Excited to blog after these past few weeks! A few weeks ago at school, what seemed like any other day, I was walking back to my house during our chai break to make some coffee (Dunkin’ cinnamon coffee always makes my day here… remember it is the small things!) when I saw a group of students and teachers standing around a female student lying on the ground. She had fainted, which is something I have seen before at school and done on a few occasions myself. We got her some soda and elevated her feet. Once she seemed to be coming around I continued to my house, made some coffee and came back to school. I sat outside with the rest of the teachers when I heard people screaming/chanting. I looked around the corner of the office building and the girl, who had fainted, was again lying on the ground, but this time two teachers were pinning her arms and legs down and chanting over her. According to the other teachers the girl was “sick from the devil” and needed to be healed by the power of Jesus. This continued for about another 10 minutes, while I laughed uncomfortably and other teachers and I discussed why I did not go to church here or really believe in any religion. I was actually laughed at by one of the internship teachers, then I got angry defending myself and told him that I respected that he had his own beliefs and I deserved the same respect – he laughed, I wanted to knock some sense into him—literally. And so, after 11 months in country, I experienced my first demonic possession and subsequent exorcism—wicked bizarre.
I know many of my blog posts include stories or comments around religion and I just thought I would take sometime now to write about how my views towards religion have changed here. Before coming to Tanzania I was perfectly fine with religion. Being born and raised Roman Catholic, going to church was not a problem for me, although I would not have considered myself, “practicing”. I enjoy some of the Bible’s messages; ones that say you should be kind to others, give to those who are less fortunate, etc. I think that they should and do form the basis of ethical thoughts and behavior. Upon arriving in Tanzania, as I have written about before, we were told that it would not be unusual for people to ask us, our names, if we were married, had children and what our religion was. As much as I think Peace Corps prepared us for the religious differences, I think they could have given us more direction on how to deal with not going to church or associating with a religion. Their main advice was to confront it in a way that made us feel comfortable. I cannot tell you how many times I have been laughed at or chastised because I do not go to church and told that I “must believe”. This has really made me believe that missionaries did not do people here any service and that religion has the ability to make people very close-minded, when I feel religion is supposed to be about acceptance. I have stopped trying to explain to people that I have different religious beliefs and have moved on to explaining that some people have different views on religion (not every one is Christian or Muslim) and that people are entitled to believe what they want and that should be respected. I really hate to say it, but I am starting to believe less and less that religion does more good than bad. I feel the people here have been imposed upon and were unknowingly not given a choice. If a Tanzanian does not follow the religion of their parents it is seen, culturally, as very disrespectful. Just another reason why I feel so fortunate to live in America where religious beliefs do not necessarily have to be passed from generation to generation and we are allowed to believe what we want, presumably, without feeling judged.
So as some of you already know, this week I had to make another trip to Dar because my filling fell out—fun, right? I was not too excited about this trip mainly because of the experience I had the last time at the dentist here. My trip got off to a rough start when my bus was running over 2 hours late. When the bus arrived at my village it was not the bus I thought I was going to take, but a really crappy bus. I should have known it was going to be a long ride when there was no space between my seat and the one in front of me for my knees. About two hours into the trip our bus slowed down through a village when I heard a sound that was mix between fireworks and gunshots. I looked out the window to see a lot of smoke and more than 50 people sprinting off into the bush. I am not kidding. Women were running with infants strapped to their backs and men and children were sprinting. Everyone on my bus closed the windows and ducked down. I am still not sure what was going on, but no one was hurt and our bus kept rolling right through. I was pretty scared, but eventually everyone’s panic turned into laughter, especially at me for being white and scared. Seriously, when you see 50+ people sprinting in the opposite direction you are headed and you hear what you believe to be gun shots, it is a wonder I did not piss my pants. The whole experience was summed up pretty well by the man sitting behind me when he said, “Well…welcome to Tanzania”. Yes, thank you buddy. This place really never ceases to amaze me.
A few more hours into the trip, the back of the bus started to smell really bad. All of the people, myself included, covered their noses with their shirts as we attempted to locate the source of the foul smell. It turns out it was actually a “fowl” smell. A live chicken, which is not an unusual thing to see on a bus because people buy them on their way home for dinner, sitting in a plastic bed in the overhead bin, had pooped and the poop was now dripping out of the bag onto the head and head rest of the woman next to me. Laughing hysterically, I offered her my apologies and some napkins.
When we arrived at the half way point about 3 hours behind schedule, I decided that I should prepare myself for arriving in Dar at around 10 pm, late, but not awful. Then at about 4:30 or 5 pm, after passing over a speed bump our bus blew a tire. At this point, I was thankful our bus did not roll over and I really, really had to go pee. I usually try not to drink anything on the bus ride, but the Diet Pepsi in my bag was just too tempting. So I took the time to get off the bus and relieve myself in the bush. Apparently hiding behind a pile of sand was not enough because I think I mooned a few people on a bus passing in the opposite direction. Oh well. At that point I was just glad to stretch my legs and empty my bladder.
About another 2 hours into the trip our bus blew another tire and we hopped off the bus again. At this point it was dark out and I estimated our arrival in Dar to be around 11 pm or 12 am. We climbed back on the bus and arrived in Morogoro, which is about 3 hours from Dar at about 8:30 pm. At this point we picked up some more passengers, who were stuffed into the aisles, leaving the rest of us with peoples butts in our faces, elbows resting on our heads and no legroom. One guy who was standing next to me, tried to talk to me in really broken English. At this point my patience had been shot and I tried to ignore him until he started speaking about me in Swahili. At that I got a little rude and told him not to talk about me and that I didn’t talk to him in English because I, frankly, was not in the mood to talk. Then, he asked for some of the food I was eating and I told him, “No”, but offered some to the woman sitting next to me. Culturally very rude, but I was tired and extremely annoyed.
At about 1:30 am, we still had not reached Dar when our bus stopped again because the driver thought something was wrong with the breaks. At this point people started going crazy and getting very upset. I even stood up and openly admitted in English that I was going to lose my stuff if we did not start moving soon. At that point I had been on an awful bus for about 16 1/2 hours. I was tired, dirty and frustrated. Thankfully after about another 20 minutes our bus started rolling again. When arrived at the bus stand a little worse for the wear it was about 2 am and I may have elbowed a few people in the rush to get off of the bus.
The next morning I had a 10am appointment at the dentist’s office, which went surprisingly well. I think the gods felt they had punished me enough because I ended up seeing a really nice Indian woman, who wore surgical gloves and didn’t make me cry. She was really understanding and I almost wanted to hug her after she finished my filling. Afterwards, I hung out with a few other volunteers who happened to be in the area and had some real food. That night I had dinner with a woman who was taking over for the ex-pats I normally stay with. We had fresh calamari, which was awesome, and a really nice conversation about Tanzania and the Peace Corps.
The next morning I boarded the nicer bus back home. Everything seemed to be going well and we were on schedule to make it back to Mbeya by around 6:30pm. About 2 or so hours into the trip I heard the girl talking to her brother behind me and realized he had thrown up from being bus sick and that it had traveled under my seat and made it to my backpack which was lying on the ground. I was so angry and so grossed out. I felt bad for the boy, it is really irresponsible of a parent to stick their four children on a bus, by themselves when all of them are under the age of 10., but I was really mad. I would not have been as upset if they had simply told me to pick up my stuff before it got vomit on it, but they didn’t and I made the bus conductor take my back pack and stuff in the overhead bin because I was so mad. [Lesson: always carry hand sanitizer when traveling, you never know when someone is going to blow chunks] Other than the puke incident, the ride home was much faster than my ride to Dar and I was back at my site by around 7 pm.
So here is to hoping I do not have to travel back to Dar any time soon. As awful as the trip was I cannot help but think that I voluntarily signed up for this and how many people get to write a blog post like this one, right? I figure that if I didn’t have experience like this the good experiences would not mean, as much and I would never have anything to blog about. So here’s to the chicken poop, bombs or fireworks and the bus-sick boy…thanks for keeping life here interesting.
I also should mention that my kitten Pebbles has passed away. For those of you keeping track this is my second dead pet and third pet overall in 11 months. She was really tiny, but did not seem sick as she was eating and acting normally. Last Thursday I woke up to find her stone dead in her box. It was really sad, but I had to bury her in the back yard. I have since sworn that she will be my last pet in country. Cannot risk anymore going to the place in the sky under my supervision.
I hope everyone is getting into back to school mode. I was honestly not too sorry to hear about the loss of power to people on the East coast because of Irene. You all got a little taste of Peace Corps life!! (Now just ad a small kerosene stove and a 10L bucket bath to that).
We are entering our home stretch here with mid term exams and Form IV graduation approaching soon. Today and tomorrow are actually Muslim holidays, so we do not have school and we have a week break from September10th till the 18th!
All my love from TZ.
