I'll take “Games You Play on a Train” for $500, Alex

In February I returned “home” to South Africa. Africa stole my heart seven years ago when I visited here, but it is still strange to have that feeling of coming home when returning to a foreign land. I no longer have to think before pulling out, “Which side of the road am I supposed to be on?” Like I did when I was in California in January, with one close call when I forgot what country I was currently in.
Some things still came naturally to me in the USA. After eight months in Africa with no Starbucks, I made a bee-line for it during my one hour layover in Atlanta. I was outside the Starbucks waiting in a long line when a girl appeared with her notepad to take my order. Without even thinking, it just popped out, “grande nonfat no whip mocha for Lisa”. I still spoke the language.

Now that I am back, I am determined to catch up on my blogging. I have so many stories to tell and they are dying to get out of my head! So forgive me if my blogs jump around in time. I am trying to get them all down before the details get blurry.

For this blog, I am going back to August 2010 when I took a side trip to Tanzania. When I returned from this jaunt, there was no time to write and post the tale as I was immediately immersed in the overwhelming task of trying to open the new daily orphan program in Mansa. I am hoping that with the seven month time lapse, the players in this story are now over the trauma and can look back and laugh at the experience.
Tim and Katrien, is it funny yet?

Blog disclaimer: Let me just apologize upfront for the potty humor that follows. There is simply no way to describe the train trip to Tanzania without sharing the gory details. The Tazara train is not for sissies. In the past, some of my readers have given me crap for discussing crap. If you are one of them, you might want to sit this week out. But you should also know that I promise not to write about it again, I am pretty sure I have exhausted the subject. It’s not that I particularly enjoy the subject, it’s just that it seems to come up a lot in Africa. It happens.

This story picks up where “Naked Knees and Other Misdeeds” left off. Tim and Katrien had just finished painting an orphan center in Soshanguve, doing craft days at both orphan centers, then packing up the AFnet van and moving me 1000 miles to Zambia and delivering supplies for a new program to be launched there. After they had me settled in and had a day of coloring and treats with the orphans of Mansa, the three of us set off for a well earned vacation on the beautiful island of Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania.

Tim and Katrien having spent a good deal of their travel money on gifts for the orphans, and me being a missionary and all, we opted to take the budget-friendly train ($50) rather than fly ($250). Besides, what better way to see the scenic countryside of Tanzania than from the windows of our first class cabin on the express train from Kapiri Mposhi to Dar Es Salaam? We would leave Zambia at 4:00 on Wednesday and at noon on Friday be pulling into the train station at Dar, bop on over to catch the 4:00 ferry to Zanzibar, and then enjoy the sunset from the rooftop bar of our hotel in Stonetown.
Piece o’cake.

We barely made it to Kapiri Mposhi by 4:00, having run out of gas out in the African bush. Luckily a Seventh Day Adventist van happened by and our hero Pius, a friend travelling with us as far as Kapiri, hitched a ride to the next town and came back with a gas can. We had bought our train tickets in advance, to be sure to get all four beds of a first class sleeper cabin so we would have it to ourselves. By the time we arrived and found our compartment, there were already two women firmly ensconced in the bottom bunks, their bags spread on the top bunks. Their tickets showed the same cabin number as ours. We calmly and confidently explained that we however had purchased all four beds of this cabin, so clearly this cabin was ours. They refused to leave. We summoned the conductor, sure that he would right the injustice of this situation. He meekly suggested to the ladies that they ought to leave the cabin. When one bellowed, “you’re just taking their side because they’re white”, he left, declaring that it would be up to us to sort it out.
Katrien and Tim staged a sit-down strike in the corridor blocking the path of passengers trying to load the train. Five hours and several emotional meltdowns later, we were still without a cabin. It was now 9:00 at night.
There were two women in our four bed cabin, and next door were two men in a four bed cabin. The loud woman was married to one of the men in the cabin next door, but she could not sleep with him because men and women cannot sleep in the same cabin together unless they book the whole cabin. It is not culturally acceptable for the two men and two women to be combined. So they got to keep their whole cabins, even though they didn’t pay for them. And we, who had paid for a whole first class cabin, got bumped to second class.
The conductor oh-so-graciously said we could still have a whole cabin, even though these have six bunks and we only paid for four. Our new cabin was at the other end of the train, next to the pleasant odor and banging door of the toilets. It was also the first door that everybody getting onto the train sees. This door did not lock. Therefore, every hour when the train stopped, our door would be yanked open and we would argue anew that we had paid for the whole cabin. Not understanding English, men would be throwing their bags on our empty bunks and trying to climb in. At 1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m.

I am allergic to only two things in this world, and they were both happily thriving in that cabin: dust mites and cockroaches. So aside from the hourly cabin disputes, my sneezing, wheezing, and nose blowing kept us all awake. I was also going through my roll of toilet paper at an alarming rate. We were each down to one roll. In Africa, you must bring your own TP as a mandatory travel accessory. By Day 2 we were all exhausted, we all had diarrhea, and TP had become a precious commodity.

Which brings us to the next subject, the toilets. I call it that, but there were no actual toilets, no porcelain thrones to perch upon. Just a hole in the floor where you could see the tracks going by underneath you. You had to straddle it and try to hit the hole. And mind you, this was not a big hole, so you had to squat low. I don’t know how to describe this feat, and perhaps I shouldn’t try. Remember, we have diarrhea and we are trying to hit a moving target.

If any of you have been on a train, or seen movies set on a train, you know about the normal sway of a train. There is some slight rocking back and forth which some people even find soothing. The Tazara train, however, was not laid during the height of African technology. Have you seen The Ghost and the Darkness? Great flick. Val Kilmer is the brave English chap who comes to finish the railway lines in Africa. He brings in Michael Douglas to kill the lions who are eating his crew. The crew, when they were not being eaten by lions, is busy laying track. Think about it, did you ever see them using a level? My point is, take the normal sway of a train and multiply it exponentially for the Tazara train. Although it’s not really a sway, more like spasmodic jerking.

Squat, sway, aim. Needless to say, not all passengers hit the hole. So this tiny room with a hole in the floor was equipped with a bucket of water to wash the floor down after use. By Day 2, they were out of water, hence the pleasant aroma of this room and our cabin next door. (At the end of the trip, we discovered that the first class car had toilets with toilets! Rrrrgggghhhh)

I must say, Tim and Katrien were amazingly good sports. Tim was able to take gorgeous photos out the window, when he wasn’t vomiting out the window. Katrien was able to fall back to sleep, after finding a large cockroach nesting in her hair. Day 3 we awoke with a sense of unease - the train was too quiet, too still. Why hadn’t we been awakened every hour by people moving into our cabin? Drats! We were still sitting at the same station we were at the night before. There was an accident on the tracks up ahead, we would have to wait until it was cleared. Four more hours we sat on those tracks, 12 hours total.
How do you pass the time when you are stuck on a train for 56 hours? Here’s some fun travel games for the kids to try:
Name that sickness – players speculate as to what is causing the vomiting and diarrhea. Malaria, food poisoning, allergy, dengue fever, parasite?

Name the offending food item – once players determine it probably was something ingested, players try to guess what it was. Was it the eggs or the chicken or maybe they didn’t boil the water for the coffee or tea. Players take turns experimenting by eliminating different foods on their trip to the dining car and see who gets better first.

Find the stinky item in your cabin – Players first guess if it is animal, vegetable, mineral. Then the hunt is on! Players look for forgotten food items left at the bottom of a backpack, old socks, B.O., what IS that smell?

Who can make 10 squares of TP last the longest – self explanatory

Name the object being shoved in your window – at each stop, women would run up to the train with baskets on their head full of food for sale. Players first try to guess what the item is, then decide whether to take the risk – is this item safer to eat than what the train is serving? Bonus points for guessing pastries – anything could be stuffed inside!

Name that language being shouted at you at 2:00 a.m. by strange man inside your cabin – Tanzania has 126 of them

We pulled into Dar Es Salaam at midnight, of course missing the last ferry to Zanzibar. Tim expertly dodged the aggressive taxi drivers and found us a helpful one who drove us from guest house to guest house, banging on doors to wake up someone to find us a room. The driver came back the next morning to take us to the ferry dock. Ahhhhh, we were finally crossing the incredibly blue waters of the Indian Ocean on our way to Zanzibar…

As miserable as that train trip was, it wasn’t totally miserable! I am glad that I had the experience.
The countryside of Tanzania that we passed through was beautiful. I loved pulling into all the little villages and having the children come running barefoot alongside the train.

And buying fresh fruit from the women in brightly colored fabrics with baskets on their heads.
And sitting in the dining car chatting with fascinatingly-accented fellow travelers.
It was an interesting cultural experience, seeing the way that the locals live and travel. This was not a tourist train.

It was also interesting to see the change in the people groups as we traveled north. Different modes of dress, language, facial features, customs. Beautiful land, beautiful people.

Plus I can say, I survived the Tazara train! I would do it again, if I could be assured of that first class cabin I paid for!
But TIA…

Tim and Katrien, good times, eh?