Day 13

Greetings from Kabila ya Wilmpilby (otherwise known as the tribe of Wilmpilby). Today we went back to the museum with the promise that the artifacts excavated from the site in 2002 had been recovered. Unfortunately that wasn’t exactly true, but they are close! Museum technicians have been reorganizing the storage unit for the past two days, and they have already found other artifacts from the Iringa region. If they do find the artifacts from our rock shelter, they have offered to give us space in their lab facility to analyze them. This is all very promising. We plan to return the day after tomorrow (kesho kutwa). Cross your fingers they find those bones! We’ve already hauled the inventory forms, camera, and skeletal reference book to the museum twice; perhaps the third time’s a charm?

After lunch, we met a former Calgarian at the Mövenpick (formerly the Royal Palm), a ritzy hotel where we often go to change money, use the internet cafe, or just kill time over pricy coffee. He had a considerably more cynical perspective on Tanzanian life. He had been working as a physician at a rural hospital near Morogoro for about a month. He talked about the high maternal mortality rate, the lack of general hygiene (including in the hospital), and the chronic shortage of medical supplies and technology. He had to fight to keep stray dogs and cats out of the patient wards. We have seen both the very rich and the very poor in Dar es Salaam, but have generally interacted with middle class Tanzanians. They are not the same as middle class Canadians, but life is so different here that it’s hard to compare. However, the third world is always lurking in the streets in the form of the starving, the deformed, and the desperately poor. I wonder what our experiences in the rural areas will be.

Today’s strange African consumer products are:

- Hair mayonnaise
- Casts of the Laetoli footprints
- A taxi with the Manchester United football logo on the windshield (sort of a consumer product)