Village Visit

On Sunday, which was yesterday, John, Megan and I, traveled with Mama and Baba Tesha to Baba’s home village, Uru Shimbwe, up in the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro. Mama runs a big private school here in Arusha, so she had commandeered one of the smaller school buses for this trip.  The village is off to the north of Moshi, the next nearest city of any size, and the ride lasted about 2 hours.  The paved road from Arusha to Moshi was smooth riding past large fields, planted mainly in corn.  There were also fair-sized herds of cattle, goats, fat-tailed sheep, and donkeys being herded, by Maasai boys.  However, every so often there were also large commercial buildings already completed or being built and plots with large houses on them.  The city of Arusha keeps pushing outward, and Mama Tesha predicted that before long, Arushi and Moshi will be blended into one big urban corridor—somewhat as Spokane, Liberty Lake, Post Falls and Coeur d’Alene are now.

With Mama Tesha

Here at Kundayo it had rained hard during most of the night, and the fields we passed were very green with healthy corn plants.  I had worried that it might rain a lot during the day, especially when we got to a higher elevation, but though the sky was cloudy and hid Kili, there was no rain all day.  Baba’ brother (but maybe not same mother/same father) had died the night before, so it was imperative for him to show up for family business.  As we wound our way through Moshi, we stopped to pick up a young man, who turned out to be the youngest son of the man who had died. I couldn’t detect any signs of what we would recognize as grief from Baba, Mama, or the young man, who was named John Paul because he had been baptized by Pope John Paul when he visited Moshi years ago. Customs around death vary so much from culture to culture that I just try to observe and not analyze much at all.

Traveling from the outskirts of Moshi up the rutted dirt road to the village was a shake, rattle and roll experience the likes of which I hadn’t had since long ago in Liberia.  The rains have already cut gullies into the road in places, and I told John by the time the students all try to get there in two weeks, things could be even worse.  I’ve only been truly stuck in the mud once—in a Land Rover in the Congo—and I can’t see how one would ever be able to pull a bus out of the ditch or a mud patch.

It’s difficult for me to describe how very dense the vegetation is along the road and how brilliantly red the soil is.  We had definitely entered a very different ecosystem than what we have down here in Arusha.  Even though much of the original forest has been cut to clear fields for banana and coffee trees or for making charcoal, there are still many large trees, vines, and plants I recognized as being like those we often buy to keep as houseplants.  We knew that Kili loomed right above us, but the clouds hid it all day.  Because John had forgotten to recharge our camera, I couldn't take any photos except two which somehow the camera decided I really needed.

What surprised me most was that the Chaga people who live in this area do not have centralized villages at all like I was used to seeing in the Congo and Liberia.  Instead, they have settled in a series of small farms running vertically up the mountainside.  This means that people do not necessarily live within the view of each other, and there is no obvious village center around which village life takes place.  John and Megan had hoped to house the students with families for several days before we all leave for Lushoto and then Dar, but with the homes so spread out, that began to seem less than optimal.  After a meal at Baba’s house, while Baba was off handling some family affairs, Mama took John and Megan on a walk to see some of the possible host homes; I stayed back at the house and took a nap.  The more Megan and John saw, the more they realized that this was not the type of place they had envisioned for the students’ village experience.  There were no young, intact nuclear families, as almost all men of working age are off at jobs in Moshi, Arusha or Dar.  Even young women have mainly left the village for city life, so the people still at Uru are old men and women, children, and some poorer relatives left behind to tend the farms for their absentee owners.  In addition, it looked like most of the adult men spend a great deal of their time at little huts drinking mgebe, the local brew made from bananas and millet.  John didn’t seem to notice, but Megan said there were drunk men everywhere.

Baba Tesha's family home

Mama and Baba's kitchen with Baba's sister cooking

It was all quite disappointing, but certainly very enlightening.  Unless one is very far from urban influence, traditional village life collapses and new types of social problems creep in.  However, since the days for a village visit are already in the program schedule, John and Megan decided the group would still travel to Uru as planned, but not stay in individual homes.  Instead, everyone will stay together at the Catholic bishop’s very large home/guesthouse and then go out to explore the village and work in the nearby fields during the days.  The total experience will not be what was originally intended, but the students will be in a spectacular rural area, get to hike on the lowest slopes of Kili, and observe a great deal about the problems destroying traditional villages today.  The final irony of the day came when John and Megan learned that the names of the married couple who take care of the bishop’s house are Adolph and Ava.  Go figure.

Our trip back to Arusha was uneventful except for the brief view we had of Kili’s top above the clouds.  By the time we arrived back at Kundayo, I felt as if I had been jarred and jerked into a million tired pieces, and all I wanted was a shower and a clean bed.  We hadn’t had dinner though, so John ran over to a little chicken roasting duka and came back with delicious charcoal grilled chicken and chipsies. I made fresh green beans from the market, too, and life was again very good.