360 Degrees Longitude (25 page)

“What do all the animals do for water?” Katrina asked.

“There are water holes around here but they must be getting mighty dry about now. It's food I wonder about,” September answered. “The lions can fend for themselves, but there seems to be nothing for the zebras, wildebeests, and antelope to eat.”

“The elephants are making runs to Costco when the sun goes down,” I said. “It's the only way.”

We divided our days between Lake Manyara, Serengeti, and Ngorongoro National Parks. Each of the parks we visited had its own personality, and in each it was simply not possible to go more than a few moments without seeing abundant wildlife including lions, elephants, hippos, baboons, giraffes, cheetahs, crocodiles, rhinos, leopards, and what seemed like a zebra, wildebeest, or gazelle for every brown blade of grass.

In short, our experience with Bariki was nothing like my experience in Alaska and it more than met Katrina's romantic notions of what an African safari should be.

• • •

Returning to Arusha, Bariki maneuvered the Land Rover into a shanty town for supplies. Bariki and Tanfi left us alone and a boy about ten years old approached the car.

“Bic? Bic?” Oddly enough an ink pen (known as a “Bic”) is the preferred item that children beg for.

As I don't believe in supporting begging, I said, “I don't have a pen.”

“One dollar!” he demanded.

“No.”

“Give me your sunglasses?”

“No.”

The young boy proceeded to recite a list of items he wanted.

Finally, he saw a bag of potato chips on the seat next to me and asked for those. I wondered if he was hungry. If he was, I don't think he would have asked for my sunglasses before he asked for the chips. Nevertheless, I didn't want the chips so I gave them to him. This turned out to be a mistake.

He quickly went over to his friends and held the bag of chips in the air like a trophy. I couldn't understand what he was saying, but it was clear he was taunting his friends that he had gotten the American to give him something. Soon, the Land Rover was mobbed by kids demanding everything from the hat on my head to the kids' clothes.

Clearly, a generation of well-off travelers before me had conditioned the kids in the area to expect handouts. This is understandable, as desperation is perhaps the only thing not in short supply in the area and well-meaning people
want
to relieve suffering. I
want
to relieve suffering. But as the scene unfolded before us, it was clear that handing out Bic pens to every kid who asks is not the answer. Within moments the scene started to devolve and we started to fear for our safety. Clearly the children from the area have learned to be brazen, and simply shooing them away wasn't going to work. Instinct told me that the primal yell I used to disperse a near-mob scene a few days earlier would have backfired. Reacting to the growing tension, Katrina and Jordan put down what they were reading and sat erect in uncomfortable silence. Fortunately, Bariki soon returned and drove us away.

We settled back into a hostel in Arusha that evening and opened our guidebook. We were looking for someplace off the standard tourist track and decided to visit Lushoto, a town in the Usambara Mountains. Lushoto is surrounded by rain forest, in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro.

The bus ride to Lushoto would take about seven hours and would start at 6:30 a.m. “We should get cash tonight before we leave in the morning,” September said, “because the bus leaves before the ATM opens.”

A trip to the ATM would have been a prudent move, but the thought of making a withdrawal at night was not on my must-accomplish list. On top of the incident with the intruder in our room the week prior, there had been the mob scene around our Land Rover and two unpleasant encounters with aggressive panhandling that very day.

“The guidebook says there is a bank in Lushoto—let's wait until we get there,” I replied.

The next day our bus twisted and turned as it clung to the edge of a cliff, climbing out of the Great Rift Valley and up into the mountains. We passed small farms growing sugarcane and banana trees, and occasionally we would see monkeys climbing across the branches of an overhanging tree. We arrived in Lushoto just before 3:00 p.m. on a Friday afternoon. The bus pulled up into a town square of hard-packed, uneven dirt. The small square was surrounded by a number of wooden shacks selling anything from used car parts to packages of crackers.

The guidebook described Lushoto as a town of 100,000 people, with a bank. Glancing about the tiny town square, it was clear the guidebook was off by a couple of zeros.

Somehow I had acquired a card proudly advertising a hotel where we could “enjoy running hot water!”

“The bank is probably going to close soon,” I said, handing September the hotel's card. “You take the kids and find this hotel, and I'll go to the bank.”

The Lushoto Bank of Micro-Finance was just off the town's main square. I'm not even sure if the bank had electricity. I do know the teller was unimpressed by the fact that I had both an ATM card
and
a credit card. He simply laughed and dismissed me with a wave of his hand.

I found September and the kids at the hot water hotel. “We have a problem,” I said.

September asked, “Did you find an ATM?”

“No,” I responded. “And it gets worse. Here's our situation.” Katrina and Jordan were listening most intently at this point, not interrupting every few syllables as they were prone to do. “We have one ten-thousand-shilling note (about US$9.50) and a handful of coins. We can't pay for even one night in this hotel, so we'll have to check out right now and hope they don't make us pay for the half hour we've been here. The closest bank with an ATM or Western Union is back in Arusha, and we only have enough money to cover one person's bus fare, one way.”

“Arusha?” September exclaimed. “We just came from there! Are you proposing that just one of us take the bus 14 hours round-trip back to Arusha while three of us huddle in the forest, waiting, without food or shelter? Is that what I just heard you say?”

“Not exactly,” I replied. “The buses only run in the mornings. So, even though it's fourteen hours of travel time, the person who goes can't leave for Arusha until tomorrow morning, then return the day after that.”

September said “okay,” with a faraway look in her eye. After a long pause, she said, “You would have to be the one to go to Arusha because I don't think it's wise for me to be traveling alone. And what would you do if you got to Arusha and found that the electricity was out? Or if you couldn't use the ATM for any other reason, like if your wallet was stolen? You would have no way to return to us here in Lushoto.”

Everything she said was true. “Look, I can't leave until tomorrow morning anyway. First things first, we can't stay in the hotel, so we need to check out now. Then we can spend the rest of the day searching for a hotel and a restaurant that will accept a credit card. Maybe we'll get lucky.”

Jordan spoke for the first time during this discussion. He calmly asked, “Does this mean I can't get a soda?”

Never before had we been in such a predicament. Our previous experience had taught us that to get money, you needed to go to the bank and the bank would take care of you. Now that this had failed us, we weren't sure what to do, and were quite anxious regarding how things might work out.

I went to the front desk to check out and September went into town to the Cultural Tourism Center to see if there was a place for us to camp in the surrounding forest. We had sent our tent back to the United States, but we still had our sleeping bags, as they were invaluable in hostels.

“I'm sorry, we can't stay here,” I explained to the clerk behind the front desk. “We have no money to pay.”

“It's okay,” the woman helping me said as best she could, trying to overcome a language barrier. “You go to town and see owner Mr. Mkwati.”

“Katrina and Jordan,” I said, returning to the room, “wait here and tell Mom when she gets back I went to talk to the hotel's owner.”

Exiting through the lobby a few moments later, I found a taxi waiting. The woman at the front desk had called it for me. “I have no money to pay for the taxi,” I said. “I don't mind walking.”

“But you will never find Mr. Mkwati. The taxi driver will help you find him. I will pay the taxi driver, you pay later.”

I was speechless. This was so different from our experience in Arusha.

The taxi driver helped me locate Mr. Mkwati in town. I explained our predicament, telling him we needed to check out of his hotel and why.

“Hakuna matata
, John. Do you know what that means?”

“Yeah, I've seen the movie.”

Mr. Mkwati said, “What movie?”

I suddenly remembered I wasn't in Kansas anymore.
“The Lion King,”
I replied. “Have you ever heard of it?”

“No.”

I briefly explained that
The Lion King
was a children's movie, summed up the plot and then tied it up with how
hakuna matata
, which loosely translates to “no worries,” was central to the plot. I felt pretty stupid, knowing full well what Mr. Mkwati was thinking—I was certifiable. I had brought my family to Lushoto from California without enough money to pay for a night in his hotel, and here I was talking about a lion cub who sang the “Hakuna Matata” song. But he was impressed that I knew a few Swahili words, such as
simba
for “lion.” Which of course I didn't, but since I mentioned the name Simba in connection with the lion cub who would someday be king, he presumed I was a Swahili master.

I learned something very important.
Hakuna matata
is more than a line out of a movie, and more than a casual greeting—it is a way of life. I didn't realize it then, but it would be a siren song for a new philosophy of life that we would need to make the difficult transition upon returning to Western civilization seven months later.

After listening to me talk about singing simbas named Simba, Mr. Mkwati started to fully grasp our predicament: that I couldn't feed my family, and that I stood a good chance of ending up stranded in a strange town the following day when I went to search for a working ATM.

He then did something most unexpected. He opened up his wallet, emptied it out, and gave me everything he had: thirty thousand Tanzanian shillings, or about $29. That wasn't a tremendous amount of money, but it
was
enough to feed my family, and also ensure that I would have a return ticket should my search for an ATM the following day be in vain.

I was not only deeply touched, but the experience left me pondering my own charity. Would I have done the same thing if the tables were turned? I'd like to think so, but twelve hours earlier I wanted nothing more than to get out of Tanzania altogether, motivated in no small part by the disturbing scenes around Arusha, which was, in no small part, why we ended up in Lushoto virtually broke.

“You'll never believe what just happened to me,” I said upon returning to the hotel.

“Where have you been?” September said. “I was starting to think you had abandoned us in despair. I've been so anxious to talk to you. You'll never believe what just happened to
me
. I went to the Cultural Tourism Center and explained our situation. They lent me everything they had in their safe. Three hundred U.S. dollars. Cash.”

I couldn't speak. This was roughly equivalent to the annual per capita income for Tanzania. No collateral, no paperwork, no specified repayment schedule, just a “here you are ma'am, and thank you for letting us serve you.”

“Taking charity from the impoverished, it kind of puts the fine point on our predicament, doesn't it?” September said.

“It's more than that,” I said. “The bank here let us down and the best plan we could come up with was to try a different bank. If everyone here thought like us, that
would
have been the best plan. What are the chances that if the three people who lent us money today showed up in Silicon Valley with no way to feed themselves, within hours they would have the equivalent of a year's worth of cash in their pocket?”

There was silence. It was a powerful, emotional lesson.

“I can't help but think of the kids yesterday who all wanted Bic pens,” September said.

“I still don't think handouts are the right answer. But neither is watching from the sidelines. Poverty is a complicated problem, with no easy solutions.”

• • •

The following day I was en route to find an ATM. September and the kids stayed in Lushoto and had a grand time hiking with Ishmael from the Cultural Tourism Center, so much so that they took me on the same hike when I returned.

Ishmael, our guide, took us through the rain forest, but he showed us much more than just the lush landscape and the green mamba snakes. He showed us that the people who live in the villages scattered throughout the hills were genuinely thrilled to see us. For the first time since entering Tanzania we felt welcomed for who we were, not because we might hand out Bic pens or buy a month-old newspaper. On a simple four-hour hike I lost count of how many families we found harvesting sugarcane by hand. Walking along we were frequently greeted with a
“hakuna matata!”
by women carrying into town bundles of cane balanced on their heads. Scattered among the sugarcane fields we occasionally found a group of children playing soccer with a ball made of rolled-up rags held together by string. They would run to us with their big, affable smiles shouting
Jambo!
(Swahili for hello) and then walk with us just for the simple novelty of holding our hands.

Ishmael was an orphan in his early twenties. He had a younger brother and sister to care for and was working hard to keep them in school. Tuition at US$100 per year was difficult to come by.

“Last year I was able to pay tuition for them but there are fewer tourists this year because of the drought. But I have my marriage cow. If I cannot save the money for their tuition, I can sell my cow.”