Finally

January 15th, 2011

This first entry comes courtesy of Mark and his very nifty iPad (more on him later).

So, where to begin? The start has certainly been a bit bumpy, what with being a little bit robbed in Dar es Salaam and then simultaneously contracting bacterial and amoebic infections despite diligent efforts to brush my teeth only with bottled water. BUT! I’ve made it to Kigoma, the jumping off point for Gombe, where I will pass the next 7 months (or thereabouts) watching baboons be generally mean to one another.

I’m getting ahead of myself though (this thing is kind of tricky to type on).

Dar is big city. It’s a noisy city. I may not love it. But despite recent events I still feel it pretty benign. People yell at you in the street, hasty half-hearted greetings but they don’t really pursue you. Men on busy roads hawk eclectic mixes of goods: reflective triangles, jump ropes, and hangers in one man’s hands, Teddy bears and recent issues of The Economist in another’s. The call to prayer comes early, along with the heat and all you can think about is a properly cold Fanta and a fan. I spent several days running between government offices–The Commission for Science and Technology and Immigration–ferrying slips of paper and receipts inexplicably from one counter to another, upstairs and down, exchanging them for other slips of paper that brought me one step closer to the coveted RESIDENCE PERMIT. I endured ESL pick-up lines from Chinese business men and conversion attempts by well-meaning middle-aged Indian men. I begged several higher-ups to decrease my wait time, admitting utter stupidity over thinking I could pick the permit up the next day, batting my eyelashes and bowing my head. But eventually I held the permit in my hand and was freed from Dar.

But I’m jumping again. I’m forgetting Sri, Aymeric, and my dear Pooya. After a bad day of losing most of my expensive belongings and a chunk out of my bank account, Sri, one of a triumvirate of MIT business students, invited me to head south with them to research electricity in rural Tanzania. “No running water and no lights,” she warned. Perfect. And it was. We taxied out to Msanga, a village of 2000+ people, and asked people about kerosene usage and solar power and ate obscene amounts of mangos, and I got a crash course in how to start a business (of sorts). And when that was done they claimed they weren’t sick of me, so we hung out some more. We formed a sort of international contingent–India, France, Iran, and the U.S. all represented–and a mix of personalities that worked surprisingly well, chatting over topics various and sundry over beers while I tried not to puke.

And that’s the nutshell. I’ll be more informative in the future, scout’s honor, but, though nifty, the iPad is proving all sorts of tricky when it comes to typing.