But I've decided that perhaps this hemisphere reversal accounts for my exceedingly poor sense of direction here. I spent significant chunks of Friday evening and Saturday day totally lost, wandering for hours on what should've been a leisurely stroll to my destination. Friday was particularly bad: I was minding my own business, out to do a nice loop past the Muslim cemetery and along Bibi Titi Mohammed Road before heading home, when suddenly I was magically trasported blocks away to the corner of Mnazi Nmoja park. Or that's how I account for it, anyway. Still no idea how it happened. I kept walking, trying to look like I was just where I meant to be, thinking I was heading home but probably going completely in the wrong direction. Eventually it got dark enough to make me nervous, so I executed the equivalent of a reboot, hopping onto a daladala terminating in Posta, the station just down the street from our house (though not at all on my original route). When faced with a new problem, reduce it to a problem you've already solved, right?
I tried to brush Friday's unintentional adventure off, but the fact that I found myself lost again on Saturday seems to indicate a more systemic problem. I've decided to attribute it to a combination of a bad sense of direction, the complete lack of street signs in most parts of Dar (not so important when there's no home mail delivery in the country), and a rather liberal sense of scale in my guidebook maps. And, of course, magic.
Sundays are strange days in Dar, when the throngs of working folks that stuff the downtown "sidewalks" (the dirt between the pavement and wide gutter) simply disappear back to their families around the outskirts of the city. It's like a 24-hour ghost town. So I decided to follow everybody else's lead and head out of the city. One of my hostelmates, Happy, invited me and two of the lovely German girls here along on her typical Sunday routine: Catholic mass in Swahili at the simple cathedral by the harbor, then out to her sister's for lunch. I honestly think I got a lot more out of the Swahili mass than the usual American English version; true, the sermon didn't sink in much (I got "baba yetu" - "our father"), but the music is just wonderful. We sat in the pews right behind the choir and got to fully appreciate the clapping and fish-shaped tambourines and swaying and non-Western harmonies and the truly unearthly sound of women ululating. (I desperately want to figure out how to ululate, but it seems rather rude to practice in a house with 12 other people trying to sleep. Maybe in Chicago. Won't my new neighbors be surprised.) It felt so much more like a celebration than American mass and I got a little dizzy and tingly after some of the songs, possibly because I stopped breathing.
Then into a daladala, truly the most crowded and most awesome way to travel in Tanzania. We drove 30 minutes out of town, all the way past the big crazy bus station, then leapt out of the van on sort of lonely stretch of highway. Happy's sister Grace and her two daughters live up an uneven rocky path from the road, left past the hairbraiding stall, under the power lines and over two small hills. We were greeted by Irene the 5-year old (running super fast!) and then Grace herself, beaming and carrying 6-month old Agnes. (Agnes is adorable, with these enormous eyes that sucker mammals everywhere into having offspring.) Lots of asantes and shikamoos and introductions, then into Grace's home, a pair of small but neatly kept rooms rented at very high city prices. She had already purchased enough Cokes and Fantas for everyone to have exactly two, and had cooked us all lunch on the little bit of sheltered concrete just outside her front door. We feasted on rice with meat and potatoes, topped with slices of huge, shockingly yellow bananas and avocados as big as grapefruits. Food was repeatedly foisted on us (Grace pulling sad faces and insisting "I cooked all of this for you!") so we ate like champions, settling happily afterwards onto the big red couch on one side of the room or Grace's bed on the other. We talked about Grace's work as an assistant nurse, pondered the differences between Iringa and Dar, teased Happy about her inferior cooking skills, all the while everyone in the room trying to be as polite and gracious and thankful as possible - the wazungu ladies trying to avoid any faux pas, the Tanzanian women trying not to make the wazungu ladies feel bad about their many, many faux pas.
As I sat, I thought a lot about what sort of gift or offer we could make in return; we'd brought cookies for the two daughters, but this seemed so insufficient for a woman who had made a bevy of complete strangers a huge, wonderful, homecooked meal and was working 80 hour weeks to pay her $50/month rent. It sometimes seems like such an overly fine line between expressing gratitude and unwittingly giving offense, between giving gifts and giving charity. There are so many lines I haven't yet learned to walk here, and this is one of the harder ones.
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