Kibondo!

In one of the emails we exchanged while I was still in America, Shelly had mentioned something in passing about it being dusty, about using a scarf to cover her face whenever trucks passed on the road. A lot of things were mentioned before I left in almost as many emails and my attention was more easily captured by the promise of my house having not just one but two (two!) flushing toilets than it was by something as mundane as dust. I really didn’t think about it again until I’d arrived in Kibondo. Even then, I didn’t think about it or notice it myself; it was more that random people I passed would comment on it. “Habari yako?” they would greet me. “Salama, na kwako?” I would reply, prepared for the typical volley of greetings – and for the most part the social script that I’d grown accustomed to in Dar was sufficient. But then every once in awhile (and often enough for me to hear it several times over the course of two days), the next remark wouldn’t be another greeting, but instead a statement: “vumbi.” “Ndio, vumbi sana,” I would agree, outwardly sympathetic, inwardly bemused. Yes, a lot of dust … judging from the approving smiles it elicited, my answer was the correct one, and yet for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what the big deal was. Obviously trucks driving on unpaved roads were going to kick up a good bit of dirt into the air, but that was to be expected, so why all the fuss?

And then, about halfway through my third day in Kibondo, it finally hit me. (I quite literally hadn’t seen the dust for all the dust.) It was like coming home with my first pair of glasses and realizing that the maple tree in front of our house actually had individual leaves on it. Except this time around, I was realizing that absolutely everything in Kibondo is covered in a layer of red dust – and not just the obvious targets, like cars, white shirts, and feet, but even things like the needles on the pine trees and the insides of closed drawers. I’m sure that in a few more days it will begin to wear on me and, like the strangers I’ve met, it will become one of the things I dislike but deal with, but for now I’m still caught in the amazement-phase. It’s like seeing the world through rose (err…rusty-red) colored glasses … sure to lose its appeal soon enough, but for now, magical in its own way.

Now, back to those two flushing toilets! Or rather, back to my lovely house with its wonderful indoor plumbing :) My home for the year is one of several houses in the Nywela compound, which apparently used to be home to a decent number of foreigners and Tanzanians who worked for various NGOs associated with the camps but is now a little less lively. So whereas in years past, the 4 bedrooms in my house used to have regular occupants, now it’s just me. Aside from the aforementioned bedrooms and bathrooms, there’s a kitchen, pantry, small eating area, and a common room – all in all, quite a bit more palatial than I was expecting! Outside of the house, there’s a small backyard and a basketball court in the front (I think someone else has a volleyball court as their front yard…)

My neighbors are a rather mixed crowd. Right next door is the Nkya family – Mr. Nkya (who works for TCRS in the Community Empowerment Project division) and a rotating assortment of kids (a few currently away at school, one about to go away to school, a couple others in school here….lots of kids!). The TCRS-KRP Project Coordinator (i.e. – my boss) lives in the house below them with his family. And then there are my non-human neighbors: more goats, dogs, chickens, and roosters than I can count … plus a horse and at least one goose … and those are just the ones I’ve discovered in my first week! Technically there are barbed-wire fences between the properties, but they’re more effective at keeping humans out than animals … and that’s not saying much since I duck under one such fence every morning and evening on my way to and from the office :) The combination of the basketball court and fences that aren’t really fences means that the majority of the non-adult occupants of the compound can be found in my front yard at different points during the day….when I wake up, it’s usually a couple of goats hanging out on the court, by the time I come back from work the goats have been replaced by a bunch of kids throwing a basketball around, then the dogs make the rounds later at night….it makes for one of my favorite kinds of ambient noise and reminds me a little of growing up at home with everyone playing outside (and then I see a goat and have a “Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” moment!)

As for the town itself …. it seems I am destined to live in small towns … first Oakmont, then Princeton, now Kibondo. Kibondo’s small even compared to Oakmont though, which is saying something! Unless there’s some big part of it I haven’t stumbled across yet (highly unlikely), it’s basically comprised of one main road with TCRS on one end and a cluster of other NGOs on the other end (IRC, UNHRC, UNICEF, Right to Play, etc.). In between there’s a bus stand and a small business district full of little stalls where you can find everything from a tailor to Pringles. From what I saw on the way here, the surrounding area is mainly subsistence farming … so compared to its outskirts at least, Kibondo is quite the booming metropolis! Geographically speaking, Kibondo’s due east of Bujumbura (the capital of Burundi) and lies to the north of Kigoma (on Lake Tanganyika) and to the south of Mwanza (on Lake Victoria). The latter two towns are both a relatively short flight away, but by road it’s a good (and probably really bumpy!) 7 or 8 hour drive to Mwanza.

Since I flew in to Mwanza from Dar es Salaam, you can understand then why I was happy to learn that the second leg of my trip would be by plane rather than car. As an added bonus, this was the first time I’d been on such a small plane (I think it had a 10 person capacity at most), and I loved it! Considering what I now know about the dust here, I have a feeling that driving to Kibondo would not have been as much of a long picturesque journey as it would have been like spending 7 or 8 hours suspended in a thickly opaque cloud of dust, whereas traveling by plane meant I could see everything we flew over. The Mwanza airport is located right on the shore of Lake Victoria, so as we departed we flew out over the lake (which was even more beautiful than it seems in these pictures I’ll put up in my next post). Then gradually, the landscape started changing and become much less flat and the blue of the water was replaced by different shades of green, red, and brown (yes, green ... for all that's it's dusty, it's still lushly vegetated - there are an amazing variety of trees, shrubs, and flowers...). We were flying low enough to be able to see houses and things moving around - I kept thinking that it looked more like one of those 3-d topographical maps than like reality what with the everything being so tidily miniature!

And that's all I've got for now....illustrations to follow in the next post!