This is the end...

As you all know, our housing situation has been crazy to say the least. Well, we are now officially out of 432 Kinondoni Road. As with everything else that has happened to us here, there is grand ole tale accompanying the event.

It started out as a good day. Robyn and I headed off to meet with the head of the Ifakara research group that we visited two weeks ago. We went to talk about moving to and working at the station. The meeting was supposed to start at 11:00 AM, but he left us sitting outside his office until 11:40 AM. Near the end of our meeting, we heard the rumble of rain starting to fall. The average rainfall in March in Tanzania (the start of the rainy season) is about 15 inches. It was March 26th and we had gotten only a couple of inches of rain so far. Well, in the following four hours, the rain gods decided to get things back on track. Tropical rainstorms are awesome, so when I say it was raining, it was actually pouring water sheets of water.

After the meeting, Robyn and I stepped outside and decided to wait for the rain to subside so we could walk to the nearby daladala stop. So we waited, and waited, and waited. An hour passed by with absolutely no let up. We called a friend with a car to come pick us up. We went and got lunch and as we causally munched on pizza, the faucet continued to run and run. We finished, paid, and got dropped off at a dala stop about three miles from home. It was about 2:30 PM. We stood under a nearby tree as didn’t bring our umbrellas or raincoats…Oops!! The tree, however, provided no protection from the rain, and Robyn and I were soaked-to-the-bone, sopping wet when we stepped into the dala. Extreme moisture and overcrowding do not for a pleasant dala ride make. And yes, it was every bit as miserable as it sounds. About 100 yards into our trip home, the driver recognized that traffic was not moving, and decided to take a short cut through the back roads. Whereas the rain had slowed traffic to a standstill on all of the major paved roads, the pothole-riden, unpaved side streets where were far worse and even farther under water—at least two feet of milky brown, refuse-laden water in most places. The sewer system in Dar barely works on a dry day, but you throw three or four inches of water at the system over four hours and you get massive flooding. There was another significant contributor to the flooding in the streets…trash. Since everybody uses the streets, and especially the open stormwater canals, as trash bins, when the rains come hard and fast, the trash plugs up all the storm drains. Apparently this happens every year but everyone seems content to just let it happen. Well done people of Dar!

So our packed, damp, and smelly daladala was off to surf the back waterways of Dar. I fully expected the dala to get stuck and force us to walk through the flood waters. We turned a random corner to find a sedan stalled sideways across the middle of the road in 2 feet of water. Chaos reigned supreme as everyone decided that the flooding gave them the right to disobey every traffic rule ever invented by man and just drive straight towards the stalled car eliminating any possibility of getting it moved. So after 45 minutes of holding our breath, I was elated when we actually made it through the waterways to a main road about a half a mile from our house. Robyn and I jumped out and walked the rest of the way home; and in the process we seemed to give a lot of Tanzanians a good chuckle as they watched two totally soaked mzungu slosh their way trough the flooded streets.

We finally made it home at about 4:30 PM; three miles in two hours, I could have moon-walked to our house faster than that. We then opened the gate to our plot and found a wading pool of stormwater where the parking area used to be. We sloshed through and down the steps to the front door. As the door swung inwards, Robyn and I saw that a foot of brown sewer water was covering the floor of the entire house (see the beautiful color pictures). The water wasn’t pouring over the stairs into the house so we were surprised to see the flood inside. Turns out, the backed up drainage system was causing the water to pour into the house via the toilets. That’s right, the toilets. I cut the main power into the house knowing the wiring in the house is suspect at best. Robyn rushed to our bedroom to see if our computers, which we often leave on the floor, and her $1,200 camera, which was in a cupboard that sits on the floor, were okay. I walked into our other bedroom (the bloody rat room) and found that all of our clothing and our bags had been spared (Thank goodness!) because they weren’t on the ground. Robyn shouts that our computers are okay. We were sooo lucky, if our computers had been ruined, we would have probably headed back home to the States—the loss would have been too much. The camera’s case was wet but not yet saturated. We did lose a bunch of other electronic stuff—a hard-drive, battery charger, cables, etc. So we dug in and quickly and silently packed up all of our stuff trying not to think too much about what we were standing in. Checking the cupboards in the small room we don’t really use, I reached in to grab something dark. It was a rat. It seems fitting that they got in one more dig before we left. Without words ever being spoken, we knew that we were done living there. All jokes aside, living there was a horrible experience. It really cast a dark shadow over our first two and a half months in TZ. So to be completely honest, walking in and finding that our house was now without a doubt unlivable was not a huge blow, it was almost seemed like a sign that it was time for us to move on. So we called our friends, Chris and Cathryn and asked them if we could spend the night. They said, “Certainly!” We took the important stuff with us and put the rest of the bags in the highest points in the house. We then went outside to dig up a cab in the massive traffic jam. After hearing our story, they invited us to stay as long as we needed to figure out what to do next. We owe them a lot—really, we owe them our whole trip because without their hospitality, I think we would have given up. Thank you Chris and Cathyrn!!!

The next morning, I headed back to the house to get the rest of our stuff and found that our housemother had started to clean the house. I told her that we were leaving that day and not coming back. She was quite shaken, as she is almost part of the house and is employed by who ever rents the house. We signed a six-month contract, so she thought she had six months of guaranteed work. She promised me she’d clean it all up and that it was fine to come back but there was no freaking way. We felt bad, but we had to do what was right for us. We paid her an extra half a month’s pay and gave her a bunch of household goods. I think she understood that we just could not live there and be happy.
So now we are out of the hellhole known as 432 Kinondoni Road. We don’t miss it and won’t even say “goodbye”, because there was nothing “good” about it. Hopefully this is a turning point of our time over here and we only have better things ahead.