After almost nine months of our common law, sans sex de facto marriage, Hunter and I have gone from the Wazungu Wawili to the Wazungu WaTATU, baby. The third amigo, our favorite pale Pennsylvanian, is here for two weeks.




It's the first time all three of us -- TK, me, Mwindaji -- have been together since the last day of college in May 2006. And not much has changed.




TK is still awkwardly tall. And he's still silly. And I'm going to write a great story about his visit when it's all said and done, just for you, Martha.

(And he's sooooo cute, too!)




Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!

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A few photos of late.



A problem you don't often think about back home -- people trying to siphon the gas out of your car -- solved.

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Derikiiiiiiiiiiiiii! I love this kid.



I mean, how could you not?

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Ain't no Air Jordans in Monduli. Just Goodyear. And Michelin. And every other tire that can be made into a sandal.

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Slavic girls are just a tad hotter than these Maasai babes.

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Hunter makes a friend.

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Mount Meru, posing as Mount Kilimanjaro. Some people say they've never seen snow on the top until this week. Global warming, shmobal warming.

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For anyone worried about our safety after having read about all the crap we've had to deal with these past few months with thieves, being forced to move out of our house, etc., please allay your fears. Olfo, our new security guard who we're almost positive stole Tom's shoes two nights ago, is ready.




Now, if I could only explain to him that you're supposed to load the arrow on the other side of the bow.

On second thought, maybe it's better that he remain ignorant on how to shoot his mshale, seeing as I'm about to fire his ass.

I Vote Max.

For my to-be-determined Balkanzania reunion in Montreal.

Élise, a.k.a. Lion of Judah, I know you're awake. And I know you're still using this blog to combat insomnia. So I know you will see this.

Max, who stayed with us back in our second month in TZ, and who reappeared in Arusha last Friday as part of a 60-person Tour D'Afrique bike ride from Cairo to Capetown, deserves the spot as your roommate next year. I give him my official endorsement. He says while you are first on his list, he feels he's about third on yours. I'm hoping some words of recommendation from me will propel him up the ladder.

If/when I visit Montreal, where I plan on getting you, him, Vincent, Mathieu and Joel together for one big reunion, and I'm ready to sing.

"IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIlllllll est des noooootres, IL A BU SA BIERE COMME LES AUUUUUTRES! Duuuuuuuhh, duh, duh, DUUUH, duh! J’ai oubliez tout de mon français kutokana Kiswahiiiiiliii!"

Merci!

TWENTY TWO IN A ROW, and counting.

"Rafer Alston scored 31 points and hit eight 3-pointers, both career highs, and the Rockets beat the Los Angeles Lakers 104-92 to stretch their streak to 22 and claim sole possession of first place in the Western Conference."

Rafer Alston?!

To win 22 in a row, you need stuff like that to happen. But you also need a little bit of karma coming out of East Africa.

Could've told you something special was in store before the Lakers game even started: check out the good omen I found awaiting me at Green Hut yesterday, a few hours before tip off.




Just doing what I can to help.

Toothpaste, right?

That's what I thought, too. Until about 1.5 seconds after I put the toothbrush in my mouth. It didn't take long for me to realize that something was terribly wrong.

(Insert gagging noise here, followed by excessive rinsing out of the mouth with parasite filled tap water.)

What was wrong was that, in my haste to brush my teeth as we were running out the door two nights ago, I grabbed a tube of something that wasn't toothpaste at all. That was made evident by two things that went down shortly before I started gagging:

1) The mystery paste didn't foam up, at all.
2) The mystery paste didn't taste very minty fresh.




Not many tubes of zinc oxide diaper rash ointment do, I suppose.

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Before you judge, let me just say that this could have happened to anyone. But especially to someone in our position.

For over a month now, Hunter and I have essentially been homeless. The house search that was supposed to take a week, tops, is now in Week Six, and it's not showing any signs of abating. In other words, the search has not proved as fruitful as we had anticipated, back when we closed up shop in Patandi and bailed on our lease at the beginning of February. What started as a temporary set up in a local bed & breakfast in nearby Usa River slowly devolved into a permanent encampment.

But an encampment doesn't quite denote a home, does it? Which is why I hated that bed and breakfast. For a night or two, it would've been fine. For a night or 40, it sucked. With the women who run the place constantly all up in our bidness -- simply by nature of the fact that they were there, nothing else -- we were essentially guests in our own home. Guests with a whooooole lot of luggage.

Every single thing that we own, and that our NGO owns, was being stored under our two single beds, and in our closet. It was like a warehouse in Room 3. Aside from our own personal effects, 100 percent of the inventory fell under the "Stuff Donated for the Kids" department: soccer balls, jump ropes, shoe polish, soap, t-shirts, toothpaste, and, as I learned two days ago, diaper rash ointment.

Had I seen this photo, it might have tipped me off. Just maybe.

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"Hold up, real quick, I'm gonna brush my teeth before we go."

Hunter, Meghann, and Meghann's Kenyan friend Lali were all waiting on me. It was Jamie's last night in TZ, and before she headed off for a month in the Punjab, everyone was getting together at Nick Pub for a little going away party of chicken and chips.

The toothpaste on the sink had been teetering towards the edge of doneskies for days at that point -- earlier that morning, it had officially been kicked. Remembering this, and remembering the yellow plastic bag I personally stored under my bed during the move from Patandi -- the one that held eight brand new tubes of excess toothpaste meant for our students -- I blindly moved my hand around the warehouse until I felt it: the crinkle of the bag, the feel of the unopened toothpaste containers. Bingo.




It was a matter of bad luck, nothing more. Heads or tales style bad luck. Had I grabbed it from the other direction -- actually seeing the label, rather than a bunch of meaningless words printed on the back -- this story never would have been written. But it is being written, because I didn't see the picture of a mother caressing her sleeping child until the damage had been done.

But in my defense, did I really need to look? I'd handled enough toothpaste tubes in my day to know what a toothpaste tube felt like. And this, my friends, was toothpaste. Definitely toothpaste.

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"Hunter!" I yelled in a hushed, yet urgent tone, not wanting to draw the attention of Meghann or Lali. "Hunter!"

He walked into the room. "What?"

"Dude." Panic reverberated in my voice as I handed him the Desitin. "I thought it was toothpaste!" I hissed.

There are moments in life that you just never forget, no matter how old, gray and wrinkly you become. Something tells me that this was one of those moments for Mwindaji.

"HO-LEEEEE SHIT!" His jaw dropped. Then he started cracking up. "Oh my God! You brushed your teeth with that?!"

I hadn't even known exactly what it was until I'd finished gagging, at which point, panic stricken, my eyes frantically sought out the "Warnings" section of the very label that hadn't tipped me off as I got up off my knees and walked into the bathroom. What I found made my body run cold:

"Did I swallow it????"

Poison Control Center?!

There ain't no Poison Control Center in our neck of the woods. Last week, when I was taking one of our students, Rosie, to the St. Elizabeth HIV clinic to get her CD4 count checked, they didn't even have a Band Aid to give her after sticking her six-year-old little arm with a mondo needle that sent a rivulet of blood dripping onto the ground -- HIV-infected blood. If they don't even have Band Aids at an AIDS clinic in Africa, how do you expect me to find a Poison Control Center as I froth at the mouth on the verge of death by diaper rash ointment ingestion? I mean, isn't zinc oxide bad? Isn't that the stuff you put on your nose when you go skiing?

"Dude," I told my supposed best friend, who instead of sharing in my concern that I might be on the verge of death, was still laughing uncontrollably. "I'm really freaked out!"

"You'll be fine," he assured me, not even knowing whether or not I'd actually swallowed anything. "Don't worry."

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But I was worried.

"Yo, I know I'm probably just paranoid," -- Hunter was unlocking the gate so we could get out of the driveway, and he was clearly amused by my panicked state -- "but I'm bringing this stuff with us just in case I go into cardiac arrest or something on the way. And also," -- I pulled the card out of my back pocket -- "I brought this Med-Evac stuff. It's right here." I motioned to the back pocket of my Carhartt's.

Looking back, preparing to be life flighted to Europe because of a toothbrushing mishap seems a bit much. At the time, though, I wasn't thinking so rationally. "I just swallowed baby diaper rash cream, and there isn't a Poison Control Center on the continent." That's what I was thinking.

And don't think that I don't hear you laughing. What would you have done in my situation, tough guy?

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The entire ride to Nick Pub, I was counting every heart beat like it was a gift from God. Not that ever breath isn't a gift from God when you're not thinking you've just poisoned yourself; it just seems especially precious when you are thinking that.

"This is how I'm gonna go out," I castigated myself, silently. Still freaked out by the "do not swallow" stuff, I wasn't swallowing. At all. For 30 minutes. "'R.I.P. Bayless Parsley. 1984- 2008. Death by baby rash diaper ointment poisoning."

Beat -- thank you. Beat -- thank you. Beat -- thank you. Keep on coming, baby. Beat...

Not quite the stuff that "Braveheart" is made of.

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I never told Meghann and Lali. Mainly because I was already getting enough grief from Hunter, and I was still kind of worried. Every little pain in my chest equaled an, "Oh my God! What was that!" in my brain. But I did tell Jamie. And only because she was leaving.

I figured it'd be a great gift to send her off with: a story that can make you spontaneously combust into hysterical laughter is certainly a gift that keeps on giving. How foolish it was to think it could have been "our little secret," though. Soon, Sam and Tait were on the scent; they wanted to know what all the commotion down at the end of the table was about.

Sam, fever stricken and trooping it just to be there, almost spit out her food. Tait, who was perfectly healthy, had a little less crazy reaction, but not by much. And Jamie, a nurse back in the States, shook her head in horror at the list of ingredients.




"Oh my God, zinc oxide?!" she exclaimed, jaw agape. "That's like the stuff you wear when you go skiing!" (I knew it). "You put this in your MOUTH?!"

"It looked like toothpaste!" I yelled for the billionth time.

"I know, but still..." her eyes continued to scroll as her voice trailed off for a hot second, coming back to life with the next revelation. "Oh gross, barbadensis, too."

No idea what barbadensis is, but it definitely doesn't sound good.

Sam grabbed a hold of the tube to have a look for herself.

"Oooh, 'goes on smoothly!'" she read from the label.

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It's been two days, and I still haven't brushed my teeth. I finally got around to buying a new toothbrush today, though. And some toothpaste, too.

Don't worry, I checked the label three times before I paid for it.

The face of a man with an "anal fissure."

"I wonder if Barry would let me borrow some of "The Cream." Two birds with one stone I guess..."

Uhhhhh........

"Anal fissure"? What ever happened to strained ligaments and turf toes? You start letting players like this...




... into the league, and that's when you begin to read about "anal fissures" on ESPN.com. And how one of them may keep our brand new, Japanese second baseman out of Opening Day, in what would be his first game as an Astro.

Say what you will about Craig Biggio's declining production in the tail end of his career. At least he was tearing ACL's and MCL's -- not his scoofy, like good ole Kaz Matsui.

The Real Life Air Up There

Now this is the kind of Tanzanian orphan I think we should be trying to save.




If I could play Jimmy Dolan, I would.




Only God knows what might have happened had this kid from Dar es Salaam been born in Arusha ten years after his real birthday, February 16, 1987. A kid that tall definitely would have been a regular at our court in Soweto, and a kid that tall definitely would have caught my eye.

And UVa would have been making room in admissions for one very tall, very athletic Mbongo baller about seven years down the line.

Hasheem Thabeet -- born in Tanzania as Hashim Thabit Manka, only to change it to the Americanized version soon to be called out by David Stern at the NBA Draft -- would have qualified for our sponsorship program had our NGO existed when he was growing up in Dar es Salaam during the 1990's. The TZ government defines the word yatima, "orphan," as any child who has lost at least one parent. Whether or not this semantical tweak is a marketing ploy (the more "orphans" a country has, the more attention it gets from Western NGO's) or a reflection of cultural differences, I don't care. Hasheem Thabeet, whose dad died during his childhood, would have been the greatest yatima in the history of the ACC.

The man is a giant: 7'3", 265, with a wingspan of 7'5". At the time that the NY Times article Mr. Booth sent me went to press (I had never even heard of Thabeet until then), he had more blocked shots (127) than nine Big East teams. MORE BLOCKED SHOTS THAN NINE BIG EAST TEAMS. And he's using his talents to send UConn into the Tournament ready to make some noise.

Man, could we have used this kid at Soweto. Hunter and I play on a guard-heavy team that knows nothing of rebounding or defense. It's fitting, I guess, that we're called the Kings; circa 2002 Kings, of course.

When I first arrived in TZ back in July, my uncle Kenny emailed me to say that Penders was looking for a big man in the Patandi region to help with the boards, preferably 6'8" or bigger. Jeep made the obvious "The Air Up There" joke when he saw the photo of me with my Maasai admirers at the Bush appearance.




And even I had someone ask this dude how old he was, and whether or not he'd ever played basketball.

(He's 28, and he's never played. Too little, too late.)

But I just didn't realize that I was too late. My real life Air Up There'er had already made his way to Houston, where he played high school ball at Cypress Christian, and then onto Connecticut, where he's following in the footsteps of two other big men from H-Town, Jake Voskuhl and Emeka Okafor.

As if he wasn't cool enough in my eyes -- a future NBA player who speaks fluent Swahili -- Thabeet played high school basketball in Houston. Nimechelewa.

How do you explain the essence of an entire people? I'm not sure it's possible. But nitajitahidi -- I'll do my best -- with a few stories about life in the land of the Wabongo.

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Meghann came into town this week, and getting all our ducks in a row for the big library opening at FK Academy was numero uno on the agenda.

Until you learn how to say, "Niache bwana, mi sio mtalii," you're gonna get this dude trying to sell you TZ flags every, single, time, you see him.

The actual construction we're leaving to Alan and his boys.

No wonder Alan said he "hadn't been sleeping at night" until we told him the opening was March 30, not March 1. This picture was taken two days ago, the day he thought it was supposed to be ready.

But girl stuff, like getting the materials together to make giant pillows for the chill out area, we can take care of on our own. That's why Meghann wasted no time in wanting to pick up some kanga's and vitenge, the colorful native cloths used by woman as skirts and by men as Sunday best shirts, which you can get for between TSh 3,500-4,000 (around $4) on market day.

Mama Big Apple, our old neighbor from Patandi, sporting her kitenge as a skirt...

And the special George W. Bush kanga's printed up for Dubya's visit to TZ two weeks ago

Saturday is the siku la soko in our old village, which is why we headed to the Tengeru sokoni.

I hate the women who sell kanga and vitenge more than I hated brussel sprouts during pre-K. They occupy a special antechamber in my heart, the same rat-infested shit hole I reserve for all the masela in our old village who used to steal from us with such impunity, it was as if they viewed our Mzungu spaceship house as one of those "Take 1" containers of pennies they put above the penny-pressing machines at Six Flags. With most Tanzanians, I give the benefit of the doubt when they try to hustle me -- life is hard for the sufferah's in Africa; what would I do if I were in his situation?; I'm just a white boy, and white boys typically mean money, so how could I expect him to do anything but screw me over?

Not with the women who sell kanga and vitenge. They get no slack from me. I can honestly say that they are bad people.

"Kabla hatujaanza, tuongee kuhusu bei," I said, making sure we agreed on a price before this woman -- licking her chops at the sight of three Wazungu standing before her, ready to spend their money -- unfolded and refolded a cornucopia of textiles in an attempt to find the right ones. Negotiating becomes a lot more emotional if you do it after this 10-minute process, I've learned.

"Sawa," she said, smiling, as if that was gonna work. "Elfu nane."

Elfu nane, as in, "8,000." As in, about eight bucks. As in, more than twice the real price. As in, I must be a freaking dumbass.

As in, that's how every negotiation begins when you're a white man in Africa. You start with "You must be a dumbass" price, and the more Swahili you spit at them, in theory, the more the price comes to resemble the bei ya Mtanzania. But it usually never gets there, no matter how fluid you are in their language.

"Elfu nane?!" I shrieked. Did I laugh, too? I think. But maybe I'm confusing it with my reaction earlier that afternoon. I know I laughed -- loud -- when the used cell phone hawker on the sidewalk in town had told us, after a four-second hesitation so he could think of just how badly he wanted to screw us, that the Fisher Price piece of crap Hunter was holding in his hands could be ours for the low price of TSh 70,000. Meghann had just seen a sale at Celtel for a brand new phone that had been marked down TSh 4,000 to its sale price of TSh 43,000.

"Elfu nane ni kichaa," I said, insinuating that she belonged at Bellview. "Jaribu tena."

After a few seconds of back and forth, her plastic smile not getting any less inauthentic, we agreed on a semi-fair deal of 4,000 a pop.

The unfolding/folding routine commenced. Meghann chose four kanga's that tickled her fancy. I offered to give the woman TSh 15,000 straight up for all four. She stared up at my forehead, clearly lost in thought, calculating whether or not she'd be making any money on the deal, for about two or three seconds. Then she agreed. The plastic smile didn't leave her face, and it was still fake as hell.

In Tanzania, when something seems like it's signed and sealed, it almost never is. I should have known this woman was gonna pull some shit. After all, she sells kanga and vitenge at the Tengeru market. Remember what I said about these women? There are no exceptions to this rule.

"She thought I had three, but then she realized we got four, for 15,000," Meghann said today, recounting her version of events. My version of events has a gaping hole in it, from between the moment she agreed on a price, to the moment that I started calling her a liar in the middle of the sokoni. "So when she found out I had taken four, she started taking them out of my purse."

That's why her plastic smile never left her face; the woman thought we had done the math wrong or something, that we were going even higher than the price we'd agreed to at the outset. I would have loved to have been inside her brain during that thought process: This Mzungu is gonna pay me 15 g's for THREE kanga?? That's about .... that's a profit! A big one!

And I would have loved even more to have been inside her brain when I started getting physical.

I've had bad experiences with these women before. More than once, I've gotten what I like to call "light headed rage" -- a common affliction for me in Tanzania. Light headed rage means your heart pounds; your blood surges; and your temper prepares for liftoff. Only bad things happen from there. Once, after watching me lose it in Swahili on an old woman trying to charge me TSh 5,000 a pop for about eight kanga, my Zanzibari friend Ras Muniyr got embarrassed and left the scene. Later, he told Emily that "Hatari is dangerous."

Little do they realize this picture was taken on Opposite Day.

Hatari, which really does mean "danger," is my name in Tengeru.

These women are always thieves in the figurative sense; but this was my first time seeing one of them play the thief in the literal sense.

I couldn't believe it. I turn my back for ten seconds to negotiate a price on another kitenge I especially liked as a potential shirt, and the woman had literally grabbed all the fabric out of Meghann's hand, going on about something in Swahili.

"What happened?" I asked Meghann, observing a scene that looked far from the end of a seamless business transaction.

"She says we owe her an extra thousand," Meghann said.

"How much did you give her?"

"Fifteen."

As in the price the woman had agreed on after looking me in the eyes with that fake, plastic smile. Light headed raaaaaaage........

"Nipe elfu!" the woman cried. "Bado elfu moja!" She wanted TSh 16,000 -- four grand a piece.

"Hapana!" I yelled, making a move towards her. "Umeshakubali!" You already agreed!

"Hapana, hapana," she shook her head, and her body, too, all the while clutching at the kanga's we thought we had just bought. "Elfu kumi na sita," she demanded. Sixteen thousand.

"MAMA!" I screamed. It's like the Swahili equivalent of "mam." "Niliposema kwamba nitakupa 15,000 kwa yote, ulikubali. Au sio??" I asked, knowing that she knew she was full of shit. "Nipe kanga!"

"Hapana." The plastic smile, amazingly, was gone.

Light headed raging, I just grabbed a hold of what she was grabbing hold of, the pile of cloth, and started to pull.

Is this really happening? I thought. Am I about to start a fight with a 40-year-old woman in the middle of Tengeru's market day, in front of my boss?

I had already given two pretty hard tugs when I let go. The path I was about to go down wasn't leading anywhere pleasant. You've got to nip light headed rage in the bud, or else you're brewing trouble for yourself.

I couldn't steal back what she'd stolen from us. But I could still let her have it verbally. Like Becky's kanga says, "Maneno Maneno Yavunja Moyo" -- Words Words Breaks the Heart.




"Umeshakubali, na UNAJUA!" I yelled. "Wendo MWONGO kabisa!" You are a complete liar!

"Haaaamna," she denied. "Haaaamna."

"Ndiiiiiyo," I mocked. "Ndiyo. Wendo mwongo. Na Mungu anaangalia KILA kitu." God watches everything.

She didn't like that line too much.

"Nilete kanga," I demanded, motioning for her to give us our stuff back; she was still holding onto the money Meghann gave her. "Nilete!"

She refused.

I yelled again for her to give it back. Again, she shook her head. Everyone was staring at us. Memories of her stained teeth and her plastic smile were long gone at this point.

"Fine," I said in English -- when I get really flustered, I find it hard to avoid breaking into English filler words -- "nilete pesa." I wanted my money back.

Somehow, she didn't see that one coming. Maybe because she figured I knew I wouldn't be getting a better deal from any of her fellow cartel members lined up on this dusty road, all colluding on prices to keep the white man down.

"Nilete!" I persisted. Blood was rushing through my veins.

Grudgingly, the woman got the TSh 20,000 note out of her pocket and asked for change. We handed her a fiver; she held onto her kanga's; and I swiped that cash out of her hand like an elephant being offered peanuts at the zoo.

I told her friend next to her -- the one I'd been negotiating with on that fly looking kitenge when all the commotion started -- to screw off, too.

Then, we proceeded to go right down the line and buy 10 kanga/vitenge for TSh 40,000 -- four thousand a piece, the same price the woman had tried to extort out of us ten seconds before. I smiled as Meghann handed over the money. Our nice old friend was getting to watch someone get the exact same money -- more, actually -- that she had tried to get herself, only to fail in glorious fashion.

Here is how this story explains a damn thing about Tanzania: people here would rather get NOTHING than bend a smidgen with Wazungu. It doesn't matter if you speak Swahili or not. If you're white, they feel they're being cheated if you refuse to pay a tourist price. And so they get nothing. A measly thousand shillings -- less than a dollar -- ain't shit for me, but it's a lot for that woman. And she lost out on it because she thought I was a bitch.

Well, she's wrong. In her neck of the woods, my name is Hatari.