Kigoma

So I spent one day in Kigoma, long enough to find out that none of the organizations I wanted to talk to could meet me until next week, and then decided to go to Kasulu, which is closer to the refugee camps and hosts a number of other organizations that work in the camps. In Kasulu, I spoke to a couple of really helpful people (specifically at World Vision and GTZ) and some extremely unhelpful, bureaucratic nincompoops (specifically at UNHCR and IRC), and decided that an even better use of my time would be to go to Makere, the small village on the edge of Nyarugusu refugee camp, where I can meet refugees without going into the camp. Now I’m back in Kigoma and happy to be reunited with the internet and electricity!

I’ve got a backlog of writing to do to get caught up on all that, but in the meantime, here’s the entry I wrote about my first day in Kigoma:

You know that feeling, “I must be the luckiest person alive”? That’s kind of how I felt on Tuesday morning, my first morning in Kigoma. I couldn’t tell you what exactly it was that made me feel that way—I’m sure it had to do with leaving Dar es Salaam on a good note, my optimism about the research I’ll be doing for the next couple of weeks, and the overwhelming familiarity of my African breakfast (too sweet tea and sliced bread with Blue Band, served on an awkwardly low table in a sitting room with gaudy, obviously fake flowers and those stupid lace doilies draped over the couches), but I think mostly it had to do with Robert.

Robert is my guide here, and he’s smart, fluent in English, cheerful, and one of the most genuinely selfless people I’ve ever met. Even down to the little things like making sure I have a place to sit, or begging me to let him do my laundry. He’s short, almost reaching my shoulder, and when he laughs, revealing his practically horizontal buck-teeth, his whole being goes into that laugh. He spent today taking me around to various organizations, introducing me to people, translating when necessary, and basically being exactly the kind of help I needed in Dar es Salaam. He’s so sincerely helpful and motivated to make sure things work out for me. I propose an organization to visit, and he jumps up excitedly and mentions two others that might be useful. When someone doesn’t answer my questions fully, he presses them for answers for me.

I’m living with Robert’s brother, a magistrate in Kigoma. His house is quite big, with electricity (which has already gone out twice, and I’m getting suspicious of its reliability despite their reassurances that this is a fluke), running water (though there’s a leak in the faucet, so I’ve been taking cold bucket showers from the collected water), and even a TV that was playing BBC news and the Cartoon Network this morning. So far they are refusing to let me pay them for accommodation or meals, but I’m hoping that I can find some way to repay their generosity—maybe I can donate to Robert’s NGO, Environmental Protection and Humanitarian Agency.

Kigoma is a small town right on the edge of Lake Tanganyika. It’s actually a lot bigger than it seems, at first, because it isn’t laid out the way we’d expect. A Western city that’s isolated and hard to reach by land, but situated at the edge of a body of water would most likely be centered along the coastline, so when you look at a map of Kigoma and see one main road that leads down to the water, it’s easy to assume that that’s pretty much the extent of the city. In person, it’s a nondescript road, with some small restaurants, a train station, a couple of internet cafés, and some shops—though it is one of the few paved roads in the town.

To either side of that road, the town sprawls up steep hills, and once you get up into the neighborhood where I’m living it feels a bit like a village. Houses are dispersed and farm animals outnumber people on the street The fresh breeze from the lake keeps the temperature cool while the sun beats down, and periodically you come around a corner and see a view of hills rolling into the lake, which stretches out as far as the eye can see (apparently it’s a ten hour boat ride to the Congo).

So at first, I thought that Kigoma was just one strip of road and rural, residential areas up in the hills. Soon I discovered that there’s a ton more activity further inland. The center of gravity, so to speak, is not along the waterline, but maybe a mile to the east. It almost feels like the one, paved road is a façade to trick the mzungu tourists into thinking there’s nothing here, and it isn’t until you turn down the alleyways that you find a bumpy, dusty backroad teeming with shops and activity, or at least one busy marketplace. Kigoma is also home to one of the world’s most spectacular sunsets. Tonight the sun became a brilliant red ball that slid by fractions into a blue haze over the lake, framed by hills on either side. /sigh/

I’m really excited to be here, doing research on refugees. I’ve realized that this is so much more what I’m interested in—the conflicts between different groups of refugees, how their displacement from their conflict influences their opinion of home and here, their relations with the local community, etc etc etc. I have so many questions. Unfortunately, I still haven’t managed to get a permit to enter the camps, so I have to rely on what I hear from the aid organizations working there. But I’m trying my best to find other ways (short of, you know, sneaking into the camp and risking deportation…)

I’ll be back in Kigoma next week to talk to organizations here and hopefully I can find some self-settled refugees. They have to keep a low profile, since they’re basically illegal immigrants, but I’d love to talk to them…

I’m still trying to decide whether I’ll stay in Kigoma until July 20th or 22nd, which would bring me back to Dar on either the 22nd or 24th. Not sure if I’ll have organizations to meet with there, or if I’ll just be hanging out in Kigamboni with Bree and Alex until my departure on the 27th – hard to believe my time in Tanzania is going by so quickly!