The Don of Darajani

I ate lunch ten feet from a severely bad-ass pride of lions in the Serengeti a couple weeks back, but now it seems like forever ago.

Shortly after arriving in Zanzibar, amid the "mzungu" tourist callouts and my glazed-eyed wandering through the streets of Stone Town, one man made a point of taking his time with me.

To be fair, time is exactly what he had to spare: easily 300 pounds, he parked himself in a lone chair in front of his shop near Darajani market every day - from early morning until late night - selling whatever the Pemba trucks were kind enough to deliver. Octopus, squid, six-foot marlins, 150-pound stingrays... you name it, he's got it - fresh off the boat.

Of course, he didn't have to do much moving - his crew did all the work for him as he watched from his storefront chair, occasionally calling out orders for where to stash a stingray or barking at fishermen selling overpriced octopus. His laugh, like his voice, deep and jolly, with an infectious white-toothed smile all the more noticeable against his coffee-black skin. A wave of the finger, a nod of the head, his commands obeyed. The Don of Darajani.

In the days of my early Swahili, he walked me through all kinds of basics. He knew I didn't eat much fish - I've never bought anything but bottled water from him - but he was just genuinely interested in learning about Canada. Every day, my VIP seat next to him was reserved for a quick discussion in increasingly complex Swahili. I'd hear his booming voice call out to me on the run back from basketball, and he'd motion to one of his crewmembers to fetch me a fresh young coconut or pineapple as we sat down to talk.

One night, after bringing my camera to a wedding, he caught me on the walk home and asked me to take a picture of the crew, who had just closed up shop for the day. Between the night light and their dark skin, the picture didn't turn out, and when he asked for a copy in subsequent days and weeks, I just kept telling him I'd bring the camera another day and take a better picture.

So last Friday, when he asked once again when I'd bring the picture, I told him: "Later, later" in the comfort of bringing it sometime this week, maybe next week, maybe next month... sometime before I left for home.

Which made it all the more painful when I was jogging to basketball the next morning, only to have a dozen strangers stop me and tell me my friend was hit by a truck on the way home from work. Dead.

This picture, the one that didn't turn out, is the picture he never got to see. On the far right, stationed in his storefront throne, is the Don of Darajani. A framed copy of it nows hangs on the store wall - it was meant as a gift for his family, but I was unanimously warned by his crewmembers: "Mapema, rafiki yangu, mapema" - too soon, my friend, too soon.

He was easily one of my best friends in Zanzibar. We hung out every day, chatting about everything and anything: life in Zanzibar, life in Canada, the best and worst times to catch octopus, the importance of education, the acceptable degrees of drunk, family, friends, whatever...

And now I'm sick to my stomach that I was so embarrassed, this long into our friendship, that I neglected the most important conversation: asking his name.

Tomorrow isn't always there. So do what you were planning on putting off until tomorrow, today (it usually isn't that much of a hassle).

Maybe you're serious; maybe you're just a joke.

We all have our own personal motivations for doing what we do with our lives. Oddly enough, though, we assume certain people (such as celebrities) have ulterior motives while others get off without scrutiny.

Personally, I don't mind the Angelina Jolies and Brad Pitts and Bonos of this world leveraging their celebrity status to make a difference. The fact is, they usually care about what they're doing quite a bit more than many of Africa's current volunteers - and they also generate much more publicity that turns the fickle eye of the global media onto an area in dire need of attention.

In an effort to reveal the ulterior motives of the average Joe, I recently posted a lens (article) on Squidoo that looks at the Top 6 Misguided Reasons for Volunteering in Africa.

Check it out. And by all means, please disagree with me and tell me why I'm wrong!

An island is only isolated if you can't use your iPhone.

Last night was Zanzibar's fourth blackout in two weeks.

In Canada, it’s fair to say we take electricity for granted. On those extremely rare occasions where we lose power, everyone’s usually in the same boat – enjoying the nostalgia of lighting candles and having conversations that aren’t distracted by the TV, and comforted by the implied knowledge that an hour later everything will be back to normal.

Back in May, Zanzibar had a month-long blackout. Some businesses survived by running expensive generators; others just closed up shop. No computers, no TV, no lights, no fridge, no fans, no A/C. A glimpse into life in centuries past, except much worse since our lives revolve around the presumption that these things will work.

It puts our dependency on technology in perspective. Spend today imagining the effect of a long-term blackout in your city. The obvious ones – computers and TV and electric heaters – would be a pain in the ass, but tolerable as you remember the fun of the outdoors and the comfort of hot cocoa.

The one thing I think we’d all struggle with is communication. No e-mails or Facebook would only be the beginning. Your cell phone would be toast. You’d try to take advantage of the relic that is your parents’ landline until you realize you don’t know anyone’s number (they’re all memorized in your cell’s contact list). Technology might not be our direct friend, but it's the direct link to our friends, and we could expect prolonged periods of loneliness and isolation without it.

Fear not: there are no blackouts coming to destroy your electronic life. But it’s worth putting in perspective how much of your life is dependent on your ability to plug in. It's worth remembering that the entire system crumbles if you remove a single element. And just maybe, it’s worth taking a couple of conscious steps towards freeing yourself from the clutches of technology – even just for peace of mind.

How much bargaining is too much?

Once again, pardon my absence. This time, I feel like it’s justified, since I was nursing a fight with malaria for the last week. Couldn’t have been at a worse time, really, since I was supposed to host a HIV awareness workshop for any member of staff associated with the Aga Khan Development Network – a pretty big group.

The workshop went on, but not without some emergency power-puking near the halftime mark: by the end of it, I was curled into the foetal position on a mat outside the door. Luckily, four injections later I am back to the white ball of energy my co-workers and basketball teammates expect.

The tourists are back in full swing at this point despite the sporadic torrential storms of the short rain season. There’s a stark contrast between the two main groups of tourists that visit Zanzibar: the wealthy elite, who pay outrageous money (up to US$1,000 per night) for all-inclusive resort packages on the beaches of the East Coast; and the deal-hunting backpackers, who scamper through Stone Town bargaining down every price regardless of the original quote.

As a Stone Town resident, I’m regularly frustrated by the abundance of the latter. Don’t get me wrong, I love backpacking and I love bargaining. But ultimately, there’s a difference between getting ripped off, and ripping off the salesman who’s too desperate to say no to your final price.

This simple graph illustrates the price of “stuff” in the market in nearly any African or Asian country. By market, I mean any store without walls: the food market, souvenirs, street meat, clothes, whatever.Obviously, the longer you stay and bitch about the price, the lower the price gets. This makes perfect sense, because a few passers-by don’t know about bargaining and simply accept the first price offered to them (to the profit and delight of the salesman). Unfortunately, this rarely happens.

Salesmen are almost always middlemen. Farmers are too busy tending their crops to sell them, just as wood carvers and sewers are too busy working. As a result, nearly every salesman pays the local market rate for whatever they are selling, then hopes to sell it at a small premium to make enough money to feed his family.

With that in mind, let’s put this price curve in the context of the item’s cost to the salesman, which obviously doesn’t get any cheaper for him. Every extra dollar he sells it for is an extra dollar in his pocket - worth noting since a backpacker bargaining from $4 to $3.50 is saving about 14%, but if the item cost $3 he is cutting the salesman’s profits in half.Now I’m all about bargaining and not getting ripped off. But in my opinion there comes a point when backpackers take it too far. They have a tendency of hammering down prices to absurd levels, well below a “fair” price just to test their bargaining abilities. I mean, at some point, when you’re paying $1 for a hand-carved necklace, is the extra 10 cents really anything but ego-stroking?

My personal favourite is when backpackers tell the locals they are “poor” travellers to gain sympathy, when the locals fully understand that the price of a return plane ticket to Zanzibar costs more than they would likely make in 10 years. Buddy, don’t bother.

Although we all have different backgrounds, North Americans and Europeans come from privilege. We can’t empathize with people who have endured true poverty – scraping to make enough money to feed yourself or your family.

Don’t get me wrong, I will walk away from some guy doubling the price because of the colour of my skin… But I try to have the decency to know when enough is enough: a massive portion of thick-cut fries and salad for 80 cents might be a rip off to a local, but you won’t catch me complaining.

No treats here... purely tricks.

So it turns out I’m an international jackass.

Which is comforting, because at times I thought it was only in Canada. Halloween helped prove me wrong, though: in a last-minute desperate attempt at pulling together a costume without spending money, I dressed as a ‘70s version of Boris Becker (with matching six-inch white shorts and an electric fly swatter as a racket).

… which is a jackass move in Canada, but at least people will laugh it off. In mostly Muslim Zanzibar, the joke was lost on people, who thought I was gay or just a total loser. Kiswahili saved absolutely nothing. It was a night awkwardly spent sitting down as much as possible, and drinking as much as possible to forget the awkwardness of the situation (which didn’t work). Also didn’t help that Halloween costumes were a bit scarce – of 200 people at the bar, I’d say a dozen had costumes – meaning most people just assumed that guy with the tiny white shorts was carrying around an electric fly swatter in case the mosquitoes started to creep near my upper thighs.

The blessing in disguise is that three German tourists happened to be partying at the same bar, and absolutely loved my tribute to their tennis hero. In between death glances and me covering my junk, these proud gentlemen were always there to cheer me on.

Other than Halloween in Zanzibar, it was a fairly standard week: plenty of work, plenty of learning Kiswahili, and no Internet. As such, I’ve decided to delve into the basics of food here in Zanzibar. As far as mannerisms, men usually eat before women, and most everything is eaten with your hands – occasionally a pain since Muslim cultures designates that you only use your right hand to eat (although you are allowed to use both for tearing apart tougher stuff like chicken).

The food here is wonderful, albeit interestingly different. For starters, you can get plenty of classic food for very cheap: fresh fruits and veggies, bread, eggs, tea, fish and meat. For a premium price, you can get an even wider variety: cereal, chocolate bars, cheese, peanut butter, and even Pringles. Unfortunately, where a loaf of bread costs 30 cents and a small box of cereal costs $6, it’s best to stick to the basics.

Luckily, the basic afford a nice variety of tastes not readily available at home. One simple delight is a fresh dafu, or young coconut, whereby you lop the top off and drink the coconut juice (which hasn’t yet turned into milk). After you finish, the salesman will gut the insides for you for a slimier (but heartier) snack to finish it off. The whole thing costs about 30 cents, and it’s usually a pretty fun social setting right after work.

Another cheap local snack is muhogo, or cassava. Vendors will barbeque these large roots and sell them for between 10-20 cents for what essentially tastes like a baked potato, loaded with spicy salts. It’s a killer snack and locals lose their minds if they see you eating it.

Cashews are supposed to be cheap, but it seems as though they’re only sold to tourists so the prices are quite high. Instead, you can pay five cents for a little bag of fresh peanuts almost anywhere you go. You can recognize the salesmen because they all rhythmically jangle a handful of small coins to attract your attention, then lift a tray full of peanut packs for your convenience.

The list of quick, cheap treats goes on: sliced pineapple, watermelon and jackfruit; pre-bagged popcorn; dates; and incredible sugar cane juice (vendors use these giant steel machines to help extract fresh sugar cane juice, which they strain with ice and serve).

For meals, street food is a beauty. The cheap local favourite is rojo, which is a stew or soup of sorts that literally translates to “gravy” – rather appropriate, since I’m pretty sure it’s the reheated remains of the grease they used to cook their meat skewers. Whatever it is, it’s delicious, and you mix it potatoes, meat, hard-boiled eggs and even salad for about $1 per serving.

A personal favourite, available almost everywhere, is called chipsi mayai. Essentially, it’s a french fry omelette. The chef tosses a serving of pre-cooked fries into a pan, then adds two eggs and cooks it – optionally with pieces of beef or chicken, and always topped with ketchup, spices and salad. A heart attack sandwich, but just so damn good.

Meat is a riskier venture, since cooking it yourself involves selecting your own cuts of meat from the butcher (which usually consists of a guy in a window with a full cow hanging from the ceiling, ready to slice) and there are plenty of fatty pieces in the meat you need to work around. Alternatively, you can buy chicken, but unless you want to pay the premium price for pre-cooked skewers, you’re gonna have to kill and skin that sucker yourself. I’ve convinced myself I’ll do it eventually, but I’m definitely procrastinating.

The other day, my local street food chefs demanded that I roll through with a camera, so we had a pretty wild photo shoot. I’ll post the pictures on Facebook when I get some decent Internet – your guess is as good as mine.

All told, the food is unreal, and if you’re smart you can feed yourself for a week for the cost of one meal at a tourist restaurant. Recently, I started buying potatoes, peppers, carrots, onions and tomatoes in bulk to throw together some mean stirfry, which is entirely easier on the budget – and healthier than eating rojo and chipsi mayai six days a week. It was getting to the point that a concerned group of local fish salesmen were sitting me down and telling me to cut down, since my eating habits would turn me into a buana mvivu (“lazy gentleman”).

What I wouldn’t give for a bag of Sour Patch Kids right now…

Tourist extremes

First off, apologies to all five of this blog’s faithful readers for the two-week hiatus. The transition to my new office has been unkind to my updating abilities: the pace of work has skyrocketed, and only one computer in my office has Internet access – I usually get a chance to use it once every two days or so.

The past two weeks have been particularly eye-opening, since I was able to see both extremes of the tourism that Zanzibar has to offer. Two weeks ago, I played a serious tourist card and headed south to Kizimkazi, where tourists flock to swim with dolphins. Luckily, we took the early bus and our boat was first on the water, which seriously made the difference.

In the early morning, the turquoise sea reflects the sunlight in a really strange way, and the water glimmers with a metallic texture that reminds you of a computer screensaver. After a ten-minute boat ride, we see two dorsal fins peek above water and our guide tells us, quite casually, to hop in. I throw on a snorkel and some flippers and see a dorsal fin reappear just as I’m jumping in, and I dive underneath to see a massive grey bottle-nosed dolphin diving below me.

I swim 20 metres above him for about a minute, until he finds a group of five other dolphins, who start to spiral around in other, and it looks like they're either wrestling or dancing. I don't really care, because before I know it, all six are barreling towards us and dive out of the sea together. Soon I’m swimming as fast as I can, right in the pack, dodging dolphins six inches in front of me for two adrenaline-pumping minutes. Jellyfish have stung my entire body, but I’m too numb with excitement to feel it.

After that outrageous experience, which already made the daytrip worth its 30-dollar ticket, we ate some lunch and headed to Jozani Forest. Here we hung out with a big crew of near-extinct red colobus monkeys, the highlight of which was when a monkey with an amputated arm tried to steal another monkey's baby. It was painfully awkward and hilarious. Shortly after, we
walked through mangroves during low tide, swung on their incredibly powerful roots for awhile, then headed back into town.

The next day was a five-dollar boat trip to Chunguu Island (Prison Island), which used to house slaves, then eventually a quarantine station for Zanzibar. Now it's the home of a tortoise sanctuary, and for 2 bucks you can play with a few dozen MAMMOTH tortoises whose ages go up to about 185 years. They're actually surprisingly quick and crafty, and one bit off a chunk of my sandal while I was feeding his friend. Soon enough, though, we realized that the trick was to give these guys a big ol' neck massage, at which point these giant beasts just melt and relax.

I paid a cumulative 37 bucks for the entire weekend's activities, which is hardly fair considering the intensity of some of the activities. It was also nice to take a break from speaking Swahili, which is surprisingly exhausting when you're always fumbling over words and trying to piece together broken conversations. Unfortunately, my other tourist extreme highlighted this weakness in all its glory.

Last week, I travelled with two Peace Corps volunteers to the small, isolated island of Tumbatu. This is a place that has been written up in travel guides as a place not to go unless you are fluent in Kiswahili, since the islanders are considered quite aloof and unfriendly to visitors. Their island, however, is an integral part of Zanzibar's history, where Arabian leaders built a giant palace when this little stopover was the capital of all Zanzibar roughly 800 years ago.

The boat ride over was eerily calm, which made the translucent waters indistinguishable from the morning sky except for a smattering of dhows and fishing canoes along the horizon. The island is appropriately dagger-shaped, and giant Baobab trees tower over the palms, keeping an ominous lookout for potential intruders. We pass over waves of coral and beautiful tropical fish, but this is hardly a place to go snorkeling, since not making fools of ourselves is definitely first priority.

Thankfully, my two colleagues have been living in rural Tanzania for the past two years, and Peace Corps volunteers are initiated with three months of intense language training, so they are pretty fluent and handle almost the entire discussion. Our boat driver drops us off around the corner from the main entrance to the village, which only makes us stick our more as we approach the beach to say hello to a group of young men. The first thing they do is take us to the village Sheha (think elder or leader), where we sign a guestbook that informs us we're the seventh people here in the past three months.

The entire trip is awkward, but interesting nonetheless. The village looks like most rural villages in Zanzibar, except that the dirt road is replaced with a road lined with solidified coral and white seashells everywhere. There's not much left of the ruins of the old palace of the Sultan of Zanzibar, or the giant mosque he'd commissioned, mostly because they were also built with coral, which didn't stand the test of time very well. One very cool aspect is that the entire island (of about 14,000 people) has independent electricity thanks to a network of solar panels.

Zanzibar's tourism industry is growing every year (I've read about 20-25% per year despite rising travel costs) and it's easy to see why. There's something for everyone. I've yet to go scuba diving in the many legendary spots (where you can see schools of tuna, giant sea turtles and hammerhead sharks, among others), visit the holding cells of Zanzibar's once-thriving slave market, or go on a spice tour. I figure I'm here for a while, so no rush... besides, I've been trying to eat, speak and live like a local as much as I can, and it's not like the most of the population here have the disposable income to indulge in activities like this! Thanks to rising food prices, the average Zanzibari budget drops about 60% of total income on food. Add rent, clothes and transport (if you can) and there's usually nothing left.

Work has been very interesting: four field visits to schools, a couple of which were in the deep bush (i.e. Dongongwe, with a population of 150) and every trip gives more credit to the work my organization does. In the spirit of keeping single blog posts from turning into novels, I'll cut off here, but since karaoke and beach trips are the only weekend plans, I'll discuss some of the cooler aspects of my work next week.

Also, I've been getting individual requests for topics: mannerisms, food, intensity of religion, etc... so if anyone wants to know anything specific about Zanzibar, I'd be happy to share. There are all sorts of subtleties that I don't think to mention, but it's really some of the more interesting stuff.

Hoping you all have well-thought-out Hallowe'en costumes,

Graham

Ask your mom or ask your dad

So I’m starting to regret bringing my Macbook to Zanzibar. It’s perpetually dusty everywhere and my fresh white keyboard has turned a grimy shade of brown. I went to plug in a flash drive today and a spider crawled out of the USB port. It’s got me wondering if Apple covers insect-induced short circuits?

Now that Ramadhan is finished, my host organization’s doors finally opened… on the one-month anniversary of arriving in Zanzibar. Luckily, my intern predecessor kept some seriously intricate records of her 8-month internship and it looks like I’ve got plenty of work to do. My main responsibility is writing “profiles” of our network of preschools, which often involves me visiting these schools: hanging out with the kids, listening to their stories, taking pictures and so on… my first school visit is tomorrow.

After writing for Metro, I’ve gotten used to pounding out copy under strict time constraints, so throwing these profiles together shouldn’t take too long. There’s plenty more to be done at ZMRC, but I’m also contemplating a side project.

I think I mentioned earlier that a local study showed that roughly 8% of young Zanzibaris use heroin. With about 65% of the population under the age of 25, that means that up to 5% of all Zanzibaris use heroin. That’s fucked up. The worldwide usage rate is about a dozen times lower.

More fucked up? The product is cut with so much flour that users barely get high and end up spending all their cash just to chase a fix. To help solve this problem, apparently one in ten heroin users in Stone Town have resorted to a gross little technique called “flash blood.” It’s simple: instead of taking out the needle after you take a hit, your friend uses it to extract your blood, then shoots your blood into his arm to get the residue of the dope. As you can imagine, a bit of a risky practice – particularly when HIV rates are rising.

I’ve got to do something about this, but it’s tough to know what. I’ve been trying to contact local organizations who might have some access to these communities: I figure I’m the last person who could convince a broke, homeless addict not to lift off so I’m better off finding people they trust.

Either way, it’s nice to put my work in context, since these madrasa preschools are giving kids a realistic chance to survive a struggling education system and give them opportunities later in life. When the average size of a single-teacher classroom is 100 kids (sharing a dozen textbooks) it’s easy to see why kids have a hard time sticking with it.

Sorry about that... A bit intense. As a change of pace, here’s three things that speaking Swahili did for me this week:

1. A dude I met on the daladala a few weeks ago called me and invited me to Pemba (Zanzibar’s other main island) for the weekend. I couldn’t go on such short notice, so instead he paid for my daladala to his home 20 minutes outside of town and introduced me to his family over a couple of sodas. I’m going there for dinner tomorrow night, and he already introduced me to the chicken we’ll be eating.

2. Stumbled across a place where a bunch of crates of Cokes being were stacked and managed to negotiate a sweet wholesale price - $6.50 for a crate of 24 (restaurants charge a buck a piece).

3. During a normal day of lounging on a hammock at the normally-empty Kendwa beach, a couple of butt-naked local children ran into the ocean, followed by their deaf older brother and eventually the rest of the entire family. After a few sentences in Swahili, I ended up swimming with them, albeit with my bathing suit.

This week’s strange Swahili lesson is a rant on family:

Mama means mother, which makes sense. Kaka means brother. You’d think dada would mean father, but it doesn’t: it means sister. So I figured papa would be father, but that doesn’t fly either because it means shark. Dad is baba. By the time I get around to this, they think my dad is my sister, who happens to be a shark.

First league basketball game tonight! Time to see if our intense, three-hour, water-deprived practices pay off in victory.