THE THIRD TERM

ILBORU REVISITED, THE PEACE CORPS REJOINED

Spring came late to the Southern Hemisphere this year. A few days before its expected return, I divined those few oracles still accessible to me and determined its arrival time as 3:22 a.m. on the 23rd. By the eve of its coming I had forgotten all about it and was much more concerned with a crescendoing intestinal malaise that suggested many ups and downs during the night. The threat was all the more ominous in that the school pump had been out of order for almost a month, and right now all five of my water-storage buckets were nearly dry. But luckily the few articles from old New Yorker magazines still left in my reading file turned out to be of unusual interest, and they carried me through the evening and a long night of sound sleep with no further discomfort.

When I awakened the next morning, spring was far from my thoughts, but suddenly I felt compelled, even before breakfast, to do something about the messy yard. So I donned some very dirty clothes, always in copious supply here, and a pair of dishwashing gloves acquired in Nairobi, and charged out to work; it was the midterm vacation week at Ilboru. I quickly scraped up enough bamboo stalks and dead leaves to start a roaring fire in the pit north of the house, and I used this to incinerate the refuse accumulated inside plus anything combustible I found outside. One by one my neighbors opened doors to see what was occurring and then quickly withdrew. It was the most peaceful morning I've spent here. The loan of a rake would have produced a tidier outcome, but its absence was not a serious handicap.

During the weekends separating housecleaning and yard-keeping activities I finally managed to meld together the lists of birds identified on my several trips with those seen locally. It's more than a little confusing since the two standard field guides, one for East Africa, the other for central and southern African countries, naturally often use different common names for the same bird and occasionally even disagree on the Latin species designation; disagreements on genus I simply ignore. And the books' drawings don't always match my sightings. Recently, just to cite one example, I heard the unmistakable bell-like tones of a bird I hadn't previously identified–it's commonly called the bellbird here–just outside my window. There were two of them, and they were so close I couldn't use binoculars. Fascinated, I watched and listened for quite a few minutes. In my part of Africa these birds are known as tropical boubous, a name applied to a somewhat different species in more southern countries, where these are called southern boubous. To make matters even worse, the birds here, which I have seen a half-dozen times since, lack the pink flush shown on the breast feathers in both field guides and look exactly like the southern African swamp boubou. Oh well, this entire bird-watching exercise may itself turn out to be a big boo-boo, and to resolve these uncertainties will certainly require some serious fireside reflection in another–northern–autumn when I resume normal living.

A few days later I discovered to my great happiness that the freshly cleaned yard was attracting quite a few birds, like manikins, firefinches, and seedeaters, who could evidently now find the food that was previously buried in debris. So I started watching the trees and bushes around my place and was rewarded with a dozen new identifications in two or three weeks, which brought my tentative total of African birds to 490.

The field guides are awkward enough, but the main difficulty in identifying birds here is the human environment. On one glorious weekend morning in early spring–southern–for example, I was idly gazing out the window while drying the breakfast dishes, when I noticed a small flash of chartreuse flit by in the bushes beside the road. I had no sooner picked up my binoculars–they seldom are out of reach–when a tchagra, a totally different bird, jumped down to the ground, and I turned to see if I could determine which one it was. But there was no time, because just then Mzee the Maasai came by with his goat, whose loud bleating was in itself enough to scare off the birds. Even alone he would have achieved the same end, however, since, like most Maasai in this area, he also speaks Kiswahili. Now that language is a vehicle of communication, of course, but in my judgment it is intended much less to convey information than it is to announce one's presence, no matter how transitory, to all within earshot; it would simply never do to pass by unnoticed. Fortunately I saw the first bird again the next day, and after long and careful study I identified it definitely as a gray-backed camaroptera. I have continued to see it occasionally, but always alone, ever since then. Tchagras are still around also, typically in pairs, and their identification, based on a verbal description in the eastern guide and drawings in the southern guide, but again with conflicting Latin and common names, satisfies me.

It was very exciting one morning on the way back to class after a midmorning tea break at home to identify a sulfur-breasted bush shrike in a tree by the road as it flitted from branch to branch with such rapidity that it seemed never to be where I looked. I am an object of great fascination to young and old alike as I train my binoculars on they know not what. That device is often assumed to be a camera, and particularly in nearby areas where I'm not so well known, I have difficulty persuading observers that I'm watching birds, not taking pictures (Si pigi picha). Only in what used to be named Burma have I met people as excited to have their pictures taken as are the Tanzanians. Several of the other birds identified during this period were truly exciting as well, but the little thrush with its lichen-like wing patches will always be a special favorite.

Communication and transportation, both within the country and to the rest of the world, remain two of Tanzania's biggest problems. The telephone at the school, for example, is so antiquated and unreliable that nobody, except the headmaster perhaps, ever uses it; it's quicker to walk to town than it is to wait for the phone, or the school's Land Rover for that matter if one has been able to reserve it. Even if the driver appears on time, which is unlikely, he will stop so often to greet friends and pick up hitchhikers that no time is saved. The only way to get a cab to the school when one is needed to convey luggage to town is to walk down and hire one, at the roundtrip price of course. A long-distance phone call requires my walking to town and back plus waiting about a half hour to get the call placed, and usually the line is not too clear when the call is initiated in Arusha. So ordinarily Dow places the call at a prearranged time to the PC Training Site, which requires two hours, roundtrip, of fast walking, or to a hotel when I'm traveling out of the country. We also use fax for serious matters, which is quite straightforward for Dow, but for me it requires the roundtrip walk to the Training Site at a time when its manager, Stanley, is there.

We have also begun using express airmail in recent months. Expensive, but so far quite reliable, it gets mail from one country to the other in three days. I used it to send my first five Social Security checks back to Seattle; they were accepted by Arusha's main post office at 10:10 a.m. on August 19, and Dow had them in the bank on August 25. All subsequent checks have been deposited electronically and on time, so that settles that matter. When I reached the PC Site on October 1 to receive a phone call from Dow, I found a fax from him announcing that my computer had been returned on September 25 and to my total surprise that the long-missing box had been delivered by the postman on September 27; both were in good shape. That resolved two more difficulties. We discussed the details further during our subsequent conversation, and then I called Martin. Only a few days before, he had gotten the complete story from the shipping agent. The latter had unilaterally decided not to send the box airfreight as I had requested, but instead to use regular airmail; that we had known for some time. The man he asked to take the box to the post office did so, but he unilaterally decided to send it regular surface mail, a much slower process; I assume the extra money went into his pocket. The shipper took no interest in our problem until September, but when he finally did and learned what had happened, he was able to trace the missing box to Amsterdam. He then insisted it be airmailed from there immediately, which it apparently was.

The letter to Margaret had not been sent, and as the day for her visit, September 30, approached I decided not to send it, at least not until after our meeting. One of the headmaster's monthly tests was to be given during the week previous to the visit, and I toyed for some time with the idea of using her visit day to go over the tests, something the students here insist on having done, but even I am not quite that nasty. She arrived the afternoon before, interrupting one class to discuss which class she and Susan, the education consultant who was substituting for Sharon, who was then in her three-week term as acting country director, would interrupt the next day. Since they were spending the next night at Gibb's Farm, Susan, at least, wanted to make an early start, so I suggested the morning's first class, at 7:30. When I added that they were quite free to bypass my class and spend the whole day at the Farm, Margaret declined noting that they were required to visit each PCV near the middle of the two-year term. That they were late the next morning was fine with me. “Margaret didn't want to leave the dining room without finishing her sausages,” Susan explained later. I could easily understand that, particularly if they stayed at Victoria House as I suspect. The class went well, as form-six classes almost always do now, and the letters of evaluation were completely favorable...even if I didn't write a lesson plan.

Airmail letters from the US generally reach Arusha in 15 days, but they can take anywhere from one to six weeks more to reach me depending on whether they are mailed to Box 8082–PC Training Site–or to Box 3014–Ilboru Secondary School. Stanley picks up mail from the former quite faithfully, and I try to walk to the Site at least once each week to collect what's come. Occasionally he sends James, the gardener, up the hill on his bike with important material, or if he's thirsty for a beer or two brings it himself aboard his piki piki. The recent opening of a restaurant and bar at the nearby Ilboru Safari Lodge has greatly strengthened my bargaining position, and after my last roundtrip to Nairobi, he carried the cameras and documents I always deposit with him during overnight absences to the Lodge on foot because his motorbike was being repaired.

The ways of Mr. Chagga, on the other hand, who collects mail for the school, are as mysterious and frustrating to me as are those of the headmaster and the academic master, all three of whom come from a tribe of that name. The Chaggas are the dominant ethnic group in Northern Tanzania, and anyone contemplating a visit here should certainly read Allen Bechky's comments about them in the “Sierra Club Guide to East Africa,” both the general ones and those regarding Kilimanjaro guides. Although bluntly written, they are if anything a bit understated. Sometimes my mail reaches its assigned pigeonhole in the faculty mail rack, but more often it goes into a locked cupboard in an office shared by several staff members. Only Mr. Chagga has a key, and even when he is on campus, which is seldom, he usually leaves the key in his house. He set a new record on November 24, a day I'll never forget for other reasons, when he handed me a letter postmarked October 7 in Dar, an absentee ballot I had really hoped to use postmarked October 14 in Yakima, Washington, and a card for a piece of registered mail to be picked up at the downtown post office. It turned out that this last had arrived at the post office on October 31 and fortunately contained nothing more important than cookie recipes from Alison. I do continue to believe that the Peace Corps really is only for kids anymore.

During the year and a half in Tanzania four packages have reached me by surface mail. Of these two were in transit for over seven months, but the other two made it across the seas in fewer than six. One of the former, a field guide to European birds loaned to me by a friend, arrived simultaneously with the season's first migratory birds, and I have used it to considerable advantage. The most exciting visitors to date have been the European bee-eaters. Beautifully red from underneath and a gorgeous mixture of colors from above, they are magnificent fliers; it was sheer delight to see them in sizable flocks all around Ilboru for several weeks.

Shortly before the end of classes I sponsored a five-day safari to some of the nearby parks for my 69 form-six students and three of their teachers. Fortunately one of my Tanzanian colleagues took charge of all local arrangements. Only three or four of the students had been in even one of the parks, so it was quite exciting for them. They still really don't know how fortunate they were to see 15 lions, six cheetahs, five rhinos, and four leopards, to mention only the more sought after animals. It was the first time I had visited Lake Manyara, and I was very impressed, particularly with the forest, starting right from the entrance, and the blue monkeys it contained. The lake itself was quite low, but the waterfowl were still interesting, if neither so numerous nor varied as they will be after the rains. Once again I stayed at Ndutu Lodge and Gibb's Farm. The former has certainly not slipped, and the latter was much better than on the previous visit. I stayed on at Gibb's for two extra days, partly to rest but mainly because of a respiratory distress that I've experienced several times before in Tanzania. It was here that my bird total reached 498 with the identification of the long sought after golden-winged sunbird. I wasn't even disappointed that it was the female, since she lacks only the long tail of the male to match his beauty.

The 24th of November, on which date terminal examinations were to begin, was a day that I had long awaited. Many weeks before I had asked when they would start and if mine could be scheduled early in that period. On these matters the headmaster and the academic master gave me their full cooperation, although I must admit I had hoped to finish the term at least a week earlier. Sponsorship of the student safari did not hurt my standing in the academic community; even the second master is friendly and goes out of his way to speak to me. If anything they were too helpful; both of my examinations, involving six streams of students, were scheduled for the morning of this, the first day.

Much of Africa is still suffering through a period of extended drought, and Tanzania is no exception. A few showers had fallen earlier in the month, but they served mainly to compact the dust, which is several inches deep in places on the road I walk to town. One recent morning I commented to Mama Lolo, who tends a small garden patch just outside my living room windows, “God has finally sent you some rain.” Although a devout Catholic, she responded with unrestrained bitterness, “Yes, but He sent too little too late.” She was right; the neighborhood contains many, many gardens with dried-up maize, bean, tomato, and onion plants.

It had rained heavily during the early hours this morning, however, and showers, some of them also quite heavy, continued until noon. My faculty colleagues were almost giddy with delight. They, and I, happily sloshed through the mud and splashed in the puddles. We even walked in the rain without umbrellas; it felt so good. Mr. Mnjokava helped start my tests and picked up some of the papers at the end. Although he had no need to stay on campus, he chose to do so, and we spent most of the morning outside discussing a variety of matters: our dissatisfaction with the philosophy underlying Tanzanian education; our support for the teachers' strike that had begun in Dar a few weeks previously and was now beginning to spread; our disappointment with the headmaster's total exclusion of his faculty from academic decision making; the value of obtaining one electronic calculator for each A-level student and teaching him to use it efficiently; and the desirability of revising my schedule for the next–and last–term by adding one more double period weekly for each of my form-six streams. The first three matters had already been discussed with Mr. Makonge and Mr. Lolo, both of whom shared our views, and when later in the morning I mentioned the last matter to Mr. Mtui, he totally concurred. My spirits were high and my heart light when I carried the six stacks of papers back to the house.

After returning from safari, I remained in considerable discomfort, aching in the shoulders and upper back and coughing forcefully enough to make sleep difficult and to bring up such amazing volumes of phlegm that I had to arise and spit them out. Although I've been bitten before by tsetse flies, those that evaded my defenses at Lake Manyara were the first to produce swelling, discoloration, and itching, all of which lasted for a week. When some staff members at Gibb's returned from a visit to Tarangire and told me the flies were bad there also, I dropped all plans to go, despite having a car and driver at my disposal, and instead spent a second day basking in the sun. During that first weekend back at Ilboru I began to wonder if my malaise might be serious. Could I actually even have trypanosomiasis?

We had stopped at the Training Site on our way home from safari so I could retrieve the personal items I'd left there. I described my symptoms to Nurse Grace, and she suggested that I continue resting over the weekend to see if that helped. Since it didn't, I walked down the hill after class–by now I had canceled the extra fifth class I had been teaching late each afternoon–to see her. She had gone off to bury her 104-year-old grandmother and had left instructions for me to visit a doctor downtown. I demurred. In matters of importance I want someone along I've learned to trust. Stanley agreed to ask her to collect me the next afternoon so we could visit the doctor together, and I went back up the hill. I used my favorite taxi this time, since I still felt pretty tired.

Grace is an unusually personable and attractive young Tanzanian woman, and whenever she comes to campus, heads turn, student and faculty alike. And when she takes my hand and leads me into the waiting vehicle, the envy is almost ponderable. So it was this warm, sunny, Tuesday afternoon. I waved cheerily to three male teachers standing nearby and yelled: “Sign me out, guys; we're off on a picnic.” The headmaster had only a few days before released yet another secular letter, this one putting all sorts of restrictions and reporting requirements on the comings and goings of faculty members. So far as I can tell, nobody, and certainly not I, paid the least attention.

We waited quite some time to see the doctor, who turned out to be a real jewel. His hands had that sensitivity of feel and his mind that awareness of his patient's problems and emotional needs that so few doctors take time to develop. I felt secure with his evaluation even if surprised that a somewhat higher than normal blood pressure turned out to be his main concern. He asked Grace to buy some Valium and a painkiller for me, which she did, without prescription, at a nearby pharmacy. We then went to her office where she drew two cc of blood and made two slides for microscopic analysis. A few days later Grace arrived at my house and announced that my blood tests were normal and that I had neither malaria nor trypanosomiasis. She took my blood pressure, which was still a bit high but she thought okay. Finally she reminded me that the doctor wished to see me again. At our first meeting he had apologized for being too busy that day to talk and had expressed the wish to have a longer social chat sometime later; we had agreed on late afternoon, November 24.

By the time I got to the house with my papers, I was hungry, much too hungry to walk downtown for lunch, so I ate at the Ilboru Safari Lodge. Although its bar is quite good, the kitchen and service need considerable improvement. Still, I enjoy its owner, Mike, a retired Tanzanian Army Colonel with training at Sandhurst and in China and Yugoslavia, and he treats me well. Afterward, I walked to town–the rain hadn't affected the road all that much–completed an errand or two, and wandered over to the doctor's office at least a half hour early. In just a few minutes he appeared and invited me into his office for our informal chat.

He is a cardiologist, trained primarily in the UK, and although he enjoyed several years of work in Arusha's main hospital, he is much happier operating his own clinic. The equipment he needs has been acquired gradually, and right now what he wants most are a treadmill, for stress tests, and a personal computer. When he mentioned the latter, I was reminded that Mr. Mnjokava also wants one. Our talk turned to AIDS and malaria, two of Africa's greatest killers. “No one needs to die of malaria,” he said. “We know how to treat that.” His face turned somber, however, when I mentioned Grace's assertion that nearly 40% of Arusha's adult population acknowledged being HIV positive. He did not challenge her figure.

When Grace arrived at the appointed hour, my blood pressure was taken, twice, first with his conventional cuff and then with her modern digital sensor. The systolic readings were 122 and 121; I don't recall the diastolic. After a brief examination, he concluded that I was perfectly okay. We ended our conversation by checking the claim Grace had made to me a few days earlier that she was five feet eleven inches tall. That's my height, and I certainly am taller than she. Well, if the doctor's centimeter scale is properly positioned on the wall, she is only five feet eight, and I've slumped to five feet ten. Declining the ride home that Grace and her Peace Corps driver offered me, I instead walked a few blocks to my favorite restaurant for pasta and Valpolicella and then set out in quest of my favorite taxi for a ride up the hill. It was nearly dusk, and I was both buoyant and relaxed.

I know nothing about official driving regulations in Tanzania, but no one walks here for more than a few minutes before realizing that all vehicles, including bicycles, take precedence over pedestrians. The latter give way, no matter which direction the vehicle is turning, whether it is leaving a driveway, or what. Drivers demand this right of way, and pedestrians are careful to comply. There is only one exception, at least in Arusha: a half–dozen or so clearly marked crosswalks–“zebras,” the Europeans call them. There are two near the post office and bank I use, and even when walking to other destinations, I often go several blocks out of my way just to cross the street within their comparatively safe boundaries. Drivers do respect them, usually.

When I first started walking around in this area, I noticed that people often looked down at my feet. Shoes are very important here, and they were curious to know what I was wearing. Not too long ago, when first my balance went and then my memory–or was it the other way around?–I started using a collapsible ski pole, with its basket removed, as a walking stick while in the mountains. In fact I purchased a pair and wore out one of them while trekking some 300 miles in Nepal just weeks before entering the Peace Corps; I carried the other, still unused, with me to Arusha in case I decided to undertake similar activities in Africa. Not long after beginning to teach at Ilboru, I began to carry this pole, fully compressed, whenever I ventured very far off the schoolyard. I liked the weight of something in my hand, particularly an object that could be useful in defense against dogs or packs of little boys. Frankly, however, I must confess also to thinking of it as a swagger stick. Mr. Mtui calls it my “magic stick,” and others think of it as having symbolic significance of a different sort. Still, I was surprised one day to be stopped by two students I don't know, one of whom asked, “We’ve been told that the stick indicates your rank of Professor; is that true?” Passersby no longer look at my feet.

My favorite cabbie parks his car, a beat-up Peugeot 504, near a gas station between the two crosswalks on the main road from town up the hill toward the Arusha-Nairobi highway. I started across the lower one, the one nearer town and hence the restaurant. As usual I was carrying my brief case and walking stick, the latter in my right hand, the case in my left. Just then a vehicle sped by, behind me. It came very close but didn't touch me. Instinctively I tapped its rear bumper with my stick while continuing to walk; at home I would have shouted something derisive or given the driver the finger. Even before I got to the other side of the road, I was suddenly grasped from behind by the car's occupants, two strong young men, one on either side of me.

“We're off-duty police officers, and you just made a stupid mistake,” they charged. “No I didn't; you almost ran me down in a crosswalk,” I retorted. “You're going with us to the police station.” “No, I'm not.” With that the discussion was over, and they pushed me into the back seat of their car. I didn't resist, but I did keep the briefcase and walking stick firmly in my grasp. “This isn't the way to the police station,” I objected when they failed to turn left onto the road going there. “We're going to teach you a lesson,” was the substance of their reply.

They drove past the Conference Center to the Nairobi highway, turned right, continued just past the Mt. Meru hotel, Arusha's finest for what little that's worth, and turned left onto an unpaved road that ascends toward the mountain itself. Once, in hope of dampening their enthusiasm for doing something rash, I commented, “I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer teaching at Ilboru Secondary School.” “Well, we didn't invite you to come,” was their retort. “That's all too true,” I thought and then laughed to myself. The road we were on was quite familiar to me, because I had walked along it for several miles the second Sunday of training, and the Jackson family had lived just off it for a month or two when I was visiting them frequently. Still, I couldn't guess what these two had in mind, but as time passed I suspected increasingly that there was no plan.

“You don't seem at all sorry for your mistake,” one of them said. “What are you going to do about it?” “I'm going to leave the country soon and never come back.” I gave my answer quickly but quietly, and it was mostly true. I was leaving for home in less than a week, and it wasn't at all certain that I could, or indeed should, return. This episode would be only one of several factors considered in reaching a decision. We drove on in silence for several more minutes, and then the car stopped. “Shall I get out and walk back to town? Is that what you want?” There was no reply, but I thought to be free of them was my best option, so I exited quickly. A group of small boys standing nearby greeted me respectfully and cheerfully. “Can I safely walk back to town from here?” “Hamna shida,” was their reply. I stood around waiting for the car to leave, and when it did I noted the license number–ARH 602. The walk back to the highway was surprisingly short, and I immediately crossed over to the hotel side. After spending a few minutes inside, I came out and hailed a cab for the ride up the hill, this one a Peugeot 505 in mint condition and with soothing music on its radio. The day was over.

Surprisingly, I wasn't at all perturbed by this incident as it unfolded, but in the following days spent grading 135 final examinations, I often wondered, “What will happen if we meet again?”

W. Vance Johnson

30 Nov 93