Zanzibar
I am back in Addis and finally have internet access again after 3 days, although my phone line has been cut. Yesterday most of southern Addis was cut off from the outside world--phones and internet were not functioning at all. No one knows why, it's just another one of the advantages to having only one government-run Telecommunications company controlling everything.Back to my post:
Zanzibar is a magical, if humid, place that lives up to the mystique of its name. The air glows with a languid, tropical liquidity in the hot afternoons, muffling the muezzin’s call to prayer, its light gilding ornately carved wooden doors studded with brass lancetips, as the smell of cardamom wafts through open windows.
Stonetown is a warren of narrow, squeezed streets, cars and trucks routinely causing tourists to flatten themselves in doorways as they pass, as working men piled into the back of pickup trucks call out and the papasis (street touts) take the opportunity to corner you and try to sell you a spice tour.
We went through the Jozani forest on our way to Paje on the eastern shore and played with a horde of red colubus monkeys who appeared to be teenaged males due to their alarming indifference to safety, flying through the trees in huge leaps as they battled with each other playfully. Paje was less of a location than a loosely defined area around a mostly deserted beach, where violent tides would crash against the seawall at night and retreat for miles in the mornings, which is when local women would foray out to collect seaweed for drying and selling.
We woke up every morning to the sight of the brilliant turquoise sea retreating, as if to hide from the sun. Of course I use the word “woke” liberally, as none of us actually slept the night through, due to heat, nighttime thunderstorms, and the coconuts their winds brought down on the roof of our bungalow.
One hot morning we walked to the nearest “store” down a sandy path, past half-finished buildings of coral and lime; a graveyard of development efforts, according to my friend who has worked in the area. The school was the only place of activity, as children’s voices filtered out through the open roof to fill the otherwise still air of the visibly impoverished village. We bought Cokes for us and candy for the young kids underfoot, shyly “Jambo”-ing the sweating mzungu. While the children were healthier and better clothed, and the infrastructure better than many places I’ve seen in Ethiopia, the same air of depression and poverty pervaded the place, and a familiar exhaustion lined the faces of the women carrying their ever-present loads—water, grain, firewood, and babies—along the path.
I will miss the sweet mangos, fresh seafood, arabesque arches, and most of all, Kat & Chris, who bravely made their first foray out to East Africa to play in the Indian Ocean with me.
posted by Margot @ 12:15 AM
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