Jul 20, 10:26 AM
A Walk Around Arusha
Okay, I’m way behind in the blogging, but I’ll make an effort to relate some of the more interesting events of the past few weeks.
To start with, I had the most extraordinary day two Sundays past. I decided I really should finally explore the villages around my house, so I started walking off the paved Nairobi/Moshi Road into a banana field, and I was soon chatting with a shortish man carrying a leather Bible case and outfitted smartly in dress pants and button-down shirt.
He asked me where I was from, etc., and the next thing I knew he insisted that I come to his house. His name was Simon Mark. His English was minimal (though better than my Kiswahili, it goes without saying), and he had particular problem with possessive pronouns. He showed me around by saying, “This is your farm. This is your house. This is your wife.” I’m by now familiar with the famous African hospitality, but until I realized what he was trying to say, his spirit of sharing seemed extraordinary. He had a very good accent, so it was easy to understand the words. They just weren’t precisely what he meant.
I met Simon’s wife, though I regret I don’t remember her name; his little daughter Rachel, a smiling wisp of a thing, four-years old, who I really thought might expire from laughing at me and the absolute Mzungu-ness of it all; the older daughter, Lightness; and the nephew, Julius, who was a bit younger than Simon and spoke more English.
I also met the Bibi (grandmother), and she seemed impressed that I said “Sikamho,” the traditional greeting of respect for an elder, and bowed a bit. She stood and smiled at me for a long time. Midway through the introductions, Simon informed me, his voice lowered and his face serious, that “Father, you are dead.”
The house we were in had a corrugated metal ceiling and the walls were framed out in sticks, but the process of filling up the hollow walls with stones and packing them with cement was not begun, so that it was really just the suggestion of a future dwelling. You could see right through the walls, and 20 kids must have been gathered to look in at me. The family had other, finished buildings, but I think Simon wanted me in the new house. There were two comfortable chairs, and a little table on which they placed, for Simon and me, tea with sugar, three cornmeal muffins, and sliced oranges. It tasted nice.
They showed me a lot of family pictures that they kept in a big paper envelope and badly worn plastic album. They also insisted I take two pictures with me. One is of Simon with the movie projection equipment he uses as part of a church project to show “Jesus Fill-ums” around at different villages. The other is of the whole family before the father’s grave on the day of his funeral. Little Rachel clearly didn’t appreciate the solemnity of that occasion, as the pictures shows her smiling her usual zany grin.
The generosity was so touching because the family obviously has so little. As we waited for the tea, and Simon and I had run out of words that we both knew, Julius brought a worn out brochure from Ngorongoro Crater, a Tanzanian national park, for me to look at. On one see-through wall they had two posters from seed companies.
After leaving the Mark family I walked on for miles through several different village, into a bar for beer and chipsi miyai (an omelet with French fries in it, if you can believe that), and up a big hill. It was a great roll-your-own cultural tourism program.
I ended the day by watching a movie in a little building in Ngulelo, the village closest to our house. I’ve often noticed the soundtrack from a movie, usually some type of martial arts picture, blaring out from one of the brightly painted concrete buildings that make up town centers. I had gotten curious earlier in the day, so I decided to check it out. I walked in through a curtain and saw that there must have been 150 people packed into a small room watching a little TV with terrible resolution. It looked as though every bench was full, but a person who was apparently in charge (he took my 100 shillings, in any event) directed the people on one of the benches to squish even closer, and I just managed to wedge my big white ass between them.
The movie was horrible, an ultra low-budget Mad Max type of affair involving fistfight competitions in a post-apocalyptic desert. It was called Eternal Fist. It was dubbed into Swahili, but whenever the Swahili interpreters on the tape cut in, the entire original soundtrack—music, sound of people getting punched, etc.—cut out.
I loved it.