Adventures in Visa Acquisition

Work has recently shifted away from teaching the students who will be taking their standardized tests this year to helping last year’s students get their visas to go off to college. I’m not sad at all to be teaching less: it’s felt like a constant battle to convince the students that I’m much more strict than I actually am (my inclination is not to care if they don’t come to study hall, for instance, as long as they get their work done. And I want to believe that the students are motivated enough to put effort into class, but realistically the motivation is coming from the parents at this point). There were some memorable classes though, like when I gave out an interesting article on the perception and the mind, and our debate almost felt like a college class, or like when class was disrupted by stray cats having sex on the roof (we think).

So on the one hand, I’m inclined to embrace the next task. On the other hand, dealing with immigration officials has got to be one of the most frustrating, thankless tasks. Most of the students got appointments that are very close to the day they’re supposed to start school, so many applied for emergency appointments before I arrived in Ghana—all were rejected.

One student came in to ask if we could try again, so I opened his online profile. “No appointment scheduled.” What?!? Saleh tells me this is normal, give it some time and the appointment will come back. A couple hours later, there’s no change. I shoot off an email through the “Provide Feedback” link and am told to call a phone number.

Woman: “That appointment was cancelled.”
Me: “What? What do you mean ‘cancelled’?”
Woman: “The appointment is cancelled. You must reschedule. The next available date is in October.”
Me: “That’s not acceptable. That date is too late. We did not cancel this appointment.”
Woman: “Please, there’s nothing you can do.”

The poor kid is sitting next to me, looking like he’s about to cry as I try to phrase my responses so that he doesn’t know just how bad things are getting. Then his mother comes in, the look of death on her face. I call the appointment-scheduling people again, and yell on the phone to no avail (but with the hope that the mother will see that I am actually doing everything I can).

The next morning, we start at it again. I send of another email, and again am told that visa enquiries are only handled through the phone. I call the embassy, only to discover that Consular has an explicit policy of never answering the phones. Ever. Under any circumstances. The phone menu is hermetically sealed to prevent anyone from talking to a human being once you hear “Welcome to Consular.” I call the main embassy directory back and speak to the people routing calls:

Me: “Hi, I’m calling because I am having a problem with a visa appointme—”
Automated voice: “Welcome to Consular.”

Me: “Hi, I really need to speak with a person regarding a problem with my visa. You see the thing is I scheduled an appoint—”
Automated voice: “Welcome to Consular.”

Me: “Hi, no one is answering at Consular, but I have a problem with my visa appoi—”
Automated voice: “Welcome to Consular.”

Me: “DO NOT TRANSFER ME TO CONSULAR.”

Eventually I figured out how to keep the call-routers on the phone long enough for them to explain that no one in the Consulate office answers the phone. As though they are physically incapable of picking up a receiver.

Call router: “You should send an email. We don’t handle these issues by phone.”
Me: “Ok, I did that. The email said that I should call.”
Call router: “Please, Consular doesn’t take calls. You need to send an email.”
Me: “But I did that! The email does. not. work.”
Call router: “Please, there’s nothing I can do.”

We made contact with a woman who works in the embassy, who told us that a number of emergency appointments had recently been made available to undergraduate students, leading my boss to believe that we could simply reschedule a student’s appointment for one of these newly available dates. At the very least, we reckoned, rescheduling the appointment would allow us to request an emergency appointment again. We started on a student whose appointment date was so late that he risked deferring to the Spring semester. MISTAKE. In order to reschedule, you have to cancel the existing appointment, and those new appointments are only available to those who were approved for an emergency appointment. Our student’s interview was rescheduled for October, no emergency requests permitted.

The next morning, we tried to contact the people behind the appointment schedules via an online chat, which was actually much more successful than I anticipated (or so we thought…). Rolande informs us that the best option is to pay the visa fee again ($140) so that we can re-apply for an emergency appointment.

Me: Ok, so that will work if I repay?
Rolande: If you repay you will have a new emergency slot available to submit a new request.
Me: I have been in touch with someone at the embassy who told me that I should not have to pay again.
Rolande: Please, the system has been changed and it does not work like that anymore.

We send the student out to get money from his parents and pay the visa fee again. We are all sure that this will work. The student is back within the hour, and we get back on the chat to let Dovene know. Dovene assures us that the request is being processed, they are working on our student’s account and passing the request up to their superiors for approval to grant us the opportunity to reapply for an emergency visa appointment. There is a four-hour wait period, so I turn to the teaching I had scheduled for the day.

I return four and a half hours after the payment was made, and see, to my dismay, that the “request emergency appointment” button has not yet appeared. Back to the chat.

Me: I have been speaking with people on the chat today, because I need to schedule an emergency appointment. I have already been denied, but I was told that if I paid the fee again, I could re-apply
Rolande: Mr. Student, I do sincerely apologize for the information I am about to give you.
[Long pause]
Rolande: Please, the possibility to reapply for a new emergency visa is no longer available.

Um. What?!

Me: What do you mean?
Rolande: I do sincerely apologize, the Embassy is no more granting emergency slots. The decision has changed. It is now one emergency per applicant no matter how many time the applicant has applied.

Now wait just a minute. There is NO WAY you told us just hours ago that the solution was to pay extra, and now you’ve just changed your mind.

Me: When did this happen?
Rolande: I do apologize about an hour ago.

WHAT? WAIT. WHAT! WHAT THE. AAAAAAUURRGHHHHH!

Me: But I made the payment before the change went into effect.
Rolande: Yes, however, the system has been upgraded already. Right now, it is no more possible for us to work with the old procedure. I do apologize Mr. Student, we here only abide to decisions and procedures.

Well if that isn’t the greatest statement of bureaucracy I’ve ever heard.

Rolande: It is our inner concern to help you.

Oh, I could tell. So thanks, American embassy. I already can’t wait to dump this mess on the person who replaces me next year. Not only are the lists of required and supporting documents ridiculously long and involved, this whole byzantine system seems to change by the minute—because God forbid any “undeserving” applicants make their way through the system for the privilege of paying tens of thousands of dollars to live in a country that is doing its best to drive all who aren't rich, white Christian males into poverty.


(Both of these students’ visa issues have since been resolved, through no work of my own.)

Lomé, Togo

This post is long-overdue, but between work, new friends and a bout of food poisoning, I’ve had remarkably little time to write. Last weekend I went to Lomé, the capital of Ghana’s neighboring country, Togo, with my roommate and two other friends. (Unfortunately, I was totally dumb and left the battery of my camera charging in Accra! Some pictures here courtesy of a travel-mate). As a supplement, I was reading (at Zach’s fantastic suggestion) Charles Piot’s Nostalgia for the Future, a surprisingly readable anthropological work about Togo and West Africa in general. I’d highly recommend it to anyone looking to learn more about West Africa, Togolese history, Pentacostal churches, shifting perceptions of witchcraft/sorcery over time, the US visa lottery or development NGOs.

Piot connects these various threads, arguing that the performative nature of the former dictatorship’s hold on power (staging coups d’états to maintain a state of emergency, for instance) has been echoed in the dramatic personal connections with God performed in Pentacostal churches, the fake identities performed by those trying to obtain a visa to the US through the lottery, the imagined magical performances of witches and the self-portrayal as needy in order to capture the interest of an NGO. Each of these performances is an act of conjury that attempts to generate something of value out of nothing—reflecting, Piot argues, the influx of cheap disposable goods that entered the country after the Cold War and the accompanying culture of accumulation.

Such performances are also related to rumor and the problematic nature of truth. Following Walter Benjamin, Piot writes that the return of death (due to a drastically weakened economy after foreign governments cut aid at the end of the Cold War) has brought a need to tell stories. “Death demands explication—and here elicits competing stories… but far from stabilizing meaning and bringing closure, storytelling produces its own excess—more stories, more versions of the same story, more ambiguity in any story’s ‘true’ meaning.” Under such circumstances, supernatural explanations involving witchcraft seem less irrational.

He writes that Togo is a country that is rejecting its past: trying to move away from the history of dictatorship, increasingly joining a new religion that very actively demonizes traditions of old, eschewing local familial bonds in favor of direct contact with distant, global communities. This rejection of the past creates an anticipation, a longing or nostalgia for the future, as well as an imaginary of exile.

What do you mean, “an imaginary of exile”? Apparently, there were more green card visa lottery applications per capita in Togo in 2003 than in any other African country, and ten times as many as in neighboring Benin. People devote their lives and large sums of money to attempts to leave their home nation. When local ceremony no longer provides entertainment, satellite TV and the internet connect one to the spectacles of distant places. I remarked, as we entered into the country, that even the location of the capital suggested this desire to leave. Situated directly over the border, a short walk past a heap of trash (welcome to Togo!) and along the coast, the capital is about as close to Ghana as possible without being out of the country (it also seems, from the map, that most roads enter the city from the Ghanaian side, rather than the Togolese side).

The city felt, in places, like a ghost town, the set of some post-apocalyptic movie. We wandered down empty, unpaved streets, in the middle of the road, and wondered where everyone was. Gorgeous colonial mansions facing the ocean left to crumble, abandoned, make you almost want to buy one to fix up—it could be a dream home, easily. I’ve noticed that both Accra and Lomé feel less dense, less city-like than Dar es Salaam or Kampala (although most of my observations here should be taken with a grain of salt, since I so far haven’t explored either of these West African cities as much as the East African ones).


Wandering through the capital near our hostel:






We did find people, later: we watched large groups of people working together to pull in fishing nets from the ocean, as we made our way along a beach that was too beautiful to be as empty as it was. (The ocean breeze also makes for *perfect* weather!) At night we walked down a street lined with outdoor bars blasting music that Piot tells me may have been preaching the word of Jesus. If so, that didn’t stop anyone from drinking, or members of large family gatherings from periodically standing up to dance. Vendors wove through the tables, selling cigarettes, condoms, clothes—just about anything. Another busy site of human activity was the “grand marché,” which we passed through twice, once on Sunday morning and once on our way to the fetish market.

The fetish market is Lomé’s biggest tourist attraction: a market full of items apparently used in traditional, non-Christian worship. The market might not quite be a gimmick—we did see one traditional healer arrive and immediately be swarmed by vendors hissing to attract his attention—but it certainly seems to rely on the tourist trade. As soon as we entered, we were told to pay an entrance fee and offered a guide. For an additional fee, we could take pictures, and it was explained that most of the items on display were for tourists, and didn’t yet have any power (the magic that makes them powerful was done elsewhere).

Piot explains that the “charismatic Christians” (meaning those belonging to Pentacostal churches) blame such traditional beliefs for all evils, including a lack of development. Rather than hybridizing the religion, as colonial churches did, charismatics condemn all activities involving spirits (but nevertheless believe in their existence and efficacy).

We wandered through a rather deserted patch of dusty earth, past tables stacked with the dried heads (and various other body parts) of monkeys, dogs, lions, antelopes, horses, elephants, and others, all laced with the smell of death and preservative that called the Murambi genocide memorial to mind. Our tour-guide explained that most of these body parts would be ground up into powder that you would wash your body with in order to achieve the desired effect. Many of the other objects were things that had once had a function (as money, as a writing utensil, etc) but due to improving technology, had been repurposed for magical use, as though anything that belongs to the era of tradition now belongs to the murky realm of magic.


Fetish market:



Once we’d seen our fill of dead animals, we were brought into a back room, where various charms were explained to us, from the flat, round object that would enhance memory if you used it to draw a cross on your forehead and then tucked it under your pillow to the stick whose smell apparently functions as a natural Viagra. There was also a trinket called “Tell Me Yes,” which, if used correctly, was supposed to make your romantic interest agree with you on everything (as long as s/he was the first person you saw afterwards). Interesting that people have told stories of trying to capture love with magic for centuries, all around the world…

Much of what we saw in the fetish market and what I read about witchcraft in Piot reminded me of the fairy tales we read in Magic class last spring. At the time, we talked about how those stories came out of the dire conditions of the time they were written in, as people developed ways to talk about poverty and death. Similarly, Piot writes, “Witchcraft narratives are very much discourses about hard realities—about unequal access and the failures of European development, about the il/legitimate constitution of political authority, about the temptations of illicit wealth production. They are concise, albeit allegorical ways of trying to understand shifts in power’s operation in today’s world.”

The witches that live in Togo are not shopping for dried monkey heads at the fetish market. They’re capturing victims to sell in exchange for money and the accumulation of goods and advanced technology. They represent the ability to make something out of nothing, the goal that those who are nostalgic for the future are reaching for.



Oh, and we also went to an art gallery holding the collection of West African art gathered by a wealthy Swiss anthropologist, who even negotiated the return from Portugal of some rare art from Benin. Beautiful art, shown to us by a construction worker in a work shirt and dirty overalls, who had no issues with us touching things (or, um, putting them on our heads…):

Preparation

When I was at home just before leaving for Ghana, I spent some time going through old stuff that had accumulated in my room. Seriously, I had saved every Valentine from my fourth grade classmates, including one with a (very well-preserved) candy heart still taped to it. Time for some pruning.

One of the gems I found was my “Livre de Memoires de 2B,” a totally adorable construction paper book compiled by my 2nd grade class when I moved to the US, in which each student had drawn a picture and written a “goodbye” sentence. Apparently, almost every single one of them was going to miss me “because you are always prepared for show and tell.” What kind of 2nd graders care how prepared their classmates are?! Thinking back, I do remember long Sunday afternoons with my mother, carefully planning each show-and-tell and checking each word in my French-English dictionary. (Thanks, Mom – you made me memorable.)

I like to be prepared, to strategize. I get by on my work ethic more than quick thinking, and I want to plan my thoughts before speaking rather than fumble with ideas out loud (it was recently explained to me that this is what people mean when they tell me, “You think a lot” – which actually happens more often than one would expect, believe it or not). So you can imagine my momentary distress when I arrived to teach my very first class—which I had prepared on the writing section of the (for me) completely unfamiliar TOEFL exam—and my students told me that the only section they felt they hadn’t covered was actually the speaking section. Okay, no problem, I can teach that for two hours…! (deep breaths)

It turned out to be a totally great class. In fact, it was much better than my afternoon SAT Critical Reading class, in which we were all drooping a little bit, and for which I had a neatly structured plan with pre-selected examples and everything. Sure, the speaking class was a little disorganized, but everyone was engaged and we talked through topics ranging from corporal punishment (all were against) to government censorship (half for, half against).

I’ve been really enjoying getting to know the students. Today was especially gratifying because I met with most of them individually to talk about their application essays and plans for college. Not to pick favorites, but so far there are a couple of students I’m especially looking forward to helping, including a girl who I would love to see at Barnard, and a boy who is an intense reader and loves to use his grandiose vocabulary and collection of pre-fabricated phrases (“the maelstrom of time”) as much as possible, even if incorrectly. He’s a little awkward and risks sounding emo at times, but it’s endearing – he’s a smart kid.

Unplanned classes give me more flexibility to hear their opinions,^[*] and ask them questions I’m thinking through myself. This morning, we were talking about structuring essays and going through some examples. I asked them whether it was better to plan and prepare, or to try things as you go, expecting that diligent students in the process of preparing for standardized tests would be in favor of preparation, but to my surprise they all agreed that plans never work out. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised: this is Africa, after all, and I’ve certainly learned the necessity of having a go-with-the-flow attitude here.

Though I’m sure it was only a Larium-induced coincidence, I dreamt of my 2nd grade class the night after my impromptu, off-the-cuff teaching experience. In my dream, I went back to visit my elementary school and Mrs. Treble was remarkably still there, still remembered me and my “Livre de Memoires” (dream logic). She asked if she should make me another one before I left for Ghana, and I refused, laughing. Time to grow a little, to push myself out of the comfort of always being the one who needs to prepare… at least in some cases.

^[*]
Obviously, this isn’t rocket science, or at all revolutionary in the world of teaching – in fact, one of my favorite things in college was when professors would begin class with a totally open-ended solicitation for comments. But knowing it as a student and putting it into practice as a teacher have so far been two very different things.

Welcome to Ghana

Ghana welcomes those who come with goodwill.
Ghana does not welcome paedophiles or other social deviants.

So read the sign on the other side of the immigration barrier, behind an officer who, I noticed too late, seemed to be taking particular pleasure in questioning, documenting and lecturing at length each person who came to his window. Why hadn’t I moved into the other line when I’d had a chance? I watched the look of condescension on his face as he argued with a man ahead of me, and prepared for battle: I hadn’t been able to produce a precise address or a telephone number for the organization I’m working for, so I was pretty sure I was going to be labeled a socially deviant meddling immigrant obruni (white person) and denied entrance. Maybe it wasn’t too late to switch to the line behind that friendly-looking officer?

Of course, when I approached, he flashed a bright smile and asked if I was going to come visit him in Ghana. Um, yeah sure! Oh great – smile, stamp, stamp, fingerprints, picture – and I was welcomed to Ghana, goodwill and all.

At the airport, I met Saleh, a very friendly Sudanese-Ghanaian civil engineer who has been covering the gap between the departure of the organization’s previous education fellow and my arrival. A word on why I’m in Ghana: I’m working as the Education Fellow for an organization that helps African students apply to American universities. Over the course of the year, I’ll be running standardized test preparation, helping students select the universities to which they’ll apply, and managing their applications.

Saleh brought me to the apartment I’ll be living in for the next year, and it is beautiful. I’m up on the third floor, which, in a country with few tall buildings, is high enough to get a delightful breeze through the North- and West-facing windows (though I’ve been told that this breeze is a bit of a fluke, and will soon be gone once the dry season begins). There’s a balcony facing North with a bench and table, a large (orange colored!) living room/dining room, and a decent-sized and well-equipped kitchen. We just have to deal with the trash heap outside the building entrance, which apparently the trash collectors have decided to ignore, and the lack of running water due to an empty water tank. Otherwise, it’s amazing.


The living room/dining room.


The view from my room down the hall.
(Ok, these pictures are taking forever to upload, you'll just have to take my word for it)

The apartment is located in Osu, just off of Oxford St, one of the main streets in Accra and a popular tourist area. I haven’t spent much time exploring yet, but hope to do so today. Last night, I met most of the staff at a West African restaurant—oh, and lest you thought I’d escape posho/ugali, I have already discovered the Ghanaian version called gari (or ebe if you’re ordering a Nigerian dish, as I did last night). Richard, one of the organization co-founders, requested that the restaurant switch from the very short CD of American songs playing on repeat to some Ghanaian music, and they promptly began to play music from Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon… basically everywhere but Ghana. Richard laughed and said, “Ah, here in Ghana we have to squeeze the culture out!” Sure enough, the jazz concert we went to after dinner featured an obruni saxophonist, and I heard of plans to open a KFC—the first chain restaurant in Accra. But listening to the church service next door, already well into its third hour at least, I’d be loath to jump to the conclusion that Accra’s development has somehow suppressed its culture.

So far, Accra has been more like East Africa than I expected (and I feel well prepared, having mastered key skills like the appropriate use of “Eh!” and “Ah!” to communicate surprise, joy, disappointment, displeasure, etc.) That smoky smell pervades, and our neighbor’s rooster is fast becoming a real nuisance. Most familiar is the excitement of adventure: time to go exploring.

A Farewell to Tanzania

I’ve been neglecting my blog a bit recently, in part because I haven’t been doing anything particularly blog-worthy, and in part because everything here is somehow absurd or challenging or worrisome or thought-provoking etc—from the Nakivale forced repatriation disaster, or my long, eventful busride back from Kigoma to dealings with the various forms of justice here, or my evolving opinion of the state’s role in development. So it turns out that suddenly it’s the end of my journey, as I’ve passed safely into the hands of Swiss Air, and I’m left trying to articulate a goodbye. Goodbyes are not one of my strengths.




There are a lot of things not to like about Dar es Salaam. It’s a hard place, gritty with dirt and crime and poverty. The city is mean in a way that I will never be. These characteristics can seem particularly harsh in the early days of culture shock, or when you’ve just had some of your most valued possessions stolen, as happened to me a few days ago. But despite all of the reasons to dislike Dar, it has won me over, and, as I sit in this bizarrely clean and air-conditioned airplane seat, I am deeply sad to leave.



So instead of thinking about the things I’ve lost, or whining about the fact that I was a mere twenty pages away(!) from finishing Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject, which I’ve been studiously underlining and marking for future reference, but which is now probably lying in a ditch somewhere since no thief would likely see the value in a scribbled-in book he can’t read, I’m going to focus on the wonderful things I’ve found here, the things I’m going to miss, the things that have changed my mind about my not-so-positive first impressions, and the things that will probably pull me back here some day in the future.




I will miss the brilliant, aquamarine blue of the ocean at Kigamboni, which makes you wonder, “How could I possibly want to be anywhere else in the world?” as you watch the waves crash gently down along the empty beach and contemplate whether you’ll buy a ridiculously cheap ice cream from the ice cream bicycles (or “bice creamsycles” as I think of them) now or later (or, in my case, both). I will miss sunset strolls down that beach, past the locals who cartwheel into the water and call out to the muzungu, to go back across the main road to the village where Bree and Alex live and where one small girl always approaches me to shyly grip my pointer finger while boys call out “give me money!”, or to catch a dalla-dalla back to Kigamboni town, which is lit at night by the candles of street vendors selling fresh calamari cooked in front of you on your way to the ferry back to Dar.




I will miss the smells of Africa. Multiple, conflicting, impossible-to-describe smells (the English language has fewer words to describe smells than any other senses) that fade as you adjust to them, and sink into your subconscious awareness. The smoky smell of morning in the village, cool with the promise of later heat. The stink of sewage, and garbage strewn in a muddy street. The distinct smell of body odor. The faint, elusive perfume of a flower in the humid evening. And more that I can’t distinguish or name, but which flood me with the contradictory thrill of being here, in Africa, and of their comforting familiarity every time I take a deep breath.




I will miss the faded, worn beauty of Dar’s old buildings. Celebrated neither for their history nor for the hodge-podge effect of old and new side-by-side, the pale blue or salmon pink buildings dating back to the 1800s are mostly ignored, orso it seems, coexisting with their uglier replacements and the newer, equally beautiful mosques. The dark lines of weather-worn age, the architectural equivalent of wrinkles, remind you of their pending demise—due either to lack of care or deliberate destruction to make way for new development.




I will miss hearing the Muslim call to prayer.




I will miss the fruit!! Do they even sell passionfruit in the US? And don’t get me started on the pineapple… Actually, let me amend that: I will miss all of the produce, its prevalence and the process of buying it. If I was charmed by places like West Side Market and Garden of Eden displaying their produce on the sidewalks of Morningside Heights as the sun seemed to draw out their aroma to entice passers-by, it’s nothing compared to the fruit and vegetable sellers here. It’s all so fresh and flavorful and adds even more color to the already-saturated scene of day-to-day life, laid out on mats on the sidewalks like a rainbow sea. I will miss the candles on the food stands at night, which make me think of those candles in churches.




I will almost miss the adventure of public transportation. It’s funny: when I was squeezed into the very back corner (where the window had come out, blowing such a thick layer of dust over me that I looked more orange than the cast of Jersey Shore) of the bus that rescued us when ours broke down, three hours into the journey from Kigoma to Dar, and I was worried about my backpack, which didn’t fit between my legs and was sitting in the aisle out of my sight, I texted Bree, “I hate traveling in Africa!!” Her response was, “Don’t worry, soon you’ll be back home and everything will be so easy and you’ll miss it.” And it’s sort of true. Fortunately, the MTA is doing a good job of cutting back on the number of subways in NYC, creating dalla-dalla-esque levels of cramped-ness – yay!




I will miss Kariakoo.




I will actually miss rice and beans. Is that weird? Wait, don’t answer that. But seriously, I’ve kind of been craving it… And pilau is now one of my favorite things ever. YUM!




I will miss the open, giving hospitality of the people who helped me—people who made my research and my travels possible, like Robert, Bree and Alex, Luke and Christiane, Obadiah, and others.




And many other things, I’m sure, that I won’t notice until I get home and don’t have them any more, or maybe even until I return. Like most experiences, my trip to Tanzania has had its ups and downs. My research was much less successful than I’d hoped, for several reasons, and I’m definitely leaving with many more questions, doubts and uncertainties than I came with. Overall, I’d say the experience has been humbling, in every possible way… but that’s a good thing! People like me (i.e. privileged and full of themselves) need to have humbling experiences more often! In the end, I’m really glad I came.

Thinking of Nabokov in Tanzania

“if, in the spiral unwinding of things, space warps into something akin to time, and time, in its turn, warps into something akin to thought, then, surely, another dimension follows—a special Space maybe, not the old one, we trust, unless spirals become vicious circles again”

In a week, I saw a cross-section of Tanzania. The drive from east to west, Dar es Salaam to Kigoma, cut diagonally through the country, through the vast, empty spaces dotted with the occasional town, and wove around the sporadic hills and towering mountain ranges. More revealingly, the journey from urban to rural brought me from capital city to quintessential African village with stops at each intermediate step along the way: Dar es Salaam to Kigoma to Kasulu to Makere. Each location brought me further from the comforts of home and closer to what some refer to as the “real” Africa, though I resist that equation of villages and authenticity (but sometimes find myself subconsciously buying into it).

I wrote at the beginning of my trip that I wanted to take Tanzania on its own terms, without comparison to Uganda and Rwanda. Nevertheless, at each stage in this progression, I found myself trying to fit what I was seeing into what I had seen in Uganda and Rwanda, trying to match each town or village to a parallel one in my previous travels. But nothing fit exactly and it felt like trying to hold onto water.

In Makere, the bizarre thrill of realizing that I can adjust (kind of, and a bit grumpily) to a temporary life without electricity, toilet paper, or running water (important in that order) brought back memories of Gulu and Nakivale. At the same time, this life was completely foreign, being so different from the other 20 years and 7 months of my life. Unfamiliarity clashed with familiarity as I simultaneously thought, “oh cool, I’m getting a chance to really see how other people who are completely different from me live” and “this is just like Gulu/Nakivale—and hey, why are you making such a big deal about reading by gaslight for two nights? You did that for a whole month in Gulu, silly.” When I walked past a large group of women and children singing outside a home, I thought (with the rosy tint of retrospection) of nights with my Acholi host family, Emma and Mama Winnie, when we would sit in darkness under the stars and Mama Winnie would lead us in singing, “My Jesus is Alive” while a pig wandered through the yard behind us and Nancy would tease us for our funny mzungu voices.

As refugees approached me on the path from Makere to Nyarugusu refugee camp to speak with me, I was almost back in Nakivale (and maybe Makere was the small town outside the camp where I stayed for a couple of nights while trying to arrange housing inside the camp). Even the red clay dust was familiar. Just like before, I groped my way through interviews in almost-correct French, and received many of the same answers to my very similar questions. At the same time, this village was neither Gulu nor Nakivale, and the little differences stood out, stubbornly refusing to allow Makere to conform to the neat categories I wanted to sort it into.

It wasn’t just in Makere, though it was there that I felt the disjointed dislocation of being in a place that didn’t quite fit any previous model the most. Every town feels vaguely familiar, like if I just catch it when it isn’t looking I’ll realize I’m really back in Kitgum, Uganda or that town where we always ate lunch on the road between Gulu and Kampala. But then there’s something a little bit different, a little out of place, every time.

A few weeks ago, RJS posted an article about culture shock in the comments of one of my entries. The article said that culture shock is a loss of meaning, and part of the process of negotiating and overcoming culture shock is the effort to find ways to make meaning for yourself, and I think my attempt to relate Tanzania to Uganda is my brain trying to make meaning out of my experiences in Tanzania.

In the same way that we look for patterns and recurring details in a text to understand what the author is trying to do, or compare similar situations across space and time to try to come up with a theory (both in hard sciences and in social sciences), we look for points of overlap in our lives—when one part of the pattern is superimposed on another—as if finding the thread that spirals through will give us the satisfaction of believing there is a purpose and significance to our individual existences. When these points don’t quite align, it’s harder to ascribe meaning, but I guess the point is that we don’t really want to come full circle anyways. Really it’s all about catching glimpses of comforting familiarity in new places and wondering if the thread is a precise spiral or just a wandering, erratic trail—if life can conform to artistic ideals, or if such organization is necessarily artificial by virtue of being ideal.

Children in Makere

When Tanzanian mothers want to scare their children into behaving, they tell them, “if you keep doing that, the mzungu’s going to come and get you!!”

And I almost have been the mythical mzungu boogeyman the past couple of days. Like the pied piper, I walk through the village with a growing swarm of children around me. One girl apparently told her friends she would follow me until she got to be just like me.

Some run away from me (one girl ran like her life depended on it while the whole neighborhood laughed at her; when she fell flat on her face, we laughed even harder), some run to me, trying to catch my attention, and all of them treat me like the best entertainment possible. It’s a game to chase after me and see who can get the closest before I look at them (or better yet, turn my camera in their direction) and they scatter.



On our first night in Makere, Robert picked out a “really nice” restaurant for us, though I was immediately skeptical because no one was eating there, and they were only serving rice and beans (fine by me, but Robert only eats ugali). Over the past day, their menu has expanded to include rice, beans, ugali and those nasty small fish with their shells still on that they buy dry and then cook in soup (as far as I can tell). Needless to say, I’ve been eating a lot of rice and beans the past couple of days.

Robert insists that we go back there for every meal—I’m tangentially wondering if he has a bit of a crush on the woman who runs it—and on our second night, the woman shepherded two bashful young girls to the bench of the other table to stare at us sit with the mzungu.

“Habarti?” I don’t know much Swahili, but “how are you?” is essential. Behind the glare of the room’s one gas lamp, directly in front of me, the girls are silent, either assuming that I’m not addressing them or too shocked to answer. I try again.

“Nzuri,” comes the timid, embarrassed reply, as the older girl, half hidden behind the younger finds her voice again.

“Nitwa nani?” I try to mimic what Robert says when he asks for people’s names. This is one of the cool overlaps between Swahili and Kinyarwanda: in Rwanda, I introduce myself, “Nitwa Danielle”

The older girl, bolder now, announces that her name is Kalega and her sister’s name is Epi (I think). We stare at each other in half-awkward silence, since I’ve used up almost all of my Swahili other than, “How is your morning?” which isn’t really appropriate at the moment. The girls are dressed in pale pink dresses, and the younger girl’s dress looks like exactly the sort of princess dress my four-year-old self would have absolutely loved to wear every day. I ask Robert how to say “I like your dresses.”

“Npanda mavazi zeno” It takes me a couple of tries, and I’m not sure my point gets across, because the young girl chirps up excitedly that her mami will give her clothes (or at least, that’s how I understood Robert’s translation). Their mother bustles in to wash some dishes in the corner and starts to tease the girls about how much they love the mzungu, how they’re going to dream about the mzungu, and what would happen to them if they went to the US.

The young girl has apparently decided that she wants to give me her dress, and sits there earnestly pulling the bows with a look of deep determination in an attempt to take it off while the rest of us try to breathe around our laughter. We tease her about what she will wear when she’s given me her dress, but she ignores us and begins to steadfastly brush the dirt from every inch she can reach, so that she can give me a clean dress.

Even though I usually think it’s creepy and disturbing when people here tell me they love me as soon as they see me, I’m going to chalk this one up to children being adorable, sweet, and sincerely giving.