TZ Friends

I lived in Tanzania for just year, but I made so many great friends there. I was working with the US Peace Corps supporting volunteers teaching Math and Science in schools all over the country (the size of Texas and Oklahoma).  I spent a great deal of my time travelling from Dar es Salaam to Arusha (near Mt. Kilimanjaro) across the Serengeti, in and around Lake Victoria, on Zanzibar (Unguja and Pemba), south through game parks the size of Switzerland, and in and out of dozens of small villages.  While at home though (about a week a month), I lived a few miles from the center of Dar es Salaam on a long peninsula in Oyster Bay.  It was a few miles to the office, and I often drove my motorcycle.  I would always stop though at this little shop on the dirt road halfway to my office.  The older woman owned the modest market, and she employed the young woman beside her. After a very short time, once they learned I was on my own, they became my mother, wife, sister, nutritionist, and I was never quite sure who was who from day to day.
I would stop, we would chat, I would promise to eat whatever fruits and vegetables they recommended that day, to marry one of them soon, and to stop travelling all over the place and settle down. We always laughed, and I never would have dreamed to pass by without stopping.  They were both always there, probably seventy or more hours a week.  Frankly, I bought much more than I could consume, but I had two security guards that became the beneficiaries of my daily fruit, vegetable, and courting indulgence.  I don't know what happened to these two - I returned ten years later and sadly the whole area had been paved and the open shops were long gone, replaced with a gas station and a subway restaurant. I haven't taken care of my diet adequately since.....

The gentleman on the right is Kitare, a language specialist I worked with at the PC headquarters in Dar es Salaam. He was very interesting man who had studied religion and politics, and who loved to debate. His keen intellect was tangled up a bit in African spirituality and Soviet socialism. We had many lively discussions, and I admired him as one of the few true pure thinkers I had ever met. From the beginning, Kitare repeatedly invited me to his home for dinner and to meet his family. I was so busy, that I didn't get around to my visit until the week before I left the country, but I was not going to forgo the courtesy. As you can see, I made it to a lot of last minute banquets, about thirty pounds heavier then when I arrived in country :)

It was a wonderful evening, though I was surprised by the relative modesty of his home - I guess my biases about his intelligence were betrayed by this, perhaps some sort of unconscious expectation of karma on my part.  It was very humbling thinking about a man who would have a very easy life in my country with absolutely no guarantees there.  We had a wonderful meal, and stayed late playing games with his family (from left to right: Dolo,the house girl; James; Evansi; Severa, his wife; Kevin; and Aidani).  Kevin, the youngest was very shy and quite wary of me. We laughed a lot, and I don't think they had ever had an over-the-top American in their house before.  I left Tanzania a few days later.  Some months passed and I got a letter from Kitare with this picture in it.  It came with a very polite note thanking me for visiting his family, but with a wry postscript:  "And Kevin is ready for you to return as he now believes he can withstand your humour!"

This is Mzee (Respected One) John, one of the PC drivers who travelled across the country with me.  John was with me during a school riot (see the post below), and other grand adventures. John was a very wise and gentle man, and we had a great deal of fun on our long trips (our last trip was more than three weeks traipsing around northern Tanzania in a Landrover).  We literally spent the entire days together as we were often driving for six to eight hours, eating together, and he would be with me when I went into the schools. It was such a simple matter to treat John well, as he was a very kind and humble soul.  I was truly shocked when I learned later that the Americans that followed me the next ten years in the post seemed very capable of screwing up the equation to the point where the drivers and staff felt very alienated.  On this day, we were waiting for a ferry to take us out to an island on Lake Victoria when we challenged these children to a fishing contest (I think they let us win). As I said, very simple to be with John.  I am very proud that I had earned his respect and that of the other drivers and staff during my stay there - doing so did not diminish the quality of my work or corrupt my relationships with other constituents.  Simple.

The owner of this beautiful smile is Jumapili, named for the day he was born, Sunday. Jumapili was a tremendous resource for the organization as he was very intelligent, extremely compassionate, and quite funny. He was fabulous with the volunteers, young and old, and his enthusiasm was infectious. I interacted with him occasionally my first nine months, but really got to know him my final three.  He is a great example of a host country professional who has to work extremely hard, often patching together multiple jobs and opportunities to make ends meet. Despite all of his industry, he was always upbeat and positive, and never failed to meet his obligations for us, even going the extra mile often. Before I left the country, I decided that I wanted to take some accelerated Swahili lessons to maximize my efforts there, and the director let me hire Jumapili to give me one-on-one lessons.  It was a blast!  We worked together late in the day after work when I wasn't travelling.  He teased, cajoled, pushed, supported, admonished, and praised me through those lessons, and I learned a great deal about tutoring with him (something I thought I was fairly proficient at prior to our lessons).  I think of him often when I am down or a bit dejected that things aren't coming together for me as I would like.  When I do, often on Sunday, I smile and feel very foolish for discounting my many blessings. 

This is John again, sandwiched between two of my favorite women in Tanzania (apart of course, from my two fiancees at the fruit and vegetable stand), Esther and Grace. They worked primarily in the north in Arusha with the new volunteers we trained there.  Esther supervised the language training and Grace directed the health services. John and I stopped by for tea one day, and we had a wonderful day chatting with them both, then I went outside to play with Grace's autistic son Eric.  Grace was such a lovely soul, but lovely in only the way life can wear down the sweetest of souls with burdens and a heart too big for her chest. She had hoped I could work with Eric and draw him out a bit.  Eric didn't often interact with strangers, but I had experience with other children buried within themselves by this awful disease, and I was up for the challenge. I looked around the area behind the house, and I spotted what I needed to find a way into Eric's reality. He followed me at a distance, cautiously observing me until I came up upon a sprinkler at the edge of the property feeding a furrow of an adjacent farm.  He slid silently up beside me, mesmerized by the pattern of the water spray as the sprinkler head rotated slowly around, shooting water in a slow tumbling arc.  Eric smiled broadly as I leaned down and twisted a small valve on the unit changing the dispersion pattern.  He clapped wildly and ran around keeping himself inches away from the encroaching spray. He made a curious guttural noise that seemed to be in time with the spurts, and I was intrigued by the coordination of the whole thing.  I joined in, trying to keep up but got soaked to Eric's delight.  We stayed out there for a few hours, intersecting around the geometry of that sprinkler, but when Grace called us in, Eric frowned and again became a silent sentinel following me back to the house. Eric disappeared, and as I walked back up to the house, I looked up at Grace's lovely face, tears streaming down it.
Esther, on the other hand,  was a force of nature!  She was the head language teacher, had written the training book, ran an extended family on her own, and loved to corner me and pick my brain about all things educational.  I never saw her in anything lower than fourth gear! She wore people out, but I never tired of her enthusiasm and passion, as it was the rare kind born of love for the world rather than her own adulation. I kept track of Esther, narrowly missing her a few years later in London, and then again a year or two later back in Dar.  I will catch up with her, I will let her know how much I respect her and miss her. Esther's last name is Simba, Swahili for lion - a perfect name for this beautifully strong woman.



Thomas Msuka was my counterpart (we shared the same duties) and my best friend in Tanzania.  No two souls could be much different, other than their love for the future of the children of that East African country. He was every thing I was not: humble, patient, diplomatic, soft spoken.  He had been the headmaster of one of the best schools in the country and then later a Ministry of Education official.  Near retirement, he had taken a more lucrative job with PC - another reminder to me how even the most talented professionals in a place like that had to struggle to raise a family and make ends meet.
Thomas and I quickly learned how to work together, each aware of the other's strengths, each respecting the motivation of the other, each seeing room to learn, and Thomas probably doing a lot more accommodating.  We laughed, argued minimally, and found that we both loved the volunteers, the schools, the teachers, the students, in different ways, but that we support each other against any adversity.  When we went to Arusha to train the new volunteers, we spent a great deal of time together.  At the end of each day, Thomas and I would break away from the rest of the mixed Tanzanian-American staff, find Simon Mahai an old crony of his from the ministry, and grab a taxi to go to Rumboshine, our favorite "dive" of a dinner on the edge of the town (we really didn't break away, no one would go with us).  We sat there for hours, flirted with the waitresses, talked politics where Thomas would let me battle Simon somewhat rigorously before he would gently indicate I had gone too far.  I would give the world to be back there, at the foot of Kilimanjaro and Meru, eating beef kidney, laughing at life and its ironies with those two men.
Thomas' gentle nature was well tested through the years as he lost children and parents and saw so many other heartbreaking things with his wife of so many years, Prisca.  When their daughter Rose got a Fulbright Scholarship to teach Swahili in New York, I went and fetched her back to Akron to spend long weekends with my family.  My daughters loved her, and ask about her often. Thomas and I are still in touch, and I had the tremendous pleasure of meeting up with him a few years ago in Dar es Salaam at a very nice tourist hotel overlooking the Indian Ocean.  I squealed (for possibly the first time in my life) when I saw him enter the lobby with his Prisca, Rose and her three children and husband.  We invaded the dinning room and ordered just about everything on the menu (on the tab of my billionaire boss of course) and caught up.  For two hours, I was Baba Kesho again (another story) and I was lost in the company of beautiful souls and rambunctious kids. Rose introduced me to her husband and asked questions about my family, insisting I greet them for her.  The kids slowly warmed up to me and we made a big mess - my boss left a big tip.  When we parted, Thomas and I hugged and I knew I would miss him like no other friend I had ever had.
There are dozens of other friends I left there in Tanzania, these are just a few that really touched my heart.  In this holy time where I am constantly reminded of sacrifice, I think of these people who had so little, gave so much, and loved me like a brother.


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