From Nairobi to Bombani

The sun was setting red across the steppe, and the twilight glow over Tsavo National Park in Kenya stirred a keen awareness inside me that I was fortunate to be alive and a walker upon Earth. Even more so did I feel this way when the woman seated across from me tugged on my shirt, smiled the biggest grin I had ever seen, pointed out the open window, and shouted "Tembo," indicating that there was an elephant grazing along the highway. Suddenly, all those years of watching Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom with Mom, Dad, and my brother became small. You know, we used to watch Marlon Perkins go all over Africa to catch animals for his zoo as we ate Chef-Boy-R-Dee pizza from a box and drank Pepsi every Sunday night at 5:00, right before Disney came on. Suddenly, the fact that the Sunday was the one night of the week we were permitted to drink soda became incidental, to say the very least. Now, just outside my window, as if it were a cow grazing along Interstate Highway 10 underneath the mesas of West Texas, there was an elephant. An elephant!

The bus was bound for Mombasa. It had already broken down twice before, and now that it was dusk, I could see the drivers were nervous that we hadn't arrived in the Indian Ocean port city yet. An Englishman called Simon sat across the aisle from me. He was an English teacher in Yemen and had traveled the route a number of times before. He said that there might be highwaymen along the road. Of course, one of the times the bus mysteriously broke down was right at prayer hour and right in front of a mosque. Not that I minded, you see, because I had never been to a mosque before. There aren't too many mosques in the Mormon towns in Utah mountain valleys where I grew up. So when one of the drivers invited me to drink tea with him in the mosque, I was most willing to accompany. Not that I minded, you see, because this was my first full day in Africa. I was 22, and I had been saving up my money, being a typist and word processor all over Boston, working every day on computer keyboards up to 14 hours for a temp agency. I worked for six months to save up enough money to buy a plane ticket and store away enough cash to pay my rent and have spending money for six weeks travel--the first big trip of my life. And I was on my way to see my childhood buddy Paul. He was a volunteer for the US Peace Corps in northern Tanzania.

To get there, I met João, a former graduate student of my Dad's from Brazil. He was working in Nairobi for a university there, and he met me at my hotel to take me to the bus station. The bus station was a myriad of buses parked in any direction other than alligned. I found one that had a sign in its window marked Mombasa. There was a large crowd of people getting on. In their hands were round stuffed plastic bags, filled with clothes, vegetables, and squawking chickens. There was no queue to speak of, and yet I didn't feel comfortable charging my way on. Finally, João shouted at me in Portuguese, "Eric, ten que fazer pushy!" With my backpack over my shoulder, I stretched out my right arm, pointed my hand as if it were a lever, and separated people, clearing my own trail onto a seat on the bus. Not that I minded, you see, because I wasn't typing on no keyboard that day. I was on my way to my great African adventure!

So, I got into Kenya, I got to the bus station, I had tea at a mosque, and I saw my first elephant. As the elephant got smaller and smaller in the distance, the glow of the steppe got golder and golder as the sun started setting in the west behind us. Suddenly, the bus broke down again. We all got off the bus to enjoy Tsavo for a minute or two. I was traveling east, so I hadn't really seen the sunset yet, only its glow on the land in front of me. Therefore, when I descended from the bus this time, I saw my first African sunset. Across Tsavo, I saw the 5-degree incline of the plain, rising into a single volcano--Mount Kilimanjaro silhouetted purplish black against the neon orange sky. I was mesmerized so that I felt I had to be closer to the mountain. I walked across the two-lane highway just so I could imagine touching the mountain. As I was gazing and being drawn across the highway by the volcanic magnet, the bus driver who invited me for tea at the mosque tapped me on the shoulder.

"Excuse me, sir! Please come back to the bus. We are afraid of lions."

I looked at him in utter puzzlement.

"Lions? Lions?

Yes, sir! Lions!

Lions?” I repeated as if such a thing couldn’t possibly be real. “Lions?"

Finally, the realization that I was in a territory where there were lions and elephants along the side of the road, as opposed to prairie dogs and rabbits, sunk in. I looked at the bus driver and said, "The bus is good. I can see Mount Kilimanjaro just fine from there."

I watched the sun set on Mount Kilimanjaro, and when the glow dipped below the horizon, I was blinded as there was only a sliver of a moon to light the steppe. In essence, I would be blinded until the bus stopped in Mombasa, not really knowing where I was, what direction I was riding, or where I was going. I felt I was I at my most vulnerable. I could hardly see the other people on the bus. I guess the front headlights were a bit dim, too. My body felt jarred as the bus rattled over potholes the bus driver couldn't see. I imagined being stopped by highwaymen. The bus stopped, and my heart flipped. The driver said the bus had broken down again, this time conveniently in front of charcoal vendors. I just hoped I would see Paul soon. The breakdown and charcoal transaction took no more than five minutes.

Still, we did arrive in Mombasa, and all in one piece. The bus stopped in the middle of street, and we were told to get down. On the left side of the street was a large hotel. It was the only hotel in sight and it was midnight. I sat down on a bench in front to pull out my Lonely Planet Guidebook Africa On A Shoestring to see if it had any advice. I had made plans to meet Paul at a different guesthouse, but I really didn't know what street I was on yet, and the darkness left me a bit disoriented. While I was looking at a map under a street lamp, a man came up to me and said,

"Excuse me, sir! I'm from this hotel. Please forgive me for saying this, but it is not safe for you to be out here at midnight. Please find a place to stay."

I thanked him for his concern and immediately went to the hotel with the lights on. It was $30, rather expensive I thought, but it would have to do. I was a bit disappointed because the bus was so late and I wasn't able to find Paul. Still, I crawled under the mosquito net in my hotel room, turned on my Sony Walkman, and listened to my Sade cassette as I fell into a mellow sleep.

The next morning, I went to the restaurant at the hotel with my guidebook. I figured that over some fruit juice and coffee, I could decide my strategy on how to find Paul. Actually, I remember Paul's father saying to me, "If you get separated in Mombasa, just stay where you are and let Paul find you." I figured it would probably be a good idea to stay at an outdoor restaurant. At least there I could read and eat in the sunlight until I saw a renegade Peace Corps dude.

And that's exactly what happened. As I was munching a slice of pineapple, I saw two Europeans having breakfast. Suddenly, I heard a voice say, "I was supposed to meet my friend last night, and he's not there." I stood up and saw Paul, my best buddy from growing up days in Utah. The sound of the chair scaping the concrete alerted Paul and he jerked his neck left to look at the noise. He blinked hard and finished his sentence, " . . . and there he is right now!"

He came and gave me a hug, sat down, and I bought him breakfast, explaining the whole slowness of my getting there.

We went to the hotel we initially agreed upon and checked out a room for three nights. We sat down on the bed, and turned on the TV. It was the first TV Paul had seen in months. There was a James Bond movie on, and he grinned, "Wow! This is luxury."

I said, "I have gifts.

Ooh! I can handle gifts. What do you have for me? I had three things he had asked for in his last letter: cheese, soft-baked chocolate chip cookies, and underwear. I couldn't tell which he liked more. He took out his pocket knife and opened up the cheese. Then he said, "Yeah! Underwear! I need underwear. Oh Eric! This is great." The last thing I gave him were the chocolate chip cookies in a red wrapper. He gleamed! "Yeah! Chemicals! I haven't had chemicals in my food for over a year. You have no idea how I've been craving chemicals." He bit into a cookie. "Oh! That odor and taste of pure preservatives. I've been missing this soooo much! In fact, there's a hamburger place down the road. You wouldn't want to have a hamburger, would you?"

I didn't want a hamburger. That's what I left the States for, to get away from hamburgers. But gently I said, "Why do you want a hamburger so?

Actually, I don't want the hamburger. I want their strawberry shake because I understand it's just loaded with chemicals, and I . . . want . . . chemicals!”

As Paul blissfully sipped on his relished and nostalgic poisons, he said, “Oh, by the way, there's something I need you to remember when we get to Tanzania. The first thing is that when you meet someone who's older than you are, you need to say "Shikamoo!

What does that mean?

Well, it means I respect you, but it literally means 'I grab your feet.'

How do you say it again?

Shikamoo

Shikamoo

Right

So does the other person say anything?

Yeah, they'll say, 'Marahaba!'

OK, so I say 'Shikamoo,' which means 'I grab your feet' and then that person will say 'Marahaba,' which means. . .

Oh, that means, 'Let go of my feet!' Really, I think it means 'good morning' much in the way it does in Arabic.

OK, I say Shika . . . Shika . . . What was it?

Shikamoo

Shikamoo

Yeah, but that shouldn't be confused with 'shika mboa.'

Why not?

Because that means 'Suck my dick!'"

I blinked and gulped.

Paul was very pleased with himself for knowing this slang and he continued giving me my first lesson in taboo Swahili.

"So wait, Shikamoo is ‘suck my dick?’" I confirmed.

"No, 'Shika mboa' is 'suck my dick' and 'Shikamoo' is 'I grab your feet.' Oh, and you know what the proper response to 'shika mboa' is?

No, what?

'Mara saba', which means 'seven times.'

Seven times to do what, suck your dick or grab your feet!

To suck your dick, but you want to make certain you NEVER EVER say these things to people in my village.

But wait, Paul. Which is which? Shikamoo is 'Suck my, No! It's 'grab my feet.'

No, 'Shikamoo' means 'I grab YOUR feet.'

So, if someone says 'Shikamoo to me,' I should say 'mara saba' to them?

No, because that means you're going to grab their feet seven times.

I figured I had three or four days to forget all of this information before actually getting to Paul's village, so I decided to change the subject and make plans for what to do as Mombasa tourists. Paul wanted to visit an old Portuguese fort that had been in Mombasa since the 16th century--Fort Jesus. Paul said Fort Jesus was in the Omani section of town and that we should dress up a bit so as to not offend our conservative Moslem hosts. I brought a pair of khaki dress pants and a knit shirt, so I was in good shape. We took a taxi and walked into the fort. Still, it was just our first day together in Kenya, and Paul wanted gossip on all the people we knew in Utah. As a result, instead of gasping at the vista of the Indian Ocean and observing how cannons were positioned to attack boats out in the port, we instead talked of how many children various Mormon friends of ours had had. I told Paul that I had heard from a friend who had heard from a friend that one particular friend of ours, she too 22 years old, had just given birth to her fourth child.

Paul said, "She did? How did that happen?

Paul, she's been married for about three years, so . . ."

Four kids in three years? What happened? Did she have twins?

No, they came one at a time. But it still works out.

It does?

Yeah! You get pregnant, have a baby, and two days later get pregnant again. Pregnancy is nine months, so if you do that four times, it's 36 months or three years.

Yeah, but I remember a lecture in my physiology class in high school that said that the women's body usually is built so that it needs some time before ovulation takes place after giving birth. Do you think the teacher was telling the truth?

Actually, I think I remember that lecture too, but I think Mormon women are exempt to that part of science.

Either that, or it has something to do with there being no fluoride in the water there."

When we walked out of Fort Jesus, we saw a number of Omani women standing in the streets. They were wearing black cloth covering the entire body except for a slit where the eyes were. I point this out because at that same moment, we saw two European women walking down the street, wearing nothing more that flower-printed bikini swimming suit bras and khaki shorts and sandals. We heard them speaking English and concluded that they were from Britain. Paul then said, "Hey Eric, look at the eyes of the Omani women watching those two British girls!

Wo!

Yeah, those Omani women hate those British girls!"

I couldn't believe that I could detect such disdain in the eyes of people without seeing the muscular twinges surrounding those eyes, but I saw true hate that day. From a distance of thirty yards, I looked into the eyes of the Omani women and saw distrust, repulsion, and repugnance with the shadows of the bleach-skinned European women reflecting in their Islamic pupils. Not that I blamed the Omani women any! This was their town and we Westerners were guests on their soil. Not that I approve of dress codes, either, though! I don't. I think dress codes are harbingers for division and prejudice. And this incindent was such a case, both sides being guilty. I felt the lack of respect by the British women parading through Mombasa with their 1980s new-found feminism. Perhaps the British women were indeed the first examples of such sexual independence these Omani women had seen before, but the Omani eyes showed that this was not information they were inspired by. The Muslim eyes squinted more and more in contempt as they registered the white skin and bathing suits as sin and disruption rather than self-proclaiming power.

Paul and I shared three days in Mombasa until his Danish friend Erling met us to take us to Tanzania. Borders are real when people make them so. I remember Paul's mother Jenny once saying that she had no desire to visit Four Corners National Monument--where Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico's corners all meet geographically--because she had no desire to venture 25 miles off the road to see something that isn't there. However, the way the border officers in Kenya and Tanzania treat travelers, the border is very real. I was very nervous because I would not be declaring all my money in Tanzania; both guide books and Paul told me it was so much more fruitful to change the money on the black market. I seemed to be rushing through the border routines, and a police officer finally stopped me, looked me in the eyes, and said, "Pole pole" which I already understood to mean, "Go slowly!" I figured it was his way of giving me another chance even if he was perceiving me as suspicious.

Really, though, what made me most nervous were the words of my father. He had been to Kenya before, and we in my family had spent many hours looking at slides of his trips there. I was always enchanted by them. Still, Dad hadn't really approved of my going to see Paul. He said, "When I went to Kenya, I was invited by the government and the government and the universities paid for everything. You would be going on your own money with your own risks. You'll try to get to the border with Tanzania, and they won't let you in because you won't have a sponsor. You can never know how the relationship with Kenya and Tanzania is, so you will get over there, they won't let you in, and then you'll be stuck."

I was worried about getting stuck. I had tried to find as much information as I could about whether the border between Kenya and Tanzania was open, but I could never get an official word. All travel agents told me that it was day to day. Still, I thought I had reason to believe I’d be okay. Paul and his own dad Thad had just met in Dar es Salaam, and Thad told me on the phone that I could probably go. And as long as Paul met me in Kenya, I'd probably be able to get to Tanzania with his being in Peace Corps.

In fact, almost no one supported my going to Africa, outside of Paul's parents and a couple of my friends in Boston--Annie and David. Mom thought I would get sick or injured. Actually, she thought I would die. And if I didn't die, she was afraid that Paul was so prone to wandering about aimlessly that he would just forget to meet me in Mombasa. My coworkers in Boston thought I was crazy. My roommates said, "Why are you going to Africa? Wouldn't you rather spend your money on a VCR?" Over dinner one evening, one Boston friend sarcastically quipped, "Yeah, right, Eric! Go to Tanzania! America's vacationland!"

At one time in the spring, Mom and Dad were so upset that I had decided to go that I decided to go to Tucson--where they lived--to see them so we could talk about it. I flew to Tucson for a week. I'm not certain I settled any of their fears, but I do think they were grateful that I was willing to make the extra trip. Still, there was the issue of what to tell Grandma. I was going to be gone for six weeks, and she and I had been talking on the phone twice and three times a week. How was that going to be resolved? I wanted to tell her the truth, but Mom was worried that I would upset her. Then I said I would tell her that I was going to Yugoslavia to meet my old high school buddy Branko, but Mom said that anything outside the US would upset her too. I realized in the conversation that I could probably tell her I was staying in Boston, and that would upset her, so I decided I would just do what Mom asked and leave it at that. I didn't tell Grandma anything. However, I was still worried about the immediate drop in communication.

Therefore, I devised a sneaky plan with the help of my Boston friends. I had been doing a temp job as a word processor in a lab at MIT. Therefore, I went into the bookstore on campus and bought a postcard which had a picture of the building where I was working. I circled it and wrote a postcard to my grandmother, saying that I was sorry I hadn't been easily contacted, that I was busy, and that I was having fun at my job at MIT--all of which were utter lies. I then dated the postcard three weeks into my trip, handed it to my friends Annie and David, and asked them to keep it magneted to their refrigerator until the day I had written on the top of it when upon they could send it.

Now I was crossing the Kenya/Tanzania border. My strategies in having people understand the desire of a 22-year-old to go to Africa were behind me now. Instead, I saw the back of the head of Mr Pole Pole and a tall silver pole with a clean Kenyan flag flying 20 feet above the Kenyan customs office, all as I looked through the back window of Erling's land rover. When I looked through the front windshield, I saw a small wooden shack with uneven boards haphazardly nailed together. Next to it, I saw a six-foot stick that was no more a flagpole than it was a very long twig; attached to the top of it was a dusty and tattered Tanzanian flag. Suddently, the Kenyan asphalt came to an end and the land rover went over the edge of the pavement into the dirt road to the south of it, dropping with a hard and jolting thud. Paul gently socked me in the upper arm, smiled, and gave me the welcome phrase, "Karibu Tanzania!"

And as we passed through Tanzanian customs, I prayed and held my breath, hoping with all my might that I didn't have to say shikamoo or shikamboa to anyone, because I could not for the life of me remember which one was which.

Erling let Paul and me stay with him and his wife Tove and their son Mads overnight in the Indian Ocean port city of Tanga before Paul suggested we get on to his town Bombani. In fact, Erling's house was right across the street from the ocean, a large wooden and concrete home with a big yard. Still it was dark inside, and the quality of house seemed dusty although not at all uncomfortable.

The next afternoon, Paul took me to lunch and the bank to change money, and then we were off to Bombani, Paul's home. Ironically, the town name was similar to that of a small town in the northern Utah valley where Paul and I grew up. Bomba means pump, as it does in Spanish, and ni means town; in other words, Paul moved from Logan to Wellsville, Tanzania. Really! There is a Wellsville just nine miles to the south of Logan, so we laughed at that irony.

But the steppe of eastern Tanzania is not the sugarbeet fields of northern Utah. It took us a while to do the daily errands of getting money and picking up mail at the post office. I also needed to call my parents to let them know that I had arrived safely. After I phoned them, Paul asked me, "So, Eric, what do your folks think of this trip?

I don't think they like it very much. In fact, Dad told me that I would get all the way to Kenya and then the border guards wouldn't let me into Tanzania because I wasn't invited by the government. He thought I'd spend $1300 on airfare and then get stuck.

Then you probably shouldn't have told them that you were traveling around with me on a motorcycle."

Paul was right, you know. I shouldn't have said that, but I also knew I wouldn't have another opportunity to call for another six weeks, so I had to just blow it off.

But the motorcycle was a blessing in my mind. I wanted to tell my folks because I honestly didn't think Paul had a motorcycle. In the two or three letters Paul had written me, he told me he used to walk the 20 kilometers from his hut in Bombani to his Peace Corps office. He said he had to hitchhike sometimes, but occasionally, he really had to spend the few hours just to walk there, stay the night at the office or a friend's place, and then walk home the next day. I knew I would have to deal with walking all over Tanzania, so the two months before I left, I skipped buying a subway pass with the Boston transit system and walked both ways to work--four miles each way. Each day it would take a little more than an hour to get to work, but I wanted to be in good enough shape to deal with Paul's 20 kilometer walks. I knew he didn't need any high-maintenance friend complaining that his feet hurt or that he couldn't make it. I wasn't there to get in Paul's way.

I rode on the back of Paul's motorcycle, affectionately known in Swahili as his piki piki, over the red clay steppe of eastern Tanzania, singing "Late in the Evening." It got to be late in the afternoon, but still we kept Paul Simon’s South American drum beat tapping in our heads as we dodged potholes and waved a locals as they shouted, "Paulo! Paulo!" Paul was a movie star of sorts. It seemed that people recognized the sound of his pikipiki and raced to the roadside to wave and shout a hello or jambo, usually in the form of his name Paulo--all this going on with the horns of the Paul Simon music playing loudly and rhythmically in the back of our brains.

The sun sets each night around 6:00 pm along the equator, and this particular July evening the sky eased its way into twilight, with the sun casting pink and yellow shadows over the red clay huts, the palm trees, and the northern mountains marked by dark green teak jungles, and as we progressed into the sunset itself, I could see in the distance in the middle of the highway, a small black mound. I thought it to be one of thousands of potholes at first, but then I could detect height. Paul stopped humming, gunned the engine, and started speeding toward the mound. He shouted, "Hang on!" and then accelerated toward the mound. The plastic windshield of my pikipiki helmut was too dusty for me to understand what he was darting toward, but I knew it meant a lot to Paul as he started to fiendishly laugh, "Heh, heh, heh!" I started to feel helpless adventure-laden worry crawl over my skin. We got closer and closer to the mound, and the color changed from silhouette indigo to oily brown. Then I felt a bump under the tire, and Paul immediately shouted with exhaltation, "YES! God, do I hate rats! YES!" I didn't bother looking behind.

…

When we first got to Paul’s village of Bombani, we were hungry, Paul said, "Well, there's only one restaurant in town, so let's go to that hoteli over there.

There's a hotel in town?

Well, there is, and it is that restaurant; hoteli really means restaurant."

We walked in and saw brown board picnic tables and picnic benches on a clay floor. Paul talked to the woman there a bit and then said we would have food in a few minutes. He was right. Within two minutes, the woman brought a bowl of white gruel and two cups of coffee. I said, "What is this?" I thought it looked like the porridge in the pictures from my old story books of The Three Bears.

It's ugali, which is ground corn.

I thought it was porridge.

Actually, that's pretty much what it is. She brought some cooked spinach with it to give it some flavor. That's probably a good thing because you can imagine how this food got its name, can't you?

No, how?

Well, an Englishman came down to Tanzania, took one look at the porridge, and said, 'Ooh! Golly!' Oh, by the way, I think you should use your right hand to eat your ugali and spinach.

Why?

Actually, I'm sure you're grossing out more than half the people in here right now because you're eating the ugali with your left hand, and that's the hand people use to wipe their ass with."

Suddenly a man about 20 years old walked up to Paul and started talking to him in Swahili. I understood nothing, but I reveled in the atmosphere of a large shack with picnic tables and corn pone for dinner. The man had the largest nose I had ever seen. His nostrils seemed to stretch across the entirely of his face and the bridge of his nose bisected his head, making him look like the x- and y-coordinate lines on the graphing paper of my old calculus textbooks. Paul seemed to be enjoying his conversation, and a number of times Paul glanced at me, using the word, Eriko, Eriko, my new Swahili name. They chatted for over five minutes before Paul said, "Hey, Eric. This is Mandumba, and he would like to ask you a question and I would like for you to answer it, please.”

I blinked my eyes a couple of times in fear and said, “OK!” I had no idea what Mandumba would ask me, and I was so sure I wouldn't understand it if it was in Swahili. Suddenly, Mandumba looked at me and said, "Owa tanah Siam."

I was shocked, and I looked at him with a gasp and no response. I squinted my forehead so hard that I could feel all the muscles between my eyes and over my nose. Paul quietly talked out of the side of his mouth at me, saying, "Respond, Eric! Respond!"

Finally, I registered what Mandumba had said, and replied, "Oh! Oh what an ass you are!" Mandumba opened his mouth and smiled, grabbing my hand to shake it welcomingly and shouted, "Yah, yah, yah!"

Paul and Mandumba proceeded to talk again for another five minutes while I sipped coffee, nibbled on tepid ugali, and sat astonished, trying to figure out what had just happened. Paul then looked at me and said, "Mandumba would like to ask you the same question again, and I would like you please to respond to him the same way you did before.

I did OK before?

Oh yes! You did it just right, so just do the same thing again.”

So, Mandumba looked at me and said, "Eriko, oh what an ass I am" and I looked at Mandumba, extended my hand out to shake his and said, "Oh, Mandumba! Oh what an ass you are!" Mandumba again grabbed my hand, shouted "yah, yah, yah!" and happily walked away.

I turned to Paul and exclaimed, "Paul! What the hell was that all about?"

Paul said, "Oh, that was Mandumba.

OK! Who is Mandumba?

Oh, Mandumba is the son of the local witch doctor, and nobody around here likes him very much, and with good reason.

Why? What did he do?

He always threatens people around that he'll get his dad to put some sort of spell on them if they don't give him what he wants. And one day, he kinda tried that on me.

What did he do?

About two months ago or so, he came up to me and told me that his friend had been in an accident with his pikipiki and that he tore up his only shirt in the accident. So he asked me if I had an extra T-shirt that I could give his friend. I said, 'Oh yes' and gave him a T-shirt that I had in my box. Well, the very next day, I saw Mandumba wearing that shirt, so I went up to him and said, 'Hey, weren't you supposed to give that shirt to your friend who was in the piki piki accident?' And Mandumba said, 'Oh, I did! This is a different shirt.' And I'm standing there, going 'Yeah right! Like there are two shirts in Tanzania that say Utah State University Range Management Society on them!'

OK!" I chuckled.

"So, a few days later, I was having dinner here, and Mandumba came up to me and asked me how to say 'Jambo, Bwana' or 'Hi, how are you?' in Kizungu.

What's Kizungu?

White man's language. You're an mzungu. I'm an mzungu. Together we're wazungu. And we speak Kizungu.

OK

So, anyway, he asks me how to say 'Jambo, Bwana' in Kizungu, and I say, 'Oh, it's very simple. Just repeat what I say: Owa , , ,

Owa . . .

Tanaa . . .

Tanaa . . .

Siam!

You mean the joke we used to play on nerds in junior high school.

Actually I think we used to say Owa tagoo Siam in junior high. I don't think we used Owa tahaa siam until we were gutsier in high school. Anyway . . .

So, he thinks "Oh what an ass I am" is how you say, "Hi, how are you?" in English?

Uh-huh, and you also responded the way I told him he would hear white people respond, so you did it perfectly. And I . . . feel . . . vindicated; hee-hee!

You are an evil soul, and I promise I will never cross you.

…

Why would I ever cross Paul? He is. He is an evil soul--good hearted, yes!--but evil in original nature.

Perhaps he gets it from his mother. She’s a reader, an English major, and an intellect, though she would never tell you she is, nor would Paul that he is. She works hard at making certain that women have shelter when their abusive husbands get out of hand. She believes in reading, and she believes in looking at things critically. I once said to her, “You know, there are always two sides to every story.” And she replied with, “I think there are more like nine, and you’re lucky if you can come with two of them.” In some ways, I found it frustrating growing up with Paul and his siblings because they were good at contradicting. It was inherent, certainly a part of their dinner conversations. It wasn’t in their nature to just naturally agree.

But now I’m an educator, and I understand the science of learning. Little did I know during my childhood that such teaching leads to outstanding scholarship. We know this from learning psychology studies (like Deci or Winograd) that say that children who constantly ask the question “why” perform better on tests and are more likely to succeed in high school, college, and beyond. And the question “why” leads to other critical thinking type questions such as, “What would happen if . . . ?” Well, I think Paul and his mother are experts at this game of “What would happen if . . .?” because they, and the other members of this family, are all born experimenters. From such play we see that experimentation in childhood must lead to adult cleverness. As much as I wish that Paul’s family could just say “Uh-huh” just once in a while, I have to respect the intrinsic evil involved in their natural criticisms for it leads to extraordinary impromptu ideas.

Take in point this story Paul relayed to me. He and his brother Dennis were driving from their grandparents’ house in Burnet, Texas to their home in Logan, Utah. At about the halfway point, say, around the little village of Des Moines, New Mexico, along route 56 just south of the Colorado border, Dennis and Paul decided to call it quits for the day and spend the night in the town’s only motel. Across the highway from the motel was a diner and bar, probably the only place in town there was to get some chicken fried steak for dinner and a beer. They ventured across the road that evening to check it out. They sat down and ordered a couple of beers.

On the wall was a sign that said YSCJCYEQFTJ. Paul looked at the bar tender and said, “Hey, what does YSCJCYEQFTJ mean?” The bar tender looked at Paul and grinned, saying, “It stands for ‘Your stupid curiosity just cost you eight quarters for the jukebox, yuk, yuk, yuk.” Paul smiled and said, “Cool! That’s funny. May I please have change for these two dollars?” The bartender gave Paul the eight quarters and Paul shuffled over to the jukebox. In front of him he saw a list of country and western songs, one of which he recognized, “Blue Bayou” by Linda Ronstadt. He put in his quarters, made his selections, and then went back to the bar to join his brother. After a couple of songs played, “Blue Bayou” came over the loudspeaker. Sitting in front of the bar tender, Paul said to Dennis, “Uh, Dennis! It’s time to go.

But I haven’t finished my beer yet. I’m only half way done.

Bartender, we’d like to pay now.”

The bartender gave them the amount, and Paul paid him straight away.

“But Paul, I still want to finish my beer.

Yes, I understand, but it’s time to go now.”

Dennis shrugged his shoulders and swigged down as much beer as he could. As he stood up, the song “Blue Bayou” was just coming to its close. They walked to the door. Just as Paul was opening the door, “Blue Bayou” started playing again.

Dennis stopped and looked at Paul. “You didn’t.”

“Yes I did! The jukebox says 20 plays for 8 quarters!”

…

One reason I was happy to leave Boston and go to Africa was that I could have a six-week vacation from the bed I had in my apartment. It was a short bed I had been given by a friend. I was happy to at least have a bed, but it was one short bed for a boy of 6 foot 4. My feet hung over the end of it, and each morning, my feet would tingle from their having falling asleep in that the rim of the foot of the bed cut off my circulation a bit.

As Paul took me to my mud hut in his village of Bombani, he said to me, “Oh by the way, how tall are you?” I said, “6 foot 4.” He said, “Oh, that’s about three meters, isn’t it?

No, I’m about 190 centimeters tall.

Oh, well I told the people here that my little brother was coming and he was three meters tall.

Three meters?” Paul! That would make me more than 9 feet tall!

It would? I told them that because I wanted them to make you a bed that was big enough for you.

And you made me a three-meter long bed? That sounds wonderful. But they believed you that I was three meters tall? There’s never been anyone that tall before—not even close.

Oh well, even so, they made you a bed that’s three meters long.”

Sure enough, when I walked into my mud hut, in the corner was a bed. It was more of a flat piece of plywood supported by four beams with a long rectangle of yellow foam pad, but that was my bed, and indeed, it was three meters long. I climbed on. I had never had such a big bed before, and I rolled on it as if it were luxury. I gleamed at having such a nice big bed. I could spread my arms and my legs as wide as possible, and not one piece of my body was hanging over the edge. In fact, there was room to spare. This was going to be great!

When I went to bed that night, I lit my kerosene lamp, or taa, and placed it on a small chair next to the bed. I fixed mosquito netting to let it hang over the bed. Then I used my duffle bag as my pillow and placed against the wall at the upper end of the bed. I stretched out for my first night in Paul’s village. I closed the door and the window to the mud hut, and blew out the taa. I was enveloped completely by darkness. I lay on my foam bed and listened to the tree frogs and the crickets, imagining the stars twinkling above the palm trees. In the distance, I could hear drums from a nearby festival, and I could occasionally hear Bantu conversations from people passing by. This was real. This was the Africa I had hoped for. I fell asleep smiling.

The next morning, I woke up with a tingling sensation in my feet. When I looked around, I realized that I had unconsciously moved my entire body down the bed a little more than a meter, leaving my feet hanging over the edge.

…

During my stay in Tanzania, Paul needed to go to town to do his Peace Corps chores. There was no point in my going or even in my slowing him down, so I stayed in his village of Bombani. Often I would play with the children. One afternoon after school, a set of children came and found me reading on the front doorstep of my mud hut. They grabbed my arm, as if to say “Follow us!” As we marched through the town, they would gather one by one another child to the point that we created a parade down the center road of the village. Each child would teach me a Swahili word, and I was to repeat it. We went to the hoteli where I had had my first ugali. We went to post office. We walked to the lake. And for each stop along the tour, the children would give me a word and I would repeat it. One by one, a new child would come by, and they would point at a word I had been taught, and I would say it. They taught me the word for tree, so they told each new child in the parade to point at a tree, and I would shout out ecstaticly, “Mti!” and the children would cheer. By the end of the afternoon, I had 30 children around me, all teaching me Swahili and laughing with each word I got right and laughing even harder with each word I got wrong.

That evening, several of the children, along with Paul who had returned from the Peace Corps office, sat outside our mud huts. The children sang songs and Paul recorded them on his tape recorder. The children then listened to their own voices on tape for the first time. They cheered as they recognized each other’s voice. I asked the children to sing a song. They had one they had written together. Paul then suggested that we play a game. I would improvise a phrase of music, and the children would repeat it. I would sing “La la,” and in tempo, the children would sing “la la” back to me—a sort of musical question and answer. I made continued to make up phrases of nonsensical syllables, and the children repeated each phrase perfectly. We could keep this up for two hours.

By the end of the week, we had our own song, called Babadiyaa. I would be outside my hut in the morning, and children would come up to me and together we would sing Babadiyaa. The notes were really what we came up with, and they were the same each time. It’s just that each time we sang a musical phrase, it was always with the syllables of babadiyaa, babadiyaa, babadiyaa. And in the evenings, as Paul and I settled around the huts for a glass of palm sap beer, or pombe, children would come to us and we would sing Babadiyaa. We would also continue our rhythmic question and answer music games, but we were most proud of Babadiyaa.

…

Paul and I were sitting in his bedroom in his hut when I said, "You know, I'm impressed by how clean you keep this place.

Well, you have to or bad things happen.

Like what?

Like rats! Remember when we hit that rat the other day?

Yeah

Well, I hate rats.

I feel a rat story coming on.

Hee-hee. It's true. When I got into this room, I put all my clothes in that box there and had a sack of flour sitting on top of it. I would soon learn my rat lesson the hard way. One morning I woke up, and there was a hole in the sack of flour and a trail of little white tracks leading out the door. Then when I opened my trunk, I found that the rats had gotten in there too.

I'm scared. Did you find little rat pellets?

No, worse! And this is going to sound kinda gross. But when I picked up my underwear, where I had sweat or peed a little, there was a hole where the rat had eaten.

No wonder you wanted some underwear!

You have no idea how happy I was to see new underwear!

So what did you end up doing?

Well, I decided I needed to remember to keep my trunk closed tightly, for one. But I still had to deal with flour because I didn't want to keep my clothes and the flour in the same place.

So what'd you do?

I had a skinny rope which I tied to the end of the bag of flour. Then I threw one end of the rope over the beam which supports this roof here. I pulled one end of it, having the flour hang from the beam and tying the other end of the rope to my front door.

Sounds like a good idea!

I thought so too.

Oh no! What happened?

That night, I heard pitter pats coming from the roof. I lit my taa and lifted it up toward the middle of the room. There I saw the silhouette of a twitching nose and the red outlines of little eyes. A rat had slid down the rope and was trying to gnaw its way into my hanging bag of flour.

You're kidding!

So, I thought for a minute: should I do it, or shouldn't I do it? Finally, I decided, 'I hate rats, so what the fuck!' I have a walking stick next to the bed that I use for long hikes in the mountains and for warding off black mambas. I grabbed my stick, blew out the taa, and started swinging with all my might, screaming, 'Yah, yah, yah, yah!' with each swing. I hit that bag of flour like it was a big piñata several times until I heard a thud against the wall and the bag of flour had crashed to the floor. When I was done, I didn't hear any noise, so with my mission completed, I decided to go to bed. And in the morning, I woke up and there was flour everywhere. I was caked in it. There was flour in my bed, in my hair, all over the floor, all over the walls, but over in the corner was a white mound of dead rat, and I . . . felt . . . vindicated!”

…

Paul had to drive his pikipiki 20 kilometers into the next town in order to do paper work for the Peace Corps from time to time, so he left me in Bombani to enjoy the jungle, the village, its children, and the mountains. He gave me a Swahili book to study, and I had a book to read, and we both had short wave radios so we could listen to BBC World Service while taking showers.

Granted, taking a shower in Bombani was not like taking a shower at home. The children in Paul’s neighborhood collected water from a nearby stream and placed it in a large metal drum just outside Paul’s bedroom door. There I took one can and filled it about halfway. I then took a kettle and filled it. I used a kerosene stove to heat the water in the kettle. While listening to the BBC quiz shows, I let the water boil. When the water reached its bubbling point, I poured kettle water into the remaining half of the first can of water. With this can of comfortably temperatured water, I could take my shower, first by rinsing myself, then by shampooing myself, and then by slowing pouring the remaining water over me, thereby washing the soap off my body. The bed was right next to me, so I took care not to get water on it. There was a slight downward slope to the southeast corner of the room, and in the corner was a small hole that led to the outside world. The water and soap drained through that hole. I would hear the voice on the radio say, “Five hours Greenwich Mean Time,” followed by five beeps; then the same voice would say, “This is London.” With that as background noise, I washed my hair. By the time I ran out of water in the can, the water in the kettle had also cooled to a nice home-like shower temperature, so I could enjoy even more water flowing over my body. And if I wasn’t in the mood for more shower, I could use the remaining water for tea. Or I could do a little of both. Paul said he loved his morning showers, and I understood why. It was private time, and it was elegant comfort in what would otherwise be considered a campsite.

One afternoon, following a morning shower, I decided to take a walk along one of the trails just adjacent to the village. It led past the river where people collected water and bathed and to the southeast toward the mountains where Paul worked in ponds and raised talapia with local fish farmers. Paul had taken me on that trail the day before, so I decided I’d try it out myself. The sun was shining, and the sun rays bursting between the slits of the palm trees above lit the rust dust of my foot steps. I hummed “Late in the Evening” to myself and reveled in the idea that I was in Africa and I was walking through a jungle.

I came to a fork in the trail, and I couldn’t remember whether I was to go to the right or to the left. I was thinking to the left, but I was still a little unsure. Between the fork in the trail was a small green fern with a large blackish flower sticking straight out of it. I looked at the flower, but then I realized that it was no flower, but rather a spitting cobra looking in my direction. I had seen spitting cobras on TV, and I knew that they like to spit poison into the eyes of their enemies. Usually, in a case like that, one uses sunglasses or binoculars and waits for the cobra to spit its venom onto those larger lenses. However, I had neither of these. Knowing that any movement could provoke the cobra, I decided to stand as still as I could but cover my eyes. I raised my hands to my eyes as deliberately and slowly as possible and covered them. I didn’t close my eyes, so I was able to detect reddish yellow light from the sides of my hands and the slats between my fingers. I then heard a brush of the plant and felt a twitter of a wind. It seemed that the snake had moved, but I wasn’t sure where. I heard the rustle of the plant and then I heard small pebbles and clumps of sand moving as the snake seemingly moved along top the soil in front of me. Still, I wasn’t exactly sure where the snake was, and I was afraid to open my eyes. Then I felt a scaly yet strong rope begin to twine its way up my leg in a curl. I was sure it was the snake, but I was still afraid to open my eyes. Then in one quick instance, the cobra snapped and shot venom into my shin.

I woke up yelling. I felt sweat crawling over the brow of my forehead and I hugged the yellow mattress that was my bed and pillow. I couldn’t see anything for no light entered my hut at all, and my taa wasn’t lit. I actually couldn’t believe I was in my mud hut. The clarity of the dream felt so real that waking up seemed like the dream—not the other way around. I was breathing fast, and I had to run to the outhouse to go to the bathroom. I couldn’t get the dream out of my head, and I didn’t want to go to sleep again for fear of having another such colorful yet frightening dream. When I returned to my foam bed, I lay staring terrified at the darkness that would otherwise be my ceiling and said to myself, “There is no spitting cobra. There is no spitting cobra. I’m just fine. There is no spitting cobra.”

The next morning, I told Paul about my dream. He laughed and said, “What day are we?” I said it was Saturday. He said, “What day do you take your chloroquine?” In 1986, chloroquine was considered the most effective drug against malaria, though mosquitoes were just starting to become resistant to it at that time. Nevertheless, it was a drug I would take for 14 weeks in order to keep from catching malaria, a disease Paul had suffered from on a couple of occasions during his stay in Africa. “On Thursdays!” I said,

“Oh, then you had a chloroquine dream!” he laughed. “The night after you take chloroquine, you can expect a highly vivid dream. We get them all the time, and some of them can be quite horrifying.” Throughout the trip to Africa, with each Peace Corps volunteer we met, they laughed as they heard me tell the story of my chloroquine dream. “Some of us even quit taking chloroquine because we were having such terrible nightmares.”

“What happened then?”

“We got malaria.”

…

The chloroquine dream was not the only time during the trip I had been chemically affected. Two days before my departure to Africa, I took my last series of shots: my last yellow fever shot, a tetanus shot, and a gammaglobulin. I had walked from my workplace at MIT to a clinic in Boston and then walked back. At noon, my friend Sally asked me if I wanted to go to lunch. I said I would be delighted to. She wanted to go to a new sandwich stand in Somerville and said she would be willing to drive. When we arrived, there was a long line, and I barked that I was starving. Sally asked me to be patient, but I said, “I think these people are too slow.” The woman behind the counter heard me and said, “Hey, what the hell is your problem.

Hey, I don’t have any problem. You all are just too friggin’ slow.

Eric?” Sally interrupted. “Come with me.” We walked outside onto the sidewalk and she said, “I’ve never seen you do that before.” I started to cry. “Come on! Let’s go back,” she said, and she drove me back to work.

When we got back to the office, one of the coworkers Joanne said, “So how was the place.” I smiled and gleened, saying, “Oh my God, Joanne, it’s in just the beautiful part of town. You’ve got to go.” And I meant it. I was positively brimming with joy about the place. I looked over at Sally, and she stared at me in utter puzzlement.

“What do you mean?” Sally said. “You got in an argument with the people there, and we didn’t even eat because you were upset.”

I was confused, and I stared back at Sally. I got flustered and I started to cry. “I think I’ll just get back to work here. I’ve got to figure some stuff out.” Joanne and Sally left me alone.

Paul said in a letter that he had been walking as much as 20 kilometers a day. As a result, in order to get into shape for the trip, I had been walking the four miles each way from my apartment in Brookline to the office in Cambridge. This particular night, I had made plans to have dinner with my friend Tigger at a Chinese restaurant on the way back to the apartment. I met him there and I ordered kung pao chicken.

As we were chatting, Tigger asked me, “So what are you going to do with your apartment?”

“Well, I gave my rent to Tim” (my roommate) “and he is going to give it to the landlord.”

“Are you going to keep the room in the apartment next year?”

“I don’t know. I’m thinking of going to graduate school.”

“Well, Eric, let me just remind you that if you sign a lease, you’re obligated to pay the full amount over the year.” I was astounded that Tigger would say something so insulting and obvious to me.

“Why are you saying that?”

“Well, I’ve known people who have left their roommates in the cold, and all of them have gotten evicted. I just feel it’s wrong for anyone to do that.”

“But why would you think I would do that?” I started to cry. In fact, I was so upset, I put my face down on the table. Well, I thought it was the table, but it was actually my plate of kung pao chicken. I didn’t lift my face from the plate. I let the sauce and rice stick to my face, and I continued to sob.

“Eric, let’s go.” I paid my bill, wiped my face, slowly walked out of the restaurant, and walked home without saying goodbye to Tigger.

…

While in Tanzania, I told the story of my day of shots to a nurse called Mylie. She was from Australia and was visiting her aunt who was teaching in a school in Tanzania. Mylie said she had the same thing happen. She was working in an operating theater in Hobart, and she kept dropping the instruments on the floor. When the doctors and other nurses inquired why she was acting so strangely, they discovered that she had had her last series of shots before her African trip: a yellow fever, a tetanus, and a gammaglobulin.

I told this story to my friend Annie, who made a similar trip to see a Peace Corps friend of ours in Niger. On her final shot day, she was traveling with a group of friends from her school in Ohio to her friend’s home in Indiana. On the way there, she said, “Guys, I’m hungry and I have to eat now.” The others wanted to make time and get to Indiana, so they insisted that Annie wait. But Annie couldn’t wait. “Guys, I’m hungry and I’m going to die. I have to eat now. I have to eat.

Annie, we don’t have time. We’ve got to get there as fast as we can.

Guys, I have to stop. There’s a Wendy’s right there. Just pull off. Just pull off the road!”

Her friends acquiesced, and Annie jumped out of the car and ran into Wendy’s. When she got to the counter, the fast food helper said, “May I help you?

Yes, I would like a whole wheat bun, please.

Would you like anything else?

No, just a whole wheat bun.

One or two?

No, just one. Just a whole wheat bun.”

OK!” The waitress ran and got Annie a whole wheat bun, put it in a sack, Annie paid the 25 cents or so for it, and ran back to the car.

“What did you get, Annie?”

“I got a whole wheat bun.”

“That’s all? Just one whole wheat bun? You made us stop for just one whole wheat bun?” Annie started to cry. “Annie, what’s the matter?”

“I need one of you to go back in there and ask for a pat of butter.”

…

The next Thursday night, I reluctantly took my chloroquine and went to bed, again tucked in the corner of my mud hut. As I had in previous evenings, I again marveled at each day, the color of the mountains and the trees, the contrast in the color of people's skin and smiles, the magic of trying to order food, the red clay of the ground, the drapery of mosquito netting, and the odors of campfire, baby food jars filled with pombe, and mosquito repellant. As I pondered these intricacies of the trip while drifting into the beta rays of semi-sleep, I was revitalized by a tapping noise in the side of the wall. My bed was in the corner of the room, so I placed my ear next to the wall. I heard a tap or two, but then it stopped. I took a deep breath and started to drift again. Suddenly there were taps again. I lit my taa, got up, put on my sandals, and started to walk around the room. I didn't see anything but the four red clay walls, the yellow foam mattress and its supporting bed, and my bag used as a pillow. I blew out the lantern and went back to bed. As I lay down, I heard taps from the corner again. This time, I decided it was someone walking outside or just the wind hitting a slight branch against the side of the hut. I started to drift again when suddenly I heard, "tap, tap, tap, tap!" I opened my eyes, again disturbed, trying to figure out what it was. Suddenly, I heard a squeak and felt racing furry pebble-sized feet scurrying over my head, over my nose, over my mouth, down my neck and torso, and along the meridian of my left leg. I tried to yell but could only breathe out long exasperated breaths. I had been run over by a rat. I lay there spread eagle wondering if I'd immediately die of rabies or the plague. I hadn't been bitten, only used as a runway. Still, I felt as scummy as a sewer. I made aspirated /p/ noises in succession, trying to lightly spit away the germs left on my face. I lit the taa and saw the little hole the rat used to escape from the wooden slats it had been running along between the slabs of clay that were my mud hut wall. I looked around the room, but I could not see the rat. I decided to wash my face and neck, so I took out the soap I had in my bag and cleaned myself as best as I could.

…

Naturally, by the time I had run over a rat, heard about rats eating flour and underwear stains, and was myself run over by a rat, I had developed the same healthy disdain for rats that Paul had established. I remember looking at the side room to my mud hut and seeing the open piles of corn and seething and spitting at the idea that those miserable little scum-bag vile pieces of brown satanic hair-globs had been snitching the food of my most endearing hosts. These were the same genus that caused thousands of people to be late to work because subway train drivers had to stop for them in the Boston tunnels. These were the same vermin that carried the plague and destroyed half of Europe in the 17^th century. And now here they were, confronting me with all their wiggly noses and scummy feet! And each night, I looked at my kerosene lamp with the last light I’d see in a day, praying to the African gods that I wouldn’t have repeat visits.

For the most part of six weeks of living in the mud hut, the African gods were friendly and kind, leading me to a sweet tropical sleep with the background noises of tree frogs, drums, and happy children singing. Africa was bliss!

But one night, the gods fell asleep to the children’s songs as I did. I awoke to the noise of pitters. My initial thought was, “Oh no! Not in the walls again!” But as I regained consciousness, I realized that the sound wasn’t coming from the wall; it was coming from the roof. I lit my taa and raised it as high as I could. I looked up and saw yellow glow on the palm leaves of the roof and the long wooden beam that kept the hut and its roof up. I only saw the beam and the underside of the palm leaves, but I still heard pitter pats. I moved to the left, guiding my extended arm toward the beam until suddenly I saw a rat looking straight at me with all of its defiance. And I swear to God that that horrible beast, in all its naughtiness, wiggled its nose at me as if to say, “I’m better than you.” I held the lamp toward that nose, and with each wiggle, I became angrier and angrier and angrier, to the point of rage, to the point that I longed for a snake-whipping stick to beat the rat to a pulp, even if it meant bringing the palm leaves and the rubble of the mud hut on top of me. My life was no longer important. At issue was the demise of my arch enemy. I then looked at my kerosene lamp and hunted my brain for an idea. Then I got one. I remember that in a James Bond movie I saw with Paul in Mombasa, Agent 007 killed a snake by spraying perfume through a cigarette lighter, thereby sending a torch of flame toward the snake. Well, I didn’t have a lighter or perfume, but I had a taa and a can of mosquito spray. So, I took my arm down with my lamp and found the can of mosquito spray next to my bed. I took the mosquito spray with my right hand—the hand I could control the best—and the lamp with my left. I extended the left hand and the lamp toward the beam and the wiggly-nosed enemy, lifted my right arm toward the kerosene lamp, asserting that the nozzle of the mosquito spray was pointed precisely toward the rat and slightly bending the right arm so that the lamp was directly between the spray and the rat. Having measured exactly where the spray, lamp, and rat were, I turned my face right to avoid exposure to the flame and pressed on the mosquito spray button. I felt the torch shoot a flare that made such a wind that I immediately dropped the spray can and the lamp, thereby extinguishing the lamp on the clay ground, the spray of chemical, and the torch after but one second of flame. Then, in the dark of the hut, I heard a pronounced thud on the clay. Relieved that I hadn’t caught the dry palm leaves of the roof on fire, and realizing that I had just committed the single most stupid act of my entire life, I decided I had no idea where the kerosene lamp had rolled to, nor did I know where my new dead foe was on the ground. And as I was barefoot, I thought it best to hop in the direction opposite to this event and work my way to the bed where I could sleep until the daylight gave me the results of my work.

I found the bed and fell asleep to dreams of motorcycle rides, friends caked in flour, anxiety from potential plague, and now Hollywood heroics in the name of James Bond, not to mention shame on the part of my own idiocy. I decided not to tell Paul that I did this for quite some time. (In fact, it was over two years before I told him, and he was rightfully mad when I did tell him.)

When I woke up, I found under my bed the mosquito spray can. In the far corner of the room was my little green kerosene lamp sitting on its side. And in the middle of the floor was a stiff brown rat with a black nose lying on its side in the middle of the floor. I smiled with the grandest pride of my life. I pumped my fist and shouted in glee, “Yes! Singed that mutha!”

…

I had been in Africa for just over a month. For my last day in the Bombani area, Paul and I decided to ride his pikipiki to visit his friends the Osmans and their tea plantation. It was a two-hour motorcycle ride up and down mountains, back and forth on jungle switchbacks, and through tea and teak fields. We met with a Gujarati couple named Mr and Mrs Osman in their fine house of marble floors and wood furniture. Naturally we drank tea, and I enjoyed hearing Mr and Mrs Osman discuss how much they loved each other, even though they didn’t meet each other until the day of the wedding. They were mighty proud of the love they had designed for each other and of the family they had raised, and they were pleased that their parents had chosen so well.

On the way back to Bombani, we stopped in a small village. We still had a good hour and a half to ride, and Paul needed some petrol for the pikipiki if we were going to make it the next 60 kilometers, so he stopped in a small store. As I waited outside the store, I heard people cry “Paulo, Paulo” as they often did. His name certainly got around, I thought. A bus then pulled up between the store and me, and I could hear people on the other side of the bus shouting “Paulo, Paulo” as they watched him in the store. I smiled. I don’t think Paul ever asked for the attention, and he didn’t ignore it, but he didn’t express arrogance either. I was very proud of him at that moment. To an extent, I wanted to shout “Paulo, Paulo” too, because he was obviously a figure in the community that people appreciated. People in the bus were shouting. Suddenly, I heard, “Hey!” I looked up and saw a man sitting high above me in the bus. He looked down at me out of his window and said questioningly, “Eriko?” I said, “ Habari gani, bwana?” How are you, sir? The man smiled at me and started to sing Babadiyaa. He sang the whole song, from beginning to end, all the notes right, all the melody in its established form, singing both my part and the children’s. As he finished our song, the bus rolled away and he waved goodbye. I sat on the back of Paul’s pikipiki stunned that a man two hours away from Bombani could learn the song that the children and I had put together only three weeks previously. I told Paul that a man on the bus sang Babadiyaa to me. Paul wasn’t in the least bit surprised. He said, “That’s what people do around here. That’s what news is. They tell people what the news is and that news spreads. Your song must be news.”