Kisima Cha Mungu

"Kisima cha Mungu" translates into English from Swahili as "Washbasin of God." Indeed, Kisima cha Mungu is Biblical in scale and in its power to captivate me. Some cosmic missile created this gigantic pock-mark in the Earth eons ago, and I am astonished when I sit at the chasm's lip and try to imagine the force that created the world I see painted in verdant brushstrokes below me. The raucous cries of baboons climb the crater walls and turkeys cry out frantically before taking flight when predators come near them in the tall grass field about halfway between my vantage point and the crater floor. A Tanzanian once told me that cheetahs live in the crater, but I suspect that this was either an error in translation or a tall tale intended to impress a foreigner, an mzungu.

When my brother Oging and I reach the place along the rim of Kisima cha Mungu where we usually stop to eat, I remark to him in broken Swahili that this sight was worth the five mile walk it took us to get here. He simply acknowledges my statement in his conversationally fluent but still shaky English. Behind us, we see Oljoro Hill: a green wedge of Grinchesque steepness littered with grey stones. Oging's house lies on the gently sloping green land just east of the hill, far removed from our sight. For two months, I have lived as a guest of Oging and his family. I have learned to think of this as my home and my family. During walks like this one, I have experienced this new land, a combination of savannah and forest, yellow and green. I have all but memorized the silhouette of Mount Meru fifteen miles to the north, its blue-gray countenance occupying a wide expanse of my vision just beyond Arusha.

On the northeastern horizon, not far from Meru, is Kilimanjaro. Sixty miles away, her beautiful slate profile silhouettes against the pale blue African sky. Most days she hides behind clouds, but today she allows me a glimpse of her face. Her gently sloping peak, constituting the highest point in Africa, demands my attention. Her fading equatorial glacier shines in the sun as the capricious clouds hint at her beauty, only to obscure her face once again. Kilimanjaro is beautiful, but also cold and inhuman. She is a dancer frozen in mid-step; the eerie stillness of her presence betrays some great motion beyond mzungu comprehension. Kilimanjaro seems timeless to me, a permanent fixture of the landscape. Her presence gives me an overwhelming feeling of temporality because compared to her I am fleeting and insubstantial. She is a foil to Kisima cha Mungu, whose existence is vibrant and violent; alive and growing.

On the crater rim, Oging and I eat the chapati flatbread mama sent with us and drink the beer we bought at the duka in Larroi while we take turns pointing to plants and animals, and naming them in our respective languages. We drink the chai (sweet, milky tea) mama sent with us, and watch as a flock of wild turkeys loiter below us in the crater. We pour the chai into our empty bottles, and discuss soccer and math and women and our respective life plans as we drink the tea. Internally, I struggle to decide whether Starbucks' chai lattes are actually as inferior to this beer-flavored tea as I remember them being. Then, the particulate red clay of the crater rim rises into the air and obscures not only my view of the crater, but also my thoughts. Oging is twenty-four and wants to finish secondary school when he can find the time and money to do so. I do not know what I want to do with my life. Unlike me, Oging does not know what he will be allowed to do with his life. We each feel restless, I think. Oging is luckier than many of his neighbors, but he is still fighting third-world poverty and I am only trying to combat the apathy that is unique to the developed world. The dust calms down now. This place mirrors us. Kisima cha Mungu is restless; a flash of movement and a cacophony of surreal sound.

Looking down from the ethereal Kilimanjaro on the horizon, we can see the primary school at which I teach each day about two miles distant. The school is surrounded by the red dirt, with specks of grass and sugarcane plants cropping up through the edges of the soccer field. The tiny hamlet of Larroi hides beyond a corn field: the corn field in which a vagabond raped a local woman while my teaching group was working in the primary school a few days ago. The Headmaster of the school informed our class of the incident, bursting into our classroom and interrupting one of my better presentations on proper condom use. My teaching partner Eliakimu and I ran through the cornfield with some local men, disappointed to realize that we would not find the rapist unless a hundred others had already done so. In the end, it turned out that the victimized woman's husband was a member of the Tanzanian army, and entire military units were mobilized to capture her assailant. As I gaze down from Kisima cha Mungu's rim, I cannot help imagining the crop devastation we wreaked during our hopeless search. The corn field linking the school land with Larroi is flat in places now; a farmer lost much of his crop so that we could feel empowered by the thrill of vigilante justice.

Beyond the corn field, Larroi is a tiny place stingily scattered with deciduous trees. It has a six-foot-square village office and four tiny shops alongside the single road that connects the city of Arusha to the line of neighboring towns. Larroi has a water pipeline where at least twenty local children are always gathering water in old plastic buckets for their families and for their skinny cows. The shops, called "dukas," sell everything from candy to food to trinkets to farm tools. The wooden walls of the dukas are translucent: the boards have been recycled many times, as has everything else. Indeed, Oging and I must return our beer bottles to Larroi after lunch so that the shops can rinse and refill them. Environmentalism does not provide the moral groundwork for the consciousness of consumption intrinsic to the people here; poverty does. Larroi is home primarily to the traditional Maasai tribe and also less traditional people of Maasai lineage like Oging's family. The Maasai are one of over a hundred different ethnicities present in Tanzania. They live a lifestyle centered on cattle and goat herding, and maintain extremely well-defined gender roles. As I sit with Oging on the crater rim, listening to a lone baboon crying out from under a tree on the far side of the crater, we talk about his nation. Poverty, the systematic abuse of women, and HIV are the three scourges that ravage this country. These issues are inseparably intertwined, and engraved deeply into the very fabric of this society; this land. Many of the Maasai still practice polygamy and measure power and influence within the community by the number of wives a man has. Like every nation, this place certainly needs change. Idealism, however, is a luxury that few Tanzanians can afford and Maasai culture developed logically to fit circumstances. The realization that Tanzania's problems do not stem from an inferior culture has completely shattered everything I knew before I came here. As we finish lunch, I begin to wonder how different this place really is from my own home.

Oging and I walk into the crater after lunch, as we have several times before. A large silvery snake glides away from the trail, disappearing into the neck-tall grass as we approach. The grass grows taller as we descend into God's washbasin. A hand-sized grasshopper lands on a rock beside the trail as we pass. The green color becomes more vibrant and the flora more lush as we descend. Moist grass brushes our shoulders as we attempt to follow the trail across the crater. The tall grass exists in patches broken by open fields and by forests of sparingly distributed deciduous trees. Splashes of green define the crater visually and a cacophony of sound throbs in the air. Animals cry out from among the trees and from behind boulders in a variety of discordant pitches and timbres, but usually they remain invisible to us. Occasionally a snake slides through the grass or a group of turkeys move about raucously, but usually Kisima cha Mungu maintains a disguise of stillness. Animals leave signs of their presence but hide themselves from sight: droppings litter the crater floor and Anteater quills decorate the trail as we descend the steep half-mile into the crater.

Anteaters ravage the surrounding corn fields, escaping from the crater at night to raid farmers' crops. For the two months I have been here I have desperately wanted to glimpse an anteater, but instead Oging and I meet a deer standing in the short yellow grass of Kisima cha Mungu, tacitly observing us. The deer never breaks its sacred vow of silence as we pass by, but stands still in observation. In a hopeless and halfhearted gesture, Oging and I chase the animal with rocks into the tall grass. We voice our desire to bring the deer home for mama to cook for dinner, but fail miserably as the deer disappears into a stand of trees. We could not have brought ourselves to kill the deer anyway, we reassure each other. Immediately, I realize that our moral consciousness stems in part from egotistical self-gratification, in lieu of actually being capable of catching our quarry. On a more pragmatic level, we would have regretted the hunt when we had endeavored to carry the carcass five miles home had we secured it. We return home with two anteater quills-Tanzanian kitsch-but no deer.