The Only One Like Me

Hamjambo!

My last few weeks have been crazy!  From traveling to Pemba Island, back to Zanzibar for a few days, then to Dar es Salaam on the mainland, then to Mikumi National Park for safari, back to Zanzibar for a few days, and I'm now on Chumbe Island starting my month-long research on the groupers that inhabit the offshore coral reef.  So this is basically the first time I've sat down in three weeks!  Keeping busy isn't a bad thing, though, and we've been able to fit a lot into a very small period of time that I definitely wouldn't have been able to do by myself.  But my experiences both in Pemba and in Dar es Salaam really made it obvious that I am an outsider here and there's no hiding it.

Sixteen elephants wandered to the watering hole at sunset while we were at Mikumi for safari, it was absolutely magical!  And yes, I know I look like a tourist, we all went to this awesome second-hand clothes market in Dar es Salaam and bought the most tourist-y safari shirts we could find!

If it's not obvious, I'm a very white person (although I am getting pretty tan from the hot African sun) who has spent most of her life in New Hampshire, so I've never been one to stand out due to the way I look - unless I had my pants unzipped or a big stain or my shirt or something of that nature.  But in Pemba, some locals have never seen a white person before, so our group of sixteen was gawked at every time we left our homestays, which was somewhat disconcerning.  While in Pemba, I learned to dislike the term "mzungu", which for those of you who do not know, means "white person" in Kiswahili slang.  It was cute for a bit, but when it started to replace my name was when I became upset.  My host mom even referred to me as her mzungu instead of using my name.  I walked by a father holding his daughter who both looked at me, and I heard the father whisper in his daughter's ear "mzungu", which she then repeated.  And I had a Massai yell "MZUNGU" to me until I finally gave in and turned around, to which he child-like replied "hi" then laughed and ran away (this is like a 30 year old man doing this).  I had never felt more disrespected after those incidents.  It was only later that I learned from my homestay aunt that most people don't mean "mzungu" in a derogatory way, it's just cultural to refer to white people like that.  Doesn't mean I like it now.

We did try to fit in though!  We all were dressed up for our Pemba homestay farewell party, so we decided to take a picture like the Zanzibaris, hence the lack of smiling.

For the past two weeks, I've been staying at the University of Dar es Salaam on mainland Tanzania, and it would be putting it lightly to say that Dar is very different than Stone Town, Zanzibar.  We weren't off the ferry for five minutes before I had young children running up to me, not to say hi (or bye, so many children say "buh-bye" and I think it's becuase it's the only word in English they know for some reason) but to yell "Give me money!" with a hand outstretched.

I'm not a walking ATM people!  Just because I'm white doesn't mean that I have money.  I constantly bargain at markets with "Mimi ni mwanafunzi", I'm a student, since I don't have a whole lot of money and I don't want to get the exorbitant mzungu prices at the market.

The view from my dorm room at the University of Dar es Salaam.

Our group of 16 wanafunzi made up probably half of the white student population at the University, meaning that everyone knew who we were, where we were, what we were doing, everything.  The only people who waved at us or said hello were the other white students - ones we've never seen before.  Very different from Zanzibar.  I've never been in a minority racial group before and it was a very different experience than I thought it would be.  I had this idea in my head that it would be liberating, and people would want to know all about you because you were different.  At least in this situation, it was very different.  We were barely approached by the other wanafunzi, and people seemed generally very short with us, even when we tried to practice our Kiswahili.  I really don't know what the problem was, and I may never find out, but let's just say I was very happy to get off the ferry from Dar and see the Karibu Zanzibar sign.

But safari was really cool too!  For the record, Mufasa and Sarabi named their son Simba, which means "lion" in Kiswahili.  They named their son "lion".  Good job Disney.

Asante sana kwa kusoma!
Kim