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.