Princeton in Africa Retreat (Nelspruit, South Africa)

The reason I was in Kasulu in the first place (and Kigoma the weekend before) was the Princeton in Africa fellows retreat, a five day event that the program organizes around the halfway point of everyone’s fellowships. The location for this year’s retreat was Nelspruit, South Africa – and getting there involved a surreal glimpse at the different stages of development found in different parts of the continent. We started out by car, bouncing along the dirt roads leading from Kibondo to Kigoma past rural villages populated mainly by farmers engaged in subsistence agriculture, waving at the children in tattered clothes who’d come running to the side of the road shouting “wazungu! wazungu!,” and stopping occasionally to wait for a herd of goats or cows to amble off to the field on the side of the road. The next three legs of the trip were by plane: departing first from Kigoma’s tiny airstrip (where the baggage claim is the back of a pickup truck), then from Dar es Salaam’s small airport (where you can see all of the departure gates from wherever you’re sitting), and then from Nairobi’s larger airport (all its gates might not be visible from one point, but you still board the plane by walking out across the tarmac and up a set of stairs), until we finally reached Johannesburg (an airport as nice (or nicer) as any I’ve flown through in the US or Europe). We finished the trip like it started – by car: first a three hour shuttle from the airport to Nelspruit, then a short taxi ride to the hostel (all of it along roads and through areas that would’ve felt exactly like home if it wasn’t for the occasional road sign indicating that the exit for a town with a tongue-twistingly Afrikaans name was several kilometers ahead). In the space of two days, we’d gone from one of the most underdeveloped regions of Tanzania to the country’s most developed city and then from the capital city of the more developed Kenya to South Africa. During the months that I’ve spent here, I’ve had a chance to travel to a number of the countries neighboring Tanzania, and while each certainly had its own flavor – different languages, unique cultural characteristics, varied geography and architecture, etc. – they all still felt (to me at least) like they were cut from the same (or similar) cloth (which is, of course, true historically (to a certain extent at least)). South Africa is only a few hundred miles to the south – separated from Tanzania by Mozambique in the east and Zambia/Malawi/Zimbabwe in the west – and yet the parts of it that I saw made me feel like I was in a whole different world. I don’t mean that it was perfect, just that there were clear differences between the economy and infrastructure of South Africa and those of its neighbors to the north, differences that could even be seen in little things like clothing and the buildings. In fact, the moment that confirmed just how surreal the whole journey was happened at the supermarket, when I realized that for the first time in months my presence was totally unremarkable to everyone around me. And to be honest, it was kind of nice to be ignored! But it was also great to then to come back to Kibondo where a simple fist bump or wave or smile is enough to leave groups of giggling children in my wake every time I leave the house :-D

Other things that were fun/exciting about South Africa:

1. Being able to drink the tap water! (I hadn’t even realized that was something I missed about America until I turned the tap on for the first time at the hostel ... so you can add that to the list of silly little things I get excited about (2-ply toilet paper, paved roads, cheese, etc. ...)
2. For such a developed country, everything at the supermarket was still really, really cheap ... it was like the best of both worlds – the infrastructure of the US + the cheap prices of goods in TZ!
3. Really nice wine (not necessarily a new discovery, but the selection of South African wines is definitely better inside South Africa than it is at home! Plus, item #2 applied to the wine as well, so it was a bit of a novelty to realize that the $3 bottle we bought would have probably cost about $15-20 in the US)
4. The hostel (the Old Vic, pictured to the right) we stayed at was great – for the most part we had the place to ourselves, the owner was this gregariously accommodating guy who always kept us laughing, and the facilities were excellent.

All those things were nice perks, but none of them compared to the retreat itself. To begin with, it was great to reconnect with the Christmas in Zanzibar crew and to then get to know the other 18 fellows. PiAf structured the retreat so that we had a number of small group, large group, and individual sessions during the day and then free time and group dinners in the evenings. I thought it was a perfect balance; the sessions were ideal for sharing stories about work experiences, examining different aspects of the first half of the fellowship, and discussing a number of related topics (like what it’s like to be a mzungu in Africa and how development work often involves balancing contradictory interests), while the evenings were not only a lot of fun but also refreshing – I found it both interesting to hear about the work that other fellows were doing and useful to discover that many of our experiences shared similar challenges, frustrations, and memorably positive moments. And on a more basic level, it was just nice to spend several days with a group of my peers – people with whom I share common backgrounds and current situations; it was kind of like being back at Princeton (albeit in more tropical surroundings) ... and that’s definitely something I’m a fan of!