(Featured image by Eleanora Robbins.)

Tanzania’s Chief Geologist, Alec McKinley, regarded me skeptically from behind his large wooden desk. “You’ll niver go into the field,” he announced in his Scots brogue. 

It was 1964 and I, a Peace Corps volunteer (and newly minted geologist c/o Ohio State University) had just arrived in Dodoma, the headquarters of the Geological Survey of Tanzania (GST), to learn my duties.  I had expected them to include fieldwork, so, naturally, I was disappointed. Just like every other geologist on Earth, I looked forward to working in the field. But I was a woman, and in those days female geologists everywhere faced uphill battles for acceptance. 

Instead, I was given the task of assessing data in notebooks, obtained from Williamson’s Diamond Mines, containing spectrographic trace chemical data. And when I say notebooks, I mean piles of them, containing data from 60% of the country. Williamson’s Diamond Mines had removed all the gold and silver analyses but left the data on the other 15 chemical elements. 

In 1961, Tanzania had too few educated people to man top-level government positions. Therefore, many British colonial personnel stayed on until Tanzanian’s could be trained to take their places.

But fate later smiled on me. Alec McKinley took home leave. Officials posted to the far reaches of the British Empire typically did this once every several years but then did not resume their duties for up to a year. Therefore, Alec would be gone for some time. Fortunately for me, his replacement, Gerald Carter, had a different approach. For one thing, he wanted to “ground truth” the sites reported in the notebooks. Secondly, as the proud and often harried parent of two daughters, he was fully aware of the inherent capabilities of females. He was, in other words, a breath of fresh air. “I’m sending you into the field,” he announced. Thus was my place sealed forever as the first female field geologist with GST.

He did put one restriction on me—I had to stay in someone’s house.  To determine where this would be, I prepared a new map.  On it I plotted the locations of my anomalies (ground-truthing sites), Peace Corps volunteers, schools, and missions. One anomaly was not too far from where another member of my Peace Corps group, a nurse, Diane Schultz, was posted in Kondoa, central Tanzania. I wrote to her, and she replied, “Come.”  Therefore, my field crew and I stayed at her place. They camped out in her yard. It was a win-win situation for everyone, too, as Diane and I discovered the first morning when we peaked out the window and saw prostitutes / girlfriends leaving the camp. Camp in a city? Enjoy city life!

My crew and I spent three weeks working out of Kondoa, prospecting for mineral deposits by taking stream sediment samples from dry stream beds (it was the dry season). Going to a previously sampled area, we walked up the principal stream until we reached the mouth of a tributary, then walked a short distance up that to take a sample. Samples were analyzed in the lab using a spectrograph.  And that was it: field work that was simple, straight forward, and routine. Nevertheless, we had to keep alert. I discovered this on my very first day in the field, when, somehow, we walked right into a herd of elephants and had to crawl away on hands and knees through sparse grass to escape.  On the second field trip, a charging rhino caught us off guard and I was saved from being gored and trampled when one of my crew yanked me up a steep stream bank just before the heavy beast (they can weigh over a ton), trotted by, huffing like a steam engine.

            However, the encounter that’s most seared into my memory happened when, walking upstream in a wide, dry riverbed, we suddenly disturbed two cape buffaloes resting in the deep shade of an overhanging tree. One of them charged. Pandemonium ensued, with everyone but me rushing for the nearest tree and climbing as high as they could. “Panda mti!” my crew screamed at me, “Climb a tree!”  Unfortunately, I couldn’t. Having had polio as a child, my stomach muscles aren’t strong enough.  So, here I was, the only person still on the ground, the sole focus of a rapidly approaching beast with wicked-looking horns. What to do? Whatever adrenaline says! Remembering a knoll about a quarter mile back, I ran for it. 

            This put my field crew in an existential bind. As I learned later, they had been told their main job was to bring me back alive; samples were secondary. So, they climbed out of the trees. I have no idea what happened behind me. I know we had two big rifles but heard no shots. I know the men put themselves in danger for me. I ran in circles around the knoll trying to escape that buffalo before someone somehow diverted it, causing both animals to run away. 

            I sat down and started to cry. My field tracker, Issa Laibu, caught up to me and asked, “U mzima? (“Are you alive?”). I said, “Ndiyo” (“Yes”). “Kwahiyo kwanini unelia, mama?” Issa asked, “So why are you crying?”. I couldn’t think of a reason, so I stopped, got up and we went back to work. Of course, we were skittish for the rest of the day. 

            After all the samples were taken in the field, I spent the rest of my time at Dodoma, plotting more data onto maps (analyses were done by others). And I admit, it was fun being young and female, surrounded mostly by single men. Social life in Dodoma was good, plenty of parties given by my European and Asian colleagues, an ever-changing stream of visiting Peace Corps volunteers, trips to Arusha for milkshakes, and travel to Dar es Salaam to swim in the ocean.  

I also met Mary Cibaya, the health care worker at the GST there in Dodoma. She first sought me out to teach her English, then later invited me to visit her and the children of her Wagogo village outside Dodoma. (The Wagogo tribe occupies a large area around Dodoma in central Tanzania.)  About once a week over the next two years, I strapped my guitar over my shoulder, jumped on my blue Peace Corps bike and pedaled out of town to her village. 

            It was fun! The village children taught me Tanzanian songs, bits and pieces of which I still remember.  In fact, even now, many years later, I still sometimes find myself crooning “Malaika, na kupenda maliaka–Angel, I love you, angel,” a love song that was popular at the time, or “Baba na mama . . . Sita rudi—Father and mother . . . They won’t return,” a beautiful melody about remembering dead parents. In return, I taught them American folk songs, just as I did at birthday parties for my European and Asian colleagues’ kids.  Soon all the kids in the village and Dodoma were singing American songs like Kumbaya, only with different accents: The African children singing Kum “ba” ya, (in Swahilli, the accent is on the middle syllable), and the other kids singing Kumba “ya.”

Mary became my best friend in Tanzania. She taught me the first lesson I needed when working with kids—that mothers and grandmothers will do their best to attract anyone who will give their children a leg up in this world. Mary had six at the time but eventually nine over the years. She always told me, “Norrie, I’m going to send my children to you one day.”  I was to learn that she meant it. 

            Almost 30 years later, in 1996, my husband, Brian, and I welcomed Mary’s 26-year-old son, Isaac, at Dulles Airport near Washington DC where we lived. After a few months with us, he moved to the Los Angeles area where there is a large Tanzanian community. We kept in touch. Isaac subsequently became a building contractor. He also married and, together with his wife, produced two bright children, a daughter who is presently interested in black holes, and a son in videography. 

            Then, 27 years after coming to the USA, Isaac asked me, now a widow living in San Diego, California, to formally adopt him. “My mother, Mary, always told us, her children, that we had two mothers—her in Tanzania and you in America,” he explained.  I was intrigued. Having given Mary the money to build the house in which she raised Isaac and his siblings and having kept up with her and them over the years, I already regarded them as “family.” Also, Brian and I had never had children. Therefore, by adopting Isaac I would automatically gain some. On March 17, 2023, we legally became mother and son. 

            Gaining a ready-made family was a decided benefit of my working in Tanzania.  I also benefitted in that my Peace Corps experience there gave me non-competitive eligibility for a 34-year-long government career with the U.S. Geological Survey. And an interesting career it was, too, especially in that, focused as it was on rocks and minerals of the world, it allowed contacts made so many years ago to become lifelong friendships which, thanks to the internet, are still intact.

No complaints!

This post is adapted from Warner, D. (Editor). 2024. We Came, We Saw, We Changed: Creating a Peace Corps Legacy in Tanzania 1964-1966. Library of Congress Control Number 2024907333 (with additional input from Eleanora Robbins).