"In Tanzania we have a saying that when you travel, you cleanse your eyes."
-John Wihala
Each day my Tanzanian host father wears a gray suit to work. His undershirt is a yellow and green striped soccer jersey with a giant portrait of President Barack Obama on the front, encircled by stars and stripes, and “The United States of America!” He tops it off with a gulf hat and either black and white dress shoes, or sandals. For the motorcycle ride to work he wears, on top of all this, leather biker pants and jacket with 1920’s biker aviators.
He served in the Tanzanian military, taught in primary school, declined an offer to play profesional soccer for a team in Tanzania, and worked as a miner. These jobs took him throughout Tanzania, and Zambia, until two of his brothers and their wives died of HIV leaving behind many young children. He returned to his home village of Kanani, where he adopted all of their children, and got married. Most his nieces, and nephews, and children have gone to school or moved out on their own, but even with the ones still remaining our house was a hodgepodge of relatives. He has one young niece and two nephews that live here, plus one of his sons and his son’s wife. Mr. Wihala’s wife lives about two days away by bus and is the head teacher at a primary school. They rarely see each other except during times when school is not in session.
Upon his return to Kanani he helped lobby the local authorities to install a pipe system in the village so that people would not have to walk great distances for water. His success in this endeavor gained him respect throughout the area. More recently he served on the police advisory board for Tanzania in Dar Es Salaam. Now he is in charge of several development projects back in the region where he grew up. His work in the development field has taken him to Denmark, and Vietnam. Vietnam he says is his favorite country because “there, they are very serious about development.” He added on another occasion, “I have never seen people so active!”
He was all too enthusiastic to have me volunteer at the local school, and more than happy to let me stay with him and his family. His house is quite remote. We have to walk along a dirt path for over a mile just to get to the dirt road where the “costa”--or large van-- picks up. From there it is another two hours to get to a paved road, and another hour to the city. He was recently interviewed by a newspaper for his work on one of his development projects, and one of the reporters asked him “why do you live all the way out here? You have money. You could live anywhere.” He laughed and replied, “I believe the expression is, ‘Rome was not built in a day.’”
The entire village is beautifully covered in corn and rich sunflowers. The land seems never to curve over the horizon, but sway in rolling hills forever. Our house, like all rural houses in Tanzania, is made of mud brick, with a wooden frame, and in our case, a corrugated metal roof. The house is extremely nice compared to most of our neighbors. We have solar panels, which operate lights at night, and a radio almost 24/7. We also have a TV, and a backup generator. These rarely get used. The furniture is nice, and the decorations are a fine conglomeration of carefully chosen items, and cheap advertising like the plastic coca cola and pepsi beach balls hanging from the living room ceiling.
On one of the tables sits a small framed poem in English with a few couplets about how special birthdays are. This would not seem overtly unusual, except that Tanzanians, as a general rule, do not know the date of their birth. All of their driver’s licenses and birth certificates simply say Jan 1st of the year that they were born. For this reason a common New Years greeting is “How old are you now?”
When Mr. Wihala finally settled down in his home village of Kanani, he took a job as secretary to the man who was responsible for coordinating projects between Kanani and neighboring villages. His boss was bad at his job and the other village coordinators began to rely on Mr. Wihala more and more. After a time, during one of the meetings of village coordinators, Mr. Wihala suggested that they hold regular meetings to address potential problems before they arise, rather than waiting until a problem occurs and then scheduling a meeting sometime in the future. He also suggested that someone be elected to oversee all of the village coordinators and represent them to other village districts. Everyone liked the ideas and voted in favor of them. In the same meeting they elected Mr. Wihala from secretary to leader of all of the village representatives. Since no institutions existed to coordinate projects and problems on an even larger scale, he quickly moved up to become the project coordinator for the entire Njombe region. He assists with all NGO’s and tries to weed through conflicting policies to form practical solutions.
“Have you ever thought about running for office?” I asked him one evening.
“I did once, but I did not bribe anybody,” he chuckled, “so of course I did not win. I made a lot of good speeches, but that is not enough.”
Frustrated by the system, Mr. Wihala wrote a successful grant to the UN, and used the money to teach and disseminate information—written pamphlets, speeches, and meetings—on the proper role of government, and what elected officials should be doing for the people.
“It was very successful," he concluded with his lighthearted smile. "Many people learned a lot, and I angered a lot of politicians. Now I have no chance of running for office.”
I was out of the village for five days during our school’s Easter break. On Easter day, one of Mr. Wihala’s relatives—a cousin who suffering from severe undiagnosed mental illness-slit the throat of a twelve year old boy in the village. The cousin was confused and thought the boy was trying to steel from him. The cousin was taken to jail. Mr. Wihala spent Easter day trying to see that his relative went to a mental institution rather than die in jail. A funeral was held the following day, and people came from different areas to give their condolences.
Two days later when I returned from the city, Mr. Wihala was interviewed by one of the major television news stations for his current agricultural project, ADDA (Asia Denmark Development Association). We were told that a story on his work would air that night. We fired up the generator about forty minutes before the expected time and turned on the news. The generator struggled away, power fading in and out, until finally, just as the introduction to his project appeared, the generator died. A large crack was letting air into the engine, and needed to be welded.
Everyone found the timing comical. Over the course of the next hour Mr. Wihala’s phone rang nonstop from friends and relatives all over the country. “Yes, we are watching right now…yes… thank you…thank you,” he told them in Swahili. The rest of us snickered in the background during each call. “It is sometimes easier to simplify things,” he instructed us.
One day I mentioned in passing the hospital in Paramio.
“Oh yes, I know where that is,” Mr Wihala said. “That’s where I got my leg fixed.”
“Oh? What happened?” I asked.
“I broke it.”
I inquired as to how that happened, and instead of the one sentence “motorcycle accident” explanation that I was expecting, he embarked on an incredible story.
As the leader of several different development organizations, one project that he helped to oversee was the funding and operating of a mill for a small village. With it they could mill their own corn for personal use and for profit. The mill was purchased, and as it so happened, it broke shortly thereafter. Mr. Wihala went to go inform the four heads of the committee in charge of overseeing the mill that it needed to be repaired. An extra three million shillings, or $2,000, had been set aside for upkeep and other expenses. He expected it to cost more than one million shillings to repair the machine.
When he met with the committee it quickly became apparent that they had all withdrawn money from the fund in different amounts, and simply trusted one another to pay it back honestly. They were all dishonest, and “invested the money in personal projects—” Mr. Wihala phrased generously. Ultimately they could muster only 150 shillings between them, or $.10.
Mr. Wihala gave them an ultimatum: “First, you have one week to find a way to get that mill working. Then I will be back to discuss how we will retrieve the money.”
The next morning since he was still in town he decided to go and check with the four committee members to see if they had made any decisions.
They had.
As Mr. Wihala rode through town on his motorcycle a truck idled precariously beside the road such that traffic had to pass between it and a series of large rocks on the other side of the street. Thinking little of it, he continued along. As he passed in front it sped forward towards him. He had time to leap from motorcycle, but could not get out of the way entirely. His left leg was crushed. “Bones were everywhere,” he said.
Fearing that Mr. Wihala would take them to court, and ultimately jail (a death sentence in Tanzania because of the terrible conditions), the four committee members had paid off a group of boys—too young to even have their driver’s licenses—to assassinate him.
After the truck shattered his leg he immediately got out his phone and dialed local friends, family, and the police. The boys, frightened and clueless, suspected that he was drawing a gun, and fled.
“I then asked a woman for some wood and rope for my leg,” Mr. Wihala said, “and someone else to bring me some cloth.”
“And you had to tie your own splint?”
“Yes, and I did not cry,” he declared with conviction and not mere vanity. “I am a leader here. Everyone was afraid, and if they saw me crying they would be too scared to help me.”
After tieing his own splint he meticulously gathered all of the scattered pieces of bone and tied them into the cloth.
While rural Tanzanians may not be well qualified in first aid, they are adept at exacting mob justice. They grabbed heir cars, and motorcycles, and farm tools of potential devastation, and with the help of the police, caught the boys. Fortunately the cops apprehended them first. This meant that the boys were only beaten to within an inch of their life. The mob would have gone the extra distance.
Mr. Wihala was taken to the hospital, and the last thing he remembers is giving the nurse the cloth of bones and instructing her to give it to the doctor. When he came to some seven hours later the first thing he did was ask to see the cloth. It was produced, and when he opened it his bones were still there. Angered and dismayed, he immediately requested to change hospitals.
When he arrived at the new hospital a day or two later the doctors informed him that it was no longer safe to reinsert his bones because his body was fighting off severe infection. They might even need to amputate his leg.
In the meantime the police informed him that the boys were being sent to jail. He told the police to wait. “If they do not have to cut off my leg, than they can go free. But if they do, then I hope they die in jail. In the meantime they will be praying for me, and for my leg.”
After two restless months he learned that they would not have to cut off his leg. The police demanded that they be bribed to not throw the boys in jail. Mr. Wihala refused, both on principle, and because he knew that it would be more difficult for the police to incarcerate them, than let them go.
The new doctors re-broke his leg, cut him open, and reinserted his bone fragments. After the surgery the doctors informed him that he had done an incredible job of collecting his own bones.
“Everything fit back together perfectly,” the doctors told him. “Not a single piece was missing.”
“I was very proud of that,” Mr. Wihala added—and damn right he should be!
One month after the bones were reinserted he was needed, in his role as assistant chief of the police advisory board for Tanzania, to go oversee a meeting two days drive away.
“I was important by that time,” he said smiling, “so they found me nice transportation to get me their, and I led the meeting.
The four committee members who were ultimately responsible for the attempted murder, took their stolen money and fled into hiding. Some of them reappeared several years later, sick and desperate now that their money had run out. Mr. Wihala did not bother with them when they returned.
“People respect me more after this because they could see that I was kind. Even today when I saw members of the boys families they were very polite and respectful to me. But also I think that they are afraid of me,” he laughed lightheartedly, “afraid that I am still bitter and angry at them, and that I may someday want revenge.”
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