Far from home

As I walked to the Royal Kitchen restaurant pit choo (a bathroom consisting of a hole to squat and pee in), I was struck by how far from home I was.

On Friday, after our weekly Swahili quiz, my friends and I waited by our usual Dhala stop, hoping to visit Karyako, a famous market and get lunch in town. Instead of a Dhala, we took a lifti. Two guys in a pickup truck stopped and we all piled in back. Unfortunately, I was wearing a Khanga around my waist with a safety pin, which opened as I jumped up. Getting out of the car at Mwengi Market was interesting. Other than the wardrobe malfunction, liftis generally beat taking crowded, sweaty Dhalas or Costas (buses). However, on this trip, we caught an almost empty Costa all the way to Karyako.

Karyako looked exactly like I imagined Dar. People in bright colors filled the narrow dirty streets. On either side, vendors sold fruit and practical products like mouse poison, rope, radios, clothes pins…etc…We looked around, eyeing restaurants, searching for somewhere with more variety than DARUSO. Finally, we find the Royal Kitchen, listed in our guide book. We had delicious Indian curries, pasta, and stir-fry but had to wait over an hour. We saw people come and go, but still we waited, while anxiously watching Al Jazeera news without sound, trying not to think about our hunger.

It was after the meal, when I saw myself in a mirror, sweaty, disheveled, with a pink and green khanga around my waist that I marveled at how bizarre peeing in a hole, hitchhiking, and ignoring street vendors would seem at home. After we wander around the market, buying fabric, fruit, and clothespins and sit on the Costa toward Mwengi, Rachel turns to me sleepily and says, “When we visit Arusha, let’s take a lifti all the way there.” I laugh, but the idea of riding ten hours in the back of a pick-up truck does sound better than a sweaty bus.