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| Monday, 06 February 2012 |
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Home  Musings More Musings (2004) Village TZ |
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34 million people, five million of them here in Dar, and Tanzania is
still…well, a village. Here is what I mean:
We went up to Sadani last weekend, a ten bungalow hotel three hours up
the coast at the mouth of the Wami river. Here think hippos,  think
crocs, the place is teeming with them. The river guide shouted at Luke
to take his hand out of the water when he dipped it in per his parent’s
instruction to get some gunk off – and it wasn’t in for a split
second…I mean truly the kid would rather eat broccoli then wash. Think
crocs enough to take your hand off that fast.
Truly, one of my favorite object is that ‘croc head under glass’ we had
in the living room back home…monster croc,  came from the croc farm
outside Antananarivo where it lived until it died – you know the one I
mean. Eight feet and something inches and over 1000 lbs. Not a croc to
smile at, let’s at least agree on that. So the owner of the Sadani
Safari Lodge where we are staying – and here I am getting waaaay off
track – says, ‘I found this crocodile head’ the way you might say ‘I
had a farm in Africa’ – so I say, yeah, great, croc heads…my turf…bring
it on! Next thing you know he is actually saying, ‘well I bet my croc
head is bigger than yours,’ and I’m saying, ‘is not,’ and he’s saying,
‘is so.’ And guess what? His is bigger than mine. I mean – and I’m not
one to exaggerate and I am truly not exaggerating here…his is waaaay
bigger, maybe twice my size. Think hippos...and think crocs...and think
croc that eat hippos, I kid you not, crocs about a hippo’s size.
That brings to mind an awful tragedy that was in yesterday’s paper. A
young man and women were married in the women’s village and then rode
together on the same bicycle over to the man’s village where the
reception was being held. On the way, as they passed beneath a tree, a
cobra reached down from a branch and bit the new bride on the head. She
was dead before they made it to the reception.
Of course there is not
one single person in all of Tanzania who thinks for one second that was
real a snake. That was Bad Bad Magic – we all know that (including me).
An awful thing, and I feel a bit bad for repeating it here...the poor
families. But in that terrible vain, it also reminds me of that wedding
one of our friends attended which was being officiated by the father of
the bride, who was a big deal local minister. He kneeled over with a
heart attack before he finished pronouncing the vows…
Well I have really drawn us off track, and I apologize for that. This
was supposed to be a story about the Village Tanzania …and now it is
too late for that…oh well, maybe one tiny thought will suffice. In the
Village Tanzania, life for thirty of the thirty four million people
living here hasn’t changed in a thousand years (or maybe not even all
that much in the full ten million since the Birth of Man). To
illustrate this point to Kate and Luke as we are rolling through this
very very rural area on very very muddy roads, I said, ‘the people out
here in these villages have to make virtually everything they use,
themselves. They have to grow, or kill, what they eat - using tools
they make from materials available right at hand. Nothing else. Imagine
a life in which you have to do everything yourself…construct your house
from materials you find, make your own toys, build your own furniture,
even weave and sew your own clothes.’
So, being normal kids, they immediately set out to prove me wrong. And
this is what they came up with over the next couple of hours driving: 3
bicycles, five hats, and the clothes on people’s backs (the cloth, that
is, as most of the clothes they themselves had sown). Everything else,
everything else we saw, the villagers had cut, or killed, or woven, or
cobbled – had created - all by them very own selves. And they call Dar
‘Bongo’, a slang term that means ‘brains’, because it supposed to take
brains to live here. I guess that mean you can’t – you know – just,
well, create everything you need. Who are the real Bongos, is what I
want to know? And so, for now, we end another chapter in the life of
the Village Bongo. |
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Heard This? |
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I bought a box of animal crackers and it
said on it "Do not eat if seal is broken."
So I opened up the box, and sure enough... |
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