Day Four

So this morning around 5:50 AM, Dr. Sabet bursts into my room, flicks on the lights, and yells, “Bryan! Come!” I thought I’d slept through sunrise and I wouldn’t get to eat or drink or something, so I come rolling out of the bed and get all tangled in the mosquito net. When I got downstairs, it turns out that the cook was late this morning so we had to scramble to make and eat breakfast before the sun came up. We managed to make it, but we were really shoveling things in there at the last minute.

Yesterday afternoon, I met some of the American Bahá’ís. They came to the house to let their daughters play with May and to see the Sabets. They already knew who I was and where I’m from. Apparently the other American in the community, who I haven’t even met, told them about me. News travels fast! I have to admit that it was nice to hear a familiar accent.

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It’s past noon and I just got back to the house after riding the stupid daladala in circles for 3 ½ hours. I managed to walk to the bus stop from the house without any problems, but when I arrive there’s a mass of buses everywhere with a bunch of Kiswahili words on the front to indicate where they’re going. So, I’m supposed to get on the Msasani-K/Koo bus to go to the Bahá’í Centre. No problem. So I get on what I thought was one of the Msasani-K/Koo buses because the man was hanging out the side hollering what I thought was “Msasani.” Unfortunately, he was yelling “Masaki” which is a whole other part of town but to my untrained ear sounded just about the same. So when the bus pulls out of the stop and turns the wrong way, I knew something was wrong. But at that point I still had a sense of adventure and way too much confidence in my ability to return to the stop I started from, so I decided to go along for the ride. Plus I don’t know how to say “Stop the bus, and let me off!” in Kiswahili.

So here I am on the bus going to Masaki. Unfortunately, I didn’t know the name of the other half of the bus’s line, so that made it far more difficult to return. Anyway, we go through the bus’s whole route, and we’re on our way back to the bus stop that I started from when the man turns to me and starts asking me something in Kiswahili. I told him I only spoke English, so he managed to ask where I was going. I told him Ubunga, which he didn’t seem to understand, and then I said United Nations Road, which is somewhat near the Bahá’í Centre. He nodded his understanding and then literally shoved me out the door at the next stop, pointed at another bus down the road, said something in Kiswahili, and sped off.

I should have waited for the bus of the same line to arrive because the bus he pointed to was from a different line, Masaki-Posta. So I get on the Masaki-Posta line, which I found out goes downtown to the National Post Office. In the process of getting there we sped past United Nations Road, where apparently there is no stop, which is good because the street is so flooded after the rain that I couldn’t have walked it anyway. So we get downtown and everyone gets off. The bus driver turns to me with a questioning look, so I explained to him in this sophisticated English my situation, none of which he understands. So finally using hand gestures and very simple English I indicated that I’d gotten on the wrong bus and needed to go back to Masaki. He nodded and when the bus was loaded off we went.

I should have known better than to think this bus would return to the place that I wanted it to. So for the next hour and a half, I rode the Masaki-Posta line trying to figure out how the hell I managed to get onto this line, which seems to run independent from everything else, from the Msasani-K/Koo bus stop. During all of this riding, I noticed that we kept passing signs for the Disabled Hospital and UNESCO, both of which are right down the road from the house. We were also in an area which seemed somewhat familiar from my travels with Dr. Sabet. So after deciding that I would never figure out how to get from the Masaki-Posta line back to the Msasani-K/Koo line without walking between the two stops, I got off at the stop nearest the UNESCO and Disabled Hospital signs and walked back home. I could have continued on to the original bus stop and gotten on the Msasani-K/Koo line bus but I was sick of the things and I didn’t want to mess with them anymore. The NTC files and work will just have to wait until tomorrow because I’ve had enough adventure for now.

So, let me describe the daladalas a little bit. They’re basically shaped like those old Volkswagen minivans. Inside there are seats for about 18 people, which fills the thing up to capacity. But do they stop piling people on? No, of course not. At one point we must have had 25 people smashed in there. And when I was saying “bus stop” earlier, this is nothing like a bus stop in the Western world. There’s no sign designating it as a bus stop (except downtown). You just kind of have to know where it is, pray that there are some other people waiting for the bus, or hope that the bus will stop when you wave your hands wildly. Some of the time you’re on a paved road with a nice little extra portion cut out for the bus to pull in and out of the stop. But most of the time the bus just barrels off the dirt, gravel, or extremely poorly paved road into the grass, dirt, mud, chickens, people, plants, trees, and whatever else is on the side of the road to pick people up and let them off. Frequently whenever someone would get on the bus and see me, they’d do a double-take, like what the heck is this white boy doing on the bus with us? I guess I’m supposed to be driving my own vehicle or being chauffeured around. I saw my first cows and guineas today on the daladala, as well as the ocean and a little seaside resort for rich tourists and foreigners. I also saw some peacocks at the Bahá’í Centre on Sunday! How bizarre is that! I totally just stopped in my tracks and stared at it. I thought I might have been hallucinating from the fast or something, but Dr. Sabet explained that they were a gift from Indira Gandhi to Julius Nyerere, the former leader of Tanzania. He kept them in his garden, but they escaped and scattered all over the city, so many of them come to the Bahá’í Centre from time to time.

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So it turns out that almost all of the employees of the Bahá’í National Centre have been out looking for me because I didn’t show up to work. No one knew that I had come back home. They started looking for me around 10:00 AM at which time I was still on the bus, riding around like nobody’s business. Meanwhile, the friends were in a state of panic, thinking someone had kidnapped me, killed me, arrested me, mugged me, or that I was just lost. Dr. Sabet was the only one that seemed to believe that I just simply got lost! So they’re all out looking for me, questioning the daladala drivers about whether I had been on their bus. They actually found the drivers and managed to trace me all the way downtown, but after that they lost my trail. Mrs. Sabet just called a bit ago and found that I was here. Dr. Sabet came home from looking for me, and I related the story to him. I think Mrs. Sabet is going to be quite upset with me, but it was an honest mistake and I had no idea that everyone would have started looking for me so quickly! Now Dr. Sabet is insisting that I get a mobile phone so that I can call. I think he was also a little disappointed that I didn’t phone the Bahá’í Centre or their home, but I didn’t have the numbers nor did I know where to stop to actually use a telephone. I feel really rotten now. I’d better go brace myself to face Mrs. Sabet.

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Okay, so she wasn’t too upset, thankfully. I found out that they had called all the police stations in town to put out a notice for me, called the American embassy to alert them of the situation, and called all the hospitals looking for an injured foreigner. The National Institute Coordinator and the Secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly were also out looking for me, and apparently the Secretary was pretty upset with the Sabets that I’d been lost, even though it was all my fault. Despite all of the trouble I’ve caused, it’s extremely comforting to know that these people care enough about me to go through all this trouble because I got on the wrong bus and they couldn’t locate me for a few hours.

Dr. Sabet said he was trying to put himself in my shoes to try to anticipate what I would be doing. He even called one of the American Bahá’ís and asked what he thought I would be doing. Of course my stubborn butt was riding around the daladalas convinced that any moment I’d be able to figure it all out. He thought I might be totally panicking or something, whereas Mrs. Sabet was a little more…um…dark in her assumptions. For example, the first thing that came to her mind was that someone tried to take money out of my pocket, I got into a fight with him, and he smashed my face in! Haha, imagine me fighting someone.

We had a little discussion about what to do in the event of an emergency and things like that so that we won’t have mix-ups like this again. I don’t want my name to be floating around the American embassy and the police stations too much! We all agreed that we made too many assumptions, so tomorrow one of the friends is going to come over in the morning and accompany me on the daladala to the Bahá’í Centre. I just can’t wait to get there so everyone can get their laugh at my expense, although who can really blame them? If someone else did this I’d probably be laughing at them, too.

P.S. – Mom, Dad, family, and anyone else prone to hysterics: Please don’t freak out reading this! I’m okay, I promise! It was just a little mix-up, and see how well the friends responded? I’m in good hands. Well, except when I'm in my own it seems. ;-)