Chapter Seven

I’ve been thinking about my Nana a lot lately. It made me cry last night how much I miss her. We were at evening prayer in the sitting room (yes, we are obliged to pray before and after tea and meals, and a half hour reading of the “word of god” at night after dinner. I’m undercover as a non-practicing but baptized Christian for the sake of reducing friction with my homestay ‘mama’) and I have nothing to do but sit quietly and think, because the whole session is in Kiswahili, when all of a sudden I’m thinking about her and the tears start rolling down my face. Embarrassing, yes, but it had been building in mind all day and had finally come to the boiling point here in the quiet of my mind at this, the first real opportunity I’d had for the quiet reflection my heart had been craving all day.
First, because a couple of my friends have asked, I’m going to interject that the reason I came to Africa a month and a half before the volunteer program I’m now working in began was to do some preliminary, primary research for my Master’s thesis, which will be starting in the fall. Because I’m in a separate M.A. program I still need to apply for schools to get accepted to do my Ph.D., which means that I need to do everything I can to set myself off from the pack, including writing a thesis based on real ‘primary’ source research, which means documents actually written by the subjects of the history.
I went to Moçambique to find documents in the national historical archives, if they existed, written by the earliest Portuguese colonists of East Africa. It turned out there was nothing there that was not in the national archives in Lisbon, and I’ve told you a bit about the drama I’ve had getting those home. In the end, the experience of dealing with the bureaucracy and finding something I want, even if I could have found it somewhere else more easily, combined with the fact that I got to get culturally familiar with the country I’ll be writing my thesis on, made the trip worth it academically. And of course, from a purely experiential perspective it was awesome just to see a new and different place.
Now I’m in Mateves, Tanzania, a village in Arusha Province, whose capital, Arusha town, is the biggest city in the north and the center of tourism for Mount Kilimanjaro. I’m here with an organization, OneHeartSource, which is building a mid-sized compound in Mateves that currently supports a small orphanage, a little corn field (‘maize’ in local parlance) and the offices from which they administer the volunteer program.
The volunteers, in addition to mentoring and tutoring the orphans, do manual labor to expand the site (currently focused on a permanent structure for a chicken coop and a pair of five-a-side soccer fields which will be the first facility in a growing community center/clinic complex), teach AIDS/HIV and sex education in local elementary and secondary schools, and live in homestays around the village with families, who get compensated for the cost and inconvenience of hosting us and also benefit from the educational interactions and the individual generosity of the volunteers.
Sunday night, we stayed in Arusha after going on a day-hike to a truly spectacular waterfall. At dinner with a few of the other volunteers the topic of crazy family members came up and, of course, my beloved, departed grandmother was one of the subjects. In the course of describing her I talked about how politically passionate she had been, how she knew Cesar Chavez and how, for a certain memorable period of my mother’s life, she had used to wear intra-uterine contraceptive devices as earrings specifically so that whenever someone asked her about her ‘interesting’ jewelry, she could strike up a conversation about family planning and a woman’s right to control her own reproductive process.
The next morning, we got back to work in Mateves planning our lessons for that afternoon and I ran across a question from our ‘Swali box’ (‘Question box’) that had caught my eye when we’d first translated them. “If you’ve been hiding a condom for a long time, when you use it, will it break?”
Now, there are, of course, all sorts of innocent explanations for the motivation of this question. ‘Hiding’ may have just meant saving; it might have meant hiding from friends to avoid getting teased; it might have meant hiding it from parents in order to hide from them the fact that their child is sexually active or thinking about becoming so. But it also opens up the possibility that the child is afraid of being caught buying new ones, which are subsidized by the government and temptingly cheap, less than eight American cents for a three-pack, because of cultural mores against contraception. Now, regardless of why the child would be hiding them, if I ever knew my Nana, and I like to think I did, the necessity of ensuring that this child had safe access to contraception (even though it’s a sixth grade class, there are older kids in there too because of the state of education in Tanzania) would have rang in her head like an alarm bell.
Partly because of her, and partly just because I’m my grandmother’s grandson and, as I like to think of it, ‘they’ raised me right, I wanted to offer to talk to any of the kids after class who were feeling nervous about buying or getting condoms. I was vetoed by my teaching partners and by the section coordinator who was worried about the repercussions for OHS if word got out to parents that we were giving out condoms in school (which is not precisely what I proposed, I must say). Frankly, I was pretty disappointed in that policy. I’m perfectly willing to take full individual responsibility for it and to do whatever it would take for OHS to maintain the opportunity for plausible deniability, and I think it shows a lack of the courage of our convictions to pass the buck on such an issue.
Anyways, with one thing and another, and arguing, although deferentially, if you can imagine me being deferential, for the importance of it, I had a pretty introspective day during which thoughts about my ideals chased thoughts of my need to learn to bend in high wind, which chased thoughts of my Nana around and around my brain. The whole thing makes me teary eyed again just thinking about how we failed to do what I think she would have wanted us to do, but at the same time, I know she would have wanted me to go with the flow and how proud of me she would have been just for trying and for everything else I’m doing here and for how far I’m coming in my pursuit of my career and everything.
OK. It’s late, I’m gonna break up again if I write about it any longer, and I need to get up early tomorrow if I’m gonna get a run (yes, Ma, I’m running in the mornings regularly here), so good night, strong values and passionate dreams to you all.
I love you Nana.

3/8/10

Chapter Six

Well, I’m headed north now, but nothing is really happening except that the god, English language book that I finally found a few days ago got forgotten in the bed of the pick-up that I got a ride to the hotel in last night. So, I guess I’m stuck with nothing to do but write again. I think I’ll go back and try and finish the narrative of the trip to South Africa.
The South Africa v. Mexico match ended somewhat disappointingly, and I gathered my things to go. I jumped in a taxi, told him to take me to the cheapest hotel he knew and off we go. We’ve only just left the airport grounds when I look through my backpack and realize…
“Crap! I forgot the laptop in the internet café!” I’d plugged it in to get a little bit of a charge.
See, this is where I’m glad it took me a while to write this part. I’ve mentioned it enough in subsequent stories that my mom already knows what happened to her computer. Still, it raised my heart rate for quite a little bit there while we raced back for it. Still, the driver didn’t seem all that annoyed about having to pay the entry toll twice for one fare, and I don’t think he even charged me extra for it, although there’s no way of knowing since there are no taxi meters anywhere on the continent as far as I know (though admittedly I can’t say about South Africa or Egypt).
At any rate, I stayed in this ‘cheap’ hotel for $35 U.S. Nice place, admittedly, and a good transitional place for getting used to African accommodations. I suppose the first twenty-four hours was an acclimatization period in more ways than one. Thus far, knock on wood, it’s the only period during which I was suckered into spending more money than I should have or for something that I didn’t really want or need.
The next morning I went out looking for a bus south. Now the classic image of travel in developing countries is the heavily overloaded mini-bus carrying as many chickens as people inside, and I’ve ridden in my fair share since I’ve been here, certainly. But for international or long distance travel I’ve found that there are plenty of charter bus companies, many running busses far more comfortable than a Greyhound, and at competitive prices.
In this case, none of the three bus lines I visited had any buses headed south that day, or rather, because they left daily at 6 a.m. they had already gone. So I booked a bus for the next morning and had the day to kill. Looking back, I realize I probably could have caught a chapa or dalla-dalla, the local names for the informal mini-busses, but that doesn’t really mean I would have saved any time or money, given that it would not have taken me all the way to Dar-es-Salaam and I would have had to hopscotch all the way.
So, I decided to wander Nairobi, which I didn’t really get to do the last time I was in Kenya. Firstly, this is because I was too young to feel really safe wandering about an African city alone, and secondly, Bernard (my ‘uncle,’ as in, not by blood, but in spirit for those of you who don’t know him) had basically taken me on a scenery-and-wildlife, game parks sort of tour of the country, and the surveying I did with his mapping crew was all in small villages. Thus, I had resolved that this was to be my social and cultural tour in order to round out my experience of the region.
I bought a city map (god thing, too, because there is absolutely no rhyme or reason to the streets, crazy for a colonial capital) and picked out a few destinations within walking distance and set off. I hadn’t gone far when I was stopped by two strangers who began to chat me up about where I was staying, what I was doing and so forth. Turns out they’re tour guides. First, they set me up in a new hotel at like a third or something of the price of the first and then they proceeded to sell me a day tour to a couple of destinations around the city. This was the second and, knock on wood again, the last noteworthy ‘scam’ I was suckered into. It’s not that they didn’t show me some cool shit: a giraffe conservatory where I got to hand feed, pet, take pictures with and be head-butted by giraffes (“Careful! If you don’t keep feeding her while you’re close she’ll butt you!” Said the keeper to two pretty girls just moments after I’d been butted. Thanks for the warning, guy.); I got an interesting view of the main slum, apparently the second biggest in Africa, an odd point of pride, and the site of much of the worst post-election violence a few years ago; and then the national museum, which is mostly natural history and therefore quite boring if you’ve ever been to a natural history museum anywhere in the world, because, with the exception of a few different local animals, natural history is all the same worldwide; but it was definitely things I did not strictly need to see in order to have a fun, exciting and informative day in Nairobi. Heck, I might have made it to the museum, at least, on foot.
After showing me around, the guy who’d been my guide, one of them having gone off to find another group of tourists to rob (joking, he’s got his living to make, same as anyone), the first guy took me to a local bar he liked and we watched the first game of the day. Afterwards, he wanted to take me to get a couple of prostitutes, and he at least insisted that I should be giving him a tip, on top of the 40 bucks or so I’d paid in Kenyan shillings for the tour in the first place. This was after I’d paid for a six-pack-worth of beers for us in the bar, and for a tour that I’d been pretty clear that I did not really need from him from the beginning. Finally I got rid of him, no further tips, no whores, and went back to the room, took a beer snooze and missed both goals in the U.S. v. England game, but caught the ending. I got up at 5:30 in the morning in order to get to the bus pick-up before the guide guy, who insisted he’d need to show me the way to the bus a block and a half from my hotel and would surely have hassled me for another tip. All things considered, I felt pretty tired getting on the bus for Tanzania.
I think I’ll stop here, but I’m hoping to get us all the way across the Zimbabwe border in the next entry, so maybe we’ll be all caught up the present soon. Love to all.

24/7/10-25/7/10

Chapter Five

I got robbed last night.

Calm down mom, dad, I’m alright, everyone is alright, I lost my Blackberry, some cash and the cheap local phone I bought for staying in contact with people here. Wallet is safe, they didn’t get my cards or even the $50 U.S. that was in it. They were incredibly amateur, which made them that much more dangerous, in some ways, but which also made it possible to resist here and there in little ways, hold this or that back and get away with it.

Again, I’m fine, perfectly safe, they never even pointed a gun directly at me, it’s OK. I lost a few pictures, some of which I can take again, and other than that I think I got away clean except for about $60 worth of the phone and currency. My Blackberry is insured and the face was so scratched it was gonna need to be replaced when I got back to the states anyways.

You want the story? OK, here it goes:

I’m in the tiny little bar section of this Thai restaurant, hanging out for the last time with this one friend I’ve met here before I head north in a few days. We’re talking, laughing, planning to go out to a real bar in a few minutes when two black guys come in, no big deal, one is carrying an AK-47 and the other has a handgun, but I don’t see it at first, so I figure the one guy is just the restaurant’s security guard. Around here you see automatic weapons many times a day, so the simple fact of a guy carrying one is no cause for alarm.

It’s not until they start shouting, pushing people around and reaching in peoples’ pockets that you realize what’s going on. Soon people are on the ground or sitting in chairs against the walls with their hands up.

They don’t speak English well at all, but they tell us to put our phones on the floor and they keep shouting at each other to hurry, hurry, and something about a taxi. I pull out my cheap phone and make sure they see me put it down, then they demand cash, I pull out my wallet, thumb the Meticais out of it and fling them at him. For a moment he gestures at me like he’s gonna demand that I open the wallet and show him that it’s empty, but he gets distracted by something else in the room and I tuck the wallet behind me between the two chairs I’m sitting on and the wall. When he looks back at me he notices the square shape in my pocket and reaches for it. Disappointed—I’d almost saved the Blackberry from them—I pull it out and chuck it at him.

After that, I’m basically a spectator. The one with the handgun, at some point before this, had pointed it over peoples’ heads at the wall and fired it. I was looking right at him, I saw where the gun was pointed. There was no impact, no ricochet, the sound was too quiet. It was clearly a replica. Still, the other guy has a real enough looking AK-47, although he holds it very inexpertly. For a moment I tell myself how easy it would be to get ahold of the barrel and keep him from leveling it at anyone. But I tell myself not to be a hero and I just sit there with my heart pounding. I don’t feel helpless: like I said, it would be easy to disarm these guys, seeing as they’ve only got one gun. I’m not helpless, I’m just restraining myself. They’re not worth resisting over a few hundred Meticais.

Good thing, too, because the unintended consequences are impossible to predict. Soon a third guy comes in, with another hand gun that looks just like the first, but I can’t know for sure. And later, it turns out there was a fourth one on the patio which, from the description of the Chinese men out there, sounds like he was carrying a shotgun.

Now the owner, who’s quite drunk, is shouting at them, advancing on them, “So what!” he says in his thick South African accent, “I’m old! Kill me! Go ahead, just kill me!”

They level the AK at his chest and I think to myself, I’m gonna see someone killed tonight. In my mind’s eye I can literally see the blood blossoming on his chest and I can’t look away.

Finally, after an interminable instant, the owner’s friends pull him away and soon the guys have left and we’re all standing around trying to figure out if that really just happened. The bar around us is in chaos, the owner is pissed at everyone and everything, he runs outside, comes back in demanding his keys, saying that the guys’ taxi has “fucked them.” Someone reaches into the fuse box and turns out the lights, which seems like a bad idea, but apparently it prevents the owner from finding the keys. He fumes around, yelling at everyone, talking about how his dignity has been taken from him, which I understand, but he also points at two or three of us younger American guys, calling us ‘Marines’ and saying we’re cowards. Whatever, he was drunk, and he had a right to be pissed. I don’t take it personally.

Meanwhile there’s an older Swedish lady FREAKING. Screaming, crying, slapping her husband. Turns out they took her wedding ring, a tennis bracelet and her purse, which she was sitting on and seems to feel they would not have noticed if her husband hadn’t volunteered it. I feel for both of them. I did the same thing she did with my wallet, didn’t I? But I know he was just trying to keep his wife safe, and there’s not really time to think in that situation. Sucks.

All is said and done and we leave. Our local numbers are put on a list at the bar, but none of us really expect to get anything back. It all still seems surreal, and the only difference I feel is I’m a little bit more nervous walking on the street at night, but otherwise, it really almost feels like nothing’s changed. Some of the people who were there don’t want to post this stuff on their blog. Think it reinforces a prejudiced view of Africa. But this is where it happened. You can’t ignore it and think it will go away once people stop being racist. The only way to make it stop is to take it on, and the best way to do that is to make people talk about it and about how to stop it from happening in the first place. It’s all a very weird and mixed-up set of feelings that I doubt will ever get sorted out.

18/7/10

Chapter Four

I’m doin’ it! I’m feelin’ it an’ I’m doin’ it. Here’s the opening trip story, at least as far as Dubai, for now, we’ll see how much I feel like writing.

Those who received my very first e-mail are aware already that I missed my scheduled flight. I arrived at Tom Bradley International Terminal as the flight was leaving, walked up to the front desk of Emirates STRESSING; on the edge of tears really. But the guy was great to me, gave me a coupon for a discounted night’s stay which, despite being in El Segundo, was kindof ok, and confirmed me on the next day’s flight instead of leaving me on standby, which was incredibly kind of him.

So I went wandering up Sepulveda to find a RadioShack, the last act of my trusty Blackberry before relegation to the position of fallback camera after I packed the charger chord for my parents’ camera but forgot the camera itself, and ran across a great little ghetto fabulous sports bar with low light and red crushed velvet wallpaper (the ribs were amazing, by the way, kind of a honey sesame seasoning) and watched game 3 of the NBA finals. It would be weeks until I got word that it had gone seven games and the Lakers had won. I got none of the details.

But I took good advantage of the hotel’s free WiFi (another ‘last’) to download four solid articles of East African history, which I printed up in the management office in the morning, great thanks to the staff of La Hacienda for that. Then I took a soak in the hot tub and my last morning newspaper in English and some Mexican food, which I rightly expected I’d not find much of here. I got to the airport before the desk even opened and was through security with about three hours to kill, which I believe I spent on a final proofreading of my term paper (which I’ve gotten an ‘A’ on, by the way, simplifying my life considerably).

It’s difficult to condense a sixteen hour plane ride into an appropriately engaging half page, but that is somewhat simplified by the fact that I spent the whole thing reading and annotating the first two articles, sleeping for a few hours, and then writing up the first of two ‘historiographical summaries’ still due before my quarter was truly over. This was aided considerably by the fact that Emirates furnishes their long-haul planes with two power outlets for every three-seat row, but hindered by the fact that they also provide individual screens for every seat, a couple-hundred-video library and video games to boot. Those amenities, added to the leggy blonde Australian flight attendant, who flirted quite pleasantly throughout most of the flight (being the first passenger checked in, by about twenty hours, I got a bulkhead seat, so her fold-up was right across from me) and the really sexy uniforms they wear, including a red hat with a scarf pinned at the temple which hangs down and then wraps around the collar (the only time they have to wear it over their nose and mouth is if they get off the plane in Saudi Arabia: I asked) makes Emirates, hands down, the best airline in the world. I’m not a terribly experienced international traveler, but first hand I can say its better than British Airways, KLM or Lufthansa, and I have agreement for others who’ve flown with more.

Ok, enough with the Emirates ad. We landed in Dubai in the most opulent airport EVER, went through customs pretty quickly, although I ran into some trouble at the declarations post after two guards carrying M4s (I can’t tell you how strange it is to walk by police and even private security toting serious firepower: Beretta, Kalashnikov, serious shotguns held so frankly you’d almost…almost…think they were toys. But you get used to it) noticed me taking pictures of the fuckin’ marble-columned, literally acres-wide baggage claim area. They waved me on when I was a little too willing to open my bag for them (“No, no, no, tell me if you’re carrying anything to declare.” Tourist.).

So, you walk out of the air conditioned arrivals terminal and the heat hits you like a sledge. Luckily its early evening and the desert gets steadily cooler but never so far as cold, or even really cool. They take you to in a bus to the Millennium Airport Hotel, which is as opulent as everything in Dubai, even though the rooms in the ‘Emirates Wing,’ which are compped, including dinner, anytime snack and breakfast for passengers with overnight layovers, like me, are quite modest.

I had a bit of an embarrassing episode when I first got into the room. None of the lights would turn on. The TV turned on, and I even went so far as to check the circuit board before calling the front desk in confusion.

*Sigh* “Sir, you must put you key card in the slot by the door.”

It had looked like a light switch, but it had no moving parts.

Tourist.

So I grab a cab downtown with the doctor and lawyer twins who’d sat next to me on the plane, but we got dropped off in the wrong place and by the time we’ve walked almost the whole ‘round it looking for the entrance, the gates are closed and we miss our chance to go to the top of whatever-it’s-called tower, currently the tallest in the world or something, I think. Shit, saved me some money, though. Turns out its quite expensive for some vertigo and a few photographs.

So we took a few pictures from the base, wandered around Dubai Mall, which is like Mall of America type of huge, then headed off to this bar the Sheila had told us about. I will say about the tower that it’s a pretty impressive building that won’t fit in the camera frame, or even the field of human vision, whole. You look at the base and start looking up and up from about fifty yards away and by the time you get about halfway up, the lights at the bottom have already disappeared from even your peripheral vision.

The bar was also impressive. Four patios on two levels, two rooms indoors, live music, covers of John Mayer unfortunately, three bars and beach access with some impressive yachts at anchor in the bay. The Sheraton Hotel was next door. The place had taken advantage of the transit crowd, like us, by building a big white dome, air-conditioned and with its own bar and a big screen TV feed. It was the night of the opening ceremony and it was kind of crowded when we first got there, but it soon emptied out and we hung out on one of the patios, near a fountain with a broad pool that must have been quite expensive to feed with clear blue water in the desert air during the day.

We met up with a couple of guys we’d eaten dinner with at the hotel who had made it to the top of the tower, saw their photos and had some weak, overpriced drinks. Whatever, I figured I was lucky to find a wet bar at all in a Muslim country. The one guy was a kind-of douchie if gregarious thirty-something bartender from San Diego (“Don’t say I’m from L.A.!” Wah.) and the other his lapdog friend, so I went home with the twins. I had another summary to write, after all, and I surprised myself by mustering the motivation to read a page or two before going to bed.

Last word on Dubai is to repeat what I told the twins, slightly buzzed at a price that should have gotten me plastered, in the cab on the ultra-modern ten-lane main freeway on the way back to the hotel. It’s a place that feels so foreign to me that I can’t really be sure, but I think, with a few more weeks in town that it’s a place I’d really enjoy.

The trip to Nairobi was a six hour version of the same flight from L.A. but a less luxurious plane and a flight attendant team made up of the most incredible variety of gorgeous women you can imagine from the senior attendant, a gorgeous Nilotic black woman, maybe Sudanese, but with an unfortunate angry demeanor, to a buxom blonde Dutch, a dark haired beauty and the new girl they were training, a perfect-featured Spanish girl who I swear would have been putty for me if she hadn’t been training and I hadn’t had to write.

I still had a page or two to write when I got off the plane. Had to find an ATM, then bought a Nigerian team jersey to get change for the bills it gave me, The jersey cost five times as much as the visa it facilitated and I still haven’t worn it since I didn’t make the game. Now it’s basically useless since the damn team’s banned from playing internationally for two years. Fuck. Oh well, at least it saved me thirty or more dollars on the Zimbabwean visa.

I found a café on the airport campus that let me plug in, but I didn’t finish the paper (so vague and distracted because of the noise that I’m frankly surprised I did well enough on it to pull the full ‘A’ in the class) until the seventieth minute, so I missed the South Africa goal and only barely caught Mexico’s equalizer after dashing off an e-mail and attachments at a badly virus infected internet café next door that’s almost sunk my last flashdrive and I barely kept off my mom’s computer. I did keep it clean, Ma, I swear, but we really should get a Norton subscription on this thing. I’m finally sold on the two hundred dollars a year for it.

Took a couple of pics of the café where I caught the end of the game to commemorate the end of my term and the belated beginning of my summer trip. (But it looks like I've lost these pictures, at least until I get a new Blackberry and can upload the backup of the main memory drive onto it from the old one)

2/7/10-3/7/10

Chapter Three

Breakthrough! I’ve finally found something that I can use!

I’ve been trying to motivate myself to tell some stories about my trip from Nairobi to Johannesburg and my night in Dubai, but I just haven’t found it. There are some very interesting parts to the whole thing, but I guess there’s not really any single unified story, despite the long road along which it all happened.

I’ve been in Maputo, Moçambique (yeah, I went there. It’s called a cedilha and I think I love it) for a couple of weeks now and, first of all, the thing you need to realize about Africa is that you can only ever get one or two things done in a day because, well, people only really work a couple of hours a day and you never really know which ones they’re gonna be. So maybe you get to the University at ten A.M. and maybe the archive building doesn’t open until noon. If it turns out that what you’re looking for is downtown in the Bexia (or Lowland) district, you’ve not only got to make your way down there, for all you know, the guy you need to talk to went home at one. The only thing that’s guaranteed is that by four when the games start, no one is in their office.

So I’ve been trying to get into this one building for two weeks. There are four buildings associated with the historical archives directorate. One is on the campus of Edward Moudlane University, the national school, one is on 24 de Julho the upper street of the two major roads in town. In Beixa (sometimes written and said Beira) there’s an admin building where I had to write a letter to the Director General (a pedido, I’m told it’s an essential to getting anything official done, so I’ve kept the file) for permission to use the archives.

The last building is sort of an annex to the National Library which is on 25 de Setembro, the lower main street that runs through Beixa. It’s where the microfilms are kept and it’s been pretty clear for a while that that’s the format in which anything as old as I want would be kept. Still, around here, as with many places, you’ve got to do things their way or they’ll inevitably turn obstinate and it’ll just be like pulling teeth. The appropriate metaphor, I think, is more like waiting for a loose tooth to come out. So finally—yesterday now, because I got distracted from finishing this last night—I not only received permission to go to the annex and an introduction to the woman in charge of the microfilm, I also got the chance to borrow a friend of mine’s research assistant as an interpreter. Sure enough, not an hour in the microfilm office with this girl and I find myself with a catalogue book of documents pertaining to Moçambique from the national archives in Lisbon, organized by author, date and subject. I flip to the chronological section, copy down the call numbers of the first dozen and a half documents and voila! I’m off to make sure they found them all this morning and that I’m one step away from great success!

Of course, characteristically, the one step is inevitably turning into six already. Apparently, the machine that could copy the microfilms for me, something they would be happy to do, is broken. So now I have to find an old school film developer or another library or something that can do it for me. Africa.

1/7/10 – 2/7/10

Chapter Two

This entry ought to be an account of the events that brought me finally to the game, but once again, events have overtaken my ability to chronicle them. Last night I had the privilege of witnessing a ceremony of spirit possession and prophecy in the Shona tradition. I had spent the day wandering Johannesburg in the company of my recently acquainted friends because the one bus that hadn’t left for Maputo by the time I got to the station was already full.

I began the day in a plaza called Gandhi Square, after the Indian revolutionary who had spent his early legal career in South Africa (I think that’s all accurate). There was a coffee shop I’d been to the day before where the serving girls were friendly (NO, it’s not like that) and I figured they could point me to a bookstore as I’ve forgotten to bring anything to read. First, I finished my entry for the game at a pizza place (Debonair’s, it’s a local chain) and then I headed over. The place is called Urban Coffee or Urban Café, I can’t remember, and it’s the only place on the entire continent, as far as I can tell, that has public electrical outlets for the clientele. Anyways, something about Africans is that they always want to show you the way, no mere bad directions will do, they’re gonna come get lost with you.

So while I wait for the server girl, who’s just closing the shop, I chat with her boss, a beautiful black woman (here, they’d call her colored, ‘cause she’s clearly mixed race somewhere back). Anyways, she’s just opened the place three weeks ago and we’re chatting, when her friend walks in, a kooky, Professor Trelawny type who tells her friend she needs more African styling in her place (she’s an interior decorator). I assure her it looks great, all it needs is a space heater until she socks away enough for a real system.

Why am I telling you this? No good reason actually, it was just a pleasant hour and this is a journal.

Anyway, the girl takes me to a bookstore specializing in textbooks, tells me it’s too late to find another one on a Saturday, so she commences to monopolize my afternoon. Now don’t get me wrong, I had fun, met a friend of hers at a dark bar with loud DJ music and quite a crowd for a Saturday at two. She says in SA they literally just party all weekend in the bars and seems amused that we prefer to relax at home until nightfall. Anyways, she doesn’t seem to feel too comfortable about my safety there, so we begin bouncing around, she and her friend showing me the inns and outs (how’s that saying actually go?) of a neighborhood called Hillbrow, just outside the CBD, Central Business District. Long story short, (too late!) I get picked up at a McDonald’s on Gandhi Square at 6:30 and I’m asleep in bed at the school by 8:00.

I wake up to the sound of drums and choral music at probably midnight. At first, I think it’s the CD player (yeah, primitive, right?) that my host leaves on with a Luther Vandross album to go to sleep to. It’s clearly not Luther Vandross playing, but I figure he must have changed it. Later, I wake and think perhaps some people must be having a drum circle and party upstairs, where I know some other guys sleep. I check my phone which, thankfully, I remembered to plug in overnight. It’s fully charged. Its 4:30 pm, Pacific Time; 1:30 in the morning. I’m awake, and its beautiful music, so I switch on my voice notes recorder.

The first song lasts for ten minutes and I don’t want to stop recording to check if its working until it’s over. When it ends, I take a listen, but its seems like the microphone is only catching the very loudest sounds. I’m fully awake now. I decide to go looking for the party. Why not?

I get out into the hallway and realize that the music is coming from the classroom next door. There are about twenty people, mostly women, wrapped in painted cloth and western coats, many with leggings or jeans on underneath. It was a strange scene, and for much of the next three hours, I would be saying to myself again and again that there was a part of this scene that was both ridiculous and absurd, and another part that was completely sane and kind of otherworldly holy or sacred.

They were standing around in a circle, singing and dancing, and a couple of women were banging the wooden backs of erasers against the wooden part of a push broom like clavés. A couple of women come over to the doorway and I half gesture, half speak to ask if would be alright if I recorded them on my phone. They nod yes and slowly edge back into the group.

For the next half hour I filmed from the doorway as they danced and stomped and sang. At one point, a man holding two mallets and an animal hair whisk fell to shaking and shivering on the carpet and another, a woman, began moaning and groaning, eventually dropping to the floor and rolling around while the others continued singing around them. Eventually they all sat down and, since it didn’t seem appropriate for me to remain standing in the doorway, I slipped past the unhinged door laying on its side across the opening and sat down against a wall.

The one holding the whisk began speaking at great length in Shona, during which time he called up individuals one at a time who came forward on hands and knees to listen as he spoke directly to them. At some point, someone rolled him something that smelled suspiciously like pot when he smoked it.

From time to time, they would break into song again, and eventually an older woman took the leader’s place. She continued calling people up one by one and then suddenly, everyone was laughing and looking at me. The leader guy gestured to me and whispered in English (the first I’d heard in an hour) that the ancestors were calling me up.

I had seen enough to know what to do. I approached on hands and knees, clopping my cupped hands together and bent my head before the woman. The leader guy kept whispering in my ear. First she was asking for the white water so the ancestors could share in my good fortune. Then she was giving a prophecy. Now, someone brought a basin of pure water which she drank from as I bent my head, listening for the end of the prophecy when I was supposed to say something, kind of like an amen.

All of a sudden, I hear a pfffft! and I feel water spraying across the top of my head. Everyone laughs and cheers and I figure I’m done, so I crawl back to my corner. Then they bring a gourd out with some milky, spiced liquid. She takes a sip from a dipper then holds it out to me, crawling forward with her eyes closed, so I jump back up to her and take a sip, hoping this stuff doesn’t end up all over me too. But I hand the dipper to the leader guy and he downs the rest of it.

Now they all get up and start dancing and singing again. One of the ladies comes over and translates what just happened for me. Apparently, they’ve been consulting with the ancestors about their problems and the ancestors have been giving them prophecies in return. She tells me the woman had dreamt of me the night before and that the ancestors have prophesied that I would have good luck.

By now its four am. Johannesburg has been in the midst of the coldest June in memory and I’m beginning to shiver, although maybe it was just the effect of the ancestors leaving me. They try and oblige me by moving me away from the door, then when they start dancing again they give me a spot beside the space heater, which helps. But I have a bus to catch at 8:45, and I’m starting to get travelers’ diarrhea, although I haven’t admitted it to the point of taking the antibiotics in my dop kit. I run to the water closet, come back, say my thank yous and go back to bed. By seven, they’re gone. I wash a little bit from a bucket of boiling water over a drain, miss the bus at the main Jo-burg station because Ken, Rex’s friend who I’m staying with, thinks it’s at 9 and South Africa is the only country in Africa where busses actually leave when they’re scheduled to. But we catch up to it at the stop near Ellis Park. I don’t know if you call that good luck or bad, but here I am, we’ve just dropped some Portuguese and Italian fans in Nelspruit and the next stop, barring a lunch break, is at the Mozambique border.

Bye for now, plenty of stories to tell, so I’ll be back soon. Peace.

20/6/10

Chapter One

Did I call this just chapter one? It feels as if ten chapters worth of activity has gone by since I finally caught my plane from LAX to Dubai. From the sixteen hour plane ride to my first night in Asia to Nairobi and four bus rides through three other countries to Johannesburg there is plenty to reflect on, but I’ll start with today, while it is still fresh and the vuvuzela are still calling outside.

The United States have come from behind to draw Slovenia two-two, which should have been a win two different ways but for the officials. I arrived in the eighteenth minute after an adventure through the streets of Johannesburg and Soweto that is a story all its own, but includes my first right-hand driving experience in the most beat up little manual transmission Nissan pickup you can imagine. In my pocket were an unused ticket to the Greece-Nigeria game in Bloemfontein the night before, which I had them print up anyways, a handful of used bus tickets and coins in various currencies, and the phone number of a Boer security guard who’d said he’d hold on to my Swiss Army knife until after the game. I found my seat at about the five meter mark from what I believe was the south end of the pitch. The U.S. were defending on my end in the first half, so I actually got to see all three goals happen on my end. The score when I sat down was already one-nil Slovenia and the pretty thirty-something English-South African woman sitting beside me with her very enthusiastic husband told me the U.S. defense had been “stupid, and the keeper didn’t even move” for the shot, although later she allowed as how it was a really nice shot that he would not have stopped anyways.

So I sat down, ate the Wimpy burger I’d snuck into the stadium in my bag and waved my flag a bit and took some photos of the crowd, the field, etc. and chatted a bit with the South African couple next to me. They were from Jo-burg and were drinking Budweisers, which are an international beer now, I guess, and it looked like they were the only ones being sold, though I didn’t drink. I told them about how I’d missed the Greece-Nigeria game on account of being held up at the Zimbabwean border for eight (count ‘em, eight) hours by two women who tried to bring in, literally, thousands of Rand (South African currency) in goods to sell without declaring them. By the time the South African customs agents caught on, they were so suspicious of the whole lot of us, which included Zambian government officials on diplomatic passports, dancers with the Zambian national dance troupe and random individuals like me that they went through every single bag and suitcase twice and checked out immunization cards, to boot, something that hasn’t been done at any other of the half dozen borders and airports I’ve passed through so far, and which I don’t expect to happen again the rest of the time I’m here.

All of a sudden, the crowd roared and I looked up in time to see a Slovenian forward making a break for goal and a lob coming off the foot of his teammate. “Oh, they’re clearly going to call this one back,” I thought to myself, “he’s obviously offsides.” But I look to the line official and his flag is down.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I yell, as the Slovene picks up the ball in space, streaks up the near side and tucks it past a diving Howard, who, it must be said, did everything that could have been done in the circumstances. The South African guy beside me is going wild but showing me sympathy at the same time. Still, he thinks the guy was onside until we see the replay on the jumbotron, at which point we can all agree that, although his feet are on and the moment the ball is struck, the lean of his body has him clearly offside. So, what can you do? The U.S. is down two-nil and not looking very energetic, although by the end of half they’ve put together a couple of dangerous looking attacks. The South African guy and I agree that nobody really wants the ball. They keep laying off to each other looking for a better look and they end up serving lobs that will have a good result if they get lucky, but come to nothing when they don’t.

I buy a couple half liter Cokes and wander the stadium at half time. The U.S. fans look pretty dejected and only the Slovenes and the international fans seem to be having any fun. I walk past a sad looking cowboy smoking a cigarette (“Ellis Park Stadium is a non-smoking area,” blares over the loudspeaker, “please refrain from smoking anywhere in the building.”). I see the first pretty white girls I’ve seen in weeks. Mostly it’s pretty bleak.

(I couldn't figure out how to rotate it and I'm tired, it's late)

But the U.S. side finally shows some urgency in the second half. Landon shows the first spark of true brilliance I’ve ever seen from him when he receives a ball in space on the far side near touch in the forty-eighth, dribbles in, keeping the goalie honest by showing cross and then coolly slotting it over his head into the roof of the net. The stadium goes wild. The South Africans, who clearly just want to see good football, are high-fiving me and jumping up and down shouting U-S-A, U-S-A along with everyone. I’ve never been a fan of Landon Donovan, I’ll admit: I’ve always thought he was just ‘OK’ in an international context, but he’s earned himself a truce from me with that one, it was absolutely clinical. Clutch. I’m sure he’s been holding his breath.

Everyone knows the rest of the story. The U.S. equalize a few minutes later and the Slovenian side startgetting pretty nasty, booking three or four yellows in about twenty minutes. The only thing worth mentioning is that I took a photograph that proves beyond doubt that no one was offsides on the third U.S. goal. I don’t know what the actual call was, but the picture clearly shows the ball airborne and an easy three or four meters of space, so if it was offsides, someone’s career needs to be ended.

Oh, well. I left in the ninety-first minute even though the Americans were making good attacks to the end because that security guard said he’d only be on duty til six and it was already ten to. I’m glad I found him, because that phone number is useless to me given that I don’t have any international roaming. I’ll probably need that thing in Tanzania and it sure as hell was a comfort walking back to the empty school my friend Rex’s brother owns which I’m staying at these two nights. These two guys were about thirty paces behind me for like eight blocks so I opened up the knife blade and the nasty looking (and FUCKING sharp) saw blade and held the thing inside my hoodie pocket all the way home. I walk around enough to know that no one stays the same distince from you for that long without dropping back or catching up and I hear that’s what they do around here; follow you until you’re somewhere isolated, then they just stab you, bam! Well, I got back alright, but I had to keep the knife out for a while when a rather hostile, possibly drunk guy showed up just as I was looking for a nice stoop under street lighting in the courtyard to write this. Rex’s contact who I’m staying with was gone dropping his girlfriend off and I didn’t feel like hanging out in his room alone. Guess I’ve learned better than to do that in Jozi.

18/6 – 19/6/10