I find myself very much in the rhythm of being in Dar es Salaam. I enjoy my colleagues (both UCSF and here) and I find that Dar has kind of become home. It certainly has its moments, trust me... I needed to go out for 'fresh' air yesterday and wound up walking over to Kariakoo. Bizarre choice, really, for fresh air. As I walked I thought about how incredibly difficult it is to capture the sensory experience of this neighborhood of Dar. One of my housemates went to Kariakoo once and when I asked her how it was she let out a sigh, got a funny almost defeated look on her face and said, Oh.... My.... God.... I confess I started laughing.
Kariakoo has no sidewalks, the narrow streets are packed with people and vendors with wares spread out on the ground on cloths along the sides of the street in front of shops all yelling out what they have to sell, cars, trucks, and motorcycles trying to drive through the mass of people and vendors honking the entire time (get out of the way because they do not stop unless they meet a car or truck coming the other direction and then they honk more, yell, and wave wildly), streets that alternate between tarmac, potholes and mud, men pushing big unwieldy carts piled high with stuff, men walking through the crowd selling bottled water and soda with the weird sound water vendors make by pulling air in through their teeth repeatedly, shops with clothing hanging everywhere and piled up in front, and narrow alleys between buildings also packed with vendors, clothing or housewares hanging and people shopping and almost no place to get through the 4 or 5 foot wide space. After going there several times and getting less overwhelmed and noticing more than the sounds, smells and sights (or perhaps, really, getting past the overload), I have come to realize that shops and vendors on different streets sort of specialize in different things. Huh. There is a some logic here. Explains the wildly unusual numbers of places selling tires and car parts a few blocks ago.
Most women are dressed in brightly colored kangas (two - top and bottom wraps, almost always wildly different colors and patterns that somehow are amazing together), about half in headscarves, the odd burka, and some of the men in long white dishdasha and kofia, kids running around in their white school shirts and blue, or green, or amber skirts and pants, people cooking on portable charcoal braziers selling food (and yelling out what they have), men yelling out to me - "mzungu, mzungu!" (white person! white person!) and me giving them a thumbs up and sometimes responding "hapana - jina langu ni Gary," (no, my name is Gary), which makes them laugh and sometimes try out yelling back "Jeery, Jeery", and suddenly in the middle of it all an ice cream vendor will be bicycling down the street with his little canopy and freezer playing carousel music and I realize I am the only one sweating profusely. It is... sometimes surreal, always stimulating... and sometimes just makes me stand there in disbelief and laugh to myself.
This is life in Dar.
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