The Personal Website of Jeremy Boles

The point of the trip was Dan. He was my roommate in college and the best man at my wedding, and in 2014 he was living in Tanzania with his family, working as a missionary and translating the Bible into some of the more obscure tribal languages spoken there. He seemed to be in a tough spot, so I went out to check on him.

Eight of the nineteen days were in Tanzania. Getting there and getting back took the rest.

Itinerary

I left Springfield on the 1st of December and came home on the 19th.

Three flights out: Springfield to Atlanta to Paris. A few days there, then the train up to Amsterdam for two more, then Amsterdam to Dar es Salaam on the 6th, and back again on the 14th.

From there the plan was a train through Belgium and on to London, but Belgium went on strike, so that was that. Poking around for another way across, I found out that a ferry runs from Amsterdam to Newcastle, so I sailed into England instead. Then a few nights in York, a train down to Wilmslow, and home out of Manchester.

Frozen in Paris

I locked my bank card on the first day. I was jet-lagged and standing at a machine, entering a PIN that neither my fingers nor my memory could quite agree on, and after enough attempts the card decided it had had enough of me.

So I went and asked for help at a bank, in French I don’t have. The man there was kind about it, worked out what had happened, and told me what I’d already suspected: this is something your American bank has to fix. That meant waiting for a bank in Missouri to open, seven time zones away, and then finding some way to call it. I got there eventually over Skype, and had my money back late the following day.

In between, I had five or six euros left over from an earlier trip, and that was the whole of my fortune.

So I was wandering a midwinter market, killing time, when I saw something I thought I could afford: a crepe, I think, or at least a flat thing wrapped in paper. I got all my change out and stood there sorting through unfamiliar coins in my palm, in fingerless gloves and a beanie, wearing the expression of a man who hasn’t slept. A stranger came up behind me, put one hand gently on my back, and with the other laid a euro coin into my handful of change.

“For you, for food,” he said, in English, with a thick accent. Then he turned around and walked away without saying anything else.

I ate that crepe and didn’t eat again until Amsterdam the following evening, which is why the first thing I did once my card worked again was order an enormous rack of lamb with a bock beer and take my time over it.

The Part I Usually Leave Out

It took me the better part of two days to work out that my apartment in Paris was on the top floor of a brothel.

I had no cell service on that trip and therefore no maps, so I spent a good half of it wandering around like an idiot. On the street where I was staying there was always a group of women outside one of the buildings, in fur coats and a lot of makeup, and they very much wanted to make eye contact as I went past. So the first time, naturally, I walked by with my eyes on the pavement, and went straight past the door I was looking for. It was the one they were standing outside.

They were lovely about it. One of them helped me work out the entry code.

I saw them every time I came or went, and I settled on the theory that they simply smoked a great deal, and that this was some French business about not smoking indoors. That held up for two days. Then I stepped out one afternoon and saw one of them leading a giddy, faintly creepy man up the stairs, past a door standing open with a bed behind it.

Arriving

I landed in Dar es Salaam at midnight. Dan was supposed to meet me.

Getting through the airport involved handing my passport, with a crisp hundred-dollar bill sticking out of it, to a man holding an Uzi. Apparently that’s how it’s done there. It felt an awful lot like a bribe. I also had a bottle of duty-free scotch that I’d bought specifically to hand over to anybody who gave me trouble, and in the end nobody did.

Then I came out the other side and Dan wasn’t there. He’d been caught in traffic. I was jet-lagged enough to be mildly annoyed about it, right up until the drive to where we were staying, which cured me. There were people walking everywhere. Fires going in barrels and on grills. Maybe half the streetlights were lit. Buildings stood in silhouette against the sky with no way to tell whether they were half-built or half-demolished, and I never did work it out, not in eight days.

Stuck

We drove down toward the park the next day, went barely into it that evening, and stayed at a hotel. The day after that is when we got the car stuck.

Very stuck. Middle of December, which in Tanzania is hot, with Dan’s two-year-old daughter in the back. Every attempt to get out put us further in. No phone signal either, so we walked a little way down the road to see if we could find a bar of coverage.

That’s when I stepped into a puddle that was almost perfectly round. It took me a few seconds to understand that I was standing in an elephant’s footprint. My socks are still stained red from that mud, all these years later.

We turned back when a herd of wildebeest started moving toward us and I began having flashbacks to The Lion King.

Eventually a driver ferrying some wealthy tourists around came across us and radioed the ranger station. A Land Rover with a winch came out and couldn’t shift us. The ranger left us there and told us to stay inside the vehicle because of the lions, which we had watched moving around this same park the evening before.

What finally got us out was a huge truck with ten or so young Tanzanian men hanging off the back of it. They were dressed immaculately, and they pushed our car free, and in doing so they got covered in the same red mud that’s still on my socks. We gave them a pile of money. I’ve never been convinced it was enough, and I still feel bad about it.

From there we drove to Kisolanza Farm and stayed in a mud-brick hut with a thatched roof, and ate by candle and lantern light. After the day we’d had, it was about the most welcome place on earth.

Dodoma

We stopped in Iringa on the way, and spent the rest of the trip at Dan’s house in Dodoma.

The house sat behind a brick wall, and they were required to employ a man to watch the gate all night. I never worked out where the requirement came from, whether it was the culture or the missionary organization they were part of. There was also Mama Paddy, the house-help who had come with the house. She taught me to make chapati.

We went to the market, where I bought some fabric to bring home to my then partner. Mostly, though, we stayed in. We watched movies, played video games, and did an enormous amount of talking, which was the point of my being there.

What I Ate in Tanzania

Shawarma cooked over an open grill at a car wash in Dodoma, eaten with a mystery condiment that lived on the table in a cheap plastic squeeze bottle.

There was also pork, which took some arranging. Tanzania is largely Muslim, and Dan’s family knew exactly one butcher who would sell it to them. The handover happened at the back of his shack, out of sight and swarming with flies, because he couldn’t be seen selling pork to anybody. Getting hold of some so we could all taste something from home was my idea, and at the time it felt like a good adventure. With some distance I wonder whether I put them in a worse spot than I understood.

We cooked it at Dan’s place, behind the brick wall and the gate, over charcoal bought from a man at the roadside and an old grill grate.

And chapati and chai, made for us by a woman who turned the front room of her dirt-floored house into a dining room whenever she had customers. We sat with her children and watched American rap videos on the small television in the corner. That’s the meal I still think about.

The Printer

Every day I sent a message home to a thermal printer, so that it could be printed out and read to my daughter, who was two and a half. They usually had a little drawing on them of something I’d seen that day. [[robot[ink]|robot-ink]] is still one of my favorite things I’ve ever made.

What It Did

It was the first time I’d been anywhere that I was the racial minority. People would say mzungu when they saw me, or Dan and his family. I’ll stop well short of saying it taught me what being a minority is like, because I was entirely aware that I probably had more money in my meager bank account than most of the people I met would see in a lifetime. But it made me think hard about the privileges I move through a day with.

And having to look at poverty directly, rather than read about it, changes something. It makes you feel lucky, and it makes you want to do something with the hand you were dealt.

The other thing it did was smaller and more practical. Working out how to get from Amsterdam to Britain in the middle of a strike, with no phone and no maps, gave me a confidence about travel that I’ve carried ever since. It turns out you can nearly always find a boat.