my first safari

Located just 300 km southwest of Dar, Mikumi National Park is a poor man’s Serengeti: a great option for those short on money, time, or both but who still want to see some of Africa’s most majestic animals. I went there for my first Tanzanian safari this weekend, joining a motley group of ten people connected in various ways to the U.S. Embassy. Half the group left on Friday afternoon in an Embassy car, while the poor schmucks who have to work a full day on Friday (yours truly included) got up at 5:00 on Saturday morning to take a taxi to Ubungo, Dar’s fearsome main bus station. We arrived in time to join the rest of the group for lunch and then set out for an afternoon game drive.



Our sweet ride: it’s a little embarrassing how excited I was by our vehicle- a triple-decker, open-air affair that resembled something out of an amusement park ride.




Impala: the most underrated of the savannah animals, in my humble opinion, the lovely impala is abundant enough to be hardly noticed after the first few minutes of the safari. Female impala travel around in harems consisting of a few dozen females and one lucky stud, while the rest of the males prowl around in big groups of bachelors, waiting for their opportunity to fight for their shot with the ladies. The females do get their say, rejecting a suitor if they’re not sufficiently impressed with the length of his… horns.



Giraffes: the giraffe is the national animal of Tanzania. Giraffes are held in the kind of reverence Americans reserve for bald eagles, and killing one brings a stiff prison sentence. The giraffe’s Swahili name is twiga, and many businesses try to burnish their image by invoking it, from the Twiga Cement Company to a cell phone promotion called “Twiga Time.” In the interest of preserving the giraffe’s dignity, I won’t post any pictures of the attempted giraffe seduction that we witnessed. The male giraffe was sniffing around the object of his attentions, trying to catch a whiff of the telltale hormones that lady giraffes produce when they’re in heat. A couple of times he appeared to be, errr, assuming the position, but then she demurred and walked a few feet away. From there the process repeated itself. We didn’t stay long enough to find out if he finally got lucky, but apparently this is all part of the ritual.



Wildlife/scenery overload: This was our first sighting of elephants, and you can also see impala in the foreground and wildebeest in the background. Not long after, this elephant family provided us with an equally photogenic late-afternoon stroll:



Later we saw another group of elephants giving themselves what appeared to be a dirt bath. They would grab some dirt with their trunks and fling it over their heads, sending a dust cloud over their backs. In this picture you can see the one on the far left in mid-fling:



Our guide explained that this is the elephants’ way of keeping themselves cool. Given that this is winter in the highlands—the night was cool enough for us all to put on long-sleeve shirts—they must be throwing tons of dirt on themselves during the hotter parts of the year. We stayed and watched these elephants for some time, and after a while we got complacent about the amount of noise we were making. The elephant on the far right expressed his displeasure by facing us head on, fanning his ears, and apparently getting ready to charge. It was a bluff, just like what grizzly bears usually do when they feel threatened (this was not my first reminder of Alaskan wildlife during the safari), but it was a little bit disconcerting nonetheless.

For the trip home, the five who came in the embassy car went back the same way, leaving the rest of us to wait for a bus at the roadside by the park entrance. We grew increasingly nervous as bus after bus barely slowed down, the driver making a downward motion with his hand signaling that the bus was already full. (As an aside, speeding vehicles colliding with wildlife is a huge problem around the park, as the grisly photographic display of roadkill in the visitors center will attest. Several dozen speed bumps along the highway have not solved the problem, so the authorities are beginning to send out traffic patrols to crack down.) Many Tanzanians work in Dar during the week and then head home for the weekend, meaning that the buses coming back from the sticks are always jammed with people on Sunday. Then by sheer luck, we saw some familiar faces: a Canadian couple with whom Elana and I have played frisbee was leaving the park in their own car. They only had three empty seats, so we sent Elana with the two other group members we deemed most likely to freak out. The two of us who remained were soon rescued by some kindhearted strangers, a guy from Northern Ireland and his English wife. Unfortunately for them, the traffic coming back into Dar was much worse than anticipated, so they followed England’s drubbing by Germany via text messages from their friends.

I’ll conclude with a self-portrait of our merry band. With me in the front row are intern housemates Jasmine and Hammad, and in the back row next to my head you can see the other half of “Elawn.”

dispatches from the house of peace

*New nicknames: my fellow intern, Elana, and I were inadvertently given a Brangelina-style combined nickname by our overtired DC boss: “Elawn.” The last time I was part of a combined nickname I was on the Danvers High track team, when Chris Abram and I, the only two freshman distance runners, were combined into the fearsome “Abramspowers.”

*Strangest thing I’ve seen a street vendor selling in Dar es Salaam traffic: an aquarium full of water and fish, balanced precariously on his head. It was unclear if he was trying to sell the entire aquarium or individual fish. Runner-up: laminated, wall-sized maps of East Africa.

*Tanzanian fashion: if you’re sporting a necktie, apparently the style around here is to tie a big, fat knot so that only a little more than half of the tie’s normal length hangs down the front of your shirt. I’m intrigued, but I can’t say I plan to adopt this fashion myself. It seems especially ill-advised if you have the slightest bit of a gut, since the tie acts like a big arrow pointing right at your extra poundage.

*I get evicted: the American family with whom I was staying has temporarily kicked me out of their guest room to make way for grandma, who is visiting until the end of the month. I’ve moved into another house—also a fortified mansion in expat land—with the other half of “Elawn” and a bunch of Embassy interns. The living/dining room is big enough to hold a wedding reception, but there’s barely any furniture and no decorations in the whole place. Nice.

*Big daddy: within a matter of days I will become an uncle, and then in November I will become an uncle again. Interestingly, Swahili makes a distinction in my relationships to my two future nephews. To young Michael, my sister’s son, I will be mjomba, or uncle. To young Bradley, my brother’s son, I will be baba mkubwa, or “big father.” In Tanzanian families, the father’s brothers are also considered “fathers,” and the mother’s sisters are also considered “mothers.” Since I am older than the father-to-be, I am baba mkubwa, while our youngest brother will be baba mdogo, or “little father.” Those who know our family will find this very amusing since "little father" could eat father and big father for lunch.

how to say "hi" in swahili

The most delightful aspect of Tanzanian culture that I have seen so far is the greetings. Whether you’re meeting someone for the first time, seeing your officemate in the morning, or approaching a stranger on the street for directions, it’s absolutely mandatory to exchange greetings, and failing to do so it the quickest way to distinguish yourself as an obnoxious foreigner. And while one greeting is a necessity, more greetings are better. While in Zanzibar, we traveled around the island with a government official who is a master of the craft. He can fire off a succession of greetings so quickly it practically gives the listener whiplash. This guy also appeared to know everyone on the island. No sooner would we stop at a police checkpoint on the road (the checkpoints are as ubiquitous as their purpose is inscrutable) than he would practically leap from the car and commence greeting, laughing, and backslapping with the cops.

A standard formula for greeting someone is habari _____? Habari means “news,” and the blank can be filled with lots of different things depending on the situation. Options include habari gani (how are things?), habari yako (how are you?), habari yenu (how are y’all?), habari za kazi (how’s work?), habari za nyumbani (how’s home?), habari za safari (how was your trip?), habari za leo (how’s your day?), habari za asubuhi (how’s your morning?)… you get the idea.

Though the possibilities for asking someone how they’re doing are nearly endless, the answer is always some variation of “good.” Acceptable replies include nzuri (good), njema (good), salama (peaceful—in other words, good) or safi (literally “clean,” but in this context, good). No matter how bad things are, things are good—“even if you are about to die,” according to my Swahili tutor. If your house just burned down or you lost your job, the time to bring that up is later in the conversation, not during the greetings. If things are really good, you can add the word sana to your reply, and if things are merely a little bit good, you can add the word tu. Another way to exchange greetings—actually, the first way most visitors learn—is for the first person to say hujambo? (literally, “you have no problem?”) and the other to reply sijambo (“I have no problem”).

Go ahead and laugh, but Americans basically do the same thing. Europeans enjoy mocking us for using “how are you?” as a substitute for “hello,” and most of the time we really only expect to hear some variant of good, well, or fine. I was once in a bookstore in the Philippines and found a guide to American culture written for prospective immigrants and visitors. Thumbing through this book was an immensely educational and eye-opening experience, and I recommend it if you can get your hands on such a book. The book cautioned would-be visitors to the U.S. not to interpret a casual “how are you?” as an invitation to discuss how their house burned down or they just lost their job.

A special, extra-respectful greeting reserved for one’s elders is shikamoo, to which the elder replies with a marahaba. Neither word has any other usage in Swahili, though I read that shikamoo is derived from “I hold your feet” (nimeshika miguu yako is my possibly erroneous translation). Some people claim that the terms originated as an exchange between slaves and masters, but their use today is widespread enough that no such associations remain. I have found that being greeted with a shikamoo by a foreigner is often a source of delight for the recipient. I share office space in Dar with a Tanzanian woman who is old enough to have teenage children, and I once asked her if shikamoo was appropriate or called for in professional settings. “Yes!” she replied with a laugh. “You should be greeting me with shikamoo every day!”

I have also waded, gingerly, into the world of slang. Someone near to my own age could be safely greeted with a mambo?, a vipi?, or a mambo vipi? I wouldn’t try any of these on somebody who is old enough for a shikamoo, since I imagine that would be like approaching an elder American and going “whasaaaap?” Slang replies include poa (roughly translated as “cool”) or, my favorite, freshi (from the English word "fresh"). I’m told that the better your slang greeting, the lower the fare you are quoted by a taxi driver is likely to be, so I have an economic as well as a cultural incentive to learn more.

I see two main virtues to the Swahili greeting system. Once is that the greetings, even if they’re formulaic, make every interaction a little friendlier. The other is that they put a little speed bump on the pace of interaction. With our frantic pace of life in the U.S., it’s easy to blow right past people with our heads completely wrapped up in our own business. If culture demands that you exchange a greeting, or preferably two or three, it’s that much harder to let those opportunities for connection go by.

when the lights went out

On December 10, 2009, the lights went out across Unguja Island, the main island of Zanzibar. A power outage is usually not a noteworthy event on Zanzibar, as the island’s electricity supply comes from an aging, decrepit undersea cable from the mainland, and the mainland has plenty of power supply issues of its own. This time, though, the power didn’t come back on for 3 months.

The outage scarcely made a ripple in the international media. Thousands of tourists continued coming to the island blissfully unaware of what was happening, since the nice hotels all had diesel generators to keep things running 24/7. Only the buzzing chorus of hundreds of generators in Stone Town would have clued a well-heeled traveler in to what was going on.

For everyday Zanzibaris, however, the blackout was a calamity. It’s enormously costly to run an entire hotel on diesel, so lots of local workers were laid off—a hard blow for a place where tourism is the main industry. The layoffs happened at both small establishments struggling to survive the blackout and large resorts under pressure from headquarters to cut costs. As the blackout dragged on, many educated workers with the means to leave abandoned the island, a small-scale incident of what the development field calls “brain drain.”

At home, the biggest problem was not the lack of electricity but the lack of running water as the island’s water pumps stopped working. Open any World Bank or UN report about water, and you’re likely to read about the enormous burden that gathering water places on people, especially women, in areas without an adequate water supply. In a sense, the blackout turned back the clock on Zanzibar’s economic development. It forced people to divert time, energy, and resources that they otherwise could have spent working or caring for their children to figuring out how to get enough water for basic needs.

The impact on people’s health, naturally, was awful. Communities around the island suffered deadly outbreaks of cholera. A study of an earlier, month-long blackout on Zanzibar found that the blackout significantly reduced birth weights (a key marker of infant health and nutrition). We still don’t know exactly what the impact of the long blackout will be, since the youngest babies who were in utero for the blackout still have not been born, but it seems likely that this generation of children will suffer lifelong problems because they were unlucky enough to pass that critical window of development in a time of crisis. Another issue I heard about over and over again was stress. Mental health gets hardly any attention in development circles—heck, we hardly consider it a “real” problem in the rich countries. But the stress of the layoffs, the disease, the lack of water, and the uncertainty of when it would all end will probably affect many Zanzibaris for a long time to come.

There are plans in the works to help prevent similar blackouts in the future, from a new undersea cable to large-scale public generators to keep electricity flowing to the grid. I also got the sense that the blackout has sparked interest in renewable energy sources on the island, which would be one of the best possible legacies of this tragedy. For the time being, however, there is little standing in the way of a repeat of Zanzibar’s awful season in the dark.

notes from a magical island

The name alone sounds like something out of a fanciful children’s story: Zanzibar. After the Lost finale I thought I had permanently lost my ability to believe in magical islands, but Zanzibar is making me believe all over again.

In addition to being a tropical paradise, Zanzibar is a cultural melting pot. Strategically located along Indian Ocean trading routes, Zanzibar has seen wave after wave of foreign influences, including Portuguese, Arab, Indian, and British. While the continent was being carved up among European powers, Zanzibar was colonized by the Middle East. More accurately, it became a part of the Sultanate of Oman, and the Omani Arabs liked it so much that at one point the Sultan’s court was moved here. As a result, Zanzibar’s historic Stone Town has a decidedly Middle Eastern feel, and the overwhelming majority of Zanzibaris are Muslim. They are also among the friendliest and most laid-back people you will meet anywhere. Even the most assertive of the street vendors are pretty genial, and I regularly walk around Stone Town with my laptop bag around my shoulder. That says a lot about how safe it is here, given that in Dar I was feeling a bit of the post-mugging PTSD from Cameroon.

Magical island or not, I am here for work and not for play. One component of my internship is helping implement a survey in Zanzibar, and I’m here with a nice little research team consisting of an American consultant hired by headquarters (Sam), a Zanzibari consultant (Fadhil), my co-intern for the summer (Elana), and yours truly. The pilot interviews went amazingly well, but for the last few days we’ve been bogged down with a lot of back-and-forth with DC about revisions to the survey instrument. As a result, we’re several days behind schedule and antsy to get going in earnest. That said, I can’t complain too much about the work environment. Most days we’ve set up shop in a hotel restaurant/bar with a killer view of the Indian Ocean, and the other night I had my first-ever conference call in a hookah lounge.

This has been my first time interacting in a significant way with a conservative Muslim society. While strolling through the narrow streets of Stone Town, you can frequently hear the call to prayer from a nearby mosque or children singing at an Islamic school. Most Zanzibari women wear some kind of headscarf, and a sizable minority wear the full burqa, with only their eyes showing. To avoid offending the locals, tourists are advised to keep their shoulders covered and not to show too much leg anywhere outside of the beach. During Ramadan, I am told, it is difficult to find food anywhere in town during the day.

Unfortunately, the enchantment came to a crashing halt the other night. I met a Zanzibari woman who just came home from a year of teaching Swahili in the U.S. on a Fulbright grant. She is a friend of Elana’s, and she and her husband joined us for a visit Zanzibar’s famous night market. Smart and charismatic and bursting with energy, she gave me a few rapid-fire, impromptu lessons as we strolled around the lamp-lit stalls selling seafood and sugar cane juice and Zanzibar “pizza.” Elana told me that she would be working as a secondary school teacher here for a shockingly small salary, and I asked Elana if she plans to do any individual tutoring on the side, since I have a tutor on the mainland but not on the island. Elana had already asked on my behalf, but the response that as a man, I wouldn’t be able to see her unless Elana or another woman accompanied me. I was even more astonished to learn that the day we saw her was her first outside the house in the week since she’d come back to Zanzibar (though to be fair, she’d been receiving dozens of guests at home). I don’t have much insight about how she feels about any of this and I don’t want to project my opinions onto her, but it depresses me to imagine what kind of opportunities even a woman of her caliber is routinely denied.

I’ll be here for at least another week, so more pictures and stories to come soon!