending time with myself doing nothing in particular.

as the semester goes on, this balance of time lists increasingly one-sided--until the couple of weeks last month in which there was no balance, and i gave up all pretense of preserving it. life was work. read, write, read some more. revise and write again. can you believe i blew off my own mother and gave only a day to a friend who'd flown all the from Japan to see me? forget about balancing priorities. all this culminated in a 25-page research paper on Uganda, and a 15-minute presentation to be given in front of 100 people or so, these two projects being the only grades in the class.

the paper is more or less done. the presentation i gave today: tenth in line out of fifteen or so, i foolishly sat in the first row, presentation on my mind, and watched everyone else get up stressed and nervous and deliver their sweated-over 15 minutes of infamy. i was in the front row, as close as i could possibly be to them, and the nervous energy was palpable. i wasn't actually worried about my presentation until other people started giving theirs, but hearing the stress in their voices, the nervous ways their eyes darted, the strained looks people next to me were giving their presentation notes, i started to feel it, physically, painfully. my shoulders tightened. my chest condensed. my heart beat a tighter beat. in a few minutes i went from unearthily relaxed about this large part of my grade, based on a brief performance, to a flaming stress ball.

let me back up: there's a reason i'd made it that far with unearthily calm. i'm sure, having talked to the rest of the students in the class, i was the only one like that. this is because i made a promise to myself, just as the worst of the unbalanced all-work-and-no-play time was getting over a couple weeks ago, to give myself one concentrated dose of do-nothing time every day, to try and balance the weight of so-much-to-do time that grad school seems to be. i started meditating.

not much: i know what a realistic promise is, know what i'm capable of. i said fifteen minutes, told myself i could find at least fifteen minutes every day to sit down and do nothing but notice my breath going in and out. and that fifteen minutes of awareness would be my anchor in the other sixteen hours and forty-five minutes of headless-chickenness.

so it was: i calmed down about my giant research paper, made a plan to finish it as best i could in the time remaining, and did. same for the readings i was doing meanwhile, same for writing the presentation script and making the powerpoint. obviously, there wasn't enough time to do it perfectly, there was too much to cover. stepping back and taking a breather, i could see accepting that lack of time would be better than stressing over my inability to either create time or clone myself to get more work done. so i sat down, wrote out the presentation, refined it, made the powerpoint, had a nice evening with friends practicing and critiquing each others' work, and then i was done, stress-free. nothing short of a miracle, maybe, judging by the anxiety my friends were experiencing today. i even found a couple hours last night, as i should have been making final stresses and revisions to my presentation, to sew part of a quilt and listen to my intoxicated friend talk about his parents' relationship growing up. life is good.

good, that is, until i finally caught the the Flaming Hot Potato Stress Ball we were tossing back and forth in the front rows of the auditorium. what if i screwed up my presentation? what if my mouth got dry, i ran the powerpoint wrong, what if what i'd written was dumb, i went over time, was way under time, talked too fast, too slow, too quiet, clammed up, flabbergasted, failed?

presenters switched, my time grew nearer, shoulders tenser, chest harder. my heart was beating sulfur instead of blood, achey and ready to ignite any moment. meditation has made me aware enough of myself and my body that i sat there feeling myself get this way, tense up, not wanting to, like a child on a rollercoaster i suddenly decide i don't want to be on, barreling down a rickety wooden track. overriding in my mind was not the thought that this would all be over soon, or that everyone else was feeling the same, but just that this was bad for me, that i didn't want to feel this way, didn't want one ounce more stress in my body than absolutely had to be there. after all, i have to live in this body, be it, for a long time still.

so i took a breath. not a quick, busy one--a nice, deep breath, as though i was sitting at home in a quiet room during my fifteen minutes of concentrated-nothing time. that was a fantasy--i wasn't at home, i was minutes away from standing up in front of my professors and peers and trying to sound intelligent with my mind aflame and chest asqueeze. i took another breath, still pretending i was peaceful, staring at the woodwork on the bottom of the lecturn, and another one, slowly, deeply. and then i wasn't pretending anymore: i literally sat there and felt my heart slip out of double-time, my shoulders unknot, my chest unwind, breathing deep, breathing slow. i managed to sit for a minute or two, calm again, and actually hear what the presenter was saying. then i'd notice the tension creeping up again, and remember to breathe, and gently unwind the intensity.

this is my fifteen-minute miracle: knowing how to breathe. that's all i had to do to calm all that anxiety. don't get me wrong, it wasn't easy, the stress came back each time my mind wandered, and i'd have to remember to breathe again, but basically i got all those straps of anxiety to uncinch and fall off with some simple breathing. when it was my turn to get up, i got up, said my piece, pushed the buttons at the appropriate times, and didn't once flub my lines. i delivered the message it'd been so important to me to send, took some questions, and got a nice round of applause as the next speaker got up, nerves sparking fire.

this was the fifteen-minute miracle everybody else saw: my presentation. i didn't think it had been that good, or bad, but afterwards i got lots of sincere compliments, some from peers that really mattered to me: they thought it'd been good. a couple told me it'd been the best of the day. to them, maybe the miracle was how calm i'd been on stage, or how i'd managed to get enough sleep the night before, or to put together my talk that well with all the other work we've had on our plates.

i know the miracle was simpler than that: it was breathing. knowing how to stay calm enough to not get overwhelmed by all of it, and just do what had to be done the best i could. and so this is my way of living in the Busyness of our great United States: to make sure i balance the Hectic with the Fundamentally Non-Hectic, and better yet make non-busyness part of my business, so that it never gets overwhelming in the first place. because being busy is good, if you're doing something worthwhile. but the second you're getting stressed out to do it, mistreating yourself and probably others in the process, is it still worthwhile to do?

no. that kind of busyness needs a miracle. good thing we are one, and capable of more.

dears,

2010-11-23T21:01:00.000-07:00

i haven't forgotten you. far from it. there are reams of unwritten blogs a-moldering in my head. there are computer keys at odds with me, because i haven't tickled them in unscholarly ways for days and months. i am at odds with myself, for not writing more. at serious and disturbing odds that i haven't evened my life-as-a-student enough to make time to digest it in entertaining ways for you, as i managed to during my life-as-a-volunteer in Uganda. if you've been reading awhile, i hope the reading has been worthwhile for you. it has been endlessly so for me, and my desire to keep it so has actually gotten in the way.

no, this is not writer's block. the real writer's block in my life is my inability to shut off from schoolwork and make time for other things, which i'm working on. i've simply been too busy since school started to write much, but i'm going to try to work on that (see the next blog). what i mean when i say my desire has gotten in the way is that i'd like to present things so neat to you, so comprehensively, that i hesitate to begin the story again mid-sentence, as it must inevitably be since i haven't written much in months, and lots has transpired which i can no longer lucidly relate.

so be it: let's just treat my life like a made-for-TV movie that you sit down halfway through and only figure out what's going on by the sordid events and dialogue that transpire after you've settled. only better.

in the meantime, i really am halfway through a book, two thirds through a novella, and an inch into a bookish work of fiction. they've stagnated with the rest, but as school holidays are coming soon, let me hope they'll get closer to completion and thus to you in the near future.

til then, adieu, thanks for reading.

my bicycle love story

2010-08-29T21:23:00.000-06:00

is one of pain, forehead stitches, decades-old scars,
of broken ribs and countless bloody road rashes;

of loss, of bicycles left in foreign countries with familiar friends,
a collaged german monster left with Shigeru in Kanagawa,
a fifteen-year-old Specialized with Osupet in Uganda,
still the nicest bike in a town where everybody who has the money to own a bike bikes,
and no one has heard of an aluminum frame;

it's a story of childhood, a never-ending childhood that's almost
made its way into a third decade, grinning like a fool in rush hour traffic,
whistling down deserted midnight streets, playing guitar even,
done with work and friends but not with life or its wonder;

a story of freedom--from chores when i was a kid, from family when i was a teenager,
from society when i was old enough to sell the car, from helplessness
when i was abroad, and always from the tyranny of two feet;

a story of being the change in the simplest ways possible,

and always a story of love--for health, for friends, for travel, for freedom,
for this earth and all of us who live here, including you and i.

heavy laid

2010-08-19T23:00:00.000-06:00

from the start i knew this was going to be a peach to savor: the way the fuzz balled under my palm, the way the juice welled up at the first touch of my teeth, cool and sweet. it was magic. better yet, the farmer who sold it to me said it'd been picked that morning--as fresh as could be, local and organic. on a hot summer's afternoon. mmmm.

so i laid my bike down and took a seat of the curb, a few feet from the steamy mainstream of farmer's market traffic, intending to enjoy my peach fully. this was, after all, the moment for which someone or ones had so painstakingly cared for this fruit from a simple green bud in spring to the invitingly heavy orb in my hand, at the peak of ripeness. how could i eat it with less than full attention?

nonetheless, the market was a riot of peoples and foods, little girls with their dads, 50something lesbians sampling roasted almonds, hippies from the hinterlands come to town to sell their crops. above all, beautiful women, in all the varieties a health-conscious university town can supply. strolling this way and that...

the fruit. right. sweet melange of orange and pink, i let it rest in my sight a moment, then laid my teeth where they'd first broken the surface, and drew them down through the flesh to the fattest part of the peach, juicy meat rolling on my tongue a moment before my mind caught up, neurons themselves tongue-tied trying to communicate the flavor.

they were nevertheless eloquent.

a second bite, this time sinking down to the core, delightfully cool and solid under my teeth, peach flesh pulling back to expose a section of dark red pit, like a dirty secret under all that fleshly armor. pushing my tongue through the cross-section of flesh i took a flavor sojourn from the sweet juice of the surface down to the tarter, firm flesh next to the pit--but what really caught me was how cool it was, almost cold down there in the center, nature's refrigeration on a 90+ degree day, still cold from the night before and a morning picking, sitting there in its crate in the back of a pickup box bouncing who knew how many miles from the country into Boulder, then sitting out all sunny day and still this cold? amazing. i don't fear to label such things miracles, they are. and most miraculous to those blessed to experience them. this was worth every cent of the dollar fifty i had to bike to the bank to get (paper money being something of a novelty these days).

a third bite, cutting up from the bottom to complete the trench started by the last, sweet cold fruit pulling clean away from the pit, shaped like the watershed of the pit's woody surface in reverse under my tongue, no peach like this ever had from a grocery store. as i am descending for the fourth bite a pair of legs too lovely to belong to any other than an even lovelier female pass, and i look up to see not this prime dame but a middle-aged man with a picture of planet earth on his shirt and another emblazoned on a blue cape behind holding a mini-guitar and a sort of half-grin under his white cowboy hat, talking with the proprietor of the roasted almond stand. my mind can't help follow along for a moment, into the vagaries of an article he had read just this morning, now that you mention it, being a social psych major, about social psychology and it said you there are three things, umm, Strength, Attitude and Something That Started With An M--a beautiful girl passes behind him, long black hair and a loose summer skirt, and i am back to my peace again. sweet peach.

the fourth and fifth bites do not fail to delight, as cool and naturally sweet as the first. it strikes me that this sweetness, this cool and dripping flesh, has never before been touched by man, is a gift mine alone from the Universe, to make into my own body, and i see in my mind's eye for a moment all that sunlight streaming in through the photosynthetic magic of leaves as raw energy meeting sweet Colorado water and nutrients brought up from the ground swelling the nub behind the flower even as it is blown away, and in the vernal dance of days a sweet pink sphere emerges, dangling delicate and sure in mid-air, its only knowledge of man the moment it is plucked from the particular branch that gave it life, said branch still represented in a twig and leaf protruding from the top of the peach. that was only this morning, and only this afternoon just now after an hour and a half learning about the Bloom Taxonomy of pedagogical terms have i arrived to choose it from among its brothers sisters and near relatives in one of many boxes set up under a white awning, and now just as quickly it is entering my mouth to be digested and made into Levi, most of it at least, shocking to think such a sweet thing as this could have truck with what i will eventually discard of it. all sweet things rot in the end, i suppose, save the idea of sweetness itself, something anyone can savor.

words tacked on the end or the middle of someone's conversation with the bakers across the way draw me up again to the fray of marketmakers, where i see two tanned girls paused midmarket in white dresses and cowboy boots, rapt on a pair of ice cream cones. they ought to be steaming in this heat. i do my best to see them as sisters of the universe and not another pair of peaches--much as they are both they are the first first and i need not mangle that order with an inappropriate gaze. too late. the peach again: another bite, fuzzy exterior folded back on its juicy interior waltzing through my sensory systems, and the pit is asking for release from its half-vanished fleshly heart, so i oblige, tearing it twig and leaf and all, eerily clean compared to the rest of the fruit.

it is a free-for-all now. i hear a band striking up somewhere in the distance, feel peace juice running down my chin, see a guy with a guitar and a big pack on his back take a glance and another through teh modern art museum's dumpster before ambling off down the alley, folded cardboard hitchhiking sign a gentle irony on his traveling back, as though advertising for a fellow traveler through whatever adventure he is in the midst of. i suppose those white dresses and cowboy boots are soliciting more or less the same, a companion on the long travel of life, but on looking they've been replaced by a bent old asian woman in a wide-brimmed hat, by an all-business lady with brimming bags under both arms, by a baggy-jogpanted 20s couple browsing brioches, then it's Captain Earth again still not using that guitar for anything other than an armrest, and i return to my peach and little patch of consciousness in this multicolored quilt. it has moments to live, like all of us, and lives them to the hilt, leaves me licking last drops of musk from my lips, a peach's worth of world heavier for the time spent here ingesting. it has been a glorious bit of fruit, and the knowledge that more such, though none exactly such, peaches await me in the forty or so years i have naturally left alive, is one of my great pleasures, as at the dusk of those forty years my memories of peaches eaten in at least as much appreciation as this one was will be an equally sweet pleasure in a life full of them.

it is time to fulfill our contract: as a friend once showed me to do on a different patch of grass in a different farmer's market on the edge of this continent where the redwoods meet the Pacific, i open the earth up just a bit and push the pit in, life-bearing seed that it is, knowing that was all it ever wanted, and close it again over top wishing it luck in the bearing of fruit, for all our sakes. that was a good peach.

then stand and swing my backpack over my shoulders and my legs over my bicycle and head off down the alley in the direction of that drifter, upwards and homewards and onwards yet, heavy laid with the goodness of the life.

it was a turning point in my life

2010-08-17T21:22:00.001-06:00

yesterday, when i saw a plane in the sky.
we had just finished packing my things into my brother-in-law's truck, and catching our breath in the evening light there came the noise of a plane overhead. we looked for a moment, shiny manmade bird flying a thousand feet above us, then i said 'that's how i used to move.'

he was a ghost:

2010-06-26T08:19:00.000-06:00

someone gone ten years or more, someone so buried in memory they had become themselves near fiction, just a few dusty memories in a growing mausoleum full of them. and yet there he was, real as the paint flecks still stuck to my skin, throwing frisbees with friends fifty feet down the park.

it was almost too far a gap to cross, like Orpheus entering the underworld. not only had we not spoken in ten years, the time we'd spent together was the low point of my life, and i a person so different from who i am today as to practically only be sharing physical features with my past. maybe he was the same, Ross. it was worth the risk to find out.

i told my mom and brothers to folf on without me, and jogged the fifty feet to where he stood, a grin welling up as i remembered him telling me about the worst christmas present he'd ever gotten, a box of second-hand clothes from his grandma. 'Ross!' i called over. he turned, and looked, and a for a second i was as stranger as he'd been to me seconds before.
then he said, 'Holy shit dude, Levi, what are you doing man?' and we were the same high school kids we'd been, or at least older people wearing those old clothes. mine hardly fit; it seemed he could still wriggle into his, but had grown out of at least some of the parts i'd shed as well.

he'd never left the area; we were 25 miles from the small town we'd lived in a decade ago. i was almost embarrassed to tell him where i've been and what i've done, because i didn't want to sound outrageous or make him feel like he hadn't done much in comparison, but he'd already heard about some of it, so i let the rest out. we had a nice little catch up, both happy to see each other and see that we were doing well.

then a silence came, and i saw that my family had in fact not folfed on without me, and that we'd run out of things to say. what do you say to a stranger you once knew? you can only wish them the best, only speak from a personal distance so great you're reduced to good intentions, like strangers who share only a few words of the same language.

then i turned, and we stepped out of those old skins, pinned new photographs to the old, discolored ones of mind, and forgot each other again in the flow of everything new.

albeit glowing

2010-06-08T17:21:00.000-06:00

it is the last day of painting, my last day in south dakota, and i am working like a mad man to get everything done. in the space of these last three days, worked around presentations given here and there, i have tried to paint four rooms, mask and tape another, seal and paint it, then get it all stripped and the equipment cleaned up before i go. at 3:05, i am almost done. it's down to the wire: thirty minutes left before i absolutely have to be in the car driving so i can be back in time to throw all my belongings in a suitcase and get in my little brother's car so we can drive the eight hours down to my mom's place.

twenty-five. getting there. the rooms are stripped, the equipment cleaned, now i'm trying to get it all back where it belongs. twenty. i half-run from the north to the central building, a bundle of tools to put back in the office there, hoping there are no residents in the rec room to stop me.

i open the door: no one. phew. i get the tools put away, come out ready to get in the car and get home in time to pack, am walking through the lobby and--there she is. the quiet old woman i met my first day here, who was then only thinking of moving in, who is sharp as a tack but not so quick on her feet, doesn't hear well and speaks very soft, from what you can see is a good heart.

phew. i don't want to blow her off: i learned enough in Uganda about making time for people, saw the value in it. especially these people who have so little human interaction. i want to make time for them, want to brighten their day and to understand their lives as best i can. so i stop. she starts talking, in a thin wavering voice, telling of how she moved in, how her grandson came over, how she had broken her ankle trying to answer the door, how he'd taken her to the hospital and the case they'd put on and...

by this time i am well past my limit for leaving. i will come home to an irate younger brother who can't stand delays to leaving, and i know in any case we won't arrive before two in the morning; i'm also anxious to leave. but i can't leave her.

she is still talking about her ankle, about how her grandson said maybe he shouldn't come over because he makes her break her ankle, and this just about breaks my heart. out of time as i am, something in me goes out to this lady, who lost her husband and would really rather be back in her house in Reeder but just couldn't manage to keep up such a big place, and i don't want to break off the conversation early. she keeps talking.

i am really past my limit now. i know my little brothers won't understand why i'm late, why i'm still packing as they sit in the car waiting to go. i think she senses it. she says she will let me go, and as i'm turning she says one more thing i can't understand.

i turn, "what?"

again, i can't understand it. "what did you say?"

she plucks up all the volume her little voice has. "you have a nice smile. don't lose it."

there is something about a compliment from an elderly person that carries so much weight. you know it is beyond all calculation for gain or manipulation, it is something that's seen and said through generations of experience in life. i don't know what to say. "thank you," i manage, and i am walk-running to the suburban to get on my way, albeit glowing. i haven't had a chance to say goodbye to all the people i met working here, but somehow i feel like i just did, feel this is a fitting last line to a chapter of my life.

so i get in and drive 100 miles an hour into the next.

i was born here

2010-05-26T19:09:00.002-06:00

driving down the main hill into Hettinger, i see on the other side of the town plains spreading empty to the horizon, late afternoon sun golden on the buttes. i imagine them filling, imagine this thousand-person town swelling in fast forward, plains populating with steel and concrete, buttes crowned with hotels and multi-million dollar homes, and this little main street, half its shops closed, rebuilds into the historic heart of an old downtown, little bistros and street performers and new civilization reimagining the old.

it all vanishes. i look at the plains again, at one-hundred-year-old Hettinger and the depopulating Dakotas, and wonder which is likely to happen faster, that new city or the end of humanity. and the sun setting on these hills, as it's done for millennia, seems to answer me.

this place will always be wild.

taking the puzzle apart

2010-05-11T18:03:00.001-06:00

these days i work as a painter in a government-sponsored housing complex. most of the occupants are elderly: old farmers and ranchers, or their widows, who never made enough off the dry dakota land to settle somewhere nicer. most of them are single, and all live alone. the place is quiet. i sometimes feel it's like a native american reservation: not where these people would choose to be, living on government land, but the only place many of them have, so they stay[1]. their lives they lead here are unimaginable to me, frightening. what does one person do all day, alone in his or her apartment, without work or much physical mobility? what sort of loneliness is that, what purposeless at the end of one's life? my mind balks at imagining what everyday reality is for the occupants.

when i see someone around, i stop and talk with them. i want to understand who they are, how they live, want to lend them an ear if that's the kind of thing that would brighten their day. i know it would mine, in the same situation. as it is, i am alone eight hours a day, painting, and the time can get long. when i was working in the south building, i'd often see Harold in the community room, jacket on, leaning his short body over a table scattered with puzzle pieces. early in the conversation, he always says "I'm just about to leave," though he's there about half the times i walk in.

sometimes instead of him it is a kind, smiling, slightly spacey old lady with a speech impediment, sitting and working at the same puzzle. there are boxes and boxes of these puzzles on a shelf above the piano, and more hang on the walls, glued together. i had forgotten puzzles--forgotten they existed at all. i don't think i've done one in fifteen years, which is like saying i've never done one. yet here these old folks are, working at them day after day, usually one puzzle assembled and one more in the works. i will greet them, and they look up and we chat for a bit, me mostly listening, them wandering gradually back into younger days, or interior thoughts, then back to reality. from there they will either wander again, or tell me they don't want to hold me up, and i go.

today i started work in a different building of the complex, and met someone new. she looks like hell: purple cotton jog pants, bulky black coat on against the wind and drizzle, maybe early 60s but with lizardlike smoker's skin, long white hairs on her chin. she is outside smoking as the sun goes down, and i stop and chat with her awhile on my way to the car. we talk of painting and renovations, about how she came here and the life she led before in Minnesota.

somewhere in our chat she mentions she does puzzles. i'm surprised, because i've never seen her in the common room, or anywhere else for that matter. she says she does them alone in her own room, and she has to work straight through from start to finish, or her cat will bat the pieces apart. "Sometimes I'm there for nine hours or more," she says. "Oh you know, you don't cook much for yourself, or just something small, it's only once in a while I'll make something nice, so, well, I remember one time," she says, sort of sighing out her cigarette smoke, "I started a puzzle at four, and I must have been working on it until, well, one thirty or more."

nine and a half hours! i comment on how diligent she is. she says she has to be, because of the cat. her next line floors me "But I get faster, after I put 'em together and take 'em apart a few times. You get to know where all the pieces go."

she takes apart her puzzles and puts the same ones back together again.

i am shocked: this is the exactly the kind of thing i have been afraid of imagining happening in these rooms. here is someone who actually spends long hours putting together and taking apart the same puzzle, over and over. just doing it once seems monotonous to me, and she does it repeatedly. i cringe from how i am feeling her life must be.

my mind tries to soften this image somehow: she has a cat at least, so maybe as she works the cat is on her lap, or she is watching the TV at the same time, but i keep coming back to her at a kitchen table, a single light on, cigarette smoking, one in the morning, putting together a puzzle she's done before.

oh God., i think, this is a real time for prayer. she has moved me to pity, something i want never to have to feel. i pray that she is happy, that she enjoys her life, that the perception of what she's just told me as awful or pitiful is only in my mind and not in hers. that the lives all these residents here live, without visitors, most of them unable to drive, is happier than it seems. i pray for it as we talk.

she's noticed nothing, and has moved on to talking about her furniture, how she has too much but just can't bring herself to get rid of it. i am still with her and the puzzle, sitting in her quiet apartment, checking piece after piece to see if it fits.

though they're not my cup of tea, i think i understand why people do puzzles: it is the joy of finding order in chaos, of gradually seeing the picture on the box coalesce out of random little colored pieces. the little excitement of discovering the piece needed to complete the cat's ear, the ship's mast, the lamppost in the quaint Norman Rockwell scene of a small town skating pond. it is human to enjoy finding reflections of our own mind in the world, as we love the ordered noise of music, the logical beginning middle and end to the story we never have in life, science explaining the apparently random laws of nature. i believe the joy of doing a puzzle is something like this, not only seeing but making order and sense come out of misshapen colored pieces.

this, however, is not that. this is that, the joy of discovery, of finding order, then destroying it to do over again. i can even see the joy in destroying, i believe that's human as well (think of little boys). but to later build it all up again, the same as it was? to do it enough that you gradually remember where each piece goes? over the course of hours and days, mastering how the little jigs and jags fit into a coherent picture, making it happen again and again. is there still joy in that? it stretches my imagination to think so. may be i am unimaginative, and putting all those pieces together time after time is just as good as rereading a book, that you bring something new to it every time.

but it strikes me, talking with her on this cold evening outside her apartment stuffed with furniture, the joy she finds in it is not that at all. it is the joy of killing time. i have seen her come out throughout the day to smoke, and go back inside, not talking to anyone or going further than her concrete front step. she has no job, no family that visits regularly, apparently no friends in the compound.

what sort of life is this? i don't hear the good answer i am hoping for in the things she talks about, in the set of her eyes. i pray that i am only unimaginative, unobservant, missing the joys she finds in life. but i leave her, the cigarette smoked, to get in my car with something like relief. spending that time with her, trying to see life as she does, has been harrowing. is harrowing, driving home. the glimpse she's given me into lives there has not dispelled but confirmed my fears. it is a puzzle i am afraid to put together, afraid of the picture it will make. at the same time, i want to do it, want to see things as they do, whatever that is. learn what i can from how their experiences have led them to lead life.

it strikes me that life may be like a puzzle for her, that she lives like she does puzzles: that in fact the picture formed from the pieces of her life may not be entirely pleasant, or even all fit together, but alone in an apartment like that you grow tired of not putting them together, and so you put the same pieces together again, sifting through memories like older people do, always hoping this time they will be different somehow, fit cleanly together into a logical picture. or maybe this life she's living--they are living--this life without family, living alone in an apartment with nothing but time, it is missing something, is a puzzle that's incomplete, with pieces missing or misfitting, and they keep trying to put it right, put it right. and not being able to, it is satisfying at least to put together these idyllic puzzle pictures of classic american life, the ones they knew. the ones they lost.

she is a puzzle i haven't put together yet. one, as i find more pieces that fit, i am less and less wanting to finish, and yet drawn to. like her. maybe we have more in common than i thought.

[1] i've been thinking some, too, about the will to survive. a friend of mine here i sometimes go to lunch will lightly say she'd rather die than have something like colon cancer. i've heard lots of people say they'd rather just die when they reach a certain age: 30, 60, 100. but when you reach it, you are always ready to live more, no matter the circumstances. this also is human of us, is deeper, even, than human: this is life, what defines us at our deepest: the will to survive. beyond the quality of life, beyond the sacrifices that must be made to do it, we want to live. don't you?

'is he me?'

2010-05-08T11:16:00.003-06:00

i asked myself as i took the change from his hand. overweight, greasy longish hair, Supervalu apron on his chest, working the register in small town Hettinger North Dakota, the place i was born. is he me?

the first time i was here, two days ago, i didn't say much. he'd given me a ticket for their weekly raffle, i'd politely inquired about how it worked, end of story. but i'd been just a little excited at finding someone else my age not obviously having moved on to the marriage-and-children stage of life. they're rare here--strikingly like the villages i'd visit in Africa, young people in dakota villages do more or less two things on finishing (or dropping out of) schooling: get married or leave.

today this iconoclast pushed it farther, talking to me something like my imagination had said he would. in the intervening two days of solitude, as i removed outlet faceplates and taped off light fixtures, i had imagined what effect our encounter'd had on him. me, i'm fresh out of Uganda, from a warm community of friends in similar places in life, and am still riding that current into the social barren that the Dakotas are for single late-20s people. he, on the other hand, he most likely (i imagined, masking rooms to paint) graduated from Hettinger High, was working this same job he'd had in school there, and somehow never took that step into the unknown that would have gotten him beyond where he is. instead he stayed, and that step outwards got harder to take as he stayed, among the familiar. i imagined he still lived with his parents, or his mom at least, and was an avid video game player, sci-fi reader. what he said confirmed at least some of these suspicions:

checking out at the counter with my bread and cheese and pasta sauce, with my get-it-because-i-can-it's-america-baby Butterfinger, he says "I heard that's an awesome game." his voice is straight out of Tri-Lambda: a bit throaty from disuse, undertoned with the grand style of oratory he likely carries on in his head during these days at work. he is commenting on a hat i have.

"yeah," i say, noncommittally, "i got it from my sister's husband, he manages a video game store."

"oh, that's like my dream job," he says, pushing the register drawer back into the till unconsciously, "to work at a video game store. or a comic shop."

and from there it's on: we have crossed the clerk-customer line, admitted our shared circumstances in small town dakota, and even found common ground. i admit that while i am not much of a video game player, i am a sometimes comic and an almost regular sci-fi reader. we talk more--the supermarket is dead though it's noon. he moves away from the register, turning to face a wall of Advil and Tylenol, and i understand he is under the managerial gun to be busy at all times, not to be seen idly chatting with customers. i imagine he has been talked to at some time in the past about bothering customers with speech from his sci-fi and comic-laden reality. i don't mind: it's good to talk with someone as irregular as i, if again as different from me as i from others here, and we talk facing the pain killers, me holding now this box and that as though considering what next to buy, he as though advising my purchase.

it comes out that he too is a writer: a writer of sci-fi, of a sci-fi trilogy about aliens invading the earth in the 1950s, at least that's the first book, and as i mention how that may be what the world's peoples need to unite, a common enemy, talk moves to the Watchmen and comic books and this and that. he is the quintessential never-got-past-it high school nerd, wallowing in his own nerddom.

and i wonder again if he is me. if i could have been he, could have been behind the register at a supermarket in a small town in the Dakotas, dreaming of the video games i would play, sci-fi i would read and write after work, horribly out of touch with the female sex and society in general. it is not such a far stretch: i can paint his life in my mind so vividly because i lean that way, because i am also an introvert, i also enjoy sci-fi escapism, i also once had a penchant for video gamery and also need to push myself to get beyond all that.

that's the sticking point, the one that has made the difference--i did push, got outside my comfort zones again and again until my comfort zone is so big it takes weeks to cross, has couches gathering dust in areas i might not pass through for years, but will still be comfortable when next i'm there. i got good at pushing, as he (i'm imagining) got worse. and i like him just for that, for being another version of me. he is obviously intelligent, describing the plot and justification for his novel, obviously introverted and creative if in a world-ignorant way, obviously chosen escapism over realism. i could have fit all those molds.

he is a potential friend, valuable as gold in these hills. more than that, he is a symbol to me of what i might have been, had i stayed here, of how i've changed and how much for the good it's been. undoubtedly the cirumstances of his life and mine have been different, and all the details i've filled in to convince myself we are in fact out-of-sync doppelgangers are likely as fantastical as the novels he plans to write. all the same, life's details are arguably as created as experienced, and these endear me to him as few others might, notwithstanding our only interaction is brief register conversation. i like him.

is he me? i ask myself, next time i see him. yes, i answer. he is me, just another road not taken, worthy of love and friendship, someone to be learned from. and in that spirit, over five dollar checkouts of bread cheese and butterfinger, we become friends.

Dear Reader,

2010-05-04T11:58:00.001-06:00

Greetings, konnitiha, jebare emirimu. This is levi, your writer. First and foremost, I want to thank you so much for reading these posts. It's been one of the loveliest experiences of my life meeting people--friends and strangers--who have kept up with my blog the last couple of years, who know intimate details I forgot I'd even written here, who talk with me about characters in my posts like they'd met them too. It is lovely to have shared my life with you, and endlessly encouraging as a writer to know that the sharing was well-written enough for you to come back time and again, reading these (often sprawling) posts on my work, life and all things experienced therein.

It is over.

That is, Africa is over. For those of you who go even further back, when I was writing about my experiences on PeaceBoat, that's over and gone as well. I am home, in my own country, writing the first tentative lines of a new chapter, what will be an entirely different volume of my life, one lived (mainly) among my own people, in my own place. The moments of shocking cultural awareness, the bizarre stories from other ways of life, insights seen through all of that back into the common things we share, those will dwindle. It has been nearly two months that I've been back from Africa, and I am piecemeal becoming a fairly integrated US citizen. Do I still sing songs in Japanese under my breath? Yes. Am I still dancing like an African when I think no one's looking? Yes. Will that ever change? Probably not. But a telltale sign has crept into my everyday English: like a good Dakotan, I find myself ending every other sentence with a trailing "so...," a spoken artifice I have always disliked and tried to clean from my speech. Nevertheless, I've started saying it again, so...

So I'm not as much of a foreigner as I was. Things are getting normal again in a way I've been fearing they would since i left the country six years ago. That everyday, nothing-special-going-on kind of feeling you get when your current experiences superimpose cleanly on those of other days and years, and you could easily forget today happened at all--that feeling is starting to creep in. Soon as I settle, it will likely settle with me, unless I fight against it. I don't know if I will: there's a part of me that doesn't like to fight change, doesn't want to label something good or bad until it's been experienced as one or the other. There is something good in everything, right? I might even say everything here is something good--it's just up to us to see it.

So Africa is over, and Japan before that. But will the blogs stop? Is the music over? Did the lights come and is this the Fat Lady singing? No. Sweet reader, so long as you are willing to read me (and probably even after you're not), I am wanting to write you all the remarkable things I find in being alive. I fully hope and intend to find them right here in my own country, without the international icing we've developed such a taste for these past years. In fact, I am finding them. Life the past two months has done nothing but encourage me about how good it is to live here at home (wherever that is, exactly), and I hope you've found the few blogs I've posted on it as good as they've ever been. They will continue to be the best I can do, because nothing else is worth doing.

Thanks for reading.

Levi

looseleaflife@gmail.com
Earth Day, 2010
Grand Island, Nebraska

old strawberries

2010-05-01T18:36:00.002-06:00

driving north and west to Hettinger this morning, telephone poles repeating themselves into the horizon, the Dakota landscape flip-flops between ugly and beautiful in my mind.

before me on the road there are patches of yellowed grass pushing up through half-melted snow, lumpy buttes rising in the distance, sky neither gray nor blue, no sign of humanity save a farmhouse in the distance.

it is ugly: this is where i grew up, the endless yellow-gray nothingness of prarie, no color or distinguishing landmarks, possibly the flattest, dullest place on earth. it is beautiful: as i came to see it once i'd been out of the country a few years, it is possibly the most peaceful landscape on earth. the bottom of an ocean now gone, the land swells and stretches, grassed and treed in impossibly subtle shades of wheat, flint, rust and earth. the sky makes up for that subtlety in shameless dawn and sunset displays, brilliant as though the sky had drained all the land's color for just these few minutes. then the rest of the time it's dull--it's ugly. no, once you get a taste for what looks dull you just find it is beautiful--a more delicate beauty, like a Japanese garden or a lesser known Mozart. no, it's ugly. it's beautiful.

my mind flops a few times between these, then out of them entirely, a caught fish desperate for water. the world, it says, is a bowl of strawberries and cream. no matter how the strawberries look, how you arrange and process the ingredients, they are all good and good together. and when you eat them, my mind tells me, it's going to be delicious. so with the world.

this sends me deeper inside. i remember sitting around digesting after another amazing dinner one night with my Japanese host family. the dad went to the fridge and told me he wanted to show me what to do with old strawberries. there were some there past their prime, and he poured them in a glass bowl, then unceremoniously dumped some sugar on top of them, and finally a few glugs of milk.

'mix,' he said. this from an excellent cook in a cuisine that can require slices of radish to be not only of a certain size, but that their edges be beveled before cooking. a culture of renowned meticulousness precision and refined sensibility. what he said amounted to heresy, but you don't contradict your host dad. i mixed. the red strawberries and white milk and granules of sugar all came together into an indelicate pink mass, something that would never sell in Japan. then we ate it. it was lovely.

what i realized today, driving to work in the morning and watching the landscape flop from beautiful to ugly in my mind's eye, is that the universe is also a bowl of strawberries, cream and sugar. it doesn't matter the arrangement: if those lumpy Dakota buttes are mountains, if the grass is yellow or verdant green, if the sky is gray or blue or ochre shot with violet and amber, if they are witnessed only after days of arduous Himalayan trekking or from the windshield of an aging red Suburban. what is important is knowing the inherent goodness of all of it, like you know the cream, sugar and strawberries--dark patches or not--are good. any way you put them together, they are going to taste good. GIGO. and if you see the goodness in them, they can't help but be beautiful, whether they're a delicate whipped cream mountain studded with strawberries and sparkling sugar, or a la Shigeru: mushed up in a bowl. the goodness is key: to seeing beauty, to making good food, to living wherever you are in contentedly. our challenge is to see the good in things. every thing. including the dreary half-melted prarie i am driving through.

so what do you do with the same 26 mile morning drive through nothingness? what you do with old strawberries: you find the goodness in them, and enjoy it. a place like Zanzibar, or a dessert like you might get at an expensive restaurant, they're easy to see the good in. too easy. that's why i like living here: it stretches me, makes me better at finding goodness in things. in people. once you see the good in them, you can love them. once you see the good in where you are, you can live there (really live, not just waste time). once you know the goodness of its ingredients, you can eat your food with joy.

now let me spell out the slightly radical proposal i had a few paragraphs back: the world is a bowl of strawberries and cream. that is, the world holds nothing but good. i mean nothing: the most blasted landscape, the worst weather, the hokiest country song, the awfullest tasting food, the most annoying person in your day. good. strawberries and cream. eat it and love it, or die trying. that's what we have to do.

guilt and awe

2010-04-29T18:39:00.001-06:00

morning awe
i float to work. from the heated cocoon of my car, i pass silent through a world of ghosts: all of lemmon, all of the dry windy dakotas, has been taken by white fog--not an early morning mist, not a precursor or substitute for rain: winter fog, frozen. it is an unearthly white, an edge to existence on all sides, a fading into nothingness, to blank air. the ground mirrors the sky: frozen white, covered in feet of snow, praries stretching white into invisibility, lumpy buttes in the distance blanketed blank. every thing i see, white: trees coated in ice, cars frosty or buried, the people you meet with snow in their skin, their eyes, their hair. only the black of the road holds some reality, and even that disappears in fog ahead. at times i am only driving on the darkest of the snow, hoping it is real, hoping it's the road.

through this wintry unreality i float, unreal myself at 65 miles an hour, warm and comfortable, carried further unearthly by the hare krisnas coming from my speakers, mysteries inner and outer dovetailing in morning mind.

i am at ease with mystery: i do not know if one hundred feet ahead stands a deer or a stopped car ready to spin me off the road, off the mortal coil. i do not know if beyond that mist there are still green hills, or mountains, houses or fields. i don't know if the name the hare krisnas chant is That Mystery's true name, or if It has one, or if It Is at all. for all i can know, i am alone in the world. it is faith and experience that paint beyond the edge of the fog, only a construction of the mind, even on clearer days. that's OK. i am not all-knowing. i don't even want to be: it's nice to have room for wonder, for awe. this morning, a simple drive to Hettinger has awakened both in me. may they never sleep.

how can i eat this?
for five dollars and twelve cents i buy eight whole wheat buns, a chunk of sharp cheddar cheese, a jar of roasted garlic pasta sauce, and a can of soda at the Hettinger Jack and Jill. it's more than enough for lunch: it's enough for two, at least. for five dollars. the glass jar of pasta sauce was a full dollar. it seems wrong somehow: how can all this food be got at such a pittance? how can this grocery store be so full of tasty foods getting old and discounted while our organization in Africa struggles to feed the kids corn mash and beans every day? and how can i go on eating this five dollar feast, loving them?

an answer
to say the world isn't fair is not enough: we have to accept it. good people die. bad people get power, get prestige, get rich. petty things keep us from loving each other, keep star-crossed lovers from crossing lines into true love. one day the sun will become a red giant and swallow this earth whole, like nothing. to say the world isn't fair is not enough: we have to accept it, have to understand which fights are winnable, and which are simple denial of facts. i will never live without taking life--even the Jain mouth-masked not to breathe in insects, brushing the ground before she walks, eating only the fallen fruit from the trees, she will tread insects, be the host to scores living and dying on her scalp, lessen the chance the seeds in the fruit she eats will themselves bear life. the sperm that fertilized the egg that became her did so at the exclusion of millions of other worthy sperm. call that original sin. our human desire for all-pervasive justice is at odds with the world, in which arguably the idea of justice doesn't exist outside our minds (and even inside them we can't agree on what it is). so am i going to eat in morose guilt, sure i don't deserve what i have? no. i'm going to do what i can to be sure everyone gets what they deserve, including me and all the people, plants and minerals that went into making this meal for me--first things, they deserve a little gratitude. if what i want is people everywhere to enjoy healthy abundant foods, it's a contradiction if that wish makes me not enjoy mine. what this meal does is remind me that i am fortunate, by chance as much as effort, and i need to spread that good fortune.

that's one answer to how i can go on eating this five dollar feast, loving my kids in Africa. because i know how things are, how i want them to be, and i'm doing what i can.

driving to hettinger

2010-04-26T18:53:00.000-06:00

i see a piece of snow on the road break randomly, seconds before my tires hit it, further breaking it. what made that piece break?

from this blossoms in my mind a temporal extension of a description i once heard second-hand of a ugandan woman who'd died, of how her spirit fingers withdrew as out of the gloves of her real fingers, how she saw her spirit body gradually pulling out of her material one like mortal clothes, as she exited via the top of her head.

i start to imagine time being like that, withdrawing like spirit fingers from our place in space, that we'd still see space be affected, but in out of sync time, as though our footprints fell in snow before our foot did, or not until after it'd lifted again. i imagine a sci fi story i would write about someone who was pulled out like that, and how it would begin with a description of the 1950s flanger sound effect, made by rotating speakers pulling the same sound slightly out of and back into sync with itself, and how time would be like that for the main character of the story.

the rest of the day happened right on time.

diversity, silence and surprise in smalltown Dakota

2010-04-21T09:32:00.002-06:00

working in silence
i am a painter. i owe my dad two thousand dollars for living expenses while in Uganda, and fortunately he recently bought an apartment complex that needs remodeling, so there was work waiting as soon as i'd gotten back. now every day i drive the 25 miles to hettinger, north dakota, and spend my morning and afternoon taking off electrical faceplates, masking doorframes, covering carpets and spraying paint. most of the time, i bring my computer, and though i spend the day alone, i am kept electric company by music, audio books or news broadcasts downloaded in the morning before leaving.

today i was about halfway to hettinger, in the houseless stretch of road where south dakota changes to north, when i realized i'd forgotten my computer. no music. at first, something like panic gripped me: oh god, what was i going to do all day? work in silence?

and then a voice deeper in me, the one that sat through a month of silent meditation, that rode bicycle alone across africa, that doesn't even always like all that music, said yes. what you are going to do is work all day in silence. is that so bad? is silence somehow scary? can you manage to be unmediated, unentertained, undistracted for nine hours in one day? yes.

so that's what i did: i unscrewed, i taped, i masked, i painted, i worked. in silence. well, not really in silence: i would sometimes realize i was singing, had been singing for some time, and probably sounded like a total loony to the elderly person on the other side of the wall, since i was singing my mental impression of the song, not the real thing. then i kept singing.

but most of the time, it was just quiet. just me and me, and the work. that's okay too. some people are uncomfortable with silence when they're with someone else. others are uncomfortable with silence when they're alone: they need the radio, the TV, the computer to be on, an I-pod at least. i'm not: i like me. there are more than enough things to think about for a day or a week or even a month. i didn't go anywhere for lunch, didn't chat with anyone that afternoon. i read a book while i was eating, then kept working, in silence again.

is that strange? i don't mind if you think so. according to how they act, i think most people would, when it gets down to it: they'd rather have the radio on, rather have a bit of distraction from what might become a lot of time with oneself. me too, sometimes. not today.

a very surprising thing
is that people are genuinely interested to hear about Uganda. when i came back from Japan, i usually had between one to three sentences before eyes became glassy, answers became monosyllable, and i could tell i'd completely lost my listener's interest. sometimes the opening words "In Japan..." were all it took.

so i was ready for my culture's cultural disinterest, came with a thick skin and a sort of truculent inner appreciation for what i'd done and seen, regardless of what anyone was going to think. i was ready for the glassy-eyes.

needlessly. one of the most surprising things about coming back has been the genuine interest people have shown in where i've been and what i've done. i can talk in threes and fours of sentences without losing interest, sometimes getting asked follow-up questions, and if anything am holding back more than i need to, out of the habit i picked up coming from Japan. in those days i came to understand the richly tapestried world i'd come to know and love was pretty uninteresting to most people in the States, and hard as it was to accept i learned to say little or nothing about it because i was apparently just boring my listener.

maybe it's working to my advantage: my cousin training his daughter in violin via the 'Suzuki method' said one of its tenets is to always stop practicing before she's had enough, so that her interest is always held. so maybe my closed-mouthedness about international experiences (blogs aside, that is!) is keeping people interested. or maybe writing about them the whole time i was there gave me a lot of good stories to tell. maybe i've learned to put things in a way that's interesting to someone with a much different set of experiences. or maybe Africa itself, the kind of work i was doing there, just holds more interest for people. i think that's it.

in any case, it's been lovely. i never liked hiding what to me was such an important part of my life, and though Japan continues to need hiding, Uganda does not. having ears for what i'm dying to tell, and a bit of understanding for the parts of life here that are harder to get back into, has made coming home that much easier.

smalltown dakota diversity
is not one of culture or race, it's one of personality. personality is the ultimate diversity you often sweep over in experiencing things from the surface level of a foreigner, is the deep learning you do from each person's own take on life, their own culture and the inner world they've created from it, how that world is expressed in what they say and do. if you want black people, asian people, mediterranean and sub-saharan people, the Dakotas don't have much going on. but if you're interested in different kinds of people, in different ways folks have found to live life, i am finding there's a lot to see in the small town Dakotas.

what else it's like being back

2010-04-16T15:49:00.003-06:00

travel
what has coming back to america been like for me? in a way, it's been like travel.

that is, i've been traveling for so long that the state of mind i got into traveling has stayed with me as i come back to this place which ought to be the end of my travels. i was pretty settled the year and some i was in Uganda. then i traveled for five weeks on my bike, enough time to thoroughly inhabit the traveler's state of mind, and only being back in Uganda for a week, i kept it (it was easier to say goodbye that way, than meditate on how i was losing a home, etc.). the four days i spent on planes and in Dubai was thoroughly travel. so when i got into Denver after all that, i still more or less felt like i was traveling.

that is, i felt i was in a special place for a short time, that things were to be done for the sake of doing them as there was little time to wait, that good conversations were to be had and not waited for, that i was seeing and doing things for the first time, familiar as some of them were. there are worse states of mind to be in.

and it just continued: through driving up to my dad's house in South Dakota, through the week i spent here with my sister and her husband, driving around to visit family, and even after they left, i've feel i'm traveling still. maybe traveling deep, moving somewhere different in life and not geography. i don't feel out of place, not like i'm not at home or that this place isn't familiar--i've spent enough time in Lemmon, though never in the house we are living in now, to take it as familiar. but somehow the special focus and hinging on moments that i have when traveling has stayed with me after coming back. maybe it's because i've been excited to be here for such a long time that it's like i've reached a destination i've been traveling towards for years (i have). or maybe i just learned something or things in those years of traveling that was valuable, and decided to apply them even after i've stopped awhile. i don't know. yes. probably all of those. but coming back, being back, has been like travel.

backpacker
speaking of which, i am even a backpacker in my own house: the airlines lost my luggage, and i was left with only my carry-on, a backpack full of books and other impractical things too heavy to put in my already overweight luggage. they didn't find the rest of my things (i.e. clothes, toiletries, souvenirs, etc.) until well after i'd left Denver with my sister and her husband for South Dakota, so i was wearing the same clothes i had been since Uganda, lugging around the same little backpack as i made the final miles home. i still haven't gotten my luggage, just dug up some old boxes and bought what i couldn't find. maybe that's why it's all felt like travel... i'm still living from my backpack.

not all of it
can make it into words. some of it is probably inappropriate for anyone's thought than my own. let me sum up what it's like to be back:

good.

things i am grateful for:

hot water in the tap
cold juice in the fridge
convenience stores
nonstop electricity
uber availability of cheese
being with family
nonugandan food
snow
my luggage being found
dumb movies on bigscreen TVs
grandma dybe's caramel rolls

things i'm not sure how im going to deal with:

how much sugar there is in everything
how much meat there is in everything
how much trash i create trying to eat something
long drives in motorized vehicles
dumb movies on bigscreen TVs
my change from international to national
deodorant
cute american girls
washing machines and dryers

what it's like coming back to the states

2010-04-13T15:24:00.004-06:00

mindwash.
mental breakdown.
a disgust with all things first world, with the ignorant wealth of our country and its people, including oneself. an overwhelming sense of guilt for all of our unearned privilege, and a reluctant resumption of that privilege coupled with hypocritical regret for not having done something more, stayed longer, learned from the time spent in africa.

these are the sentiments you are supposed to experience when you come back from africa. reverse culture shock: economic shock. the change from poverty to wealth, i was told, is harder than the other way around, than adjusting to the difficulties and trials of life in africa. you return only to feel the people you left behind are somehow more real, more deserving of the good things we have than we are, we who so thoughtlessly have them each day and night.

that's what you feel when you come back from africa. reverse culture shock. do i? no.

coming back has been different for me. how? i'm not really sure. i've been back nearly two weeks now, and it's been stewing in the back of my mind the whole time, but i haven't yet put it into words. let me try. what has coming back from africa been like for me?

coming in from the cold
in part it's been like winters in south dakota, winters where no one wants to be outdoors, out of heating, but at times you must. and at those times no matter how much you bundle up, you are going to get cold. and you are going to curse the cold and wish you were back inside and generally be fairly uncomfortable for a time. and then, at some point, you'll have been cold for so long that it becomes the normal state of being, and while it's still deplorable, it's not really on the front burner of your mind, and you go on doing the rest of whatever it is you need to do outside, still remembering somewhere how nice it will be to go indoors.

and then you do, and that's what coming back from africa has been like for me. not a culture shock--this is where i grew up, after all, and being from somewhere is a little like riding a bicycle, though if you spend long enough away it's bound to be a little unfamiliar. you don't forget your home. what you do forget--or what you maybe never noticed--is how nice it is to be home, like you notice it coming indoors after a half hour or more outside in the snow and wind: how nice it is to take off your coat, your shoes, shiver a little bit as the cold air shakes out of your hair and you get warm again, comfortable.

coming back to america has been a little like that for me.

a kid in candystore.
what have i been like coming back from africa? i've been a little like a kid in a candystore.

i didn't get this feeling much in Japan, where they had the usual first world diversity of goods for sale, and those goods had the bonus of being new and interesting and in many cases tastier, cuter, stranger and higher tech than what i knew of in the states. i never really felt like i was going without there, or had the craving for something like a bowl of mac and cheese (which i would avoid eating in the states).

but in africa, oh baby, there ain't much in the way of comfort foods, in the way of aisles of candy bars and potato chips and cake mixes and juices and boxes of cereal. supplies are limited and hard to get, especially if you don't have much cash. and living there i gradually started craving the dumbest things i never liked in the states, like duncan hines brownies made straight from the box with just a couple eggs and some water, like peanut m&ms. when somebody'd get a care package from home, or buy something rare and expensive like cheese, we'd celebrate, we would partake of it with care and joy.

to exasperate matters, i spent the last two months of my time in Africa on bicycle, peddling through some pretty unfamiliar and remote areas, sleeping where i could and eating what i could find wherever i was. a trip like that, if it lasts awhile like mine did, will make you start longing for familiarity, for comfort. and comfort, for me at least, has quite a bit to do with food.

so coming back to america i have been like a kid in a candystore. every little podunk town i go to has boxes and boxes of cake mix, all kinds of vegetables from different countries neatly canned and refrigerated in lines, every gas station has candy bars and fountain pop and boxes or sometimes trays even of fresh donuts and long johns... all of it easily accessible, everything tasting like i remember it tasted from six years ago when i used to eat it sometimes. mushrooms? we got mushrooms, baby, as many as you want to eat, right down the street. wow.

when i came back from japan two years ago, i remember having a specific craving for pizza hut pizza. this time, i had no specific cravings. my craving was generalized: my craver was saying something like "all of that. yes, that's good, and that too, and that, and that." and so every day i have treated myself to a new thing, have rediscovered some tasty little item of the United States' deathly unhealthy and in-the-long-run-not-very-tasty-or-healthy-but-so-nice-right-now french fry basket of every day food. hamburgers. pizza. carrot cake with frosting. butterfinger candy bars. sour cream and onion potato chips. wheat bread. pickles. barbecue ribs. popcorn. grape juice. i've been out of the country long enough that all of this stuff tastes a little like that forgotten first time, has a slightly exotic air about it, coupled with a lovely remembered familiarity.

i've been working the last week or so, preparing apartments for painting, and eating out of the grocery store for lunch. i walk in and become like a round-eyed kid with so much fun stuff to try: my choice of twenty-five different kinds of soda, a whole row of different flavors of cheese and yogurt to choose from, and none of it more than a couple bucks at a time, which in the dollar-perspective is so much cheaper than any of the few of those things that were available as imports in uganda seemed from the local shilling-perspective.

so today for lunch i already had some wheat buns, a block of sharp cheddar and some pasta sauce in the fridge, but i went and deliberately bought a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips and a Butterfinger. mmm, junk food. i can't help myself. it's like i've been waiting so long for it, that i want to try every little thing in the whole store, in every restaurant, in each of the aisles except the motor oil aisle of the gas station.

i am a kid in a candy store.

freedom

2010-04-07T23:37:00.003-06:00

walking away from the left luggage counter at dubai airport, i reflected that not much makes me happier than freedom: freedom from luggage, freedom from worry, freedom from physical constraints, freedom from hunger, freedom to think and speak as i please.

think about it. what feels better than being freed? today i am walking through the giant empty Emirates Terminal of Dubai International Airport swinging a single bag with a book and a bottle of water in it, headed out for a final day exploring Dubai. i feel like i've been loaded down with luggage forever: lugging my bike and panniers around the last month and a half, trying to deal with all my worldly belongings and fit the really good ones into suitcases when back in Uganda, over-stuffing my carry-on luggage to fit everything i could, and then having to carry them around everywhere in Dubai. i have a long tubular roll of woven mats and posters, a big backpack full of books that would've made my checked luggage too heavy (though it was 12kg/25lbs overweight anyhow). add to that a well-worn plastic bag with some food, a water bottle, book, laptop, etc., and you have a certified pain in the ass. i carried that pain around me the last two nights in Dubai, into and out of x-ray machines, security checks, elevators and bathrooms and endless uncomfortably-plastic-chaired lounges.

so today when i checked everything except what i really wanted into the left luggage counter, and walked away free-shouldered and ready to see Dubai, i was happy. i was happy because i was free, physically free. other kinds of freedom make me just as happy: the freedom you feel when you step on a bike and suddenly move farther, faster, easier than you did before, like the freedom of floating in water, a freedom from your own body. the freedom of giving away all your keys, like i did two days ago, of being totally unattached, just passing through, as i am today in Dubai. the freedom of having money, of not needing to worry about little details like how much the food i'm going to eat today costs, or whether i can afford a hotel room tonight (this is not currently one of my freedoms). et cetera. freedom is lovely.

i guess this sentiment makes me a good american. our national propoganda is all about freedom, to the extent that kids in the states used to ask me what it was like in those other countries i had visited "where they don't have freedom." come on. anyone can take a bath after a long day and feel gloriously free from dirt. anyone can sing somewhere alone and love the freedom of bounded speech turning unembarassedly to song. anyone can become conscious of what a freedom existing at all is, and be happy of it. as Sartre wrote, at the very bottom everyone has the freedom to say 'no,' whatever the consequences. and as i think Nietszche and the preacher in Camus' The Plague thought, everyone too has the freedom to say 'yes,' to accept what we find in this world, and make it our own.

i don't mean to impugn the United States and its ideal of freedom. there are freedoms there that people in other places don't have: freedom from worry about crime, from worry about hunger, from worry about lack of access to health care, from invasion or acts of terrorism by enemies within or outside the country. those of you who live in the States are probably thinking 'what? we don't have any of those those freedoms either!,' and the media would have you think that as well, much as at the same time it is supporting a propaganda of freedom that refuses to define itself, beyond the Bill of Rights. but compared to other places, the degree of these freedoms we have is tremendous. you will never have ultimate freedom: you are always constrained to your mind and its patterns[1], your body and its needs, your environment and its constraints. in this sense, no person on earth is free, and no government could ever grant it that freedom. but we can always get more free, like me today leaving my bags behind, and always get more conscious of the freedom we do have, like that sweet consciousness of health you have after recovering from a serious injury or illness (you lost it again, didn't you? why?). if you take time to notice it, being alive at all is a real freedom.

so i don't really buy the US, or any country, as the Land of the Free. it offers some freedoms other places don't have, and takes away others[2] but fundamentally it's YOU to make yourself free by them, and they are just decorations on deeper consciousnesses of freedom only we can give ourselves, the ones that will really really free you, 'emancipate yourself from mental slavery' as bob marley sang. the land of the free is not a place, not a political territory. it is a state of mind. and today, i am happy having it, happy conscious of the freedoms i have, feeling their balance against weights of constraint like illness (i'm battling a cold), penury (i've slept on the airport floor two nights for lack of money), missing my family in Uganda, impatience to see my family in the States, etc. i know today i am so much more free than constrained. whether that's the product of my environment, my teachers, or my own effort, it is lovely, and i am grateful for it. there are surely joys coming from duties and responsibilities taken on and done well, but today i am conscious of the joy coming from my freedoms. hope you are conscious of you own freedom to do the same.

[1] i had a friend who used to scorn the Christian notion of heaven as a place he wouldn't want to go, saying 'but i'd still be ME, wouldn't i? i'd still have all these thoughts and worries and be Dustin Stover with my own memories, just in heaven? f&*( that! i don't want to be this person again' --in short, that the real freedom of heaven would need to be a total getting-beyond of ourselves, or the glory of it would be limited by our own limitations.

forgive me for delving into a totally unrelated topic, but heaven might have gotten beyond that by: a) taking our souls and not our personal details as i'm told Hindus believe it happens, or b) being so glorious the very experience of it changes us, lures us away from all part of ourselves that keep us from experiencing it fully, naturally, out of sheer love and want to experience it as fully as we can.

or maybe there's nothing when we die.

[2] like the freedom to drink in public in Japan, or the freedom to almost-free health care in Uganda

three nights in Dubai airport

2010-04-06T10:39:00.001-06:00

the nights were not as nice as the days. i arrived the first night thirty minutes after midnight, and by the time i'd taken the shuttle to the terminal and made sure my bulky bags were being checked through to the final destination, it was around 2am. i'd been sleeping on the plane, and all i wanted to do was keep sleeping. unfortunately, the best thing i could find, wandering around this giant, glittering, deserted and air conditioned airport at 2am, were some plastic chairs with unadjustable plastic footrests. after trying them unsuccessfully, and more wandering, i found an arrival lounge that at least was deserted and quiet, and after another unsuccessful attempt at the chairs, i laid down on the tile floor in the corner, wrapped in my not-quite-stolen Emirates blanket[1], and slept as best i could in the air conditioning and the overbright florescent light. fortunately, anticipating such sleeping arrangements, i'd brought a pair of sleeping shades found when packing in Uganda, and a pair of barkcloth shorts someone had given me that doubled as a pillow.

so i slept alright, turning every half hour or so to relieve pressing hip bones, totally unable to judge the time in the ever-bright empty room. some sixth traveller sense awakened me a few seconds before two men in the long white robes and turbaned headgear of traditional muslims entered the lounge and started walking towards me. busted.

they asked me who i was, what i was doing here (i thought that, at least, was obvious), why i hadn't gotten a hotel room somewhere, and told me it was time to go. a glance at the clock said 7:30, so it was time anyway, and i passed through immigrations and security and out into dubai. it struck me as ironic that i, the quintessential white man, had been questioned by security officials that would themselves have aroused suspicion in my country--and none of us up to no good.

the second night, having made a few halfhearted attempts at finding lodging, and being confirmed in their expense (think of it this way: one night in dubai would have been more than all 40 nights of my bicycle trip put together), i left the Burj Khalifa and its neighbor Dubai Mall after a sunset music-light-and-fountain show, and took the metro back to the airport. i wasn't really sure on the legality of me entering as though i was going to wait for my plane, and then leaving again the next day, but i knew i couldn't go back to the lounge i'd slept in last night. i figured the best place would be a departure lounge, where i'd be taken for one more napping connecting passenger.

so that's what i did: i worked my way back in through information, immigration and security, joined the throngs of other passengers actually leaving that night, and found a quiet spot to bed down for the night, this time hidden by a few rows of chairs and some chinese friends. this time i committed all the way, and unrolled my mukeeka, a Ugandan woven mat, and slept on it with my sleep-goggles on and my bags between me and the wall. the mat made the floor a touch softer, but i woke from time to time to see the lounge variously empty, full of passengers about to depart, or spottily seated with people in various states of sleep-seeking. when i rose for good in the morning it was to the sun out the windows, all my chinese friends replaced with folks headed for Australia, the guy on the seat above me watching some kind of translated manga on his laptop. i yawned, stretched, rolled up my mukeeka and headed out for another day in Dubai. i got some weird looks from the security personnel, who remembered me from yesterday, but had no troubles.

the next night i was legit in checking in, as i had a flight at 3am the following morning. having been so comfortable the night before (well, not actually COMFORTABLE, but slumberable), i went back to the same place, and after surfing on the free wi-fi til i got sleepy, had a nice little nap in the same spot. i was too anxious about missing my flight to sleep deep, though, and in a few hours wandered bleary-eyed to my gate for an early check-in, a second wait at an inside gate, and finally onto the plane. after watching the city lights of Dubai, including the Palm housing complex in the ocean, pass by underneath, i did my best to get some sleep sitting up in the chair, wondering if this was the last time i was going to have to sleep in all kinds of strange places because i'm traveling on the cheap. i was serious when i wrote i no longer really want to do it. nevertheless, i wouldn't be surprised if it happens again. i was even getting kind of used to it.

[1] i was going to steal it. sitting on the nice comfy plane into Dubai, having eaten the best airplane food of my life, i couldn't help reflecting how cold and poopy the floor was going to be for sleeping once i arrived. so i folded up the blanket and stuffed it neatly in my bag. then, around the time we were coming in to land and the flight attendants were collecting the blankets, i realized that was pretty much stealing, and that i didn't want to do it. so i pulled it out and gave it to the attendant. then i had the second reflection that since i was taking another Emirates flight in two days, i could just return it then, and rather than stealing, it would be something like unpermitted borrowing. too late now: all the blankets were gone. still, i thought i'd make one more try on the up and up (it never hurts). as we were filing out, and the attendants were goodbying us, i asked one if i could take a blanket, since i was probably going to be sleeping on the floor. i guess i was a bit inpolitic, because she said no, of course, it isn't allowed. then when i'd taken a couple of steps forward she leaned over and whispered in my ear "you can just put one in your bag and leave with it." well, that was all the permission i needed, so at the next available moment, seeing a blanket lying on the seats, i did so. stolen? maybe. did i return it? yes, on the next flight. and in the meantime, it really helped me out on those chilly airport floors. did i do something wrong? i'm not sure. it sure seemed right. i'll let Mr. Kant debate the details.

two days in Dubai

2010-03-27T15:35:00.002-06:00

no longer American
just as i'm ready to go back to my country, i find out i'm not really from there anymore. at least, that's what i keep getting told: Dubai is an city of expats, so people are always asking about and guessing at where other people are from, and a main gauge of that is how they speak the international language, English. and more than ever before[1], i have been misplaced around the world. in fact, in the ten or so times i've gotten asked/guessed at, not once have they guessed the US! or even Canada. i got Germany, got Australia, got a lot of surprised looks when i said the States that indicated they were going to guess somewhere else, even got South Africa this morning from the security guy searching my luggage.

he was probably closest of all: i have an English i use for non-native speakers, and i think it's shifted this last year from being Japanese-friendly to being African-friendly. in other words, it sounds like the English an African (specifically a Ugandan: i didn't really have time to imprint how other East Africans were speaking English, though it was noticably different) speaks, and since almost all people here are non-native speakers of English, and would probably be baffled by a spout of Mmerrcininglsh (though i still see my countrymen here plugging away frustratedly), they get my African English.

in any case, i've been using my African English a lot more than my American English the last year and a half. and the four years before that, i was using Japanese-friendly Ingurishu a lot more than i was my native speaking style too. meaning, in other words, that i'm not really sure i CAN speak 'American' fluently any more. don't get me wrong: i am still totally fluent in English. but i just don't think i sound completely American anymore, even when i'm talking to a bunch of them. or rather--and this is weird--i think i can sound it, but i have to try. meaning American English has become another front i put on my language, like Japanese- or African-friendly English. maybe they aren't fronts, somehow, but separate speaking styles in my mind. either way, Dubai has made me realize i no longer naturally speak like an American.

think about that. it's pretty deep. when you live in another country, you're going to change your lifestyle a bit. you'll adapt to different foods, different medicines, different hygienic practices and social norms, etc. you'll learn some of the local language, and if needed you'll learn to speak so the folks there can understand you better. but it's a pretty far step to change the way you speak your native language so deeply you can't come back to it without trying. that's forgetting how to ride a bicycle because you've been on a trike so long. but that's where i am, five and a half years later: fluent in English, but not the English i was raised speaking. i'm a non-native native speaker, native of English but not sounding like a native of anywhere in particular (though surely i'm still closer to US English than, say, Australian). and that counts for a lot in the first impressions of people you meet: more than style of dress, behavior, etc., they base your nationality on how you speak. and since i no longer sound American, i no longer seem American to any of them, much though i guess i am, still.

is nationality something that can change? i mean, not legally, but personally? has my own identity also drifted along with my language, to be more of a world citizen than one of the US? passport aside, am i really American anymore?

i don't know. i know i have spent some time looking at my own country and its people from the outside. and i'm guessing after i go back there will be quite a few moments when i feel pretty out of place, right at home. so maybe this is best expressed like i used to say: that i've become some percent Japanese during my time there, and since have become a certain part African, and in the process have probably become a certain part simply international, a mocha-brown (like the africa-tanned shade of my white skin) mix of the colorful peoples i've been part of, the world over.

that's probably right. i am still American. just not completely. and i guess i never will be, again; the world has got into me. good--i'd hate to think i left for five years and didn't learn anything, or to hold the prejudice that speaking about what i've learned would somehow be better in one accent or another. one of the things i love about that very America whose English i've forgotten how to speak is its ideal of respect for and protection of what anyone has to say, regardless of accent. that's one thing five years of travel hasn't changed, and i guess never will. maybe i'm American after all.

[1] im forgiving Ugandans here, who consistently guessed i was from the UK, just because there is still a white man = colonist = British pattern of thinking there, though i sometimes got America or Germany.

nice line seen on an Emirates ad:
when was the last time you did something for the first time?

two days in Dubai
that's what i gave myself, a kind of bounceback time between Uganda and America, between what are sure to be two very different chapters in my life. a time to unwind one and get wound up for the next, and dilute both in the brew of a totally different place and people.

and different it is: i've never been anywhere like Dubai.

the moment i stepped out of the airport, i was reminded of Jordan: the scent of the air, a dry, mid-East air that nevertheless carries the scent and moisture of the sea. a quality to the sunlight that is a touch hazy, a touch whiter than it is in Africa or America. distinctively Middle Eastern.

that's where the comparison ends. the next closest place to it would be Singapore, which a friend of mine once described as 'the Disneyland of Asia.' i.e. richer, cleaner, newer, better organized, more unreal. if you travel in Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Laos, even Japan, life there is real. but Singapore? immaculately clean streets, new, tall buildings, everyone apparently wealthy, crime apparently non-existent, people apparently content... the kind of place where they can make chewing gum illegal.

Dubai is like that: a city too newly constructed to show any wear, a little city-state with a massive concentration of wealth, loading its square of land with skyscrapers, beautifying every little corner with a new statue, a spread of green grass and palms in a desert, totally idealistic in how far it can go. take the Burg Khalifa: opened last month, it is the tallest building in the world. by far: just look at some of the previous owners of that title, and their heights:

the Empire State Building, at 443 meters

the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, at 452m

Sears Tower in Chicago, 457m

Shanghai World Financial Center, 492m

Taipei 101, 509m

and now, the Burg Khalifa:
Burj Khalifa, Dubai, 828 meters (2,717 feet)

that's more than half again the size of the next highest, the Taipei 101. before that they were increasing by a few meters at a time, and now this thing puts them all to shame. it's amazing. it's awe-inspiring. it deserves its own section.

the Burj Khalifa
i didn't know much about Dubai as i stepped out of the airport, groggy from a sore throat and a night on the air-conditioned floor. what i did know was the tallest building had recently opened there, so tall as to be almost ridiculous. it seemed like a good place to start.

so i took the metro out, itself so new half the stations weren't finished yet, got out of the station and tried to get my bearings. only one was needed: the sharp, thin line i saw ahead, needling up into the sky. it was impossibly high: my eye followed it up and up, getting thinner as it climbed, lines reducing not only by design but by sheer distance to a top was nearly a kilometer/half a mile away, up! the morning sun was climbing behind it, giving the air a hazy quality, lightening the tower just enough that it seemed unreal, more like an artist's sketch left there in the sky, or something so close as to be mistaken for something far away.

but there can be no mistake: it's real. 828 meters/2,717 feet of steel and glass jutting up into the sky. you can never get lost in that part of town: just find the Burj Khalifa, and you've got your bearings.

i went on looking at it throughout the rest of the day. after awhile it struck me as too small, somehow: was that really most of a kilometer straight up? the distance plays tricks on you, making the regular pattern of nestled towers seem to get smaller as it goes up, til the ones at the top, which you know must be the same size as all the rest, look like little more than antennas up there.

the top doesn't move right, either: the tops of normal buildings move a bit as you move, change positions relative to you and the things behind them, as two fingers held at different distances from your eye will appear to move at different speeds when you move your head[1]. the Burj doesn't: maybe because there are no objects behind it to compare with, or simply because it is actually so far away as to be like a stationary object on the horizon, the Burj doesn't budge. this is disorienting as you walk, looking at it, like a pupil painted in the center of an eye will seem to look at you no matter where you go.

the Burj is equally inescapable: no matter where you are in Dubai, chances are if you look at the skyline, you'll see at least a few hundred meters of it jutting above everything else, a superreal needle up into the sky, somehow wrong to the eye. you get the feeling man wasn't meant to make anything that big, that it is an abomination[2]. and that brings me to another feeling i had about the place:

[1] that's called parallax, by the way.

[2] not to mention, as many might, the old correlation between towers/skyscrapers and male genitalia, and theories of masculine identity deriving therefrom. if one was to mention said theories, one would certainly have to conclude the architects, builders and owners of the Burj Khalifa are well satisfied with their display to other males, and status as 828meter alpha males the world over. one might further mention, if one was feeling rather free with words, a rambling imagination as to what sort of female genitalia might be made to match that tower, if ever there were a female need for such things as there appears to be a male. one might even imagine the two meeting in air, 828 meters up, and working their symbolic magic together, which would be rather disturbing. i'm glad i decided not to mention it.

Dubai: Babylon rebuilt being unwrapped.
giant, marvelous, half-finished towers in the desert. underwater hotels, manmade islands visible from space, a second tower of Babylon reaching for the sky. a shrine to money, a second mecca in the Middle East to the Other God, this one with near-universal following: Mammon, in the Old Testament. Money.

it is a fishing village rocketed to six-star metropolis and VVIP status through the discovery of oil and the encouraging of free trade. a place with a history so thoroughly in keeping with the American Dream that Americans are disgusted with it, jealous and somehow discontent that our mythology should have played out amongst the Arabs, that all these trappings of wealth be owned by Sheikhs with veiled wives and not the good Norm Rockwell Nuclear Family. that as we founder in economic turmoil half their city should be under construction, money and people and power pouring in, all signs pointing to success as our own signs sag towards failure.

in this light we want to mark it as evil, somehow, as wrong because we can't accept it as right when we, the chosen people[1] have not taken part. and so it is easy to go back to Daniel 9, and take this city as a sign of the end of days, because in a way it is: it is a sign of the end of our days--the US, and the West in general, that is--as undisputed global economic powers. the Arabs have taken us over. the Chinese, the Indians are likely to do the same. we are outstripped by our own ideas, by this thing we helped create, as Britain was before us, by us, their own colony. and so it continues: the building and rebuilding of Babylon, as our New York and Los Angeles once were, signs of the decline of one culture and the increase of the next, old ideas reinvented in new wealth and society.

[1] cf. the discussion in chapter nine of Joseph Campbell's Myths to Live By of the Torah, Bible and Qu'ran's mythologies of their adherents as the chosen people of God, thereby entitled to special privileges like dominance over all other peoples.

derivative: glory future
then again, i think Dubai has happened too fast: too fast to really define itself, to find a face different from those who came before. and so its malls are full of American and European stores, its lingua franca English moreso than Arabic, its basic goal unchanged from the powers before it, my own society.

surely, some things are uniquely non-Western: in the glittering new supermarket where i bought a hot round of bread covered in cheese and zaatar, there was a special gate in the wall of the meat section, with the heading PORK SHOP, and underneath, a sign: For non-Muslims. you would enter through, walk down a short hallway, and there could buy pork if your morals and desires allowed it. toilets were carefully physically separated, with attendant prayer rooms for those observant enough to pray to Allah five times a day as commanded. calls to prayer would echo over the mall loudspeakers at the right times. some architecture has distinctive Mid-Eastern influence, and old boats still ply the waterways. but for the most part, the new construction and most of the people living in it have a glittery, bland, international feel to them: you might be in London, San Diego, Taipei: there is little distinguishing the city, no idiosyncracies to fall in love with like you can in New York, or any city in Europe. it's too new: like a new car you hesitantly name, wanting a relationship but not having spent enough time together to really feel any name in particular fits. Dubai. UAE. why not?

looking through the Dubai Museum, built partially in the humble ruins of an old fort (itself not even 200 years old), with most of it in an expensive underground facility, i got the same feeling. there has been civilization in that area for a long time, but never much of one: a few people living around the sea and oases, trading and fishing and diving for pearls. 100 years ago, it was a backwater, and you can feel the pain with which this great city acknowledges its recent rise to fame, and how hard it's trying to make that history the most it can be.

no attempt can be enough: it was rags to riches, simply, and if Dubai is to be a great cultural center, it is something that will happen from here forward, with no grand old buildings to remind us of glory past. it is all glory future, if it is to be glory at all. a new Babylon still being unwrapped.

what i actually did
so, aside from random cogitations on the place, i spent my time here slowly, exhausted from quite a few nights of poor sleep and intense days at the end of my bicycle trip and time in Uganda. sleep in Dubai was no better, with hotels both prohibitively expensive and sold-out, meaning i slept on the airport floor instead (see below). the first day, i went to Burj Khalifa and the Dubai Mall, both massive and spanking-new complexes, and spent the daylight hours wandering through stores, eating foods i'd hadn't had in a year and some, sitting on public promenades reading or writing or watching people. i'd caught a cold/slight flu from being too tired and busy, so i pooped out quickly and spent most of the day off my feet, sitting here or there and soaking things in, but i made a good tour of the area. they weren't selling tickets to the top of the Burj, so i didn't make it up.

the second day i headed for the Dubai Museum, which wasn't amazing, then spent the rest of it wandering the streets around there, eating shwarmas and drinking fruit juice, watching grown men playing cricket in an abandoned lot, browsing through local grocery stores and peering at old mosques. i eventually found the waterfront, walked along it, laid down in some green grass under a palm tree, thought about the changes happening in my life, what good things i left and what good things i was going towards, smiling spontaneously to nothing at all. took a boat down the creek past the night lights coming out, wandered the night market, walked back to the metro station and went home (the airport).

not a very eventful two days, but that's what i wanted: a little space to clear my head, see a new place, rest up a bit to be in my best shape for coming home. some time to ease back in to the first world lifestyle, eat some good food, read and write. nice. and now, finally, i'm going home.

thoughts on the plane to dubai

2010-03-23T22:35:00.002-06:00

one small part of my adulthood
i think, is being less willing to be uncomfortable for the sake of getting something cheaply, or for the sake of adventure.

it was a big part of my grown-up childhood: the time from entering university to returning to the States ten years later, most of my twenties, i was hitching rides on dump trucks rather than buying bus tickets, sleeping on floors instead of getting hotel rooms, cultivating relationships with strangers while traveling in the hopes of couchsurfing, getting inside tips, cheaper fares on planes, etc.

it's not over: as i write this i'm sitting on a plane to dubai, having booked the ticket via a student travel agency though i'm not formally a student, planning to sleep in the dubai airport three nights rather than get a room, waiting for a mexican airline attendant living in dubai to give me inside tips on getting around the city, wondering if i can--like a friend did--get myself a couple free nights' stay at her place.

but here's the thing: it's no longer as exciting as it used to be. not that i am now beginning to enjoy paying too much for nothing, living in comfort for its own sake, or bland experiences in general, but i think what i enjoy in life and travel is shifting: away from the adventure of doing it all on a shoestring (i am, mind you, 2000 dollars in debt and 19 months without any income--that is, hanging on a threadbare shoestring), and towards having peace of mind enough to really experience where i am and what i'm doing.

in other words, shoestring is a lot of work. it means watching for when the flight attendant is coming, it means being buddier-buddy than you'd regularly be with the guy who owns the dump truck you can hitch on, it means scanning the airport from the moment you enter for good places to bivouac, and wondering how to sweettalk your way through baggage that's 25 pounds overweight again (like i did when leaving uganda).

don't get me wrong, taking the less traveled route is lovely. clearly, from the bike trip i just finished and the events surrounding my immediate existence, it is still my modus operandi, and i have a lot of life experiences to thank it for. but i don't think i'll be trying the back doors and talking up the locals much longer: instead of being the fun part, it's starting to just be distracting. for one, i'm not as youthful as i once was, and a few nights' poor sleep translate into general tired listlessness, dampening the days. for another, i'm not as comfortable as i used to be with cultivating useful relationships: that is, acting like i normally wouldn't for the sake of getting something from someone. i think, especially in africa, i've been on the other end of it enough not to want to do it. if someone isn't offering a place to stay, wanting to go out for food, letting my bags go by naturally, i don't want to force it. i'm all grown up now. i can accept that i'm the one who got me in this situation in the first place, and it's me who bottomline should get me out.

third, and probably most important, i'm finding other parts of travel are more interesting: the beauty of the places i visit, the people i meet there, the good food they're eating, the meanderings of thought it all entails. basically, i want to be free from worry about simple things like money, where i'm sleeping, what i'm going to eat. so i'm finding myself less interested in and enjoying doing all that shoestring, not knowing where i'll sleep (or if i'll be able to stay there all night), looking for the cheapest food option not because its the best or most interesting but just because it's cheapest, etc. there's a time for that. and me, feeling a bit momentous internally as i write this, i think i'm past it.

that is, i'm ready to be past it. maybe i feel that way because i'm fully in it at the moment, heading into a few days' uncertainty and likely uncomfortability, especially in terms of where i sleep. what used to be exciting is now just a bit of a chore: finding a place to bivouac, hauling my shit around, looking for ways to do it all on the cheap because i'm broke but still want to travel. the fact that it feels like a chore, i think that's significant. it signifies my pleasures in life are changing, and along with them the most fitting nomer for myself: it may now, so help me, be adult.

bannange.

the end: here - here

2010-03-16T22:35:00.002-06:00

what i've been searching for
this whole trip i've been asked the same question: what are you searching for?

when people learn that i'm traveling through all of East Africa, a lot of it by bicycle, they ask what i'm looking for. 'are you making some kind of research?' 'do you have family or friends you are visiting?' 'what are you looking for in Burundi?' 'but i have one question, why are you making this trip?'

this whole time i haven't known what to say to them. today the answer came.

i'd been wandering the narrow streets of Stone Town, fully lost in wonder and fact, when the street opened out onto a little park bordering the sea, and a wide stone wall there called to me for sitting. i sat. the sun was just coming into its glory, hanging maybe 45 minutes above the water, at that stage when its little circle of reflection swells and stretches to a long sparkling path on the water, like if you were made of light too you could follow it all the way back to the sun.

i sat, and i smiled. i grinned, actually. it was too beautiful: this moment, with tourists wandering, kids playing, the white sand beach stretching around the nub of Stone Town peninsula, bordered in antique Arabesque houses, the sun sparkling on the water, was everything i needed. i lost awareness of myself as anything more than a part of it.

then it came to me: this is what i've been seeking. Zanzibar, on the glowing accounts of a few friends who'd visited, had been the casual goal of my journey, physically. i didn't know exactly where i was going, or what i was going to do, but i thought if i made it through Rwanda and Burundi and Tanzania to the coast and Zanzibar Island, that would probably be pretty good. and there was a time in Kigoma, waiting for Wilson and his dump truck to get arranged, when i really considered leaving it, and biking instead back up to and through Rwanda, never reaching the coast. but something called me on to Dar and zanzibar, and now here i was, many adventures later, sitting on the pier watching an amazing sunset in the very place i wanted to be.

but that's just the thing: i didn't especially want to be here. i was as easy with ending up somewhere else, as easy i'd been with not being able to bike Burundi, because of the political situation, or take the train through Tanzania because of motor problems: there was never any set course or goal for this trip. it was taken simply to let what would happen happen. and it happened. i wasn't aiming for anything in particular.

that is what i've been seeking: not a particular place, or thing, or person, but freedom from any of that seeking, period. this was a trip taken without aim, other than to be without aim. the only thing i'd wanted the whole way was to be free. and i'd done it. not only that, but i'd had a blast doing it, and ended up somewhere as beautiful as here.

the sun was lower now, was starting to do itself in orange, to make the clouds blush and the sea sing its beauty, and the moment just got lovelier. i sat there smiling, watching it sink, aware of how felicitous this moment, this day, this whole trip had been. beyond so. the beautiful things i've seen, the crazy things that've happened, the peace i've had to write and think, the freedom i've had from anything, even from an idea of myself, it all suddenly seemed like so much luck. like a gift. i hadn't had any idea what i was looking for on this trip, what i was going towards. i knew it wasn't girls, wasn't beautiful places, wasn't adventures or solitude, etc. all of those things are nice, and they all played a part. but if they hadn't been there, i would equally have been at peace.

so they say you go on a trip seeking something. you want maybe to spend some time somewhere beautiful, to escape your life or yourself, or come to a deeper understanding of those things. i did. i was doing the last right now, in realizing i did all of those things without wanting to: they happened free and naturally, because i let them. because i hadn't sought them, as so many things you seek will elude you so long as you're after them. i understood that i was happy in a deeper way than just at seeing nice things, meeting nice people, eating nice food. i was happy at being able to do any of it: happy to be alive. and i think, happy at seeing all those things as nice because they'd come as gifts, not as things sought. without seeking, without having something to seek, it came to me, and i knew it was right, a gift. this moment, right now. this is what i've been seeking: the understanding that i can live without seeking, that i can be really free, and happy in it. i didn't, don't need to be on vacation to do this. it was just simpler to see alone, with no responsibilities. but this is something down deep, something unchangeably good. i don't know if i've managed to explain it to you. but what i was seeking found me. it might not be easy to say, but i have an answer now to all the people who asked me what i was seeking:

nothing. everything. what found me. freedom from seeking, from grasping, from expecting. pure freedom.

and knowing that at least this moment that was true, i grinned a grin as big as the sun is wide.

then Dula sat down
next to me and asked if he could practice his English. at the very moment of my revelation, at the very kernel of realizing what i'd been seeking, that it was right here, he sat down and wanted to practice his English.

what would you do?

i understood he was part of it too. i said okay. i might have answered him in monosyllables, because the sun was so very beautiful and my mind was still whirring away, startled at its own reflection, but i had with him the very very normal everyday conversation you can have with any one when traveling. where i'm from, when i came to Zanzibar, how i came, when i'm leaving, where i visited before, what i'm seeking here (he didn't understand; i let it pass), what kind of music i like, etc. all the endless conversations i'd had of the same questions echoed through my mind from days of being an English teacher in Japan, the very conversations i used to avoid when i wasn't being paid to have them.

did it annoy me? no. why should it? let Dula have his life, and me mine.

then the Puppet Master we may only be projecting exists to order our lives upped things a notch: he brought my very least favorite character, the wassup-man-how-you-doin-hakuna-matata sales/conman dressed up like a rasta and pretending to be your friend long enough to get lots of money from you kind of character. they exist in plenty on Zanzibar Island.

this one came up, ignoring what Dula was saying, crouched down with the CD 'his band made' (i'd seen lots of other people selling them) called 'Jambo,' the same as his boat out there--he points to one of several boats in the bay with Jambo written on them--hakuna matata maybe you buy one of these nice CDs eh? hakuna matata.

all i said to him was 'no.' not with resentment, not with prejudice, just a peaceful 'no' from a place that was radically uninterested in his CD or his implied offer of being my friend for money. i didn't tell him to go: he was part of this moment too.

go he did, all the same, muttering loudly about how 'he doesn't want friends, doesn't want to talk, fine.' it wasn't that i didn't want to talk, but i didn't correct him. the sun was a roaring crimson inches above the water, clouds and water belting back the same hymn of scarlet violet pink and gold, and i might have been answering Dula in monosyllables as well, but was at least hearing what he was saying. it was hard to hold his very earthly conversation and hold the other very unearthly one i was having with the sunset and myself at the same time, but i did.

then, when the sun was down and Dula had mostly run out of questions to ask, i thanked him and wished him luck, said i was going to go walk on the beach, to see what would come my way.

and that's what i did.

day thirty-nine/forty: dar es salaam - uganda

2010-03-15T20:39:00.002-06:00

this is it.
the first words in my mind waking up pulling me out of bed this morning are this is it. no more listless days on the beach, no last strolls through unfamiliar places: it's time to go home.

i was up by 4:30, had my untidy mountain of things packed clean into the panniers by 5, hung and tied them on the bike outside the Dar es Salaam YWCA, the old nervous tension about catching a booked bus train or plane in my bones. it's time to go, it's time to go. it was a morning when you know everything you do needs to be done now, because there's no other time to do it [1]. i hung my homemade panniers on the bike rack thinking how well they'd weathered the whole trip, remembering my hopes they'd last me at least out of Lukaya.

i got on the freeway out of town and rode the 10K to the bus park. it was total chaos, nothing like the quiet evening place i'd visited a week ago to book my tickets, absolutely jammed with people and buses jockeying for position, and i got well lost and in a lot of peoples' way, becoming irritible myself as i do when i'm too loaded down with stuff and have somewhere to be. eventually i paid someone to take me to the right bus, confirmed it with the conductor, stood worrying as they jammed my bike in (ignoring their attempts to get more money out of me for luggage; i'd paid), then with a sigh of relief took my seat, sweating already at 6 in the morning.

it took a moment to realize this was the end, that next i unloaded my bicycle i'd be in Uganda, having come full circle around Lake Victoria, through all things new and unfamiliar back to the familiar again. i leaned out the window, suddenly thirsty for some juice, sesame crackers, anything to give me a final bit of Tanzania, but there were only water vendors.

then the bus lurched forward and it'd begun, the end.

[1] then again, that's every moment, isn't it?

seisou
out the window, seisou:
a fibrous plant, i'm told
for the making of fabric, rope.
pale rigid leaf knives like
pineapple or aloe vera,
mature plants with delicate
oriental clusters of leaves
shooting from a tall middle stem,
a new plant borne from the old.
it is unearthly, somehow, unafrican;
even the name sounds Japanese,
and yet we roll by fields and fields.
africa is still a mystery to me.

kili
i make friends with the passenger riding next to me, a half-Ugandan half-Zanzibarian man with a trustable smile and an innocent air about him. we talk in English, Luganda and Kiswahili, i share my cookies and he his mother's chapati, and in so doing we pass the trip more comfortably. like most african men i meet, he wants to marry a white lady.

somewhere in the afternoon, as we are still driving through a Tanzania i had no idea was so big, i see these giant green cliffs rising into the clouds on the right, walls and walls of them to the north of the highway. "what are those?" i ask him in idle curiosity.

"you don't know?" he said. "that's Kilimajaro."

Mount Kilimanjaro! The symbol of Africa! those big green cliffs are the bottom of Mount Kilimanjaro! Wow! I felt like i had on first seeing Fuji five years ago, like i'd suddenly come on the heart of the land, stumbled on to a well-kept secret. it was that unifying moment of mental image and reality that comes when you've seen countless pictures of the thing, then have it before your eyes. it's a shock somehow that it's real: Mount Kilimajaro! i was glad i'd seen it before the end of the trip, before leaving africa. i guess next time i'll have to climb it.

plums
when we stop for vendors to assail the bus windows with bottles of water, they have plums too. little red, luscious plums like i haven't seen for more than a year. never a one in Uganda. i grin a big grin and buy a bowlful and my friend and i share them as we go down the road. there's no sweetness like one forgotten then tasted again.

kenya
is almost unseen: we roll into the border crossing at sunset, leave it after dark, stop for a half hour at the nairobi terminal, where we are not fed as i'd hoped (the bus company had sprung for a decent lunch that afternoon). more plums and chapati instead. i buy a water just to get some change in Kenyan money, get back on the bus and we drive off, doze off again. the bus comes to the Busia crossing into Uganda just as the sun is coming up, and i realize i've seen almost nothing of Kenya, arguably the most famous of the five East African countries. it doesn't bother me: i spent two days there while working on Peaceboat, took the obligatory safari and had a blast with my friends. true, i hadn't seen much, but i could say the same for Tanzania, Burundi, every country i'd been through. you could spend years seeing them, a lifetime. that's OK. it's good to leave some places unexplored. as my friend Kimuli would say, it gives you a reason to come back.

i think i will.

day thirty-eight: dar es salaam

2010-03-11T07:55:00.002-07:00

beat ketchup.
after saying goodbye to everyone, about six thirty in the morning, riding my bike through Dar towards the YWCA, i realized i was beat. i'd spent the previous night sleeping on a plastic counter under air conditioning... and come to think of it, the night before only gotten about two hours with the late night and early morning. and the two nights before that stayed up late with lots of alcohol, and slept when i did on a concrete floor...

no wonder i was beat. the extreme heat during all daylight hours hadn't helped any. i checked into the Y, my reservations lost but another room available, thinking i'd do some writing, but after a much needed shower just fell asleep on the bed. i woke up around noon, wrote for awhile, slept some more.

around noon i went out to some Indian snack places, filled up on strange little metal trays of fried things with sauces, went back for more writing and sleep. i hadn't written a thing, or posted anything, the whole time i was in Zanzibar, a conscious choice as it was just too beautiful to spend in front of my computer. so today was a catch up day, and that's what i did. in the evening i walked to buy some Konyagi, the local brew, for Kimuli, then through the Indian district looking for a good place to eat. it seemed to be a festival of some kind, because all the temples were open and variously serving food, playing movies, having sing alongs or concerts. at one place with music, i stopped outside to listen, and someone invited me in, so i stayed for an hour or so, til my stomach got to be too much. the music was traditional, a singer with some kind of stringed instrument accompanied by two very casual-looking guys on drums, the whole crowd of African Indians swaying to the beat, clearly their own society within Dar es Salaam. around 8:30 my hunger got to be too much, and i walked to a place i'd wanted to eat at for a spicy bowl of vegetable curry and a spicier plate of masala chips, washed down with my new favorite African soda, orange Fanta.

i got home thinking again to do some writing, but after packing my things for the morning exhaustion hit me, and i was out.

day thirty-seven: nungwui - stone town

2010-03-09T22:43:00.002-07:00

things were coming to an end. we all felt it: the last three or four days had been a blast, we'd all gotten close, and now all the guys were headed onward: Giles had a plane he was probably going to miss in Nairobi in 48 hours, Mitch the itch to move on, me a bus back to Uganda the next morning. over breakfast we chatted like old friends, and i copied everyone's pictures onto my computer (fortunate that i met people with cameras during the most scenic part of the trip).

there was also a sense of incompleteness in the sexual competition: Brad and Christine had clearly become an item, Mitch and Sandra had taken themselves out of the running, but Giles and I had both failed to get anywhere significant with Ania. today was the last day for anything to happen, but it was going to be a day of travel, from the beach to Stone Town to a night ferry for Dar es Salaam.

i also had a sense of regret, leaving that place: i'd been too caught up in the whole sex race to really get into the place, and it was easily the most beautiful i'd been on my trip. i had enjoyed it, yes, but a few more days or a week even would have been better. i think we all felt that way, for different reasons. so i'd woken up early, late night and comfy cement floor be damned, fixed my flat tire, gone for a last snorkel over the coral reefs, walked the beach picking up shells for the kids at HDCC, and packed up my stuff before breakfast. with the mix of lack of sleep--i'd gotten maybe two hours--and excess of alcohol in my system, i was kind of beat by the time we got in the van at 11. but like other high school skills, these few days on the beach seemed to have increased my tolerance for alcohol as well its after effects, and i bore through it.

the trip back was surreal: the same road i sweated up four days ago we coasted down as easily as nothing; the whole trip over in an hour. if it wasn't for the exhaust stink coming from the open back hatch, my bicycle too big to fit, it would have been quite lovely. Ania sitting next to me didn't make matters worse either.

a last day in Stone Town
so we had one day to get it all done in Stone Town. the problem is, we were six people. i learned while still on Peaceboat that traveling with more than two or three is asking for trouble: and trouble it was. we spent the first hour or so hungry, wandering around looking for guesthouses as the girls debated whether they were staying here, going back to the beach or coming to Dar. someone would go off somewhere, the rest of us would wait, they'd come back, and we'd again wallow in indecision. i put up with it because they were my friends, but couldn't have handled more than a day of it. the sexual competition being more or less over, or moot, i was starting to long for the freedom that'd marked this whole trip, being alone and going and doing exactly what i wanted. that freedom is great unless what you want is to be with someone....

and i guess that's what confused me,
because i'd been alone all trip, talking with whoever came my way but never more than a few hours here and there, and been fine with it. that was the trip i wanted: one to clear my brain, be completely free to do as i pleased, and basically get deep into the places i was going, without the distraction of any company other than my own.

the strongest opponent of that kind of free, independent spirit is romance. the two just don't mix: one desires nothing more than freedom, the other desires nothing more than possession by and of another. and i had gotten drawn into that second spirit, of sexual possession, during the last few days. now i was somewhere in between, a queasy place to be, like that after a break-up.

i had known what was happening: felt myself being drawn into the romance-driven circle of my friends on the beach, and didn't mind it. i also didn't want to take part at first, then slowly started to, but not completely, and now i was not completely not taking part in it... ick. a kind of confusing middle ground that was the best of neither: not possessed or possessing as romance wants, not really free or enjoying that freedom as independence wants. i guess i'd gotten deep enough in the sexual competition, or it'd been so long since doing so that just a little wade felt pretty deep, and i couldn't just jump out again in a flash.

after lunch Mitch and I went to buy our ferry tickets, the larger group still undecided if and how they were going back to Dar es Salaam, and i felt almost...lonely without the others. mostly without Ania, on whom my sexual target had settled[1]. i had an unfinished sense of wanting possession, something very foreign to me after a year and a half without it. it made me want to get back as soon as possible, and when we found them again at a little tea house on the beach, and Mitch was going off somewhere to travellery things and wondered if i was coming, i said no. i think at any other time in the trip, i would have said yes without hesitation, him being a backpack traveler similar to me, and two people being still an enjoyable size group to travel with, but i wanted to be in the group, be in that same sex-charged atmosphere. or maybe i was just worried Giles would get an in on Ania while i was away, old animal blood overriding more cerebral roads of thought.

i feel stupid writing this, honestly. it's nothing i've thought much about or felt like since coming to Africa, the very kind of teenage sex-only perspective i got tired of and wanted to escape. and yet, i was in it. and yet, i wasn't in it, because i knew what it was, and knew how i felt about it, and always felt a bit like laughing at how silly we all were acting. if you take just a half step back, if your animal can allow you enough to do it, a lot of sex and the things we do surrounding it look pretty silly. like seeing the courtship rituals of other animals on the Discovery channel: why go through all that work?

so i was half-in, half-out, as i'd been the whole time. but apparently more in than out, since i'd wanted to be back with them. and i guess that's what confused me, right at the tail end of a journey traveled for myself, by myself throughout, i was wanting a little group of friends and maybe even a girl to be with.

is that because it's actually better than being alone? because i'd had too much solitude on the trip? because it seemed really great after a year and a half without it? because after all that time i'm ready again to be in a relationship, and this kind of play version of it was bringing out that deeper feeling? just because the girls were so cute?

i don't know. yes. probably all of the above. most of all me being ready for a relationship again, i think. not that some cute girls from Norway seemed like prime candidates for a long term relationship, but they were more so than anyone else i'd met in a long while.

[1] this is a little uncomfortable to write, because she might be reading this, but it was all in fun, right Ania? pis mei oura.

loser?
so we went swimming, had gelato at a really nice (romantic) place on the beach, went back for showers and eventually made our way to the ferry, where we all sat around on the pier waiting for the line to go down, eating zanzibar pizza in, as Giles reminded me, another million star restaurant.

since we were foreigners, we'd had to buy the VIP tickets, but that meant having a pleather-couch lounge at our disposal, good for sleeping on an overnight ferry (we were due for departure at 10PM, arrival at 6AM). we got settled in, then as the ferry started to move i bolted for the top deck, old PeaceBoat spirit rising in me. as i later explained to Giles when he came up, on the PeaceBoat every time we'd leave a country, people would gather on the deck to wave goodbye and listen to music and basically get closure on what was usually a short, intense burst of a new culture and environment. we stood up there watching the lights of Stone Town and Zanzibar fade, talking about our lives before traveling (he'd been on the road a year, was going home in two days; me in Africa a year and a half, going home in a week), what we were going to do after, etc.

this was one nice thing about our sexual competition: it was good-natured. we were all friends, and even though it'd come down to Giles and I competing for Ania, we were still friends and had a good chat up there. Giles is a blast, one of those people who is determined to wring each moment for everything it's got, always suggesting stupid tricks or dumb games, and drawing on a wealth of random information like how to catch crabs without getting bit or to bend a spoon without touching it.

our departure ceremony never got out of the bay: apparently since we had all night to get there, the crew wasn't in a hurry to actually do more than leave the dock. so we went back inside, and everyone had laid out mattresses on the floor for sleeping. only, there wasn't enough room for everyone: just one spot beside Ania.

well, it was dumb of course, because both of us wanted to be there. and for awhile, we tried to find a way for it to work: spooning the african man to the right to make him leave (Giles' idea; ended up in us all barely suppressing laughter like a bunch of kids); squeezing together so none of us could actually lay down; rearranging couches, etc. in the end it was both him and me wanting to sleep next to Ania, and i saw it, and knew that it probably meant more to him... and went to sleep on the countertop. when i woke in the morning, they were spooning, arms and legs around each other. so i guess that means i lost the competition, or if it wasn't over, was losing. much as i knew it wasn't what i wanted, and wasn't something to take too seriously, i still felt bad, like i'd lost something pretty important. it was a badness as deep as instinct, an animal knowledge i had lost something animally important.

i told myself i hadn't been trying as hard as the other guys, that i partially chose to let it go because i didn't want to get drawn in too deeply, but they may or may not have been intellect clumsily trying to soothe disappointed instinct with something it couldn't understand. i got up and folded up my dress-blanket and filed out onto land with the rest.

Ania gave me a nice hug and long smile as we said goodbye across from the pier, which might have been just as friends, or a sign my half-hearted wooing attempts and competition with Giles had gotten somewhere[1]. i'll never know. what's certain is, i never won the prize we were running for those three days, but did run pretty far from my normal state of mind, and found between the two only confusion.

there's something to be learned from confusion, though: a few years ago, i would never even have thought twice about what we were doing, as i don't think my younger friends did. so my confusion is a sign of change: i have really removed myself, or biology has[2], from that state of perpetual sexual competition. as the ocean reminded me, it is a game, not to be taken too seriously, and as with any game--like monopoly--when taken too seriously it isn't as fun.

at the same time, some part of me was ready to take it seriously, after not having played the last year and a half, or i would never have gotten as deep and confused as i did. and that is another sign of change: a sign that i my period of waiting is over, like a mourning period after the collapse of my last relationship, and i'm ready to try again. if i wasn't ready, i would never have been taken in by this whole game to begin with.

and though i've been clearheaded this whole trip, i think the confusion has been a fitting close to it: to remind me that i don't know, haven't done, everything. that there are changing parts of me yet unknown, and how i will live will again have to change. more specifically, this trip may have been my deepest encounter with solitude and freedom, and i know those two will always be a part of who i am, and a life well lived--but they are not everything, are not enough. i've been feeling that way for a few months, the need for someone to share my life with, and these last few days highlighted it.

i am back in the game.

at least this time i know it is play, serious play but play nonetheless, and i will remember to have as much fun doing it as we did on zanzibar.

[1] see previous footnote.

[2] i will never forget, or let my friend Alice live down, what she said a few weeks before our friend David's 28th birthday (and a few months before mine): "A male is sexually active between the ages of 15 and 28." just the way she said it sounded like our sex drives would shut off on reaching 28, and we started to talk (mostly in her presence) about how we were going to be sexually shut down after 28, and thereafter how great it was to have finally escaped sexual temptation and Satan's grip. unfortunately, seems her prediction was a little premature...

day thirty-six: nungwui

2010-03-04T07:36:00.002-07:00

what i haven't told you about yet
is sex.

the undercurrent of all this time on the beach has been sex, sexual competition, the old beat of bodies pulling for each other. how that beat comes out in human rhythms of male competition and female posturing, in our free-form courtship ceremonies and elaborate displays for each others' sake.

in a way, it was inevitable: put a group of twenty-somethings together on a beautiful beach with not much to do or wear and see what happens. to stoke that fire, make the three girls all beautiful, fun to be around, and spend most of their day laying on the beach in bikinis. make at least two of the guys in their early twenties, hormones raging, the other two old enough to add experience to testosterone. your perfect reality TV show: Zanzibar Heat, or Sexual Survivor. who would be the last one standing?

this was something almost new to me. i'd more or less forgotten about sexual competition, and the all-consuming male state of mind that engenders it. don't get me wrong, i had my day: after suffering through public education and the first few years of university without a girlfriend, raging hormones fueling doubt and angst about whether i might ever have one, i flipped the switch and started on a streak of romantic relationships. it lasted the last three years of university life, four years in Japan and into Uganda, with never more than a few months' break between one girl and the next.

at some point i realized i was with these girls for reasons less than true love[1], and that each relationship eventually fell apart because of it. but realizing that and changing it are different things.

the cycle continued: one relationship fell apart, there'd follow a time of chaos and a few different girls in the picture, then things would solidify with one, and we'd be together: maybe three months, maybe six, maybe a year. the last one was a year and a half, and easily the most painful of all. part of that pain i think was my own consciousness that i was doing something i didn't want to, and frustration at my inability even with that pain to change it. there is nothing more frustrating than repeating known mistakes.

well, i eventually stopped. when you're faced with your own failure like that, it's either change or be permanently painfully unhappy with yourself and life, and that sucks. so when i got out of the last relationship, i got serious about changing myself too: i decided to take a break from romance. i was going to focus on developing myself, and love only as in a family, treating people like brothers and sisters, parents or children. i was going to work in a christian-faith-based street children's project, no better place to do it, right?

before parting on semi-friendly terms with the last ex, i told her i was going at least four months without a girl--what would have been a 7-year record. she laughed, and inwardly i wondered if i was up to it as well.

i was. in quadruplicate: sixteen months i spent working with kids, making Ugandan friends, learning the language and culture, keeping busy with good work, with not a hand-holding or late-night smooch the whole time. it's not that there weren't eligible girls around: there were a few mzungu, and as time went on Ugandan girls started to seem better and better. but something had really changed in me after the last break-up, and i wasn't interested in having one just to have one--as a prop to my self-esteem, as a way to sexual gratification, as a guide to local culture, as a quick good friend in a new place, or any other mix of the reasons people often have for being in relationships. i wanted someone i loved, and didn't want to build that love on the shifting sands of lust, as i'd found the tide usually unsettled them in time. so i have been content to wait, and not much bothered by abstinence.

then i came to Zanzibar. i find myself on a tropical beach, in a group of guys that seemed pretty intent on building just such relationships, if only extremely temporary, and some beautiful girls who didn't seem like they had much else going on. nights were spent imbibing large quantities of alcohol, days recovering and posturing in our different ways--girls in an endless parade of bikinis (we started teasing them about how many they'd brought, and how many they wore per day), guys in feats of strength or wit.

it was fun. it was a blast. i don't think there are many forces in human life more powerful than that of sex, of the ancient dance of man and woman[2]. but it's a dance i honestly had forgotten in the year and a half since i last danced it in seriousness. i have really been unsexual, just doing charity work and focusing on my writing, enjoying time with friends without thought for anything else.

well, my beach friends changed that in short order. about a day, i think. the first day, it was fun to have girls around, and mzungu friends in general to hang out on the beach with. in the course of our alcohol bender that first night, capped with skinny dipping, the girls started to be interesting as more than friends. still, i was fairly disinterested, knowing i had just two days there, and understanding too the amount of work and doing of things other than what i really wanted to it would take to make anything physical happen (it would, of course, take even more to make anything like love happen, but no one was thinking much of that). our little society had been built on that basis, and like Americans accept the amount of sex they see in everyday media, i just accepted that's what we were doing, and went along with it. everyone else was jumping off the bridge, so i figured i'd better too. why not? the water was warm.

thus the last few days of my me-focused, solitary 6-week trip though East Africa were spent in a totally different way, always around people, swimming, singing, drinking up a storm and chasing after girls. it was disorienting. it was childish. it was a blast.

[1] now don't go asking me what that is. but if i had to answer, or explain myself, i'd say it's a gift, something you give with no expectation of return. and in those relationships, i went in wanting something (reassurance i was loveable, to be specific), and so my love came with a price. meaning, unless it fit into someone else's need like lucky puzzle pieces, it wasn't the kind that lasts.

[2] if i had to wager on one it'd be sex's old enemy, spirituality. and the biological change that comes with time, of course: i think sex goes from a strong physical want to a weaker one that is often accompanied or replaced by a created psychological want for the same, something much more tied into conceptions of self and vitality than any physical forces. in some older men, who never have the biological softening of man-woman love into familial love, i've seen it be something like an addiction. these are all things i've wanted to escape: sex has its day. let it not have my whole life. unfortunately, in the West we are constantly assaulted by a media that knows sex's power, and would keep its grip on us, that the media might exploit that grip for its own ends.

the first winners in this real-ity show
were Brad and Christine, who gradually drifted away from last night's bonfire, and by today were silently accepted by the rest of the group as a couple. they were the obvious pair, the two most beautiful among us, and Brad having worked at it the hardest of any of us. of course, their coupling only increased the pressure on the rest of us to follow suit. the days were numbered. in fact, there was only today: tomorrow we were all going to Stone Town, and from there our separate ways. the pressure was on.

the fateful Boardwalk hotels
so today we swam as usual, laid on the beach, played with someone's pet monkey Mitch was taking care of, and after a silhouette picture session at sunset all went out for dinner at a local place that fried up chips, octopus and calamari.

million star restaurant or no, it turned out to be pretty lukewarm and food-poisoning-likely, so after Mitch and I finished our food, the rest abandoned theirs, and we went to a beachfront restaurant that we knew was expensive and good. afterwards, it was decided we'd play Monopoly as a drinking game, and we all settled down to beers and the buying of properties and swindling at will.

i had a good start, getting both of the purples and putting hotels on them before anyone else had property, and things were looking good. we rolled, we drank, the music played and spirits were high. my sexual rival Giles was still feeling pretty under the weather from the amount of cheap rum he'd consumed last night before rolling through the fire (the rum, by the way, also worked well for firebreathing), so he called it quits early, leaving just Brad and Christine, and Ania and I (Mitch had passed out on a hammock nearby).

perfect, right? Brad and Christine immediately joined forces to stand a chance against me, who was at that time winning, so Ania and I followed suit (symbolic? my drunken mind wondered), and proceeded to pool our flush resources to fully hotel boardwalk and park place-- a bold move.

well, that's where the good luck ended: roll after roll we hit their expensive properties, while they skipped ours, and our wealth gradually turned to debt, as they got richer and developed more. soon we were selling those Boardwalk hotels, and getting down to bare properties again. turn after turn, we paid out, they bought in. if you've ever done it, you know there's nothing more depressing than losing after you've been winning in Monopoly, and this time it became like a curse on our union. i'd hoped, you know, ania and i'd win handily and then go wander off on the beach somewhere...

not to be. we agreed to concede after it was obvious, and wandered back to our rooms together, Brad and Christine ready to be alone, me hoping Ania would want to take a walk on the beach.

she didn't. she came out from their room a minute later ready for bed, all my smooth words lost on my lips, and everybody turned in for the night. shit.

me, i went to the ocean.

what the ocean told me
disappointed, i walked with my mostly full beer down to the beach, everything dark. i sat there and listened to the waves, the first time i'd been alone in days, trying to make sense of what was taking place. did i really like or want Ania? was this whole sexual competition that important, something worth my peace of mind, more than an exagerrated version of Monopoly?

i sat for awhile, let my questions marinate in darkness and oncoming waves.

bit by bit, the answer came: no. this is a game, has been a game, as all life is. you do the best you can, enjoy doing it, accept failure or success with an equal smile, knowing happiness is something deeper than success or failure. ania bedded or no, you are still here to witness this beauty, aren't you? you are still a miracle among miracles, are you not? yes.

so accept this failure, as you do others, enjoy and learn from it. it has been play, nothing more. only when you start to take the game seriously can it confuse you about what it is, a game. winning or losing, it's been fun, right? yes.

thanks, ocean. i needed that. i let the rest of my beer get swallowed in sand, stood, and went for sleep, content.

day thirty-five: nungwui

2010-03-02T09:45:00.002-07:00

i woke up and regretted it,
drank some water and went back to sleep. it was already baking hot, my head felt like a broken carton of eggs, it looked like someone--maybe me--had shat in a bag on the other end of the room. i was covered in salty sand congealed in sweat, hung over. eurgh.

a lot of the day was spent in recovery, trying to eat safe foods, to variously sleep, swim, eat and wait my hangover off. the fourth proved to be the best, and by late afternoon i was starting to feel human. everyone else was in the same boat, not getting up til noon and not doing much afterward. it was my first hangover in years, i think. it might as well be the last: binge drinking is like egg nog. it loses novelty too fast to be more than a once-a-year thing.

whores and coke
were among the things Gabriel, the guy who'd helped me get my room, offered me around 11 that morning. i was still in bed, having successfully got back to sleep in the hopes my hangover would forget itself, when he knocked and then came in, crouching down to assure me if i needed anything, i could just ask him: diving tours, boat rentals, ganja, Zanzibar women, cocaine...

it was a little shocking, despite the hangover. i've never had anyone in a foreign country offer me so many illegal things so bluntly. i gave him an alcohol-diluted smile and promised if i needed anything, he'd be the first one i went to. then he left and i laid on the cement some more, hungover and wondering if maybe cocaine wasn't what i needed to get over this. it certainly seemed like a better idea than Giles' reassurance more cheap rum would do the trick.

Mossa cooked some fish
for us, and we had a nice afternoon lunch at his place of fish and chapati. Mossa, a local making his living renting canoes and doing security, befriended Brad and the group the night before I came, regaling them with stories over rice and beans. he was one of those rare Africans who can still be genuine living among constant swarms of tourists, and we had a nice little meal on his porch, him explaining to us how meals were taken and guests treated in Zanzibarian culture. he'd grilled the fish with salt and red chili, and the chapati was just the right amount of greasy to combine with the fish into a pretty decent hangover cure. afterwards we sat around on his porch chatting, watching the sun sink, and made plans for a bonfire that night.

could you?
randomly throughout the day i would look at where i was, and be overwhelmed by how peaceful and beautiful it was, and have to say so. and wonder again as i always do in beautiful places if you could ever get used to it.

the rare and fleeting sensation of being alive
late afternoon, Brad and Giles rented a harpoon gun, and we all agreed to spear some fish[1]. so we swam out as the sun was sinking and the tide calmed down, a quarter to half mile from the shore, to where the coral got thick and the fish swam in schools.

the gun was a long metal harpoon couched in a simple case with a trigger, powered by big elastic straps. it looked pretty viscious, but didn't seem to shoot straight. we cruised for fish nonetheless, masks down and snorkels up, occasionally diving down to chase after one. they were speedy little devils, and i realized what an accomplishment it'd been yesterday for Brad to harpoon the trumpet fish Mossa had grilled up for us.

Brad went first, missing another trumpet fish, then i had a go, cruising after a biggish silvery fish while Brad and Christine watched schools swimming by. the fish was faster than me, and the snorkel not really letting in enough air, so it was tiring. after awhile i shot just to be done with it, missed, and gave the harpoon to Christine. Giles and Ania swam up after a bit, and we traded off to swim back to shore, empty-handed.

the sunset was again gorgeous, and we stayed in the shallows watching it go down, enjoying the fleeting and rare sensation of being chilly after a long day of punishing sunshine, and awed.

[1] something pretty unthinkable to me a few years ago. still nothing i'd ever come up with on my own, but if i'm eating, i'm already killing it, right? if i can't stomach harpooning it, then i don't think i should be able to stomach it at all. do you?

the image of a beautiful girl underwater with a harpoon gun
will stick in my head for a long time: there was something powerful about swimming after Christine, a 25-year-old as close to the Western ideal of beauty as anyone gets, and watching the contrast of sunlight rippling through the water onto her skin and the big black harpoon gun in her hand, made for killing. it was a meeting of opposites: fresh life and machine of death, a holy symbol of purity and destruction, a Hollywood conflation of sex and violence, at once threatening and inviting. i forgot all about the Indian Ocean and its stunning display of flora and fauna: here were the deep currents of humanity put into form--life and its attendant taking of life, female fertility and male destructiveness, passivity and aggression, beauty and horror, all witnessed in surreal underwater weightlessness and light.

it was beyond words, too meaningful to understand, two opposites making something greater than themselves, an unknowable symbol. plus, she was cute.

forget the five-star restaurants
supper that night was at a local place i'd found, plates of rice and beans with sauces of tomatoey meat, coconutty bananas and local spinach served family style. the cokes Brad bought were so warm the tops champagned off them and onto neighboring roofs, carbonation burning on the way down. the meal was nice, served outside by candlelight, under Zanzibar's sea of stars. Giles was so impressed with what i said walking back that i'm going to say it again, just to establish copyright: it was a million star restaurant.

Mzungu in the Mist
by the time we got back and searched unsuccessfully for coffee, Mossa had a fire going on the beach, and we all walked over and sat around it, sound of the waves behind. Mossa is a natural story-teller, and went from explaining the symbol of the logs in the fire to stories of his father the famous fighter to how Pemba island was inhabited and later split through magic to stories of natural healing... English isn't his first language, but his stories came through, and you could tell from how seamlessly one rolled into the next that there was a wealth of them there in his head. to hear (and understand) them in his native language would have been amazing. we all sat bemused for the better part of an hour, sipping rum and listening to him talk. then someone showed up with a guitar, more beers were passed around, and we started in on improv songs and old favorites. soon we were trading traditional songs from each country represented there--about five--then composing new ones about each place (i got a lot of compliments on my South Dakota song, which was a rant in the local accent about all the reasons i left the Midwest in the first place). then Giles started on a drunkenly epic composition called 'Mzungu in the Mist' which took us well into the night, everyone contributing. Brad and Christine wandered off somewhere, the guitar's owner took it home, and out came the rum, Giles hitting it hard and going, as tipsiness increased, from walking over the hot embers to jumping in them, to rolling through them, to a very foolish coal-first headstand.

Mossa drifted off to bed and Giles, Ania and i started dancing on the beach with burning palm leaves, whirling them in fiery circles then throwing them sparks trailing into the water. when they were all burned we laid down to watch the stars, some of them shooting. as the night wound to a close we named our own constellations, then laid sand over the embers and went off to bed.

day thirty-four: stone town - nungwui

2010-02-25T11:50:00.003-07:00

hot.
if there was a word for this morning, it was hot. i was out of the door by 8, feeding my wide handlebars through the carved Islamic arch of the front door, two hours later than i'd normally be, my mental alarm clock on snooze after ten days without riding. at eight in the morning, sun barely up, it was hot.

hot like i was sweating by the time i reached the main road hot. totally inappropriately hot. to the point of rudeness on Mother Nature's part. anyhow, i figured, it was only 50 or 60 kilometers to Nungwui, not even a full days' ride, so i should get there before it got too bad.

only problem was, it was already bad. and getting worse. i stopped for some breakfast on the outskirts of town, a few hunks of bread and some piping hot ginger tea, doubly burning from heat and ginger as it went down, part of the mystery i still haven't understood of hot and spicy food in hot places.

getting out of Stone Town, i was pleasantly surprised to see that Zanzibar is real: a real part of Tanzania, that is. If you've ever been to an island in Thailand, like Koh Samui, Pa Ngon or Tao, you've probably noticed there are no local people there not involved in tourism: the islands are like separate terrorities in the country reserved for tourism. if you're traveling to see something more than the inside of your resort or other foriegners, it's not very pleasant. so it was nice to pass rice paddies, old men sitting around dumpy piles of mangoes, kids gawking at me like i was back in Uganda. Zanzibar is real, is a home to regular people who make their living like people on the islands always have. and somehow, that made me feel better about biking towards what was sure to be a white-tourist-only stretch of gorgeous coastline.

that stretch started to seem more and more of a dream as time dragged on, the sun rising in the sky. within an hour or two i was riding on the wrong shoulder of the road to catch the last patches of shade, and resorted to using some of my precious Japanese drink mix to rehydrate, because the plain water just wasn't doing it. the whole road started to feel up hill. then the trees vanished, and it was me and the sun, and the road. i kept looking to the west and east, as i was riding up to the northern tip of the island, hoping to see the land contract so i could believe i was almost at its end: no dice.

it was frying. i had only come about fifty kilometers, just half of what i did from Kabale to Kigali, but the last 15 kilometers or so were pure determination, a contest of will between me, the sun, and my motor-control system, not to just flop down on the side of the road and let the heat finish baking me.

cell phones can't swim
i realized belatedly, coming out from the water on the one swim break i got during that ride. it'd been inside my biking shorts, and i was too eager to quench myself in the Indian Ocean to remember it. so my cell phone, the same one i've used since i got here, went for a swim. holding it up and watching water run out afterwards, i figured it was probably done for. a few minutes later, when i put the battery back in for a moment, it started vibrating haphazardly, and i became a bit more certain it was done for. i gave it a few days to dry out, but on around the third day when i put the battery back in, before even trying to turn it on, it made radio-like fizzing sounds, and i figured it needed more time. til then, i'm back to full-on communicationlessness, which is nice. i'll take a few more days of living right where i am, without distraction. the beach is good for that. so are the girls.

my very own high end hotel
i finally get to Nungwui and find the beach, which is all the tourism i expected it to be. prices are high: i wander from guest house to guest house, pushing my bike through deep sand, exhausted, being quoted prices in US dollars three or four times higher than anything i've paid so far. as usual, a local speaking americanized english attaches himself to me, promising cheaper prices. i follow him around like a lost puppy, too weary to bargain much. when we finally get down to talking about the price i really want, though, he blanches: it apparently is actually out of the nungwui ballpark.

i wait: these kind of people usually want your money badly enough to think of something. he does: an unfinished room with no furnishings. with running water, light fixtures and a few beds, it'd be a nice place. right now, it's just walls and a concrete floor. for a third of the price anywhere else. perfect. i take it, throw my stuff down and run for the beach.

well, almost:
as i am locking the door, i see that the lock doesn't work: they've installed the fixture poorly. i tell the manager, who calls for the fundi, the specialist, and we wait. after about ten minutes, i decide they're not going to steal my stuff, or if they are it will still have been worth jumping into that gorgeous teal ocean after the ride i just had. i go. it is.

why would you sleep on a concrete floor in paradise?
because i couldn't camp.
because i was too tired to look for anything better.
because--maybe this is a pride thing--i needed to distinguish myself from the high-paying tourists.
because everywhere else was nicer than i needed or wanted.
because if it was really bad, i could sleep on the beach.
because one of the downsides to traveling alone is not being able to split the bill.
because i can: i don't mind hard surfaces.
because, maybe, psychologically i couldn't handle everything being easy.
because i am living on borrowed money, and it's almost gone as well.
because i didn't come here to sleep, or spend time in my room. i came for the beach.

the sun didn't get any cooler,
i noticed as i got out of the water the second time. far from it. thus began four days of cooking myself, though i think in the end i came out more brown than red, so no harm done.

beautiful girls and old women
wearing bikinis on the beach:
young men try the girls
as i see the women they'll become--
breasts slumping, bellies swelling,
youth spent for wisdom, or not.

body beauty is replaced with spirit beauty,
or just dies.

i wish the young ones luck in catching each other,
and together beauty that won't fade.
wonder myself if i am beautiful,
if i am growing in or losing it,
if anyone can be both at once.

ania lays her smooth hips on the sand;
the german lady across the way sleeps there nights.
old women are young girls are baring it:
beauties no bikini can hide.

i was pretty sure that was him with the harpoon
but i didn't say anything at first, being too tired and caught in what i was writing. later on, he was on the beach again, the Nebraskan i met in Kigoma, Mitch. this time i said hi, and introduced myself to his friends, people he'd met on the way up: Giles and Brad from Perth, Australia; and Christine, Ania and Sandra from Norway. the guys were good fun, in their early twenties and trying to squeeze every moment for its goodness. the girls were all friendly, spoke good English, and had the admirable aspects of being gorgeous and fond of bikinis. we sat together, talking and watching the sun set, then went out for dinner and drinks, and like that it was set: this was our group for Zanzibar. we spent the next four days together swimming, laying on the beach, laying into the drinks at night, flirting, talking, snorkeling, doing everything you're meant to do on a beautiful stretch of white sand and ocean.

it was nice: my trip up to now has been very solo, with me maybe spending an evening with someone, or seeing them off and on over the course of a few days, but always basically being alone. and i didn't mind it: i do well alone, was freer that way to do what i want, to meet new people, to wander the inner expanse of consciousness and turn up what may. but something about being on a beach with nothing much to do was made a lot better by some pretty girls and guys to hang out with.

so that night, we all went down the beach for dinner, then to another place for drinks. the boys were pretty sure we all needed to drink, and drink we did: solid and consistent, through dinner (snorting local gin up our noses, no less), through endless rounds of cocktails and beers over drinking games, through dancing and eventually closing down the pub, through skinny swimming en masse out to an anchored boat, sexual energy electric in the air, then alcohol and physical limits finally catching up with us around 4:30, we slept.

my cement was soft as a pillow.

day thirty-three: dar to zanzibar

2010-02-23T12:43:00.002-07:00

i knew it was gonna be chaos
and it was: the ticket booth for the cheapest ferry, packed with locals shoving their money towards the overwhelmed attendants, me with my fully loaded bicycle and three or four touts variously telling me to give them the money so they could buy it for me, telling me the ferry was already full, telling me to get my passport out, telling me to book their faster, cheaper boat. i kept one eye on my bags, one on the ticket window, trying to edge my and my bike's way up the curb to the window, through a crush of people.

it was hopeless: i ended up trusting a tout who ended up not being a tout, and got a ticket, then cycled like mad around downtown trying to find lunch and a new book, failing totally in the book, and ending up with some old yogurt, an apple and a big loaf of bread for lunch. in addition i got a cut on my forehead from the metal edge of an air conditioner cage outside one of the book stores.

blood and all--i didn't realize i was bleeding at the time--i got into the ferry terminal, got told three different things about where to go, found my way, lugged my bike up narrow iron stairs in the baking sun, tied it to a railing of a ship--the Flying Horse--got inside, had just cleverly sat down next to a Japanese couple hoping to pull out my other language when the conductor came and asked me if i'd like to get my cut taken care of.

so it was up to the helm again, this one a bit nicer than the Ruremesha from Bujumbura, the captain less drunk and more proficient in English to boot, though he was wearing dress slacks with no shirt and had that seedy East African captain air about him: lord of his domain, expecting respect.

i gave it to him, as they gave me cotton swabs and stinging iodine and finally a clean bill of health. forehead burning but no longer with blood running down it, finally ticketed and on the ferry with all my stuff intact and lunch to boot, i sat down with the Japanese couple for a nice ride out and some needed peace.

peace i got
in spades: a nice chat in Japanese with two people already a year into their year-and-a-half round the world trip, a decent lunch (the apple was the best part), some A/C. after a bit i went up on top deck (there were three levels) and stared at the ocean going by, bringing me more peace and peaceboat memories. the Japanese couple had known about PeaceBoat[1], and using that language again, and now sitting on the edge of a boat watching the waves go by... some ghosts from the past came back and danced. but they were peaceful ones, and merry, and after a bit i laid down on the deck and had a nice nap.

[1] if you don't, it's an NGO i worked for in Japan that arranges hundred-day round-the-world voyages by ship to encourage peace and international friendship. www.peaceboat.org

zanzibar,
oh, zanzibar. why didn't i come earlier?

the place is amazing: lovely antique Arabic-influenced houses, beautiful beaches, laidback friendly nonintrusive people, delicious food. oh to trade some of the days i spent in Kigoma days for ones on Zanzibar. my first impressions were all good.

i got off the ferry, had my passport restamped (the Zanzibar archipelago is semi-autonomous), found a nice cheap guesthouse in Stone Town (the oldest part of the city, on a little nub of a peninsula edged with white sand beach), and immediately went out to get lost.

get lost i did: Zanzibar is easily as confusing as Venice, and less well-marked to boot. i wandered for hours down winding narrow streets, sunlight filtering in from three stories above, centuries-old houses on both sides ornate with aging woodwork and the endless designs of time. bricklaid streets ran through houses, turned 35 degree angle turns into triangular courtyards, dead-ended, opened on fruit markets, closed on battered stone walls, fluttered in afternoon sunlight or lay quiet in afternoon shade.

and through all those narrow, winding passageways, the beautiful people of Zanzibar: not black, not white, not Asian, not Arabic, but the confluence of all those. women in black scarves or face masks, black robes with sometimes a startling slash of colorful dress beneath, men in ankle-length white robes, children in childish versions of both, playing and eating mangoes and walking home from school together in streets that have seens generations on generations of them pass the same way. i stopped for a cold soda with some men sitting on a wood cart, spied a restaurant across the way that looked good for when i got hungry, kept walking, wandering totally at random, discovering lovely little streets, ornate with detail added piece by piece with passing generations. i stopped to watch a mweso game and got pulled in, playing for about 45 minutes with a boy half my age, drawing a spectators as we battled to get control of each others' pieces. he eventually got me, but i gave him a scrappy run for his money, then thanked him and kept on my way.

around about the time the sun was changing colors in the sky i found the high walls of the old fort, and followed them round to a nice little park along the shore, where a stone revealed itself as perfect for sunset watching. so i did, kept company for most of it by Mr. Dula who wanted to practice his English, me only half in the conversation, but not wanting to shoo him away, the sun melding through all manners of beautiful, the waters of the Indian Ocean following suit, til they finally swallowed it.

i walked then along the shore, past some high schoolers earnestly playing football on the sloping sands down to the water, having to run and fetch the ball from the waves. as it got really dark, my stomach started to talk about that restaurant i'd seen, but that was about two hundred turns and twisty alleyways ago, and i knew there was no way i'd find it.

still, i'm onry, so i decided to try. i managed to trace myself back the first three turns or so before i lost it, and once again just followed my whim down now-dark (the line connecting the island to power from the mainland broke, so the whole place has been without electricity for two months) streets, twisting this way and that, hoping at least to find a bigger road, so i might from there find the other big road i remember being kind of near my guest house.

it was right about then the street i was on looked familiar and... there was the restaurant i'd wanted to go to, like running into an old friend. smiling at how life is, i went in and ordered a plate of rice, some tasty-looking peas an orange coconut sauce and, swallowing, decided not to get anything that looked predictable or familiar. it was a lovely restaurant with about fifteen different sauces, and i pointed at the most outlandish, octopus curry.

it was delicious. i found a seat outside with a guy who proved nice enough, and literally sat back in my chair grinning like an idiot after the first bite. this was the food i'd been looking for all along. this was the way i'd been wishing Ugandans would cook their food: this was sensitivity to flavor and real use of available spices like i came to love in Thailand. delicious. the peas were nice, in a mild and thick orange-curry coconut sauce, the rice good of course, but best of all was the octopus: it was never a favorite in Japan, because of its chewiness, but this one had been prepared different, and was tender as any well-cooked meat, in a cocount and lime inspired sauce that took me straight to Thailand.

my mouth was in heaven, was in places it'd been longing for a year and some now. i barely kept up the conversation.

talk moved inevitably to the food, and while discussing the octopus it came out that i speak Japanese. my dinner partner didn't believe me. so when his friend, a Japanese guy working at the local hospital came, i struck up a conversation just to prove it, and we three ended up having a great talk over the lasts of our food and sodas, about Japan, Uganda, Tanzania, America, about corruption and ways to cook seafood and whatever else came up. Kaita, the Japanese guy, was actually better in Kiswahili than English, and me better in Japanese, but all of us knowing some of each, so we had a strange melange of languages to go with our melange of foods (Kaita got a plate of 'Zanzibar okonomi-yaki' from across the street--something between pizza, a pancake and an omelet). when food was done and drinks were drank and we all knew it was that time, he walked me home (no way I could have found it otherwise), and we had a nice chat on the way.

i don't regret my time in Uganda and wouldn't change it for anything, but really meant it when i told him he got lucky to be placed here for his volunteer service. walking up to my third-floor room through red-walled alcoves and Islamic arches, nightly call to prayer echoing along with me, i couldn't help thinking it again. really lucky.

me too.

day thirty-one: hell - dar/tegeta

2010-02-22T22:10:00.002-07:00

it feels like years since it's been here
we never did stop, the driver going to beat hell (but admittedly doing it fairly safely) all night. eventually, i woke from the best half-doze i'd gotten despite bumps and fears to see something purple in the sky.

oh. dawn.

we were headed straight for it, and the sun had all the time in the world to gradually creep up the eastern horizon, purple fingering into pink and orange, gradually outlining some jagged mountains on the far horizon, illuminating the dark clouds above in reds and yellows, all of nature holding its breath for the moment the sun finally showed its beaming face. we'd driven all night. through hell. it was tomorrow. the driver was still 150% high on speed. seeing this dawn--both because i was alive, and well, and because it was beautiful--made it all worth it.

slow fast
by the time we were getting into Dar es Salaam, it had been more than a full day since any of us had really slept, and a good 20 hours or more since we'd eaten anything more than a bag of peanuts i'd bought waiting for some traffic police. neither had we showered in at least two full days. we were a ragged bunch.

the drive into Dar
made us raggeder: traffic jams, burning heat, empty stomachs, aching bodies, a need to get home. and me without one, and Wilson seeming pretty intent that I go and stay with him tonight. all i honestly wanted was a quiet guest house and some time alone, but i agreed, because he'd done a lot for me, and tired as i was it would probably be my best chance to see real Tanzanian life. tourist-paradise Zanzibar certainly wouldn't give me much chance.

so it was another 10 kilometers away from the city centre before we got to his neighorhood, and i said a quick goodbye to the guys in the back and the driver--still full of pep and Cheechlike hey-man grins--and wheeled my bicycle after Wilson.

the necessities
well, Wilson's lady didn't look too happy that he'd brought somebody home, but in short order we hit the basic necessities: first, a grime-sloughing, deliciously cold water shower. next, a big plate of rice and fried fish in coconut sauce at a laidback thatch-roof place down the street. this was a pleasant surprise: a little spicey, a little tomatoey, creamy in the special way only coconut can be, that fish did more than satisfy my 22-hour hunger: it nearly satisfied the craving for Thai food i've had for a year and a half. lovely.

the third necessity was just some R+R, and we sat back with full stomachs and bottles of 7UP to do just that, his lady Lightness (that's her name) slowly warming up to me as time went on.

another necessity?
after lunch Wilson wanted to go to the salon. i've noticed this is something a lot of African men like doing, especially ones in the cities. i'd never gone before, so i went too, and Lightness and i chilled on a couch, me trying to interpret Swahili comics while Wilson got a shave and a haircut.
i was next, and wanted nothing fancy, just a good shave, but the impeccably-upkept barber who came at me with the electric razor seemed pretty intent on giving me an African-dandy style close-cropped goatee, so i let him. Lightness and Wilson both seemed to think it looked good: i would've rather had it off, but didn't mind either way. i took it as a step further into the culture.

people are the same everywhere
then we took a stroll down a little lane of shops that reminded me of Japanese shotengai, market streets, and stopped off at Wilson's brothers' place to hang out and watch some dubbed Spanish soap operas (i'd embarassingly already seen the episode on), for all the world like we were in the States and not Tanzania.

on the way home, Wilson and Lightness bought some fruit, and we stopped to browse at some second-hand clothes stalls, for all the world like Japanese people wasting time downtown on a Saturday afternoon.

they say wherever you go, people are the same. i don't buy it, but to a certain extent it's true. if you had displaced us to any other place i've lived, excluding Uganda, we would have fit right in with what people do there on their days off. crazy. and nice, somehow: familiar. it was good after so much travel, and being foreign, and living without any kind of regularity, to do something familiar. Wilson and i had known each other ten days or more, and passed through the hell of the ride from Kigoma, so were friends in more than the superficial way you often are with people when traveling. we went home for plates of fruit, hung out for awhile, walked to the local high school to watch a soccer match, Tegeta High versus the neighboring school, and then went out for dinner with his brothers at a local shop. all in all, a nice relaxing day--probably the most regularly Tanzanian day i'd had, and at the same time somehow very American, very first world.

the final necessity
was sleep. Wilson and Lightness insisted i sleep in their big bed while they slept on the floor, and wouldn't be dissuaded, so i fell asleep on their big four-post bed, head full of good memories and belly full of good old ugali dagga. i slept like a rock.

day thirty: kibondo - hell

2010-02-22T09:41:00.003-07:00

we woke at 5,
were all 7 of us out the door fifteen minutes later (a particularly male phenomenon), walking back to the site before the sun rose. an hour or two later, we were unloaded and on the road again, which blessedly changed to pavement shortly thereafter, and remained that way, with one notable exception.

it occurs to me
that my friend--who will remain nameless--might be that interested in making and playing strategy games because they are, like music, a pleasant ordering of the at-times unpleasant apparent disorder of regular experience. the order is false: in the case of music, just intervals and laws we imposed to make sound match the way our minds work, and in the case of games, just a simplified set of laws and goals for existence--both leading to an experience we can understand, one that allows us to pretend for awhile as those the universe really is set up as our minds expect it to be (with justice for all, only the visible spectrum of light, actual laws of cause and effect, etc.). but they're just illusion, aren't they? i imagine myself having this conversation with my friend.
in my mind, he replies, 'isn't everything?'

by midday
there's some talk of us arriving tonight, though we have only just reached the place we wanted to have got to by last night. i wonder how realistic it is.

then the driver starts drinking
well, drinking seriously. or maybe, i started to notice him drinking seriously. as we were loading concrete yesterday, i'd noticed him going off somewhere, and later when we were setting up the truck for rain, he'd come back from somewhere drinking a beer, but i hadn't thought about it much. i think in my culture we accept one beer as not being that dangerous for the road.

then we stopped for lunch in Kahama, and he immediately ordered a sachet (two or three shots' worth) of local gin and downed it, then had a beer with the food, and as we were leaving got another sachet of gin and downed that. it was around this time i started wondering--aloud--if it was a good idea for him to be driving.

'no problem, man,' said Wilson in his reassuring way. 'these drivers, it just makes them more steady, man.'

well, possibly like a fool, i got in, figuring he'd been a good driver this far, and he'd probably been drinking just as much yesterday.

and he was fine: as lively as ever, still very attentive and driving fast but safe. after taking down all that alcohol in less than an hour...

it also occurs to me,
some time in that Olympian spell of driving, that Islamic prayer has as well as its heart silence, as does some Buddhist meditation and many monastic traditions. true, there is a call to prayer, and the shekh leads congregational worship, but these are exceptions to a general silence that pervades the place. from the time you enter, to the time prayer is finished, there is little talking, and people sit around quietly, knowing themselves in the presence of Allah. i reflected, passing a squat green mosque by the road, that silence in the presence of God--something found in many spiritual practices--is probably as important to the Islamic spiritual experience as any of the actions or prayers themselves. and it makes their prayer feel a bit more comfortable to me, as silence and focusing on the presence of God is something i am familiar with. the more i think back on my recent experiences with Islam, the more it seems a new blending of spices found in other religions, and as such familiar to me: another take on the One Curry that pervades all human life.

lushwa is kiswahili for corruption
yesterday, along the dirt roads, we got stopped a few times by traffic police. usually, they weren't even subtle about what they were after: they'd just say they'd been out there all day, can't you spare 2000 shillings. and we'd give it to them, or Wilson'd talk them out of it, and we'd be on our way.

well, apparently corruption isn't as PC once you're on paved roads, because we started getting stopped by traffic police who would look for any excuse to lecture us about all the fines we were incurring through this and that infraction. then they'd ask for the bribe.

it got worse as time went on: the further east, the more traffic cops. and the problem was, we did have some infractions: the vehicle insurance (taken monthly) had expired yesterday. the driver's liscense was not the original. the registration of the vehicle was a few years old. et cetera. over and over, we would watch the traffic cops check the insurance, ask for the papers, see the brief gleam of hope in their eyes, and settle back for their spiel.

they at least used a range of tactics: some would argue at us, near yelling. others would walk away, disgusted, and work on other vehicles without letting us leave. some would call the driver out alone, or Wilson. others would insist on the fine, and we did end up paying one, which was a little more expensive than the bribe. Wilson is a good talker, so a lot of times it just meant us waiting around fifteen minutes to an hour while he talked sense to the traffic cop, and then we'd go.

and get stopped again. sometimes just a hundred feet away by the other traffic cop on duty in the same area. wanting a bribe.

they started encouraging me to use my mzungu status, to stare imperiously at the traffic cops and speak only Queen's English, to scare them into thinking i was a corruption monitor. after all, they'd probably never seen a white guy riding in a dump truck before. so i did my best, and it worked a couple of times.

after it got dark, they finally thinned out, after one particularly nasty incident where they tried to keep us from driving at night, and Wilson had to stand out in the rain half an hour or more talking to a few different gun-toting police.

once the sun came up, they were back out in force. we must have wasted two hours or more sitting around talking to traffic cops. most of the time, Wilson got us out without paying a fine, but it cost a lot of time and pain-in-the-assedness. the driver, especially, would get pissed every time we were stopped, and sit there cussing while the officer approached, sometimes letting them have it to their face when they would start in about the violations. it was from this that i learned how to say f%&k you in Swahili, but i guess you don't need to learn it.

i have never seen such corruption, never witnessed how much of a burden it is to regular people here trying to get work done. i knew in Uganda the city council was bad, and that lawyers and government officials in general liked to stick it to you, and i'd had my own experiences with the immigration officials making things hard, hoping for bribes, but this was out of control. no wonder Africa has had such a hard time developing: it is, in part, eating itself. these traffic police and their checkpoints made me grateful for law enforcement in the States, which won't hesitate to stick you with a fine, but it's an honest one, and they get it done and you get on your way. i thought of Wilson and his coworkers, making this trip every couple of weeks, listening to the same ham stories and taking the same amount of time or money to plead their way out of them. we don't know how good we've got it.

it was around sundown
that they started talking of making it to Dar es Salaam that night. me, i knew we hadn't yet reached Dodoma, which was about 2/3s of the way there, after two days of driving. i had pretty big doubts about making Dar that night, but kept them to myself.

when we stopped for fuel later on before the last and worst of traffic cops, a sign on the wall had distances from there to other destinations. i saw Dar was still 720 kilometers away (maybe 500 miles). it was around 9pm. we weren't going to make it. i said as much to Wilson, pointing to the sign.

'no way, man,' he said, giving me his clear-eyed grin, 'we getting Dar toNIGHT!' and he slapped the driver on the shoulder, and say something in Kiswahili, and the driver slapped my hands, and we got back in a drove.

for a long time.

the sun went down, the stars then the clouds and the rain came out, and we drove. through Dodoma, me trying to sleep in the cramped little dump truck cabin, hoping for a guesthouse or at least food. oh no. we were making Dar toNIGHT.

then i started wondering if the driver was on speed
and just drinking to calm his nerves. he'd driven all day yesterday, and all day today from morning, around 8am. no breaks, no switches, just the road and booze, and he was hot as a firecracker, full of energy, rootin us through muddy diversions and tootin us around potholes, cussing up a storm when we'd hit traffic police. it had to be speed. there was no other way one man could keep driving like that, booze and all.

and drive he did: we didn't stop that night, not for food, not for sleep. we kept on driving til the sun came up, and kept on then til we hit Dar around 9am the following day, he the only driver, still ripping full of life and slapping hands when he dropped us off.

it had to be speed. speed or an inhuman determination and high tolerance to large quantities of booze. i don't know whether to feel happy he wasn't drunk the whole time, or to feel worse because he was high on methamphetamines, but either way we got there in record time!

it was the middle of the night
when the nice, smooth paved road we'd been barreling down went under construction, and we turned off into hell.

hell was a rocky, muddy track only questionably intended for use as a detour. it had been raining for some time, so we soon came to a long stretch of water, maybe fifty feet long and as wide as the track, black in the headlights. there was no one else on the road, no cars to follow successfully through the pool. our driver, drunk or high on speed or just that way naturally, didn't hesitate long: he stopped short, then pulled us into the pool, deeper and deeper, moving slowly so the water wouldn't splash the engine, keeping steady as a wheel would drop or we'd hit something big underneath, until we came out on the far side, and could move at something closer to the usual manic pace across the muddy, stoney track.

it wasn't long before another pool blocked the road, and we had again to sail its uncharted depths in the black of night, guys in back surely scared out of their minds.

the pools kept coming: we'd come to long black stretches of unknown depth, sometimes with other trucks half-buried in them, sometimes with a few islands of dirt or rock sticking out as promises of shallow water, more often than not with nothing. it was approaching the witching hour, i'd been dozing, and the whole thing took on a nightmarish air, the feared demon being that we would get stuck in this hellish place, tires buried in something unseen below the water, a hundred miles from nowhere in the rain.

it almost happened a few times: our driver was eerily good at keeping us above water, but a couple of times a tire or whole side would drop into something a lot deeper, and he'd gun it and we'd pull out somehow, then keep inching forward never knowing when it was going to happen again.

this went on for an hour or two, as though the track and the night would never end. i still had some hopes then of stopping for sleep, at least to bivouac in the truck til morning. silly me. we eventually got through the worst of the pools, and spent another half hour on the unfinished road surface offroading around half-sunken metal diversion pipes and oncoming traffic, til the road appeared before us again. i have never seen lovelier pavement in my life.

day twenty-nine: kigoma - kibondo

2010-02-18T09:37:00.002-07:00

tanzania by dump truck, part one
so, my friend Wilson did come through: a day later than planned, and only at around noon that day, but we ended up piling all my stuff, and all their stuff (scratch just me adn the driver; scratch me and him and Wilson and maybe one more--we left with six or seven), and a whole lot of bags of concrete and buckets of paint and various construction accessories into the back of a little white Japanese dump truck, and setting off for Dar es Salaam. this is the story of what happened:

death wish
either i had one, or the driver had one, or we all had our own, because there was no other reason to be driving--careening is the word--down dirt roads at that speed. let alone in a dump truck.

turns out Tanzania is a bigger country than its budget, meaning there aren't too many roads on the western side of it, and none outside of towns that are paved. at least, the road we took wasn't. what it was was rutted, potholed, bumpy and dusty. and a race track, apparently: fully loaded, people bouncing on top of the load, our little driver, grinning like Cheech, kept it in top gear, doing at least 50, laying on the horn rather than the brakes if people got in the way, giving small clearance to oncoming vehicles, slamming on the brakes and the engine brake when holes were too big to bounce.

we were going to die. at least, i was pretty sure we were going to die. i didn't discover the seat belt until the second day--when the driver put his on--so that first day was spent on the edge of my seat not only from bumps, but fear.

gratitude
we stop on the way to check on some people who are supposed to be hauling sand to my friends' construction site. they were supposed to be there before us, but someone in the back yelled, then the driver whipped us around and we drove off the main road to where a semi truck and trailer was half in a sand pit, surrounded by loitering men: their sand truck. Wilson summed the situation up by leaning over to me and saying 'African logistics.'

so their sand was late and getting later, but what struck me was how they were getting the sand: they'd parked in a sandy spot, and three sweaty guys were throwing shovefuls of sand six feet up (ten for the unlucky guy not standing by the gate) into the truck. the idea of how many shovelfuls of sand thrown six feet in the air it would take to fill that whole truck and trailer was a little overwhelming to me. moreso was imagining trying to feed myself and possibly my family by throwing shovelfuls of sand into a trailer every day, or days when there was work. but that was life for them. and they didn't look that disgruntled, just tired, but i felt grateful then that i can earn my living doing something else.

of course i didn't have any idea what we were doing
or what people were talking about most of the time, everything being in Kiswahili and Wilson's English not that intelligible, but i've gotten used to picking up on small clues, and relaxing when i can't.

Killer Mzungu
on the way it started to look like rain, so we stopped to pull a tarp (actually a used billboard sign) over the back of the truck and make a little place for the guys back there to ride, mattress and all.

being a little of the loop of what they were doing and why, i noticed a couple of kids with pretty big eyes for a mzungu, and walking over to greet them... then play a game of holding out my hand to shake, then taking it back before they could touch it... then hiding from them... then popping out and chasing them... and pretty soon about 20 village kids were into it, and we were running all over hell as the rain started, leaping fences and chasing each other around trees and laying in ambush around corners... it was a blast. just pure, simple fun. playing with kids here, who generally don't get much attention from adults and have an absolute blast when you give them the time, is one of the things i'll miss most about Africa.

when the rain actually does start
the road turns into slop, and we pass countless Scania semis stuck or nearly so in the muck trying to get up a hill. fortunately our little Canter is lighter and the driver's good at what he does, so we get around them without ever really getting stuck ourselves. we also make sure to drive a deal faster than is probably safe on those same roads, but never get in anything close to an accident, so maybe the driver was a better judge of safe than me.

or we were just lucky.

Wilson
makes funny noises sometimes: sound effects for the bumps we're taking at too-high speeds, or random outbursts to relieve the boredom.

like a scene from National Geographic
we come over a hill and the road on the far side of the valley is covered in a moving mass of blue and white, a few hundred dots moving up the far hill. these are not migrating birds or rare wildebeest, however--they are the whole population of a school just released, walking up the hill to town. that's something i've gotten used to in Africa, too: in even the most rural of areas, places where you'd expect to see wild animals, you see people instead, because the place is so heavily populated. as far as i can tell, wild animals are for game reserves, national parks, or eating. that's OK: the migrating students still made for a nice safari moment on an otherwise long ride.

Kibondo
around 9pm we finally reach one of their construction sites, Kibondo, and park the truck there, then walk 2 kilometers into town in pitch blackness, tired and hungry and being intermittently rained on. we get rice and beans at a nondescript little joint, rooms at another (i pay for a double so someone can sleep with me, then end up giving the room to others as Wilson and i share a place), and pass out for a few hours. little did i know that would be my last real sleep for the next two days.

day twenty-eight: kigoma

2010-02-17T02:46:00.003-07:00

kigoma town, i am ready to leave you
let me be honest: i was ready to leave Kigoma a few days ago. i've been to the beaches, met the people, tried the restaurants. slept in the same bed more than a week running. it's time to go.

but since Wilson promised me a ride on their dump truck across the country to the coast, and it sounded so much more interesting than going by bus, i decided to wait. thus the extra days i filled learning about Islam, which was good. but i woke up today thinking Kigoma town, i am ready to leave you.

finally. i got up, got my stuff all packed up, was ready to hit the road and see something new, get a ways down the road. only, while i was still packing i saw the driver go down, get in Wilson's truck, and drive away. i figured he might be coming back, kept packing.

he didn't.

after i some bitumbua and bananas i gave Wilson a call. he said we were leaving tomorrow.

tomorrow. as in 24 hours from now. ratty poop.

speeches about deep travel aside, i've gotten as deep as i want to in Kigoma town. i'm starting to feel more like a resident than a visitor. needing constantly to be on the lookout for someone i know, so i can wave to them. that's OK. it's nice. but i've gotten deep enough. it's time to move on.

i knew she was from South Dakota
the minute she opened her mouth, this aging lady having a soda on the front porch of Zanzibar Lodge. so i was surprised when she said she was from Rochester, New York. have i really been away from the Midwest that long, to misplace that most-familiar-of-Dakota accents? surely not. i was vindicated a moment later when she said she'd been born and grew up in Sioux Falls. i knew it.

we sat and chatted for awhile, about nothing in particular, me just happy to hear that so-familiar voice in such a faraway place.

i didn't think he was from Nebraska
right away, but the road-weary white guy i found in the dining room of the Zanzibar Lodge that night struck me as speaking a pretty familiar English as well. it didn't take long for us to determine we were both misplaced Nebraskans who had spent time in California, and i imprinted his voice as being like that of my friend Ross, who was also from Omaha.

this guy--Mitch, i later learned--was also traveling solo and unplanned, and we had a good chat over rice and beans about the vagaries of the road, and the wonders of San Diego, where he currently lives and where I'll possibly be going to school. it was a good solo traveler catch-up, and we made vague plans to be at the same beach in Zanzibar in a few days.

i am ashamed to admit this, but
i've been watching TV. MTV, no less, or at least the East African version of it. when i got my room at Zanzibar Lodge, i was happy because it looked like one of the only rooms in the place that didn't have a TV. i thought maybe it was cheaper because of the absence of that most-unneeded appliance.

only to find, on later settling in, that it did indeed have one. so a few nights later, i turned it on for the hell of it, hoping maybe to watch the BBC or Al Jazeera. what i saw instead was not Nigerian drama or a Kiswahili news broadcast coming at me, but the latest Rihanna video, straight from the bowels of Hollywood.

i was entranced: here was an unfiltered piece of Americana, piped halfway across the world right into my hotel room. New Kids on the Block, Mary J Blige, Sean Paul, other apparently famous persons beyond recollection. you have to remember, i've been out of the loop of US pop music for a long time: before this year and a half in Uganda, i was four years in Japan without access to US media, and didn't live with a TV the four years preceding that. what is entrancing is not the videos themselves, or the music, as they are al the kind of see-ut-tghree-times=and-youre-vred-senseless glitter and cathciness that is forgotten in six mnths. its the simultaneous sense of hwo familiar and forieng these videos are: that' smy language, that's my culture, those are all people from m youcntry, but the music, the syle of the videos, eth artists themselves, they are all unfamiliar. i'm like Rip van Winkle waking up from under my tree, or the classic time travlere who stumbles onto a news paper nad sees X number of years has padssed, he is not in fact ina strange new country but still in his own.

well, i am in a strange new country, Tanzania, but these videos were straigh from my own, and insofar as you get sucked into music videos when you watch them, there i was back in my own country, previewing the kinde of reverse culture shcok im going to have when i do go back in a few weeks.

not pretty. and yet, somehow, enticing. and yet, somehow, nice. teh videos hoeld their usual allure o sex and glamour, catchy beats with catchy words. beyond that, in a place wso wholly unfamiliar, weeks into a trip thats been mostly unshared by anyone who shares my experience of tha tunfamiliarity, here was something that was at least half-familiar, a good old American music video adn a good old American session of mindless video watching.

so i started turning on the TV sometimes, at night, to see if it was foreign-music video time. most of the time it wasn't, and after a quick gander at how well the Africans are imitating American pop vidoes, i'd shut off the TV and read or write or wander downstairs for a random conversation with someone on the front porch. but when it was Top Ten time, and eight or more of those top tens would be from the States, i was all eyes. i was all eyes for TV like i haven't been in maybe a decade. i would put off whatever i was doing, nto even really put it off but just forget it until the commercial breaks, then give it a desultory do as i was waiting for the next video to come, and nothing more til the Number One had come and gone (usually Rihanna's 'Go Hard' video, if you're aware of such things, in which she wears a shirt cleverly colored like her skin, to look as though she's got nothing more than two pieces of electrical tape on her breasts, and sings about 'going hard.' quality entertainment).

surely i can call some of it a study, an anti-nausea pill for the bumpy ride back to my own culture, but mostly it was--glittered vapidity and all--just a nice little escape into something homey, in a an overwhelmingly unhomey environment. and that was the strange thing i wanted to tell you: that i have gone so far afield that MTV videos made me feel at home.

tabula rasa
i have no doubt i will once again shun music videos when i get back to the states. i may also stop eating meat, start not littering again (a bad African habit i've picked up), stop drinking, etc., in full return to the Levi i was when i left, all bright-eyed from college. or i might not: i'm him anymore, and i've accepted some of the less nice parts of life i didn't want to then[1], or at least made my peace with them. i might structure life a bit different. five years has been enough time to wipe the slate clean. i have escaped all notions of which part of my own culture i belong in: no longer have a fashion style, a favorite artist or kind of music, a specific group of friends or idea of my place. i have no address, no job, no school, no club, no favorite park or cafe or library or place out of town to go and sit. i am a clean slate.

at the same time, i have all of those things in other countries: know my friends and favorite cafes in Japan, know my place in Ugandan society and have an address, a job, a group of friends and an identity there. if i think of the 5 years that have passed, i have a few identities. which one am i? i'm all of them, none of them: i'm free from the idea that i have to be one thing. the only thing i need to be is who i am, or who i'd like to be. and the only thing i am is what i am doing, at all times. just because i go to church when i get back to the States doesn't mean i'm a Christian. just because i eat meat or refuse it doesn't mean i'm a freegan or not. just because i don't wear a suit doesn't mean i'm not a suit. my slate has been wiped clean, and i think it's happened enough times that i've recognized myself not in what was written there, at whatever time, but in the slate itself: something before definition, simple existence. and i've seen that thing there, that simple existence, to be good. so whatever i write there from now on, no matter if i erase it next day or let it yellow with age, i know who i am, and i know i will always be deeper and simpler than any names, always capable of changing when i'm not happy, always only really able to be defined by what it is i'm doing right then and there. am i talking like a Buddhist? i don't know: i'm talking like i think.

some people travel to find themselves. after these five weeks of travel, these five years, have i come to know myself? yes. i've come to know myself as deeper than any words might reach. simplest to say i am a tabula rasa now, again, and forever, no matter what i might say or do. that's been the lesson of my travels: that i am, and i think everyone is, whether they experience it or not, beyond definition. there is no me to find: you already found me with is. the rest is fill in the blanks.

does that make sense?

[1] specifically: regarding meat-eating, have accepted that life comes from the taking of life, and i don't mind it as long as it's done respecting that life. regarding littering, i began doing as the Romans do, partially for the experience of it, and have accepted that no matter how good an example i set, Africans will be set on dirtying up their environment for awhile to come. kudos to Rwanda though, for outlawing plastic bags. regarding drinking, silly as i think it is, and wish we'd all sit around and drink tasty fresh fruit juice instead, it's part of our culture, is the medium around which we gather to enjoy each other's company, and i partake of and choose it, even, as such.

more of Mrs. Kaifi's poetry

2010-02-13T04:52:00.000-07:00

With tears in her eyes, she cried
when the peope of Jerusalem asked,
'who is the father of the child?'

Days passed by,
when one day a bright star shone high

She had never expereicned the immense pain before,
of which she thought she would die otherwise or

When the word of God was uttered,
with shepherds around and butterflies fluttered.

The baby was born to take over Jerusalem's throne.

The powers that possessed were to heal the rest.

So my dear, now let me be clear,
The woman in pain was the virgin Mary,
she was teh most humble and modest
of all the other women on the contrary.

The baby was Jesus, and he was the
answer in contrast to all the questions
that his mother was asked.

day twenty-seven: kigoma

2010-02-13T04:36:00.003-07:00

morning prayers
5 AM. in the pre-dawn gloom the mosque is unearthly: lit bright with floodlights on a dark street, broadcasting Islamic song into the sleeping town, lightning flashes cloud to cloud above the bay below. i am the only one there, alone with this apparition and the darkness. wondering if i've mistaken the time or if no one comes to this early service, still half-asleep myself, i sit on some bricks under a palm tree silhoutted by the lights to wait.

after some time, people come. i hesistantly walk up the steps after the second or third, removing my shoes, and go through ablution as though i know what i'm doing; no one notices otherwise. inside the mosque people are asleep on the floor, wrapped in prayer mats, one child with no blanket or pillow asleep as though kneeling, face flat to the floor. i enter quietly and sit to wait.

people file in as those sleeping wake. the Shekh calls for worshipers almost angrily, saying its kumi na moja, kumi na moja (5 am), we sit awhile longer as people enter and wake, then he gives the call for prayer, and we line up shoulder to shoulder, everything feeling holier at this hour.

i prostrate myself before God. prayers are said and repeated. we move as one body, two lines of men and their prayer leader, praying and answering and holding out a single finger, to show that we know Allah and his prophet are one.

then we sing: deep, textured male voices, sounding from all sides and resounding from the mosque walls, the liquid vowels and allophones of Allah passing from lips to mind to heart and back.

it's over. was it real? i walk back to my guesthouse, waking the night watchman again to let me in, unsure whether to sleep or stay woken. my body answers:

sleep.

early afternoon prayers
1 PM. the same mosque is new in early afternoon light, a tan and green structure of arches and minarets, not nearly as imposing but still as otherworldly. a few boys loiter on the tiled front courtyard, and call me over. i come, and introduce myself. they speak almost no English, and greet me of course in Arabic. i answer as best i can, and we muddle our way through question and answers of who i am and why i'm here. one radiates beauty and youth, a boy named Idi Omar, and he guides me through ablution, correcting my order and showing me the proper way to wash legs and arms.

we go inside, and he again instructs me how to first humble myself before waiting, standing in front and to my left so we can do the motions together. there still seems to be plenty of time after we're done, so he takes me to the shaded front of the mosque, under the arches, and we sit there with some other boys who seem to live here, one of them a peaceful-looking giant.

it is he who stands to give the call to prayer. we're in a blackout, so i'd been wondering how they would do it, as all the calls to prayer i know are blasted by microphone and loudspeaker from the top of the minarets. he does it the old-fashioned way: turning to face inward, the arches and the doorway forming a natural megaphone, he gives the call in a confident, strikingly Arabic voice, letting his voice go in the longer vowels so that it carries into the neighborhood.

when he's done, we go back inside, and the place starts to fill. as the Shekh steps in to the alcove in front, everyone lines up shoulder to shoulder, toes in line with the front of the stripe on the floor, pinky to pinky. we lift our hands to the sky, then fold them right over left on our chests, waiting. the Shekh calls, and we prostrate, we pray, we answer and sing, as always. i make an effort this time, during the repetition of prayer section, to really say the prayer he's given us for each digit of each finger on each hand, 30 times each, 3 prayers.

when it's done people clasp my hand then press theirs to their chest, or cup them to their mouths as though swallowing our greeting, clearly surprised and happy to see a white person in their mosque. Idi and friends escort me out to the steps, and i promise to be back later in the day.

late afternoon prayers
4:30 PM. i've just said goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. Kaifi, having stopped by as promised to get Mrs. Kaifi's third poem, and chat with them a bit about how it was to go to prayers yesterday. they are encouraged to hear i'm attending all five prayers today, and stumble through their English to assure me once i've become Islamic i will know it's been the right choice. i tell them i'm not ready for that yet.

since i'm in town, i go to their mosque, the same i visited last night. it is more laid back, more worldly somehow: the people a bit more real. i have once again come a bit early, and after ablution (i sit next to someone to follow along and be sure i've got it right), i relax in the outer prayer area, where a few older men are praying, and a few others sprawl asleep on the steps to the inner chamber. i notice that inner chamber has five doors (more doors than wall, really), and wonder if that's meant to reflect the five pillars of Islam: faith, daily prayer, morality, zacat (tithe) and haj (pilgrimage). people come and we all lemming up to the front, forming clean lines the Shekh checks before starting.

the service here is more relaxed somehow, or maybe i'm getting used to it. this is my fourth time praying, and the prostration feels a little natural, though i still have no idea what anyone is saying, and feel a bit like a monkey going through the motions. i said as much to the Kaifis, and they replied that "So long as you are there, and making the prostrations, and keeping in your mind the idea of Allah, you are doing fine."

so that's what i do: i try to hold in mind the idea of God, though i don't really have one more than the empty idea of Ultimate Mystery, and make the motions knowing i am humbling myself before and giving thanks to that Mystery, for which i have everything to thank.

the service ends without song, and people again greet me warmly, welcome me to Kigoma and their mosque. it is already 5; i realize that among other things keeping the five daily prayers is a time commitment: i've had to plan my day around it, and found it a bit clumsy, though the facts that i'm not used to that kind of planning, and have been arriving earlier than needed, might have something to do with it. the next prayer is in two hours, and i hurry out to try to get something done in that space.

Ibrahim on the street
greets me--he's the one who recommeded i talk with Shekh Dabas yesterday--and I tell him about what I'm doing. "So you've become Islamic?" he asks.
"No," I tell him. "I'm just learning."

evening prayers
7:30 PM. Mr. Kaifi told me the prayers would be at 7:30, though the day before he'd said 7, and i take his word for it, stopping what i'm writing at about 7:15 and walking around the block to the nearby mosque. i hit the timing right on: i have just enough time to greet Idi, wait for a place at the ablution blocks, and line up before the shekh starts service.

it passes in a dream, as things do when you get used to doing them, like those times when you wake up at the end of your daily commute not having remembered driving it, or realize you've finished brushing your teeth but don't remember doing so.

we prostrate, we sit, we pray, we sing.

it strikes me how similar the prostration, this famously Islamic form of worship, is to bows we used to do at the Arcata Zen Center: they too were done as a group, one person leading, and would start from a standing position, ending with our heads pressed to the floor (though the Buddhists took it a step further and raised hands on either side as though lifting the ground above us), to be repeated several times. i guess it is a natural expression of the sentiment of humility; even Christians kneel.

Idi criticizes me after the service, saying i missed the four o'clock prayers. i tell him i went in town, and he's satisfied. i sit with his friends a bit on the rail, then head home for the hour or so between these prayers and the last of the day. i almost wish they were now: not to get them over, but the service has a kind of momentum, that keeps getting lost as we finish and go back into the normal world. i guess that is part of the point: to keep returning people to consciousness of their God, and to the proper attitude towards their existence and the world, so easily forgotten in everyday dealings.

i've begun to really like the ablutions as well: a physical symbol of mentally preparing yourself to face God, of purifying your mind to come before God. the ablution is like the water of forgiveness, washing away sins as it does the dirt of the outside world, leaving you shriven, ready for prayer. as you finish and wait to begin, the splashing sound of others still washing is a peaceful sound, the sound of cleansing. i reflect, walking home, that little as i am interested in all the ideology of Islam, the practice itself is kind of nice.

final prayers.
8:30 PM. it is dark by now. i arrive without much time before the service, and Idi's friend the peaceful giant urges me to first go and wash myself before sitting with them. i do, fairly confident in the order of washing now, and even beginning to develop my own ways of doing it. Idi is waiting for me when i am done, my shoes in hand. he puts them carefully on the ledge by the mosque, then takes off his tight-fitting Islamic hat and puts it on my head. i smile, wondering what it looks like, and he says something to me. i make a face that says i don't understand, then he uses words that are close to Luganda kukuwa 'to give you.'

he's given me his hat. that makes me really happy, and i thank him, though he is already trying to avoid it. i feel i've passed through some kind of initiation rite, feel a bit more in place when i step into the mosque, a bit more... Islamic.

the shekh has not arrived yet, and Idi goes and himself gives the call for prayer. i'm impressed that he's allowed to do that. then as people are lining up, he motions for me to stand with him. i try to get a spot in the front row that's a bit away from the shekh's alcove, but i end up dead center, standing right behind him as he leads us in prostration and prayer. his voice rings from the natural amplifier of the little wooden alcove, washes around me in time to the responses from the faithful gathered there.

this time the prostration strikes me as being like the anjali we would do before meditation in Thailand, being almost the exact same physical form, except anjali was slower and we didn't lift our butts in the air, a part of the worship i can't help but find a little comical.

for a lot of the time, we are standing as the Shekh prays. he is a bit shorter than me, and i stand with right hand over left on my chest, watching the top of his hat bob as he prays, hearing these very Arabic sounds come from the back of a head that is very African. i wonder what he is praying for: for himself? for us? for the world? is he only praising that Mystery that is beyond all praise?

i don't know. i focus on my own prayer, my own consciousness of myself as a humble thing before the Mystery, as someone, being unaware of his own ultimate origins, who includes himself and all existence in that Mystery.

we finish with a sonorous hymn i give myself into, drawing out the rumbling syllables, becoming sound-conscious only, thinking later with a smile that i am a Westerner taking an Eastern experiential tack on a Mid-Eastern spiritual practice. goofy.

the service ends, and i am almost sad my day to observe the prayers is done. i know i will go again for others while i am in Tanzania, but doubt i will ever make a full 5 again.

Idi walks me home, talking about how he'd like someone to teach him English, asking if i can. i say no, and stop to explain to him that tomorrow I am going to Dar es Salaam.

i may have broken his heart.

i think he was pretty happy to have met me, to have made friends with this strange mzungu who was honoring his religion, and we'd really had a moment when he gave me that hat, or different times during the day sitting around waiting for service to start. i knew it was coming, was already emotionally divorced from leaving him and everyone/thing here--i've had practice--but his sadness made me sad. we walked on, but i could see it was troubling him. i was really hoping this wouldn't be the time that he ruined things by asking for money, like Daudi and J had. he didn't. at some point he just let it go, shrugged, and said goodbye with a simple word, inshallah, god willing. i knew i had lost a friend, or a chance for a friend.

i also noticed that the hat he'd given me meant something different outside the mosque: there, i was fitting in. here, i was declaring myself Islamic. he left me right at the front porch to my lodge, so the staff loitering out there, all friends by this time, saw it and gave me big compliments and the aging ladies--as always--wanted to be my wives, and started arguing about who would be first. it was nice to be with them, but the melancholy of leaving Idi and this lifestyle of prayer was still with me. i went upstairs and looked at my own reflection in the mirror, wearing that small hat. they were right, it did look good on me, or i looked good with it. i heard Ibrahim asking again, "Are you Islamic?"

i have seen and done a lot in the last two days, and understand Islam much better than I did before. i respect and appreciate a lot of it, and especially found their spiritual practice to be more rewarding than i expected. but am i Islamic? am i going to become Islamic? no. the religion never even tempted me: i know where i stand spiritually, and it will never be within the definitions of any one religion, especially any one that declares it and its people are the only true religion. the only true religions are those that are true to human nature, and to the nature of Mystery so far as we can experience it. and knowing there are many, i refuse to choose, and to separate myself from other people truly seeking God in their own ways. when in Thailand, I am a Buddhist. when in the States, a Christian. in Tanzania, a Muslim. and on my own, I am all and none of these things. i am simply a seeker of God. i believe today has gotten me closer, has taught me things at least that will be useful in my own search, done under my own power and my own terms, for the Mystery that is Greater than Everything, Allah Akbar.

Mrs. Kaifi's Poetry

2010-02-10T03:24:00.001-07:00

786
Glorifying Our Beloved Prophet

What I don't understand in my think without the faith in which mankind would rather sink.
With recklessly running time, faith in him is compulsorily prime.
With 100 glorious names to his personality, fire may forgive us in reality.
Completely illiterate and in fright by Allah's command he wrote the most glorious words that ink could write.
His attributes have no example, yet the nonfollowers engage in a life long grumble.
This phenomenal being has the highest supreme esteem.
Fools like Rushdie, who could bring no harm, to the beloved's name that bears all the charm.
The world out there is in a state of stare, with blurring music and little do they care.
With funky trends in and out, and ignorant of this fact without a doubt.
Would the world and universe come into existence without his concept, this is the white truth that we all should accept.
With immense patience and heart purified, by his command the moon slashed in half to the nonworshipers' delight.
Invited on a jounrey to witness the most divine creations of the Almighty Lord, stood the angels at every doorstep of his path and in admiration they bowed.
Before it's too late, with a dread to our fate, with pride and privilege and without a speck of fear, I want to make this clear.
To whom was equal every race and cast his concept was before all, yet he came in last.

This poem is a piece of my personal creativity and bears no clone to any poet's work, and I dedeicate this poem to all my Muslim brothers and sisters for our beloved Prophet (p.b.u.h.). Written by Mrs. Kaifi Aziz Kashmiri.

Life

Life shatters, life matters and at times it flatters.
Why does it bother the most, to those who consider it their host.
Would there be another way to lead, with emotions and compromises as its feed.
Where joyous times are its minority, and stressful moments are its priority.
Where highs and lows are its trend, and time stands out to be its friend.
With white and grey shades to it, with little choice, in its colour we rather fit.
It makes us laugh, it makes us cry, to prepare us for every low and high.
With entertainment and leisure as its spice, with glamour, beauty and other things nice.
With science and technology that takes us by, can't imagine life without aircrafts that fly us high.
Where tension and stress are a part of life, where tears and laughter are like husband and wife.
There are the strong and the weak, and there is victory and defeat.
Without its diverse impact, would we be on our feet?
With the love of our folks and those who are near, we courageously move on, eliminating the fear.
Remembering God, sticking to our values and being wise,
Apparently life will only seem nice.

day twenty-six: kigoma-ujiji-kigoma

2010-02-10T03:06:00.006-07:00

today was my day for Islam.

i have studied Buddhism and its meditations, chanted with the Hare Krisnas, was born and raised Catholic and rediscovered prayer with Christian friends in Uganda. i respect and value all of these religions and what they do, and belong to none. i want to understand and experience all of them at least a bit, meaning on the checklist of world religions remain Judiasm and Islam. Judaism I've heard some about, and have read the first five books of Moses a few times; it doesn't seem that foreign of a faith. but Islam, Islam is a world far from most Americans, and i regretfully include myself in that statement.

so when i came to Tanzania, where over half the population bows to Allah, i decided this was my chance to learn more. and when i ended up staying in Kigoma a few days longer than i necessarily wanted to, waiting for the dump truck, i decided that was the time to learn. this is the story of what happened:

questions
yesterday late afternoon i asked my friend Ibrahim, an Indian Tanzanian Muslim, to recommend someone knowledgable in Islam with decent English (a rare set of skills in Tanzania; most who go far in Islam study Arabic instead) to talk to me about their faith. he suggested a man in Ujiji, Shekh Dabas, and wrote his name on a piece of paper for me, advising i go early the next morning.

so today early i was on my bicycle, making the trip to Ujiji, stopping this time at the big Islamic center along Livingstone Road to find someone who could take me to Shekh Dabas. the center is a big place, large enough to hold a few hundred worshipers, with a separate section for females, and this morning empty as a tomb. i walked down the long collonade next to the main room, feeling strange looking for single soul in a place that clearly often held so many. i wondered about what people did here, how they tried and how well they succeeded in connecting with the universal mystery of God, what particular shape they gave that communion in thought and action.

parallel stripes laid on the mosque floor marched with me, rows of absent worshipers. through the windows on the far side of the hall i saw an old man filling pitchers of water, body wizened with age, who tottered over when he noticed my wave and gave me a sharp look up and down. Habari? he asked. Muzuri i told him and, not having the words to explain what i was doing, handed him the slip of paper from Ibrahim with the Shekh's name on it.

he got the idea and started walking with me, looking for someone would could take me to the Shekh. the first man ignored us, the second apologized that he had work to do, and the third, a woman in a blue wrap, led me down back streets between houses of cracking white plaster and palm tree shade to a watering hole where i was to leave my bike, then into a small courtyard. three women were there, in various states of cooking fried breads, a son or two helping. the woman in the blue wrap and i stepped carefully around hot pans of oil and buckets of water, slipping off shoes to enter a dim cement house, and she led me through a short hallway to a sitting room, and a chair, to wait.

this, i took it, was Shekh Dabas' house. on the wall hung a giant poster with arabic words, over a TV with DVD player and antenna decoder, a tall fridge in one corner and a china cabinet in another stacked with boxes. light came in through a window on the far side, doileyed like the chairs, couch and coffee table in the room. i wondered what the Shekh's personal life was like, if all those women outside had been his wives, if they all sat in here with their children and watched TV at night.

after a bit, the man himself appeared: Shekh Dabas, a big, round, smiling African dressed in the traditional floor-length kanzu, or white robe, and round brimless Islamic hat. he greeted me, the lady in blue explained what i was here for, and we started to talk. only, he apologized from the start for his English, and i quickly realized it wasn't up to the kinds of questions i wanted to ask.

so we went on a search for someone who could translate, walking first down to the Livingstone Memorial, where i wondered how the official i'd snubbed a few days back, not paying their 5000 shilling entry fee, was going to feel about translating for me to learn more about Islam.

after reaching the place, through more back alleys, he wasn't there, so we returned to the Shekh's house, and he did his best to call someone who could help.

it took awhile: i waited in his house for the better part of an hour, with a couple younger men who'd come, for any kind of result. finally he'd found someone back in Kigoma, and told me to meet him there at 2PM. so shaking his hand and thanking him, i again got on my bike, for a quick trip down to Ujiji beach for a swim, then back to Kigoma.

answers
i arrived at 2 not really expecting to find the Shekh there, and he wasn't, but the shop owner who'd agreed to host and translate for us and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Kaifi, were there among the stacks of mattresses that were their trade. they spoke good English, and after explaining what i was there for, we naturally got into the conversation that i'd been wanting to have about the basics of Islam.

they told me some things that might surprise you: first, that Islamic people believe in Jesus, who is named Issa in the Qu'ran, and his teachings, and further accept both the Old and New Testament as holy books from God/Allah, just not His final teachings, which of course were brought by the final prophet, Mohammed (whose name is always followed by Arabic words meaning 'May peace be upon him'). they also believe Jesus will be born again, not to judge and end the world, but to marry and this time live a full life, producing two children. he is one of 99 prophets God sent before Mohammed, starting with Adam and Eve, and including all the famous characters from the Old Testament that Christians and Jewish people are familiar with: Joseph, Abraham, Moses, Isaac, etc. Muslims believe each of them was given a special power by Allah, though they were just men--Moses, for example, had the power to part the sea. Issa, Jesus, had the power to make lame and dead people walk again, which if you think about it is mostly what he does in the Gospels.

they told me more than other holy books, the Qu'ran is scientific, which makes sense with the very scientific and scholarly tradition of Islam 1,000 years ago, containing descriptions of how babies are concieved,etc.--knowledge no one then had, miraculously written by a completely illerate prophet, Mohammed, and later proved to be true. they also said that like the Christian God, Allah forgives those who have sinned and are repentant, and, like Jesus, Mohammed was needed to allow mankind to be forgiven for the original sin of Adam and Eve. he also brought new commandments: that animals be prayed for before slaughtering (Halal), that people not take alcohol, that men and women pray five times a day to Allah, pay Zaca (like a tithe) to their Shekhs, who use the money for helping the needy, and of course believe only in Allah and his prophet. interesting stuff: i started to get an inkling for why Christians and Muslims are often so opposed to each other: because they're actually so similar.

it was around this time that Shekh Dabas showed up, smiling his infectuous smile, unconcernedly African at being 45 minutes late. Mr. and Mrs. Kaifi, both with cultural and racial roots in the Indian subcontinent, had already expressed regret at him being late, and mentioned how they always tried to keep time. it was nice to have one my biggest cultural challenges here--time management, or lack thereof--affirmed by people of another culture, though i think we'd all been in African long enough not to really be surprised or mind the Shekh's timing: that's how things work here. the Shekh sat in the chair Mrs. Kaifi had been using, herself perching on a stack of cushions, and we kept talking, sunlight sinking through afternoon on the dusty main street outside.

with the Shekh's arrival i was able to get into the questions i was really interested in: Islamic spiritual practice. that is to say, not about what Muslims say, but what they do[1]. after all, words can be interpreted many different ways, attested to by both the amount of divisions within Islam (Sunnu, Shia, Kadiria, Wahabiya, Amadiya, Ismailia, and Bohora are the ones they mentioned) and those in Christianity. holy words come from the holy experiences of people, but it seems to me that unless we have such experiences ourselves, we will never properly understand what the others wrote: words are not enough[2]. and once we've had such experiences, that understanding will probably be post-relevant. so what i want to know most is how to get there, what Islam teaches about spiritual practice[3].

the Shekh didn't disappoint: he gave ready answers to all my questions, and Mr. and Mrs. Kaifi filled in gaps they heard in what he said (them being fluent in English and Swahili as well as their native tongue). the basic spiritual practice is congregational prayer five times a day, as led by the Shekh. it includes a time for personal supplication to Allah, and a repeated prayer similar to that done in Christianity and Hare Krisna, counted on the digits of the fingers rather than with a Rosary or bead necklace. the center of their practice is sajida, or bowing before God. the Shekh explained to me that a Muslim will bow before no one or nothing other than Allah, so it is an action with a lot of meaning to them. before joining the congregation, devotees must go through ablution, ritually cleaning themselves before entering the mosque, and they explained certain rules to me that had to be followed in daily life to remain clean enough for entering the place of God and worshiping. once a year is the holy fast of Ramadan, echoing Christian Lent, ending with a a feast of celebration (like Easter). they said there were no more mystical or intense spiritual traditions within Islam: aside from daily prayer, it was up to the individual how much they read the Qu'ran, or recited verses, etc.

talk went on to other topics, Mr. Kaifi being interested in politics and how Christianity's clash with Islam had become so politicized since September 11th, and the US's role in the ongoing Isreal-Palestine conflict. by this time two of the Kaifi's three children had shown up and taken seats on the stacks of new mattresses, and we sat and had a discussion about religion in politics globally, the Shekh excluded by language but apparently content to sit. in fact, he seemed pretty content and happy all the time, with a smile you couldn't help smiling back: a pretty different image of the Islamic holy man than the angry, fire-and-brimstone image i'm used to from American media.

i'm not so big on politics myself, having given it up as necessarily evil so long as people can't treat each other decently, but i never mind a chance to explain my and many US citizens' views on events not well portrayed by the media, like the re-election of GW Bush, the invasions surrounding September 11th, and the more recent election of Mr. Obama (whose full name, Mr. Kaifi was quick to point out to me, is Mubarack Hussein Obama, as African Islamic as it gets). so we sat and had a nice chat, and Mrs. Kaifi showed me some of her poetry, which she's asked me to show to you (it's printed in a separate blog).

then the time came that often naturally comes: we all knew we'd said what we should, and i saw it was coming close to time for prayer anyway. i thanked the three for being so welcoming and willing to give their time to help me understand Islam... but still felt like something was missing. like i hadn't really understood something... and i realized that was because it had all been just talk. how was i supposed to understand Islam and its spiritual practices if i never tried them?

so, already on my way to the door, i asked if i might join them for prayer. they agreed, and told me to come back around 6:30 for evening prayer. that felt better. i thanked them again and, shaking the Shekh's hand, headed back up the road to shower and get ready.

[1] it's Theravada and Zen Buddhism that made me think like this: that no matter what doctrine a believer may hold to, the truth of God is beyond it, beyond words, and the only real way to know that truth is to experience it, through spiritual practice. Buddhism is humble enough to call itself a finger pointing at the moon, the moon of God, and warn its followers not to confuse the two: the finger is only a guide, unnecessary once you've seen the moon. in other words, the teachings of the religions are not ends, not Commandments for life, they are guides to help you on your own path towards God. and once you've gotten there, you will no longer need them. and i buy that viewpoint: an analogue in the West was Christianity's shift from holding services and printing Bibles in a scholarly language only priests could understand, and those priests therefor intercessing on regular believers' behalf for a God they couldn't study for themselves, to the church accepting that Bibles be published and services be held in local languages, thus removing the priest as a step between devotees and God. it is empowerment of the individual to make their own relationship with God, and little as i think i know about God, i think that my relationship with It is one no one can make for me. so the texts of religions don't matter much to me: they are interesting, they are guides to go along with spiritual practice, but what i'm most interested in is what that religion's peoples DO to experience/understand/get close to/live like or with God.

[2] a lot of theological disagreement i've gotten into with Christian friends in Uganda over the meaning of the Bible has come back needing it 'to be revealed' by God as you are reading. in other words, the words themselves don't necessarily communicate the meaning God intended--if you believe there is a God and S/He/It/Them/We/all-of-those-again-in-lower-case intend/s anything--it is them as read in the grace of God that gets the real meaning across. though you might also think any words read in that grace would become holy...

[3] other examples being: intensive meditation in Buddhism; personal prayer and fasting in Christianity; music and chanting in Hinduism; substance use, spirit quests and physical trials in native religions; the strict morality of Judaism; dance in Sufi; etc. humans have thought of a lot of ways to come into a closer relationship with Mystery. couldn't they all be different paths up the same mountain to the same peak? like the 'greater vehicle' and 'lesser vehicle' of Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism? could any of them, practiced faithfully by thousands and millions, be without value? is it ultimately not the practice but the will of the practitioner that makes it successful?

experience
so promptly at 6:30 i showed up at their place on the main road. Mr. Kaifi greeted me, introduced to me to his sons who would go with me to the mosque, then i sat talking with Mrs. Kaifi about her writing, about being a foriegner in Tanzania, about her childhood growing up in Pakistan and Dubai. after a tranquil half hour or so, it was time to go.

her kids are a riot: three boys, self-styled kings of Kigoma, who have to greet everyone they meet, big or small, with anything in two or three languages, most of it sounding pretty cheeky. between the constant banter as we walked to their mosque, the older one, Imran, explained to me a bit about what we'd do once there.

their mosque was a tranquil place with a thick hedge and a green minareted building in a shady compound. we walked up the steps, removing our shoes at the last one, and sat on adjacent blocks in front of water taps coming from the wall, Imran guiding me through ablution: three washes of the mouth, three washes of the nostrils, three of the face, hands, scalp, ears and feet, moving through it with the practiced efficiency of someone who'd been doing it all their life. faces and feet still dripping, we walked around to the main hall of the mosque, slipping our shoes into a cabinet.

one thing that struck me right away was how casual the place seemed to be: some men were praying, some were sitting, a few were sprawled asleep here or there. some looked like they were just hanging out in the house of Allah, bullshitting with friends.

we followed suit: sat on the carpeted floor with our backs to the wall, chatting about this and that. Imran showed me some pictures of holy relics on the wall, ran me through what the actual prayer process would be like. people were drifting in, some of them apparently doing personal prayer, others just killing time til the Shekh came.

he finally did, and in the little booth at the front of the room we watched him turn on the microphone and make that famous, longing call for prayer, one i've heard too often through slightly distorting loudspeakers to really believe is made by a human, and sat spellbound by the combination of that familiar voice booming from outside, and unfamiliar natural version of it sounding so close. it was Islam as i'd known it and was coming to know it, at once.

then everyone stood up, lined ourselves shoulder to shoulder along the stripes in the floor, and it was time to begin. the Skekh prayed for awhile in Arabic, we all said Nam, and then following the timing of his words bent down, hands on knees, straightened, then prostrated ourselves on the floor, everyone moving together. each step was taken slowly, with a lot of silence by the Shekh, in which you could just make out individual people whispering prayers; whether they were personal prayers or recitation of verses i don't know.

we did that routine, standing, bending down, straightening, then prostrating, a few times, in time with the Shekh's singsong prayer. there was something powerful about all those people moving together, praying together, humbling themselves before God. the Arabic words and the design of the place also gave it a peculiar Mid-Eastern feeling, though everyone there but me was African. i felt i had left Tanzania somewhere.

after some prostrations, we remained kneeling on floor, and people were muttering prayers and pointing one finger on their right hand out from their knee towards the front of the room (presumably in the direction of Medina). then they started muttering different prayers and touching each digit of their fingers, which i caught on after a bit was a method of counting repetitions, like the beads of a Rosary. then we all sang a song, sort of tonelessly Middle Eastern and mainly consisting--as far as I could tell--of the name of Allah, a long, droning song i could easily imagine becoming meditative in the tonal sense that Hare Krisna and other Hindu services are.

then, abruptly, we were done. people started standing up, greeting each other, and making their way outside. the actual prayer part hadn't taken twenty minutes, with ablutions and waiting around 45 minutes or an hour. i walked away not feeling fundamentally changed, or moved, but it had been interesting. on the way back i quizzed Imran how often people actually go--clearly the place hadn't been very full--and he said most people maybe make it once or twice a day, though on Fridays the place gets so full people have to pray in the courtyard.

he asked me what i thought of it, if i liked it. i said i didn't know, but would like to find out more. so i decided tomorrow i would attend all five prayer services, to try to get a feel for what it was like, both a deeper understanding of the individual prayer, and a feel for what hemming a day in congregational prayer that way--the main Islamic spiritual practice--was like. much as i had understood a lot of the doctrine today with the Shekh and the Kaifi's help, i didn't feel i would really understand the religion without experiencing it more. so i went to bed early, anticipating the five AM call to prayer, thoughts of the Almighty in my head.

anita
called--the girl from Bujumbura--pretty late that night. she'd apparently been flashing me--calling briefly so her number'd show up, in other words--for awhile, but my phone doesn't register out-of-Tanzania numbers, so i didn't know who it was. i'd been asleep, so the conversation was a little unreal. somewhere in it she came out with, "I loved you."

What do you do with that at 1 in morning from a girl you met briefly and have no chance of seeing again? she wasn't referring to any physical encounters, by the way.

i replied as best i could, something like 'thank you' or 'me too,' and she said she wanted to come see me in Uganda...

and then it was time for sleep again.

day twenty-five: kigoma

2010-02-02T23:48:00.004-07:00

you can be who you want
when you are traveling: it's like being the new kid at school, knowing you can tell any kind of lie about yourself and, as long as you can back up it up in action, it will be true to everyone there. i don't really want to lie, like i once did on moving to a new school my senior year, trying to appear as though i'd been the 'big man on campus' as someone put it (i failed pretty successfully within a week or two) but it is a chance to redefine yourself. no one knows you but you: and you always know yourself as more than the regular society you've been part of. so you can call yourself a name no one ever would have, bring to light a part of yourself you never have, and people just accept it, like they accept whatever style of hair you have no matter what it was the day before. you are new.

it's a chance, too, to redefine yourself for yourself: there is no daily schedule to follow, no social roles that need fulfilling: you are free. especially so, i guess, when you travel alone, but even with a good friend, you are still free, and finding your way through each day like a new puzzle, rather than an old maze you know well. if you've always wanted to try diving, now is your time to take a course and call yourself a diver for a week. if you've wanted to finally be quiet, or finally be talkative, the world is yours. if you've been secretly practicing dance moves for the moment you can get out of your constrictive social circle and dance, here you are. peers and friends can be as constrictive as physical or mental boundaries, and in travel you escape them.

so for me, the escape has been from a definition of myself as anything i've been: i am no longer a student, no longer a singer, no longer a teacher, no longer an NGO administrator. i'm a writer. and telling this to people somehow leapfrogs the irking question that often follows in the States, "Oh, so you want to be a writer?" ...there's no real difference between these two, but there is all the difference in the world in how you are seen, which can affect how you see yourself.

it's not only been a social thing, the frame i give myself by which people picture me. it's been a lifestyle change. writing was always a part of life in university, was something i did as much as i could while in Japan, keeping up my blog, was a goal i had for my time in Uganda, to write regularly, and i did. but nothing like what i'm doing here: you can see the length of the blogs i've written in just a few weeks. and on top of them, everything you're not seeing: the work on the other books, which was to be the focus of my writing attempts while here.

whatever i'm writing, it is part of my daily routine, and often the focus of it: something like wake up, get some breakfast, write for a few hours, go to an internet cafe to post what i wrote the day before, then do some business in town, or explore something i saw in my guidebook or as i was walking around town, or go back and write some more. the rest of the day will be a rhythm of doing, reading and writing, but a focus on the last.

i don't know if i'm writing anything worthwhile: like i said, more than expected the travel part of this trip has trumped the writing part, and i find myself more inclined to write on what's immediately happening than to focus on the books. it's okay: any kind of writing is good writing, i think, as any kind of exercise makes an athlete stronger, though eventually you'll need to focus if you want to be the best you can be. the point is, for the first time in my life, i am a writer, in name and act. this has been a dream of mine since i was an 8-year-old laying on the couch devouring The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia.

and here i am, freed by travel to do it, and loving it.

needing travel to start something, or redefine myself, is surely an excuse, as needing to move to a new school to be the Most Popular Kid is surely an excuse. both are changes you could have made yourself, and ultimately will have to make yourself for them to stick. and without going anywhere, without changing your social life much at all, if you started acting like a writer, a singer, or whatever you wanted to be, everything else would follow suit. and no matter how much you redefine yourself in talk, if you don't also walk that talk, you will not have changed. what's more, people will be disappointed in you, as you will be in yourself. some kind of big change, starting a new job or moving to a new place, or traveling, is just a grace period in which for you make the change, is a time for you to go out of your society and face yourself, and hopefully come back changed, with something new to share[1].

so that is where i am, out somewhere away from everything i know and everyone who knows me, facing myself, trying to see a writer in the mirror, to find that place in myself that has always been a writer, and bring it to the light.

and you know, i think it just might be working.

[1] In other words, it is an archetypal hero quest as described best by Joseph Campbell in his book Hero With A Thousand Faces

My Moon the Tanzanian Ebleskeeber Lady
from the quiet old lady who cooks Tanzanian ebleskeebers in the morning, as i'm buying my morning six to eat with bananas and jam, the same one who has spoken only Kiswahili to me four days running, comes

"What is your name?"

I tell her, and she keeps on with a stiff but very capable English, asking me questions: how long i've been here, where i'm from, how old i am, the whole time working on her ebleskeebers as well.

i ask her about them, and learn they are called Bitumbua, made from rice and wheat flour and a bit of sugar. she is here frying them every morning, in a giant cast-iron pan black with use. it is, and the bitumbua are, remarkably similar to the Danish breakfast food my dad makes, ebleskeebers: cooked in the same kind of pan with small round indentations, first one side then flipped to cook the other, coming out as a little saucerlike patty with crispy outside and soft inside. her batter is a little heavier than my dad's, and the cakes are a little flatter because the same amount of batter goes into a bit bigger indentation, but they are eerily similar, down to the little pocket that forms between the top and bottom layers that's just right for jam.

i ask her what her name is. she tells me Maimune, and i say "My moon?"

she answers yes, and i smile, and take my still-warm Bitumbua back to my room for a little breakfast, having made a new friend. My Moon the Tanzanian ebleskeeber lady.

i want friends, but i don't want friends.
i've learned something funny about myself: i want friends, but i don't want friends. or, i want friends only when i want them. or, i want friends who give me my space. or, i want friends but only good ones.

traveling alone for long periods is strange. obviously, if you're not an introvert you shouldn't do it. and even if you are, it gets lonely sometimes, so you make friends. i think the slow trickle of social charm that would normally be spent as it comes forth in mediocre charisma builds up as you travel alone, so that when you want a friend you have a whole wealth of funny and charming things to say and topics to talk about, and it's really easy to make them. that's nice, i've done that few times here in Kigoma.

thing is, after we've spent some time together, i start to change poles: i've had my fill. i know this person will most likely never be a best friend, or even part of my life after tomorrow, so we have our talk and then i'm done.

then--because i'm funny--if they're still around the next day i start to fear them.

take Wilson, for instance. a nice enough Tanzanian i met, the guy who's hooked me up with the dump truck to Dar es Salaam (which he'll also be riding in, apparently). we had supper and some beers one night, have sat on the front porch of the Zanzibar Lodge talking a few times. but when it's me-time, when it's Levi-time, boy i sure don't want to see him. the problem is his room's right across the hallway from mine, so i'm always fearing i'll open it and see him and have to interrupt me-time. even if he's not there, i glance with fear to his doorway: is the light on? is--God forbid--the door cracked, inviting guests or indicating imminent emergence of person? i experience a real quake of fear at these things.

it's nonsense, i know: if i don't want to hang out, don't feel like chatting, i should just act that way and be done with it. but somehow i can't: when i'm around people i get drawn into them, and if they want to stay and chat, if they want to go have a beer somewhere, i sometimes find myself going along. maybe that's the real cause of my fear: i'm afraid of my own social inability to be as i please around others. that may be a bit shocking for people who know me as someone at ease with myself, but i'm not completely! i have my idiosyncracies. like this one. no offense to Wilson, or other travel friends, but i'm still learning how to deal with y'all when i want my own space.

an exceptionally nice sunset
was experienced, sitting on the deserted beach of a non-operational guesthouse tonight, watching our good red sun sink behind a peninsula and sketch the sky a glorious orange, gold, crimson and violet. the waves came in slow on the sand, water reflecting the colors of the sky like a molten mirror sea. i'd been on my bike desperately searching for a place to catch the sunset, having abandoned what i was doing when i realized how nice it was going to be, and in the search for a good place to watch it met an undefinedly-European couple who took me back to their place, an unoperational guesthouse with a lovely little sand beach. it was exactly what i'd been looking for, and not a moment too soon. the sunset was exceptionally nice. a thank-you-whatever-you-are-that-made-me-conscious moment. thank you!

the Bastard King
has shown its true literary colors as a thoroughly worthless read. and yet i am page 430, and fearing its close in another 40 pages, as i have no fiction with which to replace it. the writing is so bad it actually acts as inspiration, because i have a constant dialogue in my head with the author about what he might have done to make it more interesting, realistic, dramatic, less repetitive, etc. and at some point it actually moves me to stop reading and write better than what he did. so it's not been a total waste. but if i had it all to do again, i might've chosen a different book back at Edirisa.

day twenty-four: kigoma - that place i was going - kigoma

2010-02-02T04:54:00.002-07:00

i'll know it when i see it
when i first stepped out of the captain's crew in Kigoma port, and looked around at the green arms of the bay stretching out on both sides of Kigoma, there was a place i wanted to go. of course, i was excited about going to Tanzania in general, but i mean specifically, i saw one place i wanted to go: the very tip of the northern arm of the bay, where two little hillocks stretch out from a steep green hill, like a baby's hand reaching into the water, new and untouched. i wanted to go there.

i think it's important to pay attention to things like that, the very first feelings and impressions you get on going somewhere or meeting someone. if you go to that place you felt on the very first glance you wanted to go, if you make friends with that person who on the first glance gave you a good feeling, you are affirming yourself, your own curiosity and your freedom to satisfy it. and usually, it turns out well.

i haven't always followed those kind of instictive feelings. in fact, for a long time in my life, things had to make sense to be done, had to be logical progressions towards a known end. so if i wanted something on that hill, if i'd decided it would be the best place to go swimming, etc., then i might logically decide to go there, so long as it fit into other plans. i would actually ignore my gut feelings on first feel, actually, disregarding them as superstitious, and wanting first to give everything the dubious benefit of doubt, whether it seemed bad or good.

well, i guess i've grown out of it: life is no fun, and often pretty lumpy/unsynchronicitous if you just follow your brains around all day. we are more than that, and if we want to live as whole humans we've got to embrace being more, and work it in. let go a little with whatever's ruling your life, let other things have a say. in my case, that means listening to irrational feelings now and then, going or leaving or talking or keeping quiet for no good reason, and paying serious attention to whims like they'd been considered arguments for or against something. i don't know for a fact this way is better--there's no control group in the experiment of life--but it's certainly been more fun.

so today was that day for me, the day to follow whim. i followed it down the road to town, out another one that looked to be going the right direction, off that onto dirt, past a fish-rank fish market, a brown beach full of women washing clothes, a shady market under palm trees, up a hill into the market's brick and reed village, through its houses and shops steadily climbing, kids running after my bike, yelling CHUPA!, til the gaps between houses outpaced the buildings and the hills rose up to the right, bay stretching blue to the left. i followed the path then through deep, eroded waterways, up treeless gravel patches where it was little more than a dusty line in the rock, across shakey wood bridges over deeper waterways, past houses walled with standing reeds, down into rougher waterways with no bridges, using my mountain bike like it was intended to be, up again through dry rows of cassava seedlings, past the occasional hut, hillside sloping steeply down into the sea, that destined hillock coming closer, rode under the shade of a big mango tree, roots exposed, through waterways so narrow i had to push the bike before me, up a long trail of close-hanging bush, and there, finally, it was before me: the silhoutte of a single shady tree, and the long, blue expanse of Lake Tanganyika, boundless as the ocean.

it was beautiful. perfect. beyond all that. it was what i'd been looking for. and walking to the edge of the land a few feet beyond the tree, i saw down below a gorgeous beach of rocks, gradually descending into the clear, bluegreen waters of the lake, coast proceeding as a line of cliffs off to my right. a place to swim, a place to read, a place to let nature's beauty soak in, i knew it once i'd seen it: this was where i was going.

the rest of the story
what i didn't mention was J.

J lived in the hut near the biggest eroded waterway, and called to me once i'd passed it, eager to tell me something in Kiswahili. when he came over, i understood he was asking if i was going to swim. i said yes, and he started off the trail before me, going to lead me.

okay. i was having fun doing it on my own, a bit more of an adventure than being led somewhere, but i followed along, peddling slowly to match his walk. it was the classic picture of a helpless white guy following an african wherever he was going. there was only one path to follow anyway, and after a bit the scenery of his back rather than the open stretch of hill leading to the water paled. so i stopped him and said in no uncertain terms thank you, i'd be going now.

and i went: over the river and through the woods, to that place that i knew i was going. and once i got there, i was hot and sweaty, and the lake was a gorgeous blue. the only problem being, it was about fifty feet down a cliff.

so i tried to find a way down, and on climbing back up from the first failed attempt, saw a couple of fishermen on the shore waving me down another way. so i followed their gestures, not much worried about being alone on this little beach with some local fisherfolk, and scrambled down a kind of natural rock stair to the bottom. and who should be there, grinning and reaching out to shake my hand, but J. he was again really wanting to tell me something in Kiswahili, and i listened for a bit, but i was still hot and the lake was right there, so i nodded and said thank you after explaining again that i don't understand Kiswahili, and jumped into the lake.

now, here's the thing: i was kind of lying. either Kiswahili is close enough to Luganda, or people here are good at body language, or it's not a hard language to learn, because if i really pay attention to someone, i can usually guess what they're talking about. J was no exception. the only thing is, i pretty much already knew i didn't want to know anything he was talking about. at first, my antipathy was categorical: that was not the time for talk, that was the time for sweet water and sunshine. so i got naked--as most Tanzanian men do before they swim, though god help a woman who ever tried it--and jumped in the water. and when it was time for floating heavenly without much sense of being more than a stretch of the lake, it still wasn't the time for talk, and i mostly ignored him trying to do so to me from the shore.

eventually, he was insistent and i'd had enough of a swim. so i came out, and he tried to teach me to skip stones. i already know how, so we skipped for awhile, me standing there naked drying off, giving half an ear to his language i could half-understand. i caught enough to know that he wanted to take me around the far side of the island, where we could take nice pictures and there was a rock you could wade out to, and maybe some interesting fish. thing was, i wasn't interested: this was where i was going, and i was here. once i'd dried off, it was time for some peaceful writing under that tree up there with the lake and the breeze. i tried to explain that to him, but he was as good at ignoring what he half-understood as i am, so when i started to climb back up the cliff, he came along, and wanted to hold my bag for me. more of the mzungu following african through africa like a lost albino puppy. i guess it offends my american male individualism: it's like an affront for someone to assume i can't do things myself--especially when i've already shown i can, and not asked for help.

long story short, i parked myself under the tree with my book and told him this is where i was, thank you for everything. and he squatted down and had some things he really needed to say to me, at first about places we could go, how we could repair my bike (the front tire had gone flat while i'd been swimming), then when i wasn't interested segueing into the hook i'd known was coming: how his mother had died of a stomach illness, how his dad was working in a different town (the place i saw with the Spanish girls), how he had never gotten past fifth grade, how he was hungry even now, they didn't have any food at home.

this kind of story was more moving the first time i heard it, about a year and a half ago. you'll remember i heard almost exactly the same thing from Daudi yesterday. and i'm not denying that any of it was true, it probably was, but i can't personally give all these kids the financial support they need to eat and finish high school and then go to university in america. more than that, here i was in the place i'd been going, the most beautiful spot i may have found on the whole trip, ready to just relax with a good book or to do some writing, and Mr. J was insistent on telling me his life story, and leaving me to connect the dots back to the ample amount of money i had to give away.

so i thought i'd cut it off in the bud. i looked at him straight, i said "Thank you, J, for showing me how to get down the cliff, for everything, but i'm not going to give you money. I can't and it is not my personal responsibility to support every needy person on earth." then i said it again in Luganda, which he looked like he caught a fair part of, then asked if he understood. he said yes. i went back to my book. he stood staring at me for awhile, then squatted down and began telling me something again in very earnest Kiswahili.

it was maybe at that point that i should've just ignored him, let him actually understand what he'd said he'd understood just now, and go away. but it's rude to ignore someone who's talking to you, something i can't stand people doing to me. so i had to listen: instead of to the brilliant words of Mr. Campbell, or the peaceful sound of the lake on the shore, i strained to make out J's Kiswahili, which after having been understood was a repetition of what he'd just said to me, followed by requests for specific things i could buy him.

i cut him off this time, a little forcefully, making eye contact. "J, I'm not going to give you money, no matter how much you talk. Please leave me alone."

he wouldn't: his talk just got more insistent, more and more Kiswahili... and by this time the peaceful easy feeling i'd had was quickly going, replaced with the mzungu-in-the-spotlight-being-asked-for-money feeling, which is not my favorite. finally J said to me straight "Give me money."

and i said to him as straight, "No."

"No?"

"No."

now we had come down to it: communication had happened. he wanted money, for reasons i partially understood. i didn't want to give him money, and didn't know how much of my reasons he understood. i knew them well enough: one, he didn't look like he was really in need of food, he looked healthy. two, i didn't have enough money to get him back in school, nor the permanency here to make sure it happened. three, i don't want to encourage africans to think that they can get money by begging, don't want to encourage dependency. four, and most importantly for me personally, i can't solve everyone's problems, especially not with money. i just spent the last year working for free, trying to improve the lives of 50 orphaned and street children, and the other staff who are working to support them. of course, he doesn't know that, but he doesn't need to. it is not my obligation to give money. i tried giving him what i had: on the shore, i'd taught him some English when he said he wanted to learn, had been friendly to him, had stood there and tried to just be natural as two people together, skipping stones. it's as much as i gave Daudi yesterday, as much as i think i owe anyone. now J was interested in taking more, and had just gotten a pretty final NO as an answer. and didn't want to accept it.

J is about my younger brother's Pete's age: a dangerous age. the age you have just come into your physical strength, the age when you can easily resent authority and any resistance to doing what you want, an age involving a lot of hormones and unresolved anger. i eyed J's arms: he was strong. he was fit. if it came to a fight, up here on the cliff where no one would know, he would probably win. and then he could take all my money, my computer, my credit card, my bike, everything. i knew that. if i ran, he could catch me. but i didn't care: i am a human being, and demand to be treated like one. so i stared him down.

and he stared me down, clearly angry.

i stared.

he stared. no? no. time passed.

after a good bit of this, i realized my mood for sitting there enjoying the day was gone. so i said, "Do you want me to leave? You want to make sure at least that I don't enjoy this place either? OK, fine." and i stood up, strapped my stuff to my bicycle, and started walking it flat-tired down the long hot walk back to town, thoroughly disgruntled. he didn't follow.

at the next mango tree, my shoulders already burned and burning further, i stopped to put on some sunscreen. he approached from behind, and passing said 'twende?' 'we go?' i answered in my best swahili, which was probably wrong, 'oyende' 'you go.'

but i was still too disgruntled to do anything but go back either, and had thoughts in my head of going back to the spot, only to have a very angry mr. J coming back ready to do some violence to the mzungu, his mzungu, who hadn't cared about his life problems, who had been so ultimately greedy with his money after mr. J had so kindly helped him in every way he could. i kept walking.

my feelings calmed a bit. it was a damn shame to leave a spot like that so soon. J was gone anyway. if he came back, he came back. i was hungry and had about a swallow of water left in the bottle, and a flat tire to boot, but hell with it, i was going back to that spot, and was going to enjoy it and everything else be damned.

and that's what i did. J didn't come back, my stomach held off, my thirst didn't kill me, and i read a really interesting chapter in my book on myths, while the breeze from the water rolled over, and little white sails moved lazily toward the horizon. life was generally very good again. i'd won a victory of my mind over itself, over the forces of frustration. it was a victory for me as a real person over the social stereotyping of me here as a rich man who ought to be giving money. and most of all, it was what i'd wanted to do since i got here, and i did it and enjoyed it, no regrets. and that was best of all.

J is part of something i've needed
to work through for a long time, as i think Daudi was. they're a pair in my mind, two young and somewhat needy african boys who started off seeing me as their chance. with Daudi, maybe because his English was better, but I think more because of his personality, we were able to get past that to a real friendship, brief as it was. i treated J the same, but he never let go of wanting money, and so things fell apart. he was probably the most insistent asker of money i have ever encountered, and doing so at one of the worst possible times, not when i'm sitting on a hot bus or walking to buy some groceries or something, but at a most beautiful and peaceful space and time. so i had to really face up to his idea of me, as someone with an obligation to give him money. and if i didn't agree with it, and didn't want to just buy him off so i could avoid confrontation and displeasantry--avoid ever expressing it and trying to change his mind, in other words--i had to stand up to him and let him know that. and that's what i did: i stood up for my right to be selfish, to not give to every needy cause i saw. because i can't. and i will not be manipulated by people who think i can.

deciding on my ability and what obligation i have to help, and standing up for it, was something i've needed to do for awhile here in Africa. previously i'd just have vague feelings of guilt and selfishness when an old woman or a street kid came up to me asking for money. i know where i stand now. it isn't a total refusal to help: i still gave a crippled child money that night, still bought a better lunch than i was having for a half-paralyzed man the next day. but i did it because i wanted to, because i was moved to from the heart, not because i'd been asked to. and that, for me at least, is how it should be. so thank you, J. i hope you, and the legion here who think and act like you did, can understand.

"Good morning" "Fine, how are you"
it's happening again: i'm being beat over the voice box with African English, Tanzanian at the moment, and it's forging my already-battered English in its own image.

i say, "Good morning."

s/he answers, "Fine how are you" with no question intonation. It doesn't sound odd anymore. next time someone says to me good morning, i may just answer fine how are you. it's not just the phrasing, but the pronunciation and intonation, too. awhile back i learned to speak English like a Ugandan does, to make myself better understood, and spend so much more time now speaking that way than i would using 'American English' that i'm not sure which is naturally any more. getting to speak without having to inhibit my slurs and colloqialisms has become a real luxury, to be savored.

speaking of Uganda, in that country how are you, pronounced for the most part, howayu, was itself a greeting word and not a question, to be answered with another howayu. this took a little more getting used to, but it started to come naturally from my mouth towards the end. Rwanda and Burundi are exempt because they are Francophone, but i noticed ca va never seemed to get answered with more than ca va, and my one rabbit left in the hat from high school french with Mrs. Anderson, common tallez vous, was always met with blank stares.

that's OK. this is Africa, a continent scarred by colonialism and now trying to make its own way with what the white folks left them, trying to make that their own. and in the process, it becomes foreign again to us.

last example, from the Soga people: "Morning." "Morning, too."

oh, America, i hope we are still mutually intelligible when next we meet.

day twenty-three: kigoma-ujiji-kigoma

2010-02-01T03:53:00.002-07:00

dr. livingstone, i presume?
these were my words to the sun-red and clearly weary white travelers i met near the end of a cobblestone road deep in Tanzania. they just nodded and pointed, the young boy in front with his coat over his head too determined to get back to civilization to respond.

i was half-joking: yes, we were in the heart of africa and our meeting unlikely, but more so i was asking directions to the famous doctor himself, or at least to the place where those famous words were uttered. it's only a few kilometers from where i'm staying, but i managed to completely miss the turn and end up on the other side of the little trading center where it's found, Ujiji (isn't that a nice name? the kind a sci-fi writer would make up for one of his planets), where the paved road turned to dust.

a friendly policeman there directed me back the way i'd come, impressed by my kiswahili (i'd managed to use everything i knew in the conversation, including my new actual full sentence, _____ iko wapi?, meaning where is _____?), and after some more iko wapi's i'd found the street, but wasn't just greeting this sun-beaten and possibly disgruntled family of travelers in jest: i was really wondering if i was going the right way.

they managed some nods or small noises, my joke either too great to set in upon them all at once, or too pathetic to muster more. either way, i knew i was on the right track.

when i got to the beach without seeing the memorial, though, i figured i'd missed it again, and the friendly folks there directed me back up the hill, carmel-peanut chunks in hand. and there it finally was: a shabby brown building with 'LIVINGSTONE MEMORIAL -->' painted in small black letters along the beam.

it wasn't too impressive, for being the home of those famous words: a big stone pillar in the center of a walled-in courtyard, probably with a plaque, and some trees. the grass had been cut. wanting to do things right, i first sought out someone working there, and found two people joking together in a back office, who then demanded 5000 shillings from me to see the place. as i'd already seen it, i thanked them all the same and left, presuming that'd been dr. livingstone.

the beach at ujiji
was a lot more interesting, and was presumably why livingstone had chosen that place to hole up: some picturesque papyrus houses along a long, sandy beach, one side packed with wood boats being repaired, the other with people swimming, bathing, washing clothes, or some combination thereof. tied fifty feet out was the big green and yellow sloop Allah Akbar (God is Greater), looking straight out of a postcard. and beyond, out to the horizon, the sparkling waters of Lake Tanganyika.

it was too much: i had to get in.

shedding clothes, dropping bicycle, laying wallet + credit card carelessly on the sand with a couple hand motions to the lady frying chapati nearby to watch them, i ran for the water. my run was speeded by how sweaty i'd gotten on the bike ride, and how baking hot the sand was.

the water was lovely: just cool enough to be refreshing, clean, a few waves, the white sand underfoot gently sloping down, maybe three feet deep at thirty feet out. i found some kids to play with, wondering what kind of charmed childhood they were having with this lake nearby, then exercised my newfround freedom to float, kicking long and slow away from the shore, occasional thoughts for my bike and credit card drowned in water and weightlessness. i mentally thanked livingstone and stanley for making Ujiji famous: it was well worth finding.

he said he'd been waiting a long time
for me, buckling a belt into his white trousers, plaid shirt neatly tucked in. there on the shores of Ujiji, as i'd been walking along the coast with not a thought in my head, stood Daudi, worn and polished black dress shoes a few inches from the surf, waiting for me.

"oh yes, i've really been waiting a long time to meet you and never thought i could meet someone like you, it has really been my dream to meet someone like you, really, i think i can call you my friend or even my best friend because..."

something like that: about three times as many words as i'd spoken all day, tumbling out of this teenage boy, shaking my hand repeatedly and so excited about meeting me that i didn't really get much chance to talk.

as soon as he introduced himself as an orphan i knew the hook was coming, but i waited for it because we were standing in his dream, and avoided it as best i could by mentioning generally how many africans i meet have it in their minds that all white people are rich...

and talk continued to his mother, who doesn't have use of her legs, and how he was struggling to get through secondary school, and how he'd been drinking tea on the other side of the village when he saw me approach, and had really been so excited to see me and thought to himself that maybe his dream would come true because he would really love so much to talk with someone like me, and now here i am and i think i can even say we are best friends or we are brothers because i have never had a chance to talk with someone like you...

laying it on thick, but seemingly honestly, so i let it play itself out, and gradually we started to have a more interesting conversation, about his culture and the lifestyle here, and how things are different in Uganda and where i came from, the United States.

the sun was getting hot, me wearing just the pair of shorts i'd been swimming in, so i convinced him to walk, and we walked up to one end of the beach, and down to the other, passing the boats being repaired and fishermen laying out their nets, finally getting to where the sand broke up in reeds and patches of land.

he said he had something to show me, so we went inland, walking barefoot on sand that gradually heated up til it was scorching, and i found myself walking on prickly dry grass just to bear the heat, actually running to the first little pool of shade, the sand like hot coals. i ran, at least: Daudi laughed at me for having such weak soles, and took me on cooler-sand routes afterwards.

we walked through a maize field and tomato plantation to reach a lily-pad heavy little pond, where he'd wanted to show me all the fishermen, but they'd turned in for the day, as it'd gotten hot, so we skip-hopped back to the wet sands of the beach, my soles literally burned tender by this time (they stayed so the rest of the day), and all the while this boy Daudi talking a blue streak, like God had just granted him command of the English language and it was too amazing to stop even once.

taking advantage of my local guide, i had him show me the best restaurant in town, which happened to be that of the same chapati-frying lady i'd asked to watch my things. true to her gestures (we hadn't actually spoken), my things were all there, and Daudi and i shared a lunch of chapatis fried in palm oil, beans cooked with more of the same (made locally), and hot tea. sunlight filtered in through the gaps in the reed roof, and the lake breeze came in through the walls.

lunch done, it was time to leave. Daudi was nice, and he'd explained a lot of the local life to me, but i guess i've gotten used to solitude and quiet a bit--the blue streak English was starting to get to me. he walked me up to the road, and around the Livingstone Memorial i told him i'd best be riding if i wanted to reach Kigoma, and wrote my name and number on his hand in borrowed blue pen, then said goodbye.

Daudi might have just been another African trying to get money out of a mzungu, but his need was real, and his innocence honest. i heard in him speaking not a single kid on a beach in Tanzania, not just an orphan in need of help, but Africa: Africa with its real needs, Africa with its legacy of dependence on foreigners, itself like an orphan, abandoned by colonial parents before it could really take care of itself, beautiful ever-youthful continent held back by its own poverty and disorganization: a child in need of a parent. Daudi was in Senior 3, on that fragile line between child and adult, beginning to be able to take care of himself.

it's not something he or Africa can really understand, but though I am a member of that moneyed tribe that changed things forever here, I am myself living on borrowed money, and couldn't do much more for him than buy him lunch.

no, that's not true: i gave him my time, as i gave Uganda my time this last year and some, time enough for us to understand each other not just as Poor and Rich, or Black and White, or simply Stranger and Stranger, but as People. as the simple, idiosyncratic moments of humanity that each of us is, regardless of wealth or race or cultural heritage. i think i got there a bit with Daudi, in the course of our few hours together. I hope so. i am not ready to keep giving hand-outs to an African or an Africa just becoming able to take care of itself, but will always be ready to teach what i know, and bridge the gap between humans not yet known to each other, so long as the other side is willing to come halfway.

Daudi was. more than willing: his blue streak of language made the few things i did get in edgewise seem pretty meaningful, and he connected all the rest himself.

he thinks i might come back, might still be his sponsor for the rest of secondary school, might pay for him to come to america and get a degree. but even if i never do, i think we did something just as important, that he'd been waiting some time for: we made real friends with 'someone like you,' not just five-minute friends but friends who knew each other as real people. and that, in his own words, is a dream come true.

so were the four cute girls
who stayed the night at my guesthouse, but they were going to an invite-only party at a nice hotel in town, and it was too late to get invited. our conversation was a nice mzungu-break anyway, after my usual solitude and Daudi's blue streak, and we might catch up again in Dar es Salaam. i spent the last hour of the night on a rock overlooking the bay, full moon above illuminating little Kigoma town, singing itself to sleep.

day twenty-two: kigoma

2010-01-31T08:25:00.003-07:00

travel far, travel deep
kigoma town is starting to feel a bit more like home. i recognize people on the street, am developing favorite places to eat, finding new places to sit and watch the bay every day, and getting a settled feel for Tanzania like i didn't take time to in Rwanda or Burundi. it's nice. travel is not only about moving--when you stop moving so much physically, you start to travel in a different sense, deeper into local culture, deeper into relationships with people, deeper into the regular life of the place you came to see. instead of riding 80 kilometers, you ride down the street, and when Chas greets you from underneath a shady tree, you stop and talk awhile. you memorize a couple words from your guidebook in Swahili, then go out and try to use them with the lady frying Tanzanian ebleskeebers in the morning. you go back to the same restaurant, the waiters smiling at you because you made a very foolish joke using Swahili and gestures yesterday, and you order your new favorite cake, and try the other kind of juice. gradually, you start to feel a bit like a regular.

are you a regular? are you going to stay for a few years, or a lifetime? probably not. there are some who do. but compared to the You who stopped in towns like this just to buy a bottle of water, and none of the faces there ever became more than strangers, You are pretty regular. and fundamentally, always moving, always looking for a different place to sleep at night, for people you can trust, it gets tiring. it's good to settle in a town for a few days, and really get a feel for it, so you remember it as more than a point on the map when you move on.

that's what i'm doing here--still traveling, but traveling deep instead of far. maybe it's practice for when i finally stop these 5+ years of travel, and stay somewhere long enough to be a real regular. i wonder what that's like. wonder if i can be a regular after so much of irregularity. i know part is me is well ready. and part is scared. and i guess that means it's the right move--not backwards, but forwards, whether far or deep. if you feel that way, it's right.

the rest of the story
when i started this trip, i had two main purposes: to travel, and to write. the thing is, these blogs weren't my only or even my main goal in writing--they were to be a kind of side project to the main one, which is the reworking of blogs written over the last year and some in Uganda into a book format.

well, things change. not only have i spent a lot more time on these daily blogs than the book, i've started another book entirely... which i don't really want to talk about. suffice it to say, i've realized either project will take me longer than i have left in the vacation, and i'd like to finish them both.

but wasn't i going to have a book done by the end of the trip? i had so nicely planned out: i'd ride bicycle in the morning, thoughts a-stewing, then spend the afternoons writing all those stewed up thoughts, body tired but mind active.

and it's true, that's exactly what happens--but what i failed to account for was the travel aspect of it. meaning, a 40-day trip through East Africa turns out to be more exciting and attention-grabbing than reworking stories about the year that came before it. so what i think about, and want to write about, are not those old blogs but what is happening here and now.

thus the failure to get even halfway through initially reading the blogs i want to make into my book, much less start editing, rewriting and adding to them! i could do it: it would just mean ignoring everything around me, staying in one place, and holing up in a room to write, breathing outside air only to eat or rest. i wouldn't mind doing that, but East Africa... the road... it's rude to ignore them.

so i've accepted the book is not getting done. i've accepted, too, that this other book is not getting done. what is getting done is a lot of travel, new experiences, and daily blogs forming all that into something intelligible, to you and to me (writing helps me reflect on and understand what i've experienced). and that's worthwhile. so the books, book 1 and book 2, they'll get a bit done--i do still have plenty of free time, and more will to write than experiences to cover it--but basically, they're being forwarded to the initial period of joblessness in the states, and the emotional/experiential inertia of africa that is sure to be washing over me during that period.

in the meantime, there is so much more of africa to see--

nevertheless
i spent most of today holed up in my room writing, only coming out to eat or when the power failed and my battery ran out. i was working mainly on the new book... something i'm very excited about, but a little too early to actually talk about, in case it falls flat for some reason!

well the train
is officially not running. waiting around at the scenic old train station this morning, some officials finally told me 'it might be starting in february or march.' when i asked if february could possibly mean early Feb, like Monday, they said "yeah, maybe, you can check back then."

i've been in africa long enough to under the Schrödinger experiment's local implications: how you observe the situation changes what you see. in other words, i think there's actually zero chance of a train coming on Monday, or next week, but because i asked like that, he said maybe. when i asked if there'd been any schedule set, he said not yet. translation: it ain't coming, baby, it ain't coming for a long time.

which means another part of the loose itinerary for this trip (along with being able to bike through Burundi) has fallen through: without that train, there is a long, long ways between here and Dar es Salaam. more than i feel like biking, or would probably have time to even if i tried. the bus ride is a grueling couple of days, followed a week or so later by an even more grueling one through kenya back to uganda. not sure i'm ready for that, much as i want to see zanzibar and spend some time on the ocean. lake tanganyika is a pretty nice second...

but i do have this friend who can get me a free ride on a dump truck heading back to the coast, with a driver who probably doesn't speak any english, which also sounds interesting...

so i don't know where i'm going, yet. far travel or deep travel are my options, basically: see some more lovely places on their surface level, or get beneath that with the place i am. i don't know what i'll do, but that doesn't bother me: Kigoma's nice. maybe i'll just stay here...

day twenty-one: kigoma

2010-01-31T01:13:00.003-07:00

the old man and the see
the first moment i set eyes on the waters around Kigoma, walking sleep-bleared out of the captain's cabin on the Ruremesha, i knew i wanted to be in them. i considered just swimming in to shore before the port opened, actually, to get the required money to pay my visa fee and avoid all that red tape.

the red tape took most of the morning, and finding a guesthouse took me a lot of the afternoon, so i didn't get around to it yesterday. i did meet some nice Spanish girls that evening, and over drinks with them decided to find a swimming spot today.

so we did: took a packed mini-van out over windy dirt roads to a picturesque little fishing village, and from there walked, waded and stumbled over a rocky beach to the shady side of a little peninsula, not a soul around except for an old man toying with his boat.

i guess he got more than be bargained for, choosing that spot, because the girls proceeded to take all their clothes off like it was business as usual, and i followed suit. we all crawled into the lake, stones too slippery to do otherwise, til we could slip into the water. it was delicious. the old man stayed in his boat the whole time, watching.

it was a perfect day for swimming, sunny and beating hot, perfect place, beautiful and no one else around, and the lake water was just the right amount of cool for a good, long swim. it was hard to believe we were in a lake and not the ocean, aside from the absence of saltwater (which you never really notice until you're IN saltwater), but on the far horizon you could make out the green lines of the Congo, a lot more distant here than they'd been near Bujumbura.

we swam, we sunbathed, we laid out in the sun on hot stones. i've gotten fat enough in Africa to kind of float again, instead of sinking like a stone the way i used to, so swimming is a lot more fun, and i'm just discovering the joys of laying in the water, barely moving, weightless and careless, drifting.

the girls had a ferry south to catch later that day, so after a final dip we hiked back into town, them speaking Kiswahili like a blue streak at the locals (i felt like a tourist)(i guess i am), had really tasty bowls of wali daga, rice and fish local style, while the taxi filled up, and then one of the hottest, most uncomfortable taxi rides of my life coming back into town.

they left within the hour, but it was really nice spending a night and day with some other long-term travellers, and a reminder to me to be more friendly to foreigners. i guess the old man was happy too.

i snagged a couple pictures from Carolina's camera before they left:

The shore of Katonga fishing village, our little peninsula in the distance.

The little peninsula with the beach where we swam.

Yours truly, old-man beard hidden by camera angle.

no one to sing my theme song with
the two girls, Cristina and Carolina, had been travelling six weeks together, and as we spent time they reminded me of all the good things about travelling with another person. at the restaurant in the morning, they ordered different foods and tried each other's. the night before, they'd ordered one beer at a time and both drank, so it was colder. as we hiked out to the beach, they spontaneously started singing their theme song, 'Thats's the Way I Like It' (KC and the Sunshine Band), whereas i've got no one to sing mine with...

little things like that. i started off this trip pretty excited to be solo, to be free, to go at exactly my own pace and do exactly what i like, and i don't regret it. i still think it was the best choice, but i'm realizing it'd also be really fun to travel with someone else who traveled the same way. i guess with someone is less about self-discovery and more about fun: you are necessarily pulled more into each other's world, but it helps as an escape and chance to reflect on the one you are travelling through, whereas going solo you are just always in that world, except in the immediate escapes of music, bad fantasy novels, guesthouse rooms, etc. i could see they traveled well together, interested in doing the same things, both relaxed and independent, giving each other enough space. best of all, they've completely avoided the mzungu-spotlight by sharing it, and being able to laugh at it, whereas it's been a real nuisance for me.

anyways, this trip is a solo one. but the times i've shared it with others--eliot and shaun, tom, cristina and carolina--have been a nice break from me.

the rest of the day
i spent exploring Kigoma, talking with local folks, looking for good places to eat, relaxing. i'd gotten in a little too much nude sunbathing on the beach, and the white areas (wearing the same clothes every day for biking, i now have dark-brown areas and white areas. sandal straps have made my feet zebralike) ripened to a sensitive pink. i sat with some university students home for the holidays, saw a nice sunset from a hilltop, had my first plate of wali maharage, rice and beans, and fell asleep reading my trashy fantasty novel.

good day.

day twenty: lake tanganyika - tanzania

2010-01-30T07:06:00.003-07:00

more red tape
awaited me like a bloodthirsty swarm of insects when i got to Tanzania, but this was partially my own doing. as we sat in the port that morning, waiting for it to open up so we could dock, i decided to check if there were visa fees for entering Tanzania--a good while after, of course, i could get any money in case they were more than i had.

well, they were--i had 30 US dollars, and the guidebook said they needed 50, cash only.

shit.

so i asked for advice from the skipper and the goods-counter, who had nothing much of value to say, but did pass on my plight to the waiting immigration officer, so before even explaining myself i got a lengthy speech on how disappointing it was to meet someone of such high status (his words) who hadn't researched the immigration procedures of the place to which he was visiting. i felt like i was in high school, and had the yeah-yeah-stuff-it-you-suit kinda its-early-morning-get-me-into-Tanzania attitude to match.

and like a high school delinquent, i got my fair share of woe: first, they agreed that, rather than ship me back to Bujumbura, i could go get money in town. but they'd only take US dollars, so i had to first withdraw local shillings with my ATM card, then go and exchange backwards to pay the entry fee. and it's 100 dollars, not 50. i probably haven't spent 200 so far this trip.

fine, it's at least doable, i thought. the only bank in town my guidebook said had an ATM refused my card, though. three times. the good folks inside the bank said that nope, if the ATM didn't do it, they sure couldn't. varmint poop.

i'd spotted another ATM, so though i figured if one network refused my card the others were likely to, i stuck the card in and answered visa, yes, english, yes, pin, yes, money, yes, wait...

wait longer... like a full minute...

this is where my last card got rejected... and...

the whirr of cash being mechanically handled! lovely, reassuring cash.

another half hour in the line at the bank, waiting for them to locate their dollars, and i was back in the port with their blood money, ready to legally enter the country. they agreed that i'd gotten the money, but unfortunately the paper quality of one of the bills was poor, so after discussion with their treasurer, they weren't able to accept it.

red. tape.

so it was back to the bank, morning getting pretty long now with me having neither legal status nor breakfast, then back to the officials who ascented to the new paper quality, stamped me, and sent me on my way. here's hoping the red tape i broke walking out that door was the finish line of the african tape i'll have to crawl through, though i honestly doubt it...

halfway point
if my trip is 40 days, and i think it will be, that means today i'm halfways through it today. phew. i've been in four countries so far, ridden maybe 700 kilometers by bicycle, managed a blog every day, a bit of work on the book, started another, and seen and done some things. in short, that means it's time for top tens.

first,
TOP TEN THINGS I'VE DONE THIS TRIP

10.had a beer at Hotel Rwanda

9. slept in a brothel, a captain's berth, and on a wood bench by the lake

8. rode my bicycle from Lukaya to Kigali

7. learned some things about myself

6. learned how to turn a dumpster into a bakery

5. had some very peaceful moments in beautiful places

4. learned some Kinryankole, Luchiga, Luganda, French, Kinyrwanda, Kirundi and Kiswahili

3. learned and experienced a lot about the Rwandan genocide

2. had some slow beers with local folk

1. left behind the stress + busyness of my previous job

followed, of course, by
TOP TEN THINGS I HAVEN'T DONE ON THIS TRIP

10.oiled my bike chain

9. been physically injured

8. cooked a meal

7. taken a good picture

6. made it even halfway through initial editing of my book

5. used my phone to call someone

4. shaved

3. worn any shirt, jacket, pair of shorts or pants other than the one of each i brought

2. made some attractive local girl swoon for me

1. gotten malaria (so far as I know...)

and rounded out by
TOP TEN MOMENTS

10.the first 30k of Rwanda

9. the coast into Kabale town

8. watching the stars on Lake Bunyonyi

7. sleeping with the drunk captain

6. the cold beer after 100kms from Kabale to Kigali

5. the push everybody from Lukaya gave me

4. sharing a meal with Anita + Willy in Bujumbura

3. the time i spent in the crypt of the Nyamata memorial

2. watching hippos on the coast of Lake Tanganyika

1. every moment

day nineteen: bujumbura - lake tanganyika

2010-01-30T00:25:00.002-07:00

safety is the salt in my su-pu
it was time to leave Burundi. why? much as i was excited to see this place, and have enjoyed moments of it since, the lack of safety is oppressive.

maybe it's psychological: whether you are 'safe' or not i think is often just a feeling you have, not necessarily founded on facts, like saying "i feel very safe here walking the streets at night." you can feel very safe anywhere, til you're mugged, and muggings can happen in very safe places, like small town america. then after it's happened, you can feel very unsafe in a very safe place. psychological.

nevertheless, the unsafe feeling i had in Burundi was not mine alone: the streets of the city clear out by 4pm, and both the guidebook and the locals said walking them by night was asking to get mugged. the country is still recovering from an extended civil war and the resultant poverty, and seems there are a lot of people with not much to lose.

that poverty was a bit oppressive too--i don't mind rundown buildings, potholed roads with big lakes in the center of the capital city, etc., but being constantly asked for money and eyed when not asked, i got the feeling my interest-factor had switched: in all countries thus far, i'd been interesting primarily because i was white, and secondarily because, therefore, i must have money. here it was clearly that i have money, and my racial status took a firm second.

even that, it's okay: you can live somewhere not going out after twilight. you can ignore all the need, or give what you can to pacify feelings of guilt. you can avoid travel by foot or bicycle, be constantly aware your money or your things might get stolen--it's just not very fun.

safety is the salt in my su-pu, to borrow a phrase from Radio + Weasel. without it, the best soup--and Burundi seemed like a pretty spicy country--just isn't enjoyable, and that was my experience of Burundi. i wished i was african to experience it for a bit without being in the economic spotlight, but i'm not (much as i'm getting tanned enough to be mistaken for Indian sometimes). so i had my see of Burundi, and it's time to go, on to somewhere i don't need to always be conscious of my things, sit on the beach at sunset without worry, eat at an outdoor cafe without being eyed. hopefully that place is Tanzania.

the last breakfast
i had in Burundi was lovely, though--i caught the Trianon bakery, the one which had smelled lovely next door to my first guesthouse--when it was rocking in the morning, and had a still-warm croissant and a cheese pie with a giant glass of plain yogurt, served with sugar on the side. the place was packed with people, the bread was fresh and kept coming, the service quick and the whole joint obviously part of a nice morning routine for a lot of people. wish it could be part of mine.

those aren't stones in the lake
i realized: those are hippos. i'd taken them for some big rocks when riding past, but later when i sat down to watch the water under a shady tree, the rocks moved, and i realized they were giant pink hippos.

wow.

the only other time i've seen hippos up close was at a national park in Uganda, and we had to go a ways by boat to their wallow spot, and they were none too pleased to see us. these guys were right in the middle of a public beach, and didn't seem to mind the naked african boys in the water at all, though a passing canoe did raise their hackles a bit. i later saw some a distance down the beach too. hippos are one kind of creature that need to nothing to be interesting--just their being at all is impressive.

african red tape
the problem with african red tape is not that there's too much of it. i think there is actually less than you'd find when trying to do the same things in other countries. the problem is it's so damned knotted and disorderly.

case in point: trying to get a ship from Bujumbura to Kigoma. given, the passenger ferry is out of service, so i had to try to line up passage on a cargo ship, but still:

i go the day before to arrange things. the guardsman at the door sends me home speaking a lot of Kirundi and French like i understand it, but the import's clear: not today.

so i come back the next day, passing him before he has a chance to shoo me, find in the shipping company's whole office of 15 people one can speak English. she tells me to wait.

i wait half an hour. the person i'm waiting for hasn't come, so she tells me to wait somewhere else. i do. when that also brings no results, she takes me to an office we could've gone to immediately, where i'm told to come back with a stamped passport and they'd process my ticket. and to get to immigration early, because they sometimes don't stick around long.

okay. so i rode the kilometers back to my guesthouse, packed up in a hurry (i was past check-out anyway, but the good thing about messy african red tape is that check out at eleven can mean eleven thirty or noon--hakuna matata), rode back to the immigration office hoping to still find the guy there, so i could catch the ship, which wouldn't go again for a week or so.

i was told to wait.

i wait. no dice. the one semi-English speaking boy in the place says the official's car is out front, let's go find him. we find him in front of a bank a ways off; he tells me to first get my ticket then he'll stamp me. ratty P.

so i go back to the shipping office for a confrontation with the dour guardsman. the office is locked up for siesta or who knows what, and he again tries summarily to shoo me. i want to know when they're coming back, so i try my flunky French--something like "a quelle temps?"--to no effect, then Luganda "bajja komawo nga ddi?" to lesser effect, but he may have caught a couple words similar to Kirundi, because he answered back something, basically unintelligible, and i asked again in what must have been basically unintelligible ways to him, and we bantered and parried nonsense there in the sunny shut-down courtyard for a few minutes before i heard him say something like 'nana.' nana is close to Luganda's eight, 'munana,' which would have been quite disappointing (meaning 8PM, well after the ship and immigration officials would have left) except i also knew 7AM is 1 in Uganda, and if the system was the same here 8 would mean 2PM, which sounded about right for a siesta. "munana?" i asked again, tracing the figure eight in the air, and he got excited saying his version of the number, and wrote it in the dirt.

Gods be praised! communication!

so i thanked him--i know that much at least in Kirundi and French--and went for some hippo time before two.

at two, i again was made to wait til 3, paid for my ticket but the lady who could actually make the ticket wasn't around... around 3:30 i said i was worried the immigration official would leave, so they sent me with someone (who didn't speak any of my languages, of course) to get stamped out, ticket apparently unneeded.

well, the official wasn't there, despite his earlier promise he would be, so we waited outside with a guard smoking Sportsmans. the official shows up, is surprisingly good about stamping me out, then we walk to the gate of the port, where the old women in uniform take a real long time examining my passport, my lovely stamps and visas from other countries, pretending not to be able to find my stamp out of Burundi, all in a flutter about how faint the ink was when i pointed it out, etc...

they took about 10 minutes to check the already-official stamp. finally walking towards the ship, i wanted to express how red-tapey those ladies had been to my non-English-speaking cohort, so i gave my best "les mademoiselles!" with a lot of surprise/distaste. he laughed and said something i didn't understand, but rubbed his fingers together in a universal symbol: money.

ding. they wanted bribes. a lot of the people today probably wanted bribes. the guys who loaded my bike on the ship, passing it bodily over frightening gaps of water, also wanted bribes. that's the other problem with african red tape--not only is it knotty and disorganizing, the best and sometimes only way to unwind it all is with bribes.

well, i reflected, the better part of a day gone to getting a simple ticket, at least i had unraveled that tape without bribery. it was something of a pyrrhic victory.

the ship, of course, wasn't yet ready to leave, so i settled down to wait.

the wait was worth its weight
in gold: pulling out of Bujumbura port, the mountains of Burundi on one side and the Congo rising steep and verdant green on either side, lights of the city coming on as the sun set burning red in the west, the old familiar feel of ship travel... it was lovely.

this won't make sense to anyone who hasn't been on peaceboat
but the departure song from my last cruise started playing automatically in my head as we pulled out of the port... does that happen to you?

the skipper said
when i asked him if they had many passengers, "never!" then agreed i paid way too much, and apologized there was no place for me to sleep tonight.

the first mate said
i could use the bottom right bunk when i got sleepy, which i did, using my jacket as a pillow. it was really comfy, laying with my head to the gently rumbling ship, door open to Lake Tanganyika passing outside and the fresh night air.

then the goods-counter came back and apologized, but i was sleeping on his bunk and i'd have to get up.

the goods-counter said
that yeah i could probably lay on the wooden bench in the mess, since no one was going to cook, but on second thought there were some extra beds upstairs in the officer's quarters.

so up the stairs we went, me groggy from an hour or more's sleep and just wanting to continue it, carrying my sleeping bag and valuables like a refugee. we passed the helm with a real green-on-black radar screen, then found the captain.

the captain said
a whole lot of things i couldn't understand, being thoroughly drunk and a lot better at Kirundi and French than English. what i did understand was that he'd give me a place to sleep, but first i had to drink a beer with him.

in improv comedy, the basic rule is to never refuse a prompt. this was one of those times, so i waited as the captain drunkenly ordered the cook to get a beer from his sack, then sat me down right next to him on the bench and opened it with his teeth, talking all the while about things it seemed i should be responding to, but not understanding then, i could only nod and grin, buyng my bed.

the beer wasn't warm, it was hot. it burned going down my throat, tasting nothing like beer should, but you'll do a lot for a place to sleep, especially after you've already started. he also added some decent beans and rice, much to the cook's obvious displeasure, and talked to me for a long time, eventually getting around to what most african guys who talk to me for any length of time get around to: wanting to go to america, and couldn't i sponsor him/his children, and give him my contacts, etc.

i promised nothing but my contacts (which he forgot in the morning--i'm not sure if he was even awake when i got off the ship), feeling rather ill at ease and just wanting to sleep again, forcing myself to the bottom of the beer.

when it was done, he insisted i have another, but i refused, said i really needed sleep. he gave me a bed in a nice little room next to the officer's mess where we'd been drinking and trying to talk. then he closed the door and locked it from the outside.

so i was a prisoner
in a room with two sacks full of hot beer, but there was at least a bed so i decided not to worry about it. later i woke up too hot, and fiddling with the windows ascertained i could crawl out if need be, if the drunk captain lost the key for instance, or had sinister plans for me. knowing that, i went back to sleep.

an indeterminate amount of time later he unlocked the door and came in himself to sleep, leaving it unlocked. i used the chance to get some drinking water, though we were in the middle of a rainstorm, and came back to bed wet.

the now-unlocked door clanged in time with the rolling of the ship, which was probably the reason he'd locked it (the latch being broken), keeping me half-awake til i wedged it between my shoes, then passed out with the captain drunk asleep on the mattress next to me on the floor.

he may have groped me
in the night, but i just rolled away from his hopefully-still-asleep arm and kept right on trying to sleep. the morning came none too soon.

day eighteen: bujumbura

2010-01-29T00:44:00.002-07:00

the burden of things
sometime early on in my solitary voyagings, i made a kind of rule about what i carried: i had to be ready to lose all of it. okay with the idea that at any time, any of it could be lost, damaged, broken, stolen, or some combination of the above. if i wasn't, i didn't take it with me.

so on this trip i have along a lot of stuff no one would really mind losing. i also have a nice little computer, my journal, someone else's tent, a credit card and the nicest bicycle i've ever owned. the tent ialready breaks the rule, since i promised to give it back to the guy who lent it to me, but everything else i am okay with losing. the bike i am planning to give to a friend before going back to america anyway, the journal is not that old (and most of what i write gets published here), other things like clothes, tools, books, etc. are expendable for sure.

the computer was a little harder to accept: i sold off my old one, added in what scarce money i had, and bought it, new and small and just right for me, a few months before leaving. it would suck to lose, but i've accepted that it might happen, and i'm not going to flip out if it does. the trip continues.

i made this rule because things are a burden. much as, for example, it is nice to have a nice camera along to take nice pictures of the things you see, that same nice camera may keep you in constant fear of it being stolen as you walk around, of it being broken as you handle your bags, of it getting wet, getting dropped, etc. put short, it's a weight on your mind and wet socks to the daily adventure of life.

accepting it may be lost frees you a bit: you still take care with it, still try to keep it no where no one will steal it, but basically you're ready for it in case they are. the trip will go on, life will go on. without this rule, my trip would be psychologically not very fun, because i'd constantly be worrying about this or that. this way, i'm free to think about whatever, free from worry about much more than the basics--what am i eating, where am i sleeping. i guess the basic experience i want on a trip is freedom--freedom from worries, plans, things needing to be done, etc. pure freedom to be as i please[1].

and on this trip i've come so far in that freedom as to feel the rule doesn't go far enough: that is, i've started wanting my stuff to get stolen. even accepting it might, it hasn't been, and all this stuff is a pain in the ass sometimes, honestly. if somebody snatched my bike, yes, i'd be relegated to public transport the rest of my days, and a heavy bag, but i wouldn't have to keep wheeling the thing in and out of guesthouse rooms, or worry about leaving it on the street when i go in somewhere.

it's not just the bike, it's everything: i sometimes wish--like today--that it would all disappear. that i had just the clothes on my back, and some money in my pocket. i guess i'd want my passport, too, so i could avoid having to spend days at the US Embassy trying to get out of the country, but that's it. no books to read, no computer to write with, just little old me and wherever i happen to be.

is that a funny wish? i guess it's one i could fulfill myself: all i have to do is leave it all on the corner of a street downtown, give it to one of the mamas begging for food with her baby on her back. but it's different doing it yourself and having someone else do it for you, isn't it? i think i've just accepted it might get lost so thoroughly that i'm sometimes surprised i still have it, and even the minimal care i give it seems like a pain. nevertheless, here i am dragging all my stuff through the narrow hallways of another guesthouse. i guess i'm not yet ready for the kind of really free travel Jesus talked about when he sent the disciples out, or that Buddhists monks do with only a begging bowl. too tied to material life for that. but now and then, i think they're the ones who really know how to travel.

[1]i think this is something that i share with my dad, who has come to love taking off on motorcycle for weeks at a time, with not much more than a general plan of where to go or what to do. i want to say we came to it by different paths, and vacations when my sister and i were still young were different, but who knows? maybe it is like father like son...

a spoonful of sugar
i think i talked while at Byoona Amagara about how the island made people think, and they either then got into the self-reflection that might have been the whole reason they went on vacation,or they left/drank themselves out of it, etc., because they were still afraid of that reflection. there are surely many other reasons to travel to beautiful places, but getting time and space to reflect on your life has got to be one of the main ones, and at the same time one of the hardest. like they say, wherever you go, there you are. you can't travel outside yourself. maybe people who time for self-reflection should ixnay the beautiful places and stay in border towns instead.

anyway, i'm starting to notice another effect of travel, one that comes after being on the road awhile. the period of time is not important: four days will feel long to some people, others need weeks, months. but at some point, you begin to wonder what you're doing. you begin to feel you don't have a purpose in society, that you are peripheral to the movement of every day life. i think this happens around the time that all the stress you had saved up from whatever you left has sloughed off, and your mind and spirit are a bit free again. the immediate purpose of escape, of release, of experiencing freedom is fulfilled. then if you are still on the road, the question is, why?

there are surely many answers to it: having always wanted to see such-and-such a thing; or doing what you're doing as a challenge (this probably applies a lot to bicyclists); having someone to meet or something specific to do later in the trip, etc. but there are also surely many travellers--like myself--who have no such answer. we are on the road, travelling, without really being able to say why is we are travelling. at least, there's no immediate answer.

and i have more to say about what kind of answers come, and what you can learn from travelling beyond the obvious seeing of sights, tasting of foods, learning of new languages, etc. but what i wanted to mention today was how extended travel can be the needed spoonful of sugar to make regular life go down. when you travel, you are always on the peripheries of regular life: you are a customer but not a worker, a guest but not a regular, a new friend but never an old one.

that life on the periphery--travel--makes you want a place. it makes you want people around you that you've known and will know for some time, some work that you can do every day, a regular bed to sleep at night with a pillow you're used to. it makes you want a home, to go home if you have one, to go make one if--like me--you don't.

and travel that way is a natural end to itself, and support to regular life: it puts you on the outside, free, and after awhile you want again to be inside, confined but comfortable, knowing your place in the world.

this feeling comes and goes on the road--for me it's strongest when i am looking for a place to stay, opening different guesthouse doors to peer in to rooms and wonder if they are mine, talking to the managers and wondering if these are my hosts for tonight, looking for the next place with every immediate thing i own along with me, feeling just a touch homeless--those are the times it hits me. and it's good: like a little sugar in the tomato sauce to balance the acidity, a little travel in the soup of life balances the restlessness we all have inside.

so travel can be that spoonful of sugar Mary Poppins sang about, herself something of a traveler, the one that makes the medicine go down...

the facts of the day
included biking most of Bujumbura looking for a guesthouse, as the nice one i was at had no vacancies for tonight; included giving some bread to mothers with children begging on the street this morning, then being overrun by them again in the afternoon, and refusing; included a long session with the Bastard King later in the afternoon, and being so frustrated with how poorly it's written i started a serious plan for a fantasy book of my own; supper--chips and rice with a chunk of beef and some sauce that tasted like ramen soup mix--with some Kenyans staying at my guesthouse, over beers of course; passing out on the bed and having to fight awake to take my malaria meds and brush my teeth. honestly, today was one of those days that will be a spoonful of sugar later.