Hey everyone,
Well I had a pretty eventful week although not all of it was so great. First off, both me and Gabe got food poisoning from the restaurant on campus, which was pretty upsetting because it was one of the best places to eat but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to eat there again. Luckily it only lasted about 24 hours, but it’s an experience I would rather not repeat. Also, we didn’t have running water through the whole thing so it was a true “3rd world” experience. However my host parents were pretty good about the whole thing and I got my appetite back a few days ago so everything is back to normal.
We had sculpture again last week and we are working with clay. I’ve never taken a sculpture class and I’ve never really worked with clay, but in class our professor wanted us to make an abstract piece. Now I’m not a particularly artistic person to begin with, so I just played with the clay until it made a shape that resembled anything, which turned out to be a turtle. So I decided to go with an underwater theme and after a few failed attempts to make starfish and a seahorse I made a clam with a pearl inside and some seaweed. So when the professor walked around and asked us what our projects represent, everyone’s answers were really funny. I said that the turtle was searching for his passion, symbolized by the pearl, to which professor responded, “Oh yes, and that could even take months or years.” It was really funny, also coupled with the fact that a girl in our group made a giant sperm and an egg and he was okay with it so I guess anything goes in that class.
And then on Sunday we went to a football (soccer) game. It was one of the TZ national teams, Simba versus Rwanda. We hadn’t bought tickets beforehand, so we just went before the game and they were selling them outside from a van, but they scanned so they must have been real. At first it was really fun and everyone in the crowd was very into it and we were some of the only white people there. We sat with the Simba fans and we scored twice in the first half, and everyone was cheering and really into it. At halftime Emily, Gabe, and I wanted to go outside to get cold drinks. We asked if we could leave and come back, and a man said to us that he had seen people try to leave and weren’t allowed to come back in, but word for word he said because we were white they might let us. And turns out he was right, they just ripped our ticket in a different place. So we started to walk along and there were a lot of people standing on the sides of the road selling drinks and snacks, and I was carrying my wallet in my hand. Some guy came up behind us and wrenched it out of my hand, and I yelled out because it had obviously scared me. I immediately regretted doing that because of the “mob justice” that is common in Tanzania and in all of East Africa I believe. The police are pretty ineffective and I can imagine not well paid, and theft is a very serious crime here. If someone yells out thief a mob will form and will immediately kill that person, from what I have heard usually by lighting them on fire. My roommate Emily has seen it when she was in Kenya, and it happened at Mwenge (a market close to school) last week but no one was there. I have also heard that it has happened on campus before, but not recently.
So anyways everyone starts swarming the guy and I almost start having a panic attack because I wasn’t sure if I could handle being responsible for someone’s death. But everyone was yelling for us to follow him while people were running up with sticks and batons and were beating the guy. Gabe got pretty far into the crowd and was able to pull some people back and saw that somehow the wallet had been either passed off or stolen by at least two other people. It was not that dangerous for Gabe to do that because he was white and white males are basically the only ones that can break mobs up because they won’t get beaten. Luckily there were a lot of police around because of the game so they grabbed a guy who hadn’t stole my wallet and were dragging him away while beating him up with their batons and their hands. We hadn’t realized that he was one of the ones that did have a wallet at one point, as Gabe saw him put it down his pants. So we all sprinted after the police because we knew that he wasn’t the thief, and we caught them just as they loaded him onto the truck. We repeated over and over how he wasn’t the one that stole it, but they made him strip down to prove that he didn’t have it. One of the hardest parts to see was that they were still hitting him and handling him roughly. They still took him because they said that he had information about who had taken the wallet, and at that point there was nothing else we could do so we just went back to the game. For all of that the only things in the wallet were student ID, my phone, and 7,000tsh (less than $5). Luckily I wasn’t hurt and neither was the thief, and I definitely learned from the experience. I saw a part of the side of Tanzania that I had been warned about, and everyone in our group was either pickpocketed or attempted to be. Additionally, when we had been outside the stadium there was a fight in between the Simba fans and the Rwandan (many of the Tanzanians who support the other league were supporting Rwanda) and people were pulling chairs up to beat each other with but there were a lot of police there so they were able to break it up. All in all it could have been much worse, but it definitely is going to make me more wary and careful about how I carry money because I never want to be in a situation again.
I can hardly believe I am saying this, but we are almost half way done! We are going on our safari next week, and I will definitely be writing again soon about it!
Love,
Beebs
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