My initial feeling of
immense disconnection upon being robbed of my iPhone on the last day of the
year 2012, a sense of almost panicky aloneness, fades quickly although there is
also a very real residual sense of separation and loss, a dis-ease stimulated
by what might be considered the “normal” anxiety one might feel being this
alone in the middle of an unfamiliar, at times friendly, and at times truly
hostile, foreign country, and also of old neural connections being relinked, and
not so deeply buried memories being stirred, particularly the feelings of utterly
helpless panic I experienced in 1945 as a four year old sent away over my every
desperate and terrified screaming protest on a transport train to what I
believed was an extermination camp. And
yes, Katie, this is true, I absolutely know it is true, and while without the
thought I might be more delightfully freer (and not just a little shallower and
less empathic) the big payoff occurs, as you know, when I turn around my
underlying beliefs about being a weak disappointing frightened little baby, not
the big boy I’m supposed to be at age four, and become the brave, courageous,
unafraid of the truth, deeply exploring, curious, and truly caring man I am.
As for where I really presently
am, as opposed to where I once was, I’m in
the Kilimanjaro Crane Hotel, at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro, a mountain I
have always dreamed of seeing, listening to people joyously harmonizing and
offering praise in a church not a block away, birds singing, chickens and ducks
calling, car horns and truck horns only occasionally punctuating the air on
this slow hot holiday, hotel workers washing dishes outside in the backyard in
a series of decreasingly filthy big pans, the first of which sits in a metal frame
above dry split wood being burned to heat the water, women laughing, chatting, and
sneezing, dishes clinking, a Philip Glass kind of opus, a gloriously flowering
tree outside my window, my shirts and underwear hand washed in the leaky sink
and hung to dry over the rail outside my room, still reading “White Tiger,” a funny,
painful, revealing book about India that I picked up in the lending library at
the Warere Guesthouse in Zanzibar, about to do yoga and to meditate for peace on
this first day of the new year in honor of Yogiraj Bates (you can Google him),
who passed away suddenly last year, to then eat the hardboiled eggs taken from
the hotel’s complimentary breakfast buffet, which have fallen more from their
perch in my room onto the floor and cracked and that I will still eat, much of
my pretense at sanitation having surrendered to African realities if I want to consume
anything other than bottled water, beer, burgers, and fries with ketchup (a
vegetable), and then – finally – not unlike how time often passes at home –
having written, corresponded, and sat in absolute wonderment - to finally step
outside my self enclosed computer dominated reality into the real world of
Africa, to find a good cup of coffee, to make decisions about safaris and
treks, to try to call my missing cell phone and see if it wants to come home
for a cash reward, to encounter the unknown and unforeseen, on this day I’ve gifted
myself, the New Year’s Day holiday, to rest, recover, and reflect - without
negative self judgments (which I disposed of in a campfire outside Soweto), to
be alone, in love, excited, filled with hope, anticipatory, alert, alive, in a
state of amazement, grace, gratitude, and immense curiosity, open pretty much
to anything, from being eaten by lions to flying home, and eager to see what
happens next. Kudos to the scriptwriters,
I say, I’m definitely renewing your contracts.
One of my favorite
sights in Moshi, something I so wish I could photograph, is a high metal table,
too tall to sit behind, that the user works at standing, permanently stationed
on the not so busy street corner where my hotel is located, painted in a now
faded and chipped industrial pale blue, with streaks of paint running down the
sides a la J. Pollack, and with a prominent sign affixed to the front of it
that reads in capital letters, “WRITER.”
It is the “office” of a man who hand letters signs and presumably serves
as a correspondent for the illiterate. I
saw him at work here yesterday, but today, being a holiday, his shop is
closed. I envy a man with a sign on his
office door reading “Writer.” I think
I’ll change the sign on my office door to read, “The Writer is in” and see what
it brings.
Further into the streets
and I am joined by yet another wondrous tout who wants to help me. His name is Thursday. The last potential aid worker’s name was
Innocent, the one before him, Good Luck.
Thursday has a friend with a shop with original paintings. He runs safaris. He can find me a good phone. He calls my phone. He tells me the sim card has long since been
removed and that the line is dead.
“I still want my own
phone, Thursday, isn’t there some way to find out who it was sold to and who
has it?”
“Yes there is Mr. Bruce,”
Thursday says, “but it is far too dangerous, and the people who do these things
do not want to be known to white people.
Come let us find you a phone a different way. I am a simple man. I only want to help you.”
So off we go, to places
only fools dare tread. Up deserted
staircases to areas of closed shops on the second floor of decrepit malls where
I can get an old iPhone for a mere four hundred dollars, surrounded by able young
men who could rob me of my every possession with little effort. Out to the farthest reaches of the city, to
streets where men at ease drink and gamble, to shops with the same paintings
and sculptures as every other shop, shops – given their locations - that I can’t
imagine have had a customer in weeks, where I do meet a lovely older man at
work on an original – if not very original - four by six canvas he has been
painting on for days. And we chat as
older men can.
“Sorry, Thursday, I am
not going to buy anything and I’m not going to be able to help you earn a small
commission. Here, let me give you a
little something for your time.” I have
in mind a five thousand shilling note, a tad over three dollars.
“But, Mr. Bruce, I will only
be happy if I can help you. Come, I have
changed my mind. Let us see if we can
find your phone. Let us go to the man I
know across the tracks. Shall we walk or
take a cab?”
“I want to walk,
Thursday, I want to see all I can.”
So off we go, quite
literally across the very picturesque abandoned railroad tracks into the shanty
part of town known as Njoro, with no curio shops, no paved streets, and
certainly no tourists. You know the
tarot card The Fool? I do, but I also want
my phone back, and although I am aware I would never do this if I was traveling
with someone else, Joy, Steven, Sam, my sister, would never put another person
in this position, I’m quite enjoying the flow of events, the mystery, the
adventure, the unknown, the script I have no idea where it will go, and other
than robbery, the actual risk to my person seems to me to be minimal. Hey, what do I know? I just wish I’d left my laptop, passport,
credit cards, and acres of cash back in the hotel rather than carrying them on
my person. What was I thinking? That they’d be safer with me? Maybe if I were walking down a busy street in
the main part of town, but I’m not, I’m deep into Njoro, a neighborhood of
small green grocers, teeny restaurants where men cook greasy meats on outdoor
grills and potato fries in deep woks filled with oil, tin roofed shanties side
by side, beauticians washing women’s hair in open doorways who teasingly call
out to me to get my non-existent hair done, gorgeous children by the dozens, a
church named The Sixth Pool of Shiloh, a modest mosque, motorcyclists, no cars,
no cats, no dogs, no chickens.
“You wait here Mr.
Bruce,” Thursday tells me deep into Njoro on a small side street, “they will
not be comfortable seeing a Mzungu (a white person). I’ll be back.
Even I am not comfortable.”
Okay, that’s fine, isn’t
that a small tailor shop over there? Didn’t
I bring my pants with the hole in the pockets with me just in case I found a
tailor in my wanderings? (I did.) See you back here, Thursday. Maybe.
So I take out the pants
from my pack, show them to the tailor who cannot quite fathom a mzungu in his
shop, ask him as best I can how much it will cost to sew new pockets in them,
am told 100,000 shillings (seventy dollars !), show my shock and surprise at the
ridiculous price, ask how much to just stitch up the hole, and am told thirty
cents. Fine, I say, let’s do that. And soon thereafter my pants are sewn, the
beautician across the street is still beckoning for me to join her, it’s funny,
maybe even sexy, and Thursday is back.
“Mr. Bruce, I have seen what
I think is your phone. The man paid
100,000 shillings (also approximately seventy dollars, a very popular number
apparently) for it. He will give it back
to you for 100,000 shillings, but he must see the money first.”
“I can’t give money to a stranger,
Thursday. Even you. You understand. Not without at least seeing the phone. You know that.”
“But, Mr. Bruce, this is
very difficult, the man cannot just show you the phone. He fears you will take it and run, that he
will lose the 100,000 shillings he paid for it, that you will identify him to
the police. He does not want to be seen
by you. I have seen inside his house, he
has four phones, video cameras, a laptop computer. Give me something to show good faith. Maybe just 30,000 shillings.”
I’ve seen this movie
before, haven’t I? Haven’t we all? Anyone want to bet on the outcome? Regardless, I’m willing to risk the twenty
dollars.
“Wait here, Mr. Bruce,
in that restaurant, have a soda, I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”
I sit in the
restaurant. I chat with someone who says
he is a student at the university. He
tells me I must trust no one. He asks me
where I am from. I draw him my famous
map of the United States showing the Pacific and Atlantic, Canada and Mexico,
California and Texas, Florida, Miami, Washington DC, New York, Cape Cod. I place a dot right on the edge of Cape Cod
Bay, in Orleans. Come and visit me I
say. I give him my email address. Time passes. Twenty minutes pass. I drink an orange soda. Thirty minutes
pass. The student is here trying to buy
a hot video camera. He too is
waiting. He at least has a friend with
him. At about the forty minute mark here
comes Thursday with two other men, one is wearing a knit Rasta cap with African
colors, the other man has shifty eyes and looks like an addict. He gives Thursday back my thirty thousand
shillings in a very obvious fashion and leaves.
Thursday and I chat.
The man has now said he paid
250,000 shillings for my phone, and is willing to give it to me for what he has
paid for it. But he will not give me the
phone without seeing the money first.
And I will not shell out any more money without seeing the phone. It’s a classic ransom stalemate.
“Mr. Bruce, you are a
lawyer,” Thursday says, “you fix problems.
What way is there for us to solve this problem?”
“Well in America,” I say
as if I knew what I was talking about, “the man with the phone would give it to
someone he trusts, and I would give the money to someone I trust, who I was
also sure knew what my phone looked like, and they would meet somewhere and
make the exchange.”
“That is a very good
way, Mr. Bruce, but you have no one to trust in Moshi. What can we do?” “Here’s what I suggest,
Thursday. Have the man with the phone
give it to someone he trusts. You come
with that person to my hotel. Without
coming into the hotel you have the man with the phone show it to me. If I think it is my phone he puts it on the
ground and steps back. You come into the
hotel. I give you the money. You bring the money to the man and then bring
the phone to me. You keep the thirty
thousand shillings.” (I suspect he’s
keeping my 30,000 shillings no matter what anyhow.) It’s the best I can do. And although I doubt it will work it also will
an end to the drama. Or so I hope. And at worst, I again hope, what
am I out, the twenty dollars that Thursday keeps no matter what? So I walk back alone to
the hotel, past the Sixth Pool of Shiloh Church, passed two white goats with
big balls butting one another over some scrawny brown doe, passed a busy bar,
and the woman seated on the ground nursing an infant who holds out her hand
begging, passed the writer’s office. When I reach the hotel gate the security guard
comes to greet me as if he knows I need a friend. He reaches out his hand I
think to bump fists, but as our hands meet he takes my hand in his and we walk
together hand in hand like lovers toward the hotel entrance, where I park myself on the
seat in the lobby window, and write, and wait, and finally surrender. No Thursday.
No phone. No further drama. I call my phone again. The sim card has not been replaced. Tomorrow is another day. The day after I plan to climb part way up
Kili and stay at the oldest lodge on the mountain below the Mandera hut. I’ve quite enjoyed this “day of rest” in
Moshi. More later.