Tanzania Week 5: Or That Time I Figured Out Why Everyone Thinks I’m From Zanzibar
The past seven days have felt like two distinct and separate existences. Like water and oil, the beginning of one world and the end of the other crashing together but never quite mixing.
Sunday night I walked around Korogwe’s market then grabbed dinner and a beer with one of the Danish girls working at NIMR, Cessie. The walk served as further affirmation of how well I fit in here compared to a lot of foreigners, at least superficially. Other than a quick greeting in passing, no one really bothered me. As long as I didn’t speak much, I was treated as a local. In her case, any walk through town entailed swimming in a sea of attention, and vendor prices magically shot up in her presence. On the other hand, I found that people are much more patient with her lacking Kiswahili than they are with mine. This is even more useful in Korogwe where fewer people speak English than in Tanga or Dar es Salaam. If anything, I am most confident in my Swahili when ordering food and drinks. That didn’t help much at dinner, as our waitress was so drunk it didn’t really matter what language I spoke. The restaurant we ate at was notable for being the only place in town that served pork. Interestingly, when ordering said pork, no direct mention of the type of meat was made. You just ordered “Nyama Choma”, which is a generic term for roast meat. If you specified a type, like beef or goat or chicken, that’s what you got. Don’t specify, and you get pork. My guess is this was an attempt to avoid offending any Muslim patrons while still cornering the market on tasty pig food.
Monday morning was awkward, but it had to happen. My preceptor, Dr. Lusingu, wanted to have a meeting with Edwin, the person helping me the most with my project so far, and I at 10:00am. The atmosphere in his office was as tense as I’ve ever felt since I’d been in Tanzania. Dr. Lusingu and Edwin proceeded to very formally, politely, and passive-aggressively discuss (argue) about my proposal, my research, and my supervision. Edwin had been blindsided the day I arrived when he was told he would be guiding me, despite never being asked nor having the time he believed he needed to do the job well. Dr. Lusingu argued that he had been not been told I had an interest in social or behavioral sciences until right before I arrived, and therefore did not now that he would need a qualitative research person to help me ahead of time. Both of them felt that they had not been informed very well about how the whole process was supposed to work and were angry at the coordinator back in Dar es Salaam. Meanwhile, I was tiptoeing around the questions they lobbed at me while trying to ask how many participants I should have and where they should come from for my focus group discussions and in-depth interviews. By the end, it seemed that Edwin was committed to helping me, and we had agreed on my sampling methods.
So, Edwin and I went downstairs and spoke with Filbert, who was in charge of data and statistics. We asked him to find people from the study villages we had selected in the database so that we could go out with field workers to set appointment dates for data collection while I set about working on proposal draft number 4. He said he’d get back to us with the results of his search.
Tuesday, I decided to walk down the hill from the lab and eat at one of the many little food spots dotting the road back into the center of town. I don’t know why I picked the one I did, but after sitting there for no more than thirty seconds, four people from NIMR drove up and joined me. I tried to hide my pleasure as best as I could when they congratulated me on picking up Swahili so fast. They had not expected me to be familiar with the food options, let alone order and pay completely in Swahili, or know that in small places like this if I didn’t specifically ask for a cold drink I was going to get an African sun-light temperature beverage. One of my lunch mates that day, Mahunda, was working on his Bachelor’s Degree in Biology in Dar es Salaam, but was doing research in the lab here in Korogwe. He is 23, as is Cessie, who is also working on her Bachelor’s degree back in Copenhagen, though she is taking this half of the year she is spending in Tanzania off from school. I’m noticing that all of the university students I have met here are all at least 2 years older than me, whether they are from Africa or Europe. Mahunda and the others invited me to hang out some time so that they could make me some “Ghetto Ugali”, whatever that means.
Later that day I met with Filbert to ask about the participants. I discovered that he only had the information needed to find one participant, and even that might not be up to date. Obviously, this was a problem, but I didn’t know what to do and Dr. Lusingu and Edwin were nowhere to be found, so I had to hold off till Wednesday. The next morning, I told Edwin the bad news, and he took me downstairs to see what we could do. Thursday was a national holiday (Eid), so everyone would be off work, and many would take Friday off as well. I watched Edwin request that Filbert do what he could to find us some available participants through other databases on Friday, even though it was a holiday weekend. In an extremely Tanzanian fashion, Edwin spent 95% of the conversation praising Filbert’s expertise, importance, and statistical prowess and just how much we desperately needed him to do this one little thing for us that would make us eternally grateful for his time and thoughtfulness before making the request. He agreed.
That night, I went to Korogwe’s bus stand to catch a ride to Tanga, where Nick and I would be flying from to Zanzibar Thursday morning to meet the rest of our friends. As fate would have it, Filbert was also waiting at the bus stand for a ride to Tanga to see his family. The bus ride was a strange one. In the midst of a fleet of small, run down and dirt stained buses came a large coach bus with an array of shining neon lights. Logically, we took the air-conditioned party bus. Inexplicably, it was the same price as the others. Uncomfortably, Filbert spent half of the ride loudly asking me about my thoughts on the upcoming elections, religion, and homosexuality before I managed to derail him back to the safe grounds of research. By the time we’d reached Tanga (much faster than I expected, mostly because the driver spent the majority of the drive in the wrong lane to bypass traffic), I think he was rather fond of me. I hoped it would help when he was looking through the database for me.
After a quick dinner, Nick and I went back to his hostel to rest up for our big trip to Zanzibar. We would be taking two different flights, mine in the morning and his early in the afternoon. I woke up the next morning earlier than I normally would have to catch my flight at 9:40, but I’m glad I did. I couldn’t find a single Bajaji to take me to the airport, probably because of the holiday. I ended up finally seeing someone passing on a Boda Boda (motorcycle) and flagged him down. It was the first time I’d ever been on a motorcycle and was an exciting beginning to the mini-vacation.
Since we were supposed to have Class-C Permits to do research, we also counted as residents of the country. This means that things like hotels and plane tickets are cheaper. However, our coordinator at NIMR headquarters still had not given us our actual permits. All we had were receipts for the application and payment. I was worried that they might question me when I checked in, but they said nothing and let me pass through, after which I boarded the smallest and most crowded plane I’ve ever been on. It felt like I was in a small bus in Dar es Salaam, not about to take off. The pilots’ high-fives after every landing (there were two stops before mine) were also not very comforting.
After landing, I walked through the resident line with a crowd of Tanzanians and completely skipped customs and immigration (a stunt that did not work as well for an Asian and a White passenger of another plane) and tried to contact my friends when I realized I had run out of minutes and texts. There was supposed to be a driver picking me up but I had no way to contact him. So I ate breakfast. Eventually, I received a text saying that the others, who had taken a ferry from Dar to Zanzibar, were going to the hotel, so I took a taxi to meet them there. Then began one of the best weekends of my life.
We explored beautiful Jozani Forest, home of the rare Zanzibar Colobus Monkey. There are only 2,000 left in the world, and I saw about 15 of them among the giant mahogany and palm oil trees.
We also spotted an elephant shrew skittering through a clearing between nests of mangrove trees, a sign of good luck according to our guide. Afterwards, we went to the beach with the world famous restaurant, The Rock, which is literally a restaurant sitting on top of a giant rock hovering above the waves. Before dinner, I spent two hours playing soccer with some Zanzibari boys and men, non-stop action that I loved every minute of. So much so that I didn’t notice the torn and bleeding soles of my feet till it was time to eat dinner. I’ve been limping around ever since, but it was worth it.
The rest of the weekend was a blur of activity. We explored Stone Town, which was beautiful and odd. It felt like walking through Havana, Cuba, but with obvious Arab influence and the people of Zanzibar everywhere. Even that was confusing as they all looked Ethiopian due to the mix of Tanzanian and Omani blood, making it difficult for me to remember to respond in Swahili or even occasionally Arabic, not Amharic. We rode to a sandbank in a Dhow, the trademark sailboat of Zanzibar, the Indian Ocean surrounding us an unreal shade of blue that no picture we took could accurately portray.
We later dove off of the same Dhow to snorkel among the fish and coral, my bravery faltering as I came to a point where the already deep water suddenly dropped off to light-devouring depths. We then sailed to a lagoon for another quick dip before having a sea food feast on the beach. On our return to Stone Town, we walked around a lively food market by the harbor, eating sweet Zanzibari Pizza and watching children do flips and dives off of the stone walls and into the harbor. The next day we explored some more before going to spend our last night in Zanzibar with a bang. We attended a huge party on the beach, lit by the full moon as much as the hanging lamps and flashing lightshow, finally dragging ourselves back to our rooms to sleep as the sun began to rise and the staff started kicking people off the beach.
The next morning, we returned to Stone Town and split up once again. Nick and I flew to Tanga together this time, with a lovely cracked plane window to keep us company along the way, before splitting up. This bus ride was a less glamourous than my first one, and took a lot longer, meaning that it was dark by the time I arrived in Tanga. Lucky for me, within a few minutes of leaving the bus stand there was a power outage, making the streets of Korogwe pitch-black and much harder to navigate. A pit stop at a restaurant with a generator, a few seconds of being chased by street dogs, and two and a half hours later, I finally made it home and fell into the deepest sleep I’ve had in a long time.
