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  Iringa, Tanzania
Monday, January 22, 2007

Iringa-town turns out to be a lovely place, high up on a plateau overlooking some rocky mountains.  The landscape reminds us of the American west, except much greener.  After wandering through town, we found the Lutheran Center, and sign up for at least 2 nights, a number that continued to grow over the coming days as we found more and more to do here.
 
Everyone turns out to be incredibly welcoming.  Cries of "Caribou" (Welcome!) and "Jambo" (Hello) greet us wherever we go, and only a few of the people excited to speak with us end up wanting money from us.  It seems that all the previous muzungus to visit here have established the precedent that if you ask a muzungu for money, he will give it to you.  Not so with us, sadly.  We've decided that we're only giving money to those who've truly enriched our experience or helped us out.  Such as the kind fellow who helped us find a path up the gargantuan rock that looks out over the town, climbing up in his bare feet.  Or the nice young man that walked along the road with us a while, excited to meet some Americans for the first time.  Since every day around 4 it pours for a while, we've had to seek shelter a few times, and Friday we got stuck on the front porch of a government building with 3 guys named Oscar, Allen, and Jacob.  We had a really great time talking with them and answering their questions about the United States.
 
Staying in the Lutheran Center, we're nearby where the people who come to volunteer from the States live, and we were able to go visit some of them briefly on Friday morning.  They gave us so many ideas about things that we could do in town, we decided to stay another day so we could fit them all in. 
 
A visit to the local Catholic Church revealed a cooking school run by Sister Georgia, from Italy.  Tucked away in the back of a primary school, at least 20 young Tanzanian girls worked under her watchful eye, making pasta, cookies, cakes, jam, and tarts, and that was just on the day we visited.  We couldn't resist buying a small bag of cookies for the road. 
 
On the way back into town under a boiling sun, 4 or 5 guys were working on a new school building, plastering over a brick wall with a mixture of sand and concrete.  They invited us over to try our hands at it.  It looks easy, but not so much, at least if you're not right-handed.  We walked around the grounds for a while, and got invited to sit down by a nice group of students on their lunch break.  We stayed there for 15 minutes or so, learning new words in Swahili and teaching them a few in English. 
 
We toured a charitable crafts shop that employs disabled locals who were previously destitute.  They make all kinds of things, from woven and dyed fabrics to paper from banana leaves or elephant dung (Surprisingly, it doesn't smell bad at all. I think at this point, I smell worse than the elephant dung.) Upstairs there's a little cafe that proceeds to ruin us financially by offering both chocolate cake and good used books.  Cierra went on a rampage and cleaned us out of our daily budget.  Okay, so some of the book purchasing was done by yours truly.
On Saturday morning, we headed out early to Isamila, a historical site where evidence of Stone Age civilization has been discovered.  Tanzania holds the key to quite a chunk of human history, as homo sapien (that's you) is thought to have evolved right here in Africa's Rift Valley.  The bus chucks us out a half kilometer from where it should have, because they have to stop to bribe the local police anyway, and this way they can save on gas.  So we stagger up the road, along the way stopping to stare at some fascinating anthills.  At one, giant prehistoric-looking black ants rush to pull a big pile of eggs out of a thick crack in the ground.  The other was a sort of ant superhighway, with little levees of red dirt on either side to keep everyone in their lanes.  This stretched across the entire road, and a giant ant pileup had occurred along one side.  I'm sure if we had waited long enough, tiny ant traffic cops would have shown up to sort it all out.  Or take some bribes.  After all, the ants are Tanzanian too. 
Isamila turned out to be amazing.  First, we got to walk right through a sandstone canyon with amazing pillar formations created by the protection of a soft layer by a hardened upper layer that had worn or fallen away in many places.  Our guide took the time to point out local wildlife and warn us when we were about to step on stinging ants or quicksand.  We also got to traipse around the actual dig sites and look at the stone age tools that had been discovered here dating back over 100,000 years.  This was a stone age weapons factory outlet.  You want spears? We got em.  A hand axe? Knife? Sling Shot? No problem.  Shotgun? That's on backorder, you're gonna have to wait around 99,900 years. 
 
Remember, 9 out of 10 chiropractors agree that you do not want to be last on a dalla-dalla.  We flagged one down about 2 miles down the road from Isamila so we wouldn't fry in the midday sun.  When the door opened, we were confronted with a solid wall of packed humanity.  But the rule goes, a dalla-dalla is never full, so the conductor eagerly packed us in, and slammed the door closed on my leg.  I ended up standing on around 2 square inches of space, up on my tiptoes.  A few minutes in, my calves gave up, and then I was just standing on someone else's foot and hanging on for dear life to an iron bar that had been welded to the inner frame.  A lady below me took out a breast and started to nurse her kid.  I decided to ignore that and concentrate on not passing out from the heat and smell.  Finally, just when I thought I'd be flopping over in everyone else's lap any second, the whole contraption screeched to a halt and the lady sitting next to the driver got out.  Presumably because I was standing on his foot, the conductor decided it would be better if I was up there, so he pushed me in and I collapsed, completely spent.  Transportation on this continent is always an adventure.
On our final day here, we decided to perform a small act of charity and buy a little beggar boy who had asked us for shoes several times some flip-flops.  We bought them, then spent the rest of the day looking for the little guy.  I finally ran into him on the street- and he was wearing shoes.  "You've got shoes!" I pointed out astutely.  He nodded.  "Ok, I'm sure you know someone who doesn't have shoes? Right?" He nodded again.  "All right.  Please give these to them for me." I handed him the flip flops.  He said thank you about 6 times, then ran off down the street.      
Whether he'd had shoes the whole time or had just found a kind soul to buy him some, I have hope that those flip-flops will do someone some good in Iringa.  As for us, we'll be doing no more good here, as we've got to move on down the road to Mbeya.
 
Cierra decided to leave me to guard the packs a good distance from the bus station so she could negotiate without being mobbed.  However, muzungu status is not so easily taken off, and she had to elude a couple of hawkers as she asked around at the bus companies.  We went with Chaula Coaches, on a 8:15 departure.  Right at 8:15, the driver started the bus, pulled forward around 5 inches, and then "broke down" for an hour while they sold the last 4 seats. 
But just because all the seats are sold doesn't mean the bus is full, oh no.  This is known as the dalla-dalla principle, and it's not long before the aisle starts filling up with people and chickens.  Actually, only one chicken, and he was relatively well behaved, especially when compared to the lady in the aisle-way who kept putting her elbow behind my head and her purse across my chest.  Her hindquarters started a pushing contest for my seat that I was determined not to lose.  When I was talking later with Cierra about it, she asked if I had thought about giving up my seat so she could sit down. 
"Yeah, I thought I'm sure as hell not giving up the seat I paid for to this rude person.  So I guess technically I thought about it."
My friends, if you think less of me for that, then let me just point out that you haven't taken this bus ride for 6 hours down pothole highway.  Even with a seat, it was no picnic.  The lady found another seat around the halfway point, and the chicken survived, clucking and flapping away when it was snatched up at the end to disembark in Mbeya.

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