Tonight We Dance – Day 4 (Iringa to Chipole)

Rooster.  Before leaving the hostel they fed us a simple breakfast of a hard boiled egg and fresh bread with butter and tea.  During breakfast we learned the names of our drivers who turned out to be really great guys who we were glad to have throughout the rest of our trip.  The primary driver was Samson, who we nicknamed ‘heavyfoot’ for his fast driving style, and the secondary driver was Alan, who we nicknamed ‘lightfoot’ for his propensity to drive slowly.  Samson spoke fine English, and Alan’s was enough to communicate ideas.  Language notwithstanding, they were a kind and funny duo.

A good breakfast and late start got us on the road by 10:00am.  Coming in during the night, we hadn’t really seen Iringa, except for the twisty and steep mountain roads.  In the morning light the place was totally different, and fascinating!  The town is perched atop a high hill and if you saw it you would immediately think that it would be a perfect place to choose for a village if you needed to be able to defend it from other tribes.  Because of the height the air is cool and very breezy, a very welcome change from the oppressive heat of Dar Es Salam
As we headed out of town, which looked far less cosmopolitan in the daylight, our magnanimous drivers helped us find a shop where we could find some of the souvenirs we were looking for- Tanzania soccer jerseys!  The boys were ecstatic.  We also tried our hands at bartering with a throng of peddlers who wanted to sell us a myriad of carvings and souvenirs.  as is the custom in Tanzania, they just walk up to the window and stare at you until you open it.  if you do, they thrust their wares in through the window and let you hold it until you decide to buy it or hand it back.  One of the boys, Augie, bought a stick with a knife hidden inside it.  I thought it was a terrible idea, but he loved it.

We soon got on the road, eager to get to our first destination.  Chipole and the following destination, Hanga, were the real point of the whole trip.  We were in Tanzania for the purpose of going to Chipole and Hanga and give of our hearts and wallets.  (ok, our hearts and your wallets).  =]

Another reason we were excited is that previous visits to Chipole told us that we could expect them to be very excited to have us there, and that the girls -secondary school students- would most definitely dance and sing in celebration, and expect us to do it with them.  That sounded like fun, and by now, we had had all the travel we cared for, and needed to feel welcomed somewhere.

The road took a turn from heading west to pointing south out of the steep mountains and into wide rolling hills littered with stick houses and mud huts with tin or thatched roofs.  For me, the thing that made the travel interesting is that people are everywhere along the roadside.  Women walk with bundles of sticks or 5 gallon buckets or bags of charcoal or baskets of fruit on their heads to sell to motorists.  Any time you stop –or even slow down to walking speed- peddlers descend on the bus like a feeding frenzy.  And stopping is fairly regular due to road disrepair or construction, frequent speed bumps or police checkpoints (though I have no idea what they’re checking for), or damaged vehicles left in the road.

One interesting aside, no one has road flares or reflectors or anything like that.  if you break down and want to warn oncoming cars of your presence, you take your machete (of course you have a machete) and hack some branches out of a nearby tree and drag a handful of them into the road about every 50 feet or so from your car.

Brian developed a game we called “spot the foreman”.  As it happens, the Chinese are spending lots of money to develop infrastructure here in hopes of winning the bid to mine for Tanzania’s large uranium and aluminum deposits.  As a result every major construction project has a Chinese foreman, and in the sea of African faces, they’re pretty easy to spot on a site among the hard hat-wearing workers.

Other places/things of interest that we passed on our second day on the road:
• Chai Bora factory and tea plantations.  Chai Bora is the primary tea distributor of tea in Tanzania.
• Sunflower farms.  Sunflowers are grown because they thrive in hot dry sandy soil, and produce oil, which is used for cooking.  Once the oil is extracted, the remaining ‘meat’ is used for animal feed.
• Once we got into the higher elevations, the temperature dropped to about 70 degrees.  Our drivers were from the coast, and complained that it was too cold outside.  They turned on the heat in the bus!  We offered to loan them jackets if they would turn it off, and they kindly agreed.

• Cassian, our host, recommended a restaurant, and we pulled off into a small town to have lunch.  They saw us coming, and began making preparations to accommodate a group of our size, and as we went inside, we saw a man ride up on a bike with a cage full of chickens on the back of it.  We subsequently heard the chickens being slaughtered, and later they were served to us.  you'd think it was delicious, fresh chicken, but no.  they cooked it until it became a tire.  such a bummer...
• Brian brought some articles written over the years about Tanzania for us to read, and I read one on the Rinderpest plague, which I had never heard of.  If you never heard of it either, here is the jist:

Rinderpest was a livestock and cattle plague that killed 80-90% of the cattle and buffalo in the southern half of Africa during the late 1800's.  Since cattle was the basis for the economy of all those countries, not to mention a primary source of food, famine and starvation killed off massive portions of the human population there as well.  Then the unmamnaged landscape became overgrown, making it a perfect environment for the tse-tse fly.  The tse-tse population flourished, and spread more disease further decimating the livestock and human populations.  Queue the slave trade!  the famine made going away with rich arabs or europeans as a slave nearly luxurious by contrast to what lie ahead for Africans at home, so a lot of people went pretty willingly.  The threat of death for anyone dissenting probably helped, too, though there were battles for freedom.  Look up the Maji Maji Rebellion.  In the end, the population of Southern Africa was reduced by about 2/3.

• Lo-slung adobe huts used to burn eucalyptus trees to make charcoal.  Bundles of it can be seen for sale everywhere along the roads in Tanzania.

• On one very sharp curve, the guardrail was totally missing, appearing to have been demolished.  Someone had clearly smashed through it and plummeted straight down into the ravine below.  As we rounded the bend, we looked across the valley and saw the oil tanker that had crashed through the flimsy guard rail and fallen into the ravine.  It was obviously pretty recent.  An oil tanker!!!  Amazingly, a group of guys had arrived with 5 gallon buckets, and they were trying to loot the oil to take home.  Crazy!  I’m not good with judging distances, but it had to have slid/rolled down a hill that was at least 4 times the overall length of the tanker, and the men were climbing down from the road and trying to haul up buckets of oil.
• There are apparently only three ways to cut the brush back in rural Tanzania.  1. Cattle or goats.  2. A machete which would be sucky tedious work.  3. Fire.  Most people burn it.  We passed a roadside brushfire that our drivers took casually but looked like a dang forest fire to me, and as we passed it, it was no more than 4 feet from the side of our vehicle (and large tank of combustible petrol).  This turned out to be a common occurrence throughout our trip.
• We ran over a dog.  That sentence doesn’t quite do the incident justice.  We decimated a dog.  It was horrendous.
• People, including kids walking along the street in pitch-blackness with massive lorries whizzing by.

After a very long day in the bus, we finally arrived in Songea town (which is in Songea region.  Think Morris county, Morristown, but with more Africa) just after dark. We were exhausted and cramped, but we weren’t done yet.  We swapped our guide, brother Cassian, for Sister Mkombelewa, who runs the secondary school we would be staying at the next three days, And Sister Aquanita, who runs the orphanage we would visit in Chipole.  Cassian went ahead to prepare a place for us in Hanga.  we would be with the sisters for the next three days, and then in Hanga for the following three days.

With that done, we had another few hours to go before we got to our destination.  Half that time was spent on a real, paved road, and then we turned onto a dirt road.  …no, not that.  Forget the mental image that just popped into your mind when I said dirt road.  That’s not what it was.  This was more dangerous than that.  It was ridiculous.  Rain grooves, rocks, piles of dirt, ridiculous angles, you name it, made it more of a runoff than a road.  The idea of driving a bus on that “road” was preposterous.  Yet I watched with horror as our driver turned to drive on it.
The “road” was itself bad enough, but apparently someone was planning to improve it, because the thing was lined on 1/3 of its “surface” with giant piles of dirt, which I guess were to be spread at some point.  In the meantime, our driver plowed though them tipping our bus to angles that made me queasy for the fear we may fall over.
This went on for a long time.  An hour, maybe?  But what happened next made it worth all the discomforts we had suffered over four days of culture shock and travel in tight spaces with diarrhea.  We entered the compound for the school in total darkness.  Our headlights and an occasional roadside fire were the only lights we had seen for hours.  Someone opened a window, and immediately we all noticed the sound of people singing and beating a drum.  It was beautiful!  After our long journey (20+ hours of flying, Bagamoyo, and two days in the bus), the sound actually brought tears to my eyes.  The boys began to look around excitedly too, though they clearly had some trepidation about their impending inaugural dance performance.

As our bus rounded a bend and came into sight, the girls (the students at the school) erupted in a cheer, and the drummer apparently had an epileptic fit.  The driver pushed the bus past the crowd of students which we could barely see at all in the darkness, towards the main courtyard of the compound, and the headlights washed over 35 or so teenage girls neatly dressed in their bright blue school uniforms, screaming and jumping and waving their arms and generally acting as though this were Justin Beiber’s tour bus.  Sadly, later they would reveal that they were indeed familiar with Justin Beiber when they asked the boys if they had any of his songs on their ipods.  Even more sadly, they did.
When we came to a stop, the girls, who had resumed singing (and the drummer, who was now rhythmic again), crowded against the door of the bus, singing and waiting for it to open.  The boys were visibly nervous.  The song being sung outside the bus at that point was simple.  The chorus was in accented English.  It went, “We like you, we like you, we like you.”

We made the boys get off first, and the girls parted for them and continued singing and staring at them.  When the last one was off the bus, the beat picked up, and in addition to singing the girls began dancing.  All around.  All.  Around.  It was like a conga line for cokeheads.  But way awesomer.  Even better, they grabbed boys by the hand in a (forced) invitation to participate.  Some politely refused which didn’t really seem to faze the girls.  A few hesitantly joined in with terrible inhibited dancing.  One boy, Jamie Downey, happily dove right in and shook what his mama gave him.  The girls giggled with delight.  This sort of thing went on for a while, and the boys warmed up pretty quickly.

They had waited for us to eat dinner, so everyone was hungry.  As we had expected they might, a banquet-style feast was prepared for our arrival in their dining hall.  Africa is always either dusty and dry, or wet and muddy.  Either way, there is usually a person standing near where you eat with a water basin and soap for hand washing.  In this case, a student was manning the station, which was at the end of a long table of steaming pots of food.  So you get in line, wash your hands, and then move down the line while the girls serve you like a cafeteria. The hospitality was unheard of.  I felt totally undeserving of it.  The sisters and the students will literally not let you lift a finger to get anything for yourself.  They were really excited to be good hosts, and it was our responsibility to let them, difficult as it was.

Dinner was great; a local soup, ugali, meat, rice, potatoes and a diced kale.  For desert, papaya and oranges.  Everything is grown right here by the students as part of their education, and they have their own cattle.  The vegetables are picked immediately prior to the meal they are for, cut and cooked in an open fire area.  It looks like a campsite, but its their kitchen, and it feeds over 500 people three times a day when all the students are in school (they’re off this month).

After the lengthy meal, we were presented some ceremony and a cake as a welcome gift.   Cake is not a regular feature here, as you might imagine, so it was a very special gift.  I was elected to cut it, which I did with joy and pride.  They obviously didn’t know it had just been my birthday, but still as I was handed the knife to cut it, they sang the “happy birthday” tune we traditionally sing for cake cutting, but with the lyrics “cut the cakey,” over and over.  The cake was not like our cakes, but it was good.  Dense because it was made with maize (corn flour), and they wrapped a ribbon around the edge.  Evidently I was supposed to cut it into a bunch of bite size pieces, and instead I made large slices.  But they were gracious, and showed me how to do it, even while they were still singing.  evidently, they don't stop singing until the cake is cut and distributed.  poor suckers.  =]

After some more dancing and singing, we went to bed in our rooms.  They were similar to most of the rooms I’d seen thus far; sparse, large cement/cinder block rooms with cement floors, a bed, a desk and a chair.  I got a dirty window, and tons of cobwebs.  My bed was a small, low slung wooden bed with a mosquito net.  It wasn't nice at all, but I didn’t care, it was a bed, and I was exhausted.  And stuffed.  I passed out.