November 10

A lot of the vendors in the market are so used to mzungu that it’s impossible to get a reasonable price from them. For example, I’m trying to buy a large mortar and pestle to crush coffee beans. Matt got it in Nyambe for 2000 schillings; the guys here started at 15000. In any village bananas cost 20=/, in Ndanda they go for 200=/.
Yesterday I was going to buy groceries when I met Peter along with Andy and Joanna, two VSO lab techs from the Phillipines and Holland, respectively. They were standing outside their car surrounded by a group of Africans, and I my first thought was that Peter had hit one by accident. I got closer and they beckoned me over, my Swahili is better than theirs and apparently there was some breakdown in communication.
Mangoes here are collected in three ways. In secluded areas people wait until the mangoes fall and pick them off the ground, but so far this hasn’t worked for me. In most places kids run around and throw stones at anything that is remotely ripe; they take one bite, realize the fruit is no good and go for another stone. Most people in Ndanda hire somebody to go into the tree and shake down all the fruits at once, then they keep them all in a bucket until they’re ready. One laborer was shaking a mango tree when a baby owl fell out. Like a fishermen who stumbles upon a pearl, he figured that this owl was worth a lot of money to some white person and was trying to sell for fifty thousand schillings, what I make in a week and what he might make in a month.
The others were perplexed. Why would anybody want an owl in the first place, and what could possibly make him worth so much money? Peter thought he would sell it for witchcraft of some sort, and that its various body parts would fetch money that way. The laborer told me it would eat chickens. But I understood badly; it would live near a chicken coop and eat all the rats and nasty animals that disturb chickens. I told him we didn’t have any chickens, but still there was no reduction in price. Obviously none of us were going to buy him, how do you feed a baby owl? But it was adorable, with soft feathers and huge owl eyes. We wanted a picture and Peter gave a cigarette, but it was no deal; 2000=/ cash or nothing. We were all put off by his ridiculous and everybody left. When I was returning from the market one of his friends tried to negotiate a deal with me, but the man holding the owl scoffed at any reasonable price and wouldn’t even look at me. I asked him who else would even be interested in a baby owl and he replied, implausibly, that one of the nuns would pay the quoted price. So the Benedictine Sisters are driving up the prices of Ndanda’s raptors.
I ran into Andy and Joanna again at dinner and we talked about how we ended up in backwoods Tanzania. “In America,” I told them, “you can’t bargain for owls.”