Bombs in Dar

If you watch the world news closely, you may have seen that there were some bomb explosions in Tanzania.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/02/17/tanzania.bombings/index.html?hpt=Sbin

I plan on writing more to put in the blog tonight but I’d like to address this first so that I don’t lose any details as time goes on.

Around 9:30 last night, I was sitting in the dining room with Mama Kawishe helping her with her English class homework. I was just about to point out how prepositions are used when we both heard and felt a large BOOM, coming from what felt like right outside the house. The curtains blew inside the house as though someone had directed a giant fan at them, and we could feel the explosion reverberate in our chests, not unlike the feeling one gets when standing too close to a subwoofer. The windows that were shut rattled and the floor shook beneath our feet. It sounded as though someone had dropped a mattress flat on the porch right outside; it sounded very close, or else very loud.

We were running on generator power at the time, and my first thought was that the generator had exploded. Seconds after we felt the first blast, though, there was a second, and Dada came running into the room, looking petrified and speaking very rapidly in Swahili, pointing outside. Mama Kawishe and I both jumped up and hurried outside, where everything looked normal. We stood for a few moments trying to figure out what was happening, when there was another blast and I, standing in the open-air outside kitchen, felt it much more vividly and went back inside.

Jackson was just sitting at the big dining table inside, and didn’t seem to think anything bad was happening. I asked him if he knew what was going on, and he just said simply, “Bombs.”

To a small town girl in Africa for the first time, this is about as reassuring a statement as “Glenn Beck just got named supreme dictator of the world!”

After a few minutes of me shooting him dirty looks and hissing “This isn’t funny! What’s going on?”, Jackson told me that it was probably a bari, or military bomb storage warehouse, that had blown up, which happens when bombs are too old and not disposed of properly. He said it had happened once before, a couple of years before, and that several people died and it destroyed several homes.

The blasts went on like this for several hours, and stopped around midnight. When I boarded the school bus this morning, Mr. Mchombe (the teacher who sits on my left while the bus driver sits on my right) told me that there were 10 reported deaths, and over a hundred injuries from the blasts from the night before. I was a little taken aback by this news, and he went on to explain that the government will probably not give decent compensation to those affected, or provide enough money to replace whatever homes may have been destroyed.

At the school, all the teachers were talking about the blasts. Around 9am, we could hear more booms in the distance; whether this was more rogue bombs or a controlled detonation of the remaining weapons, I don’t know. I wasn’t fond of the situation at all, and chose to put in my headphones and let the score to Inception be my soundtrack for grading papers. I was jerked to attention around 11am by another teacher, who told me that the radio had just informed everyone that three of the largest bombs were about to be detonated. The other teachers were crowded around the windows to watch, but soon after, the radio announced that there would be no new detonations.

The official report so far is that 20 people have been killed and somewhere around 125 injured, a dozen of those in serious condition. One of the other teachers at the school, Mr. Moses, has a close relative in the hospital from the blasts. The airport was shut down, and several cellular service providers sent text messages out to their clients in Swahili, giving information about unclaimed children at police stations and advising everyone to be calm.

For the sake of my grandparents and other concerned relatives- I am fine. The blasts happened 6 miles south of me, much closer to the airport. As I am typing this, the military is investigating the situation and inspecting other bari to be sure that this incident isn’t repeated. If anyone now feels deterred from visiting the country, let me assure you that this is an isolated incident and that Tanzania remains one of the most peaceful and stable countries in Africa.

Will post again very soon with more news about the rainy season!

Love you Nana and Papaw, Miss you so much!
Mom, Dad, and Eli- I love you and miss you very much. Hope to talk to you all again soon!