My Toyota Land Cruiser was cursed by the left breast of an old Chagga
woman while I was living on Kilimanjaro during the summer of 2002.
I was living in the Marangu-Sembeti area with my wife and three young sons. While she worked on her PhD dissertation, and the boys played soccer and argued in Swahili with local boys, I oversaw a dozen or so university students who were spending the summer living in several villages just below the National Park. Kilimanjaro National Park encompasses the mountain above 6,000' (below 9,000' having been part of the Forest Reserve). Along the Park's boundary are approximately eighty Chagga villages. The Chagga have lived on the mountain for four-hundred years and their access to the protected area and their relationship with the Park administration will hopefully be the subject of another post since this dynamic formed the core of our research on the mountain.
Several of us decided one day to see if we could drive around the entire mountain on a dirt road. We had only driven for about thirty-minutes when we pulled over for some reason that I forget, and as most of the others were focused on something out the left side of our vehicle, my attention was taken by an older woman walking towards the front of the vehicle. As she came closer I could hear her chanting as she took out her left breast and pointed it at me and squeezed it. She, and her taunting breast, came up to my unrolled window and while still chanting she took out a one-hundred shilling coin from the folds of her skirt-wrap and reached in and placed the coin on the dashboard in front of me. Fortunately, one student sitting behind me saw the entire episode and was able to provide a second witness to the rest of the party who had missed the entire affair. We mused about it for a while and then continued on our journey.
An hour or so later several of the the leaf springs on the back right of the vehicle snapped in half. Without the critical suspension part the back end of the vehicle sagged and created tremendous problems at any spead about a few miles per hour. After examining the vehicle at length we drove slowly to the nearest village where we scoured the market for repair materials. Several young men who saw our plight encouraged us to use strips of inner-tubes to wrap around the "lift-springy" to hold it. We ignored this idea and found some heavy wire and after using two car jacks in opposing directions to compress the leaf springs we wrapped copious amounts of wire around them and it held quite nicely as we removed the two jacks. But not wanting to push our luck we turned around and headed back home. We only made it a few miles before the wire-wrap snapped.
After several long hours of driving back at only a few miles per hour we made it home long after dark. The next day I took the Land Crusier to a local mechanic who told me I should have wrapped the leaf springs with the inner-tube straps. He ordered some parts and while we waitied for them to arrive I drove around with the leaf-springs tightly held together by the rubber strips that the mechanic wrapped around them.
Lessons learned:
Mbahe area looking towards Mawenzi (right) and Kibo (left)
I was living in the Marangu-Sembeti area with my wife and three young sons. While she worked on her PhD dissertation, and the boys played soccer and argued in Swahili with local boys, I oversaw a dozen or so university students who were spending the summer living in several villages just below the National Park. Kilimanjaro National Park encompasses the mountain above 6,000' (below 9,000' having been part of the Forest Reserve). Along the Park's boundary are approximately eighty Chagga villages. The Chagga have lived on the mountain for four-hundred years and their access to the protected area and their relationship with the Park administration will hopefully be the subject of another post since this dynamic formed the core of our research on the mountain.
Several of us decided one day to see if we could drive around the entire mountain on a dirt road. We had only driven for about thirty-minutes when we pulled over for some reason that I forget, and as most of the others were focused on something out the left side of our vehicle, my attention was taken by an older woman walking towards the front of the vehicle. As she came closer I could hear her chanting as she took out her left breast and pointed it at me and squeezed it. She, and her taunting breast, came up to my unrolled window and while still chanting she took out a one-hundred shilling coin from the folds of her skirt-wrap and reached in and placed the coin on the dashboard in front of me. Fortunately, one student sitting behind me saw the entire episode and was able to provide a second witness to the rest of the party who had missed the entire affair. We mused about it for a while and then continued on our journey.
An hour or so later several of the the leaf springs on the back right of the vehicle snapped in half. Without the critical suspension part the back end of the vehicle sagged and created tremendous problems at any spead about a few miles per hour. After examining the vehicle at length we drove slowly to the nearest village where we scoured the market for repair materials. Several young men who saw our plight encouraged us to use strips of inner-tubes to wrap around the "lift-springy" to hold it. We ignored this idea and found some heavy wire and after using two car jacks in opposing directions to compress the leaf springs we wrapped copious amounts of wire around them and it held quite nicely as we removed the two jacks. But not wanting to push our luck we turned around and headed back home. We only made it a few miles before the wire-wrap snapped.
After several long hours of driving back at only a few miles per hour we made it home long after dark. The next day I took the Land Crusier to a local mechanic who told me I should have wrapped the leaf springs with the inner-tube straps. He ordered some parts and while we waitied for them to arrive I drove around with the leaf-springs tightly held together by the rubber strips that the mechanic wrapped around them.
Lessons learned:
- If cursed by an old breast and a 100 shilling coin turn around and go home.
- If arrogantly ignoring lesson 1, then at least realize that inner-tube strips are rural Africa's version of duct-tape.
Mbahe area looking towards Mawenzi (right) and Kibo (left)
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