The Bleached-Sea in Tanzania
They hadn’t told us much about the place, just that it was a safe haven. I suppose that made things worse, because it moved my expectations even further away from the truth.
I have always been a “rainer-complainer”. Grotty weather irritates me. Despite the lack of rain, I had already spent a lot of my time in Tanzania complaining about the weather; about the stifling heat from the relentless African sun, the thick, oppressive, muggy air of dry-season, and the oily film of sweat and sun-cream I was constantly coated in. Complaining about the freak, torrential showers under which we would suddenly become drenched, but somehow not refreshed. Just even more clammy and humid than before.
It was cold that day, and the sky scowled down at us as we stepped off the dala dala. Strange as it sounds, something did hang in the air. Something unpleasant.
I remember us actually chatting as we approached the gate, perhaps at that point unaware of the sky, or the air. As the gates opened for us, a bell rang, and it was then that the waves came.
From three separate entry points along the grubby, crumbling building, they spilled out and headed straight towards us. Every last one of them. We were pulling them, like the moon guides the tide. Time seemed to jar, or perhaps my mind had simply developed some momentary power to stall it, and the bleached-sea was gliding towards us, closing in.
As the waves crept closer, some transformative threshold must have been crossed, for in a moment the bleach-sea had begun to separate into individual droplets, and the droplets then transformed into people. Horrifyingly strange people. They all wore the most bizarre combinations of tatty, ill-fitting clothing, and the closer they came the more the details began to appear. Their faces were a sore combination of stark white and red-raw; sun-marked, drying and painfully scabbed over. They were partially concealed under the peaks of various large, grubby sunhats.
The orphans drifted towards us in ominous silence, but before I had acclimatised to the sight before me, they had reached us, and one of them rushed at me, his arms outstretched. The single strangest feeling I have ever had was that split-second of repulsion in which I recoiled, horrified, before looking into the little Tanzanian boy’s milky-blue eyes and realising that this was just a child. More than that. They were orphans.
Albinism is far more widespread in Africa than anywhere else in the world, one study putting the Tanzanian ratio at one in 4,000 people – a reality to which I had been completely ignorant. Believed by many tribes to bring luck and prosperity, albinos are hunted and murdered across the country. Their legs, genitals, eyes, hair, and even skin, are highly coveted. This orphanage, we believed, would be a relative safe haven for these young, parentless children to live out their inevitably short lives. Albinos, we were told, rarely live past the age of 30. Cancer is their greatest killer.
After being found or finding themselves this protective sanctuary, the albinos stay here for the remainder of their days, removed from the dangerous threats of the outside world but also, sadly, from life itself. And though a safe haven, perhaps, this place was the furthest thing from a haven imaginable. The orphans sleep three to a single bunk, the mattresses are a thin, rotting sponge and there is no bedding to speak of. The floors of the buildings are cold, wet and grimy and the food looked revolting. The entire place is infected with a sweet, putrid smell which hangs in the air and catches at the back of the throat.
From that day on, far from being the “rainer-complainer”, every time it rained in Shinyanga all I could think of was what the orphans would be doing at that moment in time; their feet wet and blue with cold, their tiny, shivering bodies underdressed and crammed onto a bare single mattress.
As we passed back out of the same gates through which we had entered, the insane juxtaposition of the life awaiting me, and the one they had to live out, confined to this side of the gate, was almost impossible to comprehend. I did go back and visit again, but I didn’t stay. I have been moving about the world, meeting people, interacting, experiencing life ever since. The orphans I met will all still be there now, in that miniscule “safe haven” of living hell. That is, those that are still living.
Nothing could push someone more towards seizing, exploring, and confronting things head-on, because they can’t, and they won’t. But I can, so I will.
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