and Russel Crowe do not dance

There is a whole word importing culture not from United States but from other sources.

From India.
I'm speaking about literature, music and movies.

When in Europe we think about Bollywood, we think about B-movies with fatty dancers and incredibly long love stories between humans with no sex scene and no car accident. More or less is like this, but in Tibet, Indian movies was the non plus ultra of the imported goods.

Drudak, our driver in Lhasa was a little tacky and thug. The car was his empire, and one day, arriving to the office, I discovered that he just put fake bullet holes stickers along all the car side, just all around our NGO logo and that he installed, at his own expenses a small TV, just over the ashtray.

The interiors of the car were changing from leopard spotted to the Manchester United flag every month.

Anyway, he probably spent all his money on this TV, and so he had only one DVD to play. Video music from Bollywood movies.

I think I watched 'It's the time for Disco' at least 20 times every day, because the villages were very far.
A gang of women, beautiful and very fat compared to the LA standards dancing. The One Diva in front and 50 others in the back all making the same not very athletic and archaic typically Indian movements. Let's say that the lack of choreographer was repaid by the abundance of human being.
The song was technically very poor, but the girls twirling their wist were cute enough.
But then, something disgusting happened.
Another gang of men started to do the same hips shaking and hands cute movements, singing in play back.
And, if the Diva woman was beautiful, the man was, well, he was Shahrukh Khan always him since fifty years, always playing the role of the teen in love.
"Guys, do you really think is cool for a man in his late forties to dance in a disco with a group of men?"
But I wanted immediately to cut my fast tongue for telling to a group of Tibetan that the only foreign stuff allowed was in fact a crap.
But they just looked at me as my taste for art was completely underdeveloped. That, in fact, was the coolest thing to do for a real man. Also for Drudak, the one sticking fake bullet holes in the car.

So I shut up, and started to think about Fred Astaire and also Michael Jackson, all good dancer and looking cool, and I started to think that also other Hollywood movies, with some song and dance in the middle, would not appear ridiculous...No fucking way!
What would be of the Gladiator if he starts to dance in the arena with his fellows morituri te salutant?

Mr Crowe would have say goodbye to his Oscar, and to his fun club.

As a Gladiator would say: "to Caesar what is Caesar's...and to Indians what is Bollywood"

Amen

That's amore

There are still some romantic expats...they fall in love, they struggle in wet bed sheet by night, they over drink to forget, they eat irregularly and...they speak a lot.

Anita elected me as her confident.
My duty was to listen almost every night by telephone or live at least two hours about Nicholas.
Quite boring, but sometimes I'm compassionate.
I knew EVERYTHING about this guy. Who he was talking to, which movie he was downloading, where he was going, with who and why.
Because love pain it's talkative. At least for women.
And I was forced by Anita to interpret his every gesture in a perspective that was favorable to her, such as:
his t-shirt are full of stains because unconsciously he wants to say he needs a woman, or
he was kissing this other lady only because with you would be something serious.

Until the day our friendship broke up.
She called me overexcited, like a mongoose was running up her trousers, anticipating some good new: "Can I pass by, I mean NOW?"
"I was going to sleep, it was a terrible day, this pipe blew up and..."
"Ok, thanks, I'm coming"
Because friendship between man and woman cannot in fact exist.
She arrived ten minutes later, waving the mobile as if it were the hero of the day, what did I say? Of the era.
"Look! he send me a message!"
But I could not look, because she decided it was much more effective if she read it directly, declaring like a Shakespearean actor: "Take off my skin! And I wont scream! But if you smash my heart, I promise to make you cry!", all the exclamation marks were added by her.
"I'm not sure about the meaning, but looks like he actually loves me!"
I didn't know who to tell her, so I simply did: "Onion"
"What?"
"It's a riddle...the answer is 'onion'..."
"It's not possible! Look! He's speaking about his heart, and.. and..."
"Anita, it's onion"

And I've never seen an onion to make someone cry more than then.

The Proffessionals

We had to select 15 villages to build the water supply systems, in Tibet.
Sorry, in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, part of the Great Republic of China.

Of course, and not because is China, first thing to do is to cooperate with the local authorities, so we were going around with a man from the District that was the photocopy of the Inspector Gadget.
The good feeling was immediate.

And so we passed the first week going around together, 10 people in the same Toyota Land Cruiser. Completely illegal, but we were with the Authority.
We were young and we still found funny to seat in the trunk like teenager on a Friday night when only one guy of the band had the driving licence.
Me, my expat fellow, Dawa the factotum, Diky the translator, another Diky and Jigme as social promoters, the Two Nymas (Nyma Big and Nyma small), Drudak the driver and Mr Gadget.

The aim was to visit possible villages with no water supply system, talk to the community to know if the people was interested in this kind of project, and then collect data, visit the spring if any and study the feasibility.

That day, after 4 hours driving, we arrived in this very very very isolated village up the mountains with a bunch of scattered colorful houses. we park and sit in the courtyard of the head of the village.

They start to offer us Chang. The home made barley beer, that Tibetan are not nonalcoholic and they can and do drink. And they are extremely welcoming hosts.
So, to show you appreciate their hospitality, you should drink not one but three cup of Chang.

Was a sunny and warm day, we enjoyed a lot sitting there, drinking Chang, waiting for the people to join the meeting. And when a new family arrived, three more cups of Chang for everybody.

Six hours later the courtyard was a clandestine casino, as the staff tough everybody how to play blackjack. Children were playing also, but with their own new invented rules, and the driver left our Government representative without a penny.
Everybody was so drunk and happy that we were forgetting to make the meeting. But at the end we did, even if I will never know what was told because I was helping the translator to reach the car while she, crying, was saying: "I'm too drunk to translate, now you gonna fire me!"

On our way back we stick on the raincoat of Gadget "Kick me".

By the way, since then we learned to call the village before coming and to give appointment for the meeting a couple of hours in advance.

At the end that village was selected, and the very day we opened the water supply system, an old lady came to me and asked me: "Can you give me a washing machine, now?"

goliardic games on our way back, that day. Gadget is the one on the right

fastest animal in Africa

Is not the cheetah.

The first cause of death, in the short term, for an expat, is car accident.

And it’s impressive how Tanzanian apply the pole pole (slowly slowly) philosophy to everything but driving.

They are never in a rush to finish a job, to cook, to give an answer, to walk or to respect an appointment, but when they are driving they cannot stand to lose time.

Driving these old crappy chariot imported second handed from China or Japan, they run as every moment of the life is not expendable and must be saved.

Freud would say is something related with sex or the father, in this case, the Mother Queen, or better, Nyerere.

Or maybe is because it’s not necessary to be a Masaai warrior to be taller than a Chinese and the seats in these cars are so tiny and uncomfortable that the driver wants to end this suffer, at least this one, as soon as possible.

But also I saw so many people suffering to obtain the most basic needs (a doctor, water, food) and at the same time acting like struggling was the only and normal way to reach them, that I honestly do not believe that the public transport driver do actually care about the passengers. Or themselves.

Otherwise I cannot explain why every, but really every day, I was in the Arusha-Moshi road, there was an accident. A bus in the river, another one down the bridge, one just jumped inside a family mud house. And everybody dead.

 The most fierce were the dala dala. Old Toyota Caravan with 25 Chinese shaped seats and as many standing room in four and an half square meters. Kind of private public transportation. One guy driving, another one hanging from the side door calling costumers and waving small bills in the hand.  Collencting old and fat mamas on the fly or men with baskets of live chickens. Space for everybody, for fifty shelling I bring you to Arusha in a blink of an eye.

And running like cheetahs, faster than cheetahs in those narrow and prick roads, overcoming everything and everybody  without decelerating a moment. And between dala dala was some kind of war: you are stopping to take this costumers, so I’ll overcome you to take your next stop costumers.

Of course there were no official stops.

Why they were driving so crazily? Just because they could.

Very late I came to know that the owners of the dala dala were policemen. Renting them to schizophrenic guys to run them. That’s why, even if driving like cocaine addicted, they were never stopped by the Tanzanian police, very lavish in receiving bribes for every nonexistent infraction.

But I have my personal theory: they like to overcome you, risking clearly their lives, because in their back in all the dala dala backs, was something written, and often a picture or a drawing. The meaning or the association of idea of those, was and still is an enigma.

 “Love is the answer”, with the picture of Ban Ki Moon next to one of Gheddafi.

“When I’m rich, you will be my bitch”, and a young girl with the burqa and the sigh of a prayer.

“Jesus is the answer”, for no mentioned question, but the picture of an American rapper

The poster of the 1956 Ten Commandments

And this one, the interpretation of which has ignited a long debate in the car: “zero to hero with god”.

In case the mentioned ‘god’ was intended to be the dala dala driver, we unanimously decided to overcome it. 

lesson 5: how to make friends (not all the projects smells good as water)

ok, ok...I've told you very bad things up to now.
But also that this is the best job ever.
And I don't mean "being an expat", I mean " building aqueducts, bringing water"
there are a lot of expats who implement project like "improving education quality though enhancing the capacity building of the head teachers", or (new from yesterday) "teaching to people who came out from 'social mobilizer' university how to be a real social mobilizer".
All this is good, almost all the projects at the end have some positive outputs, but all this people suffer from invidia penis when I say: "I opened the tap and water was flowing".
Nothing is better than water.
Try to imagine your life without water:
you have to carry a bucket of 20 liters of dirty water for 5 kilometers and then you have to wash your face, brush your teeth, rinse your clothes, drink, cook, shower and so on. AH! you really want to have more water next to home.
Anyway this is just to say that when you go first to a village, and you gather all the people around you, if your first sentence is "we would like to bring water" the all stand up making an ovation and they run to kill a goat to honor the honorable guest.
If you go and say "we would like to stop you cut the clitoris and sell your daughter for three cows", they will not kill any cow. Or, maybe the worst, is when you say something that sounds like: "We are here to teach you how to use better your territory". At the end you are a white coming with good shoes to tell them that their millennial culture sucks and you know how to make it better with few steps. It is not necessary to be particularly proud to get pissed off.

In Tanzania there were four or five project at the same time. I was running the water project and the Country Coordinator (a woman i would never to look alike, selfish and ridiculously careerist, in that small NGO we were working for) was leading a project of "Land Use Planning"...they were going in the Savannah with a GPS to mark borders between Masaai villages (and I wont tell you how many conflicts can arise for the territory) and the people was making sacrifices to chase them away.
But they loved the Water Project and the man who was leading it (my supervisor. I will tell you about him next week).
The same people who fled their meetings, were digging trenches eight hour a day when the pipes arrived.
One day there was this official ceremony in Ilikrumuni village, because the community finished to install the main line. They invited also Kate, the nasty Country Coordinator. I delivered the message reluctantly, and she didn't know whether to be pissed of by the prospect of spending a whole day with me or whether to be gay to have to possibility to show to the community the she was the boss.
When we arrived, the school class was decorated with flower, women were singing, men were wearing jackets, and tons of rare food was prepared for all of us. Rice, meat, potatoes, fried bananas, pilau, fresh fruits and vegetables.
After the speeches and the food, then they bring the goat, full, roasted underground, and we started to eat again.
I had my revenge: "You see Kate, for the Water Project they don't kill goat as sacrifice to chase us away. First time you eat one?"      

typical picture for report: children happy around the new tap.