the richest man in India

The richest man in India is named Azim Premji. I have no idea what kind of person he is, but if he's anything like the Azim Premji in Sumbawanga, Tanzania, then he's a pretty fantastic guy.
Let me explain how I came to rely on the kindness of strangers in this little weathered town of Sumbawanga. I got into bed Thursday night feeling awesome. I'd met an american married couple my age who were doing research around the Rukwa valley region and had a fun dinner with them out at one of the nicer restaurants in town--great chicken curry and naan. I'd gotten approval to start my research, I was getting the hang of driving the Landy, things were going well. Probably around midnight though, I started feeling flushed and hot and I kept waking up from very weird dreams. I tried to shake it off, but when I woke up in the morning, I knew something was wrong. My face was as red as a tomato and my head was really hurting. Thankfully, I had found Sister Helena the day before (see last post!), and she had shown me the Catholic center and health clinic, and given me her phone number, saying to call if I needed anything. I called her, told her I felt sick and she said she would take me to the clinic right away.
Cut to the clinic--a few questions and one blood test later, it's confirmed. I have malaria. 15 per 200 cells are infected. I have no idea what this means! Except that I feel increasing horrible. All I want is the medicine. I get into the Catholic center's land cruiser with another sister (Sister Beata), and we are going ostensibly to the pharmacy. But wait first the car has to stop at the sunflower factory to load up on sunflower cakes for the animals. Excruciating. But I'm not complaining because I'm in the middle of NOWHERE in Africa and at least someone is taking care of me. Finally we get to the pharmacy (each bump in the road is like jamming the crowbar further into my skull), get the medicine, get some juice (malaria lowers your glucose levels), buy a mozzie net, and go back to my hotel. I literally fall into the bed. well not until I insist that the mozzie net gets hung up. I am NOT taking any chances!
So the next few days pass by in kind of a blur and well, yes, were pretty terrible. But not as bad as they could have been because what was amazing was the way the handful of people I had only just met in SWA were so unbelievably kind to me. Sister Helena, Sister Beata, Godwin (also from the catholic center), and...in case you were wonderful what the beginning sentence of this entry is all about, Mr Premji. I had met Mr. Premji for just a few seconds outside his shop a few days earlier, and when he heard I was a student of Tim and Monique's (UC Davis, they do research here), he was very excited to meet me. When he heard I was sick, he came to visit, bearing cookies and fruit juice. On Sunday when he came to visit and saw that I wasn't looking much better, he forced me to get out of bed and come to his house and join him and some friends for dinner. I was dubious--I really didn't feel like getting out of bed--but by the end of the evening I felt so much better! His friend Altaf produced a cellphone for me since my crappy Motorola one wasn't working--now I could hear from mom and dad--and Laura! Perhaps the best part was that on Saturday, when I mentioned from my bed-ridden position that it was my birthday, he dashed off only to return later that evening with friends, a card and a cake saying "Happy birthday, Clare", in hand!! We sat in the hotel restaurant and everyone sang, and as local tradition goes, everyone at the table fed me a forkful of cake from the first slice and gave me happy birthday wishes. It was really so, so nice.
So all was not lost--I still feel pretty weak and tired but the worst is over. And I discovered that even though I wasn't surrounded by friends and family from home on my birthday, I miraculously still had a very special one.

Sumbawanga

I think I am losing track of what decade I am living in here. This might have something to do with the fact that I am driving a Land Rover that is almost 10 years older than me--it was registered in 1973!!! (wait for pics, its like a flintstone's car) Or maybe it's because the other day I was asked to locate Sister Helena somewhere in this area and tell her her missionary consignment container has arrived. (didn't missionary stuff happen decades ago?? apparently not, in fact the only other mzungu woman in this town drives a car that says "soma biblia", read the bible). And not to mention the reality of potholed mud roads, limited electricity, brown water and nothing even close to a Shoprite or any other form of a grocery store. The gas station sells fruit juice from South Africa, which I think may be the only packaged product that I consume for the next 6 months. In a way, that is kind of nice, I like idea of detoxing all the preservatives and chemicals that we live on in the States.
I'm in the one Internet cafe in this town and miraculously there was no line today. Yesterday I waited about an hour while mainly high school-aged boys lined up to check their Yahoo accounts, before going home to a house with no electricity or running water. The Internet is amazing.
What else? I've started introducing myself in the villages where I'll be doing my research, and while I haven't ventured into Mbizi forest itself yet, I've skirted around it on my village drives. It looks beautiful, and sort of mysterious as its been shrouded in clouds (mawingu) for the past two days.
I met two Israeli guys who are engineers helping construct cell phone towers across Tanzania. The cell phone industry here is something I will have to save for another blog, but suffice to say it is angering. Apart from ugly towers dotting the wide open African landscape, they charge a ridiculous amount of money to people who can't even afford to clothe their children, but to whom a phone is a huge status symbol. EVERYONE here, i mean everyone, has a cell phone.
More about Sumbawanga to come, and I hope everyone had a nice valentine's day!

in search of the mangabey

Yann Martel must have spent some time wandering around in the same kind of forest that I’ve been in for the past few days in order to write his novel, Life of Pi. I kept expecting some of the vines that I was hacking my way through to reach out, curl around me, and tangle me up so tightly that a few of my white teeth would be all anyone would ever find of me. This did not happen but honestly at one point I yelled at a plant to let go of me. It was incredible; I was out with the WCS team in the forest at the base of Mt. Rungwe in search of the new monkey species (“kipungi”) that has just been discovered, and the meaning of “bushwacking” was certainly re-defined for me. Our first morning of work (after a night in a rather damp fungus-smelling tent that miraculously didn’t leak during the intermittent downpours) we started out on a narrow path down a ravine and through thick, buggy vegetation on all sides, following our hunter-turned-WCS guide, who was clad in shorts and flip-flops and wielding a machete. This seemed adventurous enough for me, but before I knew it we had turned off the path and we were literally crawling through vines and thorns and all kinds of trees that Amnon (our guide) would occasionally slash at with his machete. It was wet and humid and almost claustrophobic, being surrounded by that much dense vegetation with no end in sight. It would not have surprised me if King Kong had jumped out in front of me, chest-thumping and roaring. And I have no idea how to vaudeville dance enough to entertain a gorilla, so then I really would have been in trouble. Thankfully, no such appearances, but I was lucky enough to be one of the handful of non-Tanzanians in the world right now to see the new species of monkey discovered here, the Highland mangabey. We spotted them (well not me, Noah and Amnon did) high up in a grove of trees near a gulley, and got to spend some time just watching them, crouched down in the dirt and eating our lunch of chocolate biscuits (us, that is). They are bigger than I thought, with a fairly long coat of grayish-brown fur and a call that is pretty much impossible to explain in words. It was very cool though, to see them, and worth the menacing vines, irritating insects, and unrelenting rain. And it was also very cool to spend some time with the staff, learning a bit of Swahili, finding out that evolution is abysmally taught in schools here (they are basically told that monkeys first evolved into Africans and then later into white people, unbelievable), trying to explain why I don’t believe literally in the Bible, and getting to eat the amazing food they managed to cook around a very smoky jungle campfire—with no shortages of avocados to go with everything which made me very happy!