Less than a week

There's less than a week remaining of my forty-two day hitch in Tanzania.  I do love Africa, but I am ready to go home for awhile.  Life in Africa has it's attractions.  The place certainly gets under your skin, and I know I will miss it.  Everything here is more intense, more intimate, more pressing, more real.  The complaints and concerns of Westerners pale and shame when you watch young girls stroll happily behind their mothers with twenty-five litre containers of water confidently balanced atop their head, feet clad in homemade pieces of discarded tires, children playing with toys crafted from wire and string and discarded water bottles, boys lugging impossibly heavy loads of firewood, men and women bent at the waste in the heat of the day swinging pangas to cut grass, ever wary of puff adders and black mambas.  As we bike through villages without electricity or running water, you are met with warm smiles and energetic waves and shy attempts at greetings in English, unlike in town where you are just as likely to be subjected to leering stares of jealousy.  Those leers are easily disarmed by meeting their eyes and confidently offering a heartfelt Swahili greeting, but still, the abject poverty is strongly felt.  Compassion gives way to practicality, for you have to accept that you can't help everybody, but even so, the general aura of happiness from a population with so little, is humbling to say the least.  Africa is a much needed attitude adjustment.

I ride my bike, waving at the prisoners clad in orange jumpsuits clearing brush for cassava just down the slope from the local jail, the guards standing nearby, and they all stop what they are doing and flash big friendly smiles and return my greeting.  I would not trade the experience for anything, but I am ready to get back to Canada, and my life there.