Missing The Sun

It was nighttime when I stumbled out of the airplane onto a Tanzanian tarmac with twenty-one fellow university students, and two professors. Half a world away we pulled ourselves out of winter and parachuted squarely into summer. I couldn’t see much, but I could smell it all. Rich earthy air crossed with accumulated acrid perspiration and classic brick red dust that gritted between my teeth. The smell of travel. Here I am, this is Africa. Tanzania, the worlds thirty-first largest country and one of its poorest, snuggled against the ocean on Africa’s east coast.
Time passes and I near the end of my trip, I stayed behind while the rest our group took a game drive. A two-man grounds crew rolled onto the campsite. They began to erase the traces of us. Bury our fire, sweep around the squat toilets. The two Tanzanian twenty-something men carried a portable radio. The dial radio from the early nineties spouted reggae songs through crackling reception. I set my book down and grab a rake to help. We introduced ourselves. Elias.
After a minute of exchanging hand gestures, and reading the confusion on each other’s faces, Elias grabbed the radio, and turned the dial to an English radio station. He smiled and returned to his rake. The talk radio analyzed a nuclear North Korea and some massive sewage leakage. I smiled and my foot drew in the red dirt.
Half an hour has passes. The men are relaxing and preparing a meal behind a storage shack. I walk the fifty steps or so to join them. I sit in the dirt and watch water boil under a pan of meat. I hope they don’t ask me if I want some, I don’t know the right hand gestures for vegetarian. I decide I’ll eat it. They never ask.
I show them my Ipod. Eyes widen, I play Bob Marley. Elias knows the words. Buffalo soldier, in the heart of America, fighting on arrival, fighting for survival. I smile as one common thread in two very different tapestries appears. Eli and I exchange cell phone numbers, “I’ll call you when I home.” I promise, “to say hello.” He calls my cell phone immediately, checking if I gave him the right number. The meat keeps boiling while I try to explain my phone doesn’t work on this continent.