Alice Landrum
On a sunny morning in June, Marge found an empty seat on a bus in Arusha, Tanzania. This bus contained several other middle-age white males and females, all from the United States. Marge, a retired botany professor now traveler, propelled her body into a window seat on the left side, where she landed with a thump.
Outside lay bare red earth that glowed in the sunlight. The occasional green foliage of acacia trees with their flat tops or the thick green leaves of an aloe plant complemented the red that dominated the landscape. While she studied this view, the driver, a silent middle-aged Tanzanian man, waited for the lead Tanzanian guide, a younger male with the cryptic name “OC”, who radiated enthusiasm as soon as he climbed up the bus steps and turned to speak in distinct English.
This tour had arrived after an eleven-hour flight at Dar es Salaam late the evening before. After a frustratingly slow check through customs inside the airport, there had been a long, rough bus ride to the lodge. Near midnight she entered a dark, wood-paneled room in a separate hut where red flower petals scattered across the white bedcover gave her a pleasant jolt of surprise. She fell asleep instantly.
Following an early wakeup and coffee with a roll at the main lodge, another bus waited to take them to a local pottery studio where a Tanzanian family molded red clay pots to sell for filtering water. As the bus pulled out from the hotel lodge onto the highway, Marge watched native people walk on dirt paths along the sides of the road. The women wore kanga, loose cotton lengths of cloth that were draped around their bodies. The colorful designs of the kangacaptured the eyes of any onlooker. The younger women carried woven fiber containers on their upright heads, while the elderly carried kindling on their bent-over backs. Beyond these dirt paths sat wooden shacks with rusty tin roofs. Low green hills rose behind the shacks.
The driver made a quick U-turn to the left. The bus bounced over deep ruts and protruding rocks. Finally with relief for all, the bus stopped. Marge rose out of her seat with wobbly legs. She steadied herself with a hand on the back of the seat in front and then made the step-down onto a gravel driveway that led to an open studio. A metal roof over wooden posts sheltered the studio. Under the roof there was an area for preparing the clay, a potter’s wheel to throw the pots, and an oven to fire the pots. Stacks of finished red clay pots rested against a studio wall.
With serious faces, the owner of the studio and his daughter greeted the group from the US. Their manner was polite, but for Marge there was a feeling that these local people tolerated the tourists from America but wanted to get back to their business. This visit by outsiders was a necessary inconvenience.
The father and daughter began to explain the steps required to manufacture the three-foot-tall red clay pots designed to filter dirty water so that it becomes clean, drinkable water. The guide, OC, interpreted for the family, who spoke Swahili but not English. The people of Tanzania needed more clean water. One finished pot rested on a table to show the tourists how the dirty water became clear as it filtered through the clay barrier into a storage vessel. The family offered for the visitors to take a drink of the clean water, but no one took the offer.
The clay pot workshop fascinated Marge, who loved to see simple solutions for complicated problems such as Tanzania’s clean water shortage, a problem that could soon be a worldwide problem. She pulled out her phone and then her digital camera and began to shoot photos of the pots and the people making the pots. As she took the photos, the daughter shifted her eyes away and turned her body to avoid eye contact with the lens. Dressed in a yellow cotton shirt and pants, the daughter was an attractive young woman with short hair and the smooth skin of youth, but she appeared to be afraid of the camera. Her father watched Marge but said nothing.
OC saw Marge with her camera and called to her, “You can’t take pictures.”
“I’m sorry,” Marge apologized and tucked her phone and the digital camera back into her brown leather tote with its leather strap draped over her left shoulder. After putting her camera away, Marge decided to buy a pot to donate to the Maasai tribe. She hoped to establish some goodwill with these people who did not seem to trust the Americans, but being a realist, she doubted that her gesture would work.
Marge had forgotten OC’s earlier warning not to take pictures of the native people. That morning OC had met with the group outside of the lodge on the veranda shaded by the dense, big-leafed foliage of banana trees and wild date palms. During that meeting after introductions, he shared the rules for the safari trip: Be on time in the morning. Do not take pictures of the native people. Do not tip the porters. Stay in your tent at night. Do not try to pet a lion. At the end he repeated the warning, “Do not take pictures of the people without their permission.”
Speaking in clear, concise English, OC shared his background. He stood in front of the group with the comfortable ease of an athlete. As she watched him, Marge wondered if he had played soccer. At the university he had studied wildlife management, an important field of work in Tanzania. Now he held a coveted position as a guide in the tourist industry. He spoke fluent English in addition to French, Swahili, and his native tribal dialect. He explained to the group that there were more than one hundred tribal groups in Tanzania. Each group had its own dialect. This Babel of dialects had made it necessary for the leaders of the government to insist on the common language of Swahili to make commerce and education easier. OC talked to the group with a warm, relaxed demeanor that gave him a sense of maturity and experience.
Marge liked this intelligent young man who gave them clear lists of expectations and a plan for each day. As he talked, he stood in front of a large textile that hung outside on the wall of the veranda under the shade of the roof. The shape of an enormous burgundy turtle dominated the textile. Marge’s attention kept wandering to the turtle instead of OC. She wondered what the turtle represented in the Tanzanian culture.
Rain drizzled from solid gray clouds the next morning as the group traveled to a Maasai rural village, a boma. Dressed in their red wraparound robes, the dark men of this tribe towered over Marge in her khakis and loose white shirt. This tall, nomadic tribe who had herded cattle for hundreds of years in northern Tanzania wore red to scare away lions. Polite and gracious, these people prepared to give the group a tour of one of their large, mud-covered huts.
When Marge entered the hut with the tour group, the smell of cow dung assaulted her nose and took her back to her childhood on a farm in the Midwest. Inside the hut, small streams of sunlight entered from holes in the apex of the roof. From the tribal leader, the group learned that the tribe added elephant dung to the walls of their huts to keep insects away. Marge thought that this method of repelling insects was safer for the environment than the many insecticides used in the US.
After a few minutes, Marge’s nose adapted to the acrid smell of the dung. Meanwhile, the chief took the group to a large chamber in the hut where wooden benches lined the perimeter. In a deep, comforting voice, he asked everyone to “Please sit and let us share this cup of tea together.” After taking a sip from a ceramic cup, he handed the cup to the visitor next to him. The chief invited everyone to share this drink as a sign of goodwill and informed them that the tea drinking ceremony was an important part of Maasai culture. Marge hesitated to take part in this ceremony, but when the cup came to her, she did take a small sip.
At the end of the tea drinking ceremony, the group returned to the open space outside the hut. OC presented the gift of Marge’s clay pot to the village leaders, who thanked her, but their eyes lacked warmth. Acceptance by this patriarchal culture would require more than a brief visit and a gift from a white woman.
The search for exotic animals in the wild began as they climbed into Land Rovers to ride to a river where a herd of elephants gathered. After the driver found the elephants moving through the bush, the tourists watched the matriarch lead the herd across the river. Marge snapped photos as the older elephants nudged a baby across to the bush-covered bank on the other side of the muddy water. Once the herd had made it safely to the other side, the driver turned the vehicle away from the elephants on the riverbank and returned to the bumpy road that had brought them to this site.
Feeling a little light-headed, Marge looked across to another Land Rover where an older woman leaned her head against a rear window. She did not look well.
As they traveled across the Serengeti plain, the Land Rover carried them over rutted dirt roads which made a ride in any type of vehicle rough, one lurch after a bump after a rack to the left, a pitch to the right, and then a jolt upward. Marge wondered how the vehicle could survive this constant assault on its frame and then came another massive jolt that lifted her body off the seat. On the way down she felt the heat of the noonday sun and smelled the body odor from the other tourists in the Land Rover. Tsetse flies buzzed on the windshield. A wave of nausea swept over her. As bile began to roll up her esophagus, she knew that she had to get out of the vehicle. When her butt returned to the seat, she stood up with a raised hand to signal to the driver in his rearview mirror, “Please stop.”
The vehicle came to a shuddering halt. She grabbed the seat back in front of her for support as she pushed her body out; but before the driver could slide the door open, her breakfast rolled up and spewed out onto the floor, the nearby seats, and the lap of a man across the aisle. Marge felt so embarrassed. She needed to clean up this horrible mess, but first she had to get outside, where in a ditch of pale dirt and rocks, she emptied her stomach until there was nothing left. She managed to climb back into her seat. The driver and other tourists had cleaned up the mess so that for the remainder of the ride, there was only a faint sour odor as a reminder.
They arrived at a lodge in Lake Manyara National Park, where Marge found her luggage waiting in an open, airy cabin. Through large windows she could see the oscillating black-and-white stripes of zebras and the pale pink figures of flamingos in the wetland near the lake. Her body felt drained. After she swallowed a tablet for nausea, she collapsed on the bed surrounded by white gauzy mosquito netting. She fell into a deep sleep until hours later she woke to the murmur of voices. She opened her eyes to see two dark male faces peering between the netting at her.
She recognized OC, who asked, “How are you feeling?”
“Much better. Thank you.”
They discussed what might have caused this sickness. OC thought it might be the anti-malarial drug recommended for this trip. Marge wondered if the tea ceremony could have been the culprit. But she assured them that she would be all right, so the two men left.
She lay awake for a few more minutes as she pondered the feeling of strange eyes watching her as she slept and then she drifted off again.
On the following day, the photo hunt for exotic animals on the Serengeti preserve continued. With her pale, freckled hands, Marge held her digital camera steady with its telescopic Leica lens to bring the animals up close so she could get shots of the tawny lion draped over the top of a huge boulder, the leopard’s back covered with black rosettes as she stretched over a tree limb, the solitary cheetah peeking through the tall grass, the giraffe reaching for the leaves of the acacia tree, and the black-and-white stripes of the zebras intermingled with the shiny brown backs of the wildebeest herd as it migrated along the edge of the Serengeti, an annual event that has occurred for a million years.
When the group finally returned to the lodge in Arusha, Marge carried with her on her phone and her digital camera several hundred photographs. The group gathered for a final dinner with OC, who entertained them with Tanzanian folk tales including stories about turtles. While everyone laughed as OC explained with great care how the tortoise had tricked the hare when they went out to steal sweet potatoes together, Marge asked the waiter to bring a second bottle of water to share. During the previous days, the group had learned of OC’s storytelling ability and kept begging him for one more tale. He sat in front of the turtle textile as he told them the African tale of the trickster turtle who secretly climbed into the bag of sweet potatoes and ate all of them while the unsuspecting hare carried the bag home. Everyone laughed at the finish when the turtle crawled out of the bag to announce, “It was a fine dinner.”
When the time arrived to check out from the lodge, Marge walked into the dimly lit room with its dark overhead timbers to settle her bill. A female clerk stood at a counter across the lobby where sunlight streaming in from the tall window behind her illuminated her slender figure. This young woman in a red dress with her ebony skin and her thick black hair that exploded around her face and neck now glared at Marge with barely concealed hostility in her dark eyes as she handed over the bill.
“You must pay for the water,” she announced in carefully enunciated English, a product of a private school in this country where most spoke Swahili.
“Pay for the water? What are you talking about?”
“You ordered an extra bottle of water last night at dinner.”
“That didn’t come with the meal?” Marge’s voice rose in frustration as she thought about one more charge, but then why argue with this girl who was just doing her job. She handed over her credit card. After she signed the receipt that lay on the ledge that separated them, she looked up to hand it back to the clerk. Then she caught sight of a red clay pot like the pots used to filter water at the studio. The pot reminded her of the clean water shortage in Tanzania. She felt a twinge of shame for her irritation at the extra charge for the water. This young woman might know the family who made the pots and the daughter who turned away when Marge kept taking pictures.
Oh well, she thought, I still have my photos.
On the long trip from Dar Es Salaam back to the United States, Marge would occasionally scan through her photographs of the animals and scenery.
Years later, her nephew flipped through her photo album of the wildlife on the Serengeti. When he pointed to the cheetah hidden in the grass, the image took Marge back to that day when she turned from photographing the cheetahs to see the sudden arrival of two other vehicles that carried a different group of people. The Ugandan driver for her group started the engine of their Land Rover and drove away, leaving a cloud of dust. Marge did not have a photo of the driver, but she could still see his straight back covered with khaki, and she could hear his low voice as he spoke with an urgent tone into a cell phone held near his left ear. He gunned the engine and steered the vehicle with his right hand. Marge sensed impending danger. Her body tensed and did not relax until their vehicle was at least twenty miles away from the site of the cheetahs.
As the solitary vehicle sped over the red dirt road, on all sides lay the golden savannah topped by a cloudless, massive, pale blue sky.
Alice Landrum has been published in Potato Soup Journal, Round Table Literary Journal, and Well Versed. A retired anesthesiologist, Alice received her MD at University of Arkansas College of Medicine and her MFA in writing at Lindenwood University. She has attended numerous writing workshops, including the Quarry Heights Writers’ Workshop, the International Writing Program, and Gotham Writers’ Workshop. For many years, Alice served as associate professor in clinical anesthesiology at the University of Missouri School of Medicine in Columbia, Missouri. She currently lives in mid-Missouri with her spouse and a very spoiled orange tabby cat.