Return to Tanzania

I’ve been back from Tanzania for several months, and my life has hardly slowed down since then, so that amidst the whirlwind, I’ve had little time to write here. But since last night, I have been bursting with hope and with astonished joy, which began when the election results started pouring in and has not abated since. The exuberance is propelling me through my daily tasks today. It’s giving me an extra push to finally blog!

I am long overdue for a post about my spring trip to Tanzania. And so, instead of writing here about politics and all the incredible relief and gratitude and patriotism I feel in this moment, I will write about that other transformation. Because my journey in Tanzania was transformative—and I returned home feeling much the way I do now, on a high, and bursting with fresh energy.

I was in the country for seven weeks. I needed that much time to accomplish my goals: not only revisiting my old Peace Corps village, but also gathering information for the memoir I am writing—there were dozens of people I needed to visit and interview. I once knew them in the village, but they have since scattered themselves across the country.

The length of the trip daunted me in the months leading up to it. Most of the time, when people asked me what I was feeling as the journey approached, the word that came to mind was “dread.” I hated to admit it, but dread was the main thing I felt, and it loomed over my excitement.

I knew it would be physically grueling to travel across Tanzania for so long, mostly in crowded, noisy cities, immersed in a language I hadn’t regularly spoken in two decades, a world away from Ron and my own family and culture. I wasn’t sure how I would hold up, although I was more ready for such a trip now than I had been in a decade. I knew it would be exhausting and often lonely.

In the final days before setting off, excitement finally displaced my dread, and arriving in Tanzania was thrilling at first. I discovered that I still remembered the country intimately, even though it had changed and modernized. I had relearned Swahili for the trip. I slipped easily back into negotiating and bantering with touts and drivers at chaotic bus stendis, and chatting with shop owners at roadside dukas, and squishing myself onto crowded, noisy, diesel-infused vehicles, and wandering through bustling markets. Sitting with old friends at meals, washing my hands under warm water poured over them with a pitcher, the scenes felt deeply familiar. As I formed the ugali into edible scoops with my fingers, something in me relaxed. Until arriving, I hadn’t understood just how much Tanzania was still in me, integrated into my being, even though I hadn’t lived there in over twenty years. But now, to my surprise and happiness, I discovered that I am bicultural in this way, at ease in Tanzania even as an mgeni (foreigner) and a mzungu (white person).

But it was also very hard to be there. It was just as hard as I thought it would be, and more—being familiar with Tanzania didn’t mean I was used to things there. In between the joy over reuniting with my various friends, I was exhausted for the first couple weeks, and exhausted by all the things I had known would be hard. Jet lag. Getting lots of attention as a white person. Needing to negotiate frequently for prices and fares. The chaos of African travel. I sorely missed Ron and my family; I was frequently vexed by bad Wi-Fi connections that made it hard to communicate with them.

I wondered how I had ever survived Peace Corps. Then I realized that what I was doing this time was much harder in a way, because I was doing it all solo. In Peace Corps, I had been part of a supportive community of fellow volunteers, with months of training together and the resources of the U.S. government at my disposal. Now I was on my own.

I was particularly harassed by noise, which surprised me. I had remembered that travel in Tanzanian cities could be noisy, but the noise seems to have intensified since I lived there. The population has exploded and is now twice as large as when I served. There are just a lot more people and vehicles around, and the whole country has electricity now—even Ron’s and my remote villages—and more electricity means more stereos and TVs and devices. And I had forgotten that Tanzanians have different cultural norms around noise than many Americans do. In the first few weeks, noise made it hard to sleep and rest at all times of the day and night. There were all manner of intrusive sounds, from car horns and loud stereos, to roosters and catfights, to people shouting to each other or talking loudly or even singing to themselves!

Once, staying with a friend whose home was usually peaceful and quiet, I was awakened at 2 a.m. by the neighborhood church, whose pastor was for some reason preaching into a microphone and blasting his sermon all over the neighborhood in the middle of the night. My Tanzanian friend was a bit annoyed at this too, I think—but much of the time, I got the sense that Tanzanians didn’t notice or care about sounds that I cared about. That cultural difference only added to my exhaustion and loneliness.

But then something unexpected happened: I changed. It happened midway through my stay in my village, which was midway through my trip. There, I spent eight days in the home of an acquaintance, the daughter of one of my close friends who has passed away. The daughter became a new close friend. She was unendingly gracious to me, but in her house, too, I struggled with noise. Then, after several days there, I discovered that I was sleeping well, and that I was starting to feel very sad to leave her home and the village. I had been uncomfortable there at first, but now I had finally gotten used to things—used to this new version of visiting the village that I used to call home.

Back in the cities again afterwards, I found myself uncomfortable in quiet spaces. I started leaving hotel windows open just to hear more of the sounds from outside! By the time I got to Dar es Salaam, the big city that was the last stop on my trip, I was deeply comforted by the sounds out hotel windows. I was staying in Kariakoo, the African part of town (as opposed to the Indian or expat-heavy districts), and there was an almost constant prattle of men’s voices in the alley outside my room. There were always men talking to their friends or selling things, and there were occasional car horns too—but those didn’t bother me much anymore.

I felt other shifts in myself as well. One was physical: I once again became accustomed to being dirtier than I typically am in the States. The air in Tanzanian cities has a lot of diesel in it, and sometimes also dust or dirt, and it can be muggy. In the village, on this trip, I always felt dirty—it’s hard to stay clean in the rainy season when the courtyard is dirt and the floors are cement. But over time, my standards of cleanliness changed. My American family was surprised, the day after I returned home to Portland, to hear that I hadn’t bothered to shower yet. They had assumed I would want to shower first thing upon returning home, but I had taken a cat bath in the Amsterdam airport the day before, using airplane wipes, and by now that felt good enough. As with my getting used to noise, I had come to feel a certain comfort in not being squeaky clean.

Other shifts were cultural. I never came to love being the only white person everywhere I went, or the attention I got in touristy areas from young men yelling things to me on the street (“Hello, sister!” or “I love you!” or “What’s up my friend!” in either English or Swahili), but I got used to it all again. By the end of the trip, I was comfortable bantering with the men. Someone would yell something to me and I would yell right back to him, more comfortable in Swahili now and with more energy to balance his. That is to say, I became more comfortable being loud and assertive myself, more like a Tanzanian city dweller.

In Swahili, I started to fall into the rhythm of the language, the way I used to—not just the words, but also the inflections. Asking a question, the tone is different than in English: less gentle, more forceful, the same tone we would use for an emphatic statement. The casual “Eheee” for “Yeah” often starts with an emphatic tone too. I found myself doing these things naturally.

All these personal shifts aside, it was fascinating to see how the country is changing. I am nostalgic for the quiet life I once had in my village, which during Peace Corps often felt like a retreat from the modern world. But my quality of life was much higher than that of most villagers. I had no electricity or running water, but I had several other key amenities that most of them did not have. A mattress to sleep on rather than a thin grass mat on the floor. Money to buy enough blankets and clothing and charcoal to stay warm in the biting highland cold. A water tank that captured rainwater off my roof, so that most of the year, I didn’t have to carry it up the steep hill from the stream in the valley. Access to whatever medical care I might need, and the easy ability to afford travel outside the village.

So I am happy for my Tanzanian friends, almost all of whom now have a higher standard of living than twenty-two years ago—indeed, the whole country is rapidly modernizing. Along with electricity, piped water is becoming more common, although only in some cities is it somewhat potable. Most people’s homes are now at least partly plastered with cement, rather than being made only of burnt or unburnt brick or mud. New metal roofs are taller, better constructed, and factory-painted to prevent rust. People have beds with mattresses. Sit-down toilets are becoming common, and most squat latrines are the more sanitary ceramic kind, rather than just dirt floors with holes in the ground. The internet and cellular service are widespread. Everyone has a cell phone or smartphone—and people are just as addicted to their phones as are Americans. More roads are paved. Schools often have at least a couple new buildings, with electric lights and modern windows with glass panes.

Not everyone has the amenities listed above, and there is still widespread poverty and struggle. There are still many premature deaths—the saddest aspect of preparing for my trip was learning how many of my old friends had died. University education is much more common than before, but not necessarily useful, because there are few jobs for graduates, many of whom become things like motorcycle taxi drivers. Oppression of LGBT people has worsened. The country has descended into dictatorship.

But there are positive social changes, too—it isn’t only infrastructure that has improved. Women are visibly working in more jobs than before and have risen to leadership positions at all levels of society: in schools, in villages, and even in the presidency (or dictatorship). Access to health care seems to have improved. And thanks in large part to the U.S. PEPFAR program, HIV/AIDS is much less stigmatized now, and people are much more educated about it and have far better access to life-saving medicine. (PEPFAR was started by George W. Bush and has been credited with saving 26 million lives. In an act of colossal cruelty and short-sightedness, the program was cut last year by Trump, one of the many reasons I am so thankful that the American public has resoundingly rebuked him this week!)

These are just a small fraction of my observations. To me, it felt like I was witnessing an invigorating era for Tanzania: there are still great struggles, but overall, over the decades, there has been upward movement as the country modernizes. It felt like everyone I knew was determinedly working to make their lives better, and with hope of success.

I will conclude by returning to the personal. When I describe this trip to friends and family now, a word I often use is “empowering.” I was so nervous about traveling in Africa, as a forty-seven-year-old chronically ill person. But the trip made me more resilient, and by the time I returned, I felt energized and hardy, and much more confident in my ability to travel.

I had accomplished almost every single thing I had wanted to. I reconnected with old friends and their children. I paid my respects at the graves of those who had died, shedding tears of long-unexpressed grief. I revisited my village and Ron’s. And I gathered reams of information for my memoir.

On that piece: I carried a hefty booklet of organized, printed, translated interview questions with me everywhere I went. I don’t think the booklet was ever more than twenty feet from me in my entire time there! I was working almost constantly throughout the trip—taking pictures and notes, conducting interviews, and using nearly every spare hour to write, organize notes, or work on trip logistics. Between the trip and the months leading up to it, I don’t remember another period of my life when I have sustained such intense focus and productivity for so long. (I did take two little breaks to be a tourist: a three-night safari and a brief stay on the island of Zanzibar. But even in those places, I was still often working!)

By the end, I was amazed that everything had gone according to plan. I had expected some major snafu along the way, with my health or miscommunication or some endeavor falling through, but there was none. My months of hard work had paid off.

It was incredibly meaningful to reconnect with Tanzania as the forty-seven-year-old me. Twenty-two years is a very long time. People who weren’t even born when I was in Peace Corps are now grown and parenting children of their own. I was a different person when I lived there; Tanzania was in some ways a different country. But now I feel a new connection to it, and it’s a deep connection, because it’s rooted in that older past.

For a long time, since Peace Corps, my life and service there had come to feel almost like a dream, like something someone else had done. Now the “Tanzanian” part of me has reawakened, and it brings me joy. I love getting WhatsApp greetings from my friends there, which happens frequently. I miss them a great deal. In the end, I was very sad to leave. And I love the fresh perspective my trip has brought to life back home.

As I traveled, I found myself spontaneously writing a book about my trip. I didn’t expect to produce this “bonus” memoir, but now I have. It captures my experiences in much more detail, and I hope to eventually share it publicly. Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, enjoy this beautiful, glorious day—and the hope and change that are in the air.