Circles

The Sunday before last I landed at Julius Nyrere International Airport at about 11:30 pm.  I was returning from a work trip in Nairobi and hadn’t paid much attention to my time of arrival when booking the ticket.  It was only during the course of the week when someone asked me how long I’ve been in Tanzania that I realized the significance.  I would be arriving at the airport, within minutes of being exactly a year to the date of my original arrival in Dar.

This time I knew that the signs on top of the customs terminals do not have any bearing on who can queue in which line and so made my way to the shortest.  Miraculously my suitcase was among the first off the conveyor belt and looking through the customs officers I walked out of the sliding doors and into the balmy night.  The cab driver I always use was waiting and we took the route we always take from the airport and I stared out the window at the patch work of lights and darkness and people and traffic that I always see on such trips.  A year is plenty of time to get familiar.

Later in the week I came home late one night to find a guard sleeping outside our gate in pieces of a cardboard box.  Not our guard, mind you, he was in the watch building on our compound, but another, random guard.  The following morning there was a knock on my door at 7:30 – and a request that a battery be changed somewhere in my apartment.  Returning fifteen minutes later when I was dressed for work, a man came into my apartment saying that the battery for the security service alarm needed to be replaced.  So early and so many questions: was this related to the guard sleeping outside? Where in my apartment was this alarm system?  While I was contemplating these clearly important questions, the man came back in with a ladder.  After a quick search of my apartment, he deduced that the way to the roof was through the vent above my washing machine.  Up he went.  Minutes passed.  I began to get caught up on my ever-important text correspondence.  Suddenly he’s back in my living room. “Torch?”  I dutifully retrieve my headlamp, the security of my building depends on it! Then I start to wonder – what was he doing up there all this time if he couldn’t see?  Amid a flurry of texts, my curiosity lapses and ten minutes later the exercise is finished. 

I get in my car and go to work.  As always, a dalla swerves out at me as I drive down the main road.  There is a man pushing a wooden wheelbarrow contraption on the road, like every morning.  Like clockwork, at a busy intersection, everyone remains determined to claim the right of way, to the detriment of us all.  

Yes, a year is plenty of time to get familiar.  But the nice thing is that here in Dar, I am always surprised.