Tan Lines, Prostitutes, & Proustian Injera

Yeah, so umm, today I got a haircut and discovered I have a huge fucking tan-line straight across my forehead. Tee-hee – how embarrassing!

No but seriously, hello! It’s nice to be with you today on the Internet. Each night, I return to my spacious guest-house, & after my eyes adjust to the complete and total darkness which so often reigns there, I grope around to locate my computer, open it, claw the ants out from between the keys with my soiled, charred, malarial fingers, wring out the fetid dog-like sweat-lakes which have accumulated on my cadaverous and child-enervating frame & subsequently been sopped up by my plague-ridden & on fire polo shirt and/or tattered rags which I am wearing, and I collapse at once into the refreshing, almost sexual embrace of that amorphous glowing god, the Internet. Then10minuteslatertheInternetgoesdown, BUT IT IS TOO LATE – I HAVE ALREADY CHECKED YOUR AWAY MESSAGE!!!!! AND BOY WHAT AN AWAY MESSAGE IT WAS.

The past week, I’ve begun taking Kiswahili courses at the Russian Cultural Centre, a completely ridiculous place which is a martial arts dojo, ballet studio, music school, Russian-language library, & inexplicable hangout for small Indian children, who I’m pretty sure are there to study all 4 things at once. It looks totally out of place here, and the sudden faceful of matryoshka dolls, portraits of Pushkin, and little Slavic ladies playing piano in stuffy rooms full of Soviet books about African socialism is enough to make anyone completely addled, even if those things don’t remind them of chillin with their grandma when they were 5 & the world was puddle-wonderful. My job is paying for me to study there, which feels weird, because my personal opinion is that being given money to study a language is sort of like being given money to purchase several flour-sacks of crack cocaine, autographed by Axl Rose, bound by a red velvet cord beneath which is tucked a single tasteful card reading “For Professional Use Only.” And yet here we are. The class is attended by 2 old German ladies, and one old Romanian lady. They’ve been living here for 5 years, and still knew maybe half the Kiswahili that I’ve learned in 6 weeks. I was appalled, until I realized that most of their time here had been spent learning English, which they mastered from zero to perfect fluency. These old ladies are HARD CORE_ X.

A few days ago, my friend Kanyumbu, a Rastafarian agronomist (I never thought I’d be saying a sentence with even half these words in it), escaped from Tanzania. Kanyumbu is a Zambian, as I quickly learned when he first said words to me, I replied in Kiswahili, & his face promptly assumed the most despairing expression ever. He is also a member of the Tonga tribe, who are famous for an unusual phenomenon of genetic drift in which a sub-group of Tonga developed satyr-like feet with only two huge toes. I did not ask him about this, because I suck.
The experience of being black and language-less in Tanzania was clearly truly shittacular, as everyone of course assumed he was local. You could really sense the sudden suspicion and disappointment every time he failed to communicate. It was also really odd to meet an African tourist, in Africa, who was getting faceraped by mishaps at least 10 times as much as I was. In the brief five days that I hung out with him, he found himself embroiled in the following fiascos:

1. Having his passport & cell phone stolen after getting tipsy off 2 beers – then attempting to bribe the police into helping him recover it (the police here really don’t give a shit about ANYTHING other than devising clever methods to fleece bribes off people), only to discover that he had met the one police officer in Tanzania who firmly believes that attempting to bribe a police officer should be an arrestable offence. In the end, he may have been trying to extract some sort of meta-bribe that would allow the legal depositing of further sub-bribes, but we will never know, since Kanyumbu got the hell out of there before things got any more fucked.

2. Having a one-night stand with some random woman, who the next day tracked him down, informed him that she was actually a prostitute, and demanded an outrageous sum of money for the previous night’s sex work. When Kanyumbu told her that he didn’t even have enough money to feed himself more than once every two days, she reacted in the only way one can when prostitution is the only means of income generation they’ve got available: by calling her brother & telling him to please come and beat my friend’s ass. This entire scene took place right outside the building where I work – the woman screaming that she’d had her dignity stolen, the brother shouting bizarre accusations about how Kanyumbu didn’t deserve to have slept with his sister in the first place, everyone looking on in horror, and Kanyumbu trying to explain that, all the other potential objections to the whole situation aside, he simply couldn’t pay them. He managed to talk them out of an ass-kicking and into a trip to the police station – the same police station he’d run away from yesterday. There, he somehow managed to convince them that he would collect their payment by next week. Next week he would already be crammed upside-down into a Zambia-bound train with no food or water for 48 hours. Moral: I don’t know.

3. Nearly being arrested again because he had stayed in the country a few days after the formal expiration of his visa, on account of not having had the money to purchase a train ticket. I gave him the money to do this plus 5 liters of water for the 2- to 3-day journey.

In return for financing about 2 of his 16 misadventures, he gave me nearly everything he had on him: a bunch of Rastafarian paraphernalia (including the tooth of a lion, which I now wear around my neck), and 5 live mollusks, which he cryptically instructed me to “wash.” And then he was gone.

Tomorrow morning I am leaving Dar es Salaam for 8 days, first to travel to Zanzibar, and then to Iringa, which is a region 300 miles southwest of here (there are 26 regions in Tanzania, equivalent to our 50 states).

I’ve now been here a month. Today I ate at an Ethiopian restaurant, and it really made me think of Queen of Sheba and life in Chapel Hill. I was really taken off guard – I didn’t expect Ethiopian sponge-bread would ever serve as some kind of sentimental trigger.

I finally feel settled enough to really miss home…and to not want to go back.

~ by lookwest on March 15, 2007.