Dear friends, June 1, 2002

Once again, greetings from Tanzania where the rainy season is just ending and we are heading into the very best season of the year: winter! Now the weather will be so cool that I could almost use more than a single sheet to cover up at night. (I don’t believe it ever gets much below 60 degrees here and that’s fine with me.) Maybe I’m getting spoiled. It seems a shame take a break from here just in time to miss the best weather, but that is how things are.

As you may know, I plan to be in the States for home leave for two full months, July and August. But I already dread the tough decisions I’ll have to make about who I will get to see, and how much time I get to spend with whom. But I have enough experience with myself to know that if I try to do everything, I’ll end up doing nothing well.

Now let me get to my travelogue. This time I have decided to write about something different. Not trips or churches or customs, or even people. This time I just want to write about birds. Not the big exotic birds like flamingos or ostriches (which in any case are not in this part of Tanzania) but just the everyday birds. Not the practically nondescript ones, the little shrieky brown kinds that look like sparrows, but the ones unique to Africa, which always startle me like unexpected gifts whenever they suddenly appear.

The first bird that forces its attention on the visitor to Africa for its size, color, raucous sound and strange behavior I call the crow. Now I realize this bird is probably not a really crow. Maybe it’s a raven, I don’t know. But its shape and size remind me of a crow. Its color, however, is strikingly different. It looks like a black crow wearing a snow white bib as if dressed for an evening at the opera. But if this bird ever made it’s way inside, it’s harsh caw and bad manners would get it ejected before the overture ended.

Among their stranger habits is this. At first light they congregate on the roof of our campus chapel where we are gathered for morning prayer and Mass. That wouldn’t be so bad except for the sound their claws make against the sheet metal as they struggle to keep their footing on the steep roof. It is like an classroom full of delinquent school children scraping their nails over a chalkboard trying to drive their teacher crazy. In addition, for some unfathomable reason they like to carry large stones in their beaks. I do not know what evolutionary role this behavior may once have played, but now they seem simply to enjoy the sound of the stones skittering down the chapel roof. Were it not for their well groomed appearance, and the heart stopping effect they make when they suddenly swoop by overhead, this bird would be considered a complete nuisance.

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At this point my plan was to write about other birds, but I have changed my mind. (Perhaps I will include the description of one new bird in each future travelogue.) But something interesting happened yesterday I want to share before the memory fades.

Outside of the big cities, Tanzania can easily give the impression of being a land completely made up of subsistence farmers, school children and hawkers. Anyone not out working the fields with a hoe, or trudging up the road in a school uniform kicking something approximating a soccer ball, is almost certainly hawking or peddling something... fruit, cashews, small electrical appliances, newspapers, jumper cables, brooms, live chickens or rabbits, fresh corn, neck ties, soccer balls...name it. These plucky entrepreneurs come up to your table when you’re out for a beer, or to your car window when you’re stopped at an intersection; and they completely surround the intercity buses when they pull into the bus stands. In short, these hawkers are everywhere.

Happily, here in Morogoro they are really not an offensive lot. They don’t badger or cajole. They’re just a nuisance. It’s a bother having to smile and say over and over, “Thank you, thank you. Very nice but...” (Here there’s not much use for the word “no.” A “thank you,” a smile, and a wave of the hand is just as effective and really more polite.) So, as I was saying, these people are not really rude, they are just ubiquitous, and hence a nuisance. After a while you learn to treat them in a distant, offhand kind of way, the way usually reserved for beggars or panhandlers. It is a human interaction, but just barely human. And this is what makes my encounter yesterday so memorable.

Yesterday I was driving back alone from Dar es Salaam to Morogoro, a 3-hour trip I usually break at the halfway point with a cold soda and a bag of locally roasted cashews. This time I also decided to fill the tank with diesel. Not surprisingly, at the pump the truck was greeted by a horde of boys selling hard boiled eggs, bananas, cashews, and what all. I bought the cashews (my weakness) and after finishing the soda I returned to the truck--the trusty missionary vehicle lovingly described in other travelogues. Once again on the way back to the truck, I breezed past another hawker, this time an older man selling pineapples and slingshots (a strange combination even for Tanzania). The pineapples tempted me, but what good is one pineapple in a community of 3O! So as I say, I breezed past the man to get into the Toyota.

Maybe it was the presence of something different in this routine, maybe it was just that I was tired, but for whatever reason, when I returned to the car I was totally crestfallen to see my car keys dangling in the ignition and the doors locked! Here I was, still over an hour from home with no spare key. Even if I called the house and someone just happened to be playing hooky and picked up the phone to receive my call, we have only one vehicle in the community. To reach me with the spare key they would have to wait for the next bus...and then.... As I rested my head on the window of the truck in frustration, I could imagine the hot idle hours awaiting me,

I was startled back to the present by a solicitous voice behind me. I turned to see the pineapple/slingshot man, looking greatly concerned. It was as if “my problem” had suddenly become “our problem.” With an air of authority he immediately took control of the situation by calling some children over and describing to them the kind of metal rod we would need to trip the doorlock. Luckily, one of the urchins was cool enough first to check all the doors, and discovered to my great relief that one of the rear doors was unlocked! Hurray! No need to break in...or worse. I was so happy and relieved. And after thanking the man warmly I decided, in my happiness, to buy his two pineapples! So now we were both happy. And I drove the rest of the way home without further incident (except that one of my shock absorbers went kaput, but that’s another story.)

I fear I may not have done a good job in laying out for you the heart of this story, and what really touched me. It wasn’t the presence of the hawkers, or leaving the keys in the ignition, or suddenly discovering the unlocked door. It was the change I saw in that peddler’s eyes, and, I think, in mine, in that split second when we crossed the line from being a hawker and a potential buyer, to being two men facing a common problem together. How easy it would have been for that man simply to stay sitting in the shade and watch me struggle alone. After all, it wasn’t his car. It wasn’t his trip. And I hadn’t bought any pineapples or slingshots. But how quickly, how graciously, how effortlessly he assumed this problem as his own. (A gesture so typically Tanzanian.) Yet it was not simply his actions that changed, it was his eyes. He was no longer tentative, or servile in the least. We now looked across at each other man to man.

This incident invites me think about how much time and energy I spend here “defending” myself...I am not quite sure from what. How impregnable the shield, how inscrutable the mask I so often wear when I go out in public. How seldom I regard and am regarded by others straight on like neighbors, and not from a distance or from a height as a white man, a missionary, someone in a truck of his own. Such distancing is not unique to living in Tanzania. It happens everywhere, somewhat. But here, for me, it is strong. Now I know how strong it is, thanks to the pineapple/ slingshot man. I don’t know precisely what I shall do differently in the days ahead, but I hope this lesson will not be wasted on me.

That’s it for now. I hope to see many of you when I am home for the summer. Till then, peace,

Fr. Daniel