The smell is what I sometimes remember, exactly the same. Cow shit, diesel, dust, scalded milk. Burning trash. A tang, like something fermented. When it rises unexpectedly to meet me, in the city where I live now, I take deep huffing breaths, because I want the smell all to myself, completely, every bit of it. I let it make me lightheaded. The city where I live now smells like damp and salty mounds of seaweed, Cuban sandwiches, and the breath that rises from ripe blackberries. But every place has its own euphoria, and this one I miss in great hungry waves.
Arusha, in northern Tanzania, is a place of extremes. Even leaving the States, my friends woke up with the sun to see me off, not something any of us (students, night owls, partiers, pranksters in the quiet hours) would ever do on a normal day. My decision, a hard shove away from the familiar, made scarcely any sense to me or the people I loved enough to listen to. There was little reason involved, and a great deal of stubbornness. Why? Why not? Like a child. I chose the study-abroad program almost at random. I wanted to encounter a language I had no memory of, animals from the pages of a book, and I wanted to change. I had a strange persistent faith that challenging myself in this way would result in a metamorphosis.
Instead, I retreated, curled inward, and refused to engage. For long stretches of the time I spent in Arusha, I was deeply homesick, and nostalgia slowed my days like a drug. I was waiting for someone, and it had defined my life for so long that I was afraid to let the obsession fade. Instead, I nurtured it like a parasite. Morning-glory vines choking out the competition. It made me less.
Meanwhile, the city wanted in. There was no avoiding the smells, the noise, and the necessity of crowding together. Our group came to a hostel near the center of town after weeks spent camping, where the companionship of human bodies meant we could forget the closeness of lions walking between our tents to drink from the water tank. Now four of us shared a room meant for three, hanging laundry from the window blinds, pulling one sticky date at a time from a foil-wrapped lump and stockpiling bottles of South African wine. I shouldered my way through the streets and slept in a straight line, sometimes falling into the crack where we shoved our mattresses together. We drank lager and coffee and strong local gin and, once, Coca-Cola mixed with red wine on the roof of the hostel, listening to the call to prayer from the mosque next door and watching a dusty, gutsy game of soccer on a nearby field.
***
Tourism is the second largest source of income in Tanzania. I learned quickly to say I was a student, not a tourist, in less musical Swahili than I would have preferred. But students still carry cash. Crude batik prints, made with wax and dye on thick cloth, and endlessly similar carved soapstone trinkets, and parades of bright colored beaded things, appeared under my nose at every opportunity. I said no in so many ways. No thank you, no. No, I have no money. I don’t want it. No.
Maybe it was that pushing away that prevented me, initially, from embracing the experience. For a long time, I gave the city so little effort. I tried to think about the ideas we discussed as a group, about political ecology, the meaning of poverty, and a speech by Ivan Illich that launched me into a painful cycle of questioning why I’d come. I withdrew into myself, unwilling to engage until I could make sense of what I was hearing. But I tried too hard and was too impatient to reach the place where those thoughts resolved.
The city was in the margins, and I came to love it slowly. I loved it the way you love a fever dream, its wicked strangeness. But it was tough love, returned to me. It was work. One day, after lingering in a crowd I found the neatest of slits in my backpack, which I patched roughly with duct tape. Electricity was never a sure thing, flickering in and out on a whim, and flash floods made rivers of trash in the street and once threatened to overtake our room. We stuffed towels under the door to keep the water out. And I have never regretted anything as much as the ice cream I bought during Ramadan, and ate walking down the street.
But Arusha is also a city of possibility, and this is how quickly things happen: it was a heavy Sunday afternoon two months into my trip, and the restaurants were closed. I was looking for lunch, and a stranger approached me to offer some knowledge of Sunday lunches which I had to assume he possessed. I was hungry, and he was friendly, and he invited me on his research trip based only on my verbal affirmations: I was a student, I was learning about science, I had spent a month now on my own, and I had no particular passion. His name was Alfred, and he worked with the African Wildlife Foundation, and he spends his time in the field tracking elephants.
Elephants are a keystone species in the Serengeti, one of Tanzania’s most famous parks. “Siringet,” meaning “endless space,” which is apt. “Keystone,” meaning the presence or absence of giant gray herbivores is crucial to the park’s ecological balance. Alfred was mapping the migration patterns of those elephant populations that still remain, in hopes of decreasing conflict between agricultural communities and migrating elephant herds by educating villagers about the elephants’ habits and convincing them to plant crops away from the most traveled paths.
When I met Alfred, I thought I was failing. I was halfheartedly developing a research project on education that felt less than essential, and I wanted to be taken seriously. “Sometimes,” my friend said to me, “you look just like a puppy.” I said yes to the adventure without hesitation, but I wasn’t a different person with the promise of elephants. Alfred, like many Tanzanians, was cavalier about logistics and impossible to reach in the days leading up to the trip, and I was fragile and disbelieving the morning I walked to the designated pickup spot. I’d come close to giving up on the whole trip.
That disbelief colored the entirety of my experience for the next several weeks. Alfred operated out of hunting camps, where the accommodations were luxurious – mosquito net canopies over white queen mattresses, flush toilets, three-course meals on white plates. There were endless drinks, and photos of men (always men) who had paid thousands of dollars for the privilege of posing with their stiffening antelopes. We waited for news from the spotter plane, sent swirling out over the savanna every morning. When Robbie, the pilot, radioed with news of elephants, we would pile into Jeeps and follow his directions. The veterinarian was in charge of tranquilizer darts, fired from a helicopter and filled with an opiate called M-99 that left the elephants paralyzed but alert and allowed us to take measurements and attach a heavy leather collar, wide as a car tire, with a radio box that would make this elephant into a colorful, blinking dot on Alfred’s computer screen.
The research was one thing, the camps another experience entirely. I was used to fieldwork, and this felt the same as ever. We took data and hiked through scratchy bushes and kept an eye out for anything poisonous. The rest felt like a dream, one in which I had lost control. I was so lucky, I told myself, to have this experience. I had no right to be uncomfortable. Yet more and more, I realized that the world I was visiting felt dishonest to me. From living with families outside Arusha, walking through the streets of the city and up the mountain on a four mile hike that grew routine to us, I knew that very few people had such amenities. The contrast between poverty and excess was jarring.
I rode in the plane, and the helicopter. Only once. Alfred and the pilots seemed to feel an obligation to share that experience. In between the two research trips I took with Alfred, I stayed in his guest room, where I felt edgy and out of place. He never told me if he expected something from my involvement with his project, and I never asked.
There were many things I never asked. The things I was seeing and doing felt as though they floated in a bubble of soap that might burst if I even dared acknowledge its existence. My silence made me queasy, but the questions I had were of finances, politics, and motives, and I didn’t know where to begin. I wrote a simple case study of the project and kept my unease to myself.
Returning to the city felt comforting, suddenly. Two Australians who ran one of the hunting camps dropped me off outside a hostel with my backpack, and I knew I could find a restaurant, a room, and my friends. We went out a few days later, to a music festival, and one of the men told lies about me, and instead of feeling downtrodden and dark, I laughed with people who knew better and forgot it all.
***
Arusha pressed on me, made me leave my comfort zone over and over again. It exhausted me, but then out of the dinginess it delighted. I never expected anything grand, and suddenly purple jacaranda trees were popping bright against the street when it rained, and mangoes were in season. Once, in a restaurant, I would swear we saw a live snake brought to a table. I think I made this up after hearing it somewhere, but the story fits the city so readily. Showy but functional, the way the snake ended up dead on a plate. Arusha is straightforward that way.
I learned to be straightforward, as well. It wasn’t a flip of the switch, but a gradual awareness that came only after months of making myself small for fear of failure, or offense. I learned to take care of myself, because the city wasn’t concerned with my comfort, with my ability to navigate the streets and leave my room each day. It was only when I took responsibility for those things that I was rewarded, freely and without judgment, by experiences far beyond what I could ever have expected.
Arusha taught me to inhabit the person I was, rather than the person I wanted to be. I went to hear the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. I bought nine pairs of earrings. I took photos of the logos for American rock-and-roll groups plastered on the windows of the dala-dalas, vehicles somewhere between a minivan and a taxi that careen endlessly through the streets carrying packed passengers and sometimes chickens. People I barely knew called me taxis late at night, looked me in the eye, patiently tolerated my poor language skills. I drank the most delicious tea of my life, thick with milk and sugar, and scraped my knees playing soccer in the dirt, and held a newborn goat, and in pure moments, I stopped worrying about my own ignorance, and I lived where I was.
Loving a place doesn’t mean you will stay there. Sometimes the best love comes in recognizing your differences. At first I thought I wasn’t ready for Arusha, but now I know that the way it feels to change, rarely dazzling and often uncomfortable, tricked me too often into believing in my own failure, believing I would never shake loose the familiar weaknesses and uncertainties. My doubt in myself clung to every limb as I walked through the city, but in doing so it strengthened the muscles I used to go forward. For a while, I stopped waiting.
Failing is still a process. It changes you. I was blunter when I came back, more self-assured. Yet it’s taken me years to look at the four months I spent there with an honest and critical eye. I swam through them in a haze of my own naiveté and privilege. That I took as much as I did away from the experience is no credit to me, but belongs entirely to a city that has little to hide. Arusha is the friend who always says exactly what they mean, who makes no promises they can’t keep. Who accepts no excuses. Who is in your face much of the time. Who is beloved for all of that.
I stopped waiting.
***
Photo by Noel Feans.
