So the deal was that I’d write all about this trip during my layovers between flights from Vancouver to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Turns out that I’m in the middle of an 8 hour layover in Amsterdam – my flight is delayed by over 3 hours (edit: make that 5 hours) – and I feel like garbage. I’m not exact fully coherent, I really wish I packed my toothbrush in my carry-on, and I’d quite like it if the wireless internet here was free like it is at YVR. Anyways, here’s the plan for this trip...
This whole return to Tanzania thing sort of started in the fall. I’m going to sound a bit crazy, but bear with me. I started having dreams about going back to Tanzania at the end of the summer. The plot in each was relatively constant, though little things changed here and there. Every dream went something like this: I’d endure a very long series of flights, several modes of transportation and overwhelming anticipation as I traveled back to Tanga, to see my students and my friends. Each time I was excited to see the town itself, the changes to my school and growing students, and the laid-back African atmosphere present on every red dirt road. I was always most excited to see Saumu at the orphanage. Sometimes I’d have a gift to give her, other times I was frantically searching in little dukas for the pencil crayons she asked me for when I visited her in 2008. Regardless of what I had with me, who I was bringing with me to meet my Tanzanian family, or what I needed, I was always fighting time.
Once in my dream world, after frantically tracking down a package of pencil crayons, my mother and I finally found the orphanage where I volunteered and played with Saumu before. In this dream, however, the orphanage was built up lavishly, the street out front lined with tourists - including my supervisor from work and his lovely girlfriend on a beach holiday – and all the girls vacated from the building to supply accommodation for tourists. I stopped a Mama on the street and asked if she knew where these girls were or what happened, and she replied that you could make more money off tourists at a beach resort than you could taking care of girls off the street, so the corrupt government threw the girls out and brought in the tourists. All the girls were gone.
In another dream, I had a one day stopover in Tanga (unfeasible, but this is the dream world) on my way home from one of my big trips, so I took the rapid transit line from the Tanga airport into downtown (Tanga has neither an airport nor any organized and regulated public transit... or much of a downtown). When I arrived in Tanga, I found the streets overgrown in lush green vegetation, the shops overtaken by nature and my landmarks unrecognizable. I searched endlessly for any streets I knew so I could make my way back to the orphanage, but got lost, ran out of time and needed to call a taxi to get back to the airport in time.
The last dream I had was in November, and is a little hazy now, though I know I was looking for Saumu and couldn’t find her. This time I had brought my sister, hoping to introduce her to my adorable students and this little girl I’d told her so much about. Instead of following along with me, Annie just wanted to stop and see the kittens on the street and identify the different stray dog breeds, refusing to hurry along in my search. I ran around Tanga frantically again, trying to make my way back to the orphanage to help the girls, but couldn’t find Saumu.
I woke up suddenly, mid-dream, and in a panic when someone came to wake me, and couldn’t shake the anxious feeling all day. The English Lit major student in me still tries to decipher meaning from these recurring dreams, but I'm still not sure what to make of all of them.
I sent the coordinator of Stehmann House orphanage an email that day, asking how the girls were doing, if Saumu was making any progress and if I would be welcome to volunteer there again in the near future. A few days later I received a short reply stating that the orphanage would close early in the new year, the future of the 30+ girls left unknown, but with no way of keeping the place open due to health problems and red tape imposed by Tanzanian officials. Devastated, I started making rough plans to go back.
It took weeks before I got a response from anyone about what was going on in Tanga. Vera, the assistant at the orphanage who organized everything for the girls (an AMAZING and inspiring woman), emailed me just after Christmas to say that the orphanage was already closed down and she had helped to return the girls(ages 7-18) to any living family members - an excruciatingly painful ordeal for everyone involved. Short on time with all her responsibilities to those girls, she promised more details if I could visit before she returned to her home in Kenya.
After agonizing over flight prices and dates, rushing to get to Tanga by the end of January, plotting to be home for April 1st, and considering a new overland tour experience, I booked everything at the last minute, less than 2 weeks from today. Once the tickets were booked and I committed to doing this thing, I was finally able to fill in a few blanks and formulate a bit of a plan. I’ll spend just over a month in Tanga, Tanzania, the same small town I volunteered in for 3 months in 2008. I’ll be staying with the project manager from the pre-primary school I taught at, and spending lots of time with my friends there. Most importantly, I’ll be meeting with Vera as soon as I can to find out where Saumu is and if there is any way to ensure her safety and well-being for the future. Hopefully I can reunite with her, re-establish my connections with her and help her get through what must be an extremely difficult time.
I’ll learn more about what happened to close down the well-run and seemingly successful orphanage project that supported about 30 boys and 30 girls in the Tanga area and try to see if I can do anything to help. Hopefully I’ll still be able to do a bit of teaching at the same pre-primary school as before and participated in daily life as Idid before.
Assuming all goes well in Tanga, I’ll head south back to Dar es Salaam to meet up with a tour company called African Trails for a 40 day overland trip that will take me through Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia and western South Africa, ending in Cape Town. I’ve wanted to do a big overland trip ever since reading Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari on my last trip here, but without a traveling companion I don’t feel entirely safe taking public transit from Cairo to Cape town, and have opted to go with a tour for the bottom half of the trip Theroux described. I’ll post a map with the route when I start that leg of my journey.
For now, I’m going to wait out this last 5 hour layover in Nairobi Airport with a Stoney Tangawizi and free wi-fi...
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