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A Miracle
 Always in my heart, as I prepared for this safari to Tanzania was wondering if I might find any of the wonderful people who had taken care of me and worked on the shamba of coffee back in 1962. I remembered especially Petro Ama and his wife. I was in their elaborate beautiful wedding. We walked from one ceremony on the shamba a few miles on dirt road to a church for the celebration I’ll never forget. Then there was Bakari Omari, and Abdullah the Muslim who went on hunts with my husband and a crew, whose task was, when an eland or impala was shot, to run up to the animal and slit its throat before he died, so the Muslim’s on the shamba could eat the meat. I remember the nights when a leopard was up a nearby tree, and our dogs barked the whole night through. And elephants would come into my garden and stomp around, they were sort of the beasts of the coffee plants, tearing up whatever they marched through. And spotted hyenas would wander in the night with their strange yell.
I had no idea how I would be able to find if anyone from those days still lived. But the reward would be huge if I could find someone. By chance, after a whip and a whiz and a bounce and a boom in our giant Land rover, we arrived at a huge fancy hotel owned by Aga Khan hanging on the edge of Ngorongoro Crater. It overlooked across a huge valley toward Lake Manyara, misty as though it was. When we met the manager, I threw out a question - had he heard of Petro Ama who worked on the Farab 5 coffee plantation. I told him I had lived in Karatu sixty years ago on that plantation and wondered if he had heard of that it. The man stopped for a minute, paused, and said he remembered a Petro Ama, and he knew someone who might know about that family.
Well, the bad news was that both Petro and his wife had died of cancer. Smoking strong cigarettes had been popular back in the day. But yes, he did remember the Farab coffee plantations. The manager thought a minute, and said he was going to get back to me. For the first time I had hope. Apparently my other two friends, Bakari Amari and Abdullah were both deceased. But the manager knocked on my door and said, I think we have the family you are looking for. Petro Ama died, as had his wife, but his son was alive and took tourists on tours of Karatu and the popular sites. So, his son, Justin was called, and would he be interested in meeting me, and in two hours I was hugging this miracle. He was a guide, and his children were all in school, and his wife was a beautiful joyful lady who didn’t speak my language nor Masai. To be honest, I was in tears most of the morning because I couldn’t believe we had found Petro’s son. It was a miracle of a miracle.
Immediately, Justin took me to the burial place of his father and mother and we prayed there, I am remembering the laughter and adventures we had made with my then husband when I was pregnant with my first daughter. God had really stepped in on the golden memory this day. And we will continue to be in contact. So, though there was so much disappointment in my climbing attempt, more important came an extraordinary miracle to be able to connect with someone whose father and mother had been my friends 60 years ago. When God wants His kind of divine moment, He gets on it. And good things blossom. We visited Farab 5 (though it has another name today) to see the new process of growth and preparation of the richest of coffees. Of course, everything was modern these days. And the little cottage where we lived with only a garden in the front where I grew Daliahs, no electricity, and only a fireplace for Christmas celebration, with a small living and dining and two bedrooms is now a huge house with all kinds of luxury and, of course, electricity. I didn’t like the feel of it as much as I loved the old days of life on the shamba.
Justin road with us for a day or two, and he and his wife invited us to their home for a feast. We had a celebration of delicious food cooked by his wife and their private chef. Not only was it a feast unique in every way, but I could feel the blessings God would bestow on these modest but special people. They gave each of us a beautiful Masai fabric to wear. We posed for pictures and then hung the last chain of prayer flags done by incarcerated youth at 201 Poplar outside their house among the trees. It was a beautiful sight. Leaving them was sad, but a miracle never flies away.
The hardest part was the long drive from the entrance of the park back to Arusha avoiding tedious road traffic - cars and trucks and motorcycles and people walking on the sides of streets, and wonderful crops of home-grown food and giant trees of papaya, mango, showing how prosperous the people of Tanzania had become through agriculture and art and simple but loving Christians.
I wanted to cry for the Masai who had cared so much about me and who sang their farewell songs as we were driven off in a grand Toyota Land Cruiser, which would become our home for the rest of the trip in Tanzania and Yuseph as our personal driver - and my heart sort of broke, leaving the beauty of the soul of the people who cared about me, now wrapped in my Masai fabric mansa cloth, which was the warmest thing to wrap up in when the weather skipped and jumped to enjoy itself and we humans had to re-invent warmth as we bounced our way through jungles - maybe not jungles, but the dirt roads curving and swerving up and down the borders of Ngorongoro Crater, which is really owned not only by the brilliant Masai tribes, but is home to the most divine of animals. It was in this park that we hung the most prayer flags that the boys in 201 Poplar Pod had made. And as the flags blew in the wind, I knew God was reading them and their prayers would be read by others who passed that way.
Masai men, shepherds of a sort, wear a series of plaid, squared, brightly colored mostly red or dark blue thick cotton skirts and shawls wrapped over their shoulders. They constantly adjust these giant squares used as formal, even daily dress and they might wear two or three at a time, depending on the weather. Once while bouncing across a bristling cold cross country Landover trip on the way to the site of Olduvai Gorge, where the Leakeys found the first remnant of humankind back in the days when I lived in those parts, the 1950s-60s. We were heading that direction. I had not dressed warmly, but was freezing cold, so our driver pointed off in a distance that there was the sign of the well-known low mud huts of the Masai, surrounded by some sort of wired fence to keep the animals at bay.
Exiting the small pueblo, two men were strolling down the dirt road, possibly heading to the market in some distant field, and wearing mostly dark red and dark green fabrics. Our great driver immediately stopped the Land rover got out and began to chat with one Masai - he also being a Masai. Within a few seconds the two men had returned to their village, and immediately arrived on foot with three or four samples of their warm, heavy cotton plaids and squares. I immediately pointed to the one of two reds, and it was warm as toast, and within five minutes, I was wrapped up in warmth and the two Masai were happy to have sold one of their high-level fabrics. These are the ways of the Masai who have built Tanzania into a fascinating, loving, welcoming country that is safe and joyful wherever one goes.
~ Rev
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audrey@audreytaylorgonzalez.com
www.audreytaylorgonzalez.com
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