Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

Not a single time that I entered or left Tanzania through its main international airport in Dar es Salaam was I able to go through its lines and paperwork without at least facing some sort of obstacles from immigration officials. On the way out, it ranges anywhere from "where were you this whole time?" to "why were you here so long?" On the way in, its always some sort of hassling for payments. "Where is your visa?!" "Is it a multiple entry visa?!" "Oh you live in Iringa, where is your residence permit?!" "No, no, you don't get the permit in Iringa, you get it right here in Dar! Because where is Dar? Dar is in Tanzania!" A few attempts at negating the reasoning of the border officials quite become the author getting screamed at by the said officials, always proud, always self-confident, and always picking out some holes in the paperwork that leads to extra payments.

Before December arrived, the author heard from multiple sources of the supposed madness of a lengthy Christmas season in this piece of African outback.  There will be non-stop Christmas music blasting from every home from December to February, they said.  All the bus tickets will be much more expensive because everyone will be traveling home, they said.  And the whole country will all the sudden become a much more festive place, they said.  Exaggeration, without a doubt, but even taken with a grain of salt, such words can be credited for heightened excitements in some boredom.

In multiple occasions on this blog, the author mentioned how he misses the convenience store culture that is prevalent in many parts of urban East and Southeast Asia .  The ability to walk out to the streets from one's residence or office for five minutes, and find food, drinks, basic medicine, and other daily needs just seem so fitting to a city of the future where dependency on automobiles for personal transport is drastically reduced.  Naturally he thinks that dense cities with pedestrian-friendly blocks of dense street-level shops surrounded by high-rise residential buildings is fitting with that future.

In rural Tanzania, there is one thing that is often noticeable in any market area. Next to the usual arrays of vegetable stalls are sections devoted to colorful clothes, some hanging, some in big piles on spread-out sheets on the ground. The clothes are almost exclusively foreign in nature, easily identified with their Korean lettering, Chinese characters, European logos, and even American flags. Yet most show little sign of wear-and-tear, no doubt due to careful selection, cleaning, and ironing. At the equivalent of a couple of USD per shirt, they make for an affordable supply for locals.

When the author was growing up as a secondary school student in the US, a favorite conversation topic among his Asian-American group of friends was the perceived "weirdness" of their respective Asian families.  The concrete example of "strange" were mostly bouts of what can be termed social aloofness, with awkward gift-giving during holidays, awkward presence and absence of affection, and even more awkward get-together of friends and families .  The comparisons were always with non-Asian families, were social occasions, to the Asian kids, seems always so smoothly conducted.

Another week, another news of terrorism wrecking havoc .  This time the setting is a high-end hotel frequented by high-flying foreigners in Bamako, the capital of recently politically unstable Mali.  The gunmen shot past the armed guards and front barricades of the building, taking over the building and picking off more than a dozen of foreign guests before being killed in a counter-assault by Malian and French commandos.  With the world still so focused on the aftermath of the Paris attacks, comparatively less attention has been given to Bamako, but for this attack can be more significant.

There is no doubt that the terrorist attacks in Paris is unfortunate, and it is perfectly justified that traditional media are filled with news of latest developments and social networks are filled with messages of condolences.  Killing of innocents are morally and legally wrong and deserve to be condemned.  But the label "terrorism," after years of its continued threat to the Western world , should be more or less learned by now.  The very purpose is to generate attention through fear, with collateral damage to innocents as a tool.

When mentioning Japanese films, those in the know often come up with a few titles of horror ("the Ring" being the most well-known to a Western audience), cheesy tales of lost love (the list of tear-jerkers in this category goes on and on), or gruesome social critiques that evokes thoughts through exaggerations ("the Suicide Club" is a highly suggested film in this genre).  In all three, the ability to use an effective script for storytelling, often with limited budgets common for Japan's relatively small domestic market, is a key for success.

For someone that has lived for years in the tropics, the coming of the monsoon has become more of a signature for passing times than change of seasons.  And just as past years, the author getting his "start-of-rainy-season" diarrhea and fever (quite literally) as the first rains of the monsoon land in Iringa.  Even as he holds his stomach in pain on the bed for much of the day, he cannot forget the romanticism that he has come to witness every time this year as he retraces the memories of the first rains in tropical Southeast Asia .

Over the past few years, some international media outlets are starting to label Rwanda as "the Singapore of Africa."  On the surface, the idea is ridiculous.  The international commercial and financial depot that is Singapore is at least 60 times as wealthy as Rwanda in terms of per capita income, and the two economies share little in terms of economic structure and development history.  Rwanda's landlocked nature, and the fact that it is surrounded by neighbors with dismal infrastructure , means that strictly following the Singapore model will get Rwanda nowhere.

Upon arriving at the Kigali Airport on his three-day trip in Rwanda, the author was greeted at the arrival gate of the beautifully constructed and maintained building by a young, uniformed taxi driver.  "Where would you like to go, sir?" the young man respectfully half-bowed and politely asked in fluent English .  The author, usually doubtful of airport taxi solicitors (too many bad memories of getting ripped off in Asia), was initially a bit hesitant to disclose his destination, but quickly relented when shown the car in the impressively well-organized rank of uniform and clean blue taxis.

For people interested in ancient Chinese history, the Three Kingdoms era (roughly the second to three century AD) is one of the most familiar portion.  The titular novel on the subject, romanticizing the heroes of the era, along with numerous movies, books, and video games based off their stories, have become hits across much of East Asia in the past decades.  However, most of the interest in the era focus on the earlier half of the era, when various warlords and generals make their historical debut from humble origins in their respective lofty goal in uniting China in an era of internal divisions.

上周，著者曾以當事人的角度觀察了 本組織的同事們是如何以一種表面上的不以爲是來打發一個令人悲傷的新聞 。很可惜的是，這件以同時男友被殺害開始，以其同事的心理崩潰而突然離開組織而結束的故事并未在最近的一個星期繼續發酵，以至著者無法再以實際事例證明這件事情對所有人的持續傷害。但可以肯定的是，即便這件事情永遠不再同事間的會話中被再次提起，它對這個組織，特別是對其抱有“在非洲拯救世界”理想心態的所有外國雇員的心理打擊是持續的，所造成的心裏陰影是永遠的。

In the downtown areas of Iringa, there is the usual array of Tanzanian eateries serving local favorites like rice and beans, chips, and grilled meat, along with localized versions of Chinese, Indian, and Western favorites. Some of the more high-end restaurants frequented by moneyed local businessmen, officials, and foreign tourists on their way to nearby national parks try even harder to specialize those local favorites in a more higher-end setting. The result is restaurants that, while still fitting for the local environment, create more sanitary and secluded environments for foodies, local and foreign.

「もし身近な場所でとんでもない悲劇が起こったら、皆さんはどう反応するんだろう？」著者は何となくこんなことを思いながら、6人の同僚と土曜日の晩御飯を食べていた。その料理はまさしくもアフリカにいる外国人らしい：パスタにサラダ、赤ワインとジュースを備え、締めはクッキーとアイスクリーム。もちろんすべてが手作り。まあ、単なる普段料理に使える食材や調味料が不足してるので、これはすでに驚くほどの豊富。7人はカジュアルな会話をしながら、食事を終わらせ、ポップコーンをつまみながら夜遅くまで映画鑑賞…

In his now 27 years of existence, the author has never been to a proper wedding.  To him, the pompous ceremony is cringe-worthy in its underlying meaning beyond all the obvious pomp.  The cheesiness of exchanging vows to be side-by-side forever always have that fearful element of a permanent contract between two people, one that requires enforcement through changes in circumstances and personalities.  A wedding is, beyond ceremonial symbolism, a real symbolism of newly required maturity, one that the author is be no means ready to accept .

In front of a downtown hotel in the dusty highway town of Mbeya on Tanzania's far western borderlands with Zambia and Malawi, "the China World" shop still overflows with imported electronic goods coming through distant ports. Among the goods that arrived via possibly two days of rough slow ride on trucks from the far eastern coast are supposedly the latest cellphones from China. Advertised on big colorful banners as "high-resolution videos and crystal-clear sounds," the possibly exaggerated descriptions of shockingly inexpensive devices begged first-hand demonstrations as proof. The permanently emotionless Chinese shopowner has no qualms about turning on some music videos on these devices for his curious Tanzanian clients. Out came the sounds and dances of the latest American hip-hop hits, something that the middle-aged shop-owner with little English skills could care any less about.

The more one learns a language, the more one starts to notice the unique subtleties that are idiosyncratic, but can at the same time conflicting. My  journey in mastering the Swahili language  spoken in Tanzania sees plenty of previously foreign pieces of linguistic rules being understood as things that are inherently local. For instance, Swahili words don't have any consonants endings. Foreign loanwords, for instance, generally end with the letter "i" to ensure consonants do not finish any word when pronounced.

As part of his work in rural Tanzania, I attended weekly one-on-one classes to master the local lingua franca that is Swahili. Despite English being the working business language as well as the main language of instruction in local schools secondary and above, to work with people with less than adequate amount of formal education, like the farmers NGOs work with, being able to communicate and comprehend at least some of Swahili, as well as the local tribal language of Kihehe, is almost a requirement to succeed.