I. The Serengeti Guys

It all started on a warm Tanzanian evening. Returning at dusk from the orphanage, we weaved our way through cattle and goats that meandered between the jutting rock formations which give Mwanza the nickname "Rock City". Like the bones of the earth, they poked through its ragged grassy skin at unpredictable angles in the orange light of the setting sun.

By the time we finished the walk home it was nearly dark, but still my friend Alex was able to distinguish the familiar features of a man at one of the dukas on the street. He shook hands and exchanged greetings with Sylvester, a tall, athletic, Tanzanian man in his mid-twenties, sporting a black eye. Sound sketchy? I thought so, but when Sylvester invited us over for drinks Alex accepted, telling me that he had gotten a ride to town with this guy last week, and that the former volunteer coordinator also knew Sylvester. I had only been in Buswelu for a week or so at this point and I was up for anything; so we followed Sylvester to his house (only two houses away from our own) where we discovered the source of the formerly unidentified hip-hop beats that could be heard blasting at all hours through our bedroom windows. The Swahili equivalent of MTV was booming through a powerful sound system in the living room of gated house with tiled floors, leather sofas and glass coffee tables (all signs of magnificent wealth in Buswelu). Hmmm... so not only do they like to fight (the black eye) but they have money (must be drugs). I had expected to share a beer with Sylvester and maybe a friend or two, but what I saw was six or seven large Tanzanian men sprawling on the floor and furniture, looking tough and rather threatening through the suspicious lens of my limited African experience.

I don't know if I've ever felt smaller or caucasianer in my life, but it was nice to have Alex with me, and I managed to stifle my fears to the extent that socializing became possible. But our hosts were strangely silent, which was disconcerting to say the least. They poured us beers and gave us a couch to sit on, and then lounged around in their army pants and tank tops, some with no shirts, some with big shiny chain necklaces. Call me a racist, but the whole scene reminded me of a movie where ten minutes later the stupid white guys get killed, and everyone back at their house gets raped and pillaged (can a person get pillaged? anything seemed possible at this point).
So I tried to make some conversation in Swahili. I was glad for the few phrases I had learned before I arrived in Tanzania, and for the small amount of English that our hosts seemed to have command over. We managed to establish that Alex and I were volunteers at an orphanage, and that our hosts were somehow affiliated with the Serengeti Brewery in Mwanza, which was the source of the beers we were currently drinking.

The whole situation was pretty uncomfortable, but all in all we were treated quite well, given seats of honor, and a couple of beers to take home as a bonus. Still I was very uncomfortable with the idea that we'd crossed the Rubicon from neighborliness into friendliness, and that there was no turning back now. If they continued to invite me over there would be no legitimate reason to refuse, especially since I was now indebted to them for the beer they gave me. And they knew where I lived! "Have you seen 'Last King of Scotland'?" asked my friend Lisa, warning me against being manipulated for the purpose of some insidious plot, then discarded after the raping and pillaging was complete. I told her that I had not seen the movie, but I was sufficiently convinced that It would scare the crap out of me in the present circumstances.

With these thoughts in mind, I was quite uncomfortable a couple of nights later when they showed up at the house to invite me over. Could they see me all the time? Did they know when I was home and when I was out? As the man of the house I felt it my duty to play it safe. "No thanks, hapana asante," I told them, hoping not to offend them if their motives were pure, but not really wanting to find out the hard way that their motives were less than pure. The more I thought about it though, the more it seemed like trust was the way to go. After all, they had treated me quite nicely, if a bit awkwardly, and as long as I was the only one in potential danger it was a risk I was willing to take for the sake of faith in humanity. I would go to their house provided that it was daytime, and that someone knew when to expect me back.

I tried this a couple of times, and gradually the nervousness wore off. Things were not much less awkward, but some level of actual friendship seemed to be on the horizon. I was a bit disconcerted by their attempt to take my hands, turn me around and lead me physically to their house when I met them on the path one day, but when I dropped their hands they did not resist me, and when I told them I could only stay for five minutes they said "no problem, hamna shida".

Still, their constant presence in the neighborhood and their ceaseless invitations to their home were a thorn in my side (especially since the Lariam was making me extra anxious). One Sunday they invited me over, and said their boss was home, and that he had a problem that he wanted to talk to me about. This sounded like the moment of truth. The climax of the evil plot in which I had become entangled. They considered me sufficiently lulled into a false sense of security, and now they would spring whatever bizarrely complex trap they had been scheming all along. I said maybe I would come later, but probably not, and went back in the house, leaving rejected Sylvester to walk home alone.

I later figured out that by "problem" he must have meant "question" and that by "boss" he meant the round, kind-looking little man who showed up at my house later that night in sporting attire, gave me an entire crate of Serengeti beer (some of which is still sitting in the fridge in Buswelu) and asked me if I liked to play football (soccer for the Americans among you). I remembered him from the first night at their house, because he came at the very end, and spoke English well enough to talk politics with us. I was disarmed by his generosity and by his appearance, and I accepted the gift gratefully, wishing him a good night. I still wasn't entirely sold, but I was certainly comforted by the encounter.

A week or so later, when Ayesha had malaria, a couple of them dropped by with some apple juice for my sick "wife." I thought that was quite neighborly and rewarded them with my presence, and with some sodas and peanut brittle the next day (an awfully wholesome gift for a house full of tough-looking, unmarried men in their mid-twenties, but hey, everyone likes peanut brittle right?).

Only a few days after that, I was walking my sick Ayesha to KKKT (a good Lutheran clinic with mzungu interns and African doctors, fortunately having nothing to do with the actual KKK) a mile in the hot sun when a familiar shiny, white sedan with tinted windows pulled up alongside us. It was the kindly little round guy, and he insisted that my "wife" should not walk all that way, especially when she was sick. I couldn't have agreed more, and we hopped in with little hesitation. He soon delivered us safely to the clinic, and was entirely prepared to wait an hour until we were finished and then return us to our house. We protested vehemently, and eventually persuaded him to leave, but he gave us his cell phone number and told us to call if there was a problem and he would pick us up immediately. A few days later I came to his house with a few more bottles of soda and thanked him very much, then stayed for a movie.

By last weekend, I was friendly enough with them to go over of my own volition entirely, eat dinner with them, and watch two entire movies (a Swahili movie and "Deja Vu" with Denzel Washington from a compilation DVD entitled "American Movies Featuring Blacks!"). I finally felt comfortable enough to legitimately enjoy my time with them, in contrast to the outward friendliness and inward agitation that had characterized all of my former visits to the house. It was a good feeling to relax, and to finally allow myself to trust the intentions of these young men.

The following day, after church, I received a strange text message from the ladies of my house, asking me to come to the Serengeti house. I found this particularly bizarre, because the ladies were even more distrustful than I was (and rightly so considering the way white women are a hot commodity in this country), and I couldn't imagine what would persuade them to overcome that fear. Certainly not the numerous sheepish attempts at friendship (or the preliminary stages of dating?) that the Serengeti Guys had made over the past month or so. Something else was going on here.

I entered the house to find Leah and Lisa sitting on one couch, with Lazer and Jackson, our Masai protectors, on the couch opposite, along with four or five men I had never seen before. These were not the Serengeti Guys I knew, but presently a friendly face appeared from the kitchen (the guy with the bling in the army pants who had so intimidated me before, I now knew to be an avid cook and a gracious host). "Mambo Haricot" I said (yes his name does mean "green bean" in French) and I sat on the couch with the Masai, attempting some Swahili conversation. I figured out that these guys were some random friends who had dropped by, and coincidentally that Leah and Lisa had come, under great duress, to see if the Serengeti guys might know of a job for our friend Dennis. They had been sitting silently on the couch watching a Swahili movie and being stared at for over fifteen minutes at this point, and they were nearing the threshold of awkwardness just as I had walked in. And now all we could do was wait for the Serengeti Guys to arrive so we could ask our question, stay long enough after receiving the answer to keep them from feeling utterly used, and then retreat to the safety of our home.

Just when things couldn't get much stranger a Masai warrior we had met only once or twice, a man entirely unaffiliated with our askari (security guards) except in their shared culture, a man with great probing eyes, long braided hair and Holland Tunnel style earlobe holes came uninvited through the open door. I still don't know his name, but we always referred to him just as "the freaky masai who stares at us through the window while we're eating dinner." He didn't speak any English, and he spoke less Swahili than me (his native language being Masai), and he had probably just wandered up the street in hopes of catching a glimpse of the television. He was absurdly out of place (even in this already strange gathering of local men, Masai warriors, Australian/Canadian women, and yours truly), and I began to feel personally responsible for the awkwardness, since I was really the only link between the house and the people in it.

Then in walked Musa. This was a bit of an anticlimax after the last guest, but still amusing, since Musa was another uninvited Masai, though far more westernized and far more familiar to us than his exotic counterpart.

So there we were in the Serengeti Guys' house. Haricot (the only sane one in the scenario as far as I can tell) was there because it was his house, and he was cooking food. The random guys were there presumably because they were friends with Haricot (and possibly because they had some inexplicable presentiment that there would be white girls showing up that afternoon). The girls were there to help our friend, Dennis (and to do so without appearing to be at all interested in the young men they were asking for help). The Masai were there officially to protect the girls (but really just for the TV). And I was there goodness knows why. I guess I was there because I'm an agreeable chap and I managed to make friends with too many people at once, landing myself square in the middle of the most dysfunctional gathering I've ever been witness to. As wierded out as I was by all our cross-purposes and uncommunication, I realized that it was really ok. Haricot was still cooking away, entirely unphased by the collection of rare species' in his living room, the Masai were content watching the Swahili movie, the unidentified young men were busy ogling the young ladies, who were staring disgruntledly at the coffee table and exchanging English phrases that were quick and slangy enough to be understood only by me. So I made the best of things and practiced my Swahili on the guys in the room, which never fails to surprise and amuse the people of Buswelu.

At long last the Serengeti Guys arrived, and the tension was diffused by a friendly handshake, loaded with an unspoken gratefulness that I had somehow corralled the elusive white females into their living room. We stayed for a few minutes, making small talk and pretending we had come for no specific purpose, until finally the ladies reached boiling point. Like the kettle in our kitchen that shuts itself off before it melts its own plastic, they knew somewhere deep down inside that the party had to end right then and there. And out they went, leaving me to feel apologetic since they hadn't properly said goodbye, and to ask the fateful question myself, which I did promptly and timidly before excusing myself to play soccer with the orphanage kids. But the moment they had been anticipating for months, the actual face to face experience with the mysterious white woman in captivity, had ended in less than five minutes, and I could tell that beneath their cool exteriors they were crestfallen to the core. So as I was walking away I reconsidered my decision.
"Are you going to play football today?" I asked casually, already knowing the answer.
"Yes."
"Can I come along?"
"Of course."
And half an hour later I was in the front seat of their pickup truck (the seat of honor -- the rest of the guys were in the back) headed to a field near the Coca Cola factory in Igoma. They treated me to an uncomfortably quick meal of chips mayai (fries and eggs, delicious!) and then we bumped our way down a crazy dirt road to a slanted pitch with a great swathe of brown, cracked earth through the middle of it. Though the pich was quite reminiscent of that at the orphanage, this was not quite like orphanage soccer. There were somewhere between 50 and 100 people either watching or playing, there were referees and jerseys, everyone was a full-grown African man, and I was the gleaming white patch in the middle of the dark sea. I refer only to my skin color with that metaphor, because there was certainly nothing gleaming about my game. I did a couple of good things and a couple of bad ones, but all in all I was pretty outclassed. This fact couldn't have been less relevant, however, because in the forgiving eyes of my audience I could do no wrong.

I must have been the only mzungu ever to set foot on that field, because the minute I did the crowd erupted in shouts, cheers, and peals of deep-bellied Tanzanian laughter. My first touch on the ball was a pretty basic, uncontested pass to an open teammate, but it too caused an uproar from the sidelines. I made a quick turn and faked a guy out, only to negate my success by clumsily toeing the ball directly to an opponent. But this too was an enormous hit with the crowd, and somehow, as conspicuous as I was, I felt less self-conscious than I would have felt back home playing with a bunch of American strangers.

I left the field in triumph, having only touched the ball maybe ten times, but having won the heart of the crowd nonetheless. Everyone wanted to shake my hand and tell me I had played well. I was flattered, but I had no illusions about my own game, and mostly I was impressed with this bunch of Tanzanians who had been so open and welcoming to a stranger like me. Once again I took the seat of honor in the pickup truck, and rode off into the sunset with a truckful of footballers and spectators to shower off and then head up the street and watch the African Cup finals at the Serengeti Guys' house.

It was a fun and unpredictable weekend, and I'm glad that before I left I had a chance to really enjoy some time with these particularly friendly neighbors. I only saw them once this past week, and when I went to say my goodbyes on Saturday night only one of them was home. It was Morgan, the smallest and probably youngest of the bunch, whose broken English was a constant source of amusement both for me and for his better educated friends. He gave me a Serengeti Brewery calendar and a diary as a going away present, and I gratefully accepted, having nothing to offer in return.

Thus ended my relationship with the Serengeti Guys. The sum total: 0 raping, 0 pillaging, 1 case of beer, 1 bottle of apple juice, 1 free ride to the clinic, a diary, a calendar, and some very good times. I think the decision to have a little faith in humanity was a good one, and in the future I may realize that a little more quickly, but I think the impulse to protect the womenfolk is a valid one, and self-preservation is pretty legit too. I'm very glad I met those guys, and I'll be sure to send them something from the states.