September 6, 2003

Dear Friends,

After a long silence, many greetings from Tanzania! Thanks be to God, I am doing quite well, and I hope this letter finds you all the same. Now I am back at school in Morogoro, our community has reassembled, and classes have begun. This semester our Salvatorian formation community numbers 30. There are 28 scholastics and 2 formators. I have been joined on staff by another American, a native New Yorker, Br. Donald, with almost 45 years of mission experience in Tanzania! I think we will make a good team, and it will be great to have someone with whom to share the burden of running such a large house.

As you may recall from my last travelogue, I spent the past two months of “summer vacation” on the road, making two long safaris, one to central and northwestern Tanzania, and the other to the south and southwest. Without repeating all the gory details of the itinerary, let me just share with you some excepts from my travel diary arranged in the form of some basic rules for traveling in this part of the world. Enjoy!

Rule # 1. Planning will be punished (or Africa always wins). This is the first rule or the first law of travel in Tanzania. Surely the compulsion to plan is something most of us bring from our northern European roots where the weather is cold and people who do not plan perish. But here things are different. God love us, we European types try our best to plan, to organize Africa, but Africa always wins. Firmly but gently (and sometimes not so gently) it punishes planning. Today for example, we “planned” to leave Morogoro for Dodoma at 10:00 a.m. In fact we had gone so far (hubris being what it is) as to purchase bus tickets in advance. Of course by now I fully expected the welter of last minute entreaties and emergencies (which came as if on cue), but I was completely unprepared for the 8:30 phone call from Dominic, “Father, there is a car leaving for Dodoma in 10 minutes. Can you be here? Forget the bus. Forget the tickets Forget the last half hour that you had reserved for frenetic final arrangements. Just pick up the bag and go. And so we did.

So our planning was punished. We lost the price of our 3 bus tickets–although certainly some people who hadn’t planned their trip and just showed up at the bus stand profited from them. But Africa was also kind to us: we gained a ride in a private car, a good lunch upon our arrival in Dodoma (with wine!), a tour of the new radio station, new friends, etc. Does it all come out in the wash? Is there a wash? I don’t know.

Rule # 2. Feel at home. If there is a second rule for travelers in Tanzania it is “Feel at home.” The correlate is “...however hard you must work at it!” Feeling at home is of utmost importance in Tanzania. The greatest complement you can pay your host is, “Thank you, I really feel at home.” And it is the job of the guests to feel at home, however hard they have to work at it! Whatever people say, you must do. Wherever they tell you to sit or stand, you must obey. Whatever they give you to eat or drink, you must take. When and wherever they tell you to sleep, there you sleep. And as a guest, don’t push. Don’t be in a hurry. Don’t plan too far ahead. And don’t worry. Put yourself completely into the hands of your hosts. And feel at home. They know what’s is happening. So you don’t need to. Just trust!

Rule # 3. You will meet everyone again. We bring from home a certain idea that it’s alright to have an unresolved disagreement or misunderstanding with someone. It’s somehow ok because ours is a big country and we can safely assure ourselves that we are getting away from those people, and will never see them, never have to work with them again. This does not work in Tanzania. You always see everyone again. “Remember me? I met you here or there. I saw you in this or that place.” Faces from the past reappear in the remotest places, hundreds of kilometers from where you saw them last. It’s uncanny, unnerving.

This repeated experience of meeting the same people over and over reminds me very forcefully that the nation of Tanzania is really still a village of a kind. People operate with a village mentality. This is in no way derogatory. Village social organization is very rich and complex. And it works. Most people on the globe think this way. But at the same time it is very different from our more anonymous,more autonomous First World way of organizing things, where relationships are somehow disposable, where people are so mobile, so rootless, they meet once and never meet again. But in a village everyone knows everyone and everybody’s business. It seems almost impossible for a Tanzanian to travel anywhere in his own country and not to know someone. The incidences of bumping into familiar people in remote places are too numerous and strange to catalogue here. Trust me.

Rule # 4. Don’t think you know anything (Africa defies generalizations.) One of the great joys for me on this trip is visiting the families of our students. So often living in the school, on the compound, I feel so detached from the real Tanzania. It is like living “on” the country but not really “in” the country. So being out and in the homes of my students was for me a real treat. There I learned rule # 4: “Don’t think you know anything. Traveling in a foreign country it seems to be impossible for us to resist the temptation to make sense of things, to find patterns and connections and then to globalize (or pontificate) about “Africa and African’s.” But the reality of Africa is too complicated. It defies simple analysis.

Take African families. Actually they are every bit as diverse as families in the U.S.One of the students I was traveling with at the beginning of the trip, Dominic, escorted us to his home. There we were warmly greeted by his father (a teacher) and his mother (a member of the parish choir). By the time our visit was over we had also met 8 of his 9 brothers and sisters. We were greeted warmly and treated to chicken and beer. It grew dark and we finished our visit by lantern light, so much softer than flourescent electricity. A typical African family? Wait.

The next day we traveled to another town and met the family of another student, “Chuma.” When he was in first grade his father left home on a business trip and never returned. Just disappeared. They assume he died or was killed, insofar as for 15 years no one has had any news. But officially he is still just “away from home.” I imagine that his mother suffered greatly, and I am sure the church’s stance on remarriage didn’t help her very much. So she ended up leaving the church, and joining the Pentecostals where she met a man to whom she is now happily married. I met him and many other young people I took to be Chuma’s half brothers and sisters.

So, clearly not all “African families” are the same. Dominic’s is somehow in tact (although I picked up a cryptic remark about “another mother”); Chuma’s is a blended family; another scholastics, Boki, comes from a family headed by a widowed mother; Baraka’s family has a second mother and half brothers and sisters; both of Kamungisha’s parents have died; Mganga’s father seems to discard his wives like yesterday’s newspapers. How do “African’s view this complexity? Maybe the best comment was Dominic’s observation as we left Chuma’s house: “In this house there is peace and harmony.” That seems to be what matters most to Tanzanians.

Rule #6. A bus is not a teapot. On our travels we used many forms of transportation: private cars, a ferry, the backs of bicycles, the open beds of Toyota pick ups, our feet. But mostly it was buses. And here I learned the great rule: a bust is not a teapot. You see a teapot you can fill. There comes a point when you cannot add even one drop of water without it spilling over. But an African bus is a different matter altogether. It is never really full. It seems always able to stop and pick up one more person, one more parcel. Babies are happily passed in and out the window. Men get to the back of the bus by walking atop the seats; and if the aisle is too crowded for you to get back to the front door when your stop comes, you just scurry out the window! Don;t forget your chicken!

Rule #7. It’s not a sin to ask. Bathing in the bush. Bathing has become rather a joke between my assistant Fra. George and I. Once you leave the mission houses and their self-contained rooms where each person is left on his own in regards to bathing, and once you enter the villages everything changes. The first thing you begin to notice is the heightened solicitude of whoever is your host. “Would you like to take your bath now?” they ask as soon as you arrive from wherever. Even if you had just taken a bath and only stepped out to sit on the porch for a few minutes, when you return they will ask, “Do you want to take your bath now?” In private homes it is worse because it is harder to refuse one they have heated the water, especially if you know some girl has carried it a mile from the river it in a plastic bucket atop her head.

Of course the greater challenge is not the back-and-forth with your host about whether to bathe now or not. The real difficulty is figuring our HOW to bathe. In hotels with showers, no problem. But in the bush there are no showers, just a bowl of water somewhere out of full public view. At the first private house we stayed I had to laugh at myself. After announcing to me that I will bathe now, our host, Mr. Michael, directed me to a room. There he told me to prepare myself and showed me how to lock the door, smiled and left. So I found myself alone in a room that looked just like a bed room...two beds along two of the walls with an aisle between. On the wall opposite the door was an open window beneath which I saw a few clay jugs with water, but no basin. (Oh yes, there was also a brooding red chicken in the corner eyeing me with some suspicion, and rightly so as I think she became lunch the next day.)

So there I was alone in the room with this chicken, wondering how and where to begin my ablutions. I imagined many different approaches, all of which ended with somehow throwing the water out the window. But somehow nothing seemed right. Remembering Rule # 7, It is not a sin to ask, I called in George to help me. He was quickly followed by Mr. Michael, who was anxious that I feel at home, and after a brief explanation and a good laugh, our host explained things to me. No, this room was for changing clothes. When I was ready he would escort me to the real bathing room. That of course led to other stories, but at least Rule 7 saved me from embarrassing myself irredeemably in front of God, everybody and the chicken!

Rule. #8 One thing at a time. One day Fra. George and Fra Kamungisha and I were trying to decide our itinerary for leaving that place and going to visit Fra. Josephat. But our discussion was not going well. It seemed our choices were to rob either Peter or Paul: cheating Kamugisha by cutting our visit short in the hopes of improving our chances to catch Josephat at home. Suddenly I saw what I was doing: risking having two bad visits rather than insuring doing at least one well, and letting the other take care of itself. In short, I was trying to do two things at once, and that is against the law! Once I could see more clearly the price we would pay for hurrying, our choices became very easy. Finish here, do this well, and then we shall see. This, after all is a safari, and we cannot control the outcome.

Rule #9. Memento Mori. (Death is all around.) On an journey such as this in Africa, death is never far off. It is always in the peripheral vision, always one element in calculating where to go and how to get there. Not that this trip was particularly dangerous. Quite the contrary. But the prospect of death is always there, seasoning every decision: whether or not to jump this culvert, to go down this street, whether to take this particular bus or that particular seat; what to eat and drink, whether if I had fallen into this particular unseen pit in the dark of night I would have survived the drop, etc.

I think it has a lot to do with just getting older. Not that I fear death more (maybe it’s just the opposite) but I see death more, asleep within the most mundane objects and the simplest choices. In short, as I get older I am turning in to my Grandmother. She saw danger in every stick we wielded, in every jump we ventured, and every tumble we took. Her voice was always a counsel of caution...”be careful, watch out, you can put out you eye, you could break your leg or crack open your head. True, many of these things actually happened, but we lived to tell about them. Most other catastrophes we averted by the grace of God and probably with her worried prayers.

Rule #10. Don’t go. We will escort you. “Sindikiza” is an important word in Kiswahili and an important concept. It means to “escort “ to “accompany.” No visitor is ever just left to find his own way out of the village or to the bus stand. His host escorts him at least to the door of the room if not to the front door of the house, or better yet a good 100 meters down the path. At times I have be escorted half way home, and a few times the entire way home and half way back to the host’s house again!

In the villages this practice takes on a wider social significance. Knowing we were planning to leave on Sunday, some of the people whose homes we had visited promised to come and escort us to the bus stand. All in all there were nine of us and we made quite a sight parading the kilometer or so to the roadside kiosk. The social advantage of this procedure is to let the whole village see you. This greatly increases the host family’s social status. “We had a visitor–a European at our house. Perhaps you saw us escorting him to the bus on Sunday.” The disadvantage, of course is that the bus conductor may mistake the whole escort party for potential passengers and hurry by without stopping. But in our case even though the bus was packed it was not a teapot. We climbed aboard the minibus with its 33 large stalks of bananas (each as big as a man), squeezed in and filled the last available square centimeters of stooping space, and took a last look at our friends waving and smiling their good-byes.

Of course there are many other rules, but the travelogue has already gotten too long. I hope you enjoyed it and picked up at least some of the flavor of the trip, some of the joy and the challenge of living in Africa.

Here the weather is now getting warmer. Soon the rains will start. And with them the promise of a plentiful harvest, if all goes well. I expect to stay put basically until the Christmas break when our whole community will risk a rainy season safari to the south! That will be another story.

I hope to write again before then, I still have more to tell. Stay well! I send much love, DP