There is one thing I will forever associate with my recent trip to Kenya—the inside of a bus: cramped, unairconditioned, racing through the afternoon heat, dust pouring in the high, postage-stamp-sized windows in equal measure with the oven-hot air from outside.

In the last week, I have taken eight buses on a journey from Dodoma to Dar to Nairobi to Arusha and back. I have slid to the floor repeatedly on the way to Dar, perched on a much-abused coach-seat in the form of my favorite simple machine: the wedge; I have been crushed into the window frame for the five, unpaved, bruising hours from Moshi to the Namanga border crossing into Kenya, sharing a bench seat meant for two with one woman (approximately my age), one baby (approximately 6 months), one little girl (approximately 5 years), and one chicken imprisoned in a plastic shopping bag (age unknown); I have collapsed onto one of the lovely, recycled school buses that wends through the Nairobi suburbs—after mulishly marching more than 10 kms to feed a giraffe (I wanted to prove wrong a security guard who told me, “It is much too far for you to walk from here to Langatta!”); I have bounced across Southern Kenya on a dirt lane, ruined by lorries, in the back of a bus with a sprung rear suspension—seemingly every pebble (and there were many) bringing the back fender into jarring contact with the road and eliciting an equally thunderous swell of protest from the passengers; and I spent my final bus journey—12 hours from Arusha back to Dodoma—stubbornly opening and re-opening the window as my seat partner (who had the aisle half) kept leaning across me to close it—indeed, we were engaged in the elemental war of Tanzanian bus transportation: being aerated vs. being dusty; in a crowded space full of non-deodorant-users and their barnyard animals, I preferred the dust (and I won—I was closer, after all, to the latch).

The number of bus stations I have visited has similarly blossomed: the fume-y , shadowy spectacle of Ubungo Station in Dar es Salaam, circa 5:30 AM, reminds me of a Hollywood set for Dante’s Inferno—in the uproar of racing bus engines, swarming touts, and the taxi driver who shoved me out of the door on the wrong side of the road rather than risk his car in the noxious environment, I would not have been surprised to see an apparition pass next to me, carrying his head beneath one arm. The similarly pitched chaos of Nairobi was alleviated by one of my more genteel seat-companions—he woke me up by flicking me in the jugular (middle finger launched by the pad of his thumb) as we entered the city limits—who took me by the hand, led me through the teeming zoo, and deposited me in an (extraordinarily over-priced) taxi. In Arusha, I bought my last bus ticket while balancing on a wobbly plank suspended between two wooden boxes, behind a musty curtain, in a space the size of a card table albeit populated by no less than six individuals: myself, two ticket-sellers (one was decidedly superfluous), one “fundi simu” (phone-repairman), and two phone-repair clients.

All told, I have spent slightly less than 44 hours enduring these imprisonment-like conditions; I have read nigh on 1600-pages worth of printed material; and I have argued with luggage handlers, whom I wanted no where near my baggage, in no less than three languages (who knew my German would come in handy).

And, broadening as all these experiences might be, I have formed a new resolution: next time I decide to go to Kenya, I am traveling by airplane.

Dickson (my Tanzanian deskmate, tucked away with me in our tiny office) is chuckling madly as he types a report on his ancient Dell desktop.

Me: “What’s up?”

Dickson: “I keep telling the dispensary in Kondoa–” (chuckle chuckle) “–pregnancy is not a disease!” (More laughter.) “But here, again, the clinical officer says it is one of the top ten illnesses!” (He shows me the form; in wonderfully elegant handwriting it has been reported that the c.o. “treated” eleven “victims” of the condition in the month of January.)

Me: “I wonder if he thinks it’s infectious?”

–
Israel, driving home a noisy passel of hospital workers on the daladala: “I’m going too slow? What’s that you say? Slow like a fish?”

Mama Rhoda hollers something from the back of the van.

Israel: “Slow like a WOMAN?! Like a WOMAN??!! Fine, we’ll take the shortcut!”

Simultaneously:
Me: “NO SHORTCUTS!” / Dickson: “Mary doesn’t like shortcuts!” / Mama Rose: “Don’t take the shortcut– Maria will be angry.” / Mama Rhoda: “Shortcut? You call this a shortcut?”

–

I am opening the gate to the hospital, in a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers, all ready to go for a run.

The security guard (big eager smile, trying out his English): “Time for exercise?”

Me (cheerily): “Yep, that’s right!”

Security guard: “You make exercise for the legs?”

Me (a bit confused now): “Umm… yes?”

Security guard (disapprovingly): “They look like it.”

–

It’s Saturday morning, and I wander into a tailor’s shop on my way to the market, examining a dress, made up from a navy batik. I pull it on over my clothes, standing in a dark fore-corner next to the treadle-run sewing machine.

As far as I can tell from my reflection in the oddly-angled mirror hanging from the ceiling, it looks like I am wearing a tie-dye piece of sackcloth.

Round little tailor: “Oh…” (cluck clucking) “I can take it in for you. Right now. Sit.”

I thunk onto a bench that juts half into the street, very wobbly on its wooden legs, and watch her operate the antique.

RLT: “So how many do you have?”

Me: “Pardon?”

RLT: “This is a pregnant woman dress. You are small. I am thinking: this is your first?”

Me: “Umm. Well. No.”

RLT: “You have many already? Where are you from?”

Me: “America. But I don’t have any. Any children that is.”

RLT: “Don’t worry. I will tell no one.”

Me: “Oh, well, thank you.”

–

Last fall in Buguruni, everyone seemed fascinated by the spectacle of a white woman’s self-sufficiency. Sweeping (that endless chore) could gather a crowd of critical on-lookers; hanging my clothes to dry on the line (a reel of old telephone cord stretched between a shrub and the outhouse) would lead to reports later in the day: “So, Maria, I hear you have been doing your wash?”; the rumors of my shopping for beans, rice, or flour stirred up fascinated whispers that I could, possibly, operate a stove. The day before I left, even, Mr. Gao proudly remarked: “Well, at least we have taught you to do for yourself: I have heard that in Europe, people pay for their clothing to be washed by rooms full of machines!” There was pride in the fact that the token Mzungu in Buguruni had learned to do things the Tanzanian way—or even (for there was a somewhat malicious note in Gao’s voice, too) doing tasks that were outside my stereotypical ken, below some assumed Western dignity.

Here in Dodoma, in this small cow-town full of Western missionaries, there is a common perception of how a white woman is supposed to behave and how she is to be behaved towards. Here what I am encountering is something old, something pre-constructed, something rooted in a past that my companions in Buguruni were eager to discard. Navigating this well of preconceptions, I often find myself in positions I find deeply uncomfortable.

Most difficult is my relationship with Mama Rose, the cleaning woman at the hospital, who regularly pulls me aside to confide her various “shidas” (difficulties) and to ask me to pray with her. Although there is the unavoidable undercurrent of patronage—Mama Rose is always looking for an extra 1,000 TSh to support her family—I would characterize Rose as a friend, albeit a difficult one. Uncomfortableness arises (for me, at least) at ten each morning, when Rose has taken to serving me coffee. This is a perk usually reserved for the head administrators—and every time she pours the hot water from its thermos, mixes the instant powder, carefully measuring it from the round AfriCafe tin, and reverently places the cup and saucer on my desk where I am doing nothing more productive than reading the Times, I feel the eyes of E.M. Forster and George Orwell descend upon me, along with an intensely colonialist feeling of shame.

For whenever Rose clumsily edges that red-and-blue-rimmed saucer my way, I sense a monument to “Whiteness”—some perception of fragility, incompetence, or touchy pride needing to be ingratiated. And I do not want to be associated with that graven image.

I seem to be magnificently inept, however, in dealing with this stereotypy: Mama Rose’s feelings were profoundly hurt this morning when I explained that I could come and prepare my chai in the kitchen with her, like most everyone else. She interpreted this, rather than my attempt at democratic liberation, as an indictment of her abilities, and thus I have been accepting hourly cups of coffee and ashamedly hurried exchanges of “Asante, Maria” / “Asante, Mama” all day as penance. My caffeine headache is epic.

In Buguruni my colleagues wanted to assert their independence—an assertion that took the form of demanding I be self-sufficient and, at times, watching me struggle with the loneliness of that self-sufficiency. Here Mama Rose is demanding an adherence to a different code, one that—while it may be physically less demanding for me—represents a perhaps greater challenge. Learning to be simply another woman to Rose—without the adjective “white” and its connotations of “soft”, “irritable”, and “domineering” separating us—is necessary to me. Simultaneously, it is necessary that I allow Mama Rose her self-respect, that I learn to befriend without insulting, to differentiate between her hang-ups and my own. In short, my relationship with Rose will require more delicacy—and more headaches—than I had initially imagined.

I went to the mountain village of Lufu on Thursday—six of us packed into the Lutheran bishop’s diesel-powered all-terrain vehicle for 14 hours, bouncing along unpaved roads deep in mineral-mining country, past fields of sunflowers and maize, with washouts appearing like giant slices out of the midst of a brownie pan, and, in the tinier and tinier hamlets we passed through, increasingly incongruous signs for “Gemstone Paradises”—variations on the same cement duka selling “pink sapphire, blue sapphire, and ruby for nice price.”

We didn’t stop.

Lufu is incredibly remote—perched on the very peak of a 2,500 ft mountain, with sheer precipices falling away on either side, the surfaces miraculously terraced and coaxed into a startling profusion of greenery. There are two routes up this mountainside—one is “long” and the other is “short”. This difference appears to be purely cartographical and not temporal in the slightest.

Several times we almost lost our way and had to pause, hesitating, in low gear on the 4WD as the bishop, Dickson, and the driver argued—the boulders we were climbing over on the road having grown indistinguishable from the boulders clinging to the hillside—and more than once we stopped to allow Mama M-K or Mwimbe to climb out in order to throw up in the bushes. When we finally broke through the treeline, we were all euphorically relieved to speed through fields of grass, to pass farmhouses whose roofs had been thatched and then mud-covered and where now, with the rains, shoots of green had begun to sprout, to breathe the air, purer, colder, and thinner by far than when we’d left Dodoma six hours earlier.

Going to Lufu, however, was essentially pointless. We were there to close the village’s health outpost—part of a network of Lutheran-run dispensaries affiliated with DCMC—and ask the nurse stationed there to transfer to another location. This was not a surprise to anyone—for the past six months, DCMC had stopped sending her any medications, the government-run dispensary in Kibakwe (30 km as the crow flies) had threatened her with prosecution if she continued to practice, and the dispensary building itself remained only half built, tottering on rotten wooden supports with its windows occluded by stones and torn plastic sheeting.

Personally, I’d have just sent her a letter and spared her the posse—but then I’m no Tanzanian.

Indeed, the fact that I was grossly out of place on this whole adventure was never more apparent than on the way home. The bishop had spent much of his time in Lufu ignoring the nurse and, instead, interviewing the local young men about whether they grew potatoes. [Indeed, this was about all the conversation I could understand—while my "how to fire someone" vocabulary is pretty sparse, I do know my food items. Moreover, I was curious: was this semi-professional interest (had the bishop been a potato farmer in his youth?) or an example of Tanzanian humor (the potato as a metaphor for what?).]

Apparently neither. The bishop, rather, has an incredible appetite (or so I can only conclude) for the potato. By the time we finally departed Lufu, we had six 40kg sacks of potatoes lashed to the roof of our car, a sample of a particularly virile potato plant, potted in an earthenware jar, in our way-back, and several more containers of “baby” potatoes wedged underneath our seats. Many of these we had helped dig from the fields with our own hands—indeed, I have a skirt full of thistles to prove it.

Tottering back down the mountainside in the half-dark, laden with potatoes, jostled back and forth from one boulder to the next, picking thistles (one by one) from my scarf, I quietly seethed at the ludicrousness of this whole junket and my (non-) role in it. It was only when we stopped a few miles from Lufu, flagged down by a boy holding out his scabies covered arms for us to examine, that I realized the impact of our journey. As Mwimbe shouted out the window to him in Swahili—very infectious, need antibiotic ointment, obtain in Kibakwe—I realized that, without the Lufu outpost, the nearest medical treatment was a 30 km hike. There was nothing—not even a band-aid—to be had any more on this mountain. This place was, once we had ceremoniously locked the outpost door behind us, again officially the middle of nowhere.

There are a group of children from Ntyuka—in the three- to five-year old range, although age is difficult to estimate when one has to account for malnutrition—who see me running by their little mud-and-stick village and immediately come racing across the fields, dropping whatever they are carrying, to stand in the weeds at the roadside and chant: “Mz-ungu! Mz-ungu!” (As if I didn’t know my skin color already.) The cadence gives me flashbacks to Indians games from years ago; they might as well be chanting “Man-ny! Man-ny!”, and I half-expect to hear the tom-tom start-up in the outfield stands.

Sometimes, young men—or, more creepily, older ones—croak out at me: “Asante!” or “Thank you verrry much!” (depending on how erudite they want to appear) as I splash from one puddle to another. What exactly I’m doing that they’re thankful for, I don’t want to know. I much prefer it when a truck rushes by and the bed—full of teenage men on their way to worksites—all shout “Good job!” and wave their arms over the truck sides and through the back grating, as though they are trying to direct their good wishes at me through their fingertips. I also like it when the piki-piki riders (motorcyclists, whose vehicle is named after the sound it makes chugging up hills) give me a thumbs up as they put-put past.

Women are a different package all together—I see crowds of mamas, heads and waists wrapped in kangas, wielding hoes and swinging scythes in the fields as I run along the Mvumi road. The background has grown lush—the dust has magically and immediately begun to sprout green plants and brilliant flowers at the first signs of moisture—and everyone (mostly women) is rushing to capitalize on this luxuriance. As I pass, they all stop mid-swing and examine me—trying to determine my species—and then, when I raise my hand in “hello”, they begin waving their tools and their arms frantically, as if trying to direct a helicopter in for landing. It appears that, in addition to being startling-looking, white women are supposed to have rather poor vision.

Just past Ntyuka is a long, winding hill that lasts somewhere over a mile—a great place to lose any of the young Ntyukan men who, while apparently not interested in working in the fields, think they’d like to try running with me—and I was coming down this hill last week as an old bibi was clambering up. She had a long, wicked-looking metal tool tied to her back with a kanga, and was toiling doggedly along, weaving slightly in the heat and the labor. Her face was blank and impassive until I greeted her in Swahili, at which she broke out into an instant enthusiastic shout of “Welcome, my child!”

In addition to bringing out all of the plants and the women who tend them, the rain has produced a sudden up-swing in the number of animals ranging the hillsides. Butterflies hover along the ground, swinging through the scrub, and I find papery pieces of their wings stuck in the window frames and around the doors every morning when I board the daladala. A young man offered Timothy and I a tortoise, captured in a brilliant yellow Shoprite bag, on our lunchtime hike last week—the creature was maybe a foot in length but lay placidly in his plastic incubator, content to be hawked at every passing Mzungu. And, in the mornings after a rain, the courtyard of the administration building is awash in insects, and the five-year-old son of the German Community Health director and I poke and prod the 1.5” thick by 8” long centipedes and the giant black beetles, speaking in a smattering of English, Kiswahili, and German that only we understand.

I feel that we live, in our American cities, so much divorced from this natural cycle—when there is a drought, we complain of our air-conditioning bills; when there is an inundation, we complain of the puddles on our drive. Being out here in this countryside, smackdab in the middle of nowhere, the joy and promise of the rains are infectious just because they are so vividly, so tangibly omnipresent.

Mama Msema-Kweli is the acting hospital administrator, promoted to replace the Henry/Priscilla dynamo. I cannot guess her age—she is one of those Tanzanians adrift somewhere in middle-life, who suddenly ceased looking young at 25 and will, with equal abruptness, appear elderly when she reaches 60—but Mama M-K is clearly the product of the older generation. She always arrives at work punctually, walking in alone along the sandy drive, wearing perfectly-pressed garments of kitenge cloth that leave only her lower arms and her ankles exposed. She owns sensible heels—big, black, square ones with substantial traction—and her just-below-chin-length hair is always straightened and pulled back into a neat bun. Her eyes are wide and far apart, and she has a habit of scrutinizing one with quick upward blinks while seeming to be concentrating on one’s toes. She articulates carefully—both in Kiswahili and English—as though weighing the implications of each sentence.

Mama Msema-Kweli is an intimidating woman.

This helps explain why I was petrified when, ducking late into my first staff meeting, she expressly hailed me: “Maria! We have just been talking. In Tanzania we have a national dress code. Women are to wear their skirts below the knees and, when wearing a kanga, an underskirt to hide the leg. You understand?”

It took me a minute to get over my fright at being called by name—I looked down at my lap to hide my confusion, and then it hit me: I uncrossed my legs with lightning speed and smoothed my skirt frantically over my knees. I have no memory of the rest of the meeting—I was too busy cataloguing my closet anxiously. (I had worn a kanga the other day without an underskirt. She had looked at me a bit then. And I’d worn trousers the day before that. Were trousers off-limits? Had she looked askance then? Could I imagine Mama M-K wearing trousers? Showing-of-the-leg happens with trousers…)

As everyone filed out of the canteen, jostling to reach the daladala and start the weekend, I elbowed my way through the crowd to reach Mama. “Forgive me, Mama,” I began, and stopped short, not sure what to say next. We both looked down at my brown skirt, which reached just past my knees.

Mama took my forearm and pressed it to her chest. “Oh, Maria, this skirt is not so bad.” (Translation: Because you are white and clearly somewhat retarded, I will say you are only half an infidel.) “We were talking about this before you came because some of the other girls have been wearing almost—” she struggled to say the word—”miniskirts.” (Translation: We have here a Hotbed of Prostitution.) Looking at me critically, however, she paused, and gently continued: “But… the underskirt, Maria…” (Translation: I remember the kanga from Wednesday.)

The indictment in Mama’s “But …” was inspirational I spent most of this afternoon shopping for an “unda-sketi”—the official title of the garment in Kiswahili, although it took me three dress shops to work this out (with my limited vocabulary, I kept explaining that I needed to find a ground floor to go under my first floor skirt). After all these trials, I was finally directed to the only vendor of unda-sketis in central Dodoma, the bustling Agape House of Fashion.*

I can report that my new skirt is both as ugly as and as hot as hell, is available only in sizes X- and XX-L, touches my toes, and hangs off my waist. However, in such an outfit, there is certain to be no chance of observing anything on me that resembles a leg. Come Monday, I will be the pinnacle of respectability. I only hope Mama M-K notices. (…or do I?)

*(Yes, Sam, I spent the second half of the morning wandering the streets of Dodoma asking: “Where is Agape?”)

As I’ve told some of you, the rains (two months delayed) have finally begun here in Dodoma. Almost daily, the hills are receiving a good, thorough soaking—streams of water that fill ditches instantaneously, remodel roads into stream beds, and leave (when the water dries) snaking lines and paths over the half-hardened, sandy crust of the soil.

While the rain is a blessing—crop failure and famine were looming imminently—it is not an unmitigated one. Malaria cases are on the rise; the north-south roads—unpaved highways—have become impassable morasses of churned mud and water; and the potholes and declivities in the tarmacked streets are widening and deepening as the water pounds away at them.

This is particularly relevant for DCMC—the hospital is perched on a mountain several kilometers outside of town (18 minutes of running to reach the train station; 20 minutes for the uphill on the way back), on an unpaved, winding road that eventually reaches south to Mikumi Mission. There is no public transport out to to the hospital in regular weather—the DCMC-owned daladala does one pick-up for patients at the Anglican church in town every morning at 9 AM—and with the trek up here growing more arduous by the day, private transport (taxi, borrowed car, foot) is becoming increasingly difficult to manage as well.

Getting all of DCMC’s staff to and from work has, hence, also become more problematic—the hospital daladala runs a circuit every morning and evening, a circuit that has grown longer, slower, damper and more crowded in response to the rain. Thus every morning Israel (our driver) picks me and Dr. Helen (a Tanzanian doctor who attended medical school in Russia) up outside of Humble House, the volunteer compound, at 7:15; the hospital does not open until 8:30. We are Israel’s first stop of the day and his last stop at night: in another fit of geographical genius, Humble House was built about as far away from DCMC as is conceivably possible, on the eastern outskirts of town towards Dar es Salaam.

Israel has decided to use these junkets—until we begin our lurching, grinding ascent up the road to the health center, when he needs all his concentration to drive—to teach me: “Nice Kiswahili.” Essentially this means that, daily, I am courteously ushered into the front jumpseat, where I squeeze between the gear-shifter and Dr. Helen’s purse, to be banged by both whenever Israel shifts down. I am not sure my Kiswahili has improved since we took up this seating arrangement; I have, however, acquired some interesting bruises.

While I would trust Ananiya to navigate me out of a traffic jam in a submarine with the lights off, Israel is not of the same caliber; his tendency to wear pointy-toed, faux-leather dress shoes impedes depressing the clutch, and he likes to rocket over road bumps in a style that would do Bungee’s uncle proud. Israel does, however, have an unfailing sense of local geography: frustrated with the tedium of driving on tarmacked roads, he tends to unexpectedly veer onto narrow, trackless footpaths, announcing (in reply to my exclamations) “Short cut!” as he steers around trees, across back yards, and through roadside coffee stands and primary school soccer games at high speed. With all the rain, this short-cut mentality has made for even more (physically and emotionally) jarring experiences than in previous weeks: yesterday Israel gaily steered us into a run-off ditch, and we were stuck for many minutes—the engine kept killing—before he managed to propel us out the other side.

However, as much as I tend to close my eyes and hold my breath when Israel goes off-roading, I’d rather travel with him in the DCMC daladala than on the public ones. Public transport has its own set of perils: on a trip into town Sunday—right outside the Bunge, as our packed-like-sardines daladala slowly eased over the rows of slick speed bumps—a tire burst, and I ended up walking the last kilometer in a downpour. To add insult to injury, I had to pay the full fare anyway: funny how ineffective “Nice Kiswahili” is in an argument.

I have begun losing my hair. It’s a strange feeling, bending over in the shower—craning my head to make it fit under the dripping, cold, water-pressure-less tap—and pulling my hands away, sticky with shampoo, to find clumps of curls wrapped around them—not just strands, but locks that collect thickly on the side of the tub.

After the first episode, I pulled out my cadre of vitamins and minerals. Strange dietary patterns—and a shortage of calcium or iron—will make your hair fall out, I remembered.

Another thing that will do this includes, unsurprisingly, stress.

And it’s not as though I have nothing to feel stressed about. It’s just that stress—unlike a vitamin deficiency—is more complicated to correct.

This past Monday morning was a horrible time—when the priest, Mama Mariam, paused for announcements in the middle of the hospital’s prayer service, Henry stood up before the assembled staff and—trying to keep his voice from breaking and his tears from falling—announced that he and Priscilla had been asked by the hospital’s Board of Trustees to tender their resignations and return to the United States immediately. The room seemed, suddenly, suspended in a vacuum. No one could look at him: I stared at the stream of ants transporting a fly’s wings—now severed from the fly’s body and from one another—around the flagstones of the floor; the secretary, Marcy, put her head on her arms and wept; the dentist-cum-translator stood rigidly at attention and had to be elbowed repeatedly by Mariam before he roused himself enough to continue.

I, too, had felt that same frozenness bouncing along in the truck on the way to mass last Saturday—Priscilla’s voice was pitched almost gleefully as she exclaimed: “We got fired yesterday!” I just sat there—banging my forehead repeatedly against the truck’s window frame as Henry steered us recklessly over rocks and boulders on the unpaved road—trying to process the suddenly topsy-turvy tilt my plans for the coming months had assumed.

One week later, I’ve still not worked out what will happen with me exactly—or, even, what I want to happen. Henry envisages me taking complete responsibility for a national-scale production and distribution project while supplying me with no funding, no staff, and no support from the hospital institution to do it with. I liken this to being asked to leap tall buildings in a single bound: maybe there is some Super(wo)man out there with a BA in English Literature who can do it, but I am not sure that person is me.

The night before I ran my first marathon, I felt similarly—I was convinced I had bitten off more than I could chew, that I was going to tire out and be unable to finish the race. Deb told me her racing secret then: whenever she felt on the brink of exhaustion, she would force herself—against all her physical intuitions—to go faster. Unfailingly her body recouped; a spurt of energy always followed such a push.

Deb’s advice also feels apt now: I’m going to try really really hard for awhile here—to push Henry’s ideas into a manageable size and/or, correspondingly, to push myself into a position to handle them.

Whatever happens, I hope my second wind arrives soon. I am not entranced by the prospect of going bald at age 24.

I have taken over Office #30, the some-time boardroom, on the second floor of DCMC’s square administration building, which is tenuously connected to the health center by the hospital ward—occupied for five hours yesterday afternoon by the bishop’s wife, who spent the time writhing in the agony of passing a kidney stone (Henry: “I’ve heard its worse than labor, although I’m personally not able to make the comparison”). I have one window looking out onto the balcony that juts over the first floor courtyard, and another, with constantly slapping curtains, looking south over the brush-covered hillside that will, in a year or two’s time, become the new, expanded hospital building.

Office #32 is called by Timothy, its occupant, “the broom closet.” This is, unfortunately, a rather apt description: it is a narrow and deep room, its sides further occluded by shelves of old processors and computer parts, with a small, card-table sized desk facing the back wall. There is no light that penetrates—the windows are behind the shelving—and the only regular illumination is the blue glow of the software programs running across Timothy’s screen.

Timothy, however, is somehow incongruous to his surrounds—despite living like a vole, his appearance is decidedly more vivid: a very neat, older English gentleman, with a white beard and still-dark, pointedly bushy, Ian Mckellan-like eyebrows, who favors battered hiking boots, tropically-flavored button-ups, and transitions lenses—affixed to very round, tortoiseshell spectacles.

I knew Timothy and I would be friends when, on my first day here—amidst the administrative and political uproar that is plaguing the hospital currently—he told me: “If things ever get to be too much, just hop over the balcony banister next to #32 and clamber up the rooftop. You can lie on the tile and pretend you’re far away—just remember to switch off your mobile.”

Timothy has been here in TZ for nigh on six years—he and his wife are Anglican missionaries, originally from outside London (“the very last tube stop”), and have seen and know much of what it is to live and work in the central hill country. Indeed, despite recognizing the need for trips to the roof, he seems content to settle here for some time—as Timothy tells the story, his wife’s job (as a chemist for a petrol company) “literally blew up” six months after they moved to Tanzania (“some dumb bloke forgot to check the fill-gauge for the tanker”), at which point “there was no turning back.”

After lunch on Tuesday—a day when the scent of political wrangling was especially thick in the air—Timothy adjusted the toothpick between his teeth, and announced: “I’m going to go for a bit of a stroll,” and trooped up to his broom closet to collect a floppy safari hat and his camera.

I took this announcement as an invitation (hopefully it was meant as such), and together we picked our way through the spiky plants, fluorescently blooming acacia, and tall euphorbia candelabrum towards the mountain out back—the one decorated with radio and cellphone towers. Timothy’s battered boots were looking a bit more practical than my pink and green flip flops at this point.

Scrambling, hopping, sliding and dodging, we clambered halfway up the rock pile to rest on a flat shelf of boulders, looking out over Dodoma and back down on the DCMC complex. The boulder shelf was pitted with indentations that had been filled by rainwater, and large dragonflies, intently mating, swished back and forth.

We watched the dragonflies in silence, catching our breath, tracing familiar tracks and roads, as on a map. The trucks traveling the winding dirt path past the hospital were soundless, pint-sized toys trailing a windsock of dust.

Ten, twenty minutes passed before Timothy’s cellphone begin to jangle—he’d forgotten his own rule, it seems, of rooftop expeditions. Regretfully we scrambled back down through the bright sun-glare, me following his bright blue and yellow shirt across the desert scrub, back into the thick of things.

When Nyerere told his architects “Socialist” they must have heard “Extraterrestrial” instead. This is the only possible explanation for the touched-down UFOs that make up the buildings official (The Bunge/Parliament) and ecclesiastical (Crazy Anglicans) that dot the Dodoma landscape. A braver soul than I would offer a relevant observation here on the connection between Marx and aliens, but I will forego the temptation.

Equally noticeable in the capital are the strange mountains—out the window next to my desk, I can see a heap of rock that must reach 1000 feet or more into the sky; it reminds me of parts of Joshua Tree–a stack of boulders, the trees make a lumpy carpet over it, with the pointiest parts left exposed. Far across, on the other side of the city, looms another boulder berg, with a series of Alfalfa-like cowlicks along the top: radio towers, spiky antennae, dishes and other odd, industrial detritus. Halfway up this mountain, DCMC’s health center perches.

It gets quiet here at night—for all its resemblance to a wreckage yard of Area 51, there is not much uproar after sundown and, indeed, not much before it. I run along the main road in the semi-dark of the morning, chasing east towards Dar, and there is little other than a stray truck, a daladala or two, small groups of school children in uniform, and a business man on his bike—perched behind old-lady handlebars, pumping decorously as his tie is blown across his shoulder. It feels like a neighborhood; it feels like a dream.

Indeed, my first night here, I pulled out all the equipment I use at night in Dar—the super-duper, jack-hammer strength ear plugs, my eye-mask, the head lamp for when the electricity cuts, the remains of a bottle of 100% DEET bug spray (a horrible concoction that burns every time I apply it; hello, Silent Spring) and prepared to hunker down. The attack, however, never came—the lights stayed on, the killer mosquitoes never showed, and the quiet, residential neighborhood outside my windows—overgrown, thanks to the rains, with blooming bougainvillea and cacti—was dark. I tried to tune my radio to the BBC, but couldn’t find it on shortwave… and the noisy static felt, anyway, like sacrilege.

I have no doubt that this land is still Tanzania—a young man dropped by my front door last night in search of a glass of water and left (unbeknownst to me) with my wallet and camera. There is a goat living in my backyard; he’s rather a sweetheart (I think he looks like a “Pepe,” but I feel great trepidation in naming the rascal—people eat goats of a certain age ’round these parts). And, of course, eople still shout “Mzungu” at me and frequently observe “Good morning, Madam” when I pass by at four in the afternoon. But I feel more human, less on the edge than Buguruni—when I get into bed at night, I close my eyes, and I go to sleep. Soundly.