Ikuza Blues

So, the Anderson’s are back, which means the internet is back and time to catch up on our blog.

First, the Anderson’s came back from Kenya. Sounds like their trip home was quite eventful. First they were stopped by a road block and accused of a hit and run, something they had no part in. The police here can often be corrupt. In fact, Geoff (the other volunteer teacher here) was held up by a roadblock and asked to show his passport and threatened with deportation. All nonsense, they just wanted a bribe. And just last week, the police made a crackdown on some thieves in a local city by burning one alive as a form of torture in order to get the names of his compadres. The men from the town took the names and went to the village and stole everything from those homes, and then burned down the homes. Good old fashioned street justice. There are numerous stories of cops involved in the black market and bribes, but so are the politicians. It’s just part of life here that most people, missionaries included, seem to adapt to. If you want something done, or done quickly, someone else needs to get paid. To me, such a corrupt bureaucracy seems to make it next to impossible, but back to the story. A quick call to the American Embassy (somewhat of a trump card here) cleared things up quickly and they headed home. The turmoil in Kenya has apparently calmed down, making it possible for them to drive through Nairobi, but the most dangerous part of their trip was not even in Kenya, but only a few kilometres from Kahunda. Apparently they were driving along, around 8 o clock at night, and someone started to open fire at them with a rifle. Andy saw the man standing in the middle of the road shooting, so he stepped on it, drove right at the guy trying to blind him with his brights or run him over and luckily the guy dove for cover into the tall grass. The man only managed to get 5 shots off, one of which hit the front bumper and hit Andy’s winch, but enough to prove their story for the police (who may or may not have been involved). Long story short, they are home, alive, and well.

While they were gone, Vanessa and I got more acquainted with Kahunda. Vanessa is beginning to work miracles with our kerosene oven. Bread, pizza crusts, cinnamon rolls, pancakes, and cookies are all in her cooking repertoire now; we might have to invest in a kerosene oven when we get back. (I threw that semicolon in simply because I miss using semicolons. It is one of the best punctuation marks when used properly). The food situation here is great. We brought tons of meat and produce from Mwanza and the fruit from the village market is heavenly. The bathroom situation is interesting to say the least. Apart from showers heated by a kerosene flame, and flickering white light from our solar powered lights, our toilet also cannot digest toilet paper. So instead of feeding it to the toilet, we feed it to a garbage can, which in turn must be trekked out to the wilderness and thrown into a hole and burned. I suggested drawing straws or playing rock, paper, scissors with Vanessa for this chore, but no luck. The thankless job is mine. P.S. I despise walking out into the jungle-like "bush" surrounding our house. It is beautiful, to be sure, but is filled with lake flies, and spiders, and webs, and vines, and mosquitos. Not to mention the added pleasure of smelling rotting food and, yes, fecal matter.... our fecal matter. But c’est la vie. I keep telling myself I am camping. Which really doesn’t do much to make this place feel better, it only confirms and reconfirms my feelings about camping. Actually though, once living here and for a week at Ikuza (more on that in a moment), camping in Killbear seems like a Five-Star resort.

Ikuza was great. As I mentioned in the previous post, we were thinking of going with Dale Hamilton to Ikuza , a large island with a population of 20,000. AIC (African Inland Church) recently purchased a large clinic that had been started by a Tanzanian businessman who either lost funds or interest, but whatever the case, had given up on it. AIC decided to buy it and has been renovating and restoring it for the better part of 2 years. They have had numerous teams come and chase out the wildlife and revive the place with a semblance of order. It really boggles my mind how quickly nature can take over a building in Africa. Bats had made their homes in the roof, termites in the doorframes and windowsills, Lizards in the ceilings, moths and flies in the windows, and rats and mice in the corners. Not to mention the ants, spiders, and beetles who persistently besiege any and every dwelling here. The clinic plans to open by the beginning of April, so the work was cut out for us. Our job was to paint nine rooms that would eventually become the Lab, pharmacy, wards, etc. We gave them each a coat of prime and than two coats of off-white paint. Next we gave each room a "kick strip" with thick blue oil paint which is easy to clean and hard to get dirty (apparently). However, there was no tape to be found, so we ended up drawing a straight line with a ruler and pencil and slowly going around with a small paintbrush keeping the line straight. Tedious work. Almost as tedious as this story I’m telling.
Anyways, on top of all that, we gave the entire outside of the building a fresh coat of paint, which covered a multitude of sins. While we painted, literally, from sun up to sundown, other people were working on the lights, installing ceilings, building cabinets, etc. Not the work we came here planning to do, but a great way to keep busy for a week while the students in the secondary school wrote their exams.

The reason we worked from sunrise to sunset was because there is really not much else to do in Ikuza, and based on our one foray into the heart of the Ikuzan night life scene, I think many of these people are pretty hard up for entertainment. When the sun goes down there is very little light except where someone has the money for petrol and a generator, but even then, you have to battle the noise of a generator (which most people here do not find a challenge). On Friday night, Dale took Vanessa, myself, and Lucas (one of his Tanzanian workers...a great guy) downtown for a few soda drinks. The first place we went to was a classy establishment with tiled flooring, green lights, and a small television set playing some Swahili version of MTV. Outside the gates about 20 guys hung around trying to watch the TV. Prowling around the entrance were women of "loose" character, trying to catch a fisherman after his long day on the water. Dale shares my fascination for watching people and is a great guy to be a tour guide. Most of the people in Ikuza (and I think many of the islands) know him and he has some type of reputation among many of the locals which makes him the type of person you don’t want to be on the wrong side of. Fine with me. Dale bought us some roasted corn and peanuts from a street vendor and we sat drinking our Cokes and watching people and talking about life on the islands. We hopped around to a few other bars and saw more of the same: people playing pool, people crammed around small television sets with the volume cranked, people selling goods, people selling themselves. An interesting night. Sadly, the plenitude of prostitutes in the islands combined with the peripatetic lifestyles of the fishermen causes this region to be one of the most highly concentrated areas of HIV/AIDS in all of Africa. Chris Hamilton (Dale’s wife) works in the medical field here and is doing a PhD on HIV/AIDS in the region and estimates that almost 80 percent of the island population may be infected. Insane. Four of every five people I met this week may be at risk.

The showers in Ikuza were something else. After a long day of painting, there is nothing like a hot shower. Unfortunately, there was nothing like a hot shower to be had. The "Bafu" or shower room, was the size of a port-o-potty and designed with that concept in mind. The 2 foot by 2 foot room had a concrete floor with a tiny slope towards the back where a small hole had been made to be the drain. A plastic lawn chair had been placed in the tiny room, which when sat on, my knees were already hitting the closed door. When the door was closed, the room was pitch dark, which gave you two options: A) unchange in the dark and try not to mistake your clean shirt for your towel or B) leave the door open a crack and risk having the multitude of children who follow the Muzungus everywhere catch a glimpse of a rare sight, a white ass. I chose option A, and things went well. By each knee is a pail of water and top of the right pail is a pitcher. So you strip down, try to get as many of your clothes to hang onto the nail in the door as possible (the rest of your stuff must be crammed into the little gap between the wall and the ceiling), take a seat on the lawn chair (try not to think of how many other people have used this chair before), and pour a nice, cold pitcherful of water onto yourself (ignoring the tiny hard things that get in your hair, which upon opening the door, you realize are numerous insects who had met their Maker by climbing into the pail). Anyways, one of the more interesting shower experiences I’ve had in my life.

The food in Ikuza was great. Max, the pastor, and his wife Rebekah, made our stay enjoyable. They put on the works for us every night. Mashed plantains, mchicha, pineapple, fried fish, chicken chunks, ugali, rice, rice, and more rice. It really doesn’t seem like much food in relation to what we eat on a normal basis at home, but all this food had to be cooked over a fire and was proablaby prepared about 3 hours before the 20 minutes it took to inhale it. I mentioned ugali, that might need some explaining. Ugali is a staple of many people in this region. It looks like mashed potatoes, but has the texture and the taste of mortar, and I’m convinced could serve the same function. It is a combination of rice flour and water (yes... the same ingredients used to make the glue for paper mache – thanks for nothing Art Attack) and sometimes Cassava. But people here do not eat for the experience of food or taste (so the people here claim), they eat to fill their bellies. If that is the goal, I guess Ugali does the trick. Unfortunately, Ugali has the nutrional value of, well mortar, also and is a large cause of malnutrition in many of the children.
We met some interesting people in Ikuza as well. To help with the work, Dale hired some of the local people from the Church choir to give a hand painting or whatever else. Now I’ve said it before to Vanessa, but I think I would give my Dad about two days of leading any type of work group here before he suffered a minor aneurism. Of course there are great workers here, and most of the people have great attitudes and desires to work, just no ability to see the work and take initiative. Which, when the job they are given runs out, they stand around, make small talk, and wait for their next orders to be yelled at them. My painting partner for Day One was a young guy by the name of Celestine. After setting up our tarp and having Dale explain to us that the key to painting was a clean work area, Celestine decided to lay the paint-stir-stick right onto the clean tarp. So much for that, especially when, cleaning it up, Celestine stepped in the paint and proceeded to put little paint prints wherever he stepped. In frustration, Dale left us to paint, convinced (I’m sure) that the room would be a mess before the day was through. Well about 10 minutes after Dale left, Celestine stepped on the edge of his paint tray, covering his foot, and a large portion of the floor with white paint. The night guard was another one of those characters I’ll never forget, simply because he asked me to give him everything I owned. He didn’t speak English so it made it quite funny when his sign language dawned on me. He would point to something I owned (my Mp3 player, my sandals, my shoes, my pail of paint that wasn’t really mine to begin with) and then he would point to himself. Then I would say No. Our relationship was complicated. I was not sure when, or if, he slept. He was both the night guard and, I think, the Day guard.

But the highlight to the week was getting to fly in Dale’s float plane. He took me Tuesday to drop off his wife in Bumbili and then fly on to Ikuza. When we dropped off his wife Dale showed me how being a missionary pilot can be incredible. He flew low and harassed the local fishermen, dive-bombed and left us weightless for a few seconds, and weaved in and out of islands sing the Top Gun theme into the microphone. He even gave me some free flight lessons and let me fly the plane for part of the way home on our last day. I like to think I was a natural, but seeing how green Vanessa looked in the back and noticing that we seemed to be constantly going side to side, makes me think otherwise. Either way, one boyhood dream of mine to tick off the list.
This week my goal is to begin the construction of the basketball court – specifically the nets. After getting no straight answer from the headmaster and junior headmaster I’ve decided to take things into my own hands and so far that is working great. I’ve managed to get permission from the Director of Health to take down one rim from behind the clinic here, and managed to get another rim delivered from Nairobi. This week I’m ordering some pipe and angle iron from Mwanza and Andy here will do all the welding, so I’m pretty pumped that we may have two real basketball nets by the end of the week.