DID I SAY DAR ES SALAAM I MEANT MY MOM’S BASEMENT FOREVER.

Oh howdy there, neighbor! It is I, a man.

I have arrived in DAR ES SALAAM, TANZANIA. I have been taking little blurry photographs of lizards & frogs and labelling them things like “friend” and “joyful friend 7″. I also photographed a MOTH which was the size of 3 of my knuckles. Oh man!! I am sitting in my posh digs in Oyster Bay, the historical home of such white archetypes as Angry German Regional Administrator, Neocolonial Gentry, Young European Female of Mysterious Origin, & That One Guy (in India, it was the fratty guy I saw at a Sufi shrine wearing a shirt that said “COLLEGE”; here, I’m afraid it might actually be me). Soon I will find a place to live which is near some slums & requires a 2-hour commute to work by suicide-bus. That is gonna be way awesome. I am 10 minutes’ walk from the beach – on the weekends it is apparently a giant party there all the time. I will probably die.

Yeah, so yeah. Yeah! I guess this is it! Darrrr es Salaaaaam. I don’t really know what to say. Every day human reality strikes me as more & more exotic & unbelievable. How can anything be? I ask – a brilliant question often reserved for people who suck at thinking. But I will nevertheless ask it, and without the assistance of drugs, and you cannot shame me into stopping, FATHER!!!

I’ve kinda been through this drill before. It is the feeling of finding yourself completely alone in a Third World city, with hundreds of responsibilities suddenly materializing every moment, dozens of dangers & obstacles, social, vehicular, linguistic, zoological, vehicular, professional, bees, vehicular dangers, scatological, psychological, teratological, insomaniacal (a term I coined to describe the inability to sleep because of the fear of waking up), Muslim [roofles], AAAAND the danger of getting hit by a bus/cow. Basically, it feels like you are a very fragile snowflake, a snowflake that nobody ever loved, that nobody will ever love, & that, if loved, you will surely melt & die, making the whole affair quite, quite pointless! The 6 months I will need to spend here stretch out before me like an inconceivable abyss of terror. Actually, no they don’t, because really I can’t even imagine 6 months of this in my life. The usual “WHY THE FUCK DID I DO THIS???” scuttles through my soul like that little scrolling marquee screensaver on Windows on the maximum speed setting.

Fortunately, hot climates were invented for people of precisely my temperament of “having feelings”. Feelings such as sadness & terror are literally burnt out of you daily in mere minutes, & are replaced with other feelings such as Water & Sitting Down. Feelings of asking too many Accursed Questions before Breakfast are replaced with other questions such as “where, as it happens, am I?”

Another thing should be noted at this point, which is that, oh my god. My plane flew over Kosovo, Sarajevo,  Iraq, Saudi Arabia, & scraped by Sudan. There is something to be noted about the experience of thinking how 15 hours before you were eating baklava from Trader Joe’s in your comfortable North Carolina suburb and now you are looking with your own eyes down at genocide, civil war, inclement climates, vast stretches of terrifying foreignness, and the uncountable humble dwellings of history’s voiceless multitudes. What that something is, I do not know, & am not prepared to know.

Even the culture shock of Emirates Air is quite high…the stewardesses all wear hijab, regardless of nationality (a Swede in hijab, wearing it only because it is part of the uniform of the company they work for…a completely secularized trans-cultural hijab – welcome to today, I hope you like it as much as I do). So many foreign faces before I even got anywhere special…an entire terminal at JFK airport in New York seemed to be reserved solely for blue-skinned 7-foot-tall veiled Somalian women, a 100-man team of Chinese construction workers wearing jumpsuits bearing the word “CHINA” in huge red letters, & great swaths of people passed out on the floor who looked like the only place they could possibly be from is Biblical Mesopotamia. I really thought I could identify nationalities & languages – nope.

Anyway, yes, I am here, for a long time, and I am alone as hell. I don’t really know why I do this to myself. It was just like this in Delhi, and it really fucks with your mind for a while. Sins of neglect real & imagined regarding the people back home who make my life worth living circle like buzzards.

This weekend I will probably travel to Pemba, an island north of Zanzibar, where they will be holding a massive HIV awareness fair – theater, music, fire-breathing children, packs of HIV-sniffing dogs… I hope, I don’t know exactly. I have no idea about anything regarding what I am here to work in. No wonder I am expected to be working at it 9 hours a day. The islands sound quite interesting … they are 99% Muslim, have their own dialects, & have that “tropical paradise” look to them.

I have also inquired, with surgical precision, into this nation’s Surfaces. Apparently Dar es Salaam is the omg-African-drumming capital of the world, & being interested in African drumming is no joke to anybody. Hello, let’s be friends!

~ by lookwest on February 13, 2007.