Out of Africa

I'm writing this from the comfort of the barcalounger in front of cable television while eating a "colossal" piece of carrot cake. I've experienced no reverse culture shock. Only reverse culture delight.

I returned exactly one week ago and have been busy sleeping, eating bacon, and not helping people. I thought I might write one last blog post to catch people up on the end of my trip and basically round out my experience.

We spend about 36 hours in Nairobi, which didn't seem to be the hell that everyone cracks it up to be. Then again, we didn't spend any time in the slums or the ghettos surrounding the city. We went our separate ways from Nairobi: Ali flew back to England, Jo went back to Tanzania to try to find a job, and I left for Mombasa on a solo adventure.

Mombasa was a cute little coastal town. I splurged on a $10 a-night hotel, (they had a TV that showed the Tyra Banks Show!!!) and did some exploring. The coastal African cities have been conquered and reconquered several hundred times so they have heavy Muslim, Indian, and even European influences. The people there belong to the "Swahili" tribe and are a product of these miscellaneous ethnicities. I travelled to Diani Beach, which is a resort area on the Indian Ocean about an hour from Mombasa. It was filled with old Germans wearing entirely too little clothing and really, really high Africans. I also got to see the prolific prostitution that goes on in these parts: there was a disconcerting number of creepy old European men in the company of pretty young Kenyan women. I got tired of it really fast because everyone was acting so stupid and returned to Mombasa where I could at least watch the Tyra Banks show, which is stupid but at least funny.

The next day I returned to Dar es Salaam, and felt comforted in the familiar craziness that is Tanzania. I stayed for two nights with my friend Tom, a 2008 SPW volunteer who now lives in Dar and works for Grassroots Soccer. While at an outdoor bar on what was supposed to be my last night in Tanzania, (more on that later) we were enjoying some Kilimanjaro beers when an SUV came barrelling around the corner and crashed into three cars parked about ten feet away from us. The SUV then backed up and sped away before anyone could realize what had happened. The whole bar got up, looked at the cars, collectively muttered a few curse words and then resumed drinking as if nothing had happened.


I got to the airport the next day only to find out that I had arrived a day early for my flight. I asked a nice lady who worked for Qatar airways if there was a hotel nearby, and she told be not to worry and just to stay the night at her house. It's actually not abnormal for Tanzanians to invite random strangers to stay at their homes. It's quite sweet, actually, unless it's your house that they are inviting people to. I would regularly come home in village to find several random people in the house who would stay overnight and eat our rice and beans. I have no idea where they slept but I didn't care as long as it wasn't with me.

Side note: Tanzanians love sleeping with each other, and not just in the HIV-transmission way. The girls especially are afraid to sleep alone and often entire families will stuff themselves into one bed. I'm not really sure what they're scared of, (uh...wizards maybe?) but Rehema basically
gave me no choice but to sleep with her the entire time we were in village. Whenever she left village, all the villagers would ask me if I was scared to sleep alone. When my friend Ali's partner left the village for a few days, her partner said, "I could get a schoolchild to come sleep with you if you're scared." My other friend, Laura, had a huge fight with her partner because she refused to sleep in the same bed with her. So Laura's partner recruited a girl from their village to come each night and share the bed.


Anyway, I accept the offer and went home with my adopted Tanzanian mother. Her house was fantastic - the best I've ever seen in Tanzania. She had a wide screen TV and immediately turned on the Style channel, which we both love, and broke out a liter-bottle of Konyagi, (there's really no snobbery there when it comes to drinking...I guess Konyagi is the ultimate equalizer). She did the ultimate Tanzanian hostess act and broke out the pictures of every celebrated religious sacrament that has happened to every family member in the past 15 years. But I was sort of drunk and mostly listening to a TV program about gay guys making over fat people, so it was bearable. Then Steve, the husband, came home and laughed at everything I said, and then they tucked me into bed and I woke up the next morning with 400 mosquito bites but it had all been worth it.

By the time I arrived on American soil I had had about 3 hours of sleep in the past 40, but was awake enough to eat the large Italian hoagie that my mom and brother had brought to the airport. It was probably one of the happiest moments of my life.

Another story I forgot to mention that you might enjoy: When traveling from Rwanda to Kampala, Uganda, we stupidly decided to catch an overnight bus. It was long and uncomfortable and made everyone bitchy. As soon as we boarded, we heard a chorus of beer cans cracking. In the absence of Xanax, the Africans use alcohol to help them get to sleep on long journeys. Unfortunately, the entire bus smelled like liquor and it seemed to make everyone much more chatty than sleepy. Anyway, about four hours into the trip we got stuck behind a broken-down truck and for some reason, everyone on the bus decided to get outside. We just stayed on, figuring this was just a pee-break for those who were drunk, but the bus started moving and after about 500 feet it stopped again and the passengers re-boarded. Jo, who had been sitting next to a completely loaded Rwandan man who was among those who disbanded, asked him why he had done so. He told us that the bus was passing the broken-down truck on a very precarious cliff and everyone thought that the bus would fall off, so they disembarked.

Ugh. and they didn't even say anything to us!

So, this is pretty much where my story ends. I want to thank everyone for reading! I've touched on the much lighter, funnier side of my trip in this blog, but to be honest, the experience was very difficult. I came to Tanzania to find out whether I wanted to work in International Development and public health, and I'm not sure that's what I want to do anymore. If the HIV problem was as easy to fix as having starry-eyed young people come over to impart their knowledge and ideals on African villagers, then it would have all been fixed years ago. I'm not sure Westerners should have as much of a role in this as they do. In fact, we might be doing more harm than good. To be completely blunt, foreign aid seems to have created a welfare state among African countries, and the results have trickled from corrupt African politicians pocketing the money, to unmotivated Tanzanian NGO workers, to village people who demand money and services from anyone with white skin. There is an extremely lax work ethic here - and why shouldn't there be when foreign aid comes to pick up all the broken pieces? That said, there were several people in my village who were extremely dedicated to helping their community, and those are the ones who will save the rest. But I was so surprised at the lack of concern for fellow countrymen who were dying at an alarming rate from a horrible and preventable disease. More than once I threw up my hands and said to Rehema, (though directed at Tanzania itself) "these aren't my people dying from AIDS, these are your people. Why don't you seem to care more?" I've often wondered how bad the problem has to get before more people take more responsibility. As if a 13% HIV infection rate wasn't bad enough. The dilemma is, what if we pull out altogether? How bad will things have to get before the government decides to require comprehensive sex education in all schools and actually enforces it? If you look at the worst-hit province in South Africa, the HIV infection rate is 40% and that is with foreign aid.

Changing behavior, I think, will be the most effective, but also the most difficult part of reducing the HIV rate, mostly because it requires responsibility on the part of the individual. I know from working with teenagers and being a teenager myself that you can tell people all you want that reckless behavior is bad for them, but they're still going to do it...because in the end it's their choice. If you ask the young people in my village what HIV is and how it's transmitted, they will tell you the right answers, but that's not going to stop them from having unprotected sex, (and there's that enormous problem of believing that condoms actually cause HIV). Behavior change is also difficult for cultural reasons. From the health workers, SPW staff and Tanzanian men and women who I've talked to, I've found that infidelity is an enormous problem in the country. Despite a changing climate, women still have very little say in their partnerships - both in and out of the bedroom. If the women accept that their men will cheat, what's stopping the men?

As I mentioned before, many people in my village were skeptical about condom efficacy. They had heard from their mothers, fathers, friends, neighbors, etc. that condoms cause cancer, condoms cause HIV, condoms make it easier to get HIV and the like. I think I mentioned that even the HIV testing counselor in my village asked me if condoms really did prevent HIV. I had always responded in disbelief, and trying to be as reassuring as possible, but I'm not sure what effect that had...I mean, if you were an African living in a tiny village, who would you listen to? Some random white girl or your mom? I found some anti-Western sentiment from the kids, actually. While trying to explain the origins of HIV, (we don't know for sure, but the best theory is that it came from an early virus called SIV - Simian Immunodeficiency virus - that was transferred from infected monkey blood to human blood through open wounds during hunting) but some raucous 15 year olds kept insisting that we had brought it over from America to eliminate Africans. Sigh.

I'm sure I just made a few grand generalizations that could generate thousands of angry blog replies, but I thought this blog would be incomplete without revealing how difficult the circumstances were, in my own opinion. It is hard enough to live in a village where there is no running water, spotty electricity, no PROJECT RUNWAY for chrissakes, where most people don't speak your language and hell, where people don't even look like you, but to feel like you're not doing any good and that you don't have much support, well that's pretty rough.

I may not want to go into International Development right now, but I do have enough opinions about it to try to change the way that International Development works. If we're going to be pouring money into these countries (which I'm not even sure we should be doing) then we need to be vigilant about where the money goes. To put it in metaphorical terms, Africa is the 30 year old living in the basement of the Western countries, spending his allowance on Bud Light and video games. It's time for Africa to grow up.

I'll be taking this blog down in a couple of weeks. I don't want to get in trouble with the Tanzanian government or get sued for using "Out of Africa" without permission. So if you'd like to read more/again then you'll just have to buy the book.