GOP in Tanzania

More exploring today. I’m feeling less and less like a tourist as I walk down the street and street vendors don’t flock to us like they did a week ago. Most of the people around here know that we’re students who will be here for long enough that it’s not worth pursuing us to buy cheap souvenirs. Even when we’re exploring the city, we walk with a purpose and the locals assume we know where we’re going.

Classes have been great the last couple of days – we are all so glad to be learning more and more Swahili. The waiter who works in the hotel restaurant almost every night has taken to challenging us more and more and asking for our orders in Swahili and teaching us the words for the food. I’m so grateful that as long as you make an effort, the people are more than willing to help you. If you’re not willing to make an effort, they will simply assume you are a tourist and treat you as such, no harm done.

I had two interesting experiences yesterday:

First, Christina, Jan (a guy, pronounced Yan), and I were wandering the city and ran into someone we knew! Martha, the program director, was at the corner store where we were picking up a few things and when we told her we were searching for coffee she told us to hop in her car and she would take us to Kibo Palace, where “the best coffee in the world” was. So we piled in for the two-minute drive and ended up at one of the nicest hotels I have seen. This hotel would have been gorgeous in the United States, but in the middle of Arusha it was downright out of place. We enjoyed the coffee and the company (Martha is always up for a great conversation), but at the end I felt like I had left the country for an hour to grab coffee and then returned. It left a bad taste.

Second, we finished dinner last night and were sitting in the lobby checking our email, etc. when a Tanzanian man asked about where we were from and when someone responded that they were from Pennsylvania his response was, “Ahh, when are the Republicans going to reclaim Pennsylvania?” We all did sort of a double-take and assumed we had misheard him. “What was that?” “When are the Republicans going to win Pennsylvania back?” He then started listing all of Pennsylvania’s former Republicans senators. Well this is interesting… He proceeded to tell us that he is a Republican through and through, a huge supporter of “Richard Milhouse Nixon, Ronald Wilson Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush and George Walker Bush. George Walker Bush is the most peaceful president the US has ever had. He teaches morals and values.” Wow. I think it may have been one of the strangest sensations I have ever experienced: a foreigner defending your country’s policies while you criticize them. He really thought that W. was a godsend to the world and that the Republican Party was infallible. He would have made a great American, also, because when we asked him how he felt about Obama his response was simply, “I am a Republican, I cannot support him.” What he thought about Sarah Palin? “She is great because she speaks the truth and has good morals.”

Obviously this goes both ways and most liberals have no reason to dislike a candidate other than that he is a Republican, but we all commented afterwards on how perfectly he fell into the party propaganda that both parties spew at anyone who will listen. The oddest part about this conversation for us, though, was that this guy knew just as much about American history and politics as we did. He knew every president and their middle name, so many policies, and every Supreme Court justice’s name. It’s situations like this that make me feel so ignorant – I just recently learned that the president of Tanzania’s name is Kikwete. I can safely say I never imagined that I would have a conversation like this one in the four months I am here. But I guess I’m happy to experience things that are out of the ordinary.