This is Martin.
He’s my guard. He is about 5’2” and I’d be surprised if he weighed 100 lbs. As far as guards go, he's pretty non-threatening, except he carries a bow and arrow at night and has a vicious dog named Simba (lion in Swahili). I think the bow and arrow is just for show because security isn’t really a problem. The top of the concrete wall around the compound is studded with spiky fleurs-de-lises, and each entrance to my house has an extra door with iron bars and 1-2 padlocks.
While my interns are away teaching in their villages, I’ve had to keep myself busy. Grad school certainly takes up some time, but I still have leftover hours to fill. Luckily one of my interns brought a Rubik’s cube.
You might not know this about me, but I’m a logical mastermind.
In the afternoons Martin and I have hula hoop practice. I bought some tubes at the local hardware shop and made a couple of hula hoops. Martin is a quick learner and has already picked up a few tricks.
The other day, Martin and I were hula hooping in the gravel of our yard (which he rakes every morning at 6 am) when he looked upward towards Mount Meru (2nd tallest mountain in TZ after Kilimanjaro), pointed, and said “fire.”
The top of the mountain was smothered with white puffy clouds. Since Martin speaks about as many words in English as I do in Swahili (about 10), I needed a little clarification, so I pantomimed a volcano erupting out of the top of my head and asked, “erupting?”
Martin nodded and said, “fire!”
“No,” I said, “Clouds.”
“Fire!” he said and nodded emphatically. Not one to contradict someone who carries a bow and arrow and whose best friend may or may not have rabies, I decided to go with it, and began planning my climb to the tin roof to get out of the way of the lava flow.
“Erupting?” I asked again. “Did they say so on the radio?” I pointed to the house and mimed a radio, which actually looked more like a phone. The radio in his house was blasting Swahili Christian rock music, not the urgent government warnings one would expect during such a crisis.
“Yeah,” he said with another confident nod.
Still certain it was just a thick cloud cover, I decided to call my friend and counterpart Mohammed to get to the bottom of it. Mohammed has spent several years working as a cook on climbing expeditions on Kilimanjaro and Mount Meru. He would know.
“Mohammed,” I said when he answered, “Martin is trying to convince me that Mount Meru is erupting. Is this true?”
“No. We expect other mountains to erupt. Not Meru.”
“That’s what I thought. Thanks.”
I told Martin what Mohammed said and he started to get a little annoyed. He kept insisting that the mountain was erupting, so I texted Hussein, our safari and expedition guide who has been guiding climbs for 14 years. (Sidenote – as I was writing this, there was a knock at the compound gate. It was Hussein – write of the devil! – and I couldn’t let him in because Martin has gone to bring some giant pots to a neighbor and has locked me in the compound. Also, the chickens are starting to circle me with a hungry look in their eye.)
Okay, back to the story.
Hussein texted back, “Who is Martin? It is not.”
If Hussein says it’s not, it is definitely not. The best way to deal with this situation, I decided, was to let Martin think I believed him. About 5 minutes later, as Martin and I stared at the thick clouds around the top half of Meru, Mohammed called on Martin’s phone. A heated discussion ensued and then Martin laughed and passed the phone to me. Mohammed (who may be the male Tanzanian version of me) was calling to check up on the lies Martin was spreading. He told me that Meru wasn’t erupting, but that people were burning trees on the mountain. Fire.
I don’t know why I didn’t get the literal meaning of Martin’s words the first time around. Having lived over 2 years in Cameroon, I am pretty familiar with slash-and-burn practices. Perhaps in my current approach to cross-cultural situations as fraught with subtext, I was looking so hard for the other meaning, that I missed what was right in front of my face. Or maybe I just wanted to spice up an afternoon.
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