Bus to Madisi

Our trip to Madisi started in a 25 passenger coaster with 32 passengers and a chicken. Fortunately, I am quite a bit bigger than most Tanzanians and there was plenty of room. This bus took us to a smaller town called Mafinga where we went to a small restaurant for lunch and waited for our next bus to leave in the afternoon. Sue and I together had 4 meat samosas, 2 roasted bananas, 2 mondazi (deep fried Tanzanian doughnut), coke and water for 2900 Tsh which amounts to a little more than $2. I tried to leave a 500 tsh tip and the manager gave it back to me. Tipping is not common here and he couldn’t figure out why I was overpaying.
The next bus was a public bus called Likikima and someone at the bus station was looking out for us (knew we would be coming through) and got us situated in the front of the bus next to the driver. We waited on the bus watching the shirts in the crowd. One said “I haven’t lost my mind, I sold it on Ebay”. Many of those shirts we discard end up in Africa and are worn by someone who doesn’t have a clue what they mean. We once saw two girls holding hands with one wearing a shirt that said “I like girls who like girls” and in the villages they would only understand a simple, innocent meaning for this because they have no concept of anything else. (If they did they would never wear the shirt) The first stop for the Likikima as the conductor was collecting fares was the diesel pump. Cash flow in Africa is often tenuous and we were paying for the gas directly from our fares. The bus ride was a 3 hour trek on pretty bad roads (read slow) until we saw another bus and a man came to our window and asked us to change to that bus.
It was the huruma bus from VST that then took us through these beautiful tea plantations on the hillsides. Tea is a thick low bush with bright green leaves that grow so close together that the slope looks like a carpet. Pickers with large baskets strapped to their backs were in the fields picking leaves from the plants. We arrived in Madisi around 6 PM just in time to visit some friends of Susan Vinton’s who are getting back on their feet from AIDS with the help of ARV treatments. Ordinarily, AIDS might not be too severe in a remote area like Madisi but because of migrant workers and trucks that come for the tea, this area is not socially isolated. ARV drugs have been made available in Africa if people suffering from AIDS can get to a clinic for them. This is the purpose of the Huruma bus and Susan knows the people in the village and helps them while they get healthy enough to take care of themselves. Sue spent a couple days visiting patients with Susan and a Finnish doctor and I’ll let her tell about her experiences.