The Magically-Disappearing, Mortally Wounded Rat

This tale begins as on a night not unlike our other nights in our little house of horrors: beans and rice for dinner, locking down of the house, hunting and destroying rogue mosquitos, etc. But this night had a nice “surprise” in store for us. Robyn asked me to go get another bed sheet from the closet in other room, so I got up, unlocked our door, kicked aside the clothing which serves as our “crack under the door mosquito barricade”, walked down the hall and opened the door to the other bedroom. Now, in our house, we have only two light bulbs for three bedrooms and the kitchen so the other bedroom was really dark. The only light piercing the murky blackness was the hallway light over my shoulder. Upon opening the door, I immediately noticed that one window was wide open and there were several dark streaks on the wall under the window frame. I froze. My first thoughts were that these streaks were some kind of worm or insect invading our house. So I shuffled back to our room and snatched my headlamp so I could get a better look at the mysterious substance/markings. As I got about three feet from the wall, I saw that a medium sized hole had been gnawed through our two screens, and the unknown substance on the wall was blood. Holy shit!! I stumble backwards out of the room. I slam and lock the door (like rats can unlock doors). I tell Robyn the situation and she reacts with a, “Well, that is kind of scary, but at this point not that shocking” look on her face. So we pass the next 4 hours trying to focus on the bright side- how much everybody back at home was going to love this story. Luckily, we made it through the night with no further rat incidents. We did, unfortunately, have to sleep with our bedroom windows closed making it extra hot.

Morning dawns anew…with courage (Sorry, I’ve been reading too much J.R.R. Tolkein). Around 8 AM the next morning, I roll out of bed to let our housekeeper into the house. I am dressed in nothing but shorts and sporting a wicked case of bed head. A true sight to behold! I say to her, “Karibu” (Welcome) and, “Asabuhi” (Morning), she enters the house. As she is putting her stuff down in the hallway, I go grab a broom and a large knife from the kitchen. I jog out into the hallway and shove the broom into her hands and start adamantly pointing at the door to the other bedroom with an eight-inch knife in my hand. To make this whole moment even more surreal, you must understand that Mama speaks little English, and I speak very little Swahili. This poor little old Tanzanian woman has a look of absolute bewilderment on her face as she is wondering why we are getting ready to attack a harmless door. Next, I unlock the door and shove it open. I enter first, slowly. Mama, with the broom is watching my back. I don’t see any rats, dead or alive, on the floor, so I step aside and point adamantly at her the bloodied wall and hole in the screen. She, then realizing why we are armed for combat, just steps past me nonchalantly with an “ahhh” and starts shoving the broom under the bed! I mean, this rat may be rabid and mortally wounded and having Mama flushing it at my 85% naked body was not in my morning plans. Mama behaved as if this situation is a everyday thing. Though for all I know (and pray isn’t), bloody rats chewing through screens are a normal occurrence around here.

Well, Mama and I finish searching the room and, GLADLY, find no rat. With the all clear given, I investigate the bloodstains on the wall more closely. Through forensics learned by watching reruns of CSI, I was able to recreate the bloody rat’s movement about the room. It seems that the rat chewed through the screens, bleeding on the wall under the screen. It then climbed up the curtains (blood on the curtains), then ambled across the curtain rod (blood on curtain rod and wall), jumped over to the air conditioner (blood), walked across the unit, and then jumped over to the paneling on the wall over the bed (more blood). After this most epic of leaps, the blood trails stops abruptly. But alas, no body was found. This fact was slightly disturbing. Was the rat bleeding its way into or out of the room? Looks like we’ll never know. And here we thought mosquitos were our biggest foe. So who’s coming to visit? We have two open rooms….

Two-headed Mzungu Monster

Mzungu is the Swahili version of gringo (aka white person). For the first few weeks we were here, Brandt and I went literally everywhere together making us a two-headed mzungu monster. I remember the first time we separated. We had been exploring the city by foot all day and I had blisters on my feet so when we got off the daladala, I went directly home while Brandt picked up water. It was an amazingly refreshing twenty minutes, but anyway, back to the whole mzungu thing. It's not that there are no white people around...we recently heard a statistic that there are 23,000 South African living in Dar but we seem to be rare enough in the places we venture that most small Tanzanian children can't help but gawk at us. Some won't take their eyes off us for an entire dala ride. The elementary school aged kids also take an interest. Some times this comes in the form of saying Good Morning (no matter what time of day it is) or How are youuu? One time it even seemed to be a dare amongst a group of 10 year olds. They all quietly walked by us then the last one stopped right in front of us, looked up, said good morning and then immediately ran like hell to catch up with his gaggle of friends all hysterically laughing. It was super cute. More commonly, they just yell mzungu at us. We walk by a lot of kids on the way to the university all very keen to tell us we're mzungu. We've even heard it shouted loudly from passing school buses on more than one occasion. I decided one day that I could also play master of the obvious so when the inevitable mzungu call came. I responded by saying watoto, the Swahili word for children. I thought I was being funny. They thought I was being weird and they just starred blankly back at us like the two headed mzungu monster that we are. Oh well.

We're Baaaack

Hi Everyone! Sorry the posts dried up there for awhile. The last few times we tried to get online there were power issues and horrible connections. Then Jon and Liz returned to Dar from their safari. (For those of you who thought our blog would be filled with beautiful photos of African wildlife, I picked out one of Liz's safari photos just for you.) We went with them to Zanzibar for a much needed beach getaway. Now we're back in our home sweet home and Jon and Liz have abandoned us (boo!!) to go back to their normal lives. We have a lot to catch you up on so I'm going to try to post every day this week....

Karibu Dubya

I don’t know what kind of coverage it got back in the States, but George W. Bush’s week long tour of Africa included 4 days in Tanzania. Considering Bush doesn’t seem to go anywhere besides Crawford for that long, it was a pretty big deal. Not only was his smirking face on the cover of every newspaper for days leading up to his arrival, they also put up these giant banners with a very photoshopped, young-looking Bush all over the city. They say things like Welcome His Excellency President George W. Bush. We Cherish Good Governance or We Cherish Democracy. There are others that say things like Thank You George W. Bush for Fighting Malaria (or HIV/Aids or for the Millenium Challenge Account). These ones give the impression that George is personally donating the funding for these initiatives. We pretty much can’t go anywhere with out passing by at least 5 of these banners, even now over a week later. The upside of Bush’s visit is that all the trash lining the main streets downtown has been cleaned up. It was a dramatic change. We thoroughly enjoyed strolling the clean streets but I can’t help but wonder how long they will remain unlittered (given that the concept of throwing garbage in trashcans rather than the street is nonexistent, it probably won’t be long). There was a lot of buzz about Bush’s visit but from what we could tell it was positive. It’s pleasant change to be in a foreign country where people actually like our government. Although it’s kind of strange to see the American flag lining the streets when our daily experiences make it abundantly clear we’re not in Kansas or any of the other 49 states anymore.

The day Bush was to arrive we made the one hour, two daladala trek up to the university. I had gone up two days prior to find that the power was going to be out for at least the rest of the day and had to turn around and go home. So I was pretty antsy for internet on this particular day. Amongst my many emails was one from the American Embassy. I expected it to be another update about the situation in Kenya but for the first time since we registered with the embassy, this one was pertinent to us. Muslim Protest March of George Bush’s visit. Start time: less than 2 hours from when I was reading the email. Route: right down our freakin’ street. Awesome. So we frantically try to get in our internet essentials before hurrying back to get inside our house before the march gets there. Of course, frantically and hurrying need to be interpreted relative to Tanzania. There’s certainly no quick checking anything on the internet here and maybe I was imagining it but the connection seemed extra painfully slow that day. There’s also no hurrying when it comes to getting anywhere by vehicle on the massively congested roads. Fortunately, we were saved from having to decide to tear ourselves away from the internet because the power went out, again, about 15 minutes later.

By now the suspense must be killing you. Did we make it home in time? Or were we mobbed in a giant anti-American march? Brandt, having previously walked to our house from downtown because the daladalas were simply too full at rush hour for him to squeeze himself in, estimated it would take the protesters an hour to get from their starting point to our house. We were safely inside in time. In fact, it was so long before we heard anything outside that we were starting to wonder if the march was actually happening. But eventually we heard the steady beat of a

bass drum, followed by chanting and then the march arrived. We watched through a gap in our front gate. First came the men- marching, chanting, carrying signs. They were followed by the women, covered from head to toe in spite of the heat and long route through the city. I’m not a good judge of numbers, but maybe 2,000-3,000 people went by peaceful exercising their freedom to assemble.

We Are Legend

Most of you are probably familiar with the movie I am Legend that came out at Christmas time so you’ll have an idea of what we mean when we say We are Legend but really our experience is much more like the less well known book (Flatt and Steve- this one is for you!). Everyday at 6:10 pm the alarm on Brandt’s watch goes off. We have deemed this Robert Neville time (after the I am Legend main character) and it’s the time when the mosquitos start emerging. We seal up lock our doors to the outside (this involves many sliding bolts and unfortunately seals off main flow of air through our stifling house). We finish our dinner of beans and rice and then lock ourselves into our bedroom where we’ve duct taped plastic over the broken air conditioner. We cover the crack at the bottom of the door with whatever dirty clothes are around and begin our search for rogue mosquitos. We violently squash all that we find, leaving their carcasses on our walls and ceilings like heads on spikes on the wall of a medieval castle. So far this tactic hasn’t proven a useful deterrent but it makes us feeling like we’re winning and so the practice will continue. By about 7 pm we’re done with the security measures and then we have to figure out what to do besides stare at each other until we’re tired enough to go to sleep. Luckily, we have a fan to keep us from roasting to death. The fan’s name is Francis, he our friend and the best $30 we’ve spent in Tanzania—and yes, we are slowly descending into madness.
At this point in his story, Robert Neville begins intoxicating himself to try and drown out the sounds of the screaming vampires outside. In our story, what we need to drown out is the sounds of this dingy “bar” that just outside our front door. During the day, it seems a harmless place—a few patrons enjoying a Coke, or some chispi (French fries), maybe a beer or two. However, once the sun sets, and about 10 PM rolls around, the music starts—loudly. After two weeks, we can now be certain that they have precisely two mix CDs. One is African and the other is 80s ballads--“Well its no sacrifice, no sacrifiiiice, it no sacrifice…” , and “Lady in Reeedddd…”, Elton John, Toni Braxton, Celine Dion…all the classics from K-tel. They prefer the American mix about 2:1. Awesome. Our only wish is that we had brought some blank CDs with us so we could burn them a Phil Collins mix. I think they’d love it. There is one noise that breaks through the tunes…the sound of creatures scampering across our ceiling. There’s on that makes a loud banging sound on the tin roof. It scared the crap out of me the first time but we’ve since identified this noise as crows. The other is a bit more disconcerting since it is not on the roof but rather scurring across our not entirely solid looking ceiling. Gauged by the speed at which it traverses the ceiling of our room, we’re voting (hoping) it’s a feral, non rabid cat. It just sounds too big to be a rat (that’s what we keep telling ourselves anyway). So mosquito proofing we’ve got down but we haven’t come up with any ideas of how to reinforce our ceiling. Suggestions welcome.

There’s one last element to life on Kinondoni Road that fits with the We are Legend theme. Everyone from the guy who lives in the little 2 room house out back, to the woman down the street who sold us Francis the Fan, to the few random Tanzanians that have approached us on the street all seem to agree that it’s very very strange that we would live in this neighborhood. They sort of look at us with some combination of incredulity/astonishment/disbelief and then ask really? One guy even came right out and said we shouldn’t live here that we should live on the peninsula with the rest of “our people.” We're not really sure what to make of these comments/looks but the opinion that we are strange and don't belong here appears to be unanimous. So while we feel we’re accomplishing very little with our days, at least we can say we’re attempting to integrate and well on our way to memorizing sixteen sweet 80’s ballads. Let’s all just hope that we don't meet the same end as our beloved Robert Neville.

Tanzanian Hooch

What is the favorite drink of poor American ex-pats living in a shack in Dar es Salaam? Well, that would be Konyagi and Tang. More specifically, Konyagi and WARM Tang since we don’t have a fridge. And it tastes exactly as delicious and refreshing as it sounds.

See, Konyagi is a popular Tanzanian alcohol served with Coke or Krest (a slightly flavored soda water). It is popular because it is cheap…really cheap. 3000 tsh ($2.65) for half a liter of 35% alcoholic fun.

What is Konyagi? Well, if one reads the ingredient list on the back of the bottle, Konyagi is “”FINE SPIRIT, KONYAGI FLAVOUR, DE-IONISED WATER”. Two things about that list: number one, there is nothing “fine” about Konyagi...at all, and number two, we have no idea what gives Konyagi its “KONYAGI FLAVOUR” , which is best described as cheap, watered down vodka mixed with cheaper gin.

So, next time any of you are out a at bar and looking for a new drink to impress all your friends...order a Konyagi and warm Tang—The Official Drink of poor American ex-pats that lock themselves in their bedroom every night™.

The Hood

Here's a picture of the end of our street, Kinondoni Road, taken from a tall office building at the end. You can't see our house but I don't really want to bust the camera out on street level. Our friend Jon and his wife passed through last week on there way to safari and he GPSed the house so hopefully he'll put us up on Google Earth when he gets back to the States. I also added a picture of Brandt in the mosquito net to the Mosquito Hunter post. I'm just testing out the blog features. The next chapter of the house drama is coming soon (hopefully tomorrow) and it's a good one!

Brandt's Initial Thoughts

While both Robyn and I have been enjoying the rollercoaster ride that is life in Dar es Salaam, Robyn thus far has been our scribe, our Ozymandias. Well, it is finally time for me to write down some observations and thoughts about this crazy time. First off, my perspective going into and throughout these first few weeks, is quite different from Robyn’s. Why? Simply, it is our backgrounds. Robyn spent a year in Cochabamba, Bolivia when she was 17 and did a semester in Venezuela when she was in college. She had, through those experiences, a real idea of what it was like to live in a culture that is totally different from your own. She knew what it felt like when everyone around you spoke a language (and at a pace) that you can barely understand. She understood about the pace of life; that it could be hectic, frustrating, simple, and laidback, and on many occasions, all four at the same time. I, however, knew nothing, except that eating fish in an alley “restaurant” in Hong Kong leaves you with…ummm...intestinal distress.

So, Robyn was kind of ready for this. I thought I was ready for this. I knew it would be “Hard” and “Challenging”. But knowing that something is going to be “Hard” and “Challenging” and actually living “Hard” and “Challenging” are two separate beasts. One sounds adventurous, the other kind of sucks.

However, I am still alive and kicking. Here is a short list of things I never thought I would be doing at 37 years of age (or ever):

speaking a bit of Swahili (Mwanamume amevaa shati mmoja meusi. The man is wearing one black shirt.),

riding the daladalas all over the city,

learning to live without a refrigerator,

drinking Tanzanian beer on the Indian Ocean, and

living in a house with one million ants, 2 cockroaches (the size of mini-snicker’s bars), a feral cat who occupies the space above our bedroom, and our greatest enemy--the harbingers of ill things--the mosquitos.

At twenty one days in and counting, I find myself settling in and realizing that it is tough, but doable. I am forced to be patient, which according to Robyn (and to the absolute lack of shock to those who know me well) is just one of the many reasons why this will be a great experience for me. Well, so far it has been an experience all right--I am still waiting for the great part though.

Upfront, Cash Only

As far as we can tell, credit cards, checks and the whole concept of monthly billing don’t really exist here. We learned last week that cell phones are all pre-pay. You buy the phone and a chip that corresponds to a certain cellular company (there are at least 4 to choose from) and then you buy these scratch off cards from the corresponding company and load money onto your phone. Calling is kind of expensive but texting is cheap (even overseas if anyone wants to text us!!) and receiving calls is free (even from overseas if anyone wants to call us!!). The scratch off cards are literally sold by anyone that sells anything anywhere. So long as you have cash, reloading is no problem. And if you want to change companies, you just get a new chip for your phone. Just the other day we learned that you can get wireless internet by essentially the same process. You buy a card for your computer from a cellular company, loaded it up with money and then it deducts value for every byte of data your transfer. Electricity in your house is the same. There are little offices around where you pay cash in exchange for a card that you insert into a box at home to allow the lights to turn on. You can even watch you pre-paid kWatts tick down (more on this particular topic to come from Brandt). This is different than what we’re used to but by no means an unreasonable approach paying for your use of a service. However, this approach is kind of pretty weird when it comes to rent. Apparently, it’s standard to pay 6 months and sometimes even a whole year of rent in cash upfront. I think this is insane. The largest denomination bill that exists is 10,000 Tanzanian shillings (Tsh). This is a little less than $10. So the 2.4 million Tsh for the six months rent plus the fee for the guy amounted to one huge brick o’ cash. To us, the transaction felt more like a sketchy drug deal from a Hollywood movie than the paying of rent. Brandt was Tubbs to my Crocket. We rolled up with our cash wad stashed in our backpack feeling very skeptical of the whole thing. We enter the house and they indicate that we should sit down. The “guy” sits quietly on a chair in the corner seeming like the body guard. The women tells us we have to wait for her son. He’s bringing “the contract.” There are other people around and we’re not really sure who they are or why they are there but they all talk to each other rapidly in Swahili. Yes, this is exactly how it goes down in the movies and we are clearly the goofy white people that are way WAY out of their league. After a brief eternity, the son (he’s supposedly a doctor) shows up. Sorry, no contract. How about we just write up some bullshit on a piece of paper, you give us all your money and we’ll sign the real contract tomorrow? Hmmm…suspicious. Are we getting scammed? It’s a definite possibility. The son starts writing the bullshit contract. He asks his mother his mother a question in in Swahili. The answer we understood to be the agreed upon price and he responds with a smirk. Increasingly skeptical, I say we’ll give you half the money now and half the money tomorrow. Sure. No problem. Whatever you want. But of course that means we have to leave the house and go back out into the big scary world and walk down the insane street and get on the insane bus. We could be mugged at any moment and have all the money stolen. Yes, we’re in real pickle now. The son gives Brandt his cell number. Brandt calls it and the phone rings. Well that’s good but all he needs is a new chip to change the phone number so how much security is that really? We casually try whispering to each other. Brandt, with his Midwestern wholesomeness, says he thinks it’s ok to give them all the money. I’m skeptical but am I just being paranoid? In the end, the thought of taking the half wad o’ cash with us seems worse and so we give it all to them and hope for the best.

Thanks!!!

Thanks for all the encouragement and well wishes we got in response to our first postings!! It was soooo great to hear from so many of you! I’m not sure I can email back everyone individually right away but please do keep emails and comments coming. We’ll do our best to keep up the entertainment value here on the blog. I do want to state for the record that I’m not exaggerating for comic effect. This is the real deal. We miss you all more than you know!

The Apartment Search

Our primary mission when we arrived was to find an apartment. Apparently, the way one finds an apartment in Dar is to find “a guy” that knows where the open apartments are and you pick him up and he directs you to them in exchange for one months rent. We can’t really afford this but we’re told by the professor and the grad students that there are no posted listings and you don’t really have a choice. It’s all further complicated by the fact that very few places around here have actual addresses: mail is delivered exclusively to P.O. Boxes and navigation is mostly by placemark. The professor got a “guy” and he showed us an apartment in the neighborhood behind the guest house on our first day in town. It was an immaculate, furnished and air conditioned 2 bedroom apartment for US$ 450/month but an hour from downtown in the boondocks isn’t exactly what we had in mind. We explain that we’d like to be somewhere closer to the city center, the professor acts like this is somehow strange but presumably translates this to “the guy” (he literally refers to him only as “the guy”) and he says he’ll look. A couple of days go by and we hear nothing from the professor or his guy. We try the internet. 99% of what we find are expensive beach villas on the peninsula north east of the city (where all the white people live but we’ll get to that later). The exception is one “real estate agency” that had a couple of vague postings in the in between area we wanted with more reasonable prices (listed in Tanzanian shillings rather than U.S. dollars- looking back this may have been the first warning sign). Encouraged, I call. The person on the other end attempts to speak English to me but I have almost no idea what he’s saying so he hangs up on me. An hour later, someone calls back and wants us to meet at his office but says the location so fast I can’t make it out at all. I try to explain that we don’t really know where anything is but that’s not really getting through so I say I’ll have the professor call him for us. Monday, six days after our arrival, we see the professor for the first time since the first day. He checks in with his “guy”- he’s still looking (ummm….yeah right). I ask him to call my guy and the next thing I know, we’re off. We drive the 3 miles half way into town to pick up the new “guy”. We pull into a petrol station and wait. The guy shows up, jumps into the back of the professor’s SUV, starts up a lively dialogue in Swahilli. We just sit cluelessly in our seats with perma-grins on our faces. No one bothers to tell us this guys name or anything that’s going on. We’re not even asked what we’re looking for. He takes us to see one small house and one apartment both of which are under construction and will supposedly be ready in two weeks (oh and there’s also this bridge for sale…). There also way down these twisting dirt “side streets” that I really don’t see myself walking down by myself or at night. It took two hours to see those two places but we’ve driven no more than 10 miles. All the main paved roads are so congested with cars and pedestrians and all the side streets are dirt with potholes so big they could swallow a small Honda so either way you’re driving 5 mph. The guy continues to make phone calls while going back and forth with the professor in Swahili. We were told we were going to see two places so we’re thinking that was it. When the car pulls up to the side of a busy street and stops, we both start saying bye as the guy gets out. He looks at us weird, then the professor turns off the car and also gets. Apparently we’re not done. We hope out on a bustling road packed with cars, people and shops but not a major roadway. The professor tells us the bridge is down the road which means we’re not too far from the bus route we’ve been taking to and from the city and just inland from the Pennisula with the beaches and all the white people. So in terms of location, this seems good. The people renting the house are Tanzanians that have been living in Norway for the last 20 years. It’s run down but as a field biologist and a student traveling around South America, I’ve stayed in worse. They tell us that two English people used to live here so that’s also encouraging. The professor even negotiates them down slightly on the price into our range. However, Brandt wants nothing to do with this place and is giving me some serious eyeball action while we’re all “talking” things out. Unfortunately, it’s taken over 3 hours to look at these 3 places and without saying so explicitly, we get the impression that the professor won’t be shuttling us around to look at any more places. To make matters worse, the women renting the place is leaving for her house somewhere else tomorrow in the morning and she wants 6 months rent paid in full (!!!!) that afternoon if we’re going to take it plus the fee for the guy. We get back in the car with the professor who clearly thinks this is exactly what we’re looking for. Brandt’s still giving me the death stare so I make the excuse that we couldn’t possibly pull out that much money with our ATM card in an afternoon. But that was a big fat backfire. He asks how much we think we can get out and then drives to the bank prepared to loan us the rest. Faced with offending him and being homeless, the apartment decision has evidently been made. Super. The good news, this place is great blog material. The bad news, this place is great blog material. Stay tuned. This is only the beginning.

The Journey Begins

To all our friends and family who thought we were crazy…turns out you were right. So much has happened in the first 2 weeks. I’ve been writing blog entries but we haven’t had much internet access so I haven’t been able to post anything yet. Here are some tidbits from the first few days. We’ll try and get it all caught up ASAP.

Arrival Shock

Hello Tanzania!!! After all the plotting and planning, we are finally here! First impressions: it’s hot, it’s crowded and it’s so dusty that dusty doesn’t really describe it. The sweating began the second we get off the plane and it was only 7am. The professor from the University of Dar es Salaam that I’ll be working with greeted us at the airport and shuttled us to a guest house near the university. The main road from the airport was clogged with cars. On both sides, there’s a dirt shoulder as wide as a regular road equally packed with people walk and selling all sorts of stuff. Our first day in Tanzania was particularly rough for poor Brandt. I don’t know if it was the heat or the stress or what but his brain was definitely not firing on all cylinders. His first act in Tanzania was to “steal” someone else’s luggage. Unfortunately, I didn’t catch his mistake until we arrived at the guest house 25 km from the airport. We rushed back and I was interrogated by airport security- they didn’t want to let me back into the airport and then by the baggage people- apparently I seem like the type to steal things out of people’s luggage and then return it to the airport. In the end, I recovered my bag and all was (pretty much) forgiven.
Back at the guest house we decided to go for a stroll to check out the neighborhood. The guest house itself is a large and relatively modern house with a wall around the outside. It has running water supplied from these huge black tanks (I think). It’s not potable (and is slightly brownish at times) and is only warmed by the sun. The guest house is set back from the main road going to the University along a rough dirt road the winds through a neighborhood where other large gated houses are intermingled with small, tin roofed, one or two roomed homes. As we walked along the dirt road, we passed by many people, some carrying jugs (often on their heads) on their way to or from the communal water tap used by those who don’t have running water. The water taps seems to be a gathering place for women and children. It was along this walk where a Tanzanian stranger first spoke to us. Unfortunately these first words weren’t hello or welcome. They were “zip your flies man” (with sweet African accent). Yup, that’s right. Brandt had been strolling along, smiling at all the small children (who can’t seem to help staring at us anyway) with his fly down. As if we weren’t weird enough. We continue on our way, now fully zipped, and a car comes cruising down the path towards us. Brandt, concerned that we were walking on the wrong side of the “road” (Tanzania is a former British colony so they drive on the left but that’s irrelevant in this case because the road is a foot path that’s only one car wide) literally jumps in front of the car to get to the other side of the path. This causes the car to screech to a halt and squeeze between the two of us. Yeah so we’re definitely off to a good start here, making a good impression and really blending in with the locals.

Journey to (and from) the Center of the City (Day 2)

The guest house is located in what seem to be the suburbs of Dar es Salaam. The professor is encouraging us to find an apartment in this neighborhood but Brandt and I aren’t really suburb people. Before we make any decisions, we need to check out downtown Dar. With some rough directions from a Finnish student staying at the guest house, we set out on our journey to take the Daladala to the city center. The Daladala are very colorful and dilapidated minibuses where just about every square inch of interior space (and sometimes exterior space outside the open sliding door) is occupied by a human body part. Unfortunately, we can’t get directly to the city center from where we are so not only do we have to get on one of these things, but we have to figure out how to transfer to a different one some place we’re told is called Mwenge. We stand on the street corner in front of the fancy mall trying to figure out how it works. Each daladala has two names painted on the front of the bus denoting the two stops it loops between. We wait until we hear the dude who hangs out the sliding door and collects the money to call out Mwenge and we cram ourselves in. The ride to Mwenge is brief but we disembark to total chaos. There are people weaving in between buses and buses weaving in between people and other buses. We tell the money dude we want to go to Posta (the downtown Post Office stop) and he points off into the distance and we enter the crowd. We find the Posta bus and we’re on our way. The university is about 5 miles from the city center. It takes an hour (!!!) to get there on the traffic clogged roads. The air quality is so bad my eyes burns and my throat tingles. The city center is bustling. Capitalism on the small scale is in it’s full blown glory here. People are roaming around selling everything from belts to socks to you name it. We wonder around the crowed streets, get some food, check email and before we know it it’s almost 5 and we head back to the bus stop. There are hordes of people waiting for the daladala. Knowing we’re going to get way over charged because we know nothing about the going rates, we opt for a taxi. This was without a doubt the most insane car ride of our life. The cars were at a complete standstill on the road heading out of the city. This was irrelevant to our cab driver. He drove down the shoulder, the dirt path in front of shops and at times the lane for the oncoming traffic. Pedestrians were quickly stepping out of the way of this horn-honking, Tanzanian Jeff Gordon. Oddly, everybody just took this in seeming madness in stride. No yells or obscene gestures or even dirty looks. It was pretty much Crazy Taxi (I think that’s the name of the video game) come to life. Since we made it back alive, it was worth every penny of the $15 we paid the guy. I can’t imagine how unbearable the bus ride would have been in that traffic.

Boogie the Mosquito Hunter

As many of you know, Brandt spent 4 years researching surface proteins that could potentially be used in the development of a malaria vaccine when he was at the National Institutes of Health. He’s hoping to get involved with more applied aspects of malaria research while here in Tanzania but for moment he is battling malaria one mosquito at a time. Despite the screened windows, our room at the guest house is a mosquito sieve. Brandt has been dutifully patrolling our room and the adjoining bathroom every night before we get ready for bed. He hunts down and curses out each individual mosquito in an attempt to prolong our malaria-free time in Tanzania. We are finding ourselves exhausted in the early evenings- probably some combination of the heat and the sensory overload and there’s nothing to do outside our room except getting eaten by mosquitos so we’ve been going to bed pretty early. Unfortunately, we’ve both been finding ourselves wide awake in the middle of the night. We think it’s the jet lag but the sleeping conditions are definitely not helping. Back home, Brandt and I jockey for space in our queen size bed. Here we’re sleeping on what seems to be the world’s smallest double bed walled in by our mosquito net and it’s 87 degrees and humid. (Thanks again Mom for the travel clock thermometer combo- it really helps to know just how hot and miserable we are). So we’re spending hours every night lying awake, held captive in our weaved prison. Quite frankly, it’s starting to make me a bit batty (think Jack in “The Shining”). In spite of our sophisticated mosquito control efforts, we’re still waking up with bites. We’ve found a few inside the net in the morning plus the we seem to get hit when we rest any body part against the net when we are sleeping. This is why when is finally purchase a net, we’ll treat it with insecticide—then those mosquitos that hangout on the net will die, die, die. I seem to be tastier than Brandt, my bites out number his two to one. With each new bite Brandt recalculates the completely made up odds that I now have malaria (he’s says I’m at 7% now). Time will tell.