People are different across streets and alike across oceans.
Though I have not spent much effort recreating my old website, one small accomplishment is my "My Code" section. This lets you view some source code I have written for school projects and pet projects. It is ideal for university students and people interested in learning to program. Most of the code was written in C, Java, and Python; and at the time I write this, all of the code was written at least two years ago.
Check it out at http://adamhooper.com/code.
(nothing)
I am busy rebuilding my website. The new version is better. It is built using Ruby on Rails, which deserves a plug. The hacker in me couldn’t resist writing a blog engine from scratch.
Don’t mind the mess. Not all links behave as they ought to, and I will be putting more content in soon. I figure a website like this is better than one of those animated “Under Construction” websites from the 1990’s.
My adventures and frustration at slow Internet made me leave my blog by the wayside for the past few weeks.
I am now back in Canada, and I have uploaded a photo album online. It is massive, only because it squishes eight action-packed months of my life into a mere 70 megabytes.
I spent five nights in Malawi. This was enough for me to make several oversimplified comparisons to Tanzania:
Next up: Zambia and Victoria Falls.
Beaches being beaches and white people being rich, some Maasai warriors earn a living making crafts and selling them to tourists. I have a Maasai friend who used to do this.
Saturday afternoon, Alex, Caitlin and I found ourselves relaxing on a beach at Cholo's, an incredibly chill beach-side bar. Cholo's, as Caitlin's Blog explains, is run by what we refer to as impostafarians (Rastafarians minus their religious beliefs). It may be the most relaxed place in all of Africa.
On this particular afternoon, we were disturbed from our relaxing by a raised voice. looking up, I saw a Maasai warrior attempting to sell his crafts to the tourists fifteen feet away. The voice we heard was that of one of the Rasta owners of Cholo's.
It was clear the Rasta was drunk: he began to shout, toka!
over and over again. (Toka!
is an extremely rude and emphatic, get out!
) He had somehow acquired a Maasai stick (a half-stick, half-club just over a foot long). He used the stick to try and rally nearby dogs to his cause: the peaceful dogs were comically unhelpful rounding up the Maasai. We had to turn away and laugh.
The Maasai stood his ground, clearly displaying that he was unafraid. The Rasta stormed off, repeating toka!
with every step. The Maasai seemed to be waiting for the Rasta to calm down so that he could comply while keeping his self-respect.
But the Rasta drunkenly decided to turn back and argue his point once more. A couple of other Maasai who were strolling by came to investigate; a couple of Rastas also appeared to see what their co-worker was up to.
All parties (minus the drunk) seemed to understand each other. The drunk looked quite happy to have company: he used his friends to hold him back while he lunged at the Maasai. His friends gladly played along, restraining and disarming him.
The Maasai all watched.
I should interject: Maasai warriors are almost invariably armed and skilled. If one Maasai warrior were to square off against all three Rastas, I have no doubt the Maasai could send them running. Or kill them. With three Maasai, the prospect of a fight is a joke. All six parties (yes, even the one with addled senses) knew this.
It looked like everybody was satisfied. But one of the Maasai must have muttered a taunt, because all of a sudden the Rastas leapt into action. One ran and fetched empty beer bottles and hurled one at a Maasai. The throw was hilariously inaccurate: it sailed harmlessly into the sea. Had the throw been more accurate, the bottle might have hit us (ten feet away from its target).
Another Rasta with a makeshift weapon received a threatening lunge from a Maasai who had unsheathed his blade. This, too, was ten feet away from us.
The Maasai proudly walked off together. The inept bottle-thrower tried his luck again, receiving a threatening, unflinching glare in return.
We left.
I can draw many morals from this story. One moral is that there is some element of tribalism in Tanzania (though I still blindly contest the tensions do not run as deep in Tanzania as in Uganda or Kenya). Another moral is that even after six months here, I can still experience something completely unexpected.
The real lesson, to me, is more internal: I was siding with the Maasai.
Why? I can rationalize all I want that the Maasai were acting less childish or more diplomatic; I can argue the Rastas had no right to behave the way they did; I can even claim that the Maasai would win if the situation erupted into violence.
All of these reasons, though valid, are dishonest. I sided with the Maasai for the reason I wrote in the first paragraph: I have a Maasai friend. I picked sides before there even was a situation.
Whose side did you pick?
Challenge: I never wrote all I could and this is my last Challenge-inspired entry. Include five sentences I dreamed up which I had anticipated publishing (because I thought they sounded powerful and exciting) but which I never turned into blog entries.
I can buy a camera lens with as wide an angle as physically possible, but it will still be too narrow to capture reality.
I could argue that a wider camera lens would actually project less information. A mountain framed by a banana tree; a misplaced Habs jersey; a lopsided dala-dala; a motorcycle hanging from a tree: pictures merely project ideas, not reality. More information would obscure the ideas.
Similarly, my blog can only project narrow ideas: it cannot reflect reality. These Challenges I have been using on my blog have been helpful in reminding me of that.
What is reality? I will never know.
What is my reality?
My reality is a veritable rat's nest of hare-brained ideas. I prod at random thoughts until I arrive at conclusions. Then I hack away at my conclusions until I get new, even more random thoughts. It strikes me that if there is such a thing as sanity, I want nothing to do with it.
In Tanzania, my business (publishing magazines about HIV, gender, and sexuality) is everybody else's business. My engineering mind was not trained for this kind of interactions. Can I say I am networking
with interesting people if they will never be able to contact me? Should I call a child with HIV a client
? Everybody is connected more strongly than anybody knows. Maybe we are all part of the same company: I am in the learning department while many other people are in the suffering department. And if the world is the biggest company ever, what does that tell me about upper management?
What is your reality?
Your reality is probably quite similar to mine: you eternally struggle to find your place in a world which seems to be treating you like one six-billionth of itself.
What is their reality?
I wager it is almost the same.
But if you have never left the comfort of the West, you are missing an important mindset. Poverty and disease are rampant in sub-Saharan Africa. Get-rich-quick schemes are often glorified get-other-people-poor schemes. Even the most timid mzungu learns that pushing and shoving is the only way to board a dala-dala here in Dar es Salaam.
Personally, I do not blame Tanzanians for behaviour I can never understand. I see a potential for learning more about myself and my reality.
So far, I have never heard somebody's life story and thought, I would certainly never act that way if I were that person.
Every time I hear somebody claim otherwise because of insignificant misunderstandings, I wince.
What is common to everybody's reality?
Different though different people's realities are, everybody's reality is composed of the same three universal truths: love, fear, and Bob Marley.
I see potential. Let's get together and be all right.
Challenge: I do not really think like this all the time, and I am certainly not thinking like this now, but there is an element of truth in here. Write only thoughts which occurred to me before I decided to make a blog entry out of them.
From time to time, I go to a fancy restaurant. I spend the average Tanzanian's monthly salary in a single night, savouring a beer and food that reminds me of Montreal. It is refreshing, but it makes me feel guilty. For instance: in Uganda I once ate two meals' worth of steak dinner in two hours; this was the evening after working at a school where the children get one meal a day of beans and ugali (like rice, minus the texture and flavour and cutlery). Even Dickens would be unable to emphasize the poignancy of my social superiority.
I cherish my meal, all the while thinking disparaging thoughts about my dinner companions, every other white customer in the restaurant, every other black or Indian customer in the restaurant, the restaurant's owner, the restaurant itself, and even the concept of restaurants.
No wonder this country is underdeveloped, I ruminate. All the people around me are not developing it! The wealth changes hands between the rich, and the poor get nothing. Even the people in the poverty-reduction business take part in the farce. I should know: I am one.
The next day, I double my efforts at work, as payback to the people whom I will never meet and whom I am supposedly helping. But then, what about the day after that? If I do not keep up my double-effort, that means I could be working faster. Any time I spend on break is time I spend not helping people—people who cannot afford my laziness. I skip breaks and shorten my lunches. I doubt I will ever know if these efforts are fruitful; but can I really risk taking my time?
Once upon a time I did not know or care about any of this. Now I do care and I still do not know. I roam the streets to get time to myself to piece together my thoughts; but I am always interrupted by friendly neighbours and passers-by. Can they not see that the minutes I spend talking to them would be better spent thinking? I am only here for six months: every second is precious!
Of course, this is simply culture shock. At this point my thought process is already abstracted far away from any sick and dying and vulnerable people. I simply must come to terms with the fact that saving lives is a nine-to-five desk job.
And once the stress has built up high enough, I might treat myself to dinner at a fancy restaurant.