Because They're Burning Bricks

The ambulance was late. This was not a surprise.

The fuel tank was near empty. Also not a surprise.

We dropped some people in town and then went in search of diesel. At 4 petrol stations there was no diesel. Finally, at the second Total station there was diesel. There was also a queue approximately a quadrillion cars long. We had time to wait for the diesel but were worried the fuel would run out before we got to the pump. So we bought some tubing and went to siphon the diesel out of a willing car. After a whole lot of effort and a lot of hassle getting the tubing through some sort of filter-y contraption perhaps placed in the truck in order to prevent such things as siphoning the diesel out of the tank, we managed to get about 50 or 100cc from the tank. We needed about 40L. At this point we had already spent about an hour in our Quest for Diesel.

In the meantime, Sarah had been calling some of our Malawian friends. Wanangwa had extra diesel, but was out of town and so couldn’t actually give it to us. Billy probably had diesel, but his phone was dead. So we called James. James is an officer in the Malawian army. He told us to come to the barracks and he’d hook us up with some diesel. He guessed that the shortage of diesel was because the price was due to jump (again!) very soon, and so petrol stations were holding on to it so as to get a better price.

At the barracks we had a bit of difficulty at the gate: We drove up in our ambulance and Sarah asked for James, using his last name as well. She got a blank stare. “James,” she said again, “He’s an officer here.” More blank stares. “James,” she spelled his last name. Nothing. Eventually somebody knew who we were talking about enough to let us in and find someone to take us to James’ office. While we were waiting for about another half an hour for the driver to take the ambulance to the pump and get our 40L, James reminded me that he wants my dogs when I go home. I had asked him if he was going to treat them like Malawian dogs or azungu dogs, and he said that he would treat them better than azungu dogs; he’d treat them like angels’ dogs. But then he was disappointed I won’t be leaving for another year, ‘cause he wanted my dogs the next week, when he was moving into his new house. He tried to convince me that since he both likes dogs and wants them for security, he has more of a need for my dogs than I do and that I should at least give him one of them, but for some reason I wasn’t buying it.

We ended up getting to the airport with just enough time to grab a toasted sandwich before the flight. The flight itself was good, although the plane was unliveried because Air Malawi was chartering it from some other company***, which was weird. We even got some extra legroom for David by sitting in the emergency exit row, although the rules were a bit strange. We weren’t allowed to have our luggage under the seats in front of us, I was told that I had to put my knitting away during take off. At one point, one of the flight attendants made me put my jacket in the overhead compartment because, I “might trip on it in an emergency.” Everything they said, including the briefing to make sure we knew what we were doing in the exit row, was less, “In case of an emergency” and more like, “When we crash, which is sure to happen at some point . . .”

We were surprised to note, while they were stocking the catering on the plane, that the drinks were in crates. I kind of thought there was some trick, but lo and behold, when beverage service went around, the minerals and beers were all in glass bottles. Because sweaters are dangerous, but drunken people with glass bottles in an enclosed space are a good idea.

We took the 1½ hour ferry over to Stone Town in Zanzibar, which was nice, although Sarah had a kid kicking the back of her seat for much of the journey. Otherwise the boat is comfortable, even in the middle seat of 5, like mine. The windows are small and scratched, but some of the ocean is visible periodically. There’s an onboard movie. We think it’s Nigerian, but it’s not in English like the movies that show in Malawi. After previews with witchcraft disappearing in with a boom and a flash of smoke and sharp objects being slammed into people’s heads, the theme song for the feature film begins. Here are the lyrics:

Revenge, Revenge, REVENGE
Revenge, Revenge, REVENGE (repeat x?)

Then, just in case that wasn’t obvious enough, the title popped on to the screen in big, bold, bright red capital letters: REVENGE. For the rest of the week, Sarah and I would periodically sing the theme song to each other, since it’s the Best. Theme Song. EVAR.

There were a few Maasai in 2^nd class with us, which for some reason surprised me. It was a little odd to see (mostly) traditional Maasai in the context of the ferry and the movie and all that. There were also several women in chador sitting with their children. Sarah noticed that men she assumed were their husbands would periodically come to the women to talk or get something from them. Our guess was that the husbands were sitting in first class, although it is also possible that they were sitting on the stairs with the rest of people who couldn’t get a seat.

We decided to fly back to the mainland instead of taking the ferry again. We had booked before we went to the beach, but apparently there weren’t any actual seats left on the flight, so the travel agent had booked us onto a different flight. This seems to be a common theme in Tanzania: when we asked Mr. Makame from Haven to book us into Kendwa Rocks, he said, “No problem. Hakuna matata.” And then, since Kendwa Rocks was fully booked, he booked us into Sunset Bungalows next door, which we only discovered after we had got into transport to go to Kendwa Beach. In both instances there was a total failure to understand why it might be a problem to change our plans without consulting us. And really, there wasn’t a problem, everything worked out great and I’ll post some of the beautiful photos I have of turquoise seas shadowing over coral islands later; it just amazed me that this was perceived as being normal and acceptable behaviour.

After one more night in Dar, we woke at 4:30am to go to the bus depot. The bus station was amazing. There were all these huge, brightly painted buses, lit up by the headlights of other busses and the dim lights of the tuck shops selling water and papers and snacks. The depot was bustling even at 5am, with hawkers calling out the names of their destinations. The Malawi bus wasn’t there yet, which made us a bit nervous. Sarah quickly found and befriended a Tanzanian traveling to Lilongwe, and we used him to make sure we didn’t miss any small sign that the bus had arrived.

At about 6, some guy came and told us to follow him. We looked around, but the Tanzanian was following, and nobody else seemed to think it was strange, so we followed the guy. He led us back out of the station, going the wrong way through the tall turnstiles, attempting to ooze ourselves upstream and into the tiny spaces between the masses of people struggling to go the opposite direction from how we wanted to go. He hustled us down and across several lanes of traffic, dodging cars and buses and daladalas and lorries and anything else that was attempting to move down the street while we played frogger across it. He took us to a bus stand, like for a regular city bus, and left us there.

We waited.

Sarah and I were both keeping an eye on our Tanzanian friend. At one point, Sarah turned around, automatically checking for our friend and failed to find him. She asked me, worry beginning to edge into her voice, if I had seen him.

“It’s ok, he just went behind the stand to pee.” Sarah looked around until she found his feet peeking from under the stand and relaxed.

Eventually, the bus came. It was full. All the seats were full. All the aisle was full. All the bus was full. “But we bought seats. Actual, labeled seats,” we protested. “Get on,” they told us. But there was no way we were going to spend the 24-hour bus trip standing in the aisle. “We have seats. We want our seats.”

Two guys working for Mohamed Coach Liners appeared at our elbows and told us to follow them. We asked what the deal was, and they said they’d get us to Lilongwe, “Hakuna matata.”

We dodged traffic again, a little more carefully, a little more heart-in-throat with rush hour traffic increasing. The guy leading us was moving too quickly. I could see Denise in front of me and Sarah in front of her, but I could barely see David and Carol not at all. I hoped he was keeping an eye on her. We arrived back at the turnstiles we had struggled through 20 minutes or so before. We couldn’t find Carol and David, so we stopped cold.

“Come on!” yelled the Mohamed guy. And here’s where things started to become a wee bit antagonistic. “We can’t find our friends,” we explained. “They’re fine. Come on!” he repeated. “No, we can’t find our friends,” we said, somewhat louder.

“Come!” he hollered.

“No!” We got loud, too. It might not be useful, but it felt good. “We need our friends! We’re not going anywhere without our friends!” Eventually he explained that our friends had gone through the other turnstile with the other Mohamed guy. We followed him and found them. We were lead to a bus and told to get on.

This may not seem obvious, that we needed to ask, but we did, “Where is the bus going?”

“Mbeya.” Mbeya is 120km from the Malawian border. “We bought tickets to Lilongwe,” Carol pointed out.

The guy we later started calling White Shirt was visibly getting annoyed with us at this time. “Get on the bus!” he told us again, as if all we required was more volume to convince us of the soundness of his plan.

One of us asked, “What happens when we get to Mbeya?” At some point, we were told that a private car would meet us at Mbeya and take us to the border. At some point we were told that we would not have to pay for the private car. At some point I swear we were told that we would catch back up with the bus heading to Lilongwe, which would have seats once it crossed the border, but nobody else heard it and they never repeated it, even when Carol tried to get them to. Eventually the whole conversation devolved to this:

“You will get on the bus. You will go to Mbeya.”

“Then what?”

“You will get a car to the border.”

“Then what?”

[Louder] “You will get on the bus. You will go to Mbeya.”

[Louder] “Then what?”

“You will get a car to the border.”

“Then what?”

[Yelling and shaking his finger] “You will get on the bus! You will go to Mbeya! You will get a car to the border!”

[Even louder] “Then what?”

[Screaming, veins pounding through his head, and tired as fuck of us] “You will get on the bus!! You will go to Mbeya!! You will get a car to the border!!”

It was the kind of scene where you don’t remember who said what or who did what or in which order things occurred or even exactly what happened. So, at some point in all of this, the following things also happened:

• Red Shirt had grabbed Carol’s suitcase when he was bringing them from the bus stand back to the station. He threw the suitcase onto the bus and Carol started screaming at him, “Give me back my suitcase!”
• Sarah had stepped onto the stairs going into the bus when it looked like we were going to work something out. She was trying to decide if she should go in or not. She started to step down just as the bus jolted forward a couple of feet, leaving her hanging on to the rails, one leg swinging out into the air. Sarah entertainingly hovered there, every planned move of hers offset by the unplanned movement of the coach.
• Eventually, Red Shirt got on the bus, got Carol’s suitcase, and angrily tossed it at her.
• Sarah managed to get down from the bus without injuring herself.

It is possible everything would’ve worked out the way White Shirt said. It’s possible we would’ve ended up in Lilongwe after 24 hours, just like we were supposed to. This is Africa, after all, and here things go (expectedly) wrong all the time. But things also often go unexpectedly right. You can put yourself in situations guaranteed to be a really really bad idea and come out, not only unscathed, but somehow having benefited from it. In Africa it’s not that things so often go wrong so much as it is that they never go the way you count on, and so if you’re relying on predictability, you will feel as though nothing goes right. Africa requires more flexibility of spirit than we are used to exhibiting. But it didn’t matter, because at this point we no longer trusted these people and we wanted predictability we could trust over an adventure that was likely to find us stranded at the border. We decided that instead of being foolhardy (an acceptable level of risk), continuing with Mohamed Coach Liner would be downright stupid, and so we demanded our money back.

“You will get on the bus! You will go to Mbeya! You will get a car to the border!”

“NO! We will not get on the bus! You will give us our money back!”

We were lead back to the office, which we filled with our luggage and our breakfast (candy and crisps: breakfast of champions) and ourselves. Sarah and I sat on desks. The Mohamed people went to a different office to do their work, which didn’t really fit our plan of interrupting their day until they saw it as beneficial to give us our money back. We were told repeatedly that the guy who was going to give us the refund was coming. He’d be there in one hour, then 45 minutes, then 20 minutes. But of course 20 minutes never came. A couple of times, people coming through the office would try to help, but invariably after talking to the guys who work for Mohamed, they would suddenly forget English.

We called the number on the tickets, and got no answer from one. The second number we tried, someone answered and then hung up on Carol and turned off the phone.

At one point, Sarah and Denise went to the other office, where they spoke no English until Sarah and Denise said they’d like to buy bus tickets for the next day. Suddenly, everybody had miraculous English skills that equally miraculously dissipated upon reintroduction of the topic of reimbursement.

Someone came in and told us to sit in the chairs, not on the desks. Sarah brilliantly told him, “Look, we don’t want to be here either. Once we get our money back, we’ll be happy to get out of your way.” That kept us going until about 20 minutes later when another guy came in yelling that desks are for writing, not sitting, and escalating (surprisingly enough, without much help from us) until he picked up and shook the desk Sarah was sitting on. We moved to chairs. When staff came in after that and sat on the desks, I told them to move: desks are for writing, not for sitting. Which was funny, but bitterly so, as we knew we had lost.

We went to the airport to buy plane tickets. Nowhere in the airport accepts Visa or Mastercard except the ATMs. There are two ATMs. When we arrived in Dar, one of them had been working, which was fine by me, because it took my Visa. But this time the working and malfunctioning ATMs had swapped roles and I couldn’t get out any money. So Sarah (because all she had was a Mastercard) and I had to borrow money to buy our plane tickets. We got advice to bring a police officer back to the bus depot with us. We figured we’d just threaten, since well, I’ll just say the word ‘corruption’ and let you work out the rest. We also found a taxi driver willing to take us back to the bus depot and to translate from Kiswahili to English and back for us. Our driver managed to get through to the first number on our tickets and the guy who ran the company told us to go back to the depot and get our money.

We arrived at the depot and went to the offices. We saw White Shirt almost immediately and went to talk to him. He tried to say they didn’t have the money or they didn’t owe us the money or something, but our translator told him, no dice, we already talked to the guy who owns the company. So they called him back and then White Shirt left the room and said, “Wait here.” I asked, “Why are we waiting?” since I heard the kind of wait here that means, I’m going to string you along for as long as you’ll let me. Our translator went out after White Shirt and eventually they both came back with Tsh300,000.

I didn’t really care anymore and was ready to accept the partial refund, but Denise (rightly, I think) wasn’t. Our translator had explained to us that the guy who sold us the tickets had overcharged us by Tsh10,000 each, and then when it became apparent that we were going to come back for our money, he skedaddled. Denise pointed out that their employees cheating them isn’t our problem and that Tsh50,000 was worth going to the police and that (here’s the absolutely brilliant part) if they’d just give us the name of the employee, she’d be happy to do them a favour and report him. This got us another Tsh30,000. We said we wanted the other Tsh20,000. They said they didn’t have it. They said, wait an hour, and we’ll get it for you. They said, we don’t have it right now, but we’ll pay you out of the next person who buys a ticket. We said, why can’t you borrow it from somebody else? We said, we don’t believe that no one, in the some 50 companies selling bus tickets at the depot, has Tsh20,000 they could borrow. Eventually, we said we were still willing to go to the police. White Shirt said fine, go. So we did. As we cleared the doorway, White Shirt reached over and slapped Tsh20,000 into Denise’s hand, saying in an odd nasally voice, “Buh Bye!”