Fish Frenzy

From the lakeshore, the lights of fishing boats stretch in a thin line. The horizon twinkles. But one morning I was lucky enough to peer down from a place very high up, very early in the morning and see the boats as they really are--a swirling mass across the lake, arms spread out wide. It was like a galaxy of stars that I'm normally only able to see in one dimension suddenly made 3-D.

The past week fish have been throwing themselves into fishermen's nets. In town the price of mgebuka has dropped to 8 for 2,000/= (that's 8 fish for approximately $1.60). During the morning the town smells of fish; rattling pickups fill boxes upon boxes with dagaa and bring them to village markets. Women with plastic basins on their heads sell kuhe door to door. On Saturday I was visited by 3 different fishmongers before 9 am.

I tried to capture the sight of boats on the lake, the impossible number of lights, their twinkle. I wanted to compare the evening arrival and morning departure, but slept in too late for the morning shots. By the time I got out of bed half an hour before dawn we were surrounded by the buzz of outboard motors. All the fishermen were racing home to their villages--so I briefly admired the morning star and went back to sleep. Dreaming of fish for lunch.

Incense

Today is a chilly day, the first day of real rain in town. Windshield wipers and mud puddles remind me of last May, when the rainy season was finishing up.

We had arrived in Nyarubanda village, about an hour north of town, and turned off the main dirt road down into a valley. Goats and small children ran out of our way and then turned to watch from the embankments along the path, following our progress down the hill with steady, serious eyes.

The construction site we were visiting is on the edge of the village, where an open field goes on and on until it meets the next village over. A river runs through the valley, and we've laid about 1 kilometer of pipes to bring water to a coffee processing station. At one point on that kilometer, the pipe recrosses the river above ground. It had been cut and we had to repair it before the coffee harvest began. It was a beautiful spot where they had broken the pipe--the river flows over a terraced series of stones that are square-cut as though by human hand.

We got out of the car and the construction manager Shaba, and a group of villagers went ahead of me, striding down the hill to the place where the pipe was exposed and needed repair. I nearly ran into them as they stopped and drew back sharply.

"Heh!" Shaba breathed in an involuntary puff of surprise. He looked at the ground, and stood there a minute

"Heh!" he said with more force. "What's that?" He pointed to the ground where bushes around the river parted, where we had dug the trench for our pipe.

A single stick of incense was smoking. Stuck in the ground, it had only burnt down about an inch. The smell of sandalwood suddenly surrounded me, as though by seeing it I smelled better--or it had been creeping along the ground but decided to rise towards our noses when we acknowledged it. The group of men from Nyaruboza didn't say anything. Although their feet stayed put in the mud, they drew back.

"What's that," Ishabakaki asked again. The four men averted their eyes and kept their distance. No one said anything; it was as if they acknowledged the stick's presence out loud it would have power over them.

In distracted bursts we started talking about fixing the pipe. Once the stick burnt out the men returned to the water system and began to work. We watched them shovel the clayey mud from around the pipe onto the bank. Shaba turned to the head mason, the oldest and most confident person there. "Where are the people who lit it? They must be near."

"We don't know who lit it," he anwered.

"Well this must be a sacred place," Ishabakaki said with a nervous smile. "No no," one man said quickly, "it's just them. they just decided that it should be a sacred place."

Shaba sighed with relief when we got back in the car, the tension left his shoulders. "You can light incense for good prayers and for bad prayers," he explained to me. "I can't say which one this was."

Ramadani

Ramadhan is nearly over. I'm not entirely sure which day completes this month of fasting and praying and family time, but I'm told it's either Sunday or Monday. Actually it's definitely Sunday. Wait no, it's either Sunday or Saturday.

These doubts lie in the mysterious lunar cycle. Ramadhan ends when the new moon is sighted; it is not enough to theoretically know which night the new moon appears--they have to see it with their own eyes to declare it official. Which means that if it's a cloudy night, Ramadhan ain't over yet.

Tanzania's Muslims often chose a day different from other parts of the world--apparently Tanzanian religious leaders tend to agree that they've seen the moon before others. I don't blame them. It's tough observing the fast here, because, as it's been explained to me, "in other countries people don't work that month. But here we're poor, and we can't stop working." Plus, less than half the country is Muslim--and Christians can't also shut down business for a month.

In any case, the end of this week will mark the end of Ramadhan. And we'll all get a long weekend, Christians and Muslims and pagans alike. Muslims might not be sure which day, but every Christian in town I've talked to is positive that the holiday will be Monday and Tuesday. Long weekend here we come!

Mgebuka

When the moon is full, fish runs out in Kigoma's restaurants.

Fishermen here go out at night and use lamps to attract their catch. When the moon is bright their lamps can't compete, and restaurants in town only serve Tilapia trucked in from Lake Victoria. Which I never order. I wait for the moon to wane so I can eat mgebuka again.

Mgebuka is a medium sized fish, the length of your plate, that comes fried whole next to a big pile of rice or fries, and perhaps a spoonful of boiled greens. I soon became used to staring into its milky white eyeball and its mouth hanging open, permanently fried into place. When I don't get a whole fish I start to distrust the restaurant. Gotta see the head.

I do love mgebuka. You must savor the first rip into the white meat--with that first bite you'll find out if you got a good one, if it hasn't been fried too long. When cooked right, you can indulge in the texture of the meat itself and the pleasure of separating it from the bones, peeling it off like the flesh of a fruit.

Kompyuta

I've worked in Kigoma for about a year and a half, and in that time we've had three interns pass through the office. They've all been young people from the "coffee growing communities" who spent six months learning all about coffee tasting, exporting, and sales.

They come from varied backgrounds but have one thing in common. They'd hardly touched a computer before starting at our office.

It took about a month of hesitant keyboard tapping and uncoordinated mouse clicks before the you-tubing started. Four weeks of asking how to close a window and requests for explanations of email attachments before music video downloads. 30 days of unsaved files and forgotten email passwords before MSN chat.

It takes four weeks to become an internet addict. Our bandwidth budget is in trouble.

Rotten Tomatoes

The other day, my flat-mate started talking to a former a tomato seller he knows. He had a burning question, one that had been troubling him for years. "But what happens at the end of the day to your dozens of leftovers?" he asked.

There are approximately thirty women in the Kigoma market who sit in cramped vegetable stalls and sell the same produce at the same price. They stack their identical tomatoes in pyramids of four or five, and sit back waiting for customers to come. At the end of the day, according to this former seller, they store their leftovers on the floor underneath the stall. Rats are not a problem she says, only cockroaches.

The next day when the tomatoes are no longer so firm-looking she's not worried. Regular customers might refuse them, but all the restaurants in town need tomatoes, and they aren't so picky about quality. In the morning they come to buy the previous day's produce to add to their sauces and stews and salads.

If they've gone too bad even for the restaurants, well the women have just got to take the tomatoes home and cook them up themselves.

2 Mechanics

I brought the car to our mechanic last Saturday. He wasn't surprised to see me. "You've got a strange sound when you drive over potholes, right? An ee-ee, ee-ee, right?" he squeaked.

"How did you know," I asked-- "Did our driver let you know I was coming?"

"No, no. I was at the ATM in town this morning when I saw your car drive by and heard that sound. I knew you'd come by soon."

There are two very good mechanics in town. We used to take our car to a man named Michael whose garage is on the outskirts of town. He's taller and wider than the average Tanzanian, with big oil stained hands that look too clumsy to fine-tune an engine. His garage has no sign--we found him with directions from a fellow car owner. To find his place, turn left on the dirt path just past the big mango tree before the Friends Peace Bar, and honk at the rusted gate just down the path.

His garage is impressive. The skeletons of ancient land rovers litter the lot. Michael's office, a building in the far end of the lot, is strewn with ancient papers on the floor, a calendar from 2007, and christmas decorations from some point in the past decade. A half a dozen young men loiter and insult each other, while two work on the cars for the day.

We took the car to Michael for about six months, but there was a chronic problem with the brakes that he couldn't figure out. We decided to see if the town's other mechanic had any idea why we heard that grating noise on muddy roads.

Panya's more compact garage is just off of Mwanga Market. The taxi drivers I talk to all bring their cars there, they swear by him. While Michael looks like he could pry the answers out of the car with his sheer strength, Panya seems like he could put his ear close to an engine, tap it a few times, and diagnose the problem.

Your mechanic must be someone you trust implicitly. Both Michael and Panya refuse any payment till the job is done, and when I forget for two weeks to pay a bill don't charge any extra for the wait. But lately we've been going to Panya for all our car troubles. I have to confess, it's mainly for his office. Panya has taken an old land rover, cut off the top, and laid it on a stand of bricks. You step into the door of his office, sit down on a stool next to his crowded desk, look around and realize that you're in a car. It's that creativity and frugality that draws me to Panya. Although I do like Michael's christmas decorations.

Contract Negotiation

I bought an mtumbu, a dugout canoe, last week.

I went to Katonga, a fishing village just outside of town, on a windy Sunday. I'd never been to this market in the morning, and I was constantly being told to get out of the way by people carrying large amounts of fish. The men had already returned from their night out, and had distributed their catch along the beach. Fish was everywhere: drying on wire mesh, loaded into wheelbarrows to go to town, on Mamas' heads in plastic buckets.

Getting the boat took a bit of strategizing. The guy I enlisted to help me told me to go wait by the car so he could negotiate a bit. "If they see you they'll increase the price," he explained. After a few rounds of walking up and down the market path lined with used clothes, tomatoes, and, of course, fish, I stood by the car enjoying the wait for relative anonymity. Eventually small children stop running up to peer at me and drunk guys kept rolling along. He came back. "OK we worked something out. What's next?" I went to have a look.

We walked down to the beach. Men repaired their purple fishing nets, and chatted, and added to the general windy chaos. A dozen canoes were lined up in the sand; mine was being sat in by its owner. "Want to try it out in the water?" my negotiator asked, and made ready to push it out. "No, no," I called out "I'm just looking at the wood." Looks were passed--what the hell is the deal with this woman? But the owner suffered my examination of his boat.

The bow has been smoothed by hundreds of hands that pushed it out to the water and thousands of waves that rolled over it. But patchwork began a foot down from the prow carved out of a tree. Each jagged board is loosely held together, the gaps filled in with cotton stuffing. Some are freshly added, still cyprus white, others were pilfered from other boats painted blue, some are nearly as ancient as the bow. Originally I wanted a boat that was of no use to anyone, one that was split in half, essentially driftwood. But looking at this boat I realized I wasn't going to find one because there's no such thing. Every boat is salvageable, even if in the process it becomes another boat entirely.


So I agreed on a price with the owner. At which point we entered into the formalities. Together we walked slowly up from the beach to the market chairman's office--which doubles as a stall where he sells powdered milk and phone credit. With him was a middle aged man wearing spectacles who greeted me in English. The negotiator came along as well.

The boat owner explained the transaction that was taking place, and the market chairman said--"OK. Well we need to write the contract. Here, take this piece of paper (he ripped one out of a student notebook) and this pen (he fumbled around in his desk) and write one with all the details." The boat owner took the paper and the pen and furrowed his brow. He held the paper close, he extended his arm far, he made a flourish with his left hand to fold the paper and a flourish with his right to bring the pen at the ready. He paused. "I can't write without my glasses," he said and handed his materials to the guy with the glasses. "Here, you write it."

The guy with the glasses began. "I, Jumanne Idi Nkola, am selling my dugout canoe to Jenevive Iden for the sum of fifty thousand only (=50,000/= only.) and no cents. In front of the following witnesses: (he lists the names of the three guys). Signed: (then followed space for our 5 signatures).

The contract was signed. Money was exchanged. Witnesses were paid. "OK," said the market chairman. "Now you officially own the boat." Now I will be asked no inconvenient questions about how I came to be the owner of an mtumbu.

Little did he know, I've cleverly disguised the boat. It will never float again, and even its builder might not recognize it in its present state.