This Bus Departs at Nine O'Clock

Mudslide: Tanzanian Style

"This bus is going to fall," I stated and asked concurrently in my Swahili 101.  The buddah-bodied, sarong wrapped woman to my right laughed at my big worried eyes. 

 

            "No, young sista," her electric white teeth glowed through me.  "Hamna tabu."

Her corpulent arm, the size of my thigh, fell on my shoulders:  a universal gesture of comfort.  Hamna tabu, no problem.  I was unaware there are six different ways to say "no problem" in Swahili, depending on the degree of the problem.  It is not desirable, in Tanzanian society, to be the harbinger of discouraging news.

 

            In a car, you could travel from Iringa to the mountain-nest village of Pommerini in four hours.  In a bus, it may take up to ten hours to travel the same distance.  The authorities tell you, "this bus departs at nine in the morning," while pointing to a crude, archaic map of your destination.

 

            However, the bus always leaves well after midday, except the one time you cleverly arrive at noon, to evade the bus vigilance in the blistering fumes of the arthropod-infested marketplace.  They nod their heads at your disbelief.

 

            "I told you many times, this bus departs at nine in the morning."

 

            When you purchase a bus ticket this does not guarantee you a seat on the bus.  One voyage, I stood for four consecutive hours, with the physical support of other passengers' bodies.  And no, they would not let me ride on top of the bus, with all the cargo and the bus attendants, despite my begging.

 

            "It would not look good to have muzungu on the roof,"  the bus driver concluded and then sipped his Tuska beer.

 

            Tanzanian buses are really motorized community centers.  Some passengers organize a chorus to drown out the clamorous juju music (African dance music which parallels Caribbean music stuck on fast-forward), selected by the driver and his attendants.  The driver will play his single cassette repeatedly the entire ten-hour journey.  I became an instant celebrity the day I introduced Bob Marley's Legend on a bus trip. 

 

            In the back of the buses men are gambling with a deck of cards, drinking bamboo juice (a lip-numbing inebriating brew with a Whiskey Sour tang), or exchanging entertaining personal narratives and dirty jokes.  Women socialize, breast-feed cloth-attached infants (who never cry), sew, coif one another's hair, and generate beaded jewelry.  Children amuse themselves by watching me or agitating the omnipresent livestock:  do goats and chickens purchase bus tickets, too?

 

            The African "highways", elaborately decorated with lunar-crater sized potholes and decomposing vehicles, do have Rest Areas.  These oases in the naked bush greatly resemble American truck stops:  they offer a bar, restaurant/disco, and a flophouse.  But there are no souvenir shops, refueling stations, or toilets.  The length of one's visit is solely the discretion of the driver, and often the driver does not feel obligated to notify his customers of departure.  At the sound of the engine, individuals abruptly drop their meals, chase the bus, and leap onto a rambling bus.  The passengers, securely on board, enthusiastically encourage boarding attempts and generously applaud on success.

 

            During the trek, if you must relieve yourself, it is custom to yell, "Choo!"  This is vernacular tongue for "john" or "toilet."  The bus does not actually stop on account of your need to recycle your last meal.    However, if the driver favors you, he will slow the bus down significantly and continue in a dull roll.  You alleviate your burden alongside the route, often without bushes or ravines to conceal your private biological functions.  This means you and often a few peers, are urinating (or worse) in full view of the bus and its occupants.

 

            You adapt quickly to this humbling situation, eluding a kilometer jog to capture the bus.  I wish not to mislead you, the drivers are not sadistic.  They reasonably fear the decrepit, hand-me-down buses of the West will not survive frequent stops.  In the African country, a defunct bus becomes a fossil and the occupants are fully exposed to Nature's impulses.

 

            On this extraordinary trip, in the dawn of the rainy season, we were ambushed by mud.  As we scaled the side of the mountain, a mud pocket swallowed the two left tires of the bus.  Tomatoes, kerosene jugs, greens, and other fish-stenching cargo began to trickle off the roof.  The bus attendants dismounted and laboriously pushed the bus, while the driver prayed loudly the bus free itself from the grasp of the earth.

 

            I feared the bus was going to tip over on its left side; I was only partially correct.  The optimistic woman to my right would not confirm my apprehension until individuals alarmingly invoked Jesu Cristo and Allah.  In that delayed, dream-like quality of traumatic experiences, a wave of heads turned to the right in unison.  Trees, bushes, and wildlife surfed a colossal swell of mud.

 

            The impact of the travelling earth on the unfortunate bus spit the tin vehicle on its left side and carried it well down the mountainside.  I recall some bowel-shaking jolts and the thunderous reverberation of the volcanic mud rush during the actual "relocation" of the bus, but not much else.  All crests eventually fall, and with the assistance of two obstinate trees, the bus halted and mud slithered over and under us.

 

            An eternal, breathless silence followed the violent stop;  not even the livestock whispered.  A photograph of the interior bus landscape would exhibit human bowling pins immediately after a champion strike.  With the bus exhausted on its left side, we were piled on one another like logs preparing for a fire.  Shock slowly evaporated and sore limbs peeked from the mass.  Those people nearest the right-side windows began to prudently crawl out of the mud-oozing bus.

 

            I was one of the last travelers to be pulled through the mud spilling openings.  Everyone cheered as the final passenger, a milky-haired African man dressed in a forced suit, surfaced the drowning bus.  People congregated in small circles, inspecting one another's wounds and bruises.  To my knowledge no one was severely impaired, but of course, a Tanzanian would never confess discomfort.

 

            My only memorable injury resulted from a bus-tossed chicken that found refuge up my skirt.  Once the chicken realized it survived the turbulent encounter, it decided to peck its way through my bare inner-thighs.  The frenzied fowl's bloody incisions made walking extremely unpleasant for several days.  I was comforted by the fact, that if the chicken escaped the bus alive, it would certainly be fried soon.

 

            The tattered Africans, some with bare feet, collectively and wordlessly began to ascend the mountain.  No one searched for possessions;  they just calmly scaled the mud mounds towards the nearest village.  There were no crying children, no declarations of legal pursuit, no cellular phones to notify the authorities, and absolutely no word of a refund.  I quickly scrambled after my big-bosomed companion, "What do we do now?!"

 

            Again, her cheek-vibrating laugh, "We walk, young sista!"

 

            "How far?" I winced.

 

            "Oh, hamna shiba!" she responded.  I instantly reminded her, she said "no problem" just before we were assaulted by mud.  She observed me cautiously, "What are you thinking, young sista?"

 

            "We will walk for a long time."

 

            She laughed abundantly, put her arm around me and exclaimed, "Karibu (welcome) to Africa!"

 

            After a long pause, I said to her, "You know, the next time the bus is going to fall, I am not going to sit by such a fat woman."  She could not stop laughing.