Category: Training

GOING UPCOUNTRY

September 1964: Tanganyika, East Africa

Trailed by a swirling cloud of dust, our bus, a snub-nosed blue and white Leyland with a ladder welded to its side, rumbled northward through the dry countryside. At high speeds–the driver’s preference, even for corners and bumpy detours–the bus sounded like a cross between a cement mixer and a World War II German Stuka dive bomber. Almost new, it sounded old. 

Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika. 

After a few days in Dar es Salaam, those of our Peace Corps volunteer group with forestry, agriculture and wildlife jobs transferred by bus to an agricultural school near Arusha, four hundred miles northwest. Unfortunately, Cathy, the pretty nurse from Philadelphia, was headed to Mbeya, near the Zambia border, about as far from my posting at Ngorongoro as it was possible to get. (To locate Dar es Salaam, Arusha, and Mbeya, check the map in my previous post.)

Page 01_012
A similar bus awaiting passengers in Arusha. Kikuyu Street (note the yellow sign) was named for the Kikuyu people who occupy the highlands north of Nairobi, Kenya.  Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, was Kikuyu. 

For much of the way we passed through wooded, gently undulating country crossed by small muddy rivers. Many trees were leafless. Recent fires had left charred stubble and patches of exposed reddish soil; ashy silhouettes of fallen trees lay where the flames had consumed them. Occasionally, mud-and-wattle huts with thatch roofs appeared by the roadside, as did women walking with children in tow, balancing interesting loads on their heads–a bunch of bananas, a teapot, a bar of soap. Men sat in the shade or sedately pedaled bicycles, some carrying hefty loads, such as a gunny sack of charcoal. I saw an old man using a foot-powered sewing machine 

Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika

We arrived at Tengeru Agricultural School after dark. Awakening the next morning, we were pleasantly surprised to see this:

Page 01_019
At 14,977 ft in elevation, volcanic Mt. Meru is comparable in height to Mt. Rainer in Washington State. It last erupted in 1910. The pretty shrub in the foreground is Bougainvillea. 
Page 01_013
Tengeru’s living facilities were full, so we slept in tents on the lawn. 

Tengeru Agricultural School was situated at four thousand feet elevation in a lush landscape of small farms and large coffee plantations. We and some British volunteers were there for purposes of acculturation, which involved Swahili lessons, lectures on appropriate subjects, and field trips. I liked the field trips best. 

Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika

Many of the coffee estates, one of which abutted the school (the narrow road leading to the school passed through coffee plantations) had been established by German colonial settlers when Tanganyika was German East Africa. The coffee plants grown here were the highland type (Coffea arabica), in contrast to Coffea robusta plants, grown at lower elevations in Uganda, which produce lower quality coffee. It was at Tengeru that I discovered “real” coffee . It took only a single cup brewed from beans grown on the adjacent estate to reveal how bland the (pre-Starbucks) coffee I had grown up with had been.

Page 01_018
Coffee bushes shaded by large trees planted over half a century earlier
Coffee beans
Coffee beans being laid out to dry (banana plants grow in the background).

Plantations of sisal (Agave sisalana) grew at lower, drier elevations than coffee. A native to Mexico, sisal has large fleshy leaves with many long fibers that are used for making cordage, twine, rope and other products.

Page 01_016
Harvested sisal leaves ready for processing

 

drying sisal
Sisal fibers being air-dried

The visit to the Arusha Chini sugar cane estate was especially interesting because of the voluminously baggy khaki shorts worn by our expatriate guide. Standard field issue for the British colonial male, they were very practical for hot, tropical climates. To expedite the flow of cool air around the upper parts of one’s legs, they were approximately as wide at the bottom as they were long. Therefore, when in polite company, it was important to wear underpants and watch how you sat down. Our guide wasn’t doing either.

Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika

 

 

DAR ES SALAAM, TANGANYIKA

DAR ES SALAAM, TANGANYIKA

My Peace Corps group, Tanganyika V, landed at Tanganyika’s capital city, Dar es Salaam, on a September day in 1964. As we made our way through airport immigration and customs, I was struck by how, for the first time in my life, I was a member of a racial minority. Almost everyone here was African.

Map of East Africa

Tanganyika’s largest city, Dar es Salaam (see figure above) was just a small fishing village when, in 1884, it became part of German East Africa (present-day Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi). However, Germany soon made it the capital of “German East,” developed its port and made it the terminus of a 780-mile-long railway connecting with Kigoma on  Lake Tanganyika, and Mwanza on Lake Victoria. (Kigoma includes the one-time village of Ujiji where the famous meeting between Stanley and Livingstone took place in 1871.) Consequently, Dar es Salaam thrived, to the extent that when we arrived, it had 130 thousand inhabitants of which four percent were European (mostly British) and twenty-seven percent Asiatic (mostly Indian).

(According to Wikipedia, Dar es Salaam now has 5.12 million people, is the third fastest growing city in Africa, and is predicted to become, at 76 million people, the world’s third largest city boy 2100. The Dar es Salaam I knew in 1964 was, by comparison a sleepy little place.)

Page 01_008
Downtown Dar es Salaam (1964)

 

Nonetheless, as I had grown up in a town with under 25,000 residents (Longview, Washington), in a county (Cowlitz) with less than 50,000, I was impressed by Dar es Salaam’s size.

I also liked its ambience.

Although its newest buildings might have been modern twenty years earlier, and its signs mostly in English, Dar es Salaam exuded a cosmopolitan air. English cotton dresses, Indian saris, boldy colored African kangas and kitenges, and voluminous Muslim buibuis graced women of three races and several religions. A bronze statue of a native askari (soldier) commemorating Africans who had fought for Britain in the First World War, stood in the center of a traffic circle. Automobiles shared the streets with sweating Africans pulling rickshaw-like carts laden with goods. African mamas carried babies in cloth slings on their backs and balanced baskets of fruit on their heads. 

Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika

Some buildings, such as the old Lutheran church (now the Azania Front Lutheran Church–see below), showed a definite German architectural influence. Derived from an Arabic term, Azania means Land of the Black People. When Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged in October 1964, it became part of the new nations’s name–Tanzania. The church probably had a different name during German times.

 

Page 01_007
Azania Front Lutheran Church

 

However, at least one substantial, and very attractive, German-built building, a hospital, looked neither German nor like a hospital. Constructed in 1897, the Ocean Road Hospital was, during the German period, used almost exclusively for Europeans. Interestingly, it has a special historical significance because it was here that Robert Koch, one of the founders of modern bacteriology (and recipient of the Nobel Prize in 1905), carried out his research on tropical diseases, including malaria and sleeping sickness. The hospital is presently the Ocean Road Cancer Institute.

Page 01_009
Ocean Road Hospital

 

Other things I liked about Dar es Salaam included:

Page 01_006
Bright tropical flowers (Bougainvillea in this case) and palm trees. (Photo taken in the Salvation Army compound.)
Page 01_005
Fishing boats, the blue waters of the harbor, and more palm trees.

 

Page 01_011
The Indian Ocean’s warm tropical waters. Members of our Tanganyika V Peace Corps group are pictured here, ah, training. 

However,  my most fond memory of Dar es Salaam is of being given the opportunity to change my posting from Tanganyika’s Village Resettlement Agency to a forestry position in the northern part of the country. This completely unexpected event set the pattern for the rest of my life. Read my book, Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika. to find out why.

JOINING THE PEACE CORPS

As it had done for over a week, it rained the day I applied to join the Peace Corps. Pavements glistened, cars swished by on the highway, and water ponded in the fields. Low sullen-looking clouds hid nearby hills. Crossing the Willamette River at Corvallis,  I saw it running swift, high and gray. Winter in western Oregon

Wet footprints and water dripping from raincoats tracked and spotted the floor around the Peace Corps recruiters’s booth at Oregon State University. Despite the presence of numerous applicants (with more arriving all the time), the room was surprisingly quiet. But then, I suppose, the weather wasn’t conducive to high spirits. Maybe if I’d thought of it, I would have assumed the others, like me, wanted to help a developing nation get on its feet, but that they also felt the lure of experiencing different cultures and landscapes. I might also have wondered which part of the world most called to them (not that they could expect to be sent there, of course). For my part I was willing to go almost anywhere, although, for reasons explained in Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika, I dreamed, with little hope of it ever happening, of being posted to the newly independent nation of Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania) in East Africa.

Guess where I went.

image

Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania) with its northern neighbor, Kenya.

That summer I flew to Syracuse University in upstate one York to undergo training with a group of other Tanganyika-bound volunteers. By then, however, I had already racked up a number of first-time experiences, including being finger-printed at the police station, learning from wide-eyed friends and family that the FBI had been asking questions about me (which gave me a certain mild notoriety), and even being interviewed by the local newspaper, the Longview Daily News. Then, on my way east I flew for the first time in a large airplane.

But now here I was in Syracuse, and to my surprise, enjoying it, largely,  think, because I and the other volunteers had similar interests and goals (I was especially taken with a certain nurse from Philadelphia). Thus, even though I still tended to fall silent in the presence of three or more people, I wasn’t as shy as usual.

Our group, Tanganyika-V, was to be the fifth sent to that country. Previous volunteer groups to Tanganyika had included geologists, engineers, nurses, and teachers. Tanganyika-V lacked teachers but included large contingents of nurses and engineers (the latter primarily meant to work on roads), not to mention a geologist, veterinarian and wildlife biologist, a few agriculturists and two lawyers.  I and several others were to help concentrate widely scattered farmers into centralized locations to better provide them with needed services.

(Here’s an interesting bit of trivia: Tanganyika-I has the honor of being the very first group of Peace Corps volunteers to enter training after the Peace Corps came into existence in 1961. However, Ghana-I grabbed all the headlines by being first on the ground [they even had a book, Being First by Robert Klein, written about them.] This is because Ghana had been independent (from Great Britain) since 1957 whereas Tanganyika was not quite there, yet.)

Our training included lessons in Kiswahili. A Bantu language strongly influenced by Arabic, Kiswahili is the first language of the Swahili, a Muslim people of coastal Kenya and Tanganyika, as well as a trade language used throughout East Africa, a region with numerous ethnic groups, each with its own language (130 in Tanganyika alone). Some Kiswahili words (safari and simba, for instance) are even familiar to English speakers.

Other subjects included Tanganyika’s history, culture, and geography. On a more technical level most of us took a short course in surveying.

Page 01_002

We also did a practical in basic construction during which we built a bridge. There were three stages:

image

Design

Page 01_003

Procurement

Page 01_004

Construction

Now, over half a century later, I wonder if it’s still there.

On August 4th, 1964, we took a break to see President Lyndon Johnson speak at the dedication of the university’s Newhouse Academic Building. It was during this speech that he accused North Vietnam of an unprovoked attack on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, thereby setting the  stage for our involvement in the long and ultimately fruitless war in Vietnam. This was an I was there occasion for me, actually being on the spot, listening to our president all but formally declare war on another nation. (It also was my first sighting of an American president in the flesh.) Nonetheless, I must confess that my most vivid memory of the event is of the building (the one being dedicated) that backdropped the speaker’s podium. Designed by the renowned architect, I.M.Pei, the single-story, bare concrete structure with its projecting flat roof had the aesthetic appeal of a military bunker (thereby fitting right in with the tone of the presidents’s speech).

Upon completing our training, we went by chartered bus to Boston to celebrate. A high point of the ride was seeing the reaction of one of our trainers, a British road engineer employed in Tanganyika, to our interstate highway system. Used as he was to narrow, dirt and gravel roads that dealt with topography by going around or over it, he was transfixed by I-90 sweeping imperiously through the rolling Massachusetts countryside, cutting straight through any hill with the temerity to stand in its way. As we passed through one large cut, I heard him mutter, “Bloody hell, they just remove the hills!”

If he thought an interstate highway was exciting, how might I react to his “normal and mundane” in Tanganyika? I was eager to find out.