Keeping Entertained in a Low-Tech Environment, Part VI: Drifting

There’s nothing like being away from home to make you miss home.  I grew up in Indiana, home of the Indy 500.  Though I did spend some quality weekends in high school babysitting for kids whose parents were at the 500, the closest I’ve ever been to the 500 was attending my brother’s kindergarten class’s Big Wheel  500.  Apparently, though, something deep in my DNA likes insane, gas guzzling, BP oil-spill-enabling car stunts.  At any rate, while thousands of Hoosiers were at the Indy 500 this Memorial Day weekend, we were at the Zanzibar Drifters competition in Pwani Mchangani.

This was unquestionably THE event of the week for a large segment of the male population of Zanzibar, aged 4-80, most of whom got to the event on public transportation, some even getting into the spirit of the competition.

Before Sunday, we had watched these drifting com-petitions on TV (the majority of my household being in the male 4-80 category). But, even on TV, it’s pretty clear that it’s well nigh a male-only event.  As it was explained by a girl who was sneaking a peek at the competition with us while desperately trying to cover up her face with her headscarf, girls who are seen at drifting events--on TV or in person--risk ostracism at school. But it definitely was the event of the week, and we were very lucky to be invited to go with a friend whose family has a house in Pwani Mchangani. 

So what is drifting?  Drifting is a competition in which a driver does donuts repeatedly in a paved inter-section, leaving a certain percentage of the tire rubber in the intersection (as evidenced by the black marks and the two tires that popped during the competition). 

At some point during each driver’s time in the spotlight, he slows down the car suspensefully, and then does something really crazy, involving a door being open, feet being thrust out a door or roof, and general feats of driving prowess (kids, don’t try this at home).

Everyone has their favorite car and driver.  Some like Skyline.

We were predisposed to like Rock Star, as he drives a Cresta (just like we do!) and his relative owns the “mix” shop where Brady and I eat lunch most days. I have to say, though, Mr. Vegas made a pretty flashy impression.

At the end of the night, there was an episode of something that—at a rodeo—would be called cowboy poker:  three guys sat at a table in the middle of the intersection, just trying to have a calm chat over Cokes, but kept being hassled by a guy doing high-speed donuts around them.  How rude!

If this sounds dangerous, don’t worry.  There was a bank of tires to protect spectators—humans and goats alike—and there was a referee and an ambulance if things got really out of hand.

And all of this fun for only 1000 Tsh per carload (about 70 cents), plus a few oranges to share with friends!  Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Happy Mother's Day!

On this Mother’s Day, I wanted to say thanks to my mom, who I’m so glad was able to visit us here this year.  Her strength and resourcefulness has helped to make me who I am, and her and Dad’s travels to Africa gave me the inkling of an idea, long ago, that I might oneday want to come here.   Here are a couple of my favorite pictures of Mom and Dad’s visit back in February, when there was still no electricity.

Mom and Dad happened to be here when we were invited to visit the village of one of my favorite students, from last semester. 

An avid snapshot photographer herself, Mom knows that it's hard to get a good picture at mealtime, especially with two kids in squirrely moods.

Playing the perennial favorite game: Who's Taller?

Finally, at the airport, a picture where everyone's looking at the camera!

But I also want to wish a happy Mother's Day to Oscar and Calvin.  This has been a pretty challenging year in lots of ways, but one aspect that’s been really wonderful—all throughout—has been getting to spend time with Oscar and Calvin and to see them rise to the occasion of getting along, and getting along happily, in a completely new environment.

They've tried new things.

They've made new friends, with people of all ages.

They've entertained themselves with very limited materials.

They've mostly gotten along with each other well, despite spending many hours together, mostly in close quarters.

I'm prejudiced, of course, but I think they're pretty good kids, and I'm proud to be their mom.

Happy Mother's Day!

Restaurants of Zanzibar: Lükmaan

(This entry dictated by Calvin.)  Lükmaan is my favorite restaurant.  It is cheap, but really good.  I think the deal with it is that it’s not a mzungu (foreigner) restaurant, but sometimes African tourists from Uganda and Kenya go there.

They have a bunch of crock pots full of food so you don’t have to wait, and they have a bread-display case that they keep their bread in.  When you go in to Lükmaan, you walk over to the guy behind the counter (sometimes Lükmaan and sometimes one of the people working there), and tell them what you want.  Then, you take the food and walk over to a table.  And if you want soda, you can get it from the refrigerator yourself.  But you can’t get tamarind juice yourself because the glasses are in the kitchen, and there’s a refrigerator with a tub of juice in it that the waiter fills.  Then when you’re finished, a waiter comes over and clears and wipes the table and asks what you ate, and he writes down the items and the prices on a sticky note and totals it up in his head.  Usually our whole family eats a meal for about 8000 Tsh (around $6.50). 

Sometimes tourists come there, but it’s not meant for tourists.  They usually come in and ask for a menu and think that the waiters will bring the food over for you like in most restaurants.  But that’s not the way it goes.

They have really nice paintings around the room that change every couple of months.  Also, they have recently updated their serving area from having a bunch of crock pots to having a long metal container.  Then, they upgraded their bread-display case.  They kept the old one but the new one is much fancier (but I like the first one more).  And they have recently started having Swiss rolls! 

Our favorite things there. . .

• Mine and Oscar’s—rice (wali), with kidney beans cooked in coconut milk (maharage).  Sometimes I have bread with it, preferably mandazi (or coconut bread, in Oscar’s case) because it is good for dipping in the bean juices.  We like getting soda or juice there.  They’re special because they have Pepsi products.  Lükmaan makes really good tamarind juice and bungo juice (bungo is related to passionfruit and usually looks sort of rotten when it’s ripe).
• Mom’s—also wali na maharage, but she also likes “spaghetti,” which is spaghetti noodles and green beans and carrots, dressed with oil and soy sauce and served cold.  And she likes pilau (rice and spices served with one boiled potato and onion, tomato, and vinegar “salad”).
• Dad’s—spinach (mchicha) cooked in coconut milk, cabbage (kabichi) also cooked in coconut milk with a few tomatoes, and Chinese rice (fried rice with green beans, carrots, and sometimes shrimp).  Actually, Daddy will eat almost everything there except for green bananas cooked with sardines (he says it’s sardines flavored with green bananas!).  That’s the only thing at Lükmaan that Daddy has ever not been able to finish.  He hasn’t ever tried the cow liver.

Commencement

my current class taking the midterm

I always get a little nostalgic at Commence-
ment time, which will be in just over a week in Tacoma.  I’ve been teaching at Puget Sound for long enough to have known several classes of students throughout their time at Puget Sound, and graduation is always bittersweet—sweet, of course, because I’m proud of our graduates and happy to see them going off into the world and begin a new phase of their lives, but sad, as well, because the students I’ve gotten to know and like won’t be around on campus anymore. This year, I’ve been thinking about the graduating class, as well as about the contrasts between the kind of education that’s possible at Puget Sound as compared with the university where I’m teaching this year on sabbatical.

Among the graduating class at Puget Sound this year are a group of 15 students that I’ve known since our Writing and Rhetoric seminar together in Fall 2006. We spent a lot of time together because the class was an advising seminar, as well as a residential seminar: We went on field trips together, we had course-related movie nights, we had a meeting at my house. Since the class ended, I’ve had advising meetings for four years with the students who went on to become English majors, and I’ve kept in touch with nearly all of the students—even this year while I’ve been abroad and last year when many of them were abroad (one preceding me here in Tanzania).  Now, as they prepare to leave Puget Sound, these students are accomplished writers, performers, athletes, travelers, and researchers, and they have accrued numerous awards collectively (including four Phi Beta Kappa memberships).  These students have benefited from the many kinds of resources that come with a Puget Sound education—a low student/faculty ratio, up-to-date and comfortable classrooms, a library with easy access to information from across the country and around the world—and those are just a few obvious parts of the infrastructure, supporting academic work alone.  Through these students’ own strengths and through the support they’ve received, I’m sure that they will go on to great things, each in his or her own way.

last week on the road to class, during the rainy season

This spring, I’m teaching a course that is roughly equivalent to the Writing and Rhetoric seminar—a communication skills course for first-year university students here in Zanzibar.  I’m sure there are some terrific students in the class, but I only know the names of a few of them.  It’s not that I’ve gotten negligent.  If anything, teaching this class has kept me on my toes pedagogically; it’s not easy to teach when there are no books and all the course content must come from lectures given in the students’ second language (thankfully, I brought an LCD projector with me to Zanzibar).  The classroom is infested with potentially disease-carrying mosquitoes and is equipped with one working electrical outlet, one small chalkboard, and no working microphones. The most challenging aspect, though, is that there are at least 284 students in the course (I have yet to see a roster, but 284 students have submitted assignments). Between the campus where they study and my office are 10 miles of heavily rutted and near-flooded road, and most students don’t have Internet access, so it’s very difficult to hold office hours or to have informal conversation.  I’m doing the very best I can to make a positive contribution to these students’ educations, but I know that their experience of college will be very different than that of the students in my Writing Rhetoric seminar of Fall 2006 (or of students in any other course at Puget Sound).  They’re certainly getting a lot less writing and speaking experience, as well as a lot less individualized feedback.

So Commencement is for me this year more than usually bittersweet.  As the Puget Sound campus heads into this season of celebratory parties and goodbyes, I have a few parting words for Abbie, Annalise, Bailey, Callie, David, Garrett, Jessy, Katie, Leana, Melissa, Miles, Rachel, Rachel, Robyn, and Wes.  I have enjoyed getting to know each of you, and I hope to continue to hear from you from time to time in your lives after Puget Sound.  I celebrate your many achievements, and I hope that you find joy and success in whatever it is that you try to accomplish.  And I hope that part of what you try to accomplish will be, in some small way, closing one or two of the many gaps between your class and my current class.  I’ll be thinking of you as you cross the stage to receive your diplomas and to commence your lives after college.

Fruits of Zanzibar

(By Calvin) In Zanzibar, we have a lot of fruits that you get in America, like bananas, watermelons, and pineapples.  But there are some fruits that they have in Zanzibar but not in America regularly: mangoes, bungos, passion fruits, custard apples, breadfruits, rambutans, and mangosteens.

My favorite is passion fruit because they’re soooo sour. You eat passion fruits by cutting them in half, taking a spoon, putting them in your mouth and sucking the fruity bits off, and either spitting the seeds out or crunching them up, or—as I like to do—eating it like yogurt and swallowing the seeds.  I also like passion fruit in juice, mixed with bungo, or watermelon, or plain.  My favorite way is making the juice plain and then mixing it with soda water.

Bungo is a lot like passion fruit except with bigger seeds.  Like passion fruit, you wait to eat it until it looks all rotten on the outside.  With passion fruit, it’s ripe when it looks wrinkly and rotten, and with bungo it looks moldy.  

To eat rambutans and mango-
steens, you cut all the way around the skin at the middle, but you don’t cut into the fruit.  Then you pull off the skin and then put the fruit in your mouth and spit out the seed after you chew off the fruit like you do with a cherry.  Once I ate 16 rambutans!  Rambutan skins look sort of like sea urchins, and if you cut the skin right you can put it on your nose like a clown's nose.  Unfortunately, they’re out of season now. 

Breadfruits were originally brought here from other countries because they’re incredibly easy to grow.  When there were slaves here, the slaveowners gave the slaves breadfruit instead of other foods because the slaves could work full time and not spend so much time growing other foods.  They don’t taste like fruits, but more like potatoes that grow on trees. You have to cook them and take the “bone” out of the middle and rinse the latex out. I like them turned into big French fries.

   

I’ll miss the fruits here when I go back to America, especially passion fruit and rambutans, which you can’t get in America.  But I’m happy we’ll be able to get apples, cherries, strawberries, and many other kinds of berries!

Soccer in Zanzibar

(By Calvin) Almost everyone here likes soccer!  It’s called “football” in English, or “mpira” (ball) in Swahili.  People like watching it and playing it.

There’s quite a few places to play it: there’s our school, which has a pretty good field; there’s the beach; there are some public fields; and there’s one field that’s usually covered in rain and people wash their cars in it now. 

Our school has a team that plays against other school teams, and Oscar plays on it.  I mostly play with kids in our neighborhood and on recess.

There’s also some public TVs here where people watch professional soccer games, mostly from Europe.  Tanzania plays in the World Cup, but it’s in 174^th place.  There’s a couple of leagues that people like watching, such as the Premier League (England), the Bundas League (Germany), and La Liga (Spain).  Most people here like the Premier League the best, although there are a handful of La Liga supporters, but they mainly like Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. 

In our family, I like Arsenal, my dad likes Liverpool, my brother likes Manchester United.  My mom doesn’t really care about football, but her favorite team name is Tottenham Hotspur.    

People have jerseys and stickers and flags and noisemakers for the World Cup and to show what teams they support.  We’re going to see the World Cup and we’re pretty lucky because we’re going to see an exciting game: Argentina versus South Korea.  I’m hoping for Argentina because it has maybe the world’s best player, Lionel Messi (a.k.a. “The Flea”).  Oscar’s hoping for South Korea because it has one of Manchester United’s star players, Ji-sung Park.

Research, Recreation, Ruins, and Reflection: Diary of My Trip to Pemba

Ever since we arrived in Zanzibar, people have been opining about Pemba, Unguja’s sister island: We’ve gotten warnings about political violence there, a stronghold of the Muslim-dominated CUF party that has consistently lost in elections against the mainland-affiliated CCM party.  We’ve been told that we MUST visit Pemba, where the air is so clean and the beaches so pristine.  We’ve heard Pemba denigrated as a backwater that doesn’t even have consistent electricity (Pembans certainly must have experienced a good run of schadenfreude during our 3-month electricity blackout).

In short, Pemba is beautiful but/because underdeveloped, and tensions can run high there because Pemba has for hundreds of years had less money, development, and political power than Unguja—which, in turn, has claimed to have had less money, development, and political power than the mainland (or at least the part of the mainland that Zanzibaris see most: Dar es Salaam).  So when I decided to administer questionnaires in half of the archipelago’s 10 districts, it seemed only fair to go to half of Unguja’s 6 districts and half of Pemba’s 4 districts. . . .  And I was a little curious about much-storied Pemba.

So this past weekend, my research team and I packed up and headed over the short distance to our sister island.  I’m going to offer a diary of the trip to give a window into what traveling, living, and researching has been like—in Pemba, and more generally in Zanzibar.  (Note: this entry is quite a bit longer than my usual ones—I hope not too long to be of interest.)

Thursday

In the afternoon, I left Unguja in advance of most of my 5-person research team, with my research assistant Fatma and my friend Naheed (doing research of her own and coordinating her trip with ours).  During the half-hour flight from Unguja’s tiny airport to Pemba’s tinier airport, we were reminded again of how beautiful the sea is in Zanzibar. 

Arriving at the hotel in town, we had the now-familiar experience of the flexibility of prices.  The hotel reservation had been made over the phone by one of my research assistants—in Kiswahili.  When Naheed and I showed up, obviously foreigners, things changed.  Fatma was placed in the room that had been booked, but we were shifted from a “double” into a “twin” room, and it was only the next day that we learned that the hotel expected us to pay $65/night, rather than the 40,000 Tsh price (about $32) at which we’d booked.  Naheed and I pulled out our passports and showed that although we’re US citizens, we’re residents of Tanzania and entitled to non-tourist prices, and we negotiated a rate of 45,000 for the twin room with two beds—a better deal than the 40,000 for the double room with one bed, but not a fun conversation to have. 

Friday

Naheed went off to do her research, and Fatma and I headed out to a nearby town to talk with the District Administrator and to make sure that everything was in order for the Saturday’s session.  We’d planned a fairly tight schedule for Saturday, with 15 questionnaires in the morning, and 15 in the afternoon.  Because many of the respondents do not read well, the questionnaires are administered orally, and each questionnaire takes about an hour to administer. A long day, for sure, but many of my research assistants had never been to Pemba, and I wanted to make sure that we all had a little chance to explore the island, so we decided to consolidate the research activities into one day.

The Administrator knew we were coming but hadn’t started to gather respondents yet, so we were glad that we could talk in person and clarify what we wanted: a diverse group of people from 3 shehias in the region.  During the conversation, we learned that the Administrator was planning to ask only people from the urban area because it was more convenient.  For our research, this would have been a disaster; rural areas are where the level of literacy is the lowest, and although I want to talk with people who are literate as well as with those who are illiterate, my entire study would be compromised if I didn’t have access to people from rural areas.  Again, I was glad that we had come early to talk in person. 

We found out that the obstacle to working with rural residents was transportation; unlike Unguja, Pemba is hilly and crisscrossed with wide rivers and islets that make transportation slow and relatively more expensive.  In Unguja, I’ve been offering respondents the equivalent of bus fare and a soda and snack to make it realistic for them to participate in the study, and in Pemba, the bus fare is two to six times as expensive.  So we adjusted our reimbursement fee (and I mentally checked how much cash I’d brought with me), and all was set.  We returned to town and had a similar conversation with the Administrator there.

All ready for the next day, I settled into the hotel room and dove into the books I’d brought with me to read: two books about literacy and social policy in Africa that I’d bought in the US—both of which would be nearly impossible to buy or afford in Africa itself.  My research here is enabled by the books I brought and the scholarly articles to which I have access through the University of Puget Sound electronic collections.  I’ll leave in Zanzibar nearly all of the scholarly materials I’ve brought with me—either with colleagues here that I know will use them or donated to the university library here.

Intermittently while I was reading, I chatted with Fatma, who had checked out of her hotel room to stay with a friend and was relaxing in my room while she waited.  I’ve enjoyed these kinds of opportunities to talk informally with Zanzibari women.  In private spaces, social barriers are relaxed, and Zanzibari Muslim women take off their headscarves and buibuis (long black robes, worn like coats over other clothing).  We talked about family, friends, aspirations, cultural differences, her options for applying to graduate school—a thoroughly enjoyable few hours.

Just before sunset, Naheed returned from her research with a colleague of hers who had a car and invited us to go to a beach for a swim.  We went out—stopping along the way for fresh haluwa (a jelly-like Zanzibari sweet consisting of water, cornstarch, lots of sugar, some rosewater, and cashews—like Turkish delight without the powdered sugar coating) and for a visit to one of the nicer buildings on the island, Fidel Castro Secondary School (post-revolution, all of the high schools here were named or renamed with African and/or Communist names).

We got to the beach and saw that a swim was definitely not in the cards. The tide was way out, and between the shore and swimming depth were hundreds of sea urchins hiding in seaweed.  But the sunset and the beach were beautiful, and the drive and company completely enjoyable.  By the time I got back to the hotel, the rest of the research team had arrived, and we had a quick chat before everyone turned in.

Saturday

Bright and early, we got up to the standard Tanzanian hotel breakfast (fruit, eggs and toast, and tea with milk) and were off to the day’s questionnaires, leaving the hotel at 8 for our 9 AM meeting.  At the first site, the respondents were all present and ready to hear our explanation of the project.  I have a short explanation in Kiswahili, but I leave the majority of the explanation to my research assistants who are much more easily understood—especially in Pemba, where there are few foreign visitors.  In Unguja, I find that most people know how to listen to broken Kiswahili like mine, but in Pemba I was reminded of how far I am from fluent in this language that I’ve been learning for the past eight months!  In recognition of the more conservative culture in Pemba, I wore a headscarf all day, which people appreciated and/or found amusing—either way, not a bad thing.

After our introduction, we divided the respondents into three groups by shehia, with each research assistant administering a questionnaire to one of the five respondents from the first shehia.  While waiting for this first set of questionnaires to come in ready to be checked for completeness, I wrote field notes and made small talk with respondents.  Pemba was having one of its regular blackouts during our session, and so there were no fans in the room, which was sweltering hot.  As is typical during this time of year, there was a huge downpour for about an hour, which meant that we needed to close the doors to keep rain from coming in. Immediately after the rain, the weather cooled off, but then the temperature and humidity rose again. After the session, we drove back to town and had lunch and then set off to our second set of questionnaires.

In all, it was an exhausting but productive day. The Administrators had communicated well with the shehas, and we had a very diverse population to survey—including an autodidactic banana farmer who spoke fluent English, a 20-year-old seamstress who had never heard of the Internet, and a 70-year-old retired woman teacher who is a fan of text messaging. As in Unguja, I’m hearing loud and clear the importance of religious literacy.  Here, people who have never been to a library (explaining, “God has not wished for me to go to a library”) and who can’t afford writing paper know and read the Koran, prayers, parables, and many other religious texts.

Sunday

My research assistants visited with friends and family on the island, and Naheed and I made a trip to Misali Island, perhaps the top tourist destination in Pemba.  Misali is a nature preserve, known for its coral reefs, excellent snorkeling and diving, and informative nature trails.  To get there, we enlisted the help of Naheed’s colleague’s friend, Mussadi, who lives in Pemba.  He made arrangements for a local fisherman to take us all to the island.  We’d planned to take a dala-dala to the dock, but there were only two people in the dala-dala, which usually means that it can take a half hour or more for enough people to get in for the ride to start.  So we decided to hire the driver of an off-hours dala-dala.  We got to the village, made our greetings to people there, made our way to the port and into the boat, and were off!  The water, sky, and sun were beautiful, and we had high hopes of seeing new fish while snorkeling and maybe even some coconut crabs on our hike of the island.  We were prepared for all phases of the trip we’d planned: long skirts and sleeves for walking through the village to get to the boat, shorts and swimsuits for on the island, as well as sunscreen, snorkel masks, hiking boots, water, and snacks.

Just when we were in sight of the island, the weather changed, with ominous rainclouds as far as we could see.  We had been on the island only a few minutes when the skies poured down.  We waited out one storm under the thatched roof shelter, reading the informational materials, watching the huge land hermit crabs, and making contingency plans. 

The rain passed, and we made a circuit of the island, stopping at a couple of rocky beaches and a deserted fishing camp.  It was good to be out in the woods after many months of city living.  The highlight of the hike was a stop at this cave, reputed in indigenous religion to have curative powers.  Although the population of Zanzibar is by some counts as much as 99% Muslim, Swahili culture still has at least one foot in traditional religion.  Local healers coexist with Muslim imams, and in any given town, the ratio of mosques to local spiritual sites is about equal.

Toward the end of our hike, the rain returned, and we made it back to the shelter, dripping wet.  We waited again, ate some snacks, and swatted the sand flies that were increasingly making their presence known.  In most places we’ve been in Unguja, mosquitoes are the biting insects to watch out for, and they don’t usually come out until evening.  This being a day trip, we’d brought sunscreen, but not our high-powered DEET insect repellant.  A mistake, for sure.

Finally, the rain stopped, and we headed out to the “sponge trail,” a 200-meter-long coral formation just off the beach, where informational signs reported we could see angel fish, sea anemones, puffer fish, moray eels, and maybe even sea turtles.  We’d both been snorkeling several times in Zanzibar, but never in a place where it’s possible to just walk off the beach to good snorkeling.  Zanzibar does have some very nice snorkeling spots—and even better diving spots—but they’re all out a ways from shore and it’s necessary to take a boat out in the ocean to reach the spots.  Even though I’ve done it several times, I still find it unnerving to hop out of a boat into the open ocean to go snorkeling, and I was looking forward to trying snorkeling within easy sight of land.  But we had no such luck at Misali.  The tide had come in so far that the coral were well below novice snorkeling range, and the rain had stirred up the seafloor enough that visibility was pretty poor.  We did see some little fish and sea urchins, but not the rainbow of sea life we’d hoped to see. 

Storm clouds were again advancing, and so we decided to head back to Pemba before the storm hit.  On the way back, the boat tipped side to side, uncomfortably close to the water, but we made it back safe and sound.  In the village, a dala-dala was almost full and ready to go back to town, so we hopped on.  Along the way, we picked up more, and more, and more passengers.  By my count, we had 32 adults and 8 children on the pickup-sized dala-dala by the time we reached town.  The dala-dala said clearly on the side that it was licensed for only 20 people but,  absent traffic police, these licensing regulations are treated more as suggestions than as hard limits.  Nonetheless, it was a good ride—cozy and surprisingly cool inside, and passengers were laughing at the fun of trying to squeeze in and dodge the rain, and surprised to see foreigners along for the ride, as well.

Back at the hotel, we showered and tried to keep cool, but the electricity and generator were both off.  Our hotel room was equipped with a hot water heater, air conditioner, and television, but during our entire stay, the air conditioner only worked during the first night, and the water heater and television never worked.  For the most part the generator was on or there was a power brown-out that didn’t provide enough power to support anything but the ceiling fan and a flickering fluorescent bulb.

We headed out for dinner, but ended up returning to the hotel, where there was good food and a clean eating environment—after our day at Misali, we weren’t eager to chance the street vendor food, from which one of the research assistants had already gotten an intestinal bug.

The hotel generator was on for most of the night but stopped abruptly at about 2AM and didn’t come on again, and didn’t come on, and didn’t come on, for almost an hour.  The pitch-black room grew increasingly sauna-like, given that our screenless windows were closed.  The heat is one thing in the daytime, and quite another at night, when it can feel not only uncomfortable but also sinister.  Using light from a flashlight, Naheed and I tucked in our mosquito nets well, temporarily repaired a couple of mosquito net holes with hair clips (essential travel tools), and opened the windows to a refreshing breeze in our corner room.  Sleep would have been impossible without the breeze, but we were chagrined to find engorged mosquitoes inside our nets in the morning, along with many, many bites. 

Insect bites in the US are cause for discomfort, but rarely for alarm.  Looking at the nearly 100 bites I’d gotten and was trying hard not to scratch, I was alarmed and started the diagnosis process.  Mosquitoes? Fleas? Sand flies? Bed bugs? All of the above?  Only in a region where insect-borne diseases are rampant are bedbugs cause for celebration (gross but apparently disease-free). Days later, I’m still not certain what bit me, but I’m feeling okay, the bite marks are mostly healed, and my luggage and clothes are certainly no worse for the thorough cleaning they got.  I’m hoping the anti-malarial prophylaxis I take and the battery of vaccinations I got before coming here do their work.

Monday

My research team had already returned to Unguja, and I had a few free hours before our flight while Naheed went on a research trip.  I decided to go to the ruins at Pujini, one of the many places in Zanzibar with ruins of earlier Omani, Portuguese, German, and British settlements.  The tropical climate is hard on buildings, so untended buildings from even the 19^th century are often crumbled down to the foundations.  Having been to several other ruins, I wasn’t expecting a lot of the ruins at Pujini, from a 15^th-century Omani sultan, but it was something to do.

I considered taking a dala-dala, but I couldn’t get good information on how long the walk from the road to the ruins was and I decided to hire a taxi.  Khamis (the driver) and I drove on the road to Pujini village, and then on the 6 km heavily rutted road to the ruins.  Along the way, we saw mud houses with thatched palm or corrugated tin roofs, rice fields, mango trees, banana plants, free-range cows and chickens, and lots and lots of vegetation.  

We finally got as close as we could to the ruins and headed out over muddy ground to the ruins.  The mud just clung to our shoes, and we were laughing hysterically as I wondered aloud what the airline would think of me showing up for my flight in my muddy shoes.  We considered turning back, but someone let us pass through his backyard to a much more clear route to the ruins.  As I expected, the ruins were best appreciated with a good imagination.

We were hurried on our way by a downpour that was inconvenient but helped in the job of getting our shoes clean.  When it was finally clear enough to drive back to town, we started back down the rutted road, stopping along the way to give a ride to some kids, aged around 8-11, who were carrying a live chicken, a large bag of rice, and some vegetables to town.  Khamis kept stopping to see if we could use some water from a spigot to wash our feet and shoes, but none of the public spigots had any water.  It was only when we got almost to the road that we found a small water container that we could use—carefully and sparingly—to get cleaned up a bit.  When I got back to town, I stopped and bought Dettol, the ubiquitous disinfectant soap, and did a more thorough job of cleaning up my feet and shoes at the hotel.

By the time I was cleaned up, Naheed had returned from her research trip, and we went out in search of “mix,” the delicious soup that’s an any-time-of-day treat in Zanzibar.  Mix is an Indian-inspired dish consisting of rojo (a sauce made from green mangoes, salt, and lemon or vinegar), over baghia (chickpea and onion fritters), boiled potatoes, and sometimes mishikaki (meat kababs).  In Unguja, mix also includes kuchora (mashed potato balls cooked in an egg batter), but we discovered that in Pemba, they’re replaced with a hard-boiled egg.  Yum.

After lunch, we flew back to Unguja, where Stone Town, with its tiny airport and its restaurants and shops, seemed like a buzzing metropolis.

This entry is quite a bit longer than my usual entries, but I wanted to give a fuller picture of what our days here are like.  This is the first time I’ve gone on an extended trip without Brady and the boys, but the experience in Pemba, of traveling to “tropical” but not always glamorous beaches, giving serious thought to food and health, negotiating prices, seeing ruins, navigating transportation options, dealing with erratic and inconsistent electricity, and trying in my broken Kiswahili to forge meaningful conversations with Zanzibaris is completely typical. 

After eight months here, I do feel that I am a resident if not citizen of Tanzania, and I am to some extent part of the culture as local people are.  But I have a pretty strong safety net—of guide books telling me where it’s safe to stay and eat, of professional books that give context and meaning to my research, of vaccines and medications and lotions that make me likely to avoid the worst threats of the climate, and of a figurative rainy day fund that I can draw from when I’m unexpectedly over-budget or if (God forbid) I should need medical evacuation for some tropical disease.  I hope that someday everyone in Africa will have the safety nets that most of us in America take for granted.