Tagged: Tanzania

VIDEO: We, dada, wewe… (You, sister, you…)

We dada, wewe… (You sister, you…)

THE SINGING. Still brings me tears.

Video from Tanzania in 2006 – I was sixteen, it was my first time traveling on my own, and my first time in Tanzania. I spent three months – volunteered in an orphanage, taught English, went on a safari, saw some chimps in the mountains. Sometime later that year, I threw a bunch of the video clips together and backed it with some of the kids singing, from the background of other clips…

I don’t have the original video files anymore (a fact which also makes me want to cry), but… the singing! Really wished I’d recorded more of it…

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I’m on Salon!

Salon:  When I almost died and didn’t find God

My story (That time I almost died from typhoid fever in Tanzania…) is now featured in the Life section.

It’s been edited severely – now focusing on my, ah, religious “confusion” (see tagline: “In an East African hospital, I battled a mysterious illness, but all anyone could ask was: Did I believe?”) and hospitalization in Nairobi – rather than how I got ill and managed not to realize for months Continue reading

That time I almost died from typhoid fever in Tanzania…

“Do you believe in God?” She was earnest. She wielded a clipboard.

A grin skipped up beside. “Ca va?” He sounded young. A green mask covered half his face but I remember him grinning. From my back, on a bed, in a hallway, I replied automatically. “Comme ci, comme ca.”

The doors opened. “It is time, Miss Tankard.”

Lights, white tile, stainless steel. I remember the windows. It hurt, so they found another vein. An older voice told me to picture a happy place – to imagine my family – and they counted, backwards.

The grin on the left waggled a vial. “Maziwa…”

I swam upwards to translate. “Milk?” Split second having managed it, before she came in from the right, put her face to my ear, and whispered through her mask.

“Believe, Miss Tankard, believe. He is real.”

And then I was out. Continue reading

All’s well that…

[Synopsis]

I’m back, I’m fine, I’m busy getting things all sorted out, don’t have internet where I’m staying (with friends) but I’ve found a flat and should be moved in and hooked up by the weekend.

[Summary]

I’ve made it back to Bristol – in one piece!

One piece, minus my appendix and a litre of mysterious unidentified pus that had been in my abdomen, the last remnant of an infection that I’d probably had for weeks if not months. We’re still not certainly what exactly happened – typhoid fever? bacterial infection? – but appendicitis was only a secondary infection to the peritonitis. It was the last straw to finally get me to admit I was ill. I’d put the fatigue, cramps, and nauseia that I’d had on and off for weeks down to

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Just ask. You’re in the right place, so ask, and keep asking.

I came to Arusha over a week ago to attend the East African Association of Palaeoanthropology and Palaeontology Conference.

It was incredible.

It was inspiring – and intimidating – incredibly, intimidatingly, inspiring.

Richard Leakey gave the opening address; the conference was, in honour of the 50th anniversary of Mary Leakey’s discovery of the Zinjanthropus fossil. Thursday we made a pilgrimage to the exact site it was found, in Oldupai Gorge. Monday to Wednesday we sat in a freezing room in the basement of a generic hotel listening to many of the most famous scientists in the discipline.

“This conference is going to be very well attended. You’re going to get to meet some amazing people,” the archaeologist (rock art researcher, with whom I’d come to volunteer) told me earlier in the week. It was… Continue reading

“No get-up stand-up for your rights, here in Zanzibar,”

“No get-up stand-up for your rights, here in Zanzibar,” said a tall dreadlocked man who invited himself to join us three days running at a habor-side restaurant that seemed to be the closest thing to a Reggae bar in Stonetown, and one of the few places that locals and tourists interacted outside of the salesman/customer, hunter/prey relatonship. We never learned the name of the restaurant; the man was called Rashid and wandered through the days seeminly stoned and the nights slightly drunk.

The restaurant was hidden behind a typical souvenir and crafts shop – we’d only stopped because Brian had noticed some illegal shells in the display outside, near the shark jaws – through an area of pool tables, and consisted of a scattering of no nonsense plastic chairs… Continue reading

It was confusing, it was dirty, and it was absolutely wonderful.

The dig at Songo Mnara already feels like another lifetime, or another world.

sm17

It was amazing. The site was incredible, the island was gorgeous, the people were great. The sun was unbelievably strong, straight down on us, and if the wind wasn’t blowing sand and dirt straight into your eyes, it was only because you were downwind of the sieve and getting mouthfuls of it. The minute tonal difference between the types of soils, trying to identify them, to distinguish between them, was infuriating – almost painful – and hours spent looking for traces of decoration or finished edges on pottery fragments had me hallucinating bases. Continue reading

“… culture… is an ensemble of texts…

… which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong.” – Clifford Geertz

—-

I ate dinner last to the Muslim call to prayer, heard in surround, from the roof of the Pyramid Hotel. The calls came from three different mosques. They started on a slight delay, one after another; out-of-sync, nearly harmonizing. Ascents and vibratto wrapped around each other. The crackling bull-horn speakers turned the male voices into horns – deep trombones and lilting saxophones playing minor, off-key, beautifully. They grew in strength and more seemed to join in – there may have been more than three to start with, it’s hard to say; there seems to be a small neighborhood mosque… Continue reading