YO! YEH!

Last Friday, I went to the village. AGAIN. Another village. Not cow village, but a small town called Sumve which was highly developed by Roman Catholics – there is a huge hospital, two large schools, and a church – but not too many houses or stores, much smaller than Misungwi. The main problem, or you could say adventure, is that the easiest way to get from Misungwi to Sumve is by getting on a bike taxi and riding for about an hour and 15 minutes. So that’s exactly what I did.

It was a great trip. I will start out first and foremost by saying that, as per Peace Corps rules and regulations, I most certainly wore my bicycle helmet for the entire duration of the trip. Absolutely.

A bike taxi is just a young man with his bike, on the back of which he has installed a carrier and put a nice pad on it to carry a passenger. They are all over Misungwi, I’d say about 200 in total. It is the only realistic way to get around the town and to nearby villages, since noone has cars and you’d need a all-terrain vehicle anyway to get most anywhere ‘in the bush’ that you’d want to go. Typical fare around town is 200 shillings [20 cents]. I take them occasionally, but mostly just try to encourage these guys to keep at it, as they do incredibly difficult but important work, and are not very well respected despite what I consider a very noble effort at self-employment and self-dependence.

The young man who carried me is a good guy, and was one of the bike riders I was with a few weeks ago in an AIDS seminar, so he likes me, respects me, and was happy to haul my fat ass over mountains and rivers and all kinds of crazy little paths. I would have gotten completely lost on my own, but he has been driving his bike taxi for 4 years so he knows the way [he’s 22 now, has been doing this since 18].

It was a great trip. The scenery is breathtaking, though pretty dry and desert-like at the moment [it's a bit hard to get a panoramic view because of the bike guy's back, but it was still nice. I’m trying to figure out how to post a MOVIE clip, which is hilarious and gives an impression of how these bike rides go]. I got lots of great reactions from villagers biking to and from the main market in Misungwi, lots of YOOOOs and YEEEEHs which are the loud screams of surprise that Sukuma men use and absolutely crack me up.

I arrived, met one of my friends whom I had been working with at the Teachers Training College, and got a tour of his school [the school is an all-girls school, and when I left they were doing their laundry. probably the most colorful scene i've seen in Tanzania, second only to a Masaai market - both dominated by reds] We headed back in the early evening, another great ride and even better so since much more of it was downhill than on the way there, so I didn’t quite feel as bad for my driver. For his effort, 2 and a half hours hauling me around, I gave him twice the going rate, a whopping 5 dollars. Far more than most make, and the equivalent of my daily salary.