The sound of shillings

One of the stranger experiences of the last year was detailed in the previous post. That included watching a half-dozen Maasai count 19.3 million shillings in a law firm's opulent compound on the edge of Arusha. In a place where there is so little -at least materially - to sit in the middle of something that resembles a resort as the air is filled with the sound of counting shillings is bizarre, to say the least.

How to spend 19.3 million shillings

The lawyer's compound was on the edge of Arusha, but in another world. Down the road sticky with tar from the afternoon sun, by the murky pool in a field filled with splashing children, past two checkpoints manned by Warrior Security and into the sanctum of shiny SUVs, flawless English and Dolce and Gabbana outfits.

And, as usual, the village chief was late. He rolled up in a battered taxi two hours behind schedule. As soon as the chief sat down at the heavy teak tables that had been pushed together under a gazebo, he fell asleep.

Finally, the deal that had endured a year's worth of twists, trouble and chaos could get done.

The transaction was simple: 19.3 million Tanzanian shillings, over $15,000, for the three former University of Michigan athletes to finish purchasing two acres of land in the village where they were building a school. It had taken four trips to Tanzania, a pair of assaults, two arrests, lawyers, police and countless meetings, cups of chai and miles wandered through the dusty, forgotten village in the foothills of Mount Meru to get here. And, of course, a frantic, last-minute bid to collect enough shillings to pay the landowners.

Two elderly Maasai women, who had earlier disappeared in search of beer, sat at one end of the tables. One wore a faded red Nike stocking cap, blue dress and had silver hoops dangling from her elongated earlobes. She hunched over, her gnarled face a few inches from the tabletop. Every few minutes her body shuddered from a hacking cough. Her eyes seemed buried beneath layers of wrinkles.

Nine other family members wearing expectent looks and their best clothes jammed around the table. One of them took the land agreement and a purple inkpad, grabbed the red-capped women's thumb and used it as a stamp on each page of the document. He repeated the process with the second woman, her suspicious eyes peering from behind a red and black shawl. Neither women moved or spoke.The rest of the family laughed.

The chief woke up, after his No. 2 jabbed his leg, but couldn't figure out where to sign the document. The landowners hooted.

Wads of cash were dumped on the table by one of the lawyers. The sound of the family counting through the 3,050 bills filled the air. The leader, Philemon, put his arms around the wads of cash and pulled them close.

There was too much money. One of them tried to stuff it under his tattered sport coat. There wasn't room. Instead, he sat on the pile of cash.

Philemon told Dory, the ex-Michigan soccer player, the family was hungry. Could she pay for lunch? He was serious. There is no shame in asking here.

"All my money is gone," Dory said, not far from the truth, as she barely had enough for cab fare. "You can go buy a cow for dinner."

The family hooted again and plunged into a lengthy discussion extolling the virtues of drinking cow's blood.

Then they started talking money. They couldn't decide how to divide the windfall. Their voices grew animated. One man went to fetch a gun. We quickly left.

As we walked away, one of the locals with us matter-of-factly predicted the family would quickly shrink in size.

That is Africa. Sometimes, you don't know whether to laugh, cry or just shake your head in bewilderment as you trudge back down the road, shoeprints lingering on the sticky tar.

The bag of cash

The money appeared in a paper bag, escorted by a sleepy-looking guard cradling an AK-47.

Behind the barred window of the Western Union office in Arusha, the clerk pretended not to notice as 15 million Tanzanian shillings were dumped on the counter, quickly counted and shoved into a black backpack in wads of a million secured with rubber bands.

The three Americans I was with needed the money to make the final payment on two acres of land where they were constructing a school. They already had drained their personal bank accounts at ATMs around town in a frantic effort to collect enough cash before meeting the landowners. The wire transfer would give them enough. Barely.

The equivalent of $13,000, about six year's salary for a good, middle-class job here, was stuffed in the backpack. Two banks other banks that morning didn't have enough shillings to fill the transfer. Customers' eyes went wide when they overhead the amount. A neon sign may as well have been flashing above the group with a dollar sign.

And I was nervous.

Sure, this was the Arusha International Conference Center, maybe the safest place in town. Metal detectors, armed guards everywhere you looked, checkpoints, barriers to deflect bomb blasts. Most of it protected the AICC's principal tenant, the United Nations' billion-and-a-half dollar International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

Our taxi idled outside the gate. We had to leave. Arusha is one of those places you don't want to walk around with a backpack stuffed with cash. No matter how you try, you can't blend in here. Never mind tempting fate with a backpack that might as well be a winning Lottery ticket.

The Arusha Times, the town's weekly English-language newspaper, is filled with stories of shootouts and grisly murders and takeover-style robberies by heavily-armed gangs. Rent-a-cops brandishing AK-47s and shotguns and old Enfield rifles leftover from the British colonial days are everywhere: From banks to ATMs to the Western Union offices to stores that sell anything of value. The police don't mess around with pistols. Instead, they carry AK-47s, sometimes with two 30-round clips taped together.

Behind dark sunglasses, my eyes searched for threats that weren't there. I marveled at the bizarre, unexpected situations I've found myself in during the last year. We piled in the cab and sped away. The driver had no idea what was going on. B held onto the backpack; O sat next to him with an uncomfortable look and played with his cell phone.

Twenty minutes later, the backpack had been stashed under a mattress at the group's compound. Everyone relaxed. My visions of gangs of men wielding assault rifles and machetes dissipated.

The money was safe. For now.

A couple mentions

Many thanks to my good friend over at Squawking VFR for the kind mention of my blog and assorted globetrotting adventures. Mr. VFR hits one of the secrets of good writing: It should make you feel something. Being able to do that through stories from the road has been one of my great joys of the past year.

Also, the folks over at Hoopraker, a blog covering Big Ten basketball, tracked down my whereabouts. Well, not my exact whereabouts. Those are difficult to pin down at a given time, even for my family. But they know my days of covering University of Michigan basketball are done.

Making sense

What was different, the place or the person?

Day after day the question assailed me, as I struggled to make sense of my return to Tanzania.

The intensity of my summer in country was gone, the two-month whirlwind of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, mistaking an elephant for a boulder, junking the rest of my globetrotting to stay longer, being jumped twice and finding myself in the middle of a forgotten, impoverished village in the foothills of Mount Meru. Each day felt like living in a movie. The tension, the danger, the feeling of waking up each day knowing something strange would happen had disappeared, too. Everything felt normal. And that terrified me.

I saw the same things. The children filthy with dust, stomachs distended from malnutrition, who wanted someone to play with them for a few minutes more than a meal. The rampant corruption. The joy in the faces of people who had almost nothing. The touts hounding each foreigner who passed by. The village of mud and dung huts that looks as if they're from 200 years in the past. The air choked with burning garbage and dust. The beauty. The frustration. The anger. The bafflement. The questions. The hope. All the moments that make Africa a place unlike any other.

There was no way I could match the feelings of the first trip, of witnessing and processing these things for the first time. Emotion hung heavy over that trip, with nights I went back to my guest house, wrote for hours and sobbed, trying to understand what I was in the middle of. The emotion was still there this time. Just not as raw and basic and overwhelming. To not feel that felt disingenuous. To some extent, I was accustomed to the pain and struggle of daily life here. The shock was gone and I could see things more clearly. To have my heart break for what I saw felt normal. To have things go wrong felt predictable. To be out of my element was usual. Same goes for being unable to stay clean, frigid showers, getting sick from the food, running the risk of malaria, death-defying daladala rides, being stared at and followed because you're white, sucking in lungfuls of exhaust and dust and cultural quirks I still don't understand. Those threw me off the first trip; the second time they were as natural as breathing.

As I processed this, I felt adrift. There were days that seemed without direction or purpose, even as I was in Tanzania to shadow the group of former University of Michigan athletes on a quest to build a school and orphanage in the Olevolos village. The draft of a story about the travails of the project was finished after the summer trip, thousands of words pounded out in my Seattle coffee haunts. But the story felt incomplete. Missing something no one could quite articulate. There were moments late at night I thought of ditching the whole idea, wondering what, if anything, the two months in the summer had meant. But I returned, drawn by the feeling the story wasn't done and needs to be told, that I was supposed to be here to do that. Finally, I put my notebook away. Stopped scribbling at every spare moment, about everything I saw. Stopped comparing this trip to the last one. Stopped trying to do. There is beauty in letting go. In admitting you are weak and don't have the answers. In stopping trying to do it all yourself. In simply being.

In that, Africa felt more real than ever before. My preconceptions and prejudices and emotions didn't matter. Only the reality of what was in front of me did. Sure, that leaves you with a lot of hard questions. But that is a good place to be, a dynamic place, a real place.

Africa is the same. And I couldn't be more different.