Jambo

Karibu (welcome). Greetings family, friends, and others to our blog, Vanessa and I hope to keep this site up to date Lord and Internet willing. This whole week we have spent in a hostel owned by an Italian Catholic organization called CEFA in downtown Dar-es-Salaam (capital of Tanzania) and have had a somewhat stable wireless connection in the main lobby, but once we leave the city on Saturday morning and head to Mwanza, the situation might be different. But until then... let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.

I won’t bore you with a lengthy anecdote of the flight, it was actually a quite uneventful 24 hours with only one minor outburst from a disgruntled Kenyan, who our Tanzanian seat partner claimed (repeatedly) was crazy or drunk, as he (our Tanzanian seat partner) downed what had to be his 12th Heineken. Either way, if you’ve traveled on a plane before it is basically – landing and take off excluded – a glorified bus with wings. Not to deny flying is not a thrill. Flying at 900 (or more) km/hour, in – 50 (or less) degrees Celsius at 10 kilometres above the earth’s surface while eating a steaming hot three course meal in front of your choice of television shows, movies and video games with the odd window check to see if the Sahara is still sandy – yep, it is – is hard for one to wrap their head around. This is modern travel. Dr. Livingstone would roll in his grave. I presume.

But we made it. Coming into the Tanzanian airport was overwhelming on the senses. We immediately felt the stickiness of the equatorial humidex and each cruel degree of the 30 plus Celsius reminding me that my body – only a few days prior working outdoors in – 10 - was in no way ready for this. I heard what in my anglicized ears was the gibberish of a non Romantic language. (Interesting aside – I’ve heard that the word Barbarian originated out of such auditory confusion when early Romans claimed that the tribes outside the Empire, those tribes who communicated by saying “Bar-Bar”, were barbaric. This also may be a myth, but interesting nonetheless.) The smell was a mix of hot asphalt, body odour, smoke, summer days, and custom line-ups. The taste was...well that wasn’t Tanzania really, just 24 hours of airplane meals and HALLS. And the sights...well, the sights are a confusing pastiche of conflicting images.

Our first sights of Dar es Salaam were in the Dark, which helped to enhance our other senses in making sense of this city. However, the next morning we woke up and realized that the sun had illuminated an Edenic world that we, literally over the course of a day, had been placed in. I should state that the aforementioned hostel we are staying in has an incredible view of the city – from the rooftop you can see the tropical vegetation that consumes the hillsides which protect the city to the West, the coastlines which flank the City to the North and South, and the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean to the East which is specked with tiny islands, ocean barges and fishing boats. The city itself is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before . Unlike the current trend of strip-mallifying our expanding urban spaces with Box stores, Dar es Salaam seems to be a city that does not clear away the vegetation but grows in concert with it. Yes, I’m aware how cliché and naive and patronizing (yada yada yada) such edenic/primitive portraits of the third world can be, but as I stood on the roof late one hazy afternoon and I swept over the country with a panoramic gaze, I was struck that this cityscape was not dominated or overtaken by high-rise buildings, but by palm, ashtaka, coconut, mango, banana, and tamarind trees. (see picture) Not to say there are no high rises, nor to say that the Tanzanians do not want to do without more high-rises, in fact, as the country begins to shake off the chains of 35 years of self-destructive socialism and begins to adapt to a free market system, it will be interesting to see how the country and city begin to change.

According to Margaret, things will get much better, although there are parts of the socialist legacy that have been positive. For one, they created a spirit of unity among Tanzanians that celebrated the diversity of the tribes (an unbelievable 142 tribes exist in the country) while establishing a unity in being ‘Tanzanian’. Secondly, the socialist government took control of the countries natural resources and avoided the violent tribal warfare over such riches that has ravaged countries like Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast.

I should explain that our unofficial tour guide for the week has been Margaret Njugu from CRWRC. She is a Kenyan lady who studied at Calvin and became involved with the CRWRC in Nairobi and has moved with the organization into Mwanza and then into Dar where she is now. There is much more to her story than what she has given us, but from what we know she is quite a courageous and strong woman. (As I prepare to publish this blog we have just returned from a very interesting dinner in her home, but more in a future blog).

There is more to tell than I have time to get into this blog. We went to the Tanzanian national museum where they have houses and artefacts from some of the many tribes. Each tribe that is represented comes to the museum and builds a house from their native materials and you can go through each one. My personal favourite was the Masai home, built low to the ground and covered in Dung. The Masai tribesmen are everywhere in the city and are hired as body/security guards and their wives sell herbal medicines at the roadside. They have completely refused to adopt to contemporary life and walk the city in bright red and deep purple robes, with large swords hidden in their waste bands. Frame of reference: they are the Tanzanian Amish.

Alright, we fly out tomorrow morning at 6 am for Lake Victoria. There is much more to talk about concerning this week and I am already unbelievably behind on the blog. I will try to post blogs alongside pictures to avoid this becoming a glorified photo album, but that is all for now. Till then, keep us in your prayers as we continue to keep you in ours.
Doug and Vanessa Sikkema

p.s. (re: Blog title: The Sukumas are the most dominant tribe in Tanzania and live mainly in the Lake Victoria region we will be heading to tomorrow).