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Arusha

March 28th, 2011

I’m sitting in the courtyard of a rather nice safari lodge in Arusha.  Arusha is the bustling staging point for all things Serengeti and Kilimanjaro and is usually crawling with wazungu.  Luckily it’s low season now.  I’m sipping a Tangawizi, the local ginger ale that makes my tongue go vaguely numb in a sort of pleasant way, and unabashedly using the wireless internet and power provided by the lodge.  The rest of Arusha is suffering one of the chronic power outages that has plagued the country for the past months, sometimes knocking out electricity for most of the week.  The explanations for this are vague but troubling.  One person tells me it’s because there has been little rain this rainy season and the power generated by Tanzania’s rivers can’t match demand.  Another says it has to do with the government’s inability to pay its own power bills.  Neither explanation bodes well for the country, environmentally or economically.  But sitting in this lodge you wouldn’t know anything could be wrong.  The Tanzanian Christian music station is pumping peppy beats about following God into the light and lazy mosquitoes likely harboring Dengue fever hover around my feet.  I’ve given up swatting them away.  And the sun is shining.

My reasons for being in Arusha make less sense in the light of day, but I’m still glad I’m here.  The plan was to come here and analyze some data, reevaluate my project, and start work on my written preliminary exam.  I gave myself two weeks.  Truth be told, though, the internet here isn’t any better than in Kigoma and my project so far has been a bit of a bust, so, in reality, I could have stayed in Kigoma and accomplished all that I’ll accomplish here.  But Arusha has plumbing (most places) and fancy restaurants.  The circus is in town.  I can go to movies (albeit bad ones, but I deny myself the luxury of pickiness).  In most ways, this is just a working vacation, a change of venue, a breath of fresh western-ish air, before I head back to the muggy mountains of Gombe.  And Nate is coming.

Arusha is better than Dar.  It’s smaller and the vendors are more persistent, but the town center is pleasantly familiar, even if it has been almost 8 years since I last spent a lot of time there.  The ex-pat community is huge and I’ve already had many conversations with NGO employees who’ve either been here 3 months or 30 years.  You can buy every fruit imaginable on the street — the apples, impossible to find in Kigoma, are to die for — and Swahili isn’t always obligatory (but it helps with bargaining).  Souvenirs are hawked from every street corner and I even managed to brave the Maasai market in an effort to procure some gifts early on.  Bargaining is extremely draining in Arusha because vendors hike the prices into the stratosphere because most wazungu have no idea, and so it takes a good twenty minutes of haggling to bring them down.  I did meet a wonderful mama (middle-aged-to-older woman) who offered me a cup of tea and we chatted for at least half an hour about the weather and business and children, mixing Swahili and English as if they were the same language.  Then I took a daladala (the public bus that looks like a minivan doubling as a clown car, each with a different phrase ranging from the religious to the inscrutable tattooed on the windshield) back to my adviser’s house in the ‘burbs.  They have hot water in the shower.  It’s like I’m staying at the Hilton.