Save The Last Dance For Me

Wednesday, 08/13/14, 10:33 a.m.

Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Swahili speakers are really into their methali, or proverbs, and there’s one I’ve been thinking about and saying a lot lately: Milima haikutani, lakini binadamu wanakutana. Mountains don’t meet, but people do. It basically means that goodbye is never forever, and that’s true. It was a comfort to me during all the goodbyes back in Ifakara at the end of last week, knowing that with my Swahili proficiency (ain’t nobody calling me fluent yet) and interest in public health I have to return to East Africa. Plus, my Swiss running buddy, Sabine, summed it up perfectly when she said that the kind of people who travel keep on traveling, so you end up bumping into these people all over the world. Nonetheless, last week was more than a little bittersweet. 

For my last Ifakara weekend, I didn’t end up attempting to make a Slip-n-Slide (probably for the best, let’s be real here), but instead was invited to go see what work is like for the non-profit Msabi (Maji Safi kwa Afya Bora Ifakara=Clean Water for Better Health Ifakara). The plan was to do a survey of a potential water point out in the village of Kiberege in order to start drilling a well that week. However, when I arrived at their small office last Saturday morning, somebody had forgotten to call the community to let them know Msabi was coming that day. This would not do, so the survey was postponed. Jesse, the rugged Australian engineer with a bright red beard who had invited me along, turned to me and said, “You wanna take the motorbike out for a scoot anyway? It’s a beautiful ride.” Heh. He called it a scoot. This is why we are friends. He gave me a helmet that made my head feel invincible, but also about as heavy as all the rest of my body, and I clambered my way onto the back of the pikipiki in typical awkward-Taylor fashion. We headed out to Kiberege, about 40 kilometers away, anyway to check out a primary school where there was Msabi’s special kind of water pump and a latrine that Jesse had designed. 

It was indeed a beautiful ride! It’s crazy how fast the scenery can change when you go to different areas around here. All the vegetation on the rolling hills became greener and villages became smaller and more sparse. Robert Pirsig, in his philosophical book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, says that you can’t really appreciate a journey from inside the confines of a car, and that the only way to do it is to be part of the scenery yourself on a motorcycle. I loved being whipped by the breeze and feeling the sunshine. Although it generally isn’t as safe a mode of transportation as a car, I’ll have to agree with ZAMM. Especially in places like this, sometimes taking a car is impossible because of the roads. Well, “roads.” That’s why Msabi only uses pikipikis, and while I was white-knuckling the handle at my hip and sitting so close to Jesse that my helmet kept thunking against his, I wasn’t complaining. Conversation was a bit difficult, though, over the engine and through two helmets. Jesse turned his head a little back towards me.

“WLEKFJLSDKFUJJNHS.” 

“WHAT?”

“WSLKDJFLKSDHLUJFM.”

“I CAN’T HEAR YOU.”

“HERE COMES THE DUST.”

And just like that, we hit a wall of dust on the unpaved road. Okay, so maybe Pirsig had never been to Tanzania when he denounced car travel. Between the bouts of dust in the air, the powdery dust on the road, and trucks that seemed to fly like bats out of hell, I was glad Jesse was such a good driver. There’s a certain amount of fatalism among truck and minibus drivers here, which is shown through signs on the vehicles that say things like MUNGU AKIPENDA--basically, if God is willing. You know, you really don’t have to drag God into this if you’d just SLOW THE [EXPLETIVE] DOWN. Luckily, we got to Kiberege just fine and parked outside the primary school, sparking the curiosity of a handful of children playing on the grounds. Jesse showed me how the Msabi pump worked (“This rope acts as a piston...” “Mmm yes, I am definitely an expert in the physics.”) and we were able to clean some of the dust off our arms and faces. Then, we ventured behind the schoolhouse, giggling kids trailing behind, to see the latrine painted with pictures of children cheerily reminding the real ones to always “Wear shoes when you use the bathroom!” and “Use soap and water to wash your hands!” What’s actually special about this latrine is that it collects rain water to use for hand-washing and converts fecal matter into compost by letting it decompose and removing pathogens. Voilá, nutrients for the school garden. So cool! And all of this in a facility that’s much cleaner than the dilapidated old latrine down the path that seemed far too small to address the needs of hundreds of schoolchildren. So, apparently, Jesse does more than drink whiskey, which I suppose is a good thing to know about one’s friends. 

Wednesday, 08/13/14, 9:57 p.m.

Doha, Qatar

Well, Qatar Airways apparently finds it necessary to board everyone over an hour before takeoff (we just really want you to spend more time with that man hacking up a lung while kicking your seat, that’s all), but I’ve now completed one flight! Only one more flight to go, even though it’s a doozy at 13 hours. But back to the story...

The next day, last Sunday, Jacquie and I rode our bikes to KATRIN, which you might remember as the agricultural research institute where I went in my last entry. This time, we had a hand-drawn map in tow from a friend and were more set on making it to the actual back gate of Udzungwa National Park, where apparently the Lumemo River makes a little pool where you can swim. As a captain in the Australian army reserves (something I wouldn’t have originally guessed from her pearl earrings and cocktail-party-hosting), Jacquie makes for a great companion for wandering in the wilderness. I just bumble around filled with the spirit of adventure and not much else, not unlike the little boy in Up. We used her compass and the help of a few locals, and finally made it where Innocent and I could not the week before--a little Tanzania National Parks building down one last very rough hill! And to think my Stupid Whore Bicycle actually made it over rocky terrain this time. A guard with an AK-47 (as are so casually carried around here) materialized out of nowhere and showed us the walking path to the river. No pool, but the guard said there were crocodiles in there anyway. Needless to say, we quickly took our pictures and scurried out of there, assuming this pool people keep trying to find must be some sort of Holy Grail. And, just as mysteriously as he appeared, the guard dissolved back into the forest, so we set off again. Could that be what a Tanzanian fairy godmother looks like? Up for debate. 

The excursion wrapped up at the house of Novatus, a local Tanzanian who works for Msabi and who invited us over for lunch. We gratefully piled our plates with homemade coconut rice, greens, and chicken while a Chuck Norris movie (yes, really!) blared on the TV screen. In Tanzania, it seems like a status symbol to have your TV playing loudly all the time, if you have one. Same with speakers blasting the same Bongo Flava song on repeat literally day and night. Kennett Square doesn’t have a lot going for it, but no one has ever been able to accuse it of being too loud, and for this I will be grateful tomorrow. However, it was wonderful to be so generously invited into someone’s home for a meal, especially when our legs were so tired.

As I mentioned last time, work had pretty much wrapped up by my last week. Dana, the Harvard post-doc, sent me an article on how to code qualitative data (from my interviews) for analysis and threw me off the deep end to try it out. It’s an important skill in research, and while it’s a pretty mundane task involving big Excel spreadsheets compared to field work, it appealed to the part of me that organizes all the crayons in my Crayola 64-pack and writes to-do lists all the time. It’s encouraging to me to know I like all parts of the process! I also wrote up a prose report of the interviews, which will help Dana write the official paper that gets published about Saving Brains. With time to spare, I was also able to go with Tom to the entomology lab’s field site in Kining’ina to help set up an experiment with the mosquito colony’s viluilui (best Swahili word ever), or larvae. In the screen houses, they have made a perfect mosquito environment so that they can study them. Lots of plants, standing water, and mock huts. Mind you, these are the same mosquitos that feed on someone’s arm twice a day, and get a cow brought to them every evening. That day, we put rat glue on overhead projector sheets (you don’t need fancy equipment to do science!) and put them in buckets of water with the larvae to see if the glue harmed them. It was a slightly banal, but necessary, follow-up to an experiment in which they were catching tagged adult mosquitos with these clear sticky sheets to make sure the glue itself wasn’t messing up results. Satisfied that I had shadowed at least a couple of other projects in Ifakara before leaving, I visited Nurse Neema to observe one last clinic assessment before completely wrapping up my brief but memorable stint at the Ifakara Health Institute. 

I joked with people before I left that my ukulele skills when I returned home would be inversely related to how many friends I made in Tanzania. I can now sing and play at the same time...but the two nights of goodbye dinners were when I really felt special and realized what great friends I had made this summer, despite being sent out to Ifakara completely by myself. On Wednesday, after one last round of Frisbee, Geofrey and his roommate Felician invited me to their house for a meal of a hearty potato and tomato stew eaten with our hands and a semisweet, thin pancake. To show my appreciation, I brought the aforementioned ukulele to entertain them while they and our friend Fatuma cooked (So many men cooking for me that week! How progressive!), which is when I found out that all of them loved the song “Save the Last Dance for Me.” After the first time they heard it, I must have been asked for six encores throughout the evening. It seemed so appropriate as a goodbye song, as an homage to my Ifakara summer, so I was happy to oblige. The candle on the low table we ate upon flickered and lit up features of happy faces, from such different backgrounds but brought together by things everybody loves: food, togetherness, and song. For my official last night, Thursday,  about ten of us went to a restaurant (It was actually indoors! How fancy!) for cassava ugali, fish from the Kilombero, and one last round of goodbyes before I headed off on the 9-hour drive to Dar es Salaam early Friday morning. 

Not much to say about Dar, as the city has about as much charm and culture as a Payless Shoesource, but I stayed in a cute and simple B & B near the IHI Dar office before flying to Gombe National Park on Saturday. I had four days to play with before this journey back to America in which I could either go lie on a beach in Zanzibar or go out near the Congo/Burundi border on Lake Tanganyika to track chimpanzees. As a Human Evolutionary Biology major who works for Harvard’s chimp behavior lab, this was hardly a dilemma. Although Kigoma (the nearest town) is west of Ifakara, you have to go back to the coast to Dar and fly if you want to get there in a reasonable amount of time since it’s so remote. I spent some time wandering around Kigoma midday (much to the consternation of locals and other travelers who couldn’t understand that I was actually speaking Swahili and confidently doing things by myself) before getting on the local lake taxi to Gombe in the afternoon. It’s only accessible by boat (and in a remote region, at that, making tourists few and far between), so you either pay $300 for a charter boat or 4,000 Tsh ($2.50) for a trip on a wooden motor boat piled high with people, sacks of rice and sugar, luggage, and all kinds of knickknacks people want to take back to their villages up the coast. I could deal with this and the lack of a sunshade, so after at least four men shoved pieces of paper in my face to sign to get on their lake taxi, I sat on the side of one swinging my legs into the hull of the boat, above some sacks and a chicken in a black plastic bag. Its owner had second thoughts and tied the knot around its neck instead of over its head, and placed it below a plastic chair out of the direct sunlight, but it was still grotesquely comical. Buddy, someone out here’s got it in for you. Escape and rejoin your fowl friends! This chicken seemed to be woefully inept at receiving my telepathic advice, though. Her loss. The 3-hour ride went relatively smoothly, with fisticuffs only breaking out once onboard, and I was able to ward off a persistent suitor with my mild case of Bitchy Resting Face, expertly harnessed for the occasion (I can thank Grandpa Weary’s genes for this). I quite enjoy living in the twilight zone of understanding a fair amount of Swahili but people assuming I don’t know any, because it’s great for eavesdropping. “You should stop that,” another young man sitting near this pest warned him. “She’s getting angry.” No more marriage proposals and mockery all the way until landing at Gombe. Where, I might add, the boat operator took my shoes off my feet as I was trying to get off the boat and chucked them ashore, sending me jumping off the boat and splashing down after them. But I had made it--Gombe National Park, site of Jane Goodall’s famous research, and a worthy pilgrimage for any HEB student!

Thursday, 08/14/14, 8:05 p.m.

Kennett Square, PA, USA

It seems like this story will take two days and three countries in order to tell it. I’ve basically been awake since 11:30 p.m. EST on Tuesday at this point (I don’t sleep well on planes), and am starting to get delirious, but I feel compelled to wrap this up before I pass out face-first into my keyboard. Now, shall we?

My Sunday morning chimpanzee tracking was an awe-inspiring experience I’ll remember for the rest of my life. My guide, Husseini, and I started at 7:30 a.m. in order to see the chimps together before they all dispersed for the day, and made our way from the rocky lake shore inland to the mountains. At 52 square kilometers, Gombe is Tanzania’s smallest national park, but the hiking is strenuous. I muttered about leaving my hiking boots at home as we traversed steep slopes the whole way, all covered in a layer of dry leaves and dirt that shifted underfoot just when you needed to secure your footing the most. The chimp trackers who had gone ahead of Husseini and me informed him of chimp whereabouts through a walkie-talkie, and we shared a significant look when after half an hour of hiking we heard some unmistakable hooting coming through. Some people spend several hours hiking before they catch up with the chimps, so I was considered lucky. Pretty soon we came to a clearing, and my breath was literally taken away. Less than 20 feet away was a family of chimps sitting on the path while lazily grooming each other. I lamented my lack of a good camera as my pictures kept coming out blurry in that primeval forest’s half-lights, but it meant that I could just sit there observing and committing them to memory. They all have names instead of numbers, a tradition started by Jane Goodall that was unheard of before her, and Husseini told me all about the who’s-who of Gombe. It’s one thing to know that chimps share over 98% of their genome with us, but it’s another thing entirely to see them up close, looking and acting more human than it seems even I ever could. One scratching his butt, another sticking her finger in her ear and inspected said finger afterwards. Caressing, fighting (A big fight! The only time I was nervous about walking amongst them was when a large male came barreling past me on the trail), and reconciling, all according to an elaborate set of societal rules. 

Fortunately for the chimps, but unfortunately for their human visitors, park rules say that once you find them you can only stay with them for one hour, but Husseini apparently told the guides I was a “biologist who studies chimp behavior” (sure, we’ll go with that) so I was allowed to stay for double that time. I was drinking in as much as I could absorb as motivation for another semester of Excel up on the fifth floor of the Natural History Museum. The time still flew by quicker than you can say Pan troglodytus, and Husseini asked if I’d like to go see the waterfall and Jane’s Viewpoint. Of course I eagerly said yes, but I understand why most prefer to just return to the rest house for lounging on the beach. The hiking only got harder, with steep inclines and climbing on our hands and knees under fallen trees and wayward branches, but the subsequent vistas of twinkling Lake Tanganyika, the second deepest in the world, were spectacular. You could almost convince yourself you saw the Congo off on the horizon, despite how massive the lake really is. After the hike back to the rest house, I sat outside and got some more quality primate time because the local baboons, who are quite habituated to humans as well, were playing on the patio. Their mannerisms while playing kept reminding me of my dogs, and one even sat under my chair for awhile! The downside of this total lack of fear, though, is that they can be quite aggressive about food. You’re required to keep food in the dining room to avoid baboon theft, but as I sat at a table to eat the lunch I had packed, a midsize baboon opened the door, hopped on the table, bypassed several food items for the sake of my Ziploc bag of peanuts, and started to make a break for it. Now, I want you to have the image of this situation in your head. Imagine me, covered in dirt and forest, chasing a nimble baboon around a room while clapping my hands loudly and yelling, “BAD MONKEY! BAD MONKEY!” to try to startle it into dropping the bag. This was less than successful on the impudent simian, but suddenly a worker ran out after the baboon and somehow returned the bag, now sporting a large hole, to me. In case you’re wondering, the peanuts have since been consumed (triumphantly; +1 point for the hairless weakling), but I am keeping this bag as a keepsake. The rest of the day was spent enjoying my private beach, since tourist season is coming to a close, and making my way through Heart of Darkness for the first time, realizing that this was an uncanny but uncomfortable set of circumstances for starting such a book. Beach read, amirite?

I was told by different people that the lake taxi would pass Gombe anywhere between 6 and 7:30 a.m. the next morning, so I decided to get out there at 6 and just watch the sunrise if I had to (I had been falling asleep before 9 each night of this mini-trip like the party animal I am, so no big deal). At 6:30, the lake taxi arrived, but so did Husseini. At first, I thought he was coming to see me off and was touched--he had been such a great guide the whole time! When he asked for more tip money because the trackers were apparently angry there wasn’t enough for them, too (I never saw them outside the forest!), I was crestfallen. Is there no proverb here about gift horses and their mouths? I understand most of the visitors must be wildly wealthy, but I didn’t have to give anything in the first place. It put a small smudge on the experience right as I was puttering away, swinging my legs down into the boat’s hull again while sitting on a board placed sideways across it (you improvise a seat), but I tried to shake the bad feeling off. Three hours of leg-swinging later, I arrived back in Kigoma and wandered my way to the fishing village of Ujiji, where the famous “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” encounter happened in 1871. Historical British explorers aside, the village is also interesting because they make wooden boats there completely by hand, the way they’ve been doing it forever, and I was able to watch this out on the beach. 

When I had had my fill of sightseeing and mzungu-heckling (which only gets worse as you leave Ifakara and people just assume you’re a normal tourist), I checked in at the Kigoma Hilltop Hotel, because I figured I’d have one 4-star-hotel night in Tanzania as a last hurrah. A beautiful pool and outdoor restaurant overlooking the lake (they weren’t kidding about the hilltop thing), semi-tame zebras grazing on the grounds, and my third day in a row of private beaches. This beach ended up coming with a hidden caveat emptor, though. After a wonderfully restful afternoon of sunbathing and swimming while listening to the waves lapping and a few goats bleating, I walked the 20-minute hike back up the hill to the hotel compound, when I came to a gate that had been opened for me by a guard on the way out. This time, the guard was nowhere to be found, and the gate was locked. Cement wall, high fence here, electric on top...this can’t be happening. It’s already 5:30, so what if nobody comes back and I’m stuck out here on this wild hillside all night? I just wanted one night without spiders, that’s all. I started to shout at the top of my lungs (which, as you may know, is a decibel level that means serious business) in both English and Swahili, “HELP! HELP ME! IS ANYBODY THERE? I’M STUCK ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THIS GATE! CAN ANYBODY HEAR ME? HELP!” No answer. After the better part of an hour, my throat started to get scratchy, but I heard a gate creak open and close farther to my right. This is not okay. If I can hear your stupid gate, you can hear my screaming. I decided to test my luck against black mambas in the bush and climb through in my shorts and flip-flops to follow the sound along the wall, shouting the entire way. Finally, I could even hear voices of other guards. This is REALLY not okay. I am now pleading for help right on the other side of the wall and you are deliberately ignoring me. I finally had to make it explicit in Swahili, “I NEED HELP. I CAN HEAR YOU. TALK TO ME,” to draw a response out of this numbskull. “Oh, pole sana. Sorry. I don’t know where that guard is. He is Maasai and lives farther away. Go back to the gate and I’ll let you in,” he called back casually, with not a trace of remorse in his voice. He was even smiling when I met him at the gate, although I had steam coming out both ears and was tearing him a proverbial new one. THIS IS HIS JOB I DON’T CARE IF HE LIVES ON THE MOON IT WILL GET DARK SOON WHY DID YOU IGNORE ME WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU THE GUARDS ARE TERRIBLE HERE YOU OUGHT TO BE ASHAMED OF THIS SERVICE all the way back to reception, where the young man at the counter was also just smiling and brushing me off, looking more worried about how this appeared to the small cadre of Tanzanian businessmen waiting to check in. Good, I hope this is embarrassing. Until I left the following morning, I kept trying to let it go and accept that the rest of the experience there was really quite good, but it was a fly I just couldn’t get out of the ointment. Each additional frustration on this trip was making me more and more eager to return to America and not have to fight for myself all the time anymore. 

After a stiff goodbye at reception the next morning, I was on the dinky propellor plane again on my way back to Dar es Salaam. Jacquie was staying at the same B & B because she was judging a national high school science fair, so it was a big relief to have dinner by the waterfront (Indian Ocean this time) in the same place where I was taken to get drinks on my very first evening in Tanzania a short but crazy two months earlier, and to be able to gripe to someone who understands. Foreigners like Jacquie who work in Tanzania full-time must have limitless patience. She likened it to driving an old lemon; you just expect that it’s going to break down every so often and cause you problems, and that’s just how it is. I would just be angry a lot more often, which, unfortunately, is a pretty effective modus operandi. We both felt better after downloading a bit (she had been having a frustrating work week), but also both agreed that as a whole, we love the meaningful work we do, the wonderfully gracious people we meet,  and the truly inspiring places we go. It was nice to hold out on that one last Ifakara goodbye until the very end, and then I was off to the airport once again Wednesday morning. Tired but replete. Frustrated but sentimental. Having a lot more answers than when I arrived in June, but having twice as many new questions to ask myself and the world now that the curtain is falling on this show, now that the orchestra is playing the finale. The houselights are coming back on, but this certainly isn’t the last time I’ll be on this stage. There will be more adventures and misadventures, and therefore more stories to tell, for as long as I can keep it up. 

Thus ends the third installment of the Taylor Goes Global blog. My grandma keeps telling me to get these made into a book, but I think that until I can come up with a more publishable title than That Baboon Grabbed My Nuts! (and other stories) I’d better hold tight. I can’t claim yet to have any big revelations about how this summer has affected me, because I think that will only come with some hindsight. I have substantial stripey tan lines on my feet from my Chacos sandals, hair that now resembles the Beatles circa American Bandstand, a head full of more real visualizations of my future career goals, and a heart full of memories. All I really can know now is that I’ve been at home now for 12 hours, and it’s hard not to be already thinking about the next endeavor.