Footnotes from Tanzania & Zanzibar

Nursing mosquito bites and jellyfish stings,
I recalled how painful it had been to leave Tanzania after living there with my family. We’d moved to Dar es Salaam in 2005 when my husband accepted a job as Director of CDC's AIDS project there. Like me, our children were excited by the prospect of living in a country with landscapes like Mount Kilimanjaro and the Serengeti.

It wasn't hard to adjust to life in Tanzania with two teenagers. After living in west Africa in the 1990s—in Cote D'Ivoire—our kids adapted seamlessly to the international school in Dar es Salaam and made friends immediately.

I picked up some Swahili and learned to drive on the left side of the road while shifting gears with my right hand. Plunging into community activities, I joined the board of the International School, taught a writing class, and tutored local children in English at a primary school. I also wrote a monthly column for a magazine called Dar Guide.

I came to love the foreign sights, sounds, smells, and tastes in that east African country. It helped having the Indian Ocean only a block from our house. An avid swimmer, I’d check the tide chart each day and try to swim when the tide was in.

It also helped having yoga classes with my friend Cathy who had children the same ages as mine and served on the school board with me. Cathy and I hadn't seen each other since we moved away from Tanzania, and seven years later we planned a week-long reunion in Dar and Zanzibar.

Return to Dar

Lucy (l) & Prudence (r) with Terry (c)

Dar had changed a lot in the years since we’d lived there. Most of the dirt roads on the Msasani Peninsula where we’d lived had been paved, and there were new shopping centers that made it easier to buy groceries. The downside of such development was that faster cars and paved roads made it more dangerous and less pleasant to take long walks on the Peninsula.

Salum Kambi, Artist

Few of our old friends still lived in Dar when we returned in 2014. I met up with an artist friend, Salum Kambi, who told me that the economic downturn had been a disaster for local artists. Two galleries where he used to exhibit his work had closed due to a lack of tourists. I also managed to meet up with our former housekeeper and guards. They, too, had been hurt by the economic downturn even though they’d found jobs.

Back in Zanzibar

Stone Town

After a few days in Dar, Cathy and I flew to Zanzibar and spent a day wandering around Stone Town. It was like stepping back in time, into an Omani Indian world that had flourished there centuries before. Little had changed in the decade since we’d first visited Zanzibar, although buildings in Stone Town seemed more dilapidated as did the pot-holed roads.

A Zanzibari artist I knew, Maadi Aussy, told me that he hadn't been able to paint in recent years because watercolor paper was hard to find and few tourists were coming to Stone Town. Aussy still sold his vivid watercolors of Zanzibari doors and dhows in an outdoor stall at the historic Portuguese Fort.

Stone Town

Cathy and I took a taxi to the east coast of Zanzibar and stayed at a small hotel I knew from earlier trips to the island. It was blissful being by the Indian ocean again, watching local fishermen sail out to fish while village women harvested seaweed when the tide was out.

In the years since I’d visited, the white-sand beach in front of the Blue Oyster Hotel had eroded away and the owners had to haul in huge coral rocks to bolster the cement retaining wall. Another unsettling change was the presence of jellyfish in the water. I’d never encountered them on previous visits to Zanzibar, yet they were everywhere this time. I couldn’t avoid stepping on their transparent blue bodies as we walked the beach, and I couldn’t swim without getting stung. Erosion and jellyfish were unsettling signs of climate change around the Indian Ocean.

Indian Ocean

Cathy and I enjoyed the warm sun and long beach walks in Zanzibar. When she returned to the U.K. a few days before I did, I realized that the best part of our three-year sojourn in Tanzania was having family and friends around to experience it with me.

While my husband's job may have lured us to Dar, I’d made it mine and wrote dozens of articles for Dar Guide, along with a novel about that special place and time. Our sojourn there also figures largely in my travel memoir, which will be published in 2023, “Circling Home: What I Learned By Living Elsewhere.”