The Lost Daughter: A Memoir (15 page)

“He also said they don’t need a reason to attack, neither. They’ll just roll up on you and Bam! You bit!”

“Yeah, but he also said the chances of that happening are slim to none. You’re more likely to get killed by a hippo.”

“Aha! Another reason why we should be inside!”

“Oh, brother!”

“What’s that?” Andy shrieked, and rushed toward the cabin in a high-stepping fashion.

“What’s what?” I asked, startled to my feet, causing my dinner plate to fall facedown in the dirt, attracting the attention of the foraging baboons.

“That!” Andy said, pointing at something under the table from the safety of the cabin. I cautiously squatted down to take a look.

“It’s a rock, you dope!” I said, falling back in my seat waiting for the rush of adrenaline to clear my system. Joseph called over to us to ask if we were OK.

“It’s OK, Joseph. Andy thought he saw something.”

“OK,” he said knowingly.

I let the baboons have my spilled dinner and joined Andy in the cabin. He climbed onto the bed and didn’t utter another word, but I could see his mind fabricating all kinds of scenarios that could transpire after the sun had fully set. Scenarios that included us fending off venom-laced fangs, flailing hoofs, slathering jaws and eviscerating horns.

While I unpacked and Andy washed up, I learned that my big burly boyfriend’s phobias weren’t just limited to mammals and reptiles. He was also terrified of insects. He discovered ants in the bathroom and ran back into the bedroom to notify me of the situation. Resigned, I went to a small utility closet and grabbed a broom and swept the little beasts out the front door. To Andy’s credit, they were pretty large for ants (nearly half the size of a thumb). I calmed him down and we turned in for the night. Neither one of us got any sleep. Our relaxing safari turned out to be an emotionally exhausting time for the both of us. So I was glad when the time came for Andy to board a plane back to the States, leaving me to explore more of Tanzania on my own terms.

The first thing I did after seeing Andy off was to return to the hotel and book a trip to Zanzibar Island, just off the coast of mainland Tanzania. With my tour book in hand, I bought a ticket on a high-speed ferry scheduled to leave the next morning at 7:30
A
.
M
. The travel agent who arranged my trip suggested I also purchase Dramamine, as the ninety-minute crossing can be quite choppy. I ignored the suggestion. I’d been out on many boats fishing and never once experienced anything akin to motion sickness. It wouldn’t be until I reached the Dar es Salaam port that I’d finally see that tooling around a lake on a bass barge and crossing the Indian Ocean on a high-speed ferry, standing room only, simply did not compare. I stood there on that heaving boat with my heaving guts, hot, soaked in my own and several other people’s sweat, dehydrated and packed on board like an illegal stowaway, swallowing my own vomit for nearly ninety minutes that passed like centuries. If I had had a knife, I would have killed myself.

Luckily I had no knowledge of just what a risk I was taking. Boat crossings from Dar es Salaam to Zanzibar don’t always get their passengers across safely. As recent as 2012, at least sixty-five passengers were confirmed dead and over two hundred missing after an overcrowded ferry traveling from Dar es Salaam to Zanzibar capsized. The year before that, another boat capsized, killing more than a thousand passengers.

It was a relief when we reached Stone Town, Zanzibar’s main city. Its rich history and eclectic architecture dating back to the nineteenth century reflected the influences of Arab, Indian and African traditions. From the minute I stepped off of the boat, however, it was its Arab roots that screamed out to me. The great mosques, the narrow, winding streets, the outdoor markets and the elaborately carved doors all sent me back to my carefree days in Morocco. The use of coral stone as the primary construction material gave the buildings a reddish tint that lent the small city an even cozier vibe.

I wandered around taking in the wonders. I visited the small palace where Dr. David Livingston lived while preparing for his final expedition into Tanganyika in search of the source of the river Nile. Livingston must have been a pretty lovable guy, because the Africans that cared for him in his final days of malaria and dysentery bickered with Britain for his remains. The Africans, in the end, cut out Livingston’s heart and sent the rest of his body back to Britain with a note attached, declaring, “You can have his body, but his heart belongs in Africa!”

I also visited the slave market and sat inside the tiny, dark cells where the slaves were held. I contemplated the possibility that my ancestors may have sat in this exact same spot under more unhappy circumstances. I whispered to their lingering spirits. I told them I was doing fine and that they were not forgotten.

Next I visited the Palace of Wonders, built in 1883. It got its whimsical name because it was the first building in Zanzibar to have electricity and the first in East Africa to have an elevator. The Old Fort was next door. Built in the seventeenth century by the Omanis to defend the town from the Portuguese, it was Stone Town’s oldest building. I visited several other tourist sights, but I was most anxious to go on the much-hyped spice tour.

My guide ushered me into a vehicle and took me to the plantations outside the city where spices such as cloves, cinnamon, cardamom and lemongrass were grown. Our first stop was at a distillery where essential oils are processed. As we entered the space, the strong, sunshiny aroma of lemongrass greeted me. I bought several small bottles of it before my guide shuttled me on to a local spice farm. Small children played outside mud and grass huts in a world of neon green foliage and rich, dark earth.

Farmers walked us through their crops, identifying the various plants and their uses. In addition to spices and herbs, there were hundreds of fruit trees. Many were familiar like pineapples, mangoes, papayas and bananas. Some were totally alien, like breadfruit (the flesh has the texture of fresh-baked bread and taste similar to potato), jackfruit (the world’s largest tree-borne fruit, which can weigh up to eighty pounds and with a taste similar to a tart banana) and custard apple (a sweet fruit that tastes, as the name suggests, like custard).

My guide waved a boy of about twelve over and spoke a few words of Swahili to him, which sent him scampering up a towering coconut tree with the blade of a machete clenched in his teeth. When he reached the fruit dangling just beneath the canopy, he used his machete to cut loose several green coconuts, sending them raining down to the ground. He scrambled back down the tree and with his machete whacked the top off of one of the coconuts and handed it to me, smiling broadly. After my long day trekking through the humidity, the fresh coconut milk revived mind, body and spirit.

As promised, my guide dropped me off safely back in Stone Town, where I wandered over to the Blues Restaurant overlooking the water. I grabbed a table on the deck and ordered lunch. I was charmed by a group of skinny, half-naked boys playing happily in the water. Their dark skin was as slippery and shiny as a seal’s. I dragged my feet when the time approached for me to reboard the ferry back to the mainland. The minute I saw the ferry sitting there heaving up and down, the symptoms of seasickness washed over me. With a whimper I approached my destiny.

I WAS LOOKING
out the window of the plane as it made its final approach into Shinyanga and I did not like what I saw. Unlike the lush greenness of Zanzibar and the hustle and bustle of Dar, Shinyanga, from my lofty perspective, was a dust bowl in the middle of nowhere. We came to a skipping stop on the airport’s unpaved only runway. My fellow passengers, all Tanzanian, broke out in applause for a safe landing. I joined them.

I stepped off the plane into a virtual furnace. I was surrounded by a dry, dusty landscape dotted here and there with thorny acacia trees. Historically, this area was densely forested with woodlands and bushland species of plants. The land has been degraded over the years, however, by drought, overgrazing, cash crop cultivation, destruction of the forests to wipe out
tsetse
fly infestations and an increase in population leading to a higher demand for firewood. This has transformed a once fertile area that sustained generations of agropastoral people into an area with low productivity and major soil erosion issues.

I dragged my suitcase through the dust and dry heat, following behind my fellow passengers, when a Tanzanian gentleman approached me and identified himself as an employee of the United Nations compound where I would be staying until I found permanent housing.

Like most of the Tanzanians I had met, he was extremely welcoming and well dressed in a blazer with a light-colored button-down shirt, polyester slacks and leather dress shoes despite the heat. Within the hour he deposited me at the compound, which was not as grandiose as the name might suggest. It was an underwhelming one-story, cinder-block complex with several bedrooms and a central kitchen, eating and living area. I was the only person living there at the moment, but there was a woman who worked at the compound who would be doing the cleaning and cooking. Her name was Amina, a soft-spoken, plump, older Tanzanian. She welcomed me inside and showed me to my room. It was neat and clean and contained a single bed, with a side table and a lamp. The thick tan curtains were pulled back and sunshine streamed into the room.

Outside my window was a large patch of dirt and, to my delight, a group of about fifteen banded mongooses were lounging in the shade of an acacia tree. Amina was puzzled by my excitement. I guess her response to my fascination with the mongoose would be similar to her visiting me in the States and becoming obsessed with watching tree squirrels. I felt vindicated, however, when a decade later the Animal Planet network aired their hit program
Meerkat Manor
that followed the day-to-day activities of Kalahari meerkats, which look and act very similar to the banded mongoose.

Amina pried me away from the window long enough to show me the bathroom across the hall and inform me that dinner was at eight
P
.
M
. This gave me plenty of time to unpack, shower, ogle the mongoose family and take a nap before dinner.

Shortly before eight, I joined Amina in the kitchen, which smelled pleasantly of a spicy vegetable stew. She was boiling a very large pot of water and told me I must never drink water straight from the tap. She made several days’ worth of potable water at once in the big pot. She set the table and before she left, she told me she would come by in the morning to make me breakfast and show me around the town. Then she was gone.

I took a closer look at the meal she had left for me. The stew looked delicious. There were large pieces of potatoes, carrots and lentils. What I didn’t recognize was a bowl of what looked like raw bread dough. I pinched off a piece and popped it in my mouth. Sure enough it tasted exactly like what it looked like: bread dough. I set it aside and devoured the stew, figuring I’d ask Amina about the raw dough in the morning.

The next day I was up early. Amina was already in the kitchen preparing breakfast: sweetened coffee with cream, toast and jam. After I sat myself at the table, Amina went to the kitchen and came back with the small bowl of dough that I did not eat from the night before. It turns out it was meant to be eaten as it was presented. The dish is called
ugali
and it is a staple food that could be found all over sub-Saharan Africa.

It is made from
cassava
, or corn flour mixed with water, and stirred in a pot over medium heat until it reaches the consistency of bread dough. More water can be added, making it into a porridge that many eat for breakfast. Amina told me how to eat the doughy version. The traditional way is to break off a piece and roll it into a ball and then make a depression in the middle of it with a thumb, effectively creating a spoon that is then dipped into a sauce or stew. One can also fold it around a piece of meat to keep the hands from getting covered in sauce. In essence
ugali
serves the dual purpose of being a food and a utensil, similar to how Moroccans use baked bread to eat their
tagines
.
Ugali
is cheap, easy to prepare and makes a very filling meal when combined with meat and stews, thereby sustaining millions of Africa’s poor. For the uninitiated,
ugali
is an acquired taste, as it is flavorless and gummy in texture, though by the end of my stay in Tanzania I would be preparing it and eating it for dinner every night.

Seemingly about the size of a large village, Shinyanga served as the headquarters for the regional administration and the headquarters of the urban districts. It boasted a population in the tens of thousands and was home to several major nongovernmental agencies working on issues ranging from deforestation to HIV/AIDS prevention. There were no paved roads and almost no buildings over two stories, though the streets were crowded with people. Women, almost always beautifully dressed with hair and makeup done, strolled along with babies strapped to their backs. Some were shopping or gossiping in front of the many beauty salons. Men in grungier states of dress were hanging out on street corners watching the women or strolling hand in hand with their friends. Motorbikes and bicycles zipped by laden with entire families, carrying the week’s shopping and a farm animal or two.

The streets were lined with barber shops, tiny one-room stores selling everything from sweets to small sachets of laundry detergent. There were many repair shops. Nothing was wasted in Shinyanga. In the States, when a radio stops working or a pair of shoes begins to wear thin, they are tossed in the trash. Not in Shinyanga. There were very clever repairmen and craftsmen who could fix anything and make a worn-out pair of shoes look new. There was sound everywhere: cars and motorbikes, barking dogs, boisterous conversations and music. Always music. Lively African music blared from every shop and passing car, reflecting the variety of music being enjoyed in the area. Traditional music from one shop blended with the hip-hop-inspired music from another, which was blending with Islamic tunes from another. The overall vibe was of a prolonged block party.

•   •   •

During my first week at the U.N. compound, I got a message from my supervisor in the States that he had delayed his trip to Shinyanga for two weeks. I was a bit annoyed because I was anxious to move out of the compound and into the community, as well as get to work. I was incredibly bored with having just two hours of Swahili classes a day and a group of mongooses for diversions. Luckily an unexpected visitor would change things for the better.

Not long after my supervisor’s message, I got a visit from an African woman. Her name was Ruth. She came to see me when she heard that there was a newly arrived African-American woman in town. She was a beautiful, petite woman with skin best described as golden brown. She was originally from Ghana but several years ago immigrated to Norway with her Ghanaian-born husband named Emmanuel and their two young boys, Joshua and Derrick. They were in Shinyanga for her husband’s work. He had a two-year contract working with the Tanzanian government on behalf of a Norwegian NGO on deforestation issues in the area. She told me that they had been in Shinyanga for several months and, as there was very little to do, she was bored out of her mind and in search of friends. We became inseparable.

Ruth introduced me to her neighbor, a local woman named Mercy. Mercy lived in one of the many corrugated-roofed mud houses in the neighborhood with her husband and four children. She was a tall, sturdy woman, kind and quick to laugh. When I visited her house for the first time, she showed me her new calf. It was honey blond with huge eyes and long eyelashes. Mercy told me to allow it to suck on my fingers. She giggled like a small girl when the force with which the calf latched onto my fingers startled me. From that moment on, I visited Mercy nearly every day to spend time with her and her family, and also to visit with the little calf.

Mercy helped me find a house to rent equidistant between her place and Ruth’s house, which was very large, completely furnished and gated. Ruth also had several large shade trees in her yard and a chicken coop with a dozen chickens that produced fresh eggs daily. The three of us spent weekend afternoons and early evenings relaxing under the shade trees playing with her chickens, who allowed me to pick them up and even cuddle them.

My house was not as fancy as Ruth’s but was considered extravagant in an area mostly comprising steel-roofed huts with outhouses and no electricity. My new home had a small used sofa for the living room and a full-sized bed with mosquito netting, a desk and chair for the bedroom. Ruth insisted that I hire a woman to cook and clean. I insisted I could do these things for myself, but Ruth explained that hiring the locals helps generate income for the community as well as makes life easy for us expats unaccustomed to handwashing clothes and scrubbing floors on our hands and knees. I saw her logic and hired the teenaged daughter of a family that lived in a little shack down the road from me.

Clara was shy and kept to herself no matter how much I tried to engage her in the hopes of using more of my Swahili. I’d hired her to come every day to make breakfast and lunch, do the shopping, clean the house and wash clothing as needed. I paid her three times what she asked, which didn’t amount to much but elicited the first and only smile I could coax from her. She turned out to be an excellent cook. Every morning she made fresh fry bread, and for lunch she prepared a perfectly seasoned lentil stew that was so delicious I’d have her make it every day for the entire nine months I lived in Shinyanga.

I was thrilled to be out of the compound and in my own place. The first night in my new home I was awakened from a deep sleep by a strange noise. I turned on my flashlight, which I slept with, to discover to my horror that my mosquito net was covered with thousands of insects. Some were as long as my hand. Many I’d never seen before. The noise that woke me up was the buzzing of thousands of pairs of wings. I’d made the mistake of not closing my window completely before going to bed.

Since the hoard was not able to get past the netting, I simply turned off the light and went back to sleep. By morning the mosquito net was clear. The only evidence that the insects had been there at all were the dozens of crispy corpses ringing my bed.

Insects were not my only uninvited house guests. I also shared the premises with several geckos. They hung out primarily in my bathroom and bedroom, slithering across the floor and up the walls whenever I happened upon them. When I told Ruth about them, she surprised me by telling me I was lucky to have them. The geckos, she told me, eat insects and therefore will keep their numbers down in the house. From then on, I saw the slithering little beasties in a new light. Sealing the windows and hosting the geckos, however, did very little to mitigate my insect issue. Daily I found insects in my hair, in my shoes, in my food. I’d even occasionally find one or two in my underwear. I eventually had to come to terms with the fact that I was in rural Africa and simply had to get comfortable living up close and personal with wildlife.

It didn’t take long for me to acclimate. After a few weeks I could blithely pick insects out of my hair and undergarments without first issuing a blood-curdling scream. I knew I had totally gone native, however, when after a hard rain millions of locusts swarmed the area, causing everyone to retreat indoors for at least an hour. I sat inside with Clara, listening to the sound of thousands of locusts slamming into the windows of the house like so many pebbles. After the majority of the swarm had passed, Clara grabbed a plastic tub and headed outdoors. I followed, curious. She started picking up the dead and injured locusts that covered the ground like a living, writhing carpet.

I could see other people up the road emerging from their homes and doing the same. Birds and small mammals were also about, snatching up the locusts as well. I thought,
“What the . . . ?”
Clara returned with the tub filled with the still wiggling locusts. It wasn’t until she deposited the basket on the counter in the kitchen that I realized what was about to go down. I watched fascinated as she meticulously cleaned each insect, removing the legs, wings and head before placing them in a colander. She then rinsed them in cool water, fired up the propane stove and grabbed a frying pan. When the pan was hot, she poured in a heap of bugs, added a bit of salt and cooked them as if it were a stir fry. When they were done, she placed about a handful of them in a small bowl and handed it to me.

I daintily picked one up, irrationally expecting it to wiggle even after being dismembered and roasted. With Clara watching me closely, I closed my eyes and held my nose with one hand, as if I were about to jump into a pool, and popped the roasted locust into my mouth with the other. I chewed it slowly and deliberately. It was delicious—crunchy with a nutty flavor. Clara and I sat companionably on the kitchen floor and finished the first batch together. She made a second batch for me to eat later and carried the bulk of the still wiggling locusts home to her family.

•   •   •

My boss was a retired physician who, after a visit to Tanzania, decided to start a health-oriented nonprofit. I’d met briefly with him and his wife in the States and found them both to be open and sincere in their desire to help the people of Tanzania. I would be working solo to reopen an office in the town, and create and implement a health outreach program centered around conveying to the community the importance of childhood and maternal immunizations. I was worried that I wouldn’t have the language skills or community ties to carry out the project, but he reassured me that my language would improve and he’d find local people for me to work with.