Ex-Paticularities

Pics: Juma, my new favourite. he never used to smile when he first came to HAPO but on Friday he blew me kisses (we taught them that).

Walking back from sports day

Chris and Tom, the ex-Zim tobacco farmers, with Anne Marie on Friday night

Sunday morning and I’m drinking instant Nescafe, with boiled yellow tap water and long-life milk. Mmm, delicious. Number on my list of edible cravings: a glass of cold milk (preferably with a Mint Slice biscuit or three, which my dearest mama makambo (stepmother) is arranging to send me. Not sure she can also include the milk, though). And why didn’t I listen to Kendall when she said bring Vegemite? Why? Why?

This weekend we had a visit from the Big Cheese in the UK, Simon Headington, who began Volunteer Africa in the early ’90s and has had a working relationship with Mama and the Doctor ever since. It was his first time out to Tabora since volunteers starting working here late last year and we were all slightly on edge about his visit because we had heard that the one volunteer so far who hated the program had sent a 13-page email to him outlining all her complaints and criticisms of the project. We arrived at HAPO at 9 on Friday morning as usual and, in typical Tanzanian style, we surprised with an unscheduled and unstructured four and a half-hour meeting in which the Singida project people told us about HAPA and the Tabora project people told us about HAPO. Needless to say it was total murder, particularly when meetings here always involve us volunteers being forced to watch the Tanzanian contingent engage in their favourite sedentary activity – digital exploration of the nasal canal. Yes, nose-picking is part of the lifestyle here and the subject of endless speculation amongst us temporary ex-pats. Let’s face it, everyone does it in some form or another, but in my world, anyone who gets caught doing it within a five-mile radius of another human being is considered the scum of the earth. Here, there’s absolutely no hint that it even occurs to anyone to be private about it; no one ever tries to turn their head or use a handkerchief. I’ve even engaged in anthropological experimentation by locking eyes with someone doing it to see if that has an effect. Nope. Round and round those fingers go; when one digit finishes a circuit or two, the next one on the hand gets a look in. Combining that knowledge with the other Tanzanian cultural imperative – shaking hands with absolutely everyone and then continuing to hold hands while you ask about each other’s families, children, houses, work, days and weekends – means it is very difficult to resist engaging in the ex-pat cultural imperative – surreptitiously reaching for the pocket-sized bottles of hand-sanitiser. Obviously it makes me think twice before I bite my nails around here.

Simon and his colleague Katie visited us (unannounced) at home yesterday for a chat about the vol perspective of the program. His biggest concern regarding volunteers seemed to be how often and to what degree we socialise here. There were stories about former vols bringing men back to the house; about vols going out drinking every night of the week, and while this is problematic simply because your mind is supposed to be on the kids, not on getting paralytic, it’s also an issue because of the impression of wazungu it gives to the locals. It was somewhat unfortunate, however, that we had to talk about this after having stayed out all night the night before; none of us except malaria-ridden Sandra had had any sleep at all and had just gone down for a nap at 2pm when Mandi yelled “you guys, get up, Simon’s here!” (this was after an earlier unscheduled visit from Mama and the Doctor at 9am which involved Adela banging on my window to let her in, and then me going to the door in my shorts, not realising the Doctor was there too and then madly scrambling around for a kanga). Luckily we were able to say truthfully that we only leave the house two nights a week, and that staying out till 6 is most definitely an exception to the rule. Well, usually. Is it ok to say a lot of the time?

We go to the Tabora Hotel every Friday and Saturday night and each week it’s so formulaic… we get there at 8 or so, the food takes the requisite hour to arrive, the band starts at 10 and plays the exact same songs in the exact same order interspersed with the exact same comments from the bandmaster, we have the exact same lovely drinks waiter who takes care of us all night, and we dance to the exact same selection of Tanzanian Top 40 when the DJ comes on at about 1am. Yet it’s always fun, particularly the Hanky Dance (see picture) which none of us can understand the meaning of but is a Tabora Hotel institution (basically involves waving a white cloth around while the band sings instructions: “kushoto, kulia, kushoto, kulia… Mmechoka mmechoka? (left, right, left, right.. are you tired?”.

This particular Friday I started chatting to two ex-Zimbabwean tobacco farmers (see pic) who now live in Tabora and who the others know a little (one of them is dating an ex volunteer who is coming back here next month). Both lost their farms in the violence surrounding Mugabe’s Land Reform initiatives in the early 2000s, but wouldn’t discuss any details when I asked them to talk about it. After drinking three-quarters of a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red, one began to talk about his time in the Rhodesian Army in the independence war of the 1970s. When I asked him if he had read two of the most mesmerising books I had ever read – “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” and “Scribbling the Cat” by Alexandra Fuller, the first the memoirs about the author’s life as the daughter of Rhodesian farmers, the second about her relationship with an ex-Rhodesian soldier – he told me that he actually knew all the men in the second book. He was able to tell me exactly which pseudonym belonged to which person; that he knew the tattoo on the protagonist’s shoulder and that he had served in the army with two of the others.

It was amazing to hear this because that book had a huge effect on me and I remember my heart going out to the man on whom the book was focused; that he was a broken man who had seen and done terrible things for reasons he believed in wholeheartedly at the time but that now haunted and destroyed him. Then there I was, sitting next to a man who alluded to (but would not detail) many of the same things and appeared to me to be as broken as the man in the book. We’re all broken men, he said. I’m no hero. I did things I thought were right at time but they were terrible, I did and I saw terrible things. One thing about the army, he said, is that they never teach you how to grieve. I asked him if he had ever really told his story to anyone. He said he once told a total stranger, that he broke down and cried but had never told anyone else, not even his wife. His best friend was killed in the war, his marriage had broken down and he had been chased off his land and lost his family farm and was living in Tanzania alone. He was 47 years old and looked 60. And yet he adored Africa and had never left its shores. It was an amazing interaction which obviously took my mind off the dance floor, even though everyone around me continued to get soddenly drunk and insist that Anne-Marie riverdance for us.

Yet the wazungu image is a source of internal conflict, as it always is for me. At one point the drinks bill came for the 8 or so people who were drinking and it was a whopping TzSh82,000 (about $80). I felt horrified by this, not because $80 is a lot of money but because TzSh82,000 is about six weeks’ salary here and I hated the image of wazungu that this bill must have reinforced for the staff. At another point some of us were playing pool and one of the pilot boys leaned over the table and pulled his pants halfway down his ass before taking his shot. This is certainly not acceptable behaviour here (as far as I’m concerned it’s not acceptable anywhere but you know what Aussie pubs are like) so I was completely mortified and yelled at him, then apologised profusely to the waiter who was standing nearby, then insisted that the pilot apologise to him too. The guy accepted the apology but he wasn’t happy. All this, then added to the fact that everyone except me got horrendously drunk and were the last ones in the place (by this time we had joined tables with the tobacco guys), singing Irish folk ballads at the tops of their lungs and yelling at me for not being trashed like them. The whole evening gave me much to think about and it was fairly hilarious to immediately follow it with a three-hour discussion about the behaviour of volunteers at HAPO. Granted, this night was definitely an anomaly and we are a hardworking and dedicated group of volunteers who are certainly focused on the program and not on socialising. But it’s funny that how no matter how hard I try, how sober I stay or how earnestly I apologise on someone else’s behalf, there will always be times when I will be embarrassed here just by virtue of the fact that I am white.