Now We Have Become the Teachers

Bongoland is the street name for
Dar es Salaam – “land of brains”. Sounds like
Zion for zombies, but it just means you need brains to survive in a city where 3 million people are under the impression that there are resources for which they need to be competing. The bizarre irony of trying to find your life in a city like this is that despite all the amazing ingenuity of people doing all sorts of things to get some sort of livelihood, very few of those same people realize that compared to the villages they escaped from, committing themselves to the city life has only increased their chances of finding misery. Ingenuity and futility accompany each other everywhere. Thus, after 48 hours of continuous rain, the men with milk crates come out, hammer them apart, and try to sell the wooden sides to passersby, so they can use them to float across foot-deep puddles. Rastafarian artists sleep on the street – they can sing, dance, paint, and play 5 instruments, but mostly they practice the museless art, theft. Men sell sketchy firewater out of slum alleys to feed their children, whose ever-changing mystery ingredients have occasionally caused entire drinking parties to collectively drop dead. Nobody seems to want to get the hell out of here and go back to growing peanuts. I still can’t figure out why.

 

The second meaning of bongo can be “puzzle” – the city as a breeding ground for mystifying situations that cannot be understood just by getting more knowledge, but by learning to think differently, to think like the people who make those situations happen. The city is an invitation to upgrade the number of things you learn about life from 4 to maybe like 1,000. I decided I could go for at least 6.

 

HUGE FUCKING MISTAKE!

Some of you may be wondering why I haven’t blogged in like 2 months. Well, bear with me as I pretend that I have an audience of more than like, 1 person, and say I have one fuck of an excuse for you!

In the past few weeks, I have narrowly escaped a face-stabbing, become homeless, lost $1,000 and not one but two cellular phones, been literally pursued Tom & Jerry-style by not one but two insane sluts, and slept in every sort of place ranging from Dar’s most notoriously unsafe slum, a condemned garage next to a chicken coop, a converted stable, the mansion of a 50-year-old German development expert working for the Ministry of Justice and his multinational cohort of supposedly Platonic girlfriends 30 years his juniors, a home belonging to the President’s sons, and of course, that time-tested impromptu sleeping location, a concrete lot inhabited only by starving cats. Time-tested for 5 hours. Result: no.

What the fuck is going on with my child?!!? you may be saying, completely forgetful of the fact that I am not, in fact, your child, or even related to you in any way. But your question is a reasonable one. Homeless in a third world city is not exactly how I saw my post-gradu — oh shit wait, yeah it is. Hmm! You too can achieve your dreams, kids.

The forthcoming entries will attempt to detail the completely retarded events of April 27th to whatever forsaken date today is. The beginning of April was in general pretty uneventful – nonstop rain, I got really tired of a whole lot of things, I had unprecedented access to nice food & internet for 3 weeks while the person from work in whose house I lived was on holiday, I started really missing home, and I just spent a lot of time online, reading books, and writing the equivalent of 3 15-page papers a week for my job. I beat myself up a little for having failed to conceal from myself my mounting irritation with many aspects of Tanzanian life, but I knew it was just another stage to go through, that my will to explore would soon come back to me.

Nevertheless, I came to realize in that time, during which I fell into the company of some fellow expats, that my strategy for living here was quite different from theirs. I knew only Africans, I ate only African food, I attempted very hard to enjoy the overwhelming futility of getting any basic endeavor of human life to go according to plan and even succeeded about 50% of the time, and, most unusually of all, I talked to Tanzanian strangers. Moreover, I was mystified by how anyone else’s experience could have been otherwise. By the time the expat club noticed my existence, I was already well past the point where I could have completely isolated myself from all local people and activities, as they had somehow done. My one attempt at bringing together the expats and the African street youth over dinner was the most colossal failure of social engineering since that one time I tried to switch personalities with a friend – nobody talked to each other, the Germans complained bitterly and with genuine rage about the 15-minute delay of their $10 sushi platters, and the penniless Tanzanians were utterly shamed and baffled by the concept of food, half of them getting up, announcing apropos of nothing, “We must go to purchase a fan,” and literally running away.

In other words, I pushed my luck on all available fronts. Considering the length of my stay here, it was only a matter of time before my general life philosophy of openness to the universe’s many clusterfucks violated some unspoken metaphysical mandate of common sense, and the cosmos decided to teach me a much-needed lesson. The lesson began on April 27th.

***

In completely unrelated news, today I discovered, on some guy’s literature blog of all places, that my dad has had a scientific phenomenon named after him. It is called the Yakobson Paradox, which sounds to me like the name of a made-for-TV action thriller starring Johnny Depp’s cousin and Mia Sorvino as two renegade flavor chemists on the run from Mia Sorvino’s maniacal ex-husband, played by Patrick Warburton, whose involvement with a top-secret government project has given him the power to reverse time. However, to maintain his power, he must constantly feast on the neural ganglia of innocent women, though once he reverses time, it is as if he never feasted on them at all.

In any case, please behold this link, which will explain the Yakobson Paradox in language a baby can understand, and by a baby, I of course mean a scoliotic Chinese nanophysicist who has spent 11 years calibrating a simulation engine that can recreate the tensional dynamics of a carbon filament subjected to seven different kinds of angular flexion.

http://imechanica.org/node/791

See ya!!

~ by lookwest on May 23, 2007.