Tanzanian Days

Thursday June 10, 2010 6:55pm

There’s this time of day just before sunset where light rakes across the landscape and I remember why I so love photography. Because really, photography is a love of light. A delicate understanding of the relationship between objects and (as most often in my case) the sun.

I climbed a small mountain, what some might consider a large hill, near my house today. I am on a quest to find personal space, peace and quiet, me time. Most of you who know me know how prone I am to cram my schedule full of productive activities, leaving me exhausted but fulfilled, moving ever forward in my somewhat eclectic life story.

But here, in Africa, in my little village, with my 2,204 villagers spread out over 8 hours of foothills and mountains, whatever I do never seems to be enough. And I am exhausted. So my plan is to do less.

Counterintuitive? Nah. I’m just tired. I feel like all of my projects are suffering from the lack of time to commit to any one single project. So I am cutting back, and wandering a bit, on my own.

And on top of that little mountain, looking down at the sun raking over the cornfields and the scrubby brush, over the mountains beyond, and the mountains farther beyond, I felt happy. And that’s a start.

So I climbed back down off the mountain, aiming haphazardly towards the primary school, cut through the soccer game, and went to my newest phone-signal spot down the road. There, I met a drunk man. Harmless, rather friendly in a comfortingly non-hitting-on-me way, which is unusual for drunk men. Instead he wanted to talk about our local Catholic priest.

In my first week here in my village, I had an unfortunate encounter with this priest. I will spare you the details as this is a very public venue, but needless to say, it was an un-priest-like encounter. Since then I have had numerous conversations with women here in the village, after I got a lot more comfortable of course, and found that everybody already knows that the guy is a creep.

So tonight, this drunk fellow is telling me that his wife’s sister recently got a ride with the priest as she was walking into town (the priest has a car, and is one of the 2 people in the village with this privilege). And he stopped the car and made, shall we say, (again because this is very public, we’ll leave out details) a forceful and graphic invitation.

I try to reason with this drunk man, making him aware that I know of the priest’s behavior and am rather furious and confused as to why the community both knows about it and still tolerates his presence in our village and in our church. He tells me this: because it is the custom of the Pare people, he put a medicine on his wife. If the priest sleeps with his wife, he will be stuck to her, unable to separate. And then the man will know that his wife has been unfaithful.

And my answer is: “Huh?” no but really? I asked him what the name of this medicine is and how it works but he said it was something known to him and his people. I suggested strongly and repeatedly he simply have a few words with the priest about his behavior, and he agreed that he would do that in addition.

And then he invited me to dinner. Which I declined. (As a rule, I don’t go home with drunk people)

So now I am eating my beans. Without rice or anything else cuz I don’t feel like cooking any more. And cooked with tea spices because I misplaced my curry powder cleaning today. Which I have to say makes for interestingly flavoured beans.

It’s these long evenings by myself that kill me.

Sunday June 13, 2010 8:47pm

Tomorrow I will walk into Same. My bike, as usual, has a flat tire, and in the soft glow of afternoon errands I couldn’t bring myself to again ask the fellow who always repairs my flat tires to help me yet again. Sometime soon I will have to learn how to do it myself.

Tuesday I will be leaving early in the morning to spend a solid 24 hours with a local group called Muhama, which is also the name of a local tree, who do a number of great things along with sing and dance in the traditional Pare tribal custom. They have invited me to come with them to guard and celebrate the Mwenge – the freedom torch of Tanzania – as it passes through Same.

They warned there will be no sleeping, only singing and dancing and staying with the torch as it travels through villages and towns. And at least the dancing part I can handle. The songs, I usually catch on in time.

I am not allowed to bring my camera, I have been warned time and again, that the photography surrounding the mwenge can only be done by government registered photographers, and one person even related a story of a poor Norwegian tourist whose camera was . . removed from her possession. So you will only get my written account, but I promise to draw pictures with my words, as best as I can.

For now I am off to prepare for these next few busy days.