For the past 11 months or so, I have been dreaming of the moment where I return to the place that not only stole my heart but forever changed me. If last summer had a song on infinite replay it would have been “Karma Police”, particularly the line that goes “For a minute there I lost myself, I lost myself..” to describe how I almost didn’t follow my true calling in life to instead pursue a career of financial stability and ultimately a meaningless path. I laugh at myself about how nervous I was departing the US to Tanzania. Another year wiser, I now know better than to believe all the horror stories told to me, particularly of those that have never even visited the places I went.
The bus ride from Nairobi was great. Fred, a local and friend from last summer, did end up at the Mennonite Guest House when I landed and we left at 7am. The bus interior was quite nice. A coach bus with disco red velvet lined seats, floors and ceiling. The overhead even reminded me of a plane. There was a light and switchable air ventilator. There was even a TV on the bus playing music videos of first Bongo flavor (a Kenyan/Tanzanian favorite mimicking a cool Caribbean mix) and popular American hip hop. Right after Rihanna’s music video played, Chris Brown’s ironically played. It was the same song that I had watched him perform live about 2 months ago on a taping of Dancing with the Stars just 2 days after he angrily threw a chair at the mention of his past abuse towards Rihanna. The only thing missing from the nice bus was a bathroom. There was 1 bathroom stop which women and men scurried to bushes to relieve themselves and quickly hurried back to the bus that would certainly leave without them. During the 9.5 hours of traveling, I make zero stops to the bathroom. After countless 5 hour road trips to NorCal and driving across the country, I learned to train my bladder as if one would train a puppy not to poop at the wrong place or time. Basically, I drink little to no water until I know I’m about 2 hours away. It works everytime.
Halfway through the bus ride, a man enters our bus and begins preaching or maybe talking in Swahili. He does this for about an hour or two. A similar tactic is used in Haiti where a man stays on the public bus all day long and talks and talks and talks and then sells whatever he is selling. The first Kenyan man to do this on the bus, I don’t mind. His voice is easily overpowered by the music from my headphones. The second guy to talk/preach sounded like Freddy Cougar with strep throat. I might have preferred nails on a chalkboard to his horrific raspy tone that not even the loudest music setting can drown out.
I look up at the scenery between falling in and out of sleep and reading “Eat, Pray, Love” and salivating over the Italian food depicted in the novel. My heart is lightened by the baby blue sky sprinkled with cirrus clouds and the dark red soil below. I get giddy at the sight of a Masai man walking down a corn field with his back towards the bus and his beautiful cape flowing in the wind. I wonder how my life would have been had I been one of the little kids playing outside of their mud hut home oblivious to the Western world. Our bus passes by a huge market with at least 10 rows of umbrella food stands that are manned by women. We also pass by a small truck that must have taken a sharp turn and completely flipped on its driver side. I wonder if the driver was still alive and the cause of the accident. Last year, on our way to Shirati, the driver nearly misses a small child that hastily decided to run across the street as a speeding van was approaching and misjudged the speed/distance calculation that comes with experience.
Nine hours on bus pass by. I anxiously wait at the visa booth in the Tanzanian border patrol station wondering if they will harass me like last year about how I was actually a volunteer and not a tourist vacationer which would require a more expensive work visa. I get my passport stamped back. The one patrol police says something to Fred in Swahili while looking at me. I think he wants me to stay in Tanzania longer. I slip out of the station to the taxi awaiting Fred and I and exclaim with excitement that I was not charged the $100 visa fee! I almost wanted to say something inside but did not just to see how far I could go before they realized their mistake. I guess I kind of stole, and stealing is wrong, but I am very broke and probably (definitely) shouldn’t even be spending money to sojourn out to Shirati but this is probably my last chance for at least a long while.
Even though nearly 10 hours have passed while in transit to our final destination, I am still surprised at how fast we are approaching Shirati. We drive in the taxi on dirt roads for an hour on Utegi Road until more and more familiar landmarks pass by. Its Monday market, I forgot that the awesome overcrowded market where people from all distances would come to buy produce for the week occurred today. I imagine how a café would do in the Obuere area which is where the market and several wooden shack stores reside. I saw a tea café with small tables for two and a rustic sign saying tea café on the ride from Kenya…I thought of it as the Starbucks of whatever dinky town we were passing by. Maybe a laid back and luxury expenditure would fit well in the area, afterall, everything runs on Africa time. I also tell Fred my other business idea for the Shirati area, an ATM machine. There are tons of mzungus (white people) that volunteer in Shirati every summer and are in constant need of cash and the nearest ATM is 2 hours away with a maximum withdrawal of about $260 per day.
At long last, the sedan taxi pulls over in front of Dr. Esther Kawira’s house. She is the American doctor that fell in love with a Tanzanian man in Indiana and after much debate on her husband’s side, they got married and raised 4 kids in Shirati. I greet her husband, Josiah and gave him a big hug and the remark I continued to give everyone else that I saw, “I told you I’d come back!” We go to the SHED hostel where I spent my time living in Shirati last summer. A local woman runs and shrieks when she sees my face and embraces me to the point of almost lifting me from the ground. Its Cecelia! She is now apparently nicknamed MamaBabu after she took in Babu, the kindergartender being sponsored by Room for Compassion. I ask how Babu is and how Teresa Aneti (Babu’s very old grandmother) are doing and she says they are both good. To my surprise, there are other mzungus at the hostel. I get a room with four beds all to myself. I later find out that it’s the bat room…5 bats were killed last week. I make my way around to meet other public health professionals, medical students and a ton of undergraduate U of Cincinnati students. Most are here working with Village Life Outreach Project, another fantastic organization that does many things including successfully building a health center in a remote region and apparently plans are underway for a new school. I walk with a few girls to the center of Kabwana, the mini town center of Shirati. I stop in my tracks at the sight of the humungous red sun setting and realized how much I missed it. We stay an hour drinking soda out of glass bottles and talking to secondary school soccer boys and walk back. I stare up at the cosmos and see how different the stars look in the Southern hemisphere. The familiarity of the village makes me feel like this is home and I’m finally back.
No comments:
Post a Comment