Date: Fri. Mar 24 03:47:56 2006

=== I started out declaring that contrary to popular lore, the busses here in Tanzania "do not careen but travel along in a sensible way..."
funny because soon there-after I was in a bus that indeed careened along the most outrageously rutted dirt road I've experienced, and crashed in-between two trucks it was trying to squeeze through the middle- no one was hurt, we were just jammed between the trucks, and tempers were hot! I feared the truck guys would beat up my bus driver (and his posse), but instead all the men gathered, yelled and swore for about an hour then burst out laughing, and off we drove (I got pictures)- so my destination there was a British lady running an AIDS information and street kids project- amazingly in this fairly small village were about 700 street kids, all boys that I saw- the kids were great-I really loved hanging out with them, but it was not the place long term for me; plus the buses had struck fear in me, so I got a ride with a young American Fulbright scholar to his village where he's researching Sindhalese people who use a clicking language and are on the cusp of converting from hunter gather to farming- ate and hung out w/his local family and went w/his local assistant hut to hut conducting a census, in the process meeting some of the greatest characters, and the place was beautiful- then I steeled myself and got on another bus to Kondoa, a small town en route to Arusha- that bus ride went well although at one point the whole bus sort of surreally filled w/ biting, divebombing, flies-everyone on the bus swatting away- about that I wrote: the bus full of flies with that grin-ny old man chivalrously smooshing them against my window for me, that was something"! Anyway I've since had a bus story to surpass all others, but I'll cut back to my early days, in the Land-Rover hangout on the beach outside Dar es Salam:
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