Country #3

(from Monday/Tuesday)

My first impression upon arriving in Tanzania was “these people aren’t very nice”. They didn’t readily look me in the eyes, didn’t consistently smile and say “hello”, and didn’t always return my wave. Was it that I didn’t speak Swahili? Was it that the town we were in, Arusha, had a fair number of foreign visitors? Was I losing my charm, my intrigue?

And then within 24 hours, I realized that Tanzanians are perfectly nice and perfectly friendly. It’s just that very few people on the planet can compete with the Ugandans in this arena, so everyone looks bad in relation to them. So it was really just a matter of changing my perspective, and perhaps lowering my expectations. I ended up kind of liking Arusha: there was something both sort-of, semi-cosmopolitan and quite traditional about it. From the guide books, I thought that it might be little more than a jumping off point for trekkers and safari-goers, but it’s definitely a real city with a lot more commerce than that. And unlike the real cities in my beloved Uganda, there’s a lot more poverty and rarely a block without beggars. From what I’ve seen and heard, Tanzania is in a lot worse shape economically and health-wise than Uganda, and my guess is that my work over the next several days will bear this out.

But the small part of Tanzania that I’ve seen also suggests that this will be an amazingly beautiful country. The drive from Arusha to Keratu, where we are now, was brilliant, and I knew that I was in Africa when I saw two zebras to the side of the road. I had seen baboons in Uganda, but these were zebras, and I’m told that we’ll likely see elephants and frickin’ giraffes (my all-time favorites) as we drive today to Endulen. It makes me wonder a bit why people go on safaris when they’ve got giraffes on the cheap as we travel from one town to the next. With this said, I’m sure that I’d love seeing the animals that I’d see on safari, but I absolutely can’t afford to go and likely don’t have time for it, so it’s nice to be happy with the occasional wild animal sighting as I go about doing my nonprofit photography.

And maybe I’ll even get the chance to talk to the animals. Might be as easy as speaking to the average Tanzanian. While English and Swahili are the official languages, even minimal English seems rather rare in this part of the country, and I’ve been remiss in learning much, if any, Swahili. And I should. Both because it would help me, but also because it’s got to be one of the prettiest sounding languages I’ve ever heard. Some of the greetings are, in my poor transliteration, “salaam”, “mambo”, and “habari”, and some of the responses are “nzeri”, “poa”, and “sijambo”. Great language, and I’m sure that knowing it would open lots of doors and bring smiles to many a face. Of late, I’ve been interested in studying languages because of their functionality, and this is the first in a while that I’ve been inspired to learn because of its beauty. Who knows if I’ll follow through on actually learning it, but I’m putting it near the top of my list right after Hindi, which I’m hoping to study in the summer, and before Farsi. I’m told that I’ll be meeting some folks in the next couple of days from a tribe that speak a click language. Not high on my list of priorities…yet! But it reminds me of my good friend, Will, who would conjugate “click” using Spanish rules as we traveled the world. So, I’ll sign off with his version of click language meets Spanish that still sticks in my head so many years later: “click, clickas, clicka, clickamos, clickeis, clickaron.”