grim from mildew and falling to pieces. Surely it is one of the few international airports without a visible clock. There are no hustling taximen or begging children outside the door. It costs fifty cents to enter the airport grounds, and they can’t afford it. A safari guide named John collected me in the minivan in which we’d spend the next two weeks. It was a beaten, slew-wheeled, butt-sprung vehicle. John managed to keep it working (except for flat tires and getting stuck, and a rear hatch that sprang open in a remote corner of the Maasai Steppe with a lion on one side of the road and an irritated mother elephant on the other). We drove for an hour and a half through the smoky African night. Smoky is not an adjective chosen for artistic, evocative reasons. According to Tanzanian government figures, 90 percent of the country’s energy generation is just plain lighting fires. Virtually all the cooking, heating, lighting, and manufacturing in Tanzania is accomplished by the same method you use with burgers on weekends. We arrived on the outskirts of Arusha, the principal city in northern Tanzania. Here was another stained and flaking assistance-to-developing-nations structure —the best hotel. No air-conditioning, no screens, and not much happening in the bar. In the morning we drove to Arusha proper, a low sprawl of neglected stucco buildings, with here and there a large government office made of that inevitable aid-donor cement. Half the businesses downtown had something to do with doing something with tourists, and the rest sold used refrigerators. The thin and sluggardly traffic was made up of colonial-era Land Rovers and large, woebegone trucks with obscure South Asian brand names. A few trucks were full of farm produce. A few were full of people. All the others were broken down by the side of the road, with men lying under them, occasionally working on the truck mechanicals, but usually sleeping. In the center of town, in a traffic circle where one bus seemed to be permanently circling, was a monument to the fact that Arusha is, geographically speaking, halfway between Cairo and Cape Town. This is something that Arusha has never been accused of being, metaphorically speaking. Outside the small business district, the roads were lined with scrap-wood and palm-thatch stalls, some with signs that overreached the mark— HOLLYWOOD BAR —others selling modest goods, such as scrap wood and palm thatch. Vendors who couldn’t afford sheds sold goods more modest yet: pieces of bicycle tire and
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