Dustin Long
Heidelberg Columnist
I’ve always loved Africa, or at least said and thought that I did. I had never been there, but I took every chance to meet people who had been, read about it, dreamed about it (honest), went to lectures on African AIDS relief and non-governmental organizations, and bought the “Ghost in the Darkness” and “The Power of One” DVDs. Through an all-around great Pepperdine friend named Ara Rustad, whose family has lived in Tanzania for the past seven years, I finally got to go myself. I did some really cool tourist stuff, went on safari, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, went scuba diving, learned to ride a motorcycle in the spice fields of Zanzibar, was attacked by bats, saw the tsunami, sneaked past customs, cracked my tooth on cow bone or chicken beak eating with a Masai leader and had a class-A adventure. But it’s the people who are really worth writing home about.
Communication was tough at first. “Lonely Planet” said that most people would speak English, that Swahili was the old lingua franca but is now just used as a sort of street language. “Lonely Planet” was wrong. I had another problem, too. My first of five days on the Kilimanjaro trail I came across a boy chopping at the vegetation alongside the trail with a panga. He wasn’t getting enough vitamin C, so his teeth and gums were terribly contorted to make him look almost rat-like, and I couldn’t tell by his face if he was 12 or 20 or older. His clothes were worn thin, and even worse, he had no shoes. Walking in the rainforest was tough enough with my $120 boots, but this poor guy’s feet were cut and bitten and infected, had clearly had some breaks that hadn’t healed properly and were so swollen on the bottom that he had trouble balancing on them. I felt terribly awkward sitting there with my Kelty backpack and GPS, eating my sack lunch. I don’t know why he was there, he didn’t seem to be doing anything productive by chopping away at those plants, but I was told the rangers paid him between 50 cents and $1 a day so they could say the trails were “regularly maintained.” More likely, he was there hoping someone like me might give him something to eat. I felt almost too ashamed to acknowledge him or ask him if he’d like something to eat. By the time I got over that feeling, all I had left to give him was half a bread ball. A month taught me that people need help, but that what they really need is for people like me to talk to them and joke around with them and even make fun of them without feeling awkward and without pity, but show interest in them as people worth having as friends. I spent my last two days there in orthopedic and general medical clinics and enjoyed this more than just about anything else. One guy had just found out he had HIV and was pretty shaken up, thought I was a doctor, and started to talk to me. I felt awful for him, but it turns out he’s a painter, so we talked about his favorite subjects for painting, and I embarrassed myself trying to speak a little Swahili. He laughed and I smiled, because even though he’s very sick and losing his job because he has HIV, I had paid him the compliment of feeling comfortable around him.
I’ve got to say that Africa is an amazing place, there really are lions and rhinos, they really do say “hakuna matata,” the people are warm and beautiful, and it’s a hard place too, but, there, people know that’s just part of life and smile.
01-13-2005
