Mwezi, Mwezi!

Over the past couple of weeks, Wes has been steadily exploring every inch of downtown Dar. To the extent that he is now more conversant with the nooks and crannies of Dar than either Cristiano or I. On Saturday, Wes gave me an orientation to downtown Dar with an emphasis on Indian restuarants, the best place to get ice cream and traversing Kariakoo, a bustling part of town where goods of all shapes and sizes are sold. Kariakoo on a Saturday is similar to a disturbed bee hive with hundreds of people walking shoulder to shoulder in all directions. It was very alive.

While meandering around, we took a walk down the jewellery street. In Dar, like many other cities, shops that sell the same type of goods tend to line up together on the same street. For instance, there will be a stretch of hardware stores with brooms, plungers and mousetraps cheek by jowl for 500m and then there won't be another hardware store to be found anywhere else in the city. As we were walking down the street, this guy grabbed the bottom of my pants and started going off in Swahili. Naturally, I turned my body towards him to try to figure out what was going on. At the time, I was standing in front of a generator that was busily puffing out heat and gasoline fumes so I thought perhaps something from the generator had splashed onto my pants. As I turned, I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. It was buddy's partner's hand snaking towards my pant's pocket. A quick yell and our "friends" quickly merged into the crowd. As it turns out, they tried to pickpocket Wes at exactly the same time. Talk about strength in numbers. At the end of the day, they were totally unsuccessful but it gave us a little adrenalin rush. It would have been rather amusing if the guy had got his hand in my pocket and made off with the large wad of forest green....toilet paper, an essential for every female traveller. Cristiano had a similar experience about a month ago, which was also unsuccessful. Both Wes and Cristiano have a well-developed "slap my hands on my pant pockets" instinct.

I am told that mzungus are frequent targets of pickpockets. My colleagues have advised me to keep my money in my bra in future. The theory is that even the most brazen thief is not going to feel you up to get your money. They have also advised me to shout "Mwezi, mwezi!", which means thief, thief. This time, I didn't have the presence of mind to shout anything, other than "No". Very useful hey. I have little doubt that people would come to our assistance if we shouted thief. However, I would be a little concerned as to the form that the assistance may take. For the Human Rights report, I have literally read hundreds of newspaper articles on various topics that are relevant to the report. One of these topics is mob violence. There have been a number of instances this year where a thief has been caught by a crowd and beaten or killed for his alleged crime (it is almost always a man). It is my understanding that people sometimes take matters into their own hands because they are frustrated with and have little confidence in the judicial system. I can understand their position, as the judicial system seems to leak like a sieve and it can take years for a person to be prosecuted. However, I'm a bit of a traditionalist and prefer doing it the good old way, which starts with a person's arrest.

Exploring Zanzibar

Stone town

Wes and I had an awesome time wandering around Stone Town and sunning ourselves on the white, white beaches of Zanzibar. I've posted some pics on facebook, which can be accessed by clicking the "Zanzibar" link under Pictures. And that's all she wrote (for now) because I've got some catching up to do at work.

Eating Dirt (aka Geophagy)

Eveline, our downstairs' neighbour, trying out the soil cigar

On my way home, I stopped to pick up a couple of potatoes from a roadside stall. As I tested out my newly acquired Swahili, the proprietor placed a blue, plastic shopping bag in front of me. Intrigued, I peered into the bag to see what looked like some sort of exotic root vegetable. My initial guess at the contents of the bag was wrong, it was actually 40 or so tightly compacted, cigar-shaped pieces of soil. The first thought that crossed my mind was why would someone want to sell me pieces of soil, which is exactly what I asked the proprietor. Obviously, I was wearing a very unflattering outfit that day, as the guy thought I was pregnant and wanted to sell me soil to eat. Good, old google indicates that the practice of pregnant women eating soil for its mineral content is somewhat widespread in Sub-Saharan Africa. It’s kind of like taking a supplement. There is a theory that the dirt helps boost a pregnant woman’s immune system. This is also not just any old soil, it has to be a certain type of soil and it comes from locations that are known for their high quality soil. At Tsh50 a pop, I bought one cigar of soil and was on my way. Cristiano, Wes and I each took a nibble of the cigar later that night, only to find that it tasted distinctly of dirt. I’m not sure why we were surprised.

Stepping into Africa

Cristiano and Wes in Sno-Cream

Friday afternoon is invariably hot and slow. Its slowness was exacerbated for me because I was waiting for 8 p.m. to roll around and for Wes, my boyfriend, to enter onto the African stage. Wes will be hanging out with me in Dar for the next three weeks. It is his first African experience, but I suspect he’ll get into the swing of things fairly quickly as he spent several months in India.

Wes was keen to explore the chaotic downtown core and sample the local, or not so local, fare. High up on the list of edibles to find were samosas and chai masala. Before I came to Dar, I was told that you could get chai everywhere. Of course, at the time, I didn’t appreciate that chai meant tea in Swahili and not chai Indian-style. It is fairly easy to land your hands on a chai, which is inevitably a huge mug of tea that is a triple triple of unrefined sugar and milk powder. It is a little harder, or has been for me, to find chai masala. After a couple of hours of exploring downtown where we delved deeper and deeper into the Indian area and success. We found a tiny, hole-in-the-wall restaurant serving small cups of spicy chai masala and an assortment of fried goodies. Of the fried goodies, the egg chop deserves a mention. It is a boiled egg that is coated in a .5 inch of mince meat and deep fried. It tastes amazing and is a heart attack waiting to happen. We also found an ice cream parlor, Sno-Cream, that is slated to be THE place to get ice cream in Dar. The picture, above, is Wes and Cristiano signing the Sno-Cream’s guest book. I’m not sure why Sno-Cream has a guest book, but it does. As you may be able to tell, I’m enjoying seeing what Dar has to offer in terms of food.

A fairly long walk around town and we landed up at the ferry to the southern beaches. The ferry costs Tsh 100 for approximately a 7 minute journey. The ferry is blue, rusted and somewhat rickety. Nonetheless, several cars and a few hundred people later, it made a quick exit from the landing slip and powered off to the unknown. We made it to the other side, but not to the southern beaches, as we were running a little short of oompha after our downtown explorations. Instead, we settled for a cold soda in the shade of a tin roof before heading back to Dar.

Once we were back on the Dar side, we took a quick side trip to the fish market. The fish market is row after row of concrete tables alive with quick hands and neatly arranged fish. You can get everything at the fish market from red snapper to tuna to lobster to stingrays. We were intrigued by the stingrays because it is not immediately apparent what you would do with a stingray. They were being dragged by their tails from the back of a pick-up to a low-slung, concrete table where they were quickly sold to a member of the eagerly waiting crowd. None the wiser as to how you prepare a stingray, we skipped over to the “land market” to sniff the spices and watch great quantities of fish being fried in vats of oil. The whole scene was a little medieval, as black smoke billowed out from industrial size woks and black men scooped out schools of fried fish.

After a bit of googling, I found out what you can do with stingray. It is edible. Step 1 is removing the barb on the stingray's tail and then you make a fillet from the wings by detaching them from the stingray's body and removing the skin. Apparently, you can punch out rounds from the stingray fillets to make "scallops" or you can BBQ the fillet. Interesting as it all sounds, I don't think this is something I am going to try anytime in the near future.

Wes and I are journeying to Zanzibar next weekend to explore Stone Town and the northern beaches. The trip to Zanzibar will be my first trip outside Dar’s city limits and I’m looking forward to it.

The ferry from the southern beaches back to Dar.

M is for Maasi

A morning journey on the dalla dalla is enlivened by the presence of a beautiful and somewhat exotic maasi man. There are a number of maasi men in Dar, most of who seem to work as security guards. According to a newspaper article, the maasi come to Dar to make their fortune and, potentially, meet a white woman. After all, white women “perceive [maasi warriors] to be erotic that is why women pensioners from Europe come to look at them”. My dalla dalla maasi had a chequered, rich red fabric draped around his body and a white bead sheath encircling each calf. His hair was shaved into a triangle with the point contacting to the crown of his head where it met finely rolled skeins of hair that draped down his back. I spent the entire dalla dalla trip taking side long glances at the maasi, drinking in his attire. I felt like one of the little kids that peep at me through their eyelashes as I walk down the street. My knowledge about the maasi could fit into a thimble. What I do know is that the maasi come from northern Tanzania, almost a 100% of their women undergo female genital mutilation (like or not), and the Swahili plural for maasi is wamaasi.

I learnt the plural of maasi during my first Swahili lesson. I decided that the ad hoc process of learning Swahili from my colleagues was not cutting it so I’ve started taking Swahili lessons twice a week. My teacher is an incredibly petite and vivacious woman who delights in testing our Swahili vocab, which is non-existent. We have been told numerous times that Swahili is an easy language to learn and, relatively speaking, it is easy. There are few irregular verbs, words don’t have genders and sentence construction is straight forward. However, Swahili has few, if any, commonalities with either the Romance or Germanic languages. I think learning Swahili is going to be a feat of memorization, which will no doubt be helped by our almost total immersion. I’m looking forward to surprising my co-workers with a well-placed Swahili phrase or even a whole sentence.

This week, a virus ate the 90 page document I was working on, leaving nothing more than a trail of Ys in its wake. I almost cried. The efforts of the IT guy and my implementation of various web-based solutions resulted in the recovery of about 55 pages of the document, much to my relief. In the circumstances, it was a good result. I was later told that the server, upon which all the documents are stored, often gets viruses. I was advised to keep a back up copy of any documents I was working on either on my desktop or on a USB key. This piece of advice felt a little like closing the barn door after the horse had escaped.

Playing Twenty Questions

Tanzanian interactions are characterised by a somewhat extended greeting process that starts with “how are you” and swiftly moves to questions about your family, your health and your home life. Being a somewhat unknown entity, many of my interactions with Tanzanians swiftly move from enquires as to my well being to the following three questions:

1. Are you married? My negative answer often leads to look of puzzlement and a quick glance at my ring finger to check the veracity of my answer. Occasionally, a follow-up question is asked about my age, which often leads to a deepening of the puzzled look.

2. Do you have any children? A swift “no” results in some concern being evinced about my health and advice about the appropriate age for motherhood.

3. With almost all hope gone, the final question is what religion I practice. Telling people that I am a practicing atheist doesn’t seem to carry the same weight, as if I told them I was a practising Christian or Muslim. 90% of the time, my answer leads to a discussion about different religions and the choices people make about spirituality. The other 10% of the time, I get invited to attend church.

My impression is that, by Tanzanian standards, I’m not terribly successful. I briefly considered becoming a born again Christian so I would have at least one positive answer to give, but I’ve put that plan on hold until I have a chance to figure out exactly what that would entail.

The other topic that has come up for discussion on a number of occasions is weight and, more specifically, my weight. This discussion normally occurs, as my colleagues encourage me to eat every grain of the 2 cups of rice that are served with lunch. In Tanzania, the perfect shape for a woman is a well-rounded 8 with an emphasis on the bottom half. This perception of beauty is revealed in the clothes that are tightly stretched over hangers that are suspended from sidewalk trees, dancing in the wind in an effort to catch your attention. The top half of every pair of pants or skirt noticeably balloons out before gradually narrowing. I’ve decided to take my colleagues’ encouragement to eat more with a grain of salt and sweat-drenched visits to the gym.

Weekend Warriors

And the power is back on after a 12 hour hiatus. I was a little concerned I was going to venture into the dark hours with only a candle to light my way and without a cool breeze in sight. It was noticeably hotter in Dar this week and a functioning a/c is creeping up my list of essentials.

My friend, Maggie, came down from Arusha this weekend to explore the metropolis of Dar. Maggie and I met in PLTC 2 years ago and instantly bonded, as she had recently returned from working at the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda in Arusha (where she is currently doing round 2) and I had come back from Gulu in Northern Uganda. I think we were both a little startled to find ourselves back in Vancouver in the midst of a bar admission’s course.

Maggie and I became weekend warriors and packed in as much as possible into 48 hours. Friday night was an exploration of Dar’s, or more accurately, the Msasani Peninsula’s night life. It was my first real night out on the town. Maggie and I made our way to a club called Garden Bistro (which made me think of the Bread Garden) at 11 p.m., only to find that we were several hours ahead of the curve. My impression is that the Garden Bistro is the last stop on the club tour, as it stays open until the sunrise hours. After a few hours of dancing, a couple of local beers and a closely avoided altercation with a prostitute, we were ready to go home. It was just about as much excitement as we could handle in one night.

Saturday morning saw a bleary-eyed trip to Bongoyo Island. Bongoyo is a beautiful marine reserve with sparkling, aquamarine water and fine, white sand. It is a cliché I’m willing to buy into, complete with the coconuts. The swimming is amazing at Bongoyo, although getting in and out of the sea got a little more complicated as the tide changed and well-rounded waves started to roll onto the beach. I had one or two teakettle moments when the waves swept my feet from underneath me. The waves became a bit more of an issue when the small fishing boat, which would take us to the big fishing boat for the trip back to Dar, came to retrieve us. When Cristiano and I went to Bongoyo a couple of weeks ago, it was a matter of taking off your slip slops and taking a lady-like step into the small fishing boat. It was all very calm and orderly. However, this time, it was a finely timed operation that required a quick dash down the beach into thigh-high water to scramble into the boat while it was in the trough between two waves. The whole process was set to the urgent “faster, faster” of the black men holding the boat in place. It was a no-holds barred operation as people were physically lifted into the boat and those on board leaned this way and that to keep the boat on an even keel. A little shot of adrenalin to end the day.

Sunday started with a quest to find Dar es Salaam’s oldest graveyard. The graveyard is Arabic and is said to date back to the 17th century. We quickly found that, despite its age, the graveyard is still very much operational. It is a little unclear where the path ends and the graves begin, as the majority of the headstones are diamond-shape markers loosely held by the sand and scattered in a seemingly random pattern. The headstones are occasionally interspersed with what we assume to be mausoleums, each gently crumbling into the sand. It is my understanding that the mausoleums were constructed using blocks of coral cemented together with and then covered in mud. The crust of the mausoleums has shed over time to reveal the underlying coral skeletons. The graveyard contains some of the biggest baobab trees I’ve ever seen. The baobab has green-suede, cylindrical fruit that is the size of a 1L container. I had the opportunity to try the fruit the other day, the inside of which is white and crumbly. I’m not sure how to describe the flavour, other than saying that it leaves a lingering, slightly sour taste. Some people grind the contents of the fruit to a powder and use it to make a starchy, somewhat stiff mixture (similar to pap) that is eaten with stew.

Onwards and upwards to a quick tour of the famous buildings of downtown Dar – the Askari monument built to honour those that fought in WWI, the Court of Appeal, the High Court and the State House. We were shooed away from the State House by a military man who was not amused by us peering through the State House’s gate. In typical Louw fashion, we also trooped off to the National Museum where we engaged in a quick round of bargaining on the entry fee. The National Museum was surprisingly interesting with a basic, pictorial rendition of Tanzania’s history and some interesting footnotes on Tanzanian culture. It also has a coelacanth floating in a bath of formaldehyde and a concrete impression of the footsteps discovered by Dr. Leakey in Olduvai Gorge. The footsteps indicated that man was an upright being much earlier than had been previously thought.

On a side bar, I officially became a TZ resident this week. I got my permit after multiple trips to the Dept of Immigration to photocopy my entire passport, photocopy my application (again) and provide them with more passport pictures. The major perk of the resident permit is that I can stay here for the next 6 months. The minor perk is that the ferry tickets to Zanzibar are $20 cheaper for residents.