Eating grasshoppers and waiting for Kilimanjaro

Here’s how you get to Mount Kilimanjaro from Bukoba in one day. You don’t. Your first flight to Mwanza gets delayed a couple of hours so you miss your connector to Kilimanjaro Airport. So first you have chapatis and tea at the Airport café and then you try to figure out what to do with the next three hours. You read. You nap. And when you get peckish, you dig into the grasshoppers. Crispy on the outside, sort of chewy and nutty flavoured on the in. 

Crispy goodness!

 

They sell them by the handful at the Bukoba market in huge plastic bins: smoked, salted, pili-pili (hot and spicy). You see fellas sitting on the ground, in the middle of a ring of what appear to be shards of transparent plastic. It’s the wings they’re pulling off. (At this point, the insects are dead but I can’t tell you how they become so.) A gust of wind sends the wings fluttering once more, as if to mock their newfound incapacity. The green bodies, an inch to an inch-and-a-half long, are then fried up with the aforementioned seasonings and sometimes smoked over a wood fire. I had a plain salted one. It was mild flavoured. Bits of the crusty body got caught in my teeth which was somewhat disconcerting. I passed on seconds but my photographer friend Scott ate a few handfuls, lamenting the absence of beer. He said they were filling, but greasy.

Our flight to Kilimanjaro the next day was swell. We got a good view of Mount Meru, her first cousin, but Kili was shielded in cloud. Even still, her most expansive base, sitting as it does in the middle of tortilla-flat land, blatantly insinuates her upper girth: 5,895 metres above sea level. There is no mistaking her claim to fame as the biggest mo-fo mountain around.

Met a guy named Don on the plane. He’s a tour operator out of Arusha – takes tourists to Ngorogoro Crater, Serengeti, up Kili. He came of age during Nyerere’s presidency when school, even university, was free. We talked a lot about what’s happened to his country since then, how Nyerere’s socialist vision of equality for all has been perverted by greed and self-interest. How discoveries of gold, diamonds, Tanzanite, natural gas and oil ought to help raise the standard of living instead of lining the pockets of the rich. But he seemed defeated somehow. I wished I’d had some grasshoppers to offer him but Scott had them in his bag. I told him I’d met the most amazing people here, that they never complained, that they endured their lives stoically. He said maybe that was the problem. He said maybe people should get angry so things could change.

Then he saved Scott and I a $50 USD cab ride by driving us to Arusha for free. He said “you’re welcome” even before I thanked him, as Tanzanians always do. I thought maybe that’s the problem: centuries of hospitality have invited endless exploitation. I thought of all the people taking from Tanzania, then and now, from within and without. But I also thought, if I was stranded and penniless here, someone would take care of me because that’s what they do. And that’s why, to bring it full circle, CUSO volunteers are here. They’re just trying to pay it forward, and back.

 

All I ever hear: redemption songs