Tracking Tom Cruise in Tanzania

The winds have arrived in Ujindile and like any good Tanzanian guest they brought gifts: a cloudless blue sky, a proud lingering sun, and visibility for kilometers on end. Everyone is about the village—women carry baskets of beans on their heads, students in giggling groups on mkeka shuck mahindi, uniformed preschoolers play kata (hopscotch on steroids), bees swarm and settle, goats mow the overgrowth, the harmonic choir gives the sunset a soundtrack, and the lazy Peace Corps volunteer takes it all in from her hammock.

Yes, the height of hammock season is upon me. I fight the morning frosts with trail runs on the newly dry footpaths, group meetings (mostly in preparation for the community garden we’re planting), clinic talks (how to fight anemia with no iron in your diet…boil a few nails and use the juice to cook, Where There is No Doctor is an astounding resource) and more AIDS education at the primary school (ask any one of those sixth graders which white blood cell HIV affects most and they will tell you chembechembe saidizi T4 ...I’d put pesa on it). Constant motion is my morning mantra. By mid-day the sun has taken the bite out of the high-altitude bitterness. By afternoon that big bright jua lays over the land like a blanket. This is my cue to crawl into that clay dyed piece of canvas attached to two mammoth white eucalyptus trees, and let Ms. Windy season sway me in her gusts.

I busy myself with small tasks like learning new vocabulary, checking groups’ budgets, and other simple paperwork. I grab a book on chicken husbandry or micro-business, and a handful of sticks for Tusker. I write bad poetry. I make small talk with neighbors, I shell sunflower seeds, and I daydream about Swahili fluency.

Last week I put my feet up with a stack of papers—notes and plans from a previous volunteer dated five years ago. Replaced Peace Corps sites are interesting. As a replacing volunteer you go about your day to day work focused on the present and the needs of now. You give condom demonstrations, immunize chickens, and make plans with PLWHA (People Living with HIV/AIDS) all the while forgetting that someone was here before you; that your work is the extension of someone/s successes and failures. It’s like an inherited landscape but instead of painting over it, you add colors to the sunrise.

These are the types of things one thinks about when one sways away an afternoon.

When I first arrived at site I heard many things about the particular volunteer whom these papers belonged to. She was a saint (or goddess, depending who you talked to). She rid the village of AIDS, built a dispensary from twigs and sticks, and drove a chariot pulled by winged donkeys every morning to guide the sun. There is a picture of her in the town office—long gray hair, a modest smile, and dark wise eyes.

In the stack of papers I found this letter-

Dear Tom Cruise,
I’m a Peace Corps volunteer living in a small African village in the southern highlands of Tanzania. There is a villager by the name of _________ who has five children and owns one of the local drinking clubs. Although he has a different skin color he is in every other way your likeness. He is your African twin. I thought you would like to know.
Sincerely,
Ex-Volunteer

I straightened up a bit in my canvas. A Tanzanian Tom Cruise? In my village? This was an unexpected gem of a letter. Somehow it had escaped an uncertain future in airmail and fan club inbox and found its way serendipitously into my hands. I decided to follow up on Tanzanian Tom Cruise. What was his connection to the previous volunteer? Does he know who Tom Cruise is? Do they have anything in common—height, age, religious views (though rare, scientologists do exists in Tz)? Who was the Kat to this Tom? I intended to find out.

I waited until Sunday—official get out of the shamba and loaded on ulanzi at the klebu day. I awoke with the church bells calling the faithful to service, and me to my yoga mat. Warrior, Eagle, Butterfly—all poses I much prefer to Kneeling on Hard Wood. I stripped down and washed my hair in the courtyard faucet, drip drying in the sun. I dug through an old pile of People Magazines and found a good picture of Tom. Memory refreshed, hair dry, and kanga on I headed to the klebu.

The klebu was as busy as I’d ever seen it. Men stood peeing off the main road into corn stalks—highway markers signaling the exit ramp into klebu. Music was blasting, two young dusty-skinned watoto (children) bounced their boney knees and swung their bodies to the bongo beats. The fiery sun had ignited a thirst in the village as I’d never seen. Dozens of men were scattered about the klebu courtyard playing checkers, yelling, leaning, drooling over fried pork, and helping each other to various dark doorways—but which of these dark doorways belonged to Tom Cruise??

I made a weaving pattern around the masses, greeting, shaking hands, and making mental notes to never use my right hand to eat again. I searched sweaty faces for signs of Tom Cruise: a twinkle in an eye, a dimple, aviators, anything—nothing; nothing but drunken men in second hand clothes and smiling mamas in bright kangas.

I’d been out and about for a few hours, stuck in the sun making small talk while secretly stalking a celebrity look alike. I’d gotten lost in my mission, was sunburned and thirsty, and not in the mood for the blood thinning pombe. The only place left to look for Tom Cruise was within the dark doorways of the pombe club rooms—I questioned just how serious I was about this hunt. Things were looking bleak.

Just as the local lush threatened an uncomfortably long handshake, Nixon, a member of the chicken group, rescued me. He brought me to a quiet group in the shade. He ordered me a warm pepsi and friendly banter about tetea and jogoo (hens and cocks). It was then that I saw him. Not short but tall, with a huge smile, and unmistakable eyes. It wasn’t Tom Cruise but Morgan Freeman—those eyes were a dead give away. He shook my hand and murmured something that sounded like get busy living or get busy dying, but in Swahili. I drank my Pepsi. Now that I thought about it, even Nixon himself had a Jim Carey smile (circa Dumb and Dumber), Samweli had a Clint Eastwood jaw, and that kid who brought the soda—didn’t he have a hint of Haley Joel Osmond? The oddest part of the whole revelation was that I remembered what Haley Joel Osmond looked like. I finished my Pepsi.

The sun was slowly descending and I still hadn’t found Tz Tom. He, like the real Tom Cruise, was elusive. I respected this. Having spent the afternoon with Haley Joel Osmond and Clint Eastwood who was I to complain? I decided to head back up to my nyumbani. Morgan Freeman escorted me up that red carpet dirt road. Fifteen minutes later I was back in the hammock, enjoying the first class sunset. This was my Ujindile—sunsets and stars, kata and choirs, afternoons in the hammock, and Nixon’s coming to my rescue. So Tz Tom doesn’t have a place in it. I caught a glimpse of the first twinkles over the horizon and thought- we all see different things in a single landscape.