“I went to a place where every white face is an invitation to robbery,
Sittin’ here in my safe European home, I wanna go back there again.”
Last weekend took me to Arusha where I was trying to do something useful with my time for the excellent African Palliative Care Association (http://www.apca.co.ug/). Must confess that I felt like a tiny bit of a fraud at first, having very little confidence that my brain was useful enough to make it worth their dollars transporting my body that far. Being introduced as “Dr Taylor” also remains a strange and slightly uncomfortable experience, but perhaps that title is the reason I get offered the odd piece of work like this. Does it make my PhD all seem worthwhile? Maybe it will eventually but it’s not even close yet. The thought that such a dull and protracted episode of turd-polishing and box-ticking, culminating in a viva which I can honestly describe as the worst 3 hours of my life, can lead to me gaining any more than a congratulatory handshake from colleagues still feels like a farce to me. Still, I guess this kind of work is a way of moving on, all part of the process of “closure” or whatever a psychiatrist would call it.
So I landed at Kilimanjaro airport hoping that the few days of work would be at least doable, possibly even therapeutic. It was quickly apparent that if anything was going to make the work difficult it wasn’t a weakness of mine, but of the limited data available. The original and ongoing work – which is valuable and interesting in its own right, naturally – wasn’t set up as a research project, and retrospectively using data for a new purpose is always controversial.
The accommodation was extraordinary, big and opulent and a stark contrast to the surroundings in rural Tanzania. I have to say I wouldn’t choose it myself but I suspect choices were limited anyway. I was warned by the hotel staff and another guest not to put myself in danger by going outside the gates of the complex, hence (at last) my reference to the Clash lyrics above. I am, of course, a surly misanthrope so normally any excuse to avoid personal contact is a good one. But I loathe feeling like the privileged white man, and in accordance with the other theme of this blog I needed to keep up with some exercise, so I got up at dawn to take a run around the local roads. What can I say? It is hard to describe the inspirational feeling of calm and beauty that I felt running through the foothills of Mt Kili. It soothes almost every sense. The views, the birdsong, the cool (yes!) and clean mountain air, just slightly thin with altitude.
The roads were rolling hills, and unsurfaced so the 4-5 cars I did see in nearly an hour could barely go faster than me anyway. I have never enjoyed running so much in all my puff. Normally it is a way to keep in shape or to get somewhere, but suddenly I could understand what motivates people to want to run and run and see just how far they can go, at which point a virtual nod to my friend Anna:
annakatfinn.blogspot.com/
And it goes almost without saying that I never felt in the faintest danger that someone was about to mug me for my cheap digital watch, despite that fact that in Tanzania it is unremarkable to see anyone from the age of about 3 upwards carrying a machete. The most threatening encounter I had was a couple of young men working in a field who called out “Good morning, how are you?” in a difficult accent. My conclusion is that the only robbery taking place on the road to Arusha is the daylight variety inside the hotel (a roughly 500% mark-up on a bottle of mineral water, for instance), and the rumours of danger are “an invitation to robbery” designed to keep these prices viable.
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