“Let us go, then, you and I.”
From “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot
Going in Tanzania is mostly communal. A small bus bouncing on a rocky road groans with the weight of too many people packed elbow to cheek, cheek to cheek, stomach to chin. Men and women march together by the road balancing freight on their heads.
If people are not going, they are waiting, and their waiting becomes going.
One day I arrived at the college campus in Moshi Town expecting to teach at 8:00 a.m. and learned from students that the schedule had changed, that our classroom had changed, and now I had four hours to wait. I graded essays under the canvas roof of the makeshift canteen, situated on the only grass on campus, until my feet were so bitten by insects that I had to move. I needed to shop for Christmas gifts, and I had time. Going seemed to be the thing to do, but it meant some uncertainty. While I knew where the closest bus stand was, I did not know what bus to take to return back to the campus. When my colleague James stopped to ask me a question, I asked him for directions.
James is basically a snake in character, which isn’t being kind to snakes. In the past four conversations I’ve had with James, nothing he has said turned out to be true. At tea time once, he stopped our conversation abruptly to say he had a class to teach. Two minutes later I found him in the hallway of the administration building pacing outside an office. Another time, he had informed me that the new schedule for teaching was posted on the bulletin board. I found no such schedule.
But the real reason not to trust James had to do with a much earlier incident a couple months ago when I was having tea with a student worker. James came into the dining hall and reminded the student, Sarah, that as his African sister, she should serve him some tea. She did it. I asked James what he did for her as her brother. He came up with a good list and I asked him how many of those he had already done for her, which brought about a change in topic. At another tea time when he told the student again that he wanted her to serve him tea, I reminded him that he had a healthy set of arms and legs to serve himself. And then at another tea time, James walked to my table where I sat sipping tea and told me that since Sarah was not there to serve him, he would go out and find her. I knew then that James did not like me.
Last week I found out James would be my tutor for my seminars. This means I have to work with James. I will tell him what material he should cover with my students who will be grouped into sections much smaller than 160 students in my lectures. It also means that when James told me he had a master’s degree, he was lying because people with master’s degrees are lecturers, not tutors.
When I asked James what bus to take for the return from bus terminal to campus, I knew James would not recognize the truth if it struck him down. James’s instructions were long and tortuous, but when I started to write down place names he mentioned, the instructions became more focused: take a bus that says “Mbuyuni.”
To worry about whether James’s advice was good or not—that would’ve been a definite refusal to go for the ride.
At the bus terminal, I stopped and asked a man and woman seated on a bench where the Mbuyuni bus was. They pointed to the end of the terminal. Then the woman said a few words, some of which I understood: “wait” and “let’s go.”
She took me by the hand and led me across the street. The person who takes me by the hand, despite the sweat and dust of my fingers, is the one who wants me to find the way, the one who walks the distance in the hot sun to make sure that I have gotten what I asked for. This woman who took my grimy hand would not let go until we had crossed the street, until she had hailed the Mbuyuni bus, that is, the second Mbuyuni bus because the first one took off after briefly stopping for two seconds.
The bus traveled to the right section of town, but I did not see the Moshi Town campus anywhere. I saw the Tanzanian Breweries Limited factory near the Moshi Town campus. But I didn’t know what to ask for. Maybe the bus would arrive at a place that I would recognize. Soon enough, I was the only passenger, and the conductor said another word that I recognized: “mwisho,” “the end.” The end was a little subsection of Moshi with chickens and goats and a field of some crop I didn’t recognize and a road and shops that I didn’t recognize.
The conductor pointed to another bus headed in the opposite direction. I boarded it and after greeting a friendly woman beside me, I managed to ask about the Moshi Town campus. A man in the front seat seemed to know it and after the bus made its first stop, he told me to go with him. Though he did not take me by the hand, he led me through long passages between houses at a very fast clip, and after we managed to exhaust our foreign language supply, we walked at a fast clip in silence and burning sun. Suddenly the Moshi Town campus appeared. I was led once again by someone who merely said, “Let’s go.”
“Let us go, then, you and I” is a call to go to the unknown, to knowingly follow the advice of a snake, not with trust but out of the yearning to go. The call is also a hand that takes my grimy one because it wants me to go where it takes me. To answer the call is to discover what love is.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Cheated and blessed
Arusha is a big tourist city near Moshi. When I take the bus from Moshi to Arusha, I take a huge bus at the terminal where small and giant buses roar in and out, all of them blowing black smoke behind them. In the huge buses, there’s an aisle down the middle, and when seats are filled, middle seats are folded down. When those are filled, the conductor orders people to share the fold-down seat. Sometimes it’s done thoughtfully. That is, the conductor has taken into account the size of bottoms that need to share. Other times, the conductor has ordered two people with very large rumps to split a one-rump space. Usually the two passengers complain and figure out how to rearrange themselves, and everyone is mildly content.
Buses don’t follow a schedule as far as I can tell. I climb onto a bus, and when it is full, the bus departs. Time is not of the essence; money from passengers is. While the first passengers wait, vendors walk around with goods to sell: bottles of water, cookies, sunglasses, underpants—whatever can be carried over to a bus and thrust through a window.
A few weeks ago, I wanted a bottle of water, normally five hundred shillings, the equivalent of fifty cents. I handed the vendor a ten thousand bill. He left to get the correct change and when he returned, he handed me the bills and disappeared. I looked at the change, subtracted in my head, and realized I had just paid two thousand shillings, the equivalent of two dollars rather than fifty cents.
Local customers here are very savvy about any transaction. They scrutinize any shoe, any bucket, pushing and prodding at potential weak joints. They argue prices down, or they walk away in disgust. If I get a fair price out of anything, that’s because the Tanzanian standing with me has done all of the work. Or the merchant wants me to return for future business.
But these roaming vendors figure I won’t return. I’m on a bus, I’m clearly a tourist, and they can get away with taking an extra two thousand shillings. So I sat on the bus seat and stewed about being cheated, but only briefly. I was sitting on a bus after all, and the cheater had to work every day pushing his goods on people who mostly didn’t want to buy them.
About a week later, I took another ride to Arusha, boarding the huge bus. On the way, we stopped at the bus terminal in a nearby town called Boma. For reasons that remain a mystery, the bus to Arusha always stops at this terminal, and some official-looking person at the gate is handed money. In the meantime, while the bus waits in line before the gate, vendors swarm about us.
That day I decided I wanted a package of sweet cakes, which cost five hundred shillings, but I had only a thousand shilling bill. The vendor—who looked like a teenaged boy—shook a second package at me and gave a look of pleading, but I shook my head, I only wanted one package. As I handed him my bill, the bus started to roll. He slapped his packages onto the chest of the guy standing beside him, dug into his pockets, and jogged beside the bus. I hung my head out the window, and the bus shifted into second gear. The boy now shifted into a sprint. Just as I mentally let go of the five hundred shillings, he thrust a bill into my hands.
I poked my head out of the window even further. The boy stood behind a cloud of black exhaust, his body heaving with each breath. And I did the only thing I could do at that moment—I blew him a kiss.
Buses don’t follow a schedule as far as I can tell. I climb onto a bus, and when it is full, the bus departs. Time is not of the essence; money from passengers is. While the first passengers wait, vendors walk around with goods to sell: bottles of water, cookies, sunglasses, underpants—whatever can be carried over to a bus and thrust through a window.
A few weeks ago, I wanted a bottle of water, normally five hundred shillings, the equivalent of fifty cents. I handed the vendor a ten thousand bill. He left to get the correct change and when he returned, he handed me the bills and disappeared. I looked at the change, subtracted in my head, and realized I had just paid two thousand shillings, the equivalent of two dollars rather than fifty cents.
Local customers here are very savvy about any transaction. They scrutinize any shoe, any bucket, pushing and prodding at potential weak joints. They argue prices down, or they walk away in disgust. If I get a fair price out of anything, that’s because the Tanzanian standing with me has done all of the work. Or the merchant wants me to return for future business.
But these roaming vendors figure I won’t return. I’m on a bus, I’m clearly a tourist, and they can get away with taking an extra two thousand shillings. So I sat on the bus seat and stewed about being cheated, but only briefly. I was sitting on a bus after all, and the cheater had to work every day pushing his goods on people who mostly didn’t want to buy them.
About a week later, I took another ride to Arusha, boarding the huge bus. On the way, we stopped at the bus terminal in a nearby town called Boma. For reasons that remain a mystery, the bus to Arusha always stops at this terminal, and some official-looking person at the gate is handed money. In the meantime, while the bus waits in line before the gate, vendors swarm about us.
That day I decided I wanted a package of sweet cakes, which cost five hundred shillings, but I had only a thousand shilling bill. The vendor—who looked like a teenaged boy—shook a second package at me and gave a look of pleading, but I shook my head, I only wanted one package. As I handed him my bill, the bus started to roll. He slapped his packages onto the chest of the guy standing beside him, dug into his pockets, and jogged beside the bus. I hung my head out the window, and the bus shifted into second gear. The boy now shifted into a sprint. Just as I mentally let go of the five hundred shillings, he thrust a bill into my hands.
I poked my head out of the window even further. The boy stood behind a cloud of black exhaust, his body heaving with each breath. And I did the only thing I could do at that moment—I blew him a kiss.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
In spite of the dust
This morning, I am teaching Basic Communication Skills to at least 100 students at the Moshi Town campus of SMMUCo. The campus opened last week, a month after classes started.
Three buildings on this campus, a former brewery, are still being transformed from beer-making activity to learning activity: the administration building, the cafeteria/library/classroom building, and a large lecture hall. The other buildings have not been transformed at all. An architect has yet to inspect one building to see if it has potential to be a dormitory.
The streets in this area of Moshi are a fine powdery dust, with large manufacturing enterprises making up most of the activity. Large lorries barrel in and out, stirring up large clouds. The campus grounds are also the same powder. Workers shovel the makings of concrete. Others pound away at old concrete, throwing out more dust. The small act of walking stirs up small billows.
When I dressed this morning, I thought of wearing a handkerchief over my hair. I thought of wearing worn-out clothes that I could easily wash and wouldn’t worry about preserving. If I had goggles and a face mask, I could wear them also. I chose instead a simple wrinkle-free skirt and wrinkled blouse.
The large lecture hall where I teach looks more like an airplane hangar with at least two sides open to the air and sunshine and dust. A chapel service is still in progress when I arrive, so I sit in a seat and discover that there’s a fine layer of dust on the desk, and I imagine that my skirt has nicely removed a layer for the student who takes my place. The evangelist says a final prayer, and I move to the front of the class arrangement. I would call it a classroom but it’s more an island of desks and chairs in a sea of concrete floor, all of them facing a white board.
The white board still has the previous class’s lecture on it. As students begin to wipe off their seats and chairs, I wipe off the white board and realize that really I’m erasing two or three lectures underneath the current one, plus the latest layer of dust. Finally one kind student takes the eraser from me, moves just beyond the hangar, dips the eraser in a water puddle and returns to wipe off the board. Now the board has smeared into it a layer of puddle. Later a second volunteer student will take the eraser to a room in the next building and return with a cleaner, wetter eraser. That will wipe out three layers of letters. And by creating a film of blue and black gray, this latest smearing will give a nice contrast to my blue letters.
Very little can happen in an airplane hangar with over 100 students. Surely the last row cannot read my handwriting mixed with dust, three lectures, and puddle. Surely they cannot hear me shouting above the workers pounding in the unfinished building next to us. Surely the dust already clinging to their fingers, their pens, and papers drives them nuts. Surely they have better things to do than wait ten minutes for me to wipe off the board.
But they have come wearing their finest clothes, the men in pressed shirts and ties, the women in dresses and scarves. Somebody’s perfume wafts pleasantly from the front row.
I am telling them the parable of the talents because I have witnessed two weeks before a pathetic set of student presentations. I tell them that as future teachers, they will be given five bags of talents and they should understand how powerful and life-giving those bags are. Their focus in preparing these presentations should not be fear, but the importance of what they do.
And in saying this, I see them lean forward. Some of the students in the back have turned one ear toward me. After I finish telling the parable, I will begin a painstaking process of writing on the board a sample essay rather than giving them a handout because circumstances discourage me from making over a hundred photocopies. And they will write patiently. The students in back will occasionally stand up to get a better view of what I’ve written on the board. Other students will help the ones beside them by showing their notes. Someone will ask me to explain something again. And afterward, students will come to me with drafts of the next assignment even though I hadn’t finished explaining it.
Next Monday, I will take extra care in pressing my skirt in spite of the dust.
Three buildings on this campus, a former brewery, are still being transformed from beer-making activity to learning activity: the administration building, the cafeteria/library/classroom building, and a large lecture hall. The other buildings have not been transformed at all. An architect has yet to inspect one building to see if it has potential to be a dormitory.
The streets in this area of Moshi are a fine powdery dust, with large manufacturing enterprises making up most of the activity. Large lorries barrel in and out, stirring up large clouds. The campus grounds are also the same powder. Workers shovel the makings of concrete. Others pound away at old concrete, throwing out more dust. The small act of walking stirs up small billows.
When I dressed this morning, I thought of wearing a handkerchief over my hair. I thought of wearing worn-out clothes that I could easily wash and wouldn’t worry about preserving. If I had goggles and a face mask, I could wear them also. I chose instead a simple wrinkle-free skirt and wrinkled blouse.
The large lecture hall where I teach looks more like an airplane hangar with at least two sides open to the air and sunshine and dust. A chapel service is still in progress when I arrive, so I sit in a seat and discover that there’s a fine layer of dust on the desk, and I imagine that my skirt has nicely removed a layer for the student who takes my place. The evangelist says a final prayer, and I move to the front of the class arrangement. I would call it a classroom but it’s more an island of desks and chairs in a sea of concrete floor, all of them facing a white board.
The white board still has the previous class’s lecture on it. As students begin to wipe off their seats and chairs, I wipe off the white board and realize that really I’m erasing two or three lectures underneath the current one, plus the latest layer of dust. Finally one kind student takes the eraser from me, moves just beyond the hangar, dips the eraser in a water puddle and returns to wipe off the board. Now the board has smeared into it a layer of puddle. Later a second volunteer student will take the eraser to a room in the next building and return with a cleaner, wetter eraser. That will wipe out three layers of letters. And by creating a film of blue and black gray, this latest smearing will give a nice contrast to my blue letters.
Very little can happen in an airplane hangar with over 100 students. Surely the last row cannot read my handwriting mixed with dust, three lectures, and puddle. Surely they cannot hear me shouting above the workers pounding in the unfinished building next to us. Surely the dust already clinging to their fingers, their pens, and papers drives them nuts. Surely they have better things to do than wait ten minutes for me to wipe off the board.
But they have come wearing their finest clothes, the men in pressed shirts and ties, the women in dresses and scarves. Somebody’s perfume wafts pleasantly from the front row.
I am telling them the parable of the talents because I have witnessed two weeks before a pathetic set of student presentations. I tell them that as future teachers, they will be given five bags of talents and they should understand how powerful and life-giving those bags are. Their focus in preparing these presentations should not be fear, but the importance of what they do.
And in saying this, I see them lean forward. Some of the students in the back have turned one ear toward me. After I finish telling the parable, I will begin a painstaking process of writing on the board a sample essay rather than giving them a handout because circumstances discourage me from making over a hundred photocopies. And they will write patiently. The students in back will occasionally stand up to get a better view of what I’ve written on the board. Other students will help the ones beside them by showing their notes. Someone will ask me to explain something again. And afterward, students will come to me with drafts of the next assignment even though I hadn’t finished explaining it.
Next Monday, I will take extra care in pressing my skirt in spite of the dust.
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