Adventures in beer buying

We’ve become more accustomed to life in Haydom. One of our major accomplishments was negotiating a crate of beer from the local distributer. In Tanzania, you HAVE to return the soda and beer bottles, so it’s quite a hassle to buy beer to take to your house, especially if you’re not returning empties. Also, men, such as beer distributors, seem to like to deal with other men rather than a mzungu woman.

On our beer-finding expedition, we walked up to a distributor, where of course, as in all Tanzanian stores, there were about 5 men loafing around, seemingly doing nothing but being nosy. As soon as wazungu walk up, they get interested. Ryan and I start looking around and I ask if we can buy a crate of Tusker. They look for our empty bottles, and realizing we have none, say they don’t have any Tusker. We can see it sitting 10 feet away from us. When I mention this fact to them, they tell Ryan that we need bottles. When Ryan stares blankly back in their direction, and I say that we will pay a deposit for the bottles, they ask Ryan how much. Finally, we are able to negotiate a price for the bottles, and the cost of the beer. This was a big purchase in Tanzanian, almost $40 for 24 beers and the bottles, so I wanted to be sure that when we returned the bottles, we’d get our money back. I made them sign a contract (a blank piece of notebook paper, which I wrote an agreement on in Swahili), which they thought was the weirdest thing in the world. You don’t get receipts here, let alone ever have to sign anything. We’ll see if the contract actually works, or if ANY of the random guys are there the day we return them…….I’ll keep you posted!

As we were getting the beer, Ryan looked around the corner of the building, then fled to the other side of me. At first I thought he was being paranoid or something, and didn’t notice the sloshing sound backgrounding my negotiations. Apparently, there was a guy standing in a bucket….stark naked….just outside of the beer distributor. After he finished his bath, he came to join the mob of people watching the wazungu try to get beer. Just one of the many random things you see walking down the street in Haydom.

After we successfully got and paid for our beer, our elation faded as we realized we had a mile-long walk back to the house, carrying 50 or so pounds of beer. We thought we were being smart by bringing a cloth to cover it while we carried it back, but nothing could cover up the distinctive sound of bottles clunking together. If possible, we were even more of a spectacle on this walk back than any other. When I say ‘we’ carried it back, I mean of course Ryan carried it back. He definitely got his workout for the day, and earned his luke-warm beer! The next day, we were sitting down, and he noticed 2 bruises on his legs. I got really worried that it was some kind of horrible bite, or crazy African disease (I can be a bit of a hypochondriac here), but then we realized it was from the crate banging on his legs as he walked! Anyway, now we’ve been enjoying Tusker at home on our evenings off, and remembering that in Tanzania, EVERYTHING is an adventure!

-Betsy