So we’ve been traveling for the last month or so, first to Morogoro for a conference, then over to Dar, and Mafia Island, back to Dar and down to Mbeya. After being on the road that much, one becomes acutely aware of the sheer variety of transport options available to one in a developing country. In just the last couple of months, we’ve ridden in the backs of pickup trucks with as many as 31 other people (our usual transport to and from the village), gotten rides in dump trucks and flatbeds, sped through Dar with six people squeezed in a glorified golf cart, been in buses and vans that overheated, ran out of gas, stopped for a half hour so the driver could shop for shoes, or stopped for hours without explanation. But I think our ferry ride out to Mafia Island might be our most adventurous transport experience to date.
We boarded this rustic vessel – Tuggy the Friendly Tugboat as it became known – with peeling blue paint and a diesel engine that shook the whole boat, and after ferrying through the mangrove swamp, we were out in the ocean, heaving and jolting around in the heavy chop. If you were on the fence about getting seasick, the roughish seas and the boat’s questionable seaworthiness helped put you over the edge. Michelle and I made the four-hour trip without suffering such a fate, but the strong crosswind forced us to be on guard for bits of breakfast flying across the deck when someone was hurling over the far rail. By the end, the passengers, laid out on the deck, with their things tied up in plastic bags, children crying close to their mothers, hair matted, hands pruney, eyes stinging from the water thrown up by the bow, evoked a Tanzanian cross between an Ellis Island arrival and Maid of the Mist. Then after boarding another smaller boat to bring us to shore, this one requiring a full-time bailer to keep it afloat, we arrived on the beach, dripping wet and only a little battered around.
And so Christmas was spent on the beach with nine other Peace Corps volunteers and a couple of British aid workers who brought fruitcake and bad Christmas jokes. We tried to sing some off-key Christmas carols – so out of place there on the sweltering beach – and constructed a snowman out of sand (a sandman, then?), that despite the festivity and whimsy associated with snowman-making, failed wholeheartedly to be of any use in conjuring up much of the Christmas feeling, which was probably just as well.
But on Christmas Eve, we went swimming with the whale sharks that migrate between Mafia and the mainland from December to February, feeding on plankton and algae. The gist is this: ride around in a boat until you find a shark, jump out with flippers and masks, swim around with it until it dives too deep or swims away, then repeat. Since the water is cloudy from all the algae (hence the feeding/migration) you have to be within eight or ten feet of the suckers to really see them. I swam along side of one that was about twenty feet long – and turns out, a twenty foot giant speckled fish feels much bigger when you’re in the water with it than it looks from the boat – for about a minute, an arm’s length away, a school of little yellow striped fish swimming inches ahead of the shark’s mouth, grabbing bits of food discarded with the seawater from its giant mouth, and other, longer, white fish clustered tight underneath its fins, for reasons not immediately obvious, us together, a whole little Christmas ecosystem swimming there in the bay.
In contrast, we’re in frigid, rainy Mbeya right now, our last stop before returning to the village, where we’ll start to get down to work. The conference in Morogoro was, I think, beneficial in fleshing out ideas for specific projects we’ll tackle in the village, particularly from Michelle’s standpoint. Our village has a high prevalence rate of HIV – somewhere between six and eight percent – so Michelle will be working with her counterpart, a nurse at the clinic, to organize a group to help reduce stigma and provide emotional and medical support for people living with HIV/AIDS. She’ll also begin teaching life skills (self-esteem, decision-making, etc.) at the primary school, and take the lead on some of the organizational, operational, and outreach aspects of the health clinic.
As I think I’ve suggested before, it’s been a bit more frustrating for me to find work, as there just aren’t that many people in the village interested in pursuing environmentally-related projects. It’s not to say that more trees couldn’t be planted, water quality couldn’t be improved, etc., but projects without support from the village, however worthy they may be, are bound to fail before too long. So to start, I’ll likely focus on basic environmental education – a series of hands-on workshops for farmers, perhaps – and see what comes out of that. I’ve also been talking with folks from the Southern Highlands Conservation Programme, which is the Mbeya branch of the Wildlife Conservation Society, about working with their ecologists on some of their botanically-oriented projects in protected natural areas in the region. There are a couple logistical things to work out before that happens, and progress can be slow in Tanzania, but I’m hoping that something will come together in the next couple of months. We’ll be sure to keep you posted.
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