With my schedule allowing little room to breathe, exhaling was not even an option before I departed on my journey here to Africa.  All the anticipation and excitement of a new adventure remained suppressed and tightly bottled inside as I traveled despite all conscious efforts up to that point to unwind and simply let go.  My mind sifted through thick stacks of personal worries and the weighty thoughts of disappointment in unfinished business of my own agenda as the engines grew louder and we began speeding down the runway.  On a lengthy recovery from an ordinary cold that proved to be more annoying than infectious, I quickly set four colored and glossy pills of generic sinus medication onto my tongue, sipped from my complimentary orange juice, swallowed hard and prayed my anxiety would grow as distant as the continent I was leaving behind.

To my satisfaction, I woke to a dry but crusted nose, another complimentary orange juice and a certain weightlessness that is only granted in that strange sort of post-stress moment when you realize for every mile you have traveled at 30,000 feet you have grown farther from the place you were so recently held hostage by your own situation and are another step closer to your destination.  Arriving early enough in Nairobi to make my first breathes of fresh non-re-circulated  air crisp and brisk, the fact that I had just traveled half way across the world to film a movie that could potentially affect the way thousands live everyday was a sobering reality that quickly made residence in the foreground of my mental landscape.

The terminals and the escalators, the moving sidewalks and the duty free’s and the foreign accents and unfamiliar buses all blur together in a sort of surreal, spinning carousel ride played in fast forward with only brief moments of real time that seem like they actually play in a distorted slower than life sort of motion.  To highlight one of these moments that stand in my memory outside of time and space, I recall a conversation I had with a man I sat next to on the bus ride from Nairobi to Arusha.

As we boarded the bus, the open seats all in a row in the back looked most appealing but the solo traveler right in front of us poached one to my dismay and left me, last to board among the team, searching for another seat elsewhere.  As divine intervention would have it, the only open seat was in the middle of the bus in the aisle, a few distant rows from the only people I could adequately communicate with.  Feeling isolated and alone, I took my seat with my briefcase at my feet and my camera backpack on my lap, too exhausted to care about any of it.  Not having closed my eyes but a minute, the Tanzanian next to me spoke up in a soft and cordial greeting.

Maxwell was born and raised in Tanzania but educated in Oxford so his English made for a wonderfully familiar but uniquely different experience all in one.  We talked about politics in America, politics in Tanzania, politics in Kenya and then how he likes to eat Snickers bars.  Feeling educated but bored with the conversation, I was still intrigued by this man next me smacking on an intensely potent menthol chewing gum and began to then rack his brain of every Africa question I could think of that I would want answered by a true local.  He was joyous to answer and as I was to listen and somewhere in the middle of all of it we found ourselves sharing war stories of a similar kind.  Disregarding the typical wisdom of his parents, Maxwell left the potential of a well paying job in the city to pursue the calling of his heart in charity and ministry.  His tales of journey, self-realization, mistake, ignorance, trial, blessing and sacrifice echoed through the expanse of my thoughts that day as an unannounced and unexpected voice of encouragement and affirmation, officially marking my welcome to Africa.

Upon arriving it was time for more farewells and good lucks, handshakes and hugs.  It was at this point that we boarded another bus from Arusha to Moshi and my fatigue of travel and feeling ill caught up with me all at once, sending me into a deep and peaceful sleep despite the frequent potholes and speed bumps of the two lane poorly paved highway.

Waking again, still half asleep and really just trying not get lost, I followed Megan and the team walking around Moshi to our first contact, who would store our bags for us for the day in his Safari Tour office.  Amazed at the immediate friendliness of the locals on the street, I found myself in multiple conversations surrounded by comedic Tanzanians speaking a jumbled English Swahili, all wanting to find out about me and my stay in Africa.  Skeptical of their true intentions, it became obvious after a few minutes of conversation that I was a walking dollar sign and assumed to be a European doctor.  This meant that I must want to go on a safari here in Africa and that no one could possibly give me a better deal than they could.  Unknown to me then, this would be a foreshadowing of how we would be perceived in our village as well as an interesting statement on how European and American cultures have previously interacted with those of Africa.

More to come…I can’t think straight to write anymore today and you probably can’t read anymore either.
Here’s the rest of the random quickies from the last few days…

Here are a bunch of little Oska’s photos that he took on my camera too…He’s a natural.

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