In Tanzania, an American English teacher reconnects with his students

Mountains can never meet, but people can meet again.

— Swahili proverb

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The mountain was just as I remembered it: high and stark, dusky black against the blue sky. Its name was Meru and, like its sister to the east — Kilimanjaro — it was the remnant of an extinct volcano. It had a steep grade on one side, which gave way to foothills and then to the city of Arusha. On the other was a long slope that rolled out into lakes and plains.

For many years, Mount Meru had hovered in the back of my mind. In the mid-1990s, I had lived in its shadow, in its foothills, just outside Arusha, where I taught English at a local school. I had seen the mountain only from afar, and the fact that I had never climbed it always felt like a kind of failure. Unlike most people who travel to Tanzania, I had no desire to climb Kilimanjaro, which seemed like an overrun fundraising cliche. But Meru was different. Meru was difficult, unforgiving, temperamental, with an air of hard beauty and mystery.

Our bus rolled forward, and I stared out the window at the mountain’s outline. After all these years, it looked the same, though much else had changed. Seeing it again reminded me of my last glimpse of it through a bus window, and of the ache of departure, of the bitterness of leaving all my friends and students and neighbors, but also of the sweetness of having known them.

This was a reunion of several kinds. After too long I was back in this place — to reconnect with people, to find out how things had changed.

But also, I was finally here to meet the mountain.

***

In the morning, I woke to sounds that I’d long ago forgotten: chattering crowds of children running to class, hornbills squawking in the trees, the clanging bell announcing breakfast at the school. As it happened, I was staying where I had lived back then: an old German colonial house in a place called Ilboru. When I had first moved in, back in 1996, it had been empty for many years. There was no water, spotty electricity and a cold breeze that blew down from the mountain, chilling the house at night.

Today, it had been reborn as a bustling teachers’ center with computers and a library and a guesthouse for teachers attending seminars and other travelers.

After I got up, I headed out the front gate and walked down the dirt road into town. This was unsettling: Memory distorts, and so the curves of the road felt familiar but also strange. The trees seemed taller. There were more buildings and fewer farms. The kids were ruder. Yet the air was filled with the same old smells of dust and cooking fires.

When I got downtown, I spent several hours wandering around. The lepers who used to beg by the river had been kicked up the road by trinket vendors. The library was still a sorry, run-down affair, filled with books on Dianetics and other irrelevant subjects. The “Modern Supermarket” had evolved into a liquor store. The Metropole Bar and Restaurant was now the “House of Burgers.” People, in general, had gotten fatter, and they had cellphones. Hotels were going up everywhere. The clock tower by the post office actually worked — and was sponsored by Coca-Cola. The Air Tanzania office was open, but the company’s two planes were broken.