Disappearing Bride

Saturday and Sunday, February 16 -17, 2019

Saturday was another day during which I stayed inside the Kundayo compound and did odd tasks such as washing socks and making spaghetti sauce. John as usual walked down Kjengi to his favorite produce and fruit market to buy bananas, mangoes, and avocados. He also stopped by the small Kjengi store to get some tomato paste for the spaghetti sauce. However, the most exciting moment of the day was when we were on the garden terrace and Mama, who is not usually out before noon, came to talk with us.

Socks hung to dry.

Mama was all dressed up and ready to go to a wedding which had just been called off. Mama had been to the bride’s “sending off” party, a.k.a bridal shower, on Thursday, and all seemed well then. However, early Saturday morning—the neighbors say around 7:00 a.m.—the bride’s former boyfriend came to her house, supposedly to give her a wedding gift, and she and he disappeared. The official signing of documents, etc. was to occur at the church at 8:00, but the bride did not appear. Finally, around 11:00 a.m. the wedding and following feast were cancelled. Mama was ready to drive out to Njiro to be with the bride’s mother and find out more about this strange event and then give us an updated report when she returned in the evening.

Mama dressed for action.

Of course everyone was all aflutter, and though I have no idea of sequence, it was determined that young woman had left her phone behind and no calls came in or out on it all day. The police were trying to track her former boyfriend, who is mixed Tanzanian/ Greek and quite wealthy, but when they went to his house, he was not there. However, his German wife and her children were! No one seems to have known about this wife. She reported that her husband had been acting strangely and had moved out of the house 3 months before. Now people were really getting concerned that the girl must have been  abducted by a jealous former boyfriend. Still, there were some who wondered if the two missing persons hadn’t worked out a disappearance together.

Also interesting is that the bride-to-be is also mixed race, Tanzanian/ British, and because her father died when she was very young, she was raised for many years by a British family who owned a nearby coffee plantation. The groom-to-be, however, is “pure Masai” as Mazo put it.
I have no idea how that may affect the negotiations of what happens when a marriage does not take place, but things could get very complicated and even nasty.

We went to bed still not knowing the resolution of this mystery. (John kept wondering who was getting to eat all the food that had been prepared for the wedding guests.)

Sticking with our routine on Sunday, we got up and prepared to go to church. John had gotten an email from George stating that he had found John’s camera in the back seat of his car and would bring it with him to ACC. John was very relieved! I was looking forward to hearing what my friend Terry would say in the sermon she was scheduled to give. She’s definitely not a linear thinker, so I anticipated some interesting content.

Sunday's flowers

Again, as usual, Ray picked us up at 10:00 and transported us to church. There seemed to be fewer people than normally are there, but as there were no big conferences going on in town, there weren’t as many possible visitors as last week. The service proceeded according to the usual format, and Terry did well—although she used most of a book I read back in the 1970s and spoke far too long—and then one of the elders walked to the platform and asked for prayer for Claire and Amani, a couple who were to have married yesterday but had not. OMG! This was the same couple Mama had been telling us about on Saturday. They are members of ACC and their bans had been read each of the past three Sundays.

After the benediction, I approached Rebecca, the elder, and told her that we knew of the strange disappearance of Claire, etc. Rebecca then told me that Claire had returned last night, but didn’t divulge any further information. So, while we now know that Claire is safely home, we still don’t know the circumstances of her disappearance or what may happen now with her and Amani. The ex-boyfriend is still eluding contact. Mama Kundayo has stayed inside all day today, so we have learned nothing new from her.

Rebecca speaking with Mrs. Olson, who is wearing a curiously furry dress.

John talking with Roland Bunch, the author of Two Ears of Corn.

After church, Mary Lou announced that she wanted to eat Indian food again, so we took a taxi to Taj, one of the two Indian restaurants we like best. We had gone there while Mary Lou was on safari, so it was new to her. However, she had no idea what to order since she knows nothing about Indian food. In the end, she made a good choice, mutton in a mild green sauce. I had chicken coconut curry and John had another mutton dish. It was all excellent. Just as we finished our meal, it began to thunder and soon we were in a deluge. John called Ray to come get us, but for some reason that took half an hour, which we spent huddled under a thatched roof getting sprayed when the wind blew.

The, we were back at Kundayo again and we could relax and begin packing for our trip to Uru Shimbwe. We’ll catch a coaster bus along the highway and ride to Moshi, where one of the Catholic Archbishops’ nephew’s will meet us and take us up the hilly roads near Kilimanjaro. There we will stay at the archbishop’s house until Wednesday, when we will return to Arusha. There is a lovely waterfall that John and Mary Lou plan to hike to on Tuesday, while I just sit looking out at Kili—I hope it’s visible—and reading. We will not have internet there, so I will have no Trump distractions.