How We Found Atu: Travels, Adventures, and Discoveries in East Africa
The airport in Dar es Salaam is unyielding. We had Johannesburg and Lusaka for comparison after spending 10 days in Mpanshya, Zambia where my husband did some teaching. The real reason for my journeying along was the opportunity to visit our oldest child in her home in Nyololo, Tanzania. A Peace Corps volunteer nine months into her first year, this was the second time in 22 years of life she had missed Christmas with her family. The first was when she boldly chose to leave us at 14 to help deliver supplies and rehab a dispensary in Haiti. That trip, along with other brief trips to conduct service projects in Honduras, Peru, and Bundibugyo, should have been premonition enough that ensuring the well-being of this child might involve more than the usual investment parents make in planes, trains and automobiles .
And so we found ourselves in Dar, “muzungu” with a penchant for choosing the wrong visa line and a series of ATM machines that would not deliver needed cash. We bargained with a taxi driver to please accept the last $24 US we had in our possession to get us to our hotel. That night a series of explosions happened at the nearby armory that literally rocked our hotel and led to an uneasy sleep. At 8 am the next morning we were armed with “doti” in the form of Tanzanian shillings to begin our trip across the country in search of a better understanding of our daughter’s world. We traveled through the city with its mix of new construction and dilapidated concrete ruins side by side. Endless villages peppered the highway with mud huts and women clad in colorful khangas sporting large baskets loaded with coal, cooking oil, or produce perfectly balanced on their heads. In between the towns, where the highway had been engineered with ridged speed bumps, our driver passed the local buses packed tight with Tanzanians at speeds of 100 mph. At a brief stop to visit the choo, we were swarmed with vendors for roasted cashews, renditions of the Last Supper carved out of ebony wood, and hard boiled eggs. Three hours west of Dar, we entered the Mikumi National game reserve. Now the buses passed us as we asked our driver to allow us to gawk at the impala, giraffes, and zebras that grazed unselfconsciously near the highway’s edge. Giant baobab trees majestically marked time. We left the reserve to wind along the Ruaha river where families of silver haired baboons boldly approached vehicles for handouts.
Katie advised that we call her when we entered the Mafinga district so that she could walk the six miles to the main road and guide us in. (It always startles me to be in a land where cell phones greatly outnumber the homes with indoor plumbing and electricity). It was the middle of the rainy season and the downpour started; she directed us to look for a man on a bike with a red hat at the turn off for Nyololo who would lead the way to her house. We must have been rather obvious as he appeared in dense rain, tapped on the window, and said, “you are looking for Atu, I presume.” I assumed it was a mis- pronunciation of her name. Without him we would never have located her along the winding, rut filled, mud trail that led into her cinderblock cottage tucked deep within the village. And “Atu,” the nickname with which she has been christened, is a local Wahehe tribe expression that means, “we give thanks”.
She welcomed us in traditional dress, a long embrace to bridge the nine months apart, and a meal of peanut curry and pineapple that she had prepared over an outdoor fire. Her walls are decorated with pictures of family and dear friends from home attached to pieces of African cloth. We were bearing the Christmas gifts she had requested: a non-stick frying pan, a sharp knife, warm socks (it actually gets quite cold in the highlands of Tanzania), flannel sheets, chocolate bars, Crystal Light, as well as a gift she had no knowledge of: a Kindle preloaded with How I Found Livingstone by H.M. Stanley containing rich history of the land she calls home. This child, who read little with the distractions of her modern life in the states, was now devouring anything she could find.
The three of us retired to her sleeping room, the one secure place from the rodents who remind her each day that they were the true owners of her hut. On guard for their rummaging, I slept little that night – but as I listened to the breathing of my first born and the man who helped make her, I felt profoundly blessed.
The next morning we carried water to boil for oatmeal and wash the dishes. Then it was out to make introductions to the people who now considered her part of their family. Katie’s fluency in Kiswahili had rapidly improved in the isolation of her village. Her Tanzanian Peace Corps partner, Mama Chalamila, has helped her integrate into village life and find meaningful work. A health care worker, she assists in the local mother/child nutrition and HIV clinics and teaches health education in the schools while she develops a project that will hopefully leave her village a better place. Privately she helps a local woman whose husband left her with two small children to develop life skills and tutors a boy who desires to learn English. She clearly finds pleasure and frustration in it all. She has developed healthy coping mechanisms to work through the frustration: a monthly weekend in Iringa with other Peace Corps workers, prayerful solitude, and regular visits to her favorite respite place which she saves for the last stop on our walking tour. An Italian mission organization founded an orphanage for children in her village left alone when their parents died of AIDS. A beautifully landscaped oasis, we round the corner to the pavilion where the children play to behold eight 2 to 5 year olds who run and crawl to her squealing, “Atu”. She has arms big enough for them all.
Our driver, a city boy who grew up in Dar quietly observes the experience. “Life is very hard here,” he tells our daughter as we part ways. Somehow she sees her way through. -Peggy Morris
In my kitchen after our reunion!
At the Orphanage with Cepha
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