Jason Spears holds a BA from Hampshire College and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. He has been previously published in the Moscow Times Business Review and on www.peacecorpsworldwide.org. He lives near New York City.

The smells of burning charcoal and grilling seafood mingled with the smell of night-sea air, which was still warm enough to make me drowsy.  The flowing rhythm of Swahili, the roughness of broken English, and the sloshing of water against boats and the rocks mingled into the soundtrack of Zanzibar– an island in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Tanzania. 

Sherif, who was around 16, sat next to me on a rough concrete bench.  We were at the edge of the outdoor market near the harbor.  He grew up in a village elsewhere on the island.  His parents had sent him to his aunt and uncle in the city so he could attend school and, hopefully, the university.

 At night, Sherif and I often went to the harbor’s night market, where he would ask me questions while we watched the foreign tourists indulge in their romantic notion of being immersed in Africa.  The glow of charcoal fires and the yellow light from lamps lit their mostly Caucasian faces.  They bought barbequed octopus and chunks of kingfish on skewers, as well as ripe pineapple.  Their tongues tingled from drinking the milk of a coconut that had been chopped open with a machete.  

“Jason.  What say you?” Sherif asked.

In the low light, his skin blended into the background, making his teeth and white shirt the most luminous things about him.  With difficulty, I could see the edges of his small round face, which was almost too tiny for his huge smile, but could not see his buzzed hair or his large ears.  For a second, he reminded me of the Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland, fading away bit by bit.

“Sorry. What?” I said.

“Jason, what say you?”

“You mean how do I feel?”

“Yes.”

“Um, I’m alright. Okay.”

My eyes adjusted to the darkness.  Sherif put his thin right index finger on his fat lower lip and he gazed at his sandals.  Turning to me, his smile grew wider.

“Jason, when you go back to California.  You get me plane ticket, passport, visa,” as he spoke, his hands came together and fluttered like a bird.  He thrust his hands from his chest, “I come to California!”

“Uhm,” I mumbled and shifted away from him.

During the past two weeks, he had repeatedly asked the same question, to which my answer never changed. His eyes widen every time his hands took flight.  Perhaps, he believed that one day someone would take him away from Zanzibar, a place he had never left.  It wouldn’t be me. I stared at the ground.  After a moment, I looked at his face briefly before shifting my eyes away from looking directly into his.

“I’m sorry Sherif.  I just don’t have the money.”

Sherif continued to focus on me gleefully for a minute, then his face turned blank.  He stared at the boats bobbing up and down in the bay.  Modern boats, with powerful engines and square cabins for fishing and taking foreigners on tours, rode the small waves next to dhows, the traditional sailing boats, which had been used for centuries to fish and trade spices. 

Zanzibar had been a key port along the spice trade routes that brought merchants and supplies from India and the Arab world to the tiny island.  Through trade, Islam, the dominant religion of Zanzibar, spread down the East African coast from the 10th to the 15th century, though some historians claim that there is evidence of Muslim settlements on Zanzibar that date back to the 9th and 10th century.  The settling and mingling of the traders, along with indigenous Africans, created a uniquely mixed culture and the Swahili language.  In the early 1600s, the Portuguese colonized the island.  Arabs from modern-day Oman threw out the Portuguese in the 18th century, but they eventually lost the island to the British in 1890.  Zanzibar became independent from Britain in 1963, and, a year later, it united with the nation Tanganyika, on the mainland, to form the present Tanzania.    

Despite all the different rulers, the dhow has remained a cultural symbol of Zanzibar.  It has a distinctive sail in the shape of a right triangle–the mast the vertical leg and a long pole of wood the hypotenuse–and a wooden hull with curved bows.  Sherif’s uncle, Muhammad, was a fisherman, and I imagined his boat was one of the dhows.  

We sat next to each other like strangers on a bus for several minutes.  Sweat built up on my forehead and I couldn’t stop shuffling my feet in the dirt.  Every time he asked for me to take him from Zanzibar, I wanted to look away.       

I leaned forward and rubbed my palms dry on my pants.

“So, why do you want to go to America, Sherif?” I asked.

Sherif’s face lit up with a smile again.

“Here there is no work,” he said and shook his head for emphasis.

“So my parents,” he said as he sat up straight, “say, ‘Learn English.  Study business.  Go to America.  Make money and send it home to us.’”

 I stared straight ahead at the crowd.  I had not previously known that Sherif’s desire to go to America was encouraged by his whole family.  Now, I viewed Sherif as asking on behalf not only of himself but for each of his relatives and, figuratively, I had to turn them each down.  I turned to Sherif.    

“You don’t want to fish like Muhammad?” I asked.  His uncle was doing well. He owned his own boat and hoped to one day save up enough money and buy a motor for it.  He had an apartment large enough for his extended family, and everyone always ate.

“No!” shouted Sherif.  His luminous smile disappeared underneath a frown and then returned.

“Business is better!  There is much money in business.”

Was business better?  Chances were that Sherif would not get to America.  Possibly he would end up like the young men who spoke English and hung around the hotels looking to make money off of the foreign tourists.  Some sold weed or pimped prostitutes, who sat in nearby bars. 

A couple of days before, I had a run-in with such a man as I left the Hotel Africa, which had a large open-air bar that faced the sea on its top floor.  From it, tourists loved to watch the sun melt into the Indian Ocean in a flurry of fiery oranges, pinks and reds, while they downed bottles of cold Safari lager.  After finishing my beer, and having seen enough of the sunset, I headed down the stairs and went out of the hotel through the lobby.  As I walked out of the entrance, the man, who had been leaning against the hotel’s wall just to the left of the doorway, started trailing a couple feet behind me.

“Hey Mister!  You want some pot?”

“No,” I said, glancing back briefly.

“Woman?”

“No.”

“Group sex?” He snickered as he walked away.

Not all the young men sold vices.  One evening, I hung out with three other Americans in an outdoor ex-pat bar with cheesy bamboo partitions and furniture.  A man in his twenties, wearing a clean, light sports coat and slacks, sat down in the empty chair at our table.  He focused his attention on Jeff, the closest person to him, a skinny blond from Tennessee.

“Hello, how are you?” he said in a warm, friendly voice.

“Fine,” Jeff replied.

“Where are you from?”

“America.”

“Ah, yes.  Would you like me to show you some private beaches?  Or around my island?” he offered putting his hands on his knees and leaning forward.

“Um, no thanks.”

The young man’s hands dropped between his spread legs.  He rolled his head to the side of his shoulder that was closest to Jeff.

“Please, I need to make some money.  Can you give me some money?”

“Sorry.  No.”

“Please, I come from a good family.”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Please. I can take you home to meet them, to show you,” he implored as he turned his hands palms up and then let them flop like dead weights on his thighs.

“I’m sorry, it’s just,” said Jeff.  He turned away from the man and focused on his thumb rubbing the side of the beer glass.  “I’m sure everyone can tell me the same story.  I don’t know who to believe.  I just... no, I’m sorry.”

With slumped shoulders, the man got up from our table and walked away.

Other young men were more successful than this man.  The worst played on the naiveté of foreigners.  Recently a young Italian couple had been promised a private beach tour.  Instead, they were taken to an isolated location where they were beaten and robbed.  The woman was gang raped.  Fatma Alloo, the director of a local non-governmental organization and a Zanzibar native, believed that these young men viewed themselves as having no future and lived a life that reflected that bleakness.  In her opinion, the law-abiding citizens hated these men and saw them as chipping away at their good moral society and the island’s mystique of romance and beauty.

I glanced at Sherif and then turned away before he could lock eyes with me.  I didn’t want to look and see one of these young men in him.  I wanted to think of him as the friendly, easy-going teenager who loved to ask me questions as soon as I walked through the door, who rapped his favorite lyrics from Tupac Shakur.  I wanted his studying of English and business to pay off with a respectable job that could provide for his family.  I wanted him to have the future he imagined and not the one dictated to him by circumstances.

Did Sherif ever worry about his future?  He understood that Zanzibar offered him limited options.  His family wanted him to take care of them.   However, Sherif never showed fear. 

One night, Sherif and I sat at the dining table at his uncle’s apartment drinking tea and talking.  Someone came to the front entrance and called for Sherif.  He stepped outside to see who.  A moment later, he came back with three guys his age and introduced them as school friends.  They wore knock-off American jeans, sneakers, t-shirts and baseball caps.

One stepped forward with a huge grin and spread his arms wide before saying:

“Hello! I am Muhammad!”

“Well, uh, I’m Jason,” I said and shook his hand.

He sat down across from me and asked the usual first questions of where I was from, how long would I be staying etc.  His other friends didn’t introduce themselves and stood a couple of feet back, watching me.  I never thought of asking his companions anything.  Muhammad’s loud voice and habit of waving his hands around as he spoke held my attention.

Muhammad asked if Sherif and I wanted to go for a walk with him and his friends.  The five of us walked out of the apartment, which was on the bottom of a three-story building.  The street, in front, hit a dead end a few feet from us.  Muhammad led us up to the main road that the street connected with, which happen to run parallel to the beach.  As we walked up it, Muhammad asked me how much Swahili I knew.  I told him about five phrases.  He smiled and told me: “I speak excellent English.”

He announced the Swahili names of random objects we walked past.  With him dominating the conversation, the others were quiet and had fallen a couple feet behind us.         

Muhammad stepped off of the street and onto a dirt path, which led between two houses made of scrap lumber with tin roofs.  We were walking into the section of town referred to as the unplanned district. People had squatted on land here and built homes.  Some of them remained made of recycled wood nailed together like a giant jigsaw puzzle, while others poured concrete and built brick walls.  Dirt streets and paths, that began, ended and bisected at random, connected the clusters of homes, which formed into neighborhoods.

The only light came from people’s doorways and windows, which cast shadows in abstract shapes on the ground.  We stepped in and out of darkness at random.  The ground was uneven.  Muhammad continued to say the names of objects that were barely visible.  His voice was unhurried, he knew where we were.

We turned onto another narrow path between houses, which led to a large street lined with concrete block buildings.  Towering above everything, they cast a huge shadow over the smaller structures crowded around them.  Little light came out of the uniform windows.     

I turned to Muhammad. 

“Hey, Muhammad.  What are these?” I asked and nodded my head at the grim buildings.

“Oh. Jason. These are ‘apartments.’ Eh, where people live,” he said.

Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s first president and a socialist, had traveled to Eastern block countries and other socialist countries, such as China, and brought back technical help to build up his young country.  As a part of this initiative, East German engineers had built these gigantic square buildings, whose strong straight lines contrasted with the haphazardness behind us.

A smug grin appeared on Muhammad’s face, and he thrust his chest out.

“Do you know how to say ‘apartment’ in Swahili?” he asked.

“No.  What is it?”

“Come here, I will write it for you,” he said.

He gestured at a streetlight that leaked a weak beam.  Not a single one functioned on the main road to Sherif’s home. 

Muhammad and I stepped into the dim light.  He moved in front of me with a scrap of paper and a pen, while Sherif and the other two friends flanked him, making a semi-circle.  Sherif leaned in as Muhammad wrote, while the other two scuffed at the ground with their shoes.

As he slowly printed out the word, and others he thought I should know, a green jeep shot past us.  No other vehicles were on the road to slow it down.  Then a pair of brakes squealed, followed by the approaching growl of an engine mixed with the increasingly loud thuds of a car carelessly slamming into the ruts in the road.  Two small dots of light flew towards us and grew into a pair of large, glaring spotlights.  Everyone stopped talking and focused on the vehicle, which had passed us a moment before.  Muhammad’s grin disappeared.

The driver twisted the jeep into a hard U-turn. The wheels locked and the brakes shrieked as it swerved off the road and sprayed dust into the air and rocks everywhere.  I smelled burnt rubber and tasted dirt in my mouth.  Frozen in position, I watched the jeep move towards us for a couple of feet and wondered if we were a second away from being hood ornaments.  

The boys clustered into a tight group before inching backwards and pushing me along with them.  Two men in green shirts and brown pants jumped out of the jeep and slammed the doors behind them.  The weak street light dimly lit their clenched jaws and hard eyes.  They were the local police, mapolisi in Swahili.  They yelled as they threw open the back doors of the jeep.  They pointed at the backseat of the vehicle and without putting up an argument everyone scrambled inside.

Too confused to be scared, I began to tense up after I was sandwiched in the back.  The air inside was stuffy and smelled of sweat.  I could feel body heat around me and realized that I was squished between people whom I couldn’t recognize.

Where the hell were we going and why did we get picked up?  I hadn’t been doing the dumb tourist thing of buying pot.  No one offered an explanation.  Instead we sat in silence.

Part of me tried to calm myself down.  Obviously, we had done nothing wrong and we just needed a chance to explain ourselves, but could I really apply that logic here?  The problem with police in the third world is they are unpredictable.  Corruption is a part of their life and income.  Some enjoy a chance to flex their muscle.  One encounter could only involve the scrutinizing of visas and passport. The next would include the demand to pay a “fine” for a made-up violation.     

The jeep came to an abrupt halt, which tossed us forward then whipped us back.  We had stopped in front of a single-story concrete building with a few steps leading to a glass double-door entrance.  The building did not have any exterior lights, so if any signs had been posted outside, they weren’t visible.  A couple of large windows glowed from the interior light.  The mapolisi opened the doors and told us to get out with short, sharp commands.  Within a couple of seconds we stumbled up the concrete steps and inside. 

I squinted my eyes against the bright light and looked around.  I was horrified to see mapolisi all around us.  They slouched against the walls and the counter because they didn’t have anywhere to sit.  The room was setup like a reception area.  A large wooden counter ran most of its length with gap in the middle wide enough for two people to pass through. 

A polisi thrust his index finger toward the wall behind the counter and snarled something.  The guys scampered to the corner and I followed, not wanting to be separated from them. 

An older man appeared from an adjacent office.  He wore a plain, white, collared dress shirt and had a neatly kept beard with a hint of gray.  The mapolisi ceased their small talk and stiffened to attention.  This was the officer in charge.  He was short, almost a head shorter than most of his subordinates, but he owned this room with nothing more than his presence.          

He fixed his serious look on Sherif and his mates.  A firm sweep of his hand and they shuffled across the aisle away from me.  He planted his elbows on the counter and leaned forward with his hands clenched together into a fist.  The mapolisi relaxed again, but didn’t talk.  The chief sternly lectured the teenagers.  They bowed slightly before him and talked simultaneously in high-pitched voices.  Their hands wadded up their baseball caps.  Even though the chief did not pay any attention to me, I feared the power he held over us.

The space between the boys and me couldn’t have been more than five feet.  It seemed like 500 because I didn’t understand a word of the conversation.  Out of the loop and in the dark, I drummed my fingers against my thighs and hoped that the guys could talk us out of this jam.

At the same time, my gut told me that someone would eventually demand a bribe.  A friend of mine had been picked up while buying pot in a fish market in the capital city of Dar es Salaam, on the Tanzanian mainland.  The mapolisi had grabbed him right after he had bought the stuff and put him in the back of a van and demanded all his American money, $400, as a pay off for releasing him and not prosecuting him.

I had not been buying pot, but the mapolisi had all the power here.  If they required a little greasing of the palms, my pockets held no more than enough Tanzanian shillings to buy one beer.

My arms dangled at my sides and my shoulders slumped.

“Excuse me,” said someone behind me.

My shoulders stiffened.  I slowly turned around to see a polisi leaning on the counter.  Sweat broke across my brow.  He was only three feet behind me.  How had I not noticed him?

“What were you doing...with them?” he inquired as he nodded his head towards Sherif and his cohorts.

He studied me for a moment before he rested both elbows on the counter and looked in the direction of the boys.

I turned to see if Sherif and his friends were making any progress in getting us out of here.  Muhammad was firing off a steady stream of Swahili in a grave tone at the chief.  Then he put his cap into his left hand and pulled the little square of paper he had been writing on out of his pocket.  He offered it timidly to the chief who took it and held it with both of his thumbs and index fingers at a little less than arms’ length. Everyone waited quietly as he inspected the vocabulary sheet.  The flies could be heard buzzing in room.

The chief asked Muhammad a short question in a calm tone.  Muhammad immediately turned around and thrust his arm at Sherif.

Sherif stood three paces behind the other teenagers with his arms folded across his chest.  His relaxed face made him look like an interested bystander who happened upon a dispute.

The chief asked Sherif something in an easy, conversational tone.  Sherif responded with a word and a nod, with no nervousness in his voice or face.  The chief asked a couple more things of Sherif, to which he answered in the same manner.

The chief glanced down at the paper for a brief moment and then tossed it back to Muhammad.  He grumbled something, headed back into his office, and slammed the door behind him.  Sherif’s friends smiled and put on their baseball caps.

I turned to the English-speaking polisi.  He took his right hand out from under his chin and pointed it at the door in the shape of a pistol.

“You can go,” he mumbled.

“Thank you,” I said while making a bee line for the door.

Outside, my skin quickly cooled in the night air and I took a deep breath.  In silence, the five of us walked down the street and away from the police station at a steady clip.  After a couple of blocks, Sherif turned and smiled at me.

“Jason, were you afraid?” he asked.

“Well, yeah.”

Sherif threw his head back and began to laugh.  His friends stopped.  I avoided looking at him directly and wanted to tell him to “shut the fuck up.”  Instead, I let my anger stew in my gut.  I was too tired to chew him out.  Besides no one had joined in with Sherif, so it was probably just his odd take on the situation.

   His laughing sputtered to a halt and, with a glowing face as he gasped for air, he looked around.  His expression dimmed as he saw his friends staring at him with narrowed eyes and knitted brows.

Muhammad shrugged his shoulders and flipped up his palms as if to ask Sherif, “What?”

One of Sherif’s friends, a lanky kid with a worn out Chicago Bulls cap, jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction we had come and asked Sherif something.  Maybe he wanted to know how getting dragged into a police station without having done anything could be a joke.  Sherif tossed a glance in my direction before muttering something to his mates.

They shook their heads and gazed at the road as if to say “Whatever, man.”  Then we all started walking again with Sherif in the middle of our group.  He tried to contain a snicker, but it erupted into cackling laughter.  After a moment they all let out some meek nervous giggling that quickly died away.  Everyone was worn out.  Muhammad was quiet and had lost some of his swagger.  Sherif, though, strutted with a smile.

Sherif and I sat on the worn floral patterned couch in the living room.  Neighbors and relatives focused on the color TV set on a wooden bench, which showed an American action movie involving U.S. soldiers shooting up an unnamed third-world country.  Little boys from around the block either sat or lay down on the bare concrete floor in front of the television, while around a table in one corner of the room, men from the neighborhood were talking leisurely as well as watching.  The film was neither dubbed nor subtitled.

Sherif wasn’t interested in the gunfire on the television.  He rubbed his chin and stared at the whirling ceiling fan before turning to me.

“Do you have pictures of America?”

“Oh yeah.  They‘re in my room, I’ll go grab them.”

I got my photo album and flopped back down next to Sherif on the couch.  He grinned and inched closer to me.

“Okay, this is my family,” I said pointing to the first one.

Sherif moved his head closer to study the details of the photo, while the children stopped watching the TV and formed a semi-circle in front of Sherif and me.  They pushed and shoved each other as they fought for the best viewing spots.  Occasionally one would whine as an elbow pushed against his ribs.  The adult relatives and neighbors ignored us.  

“And this one is of my home in the summer and that one is it in the winter.”

Sherif studied the photos of my home gleaming white in the sun and dulled from a layer of snow and the overcast sky.

“You're home!” exclaimed Sherif.

Some of the boys started to lean in further and Sherif shot them a scowl.  They sank back.

The next pictures showed rivers, deer and other snapshots of Oregon.  Sherif quietly rested his chin on his right fist with a polite smile.

“These, um, next group of photos are of my university,” I said.

“In California?” he asked with excitement pointing at them.

The photos were actually black-and-white pictures cut out of my school’s course catalog.  Sherif leaned in close biting on his lower lip while his eyes grew bigger.  He examined each image slowly as if he was committing every detail to memory.

As I flipped through clippings of the campus, Sherif’s physical closeness made me want to lean away from him.  My hands trembled.

One picture was of my college’s courtyard, with Mount Baldy in the background.  The photo was taken on a rare clear day.  The entire mountain was visible and its snow covered peak glistened in the sun.  Sherif’s eyes locked on this image.

“Uh, that’s Mount Baldy...  It’s a mountain near my university, but normally you can’t see it because there is so much smog, like dirty air, its bad for you.  We have lots of it in California... Do you understand?” I asked.

He continued to focus on the photo and after a long moment, he gazed up and smiled.

“Yes... yes, I understand,” he said before returning his attention to the album and waiting for me to show him more.

The last photo showed my friends from college at a birthday party in one of the dorms.

“Well, um, this is a room like the one I lived in at my university.”

“Your room!” he shouted.

“Well, one likes it.”  

Sherif inspected the photo.  It showed the stuff a couple of average students at my college had: wall to wall carpeting, bright lighting, relatively new furniture, computers, printers, stereos and a small refrigerator.  Sherif’s uncle didn’t own a computer or carpeting.  The lights in his apartment cast a dim shade and all his chairs and tables were well worn.  He was considered to be middle class in Zanzibar.

This photograph showed that mere students in America had more material wealth than his successful uncle. It had reinforced Sherif’s understanding that Americans commanded an affluence almost unimaginable to ordinary Zanzibarians. 

I cringed. I had created a gap between my insistence that I did not have the money to bring him to California and the version of my life that was in my photo album.  The reality in the pictures fed into Sherif’s fantasy.  None of the problems that I told him America was afflicted by had affected his understanding of it.  His smile never diminished nor did his eyes stop gleaming.

I shut the photo album and looked at Sherif.

“Jason, you buy me ticket, visa, passport and... and I fly to California!” shouted Sherif as he jumped off the coach while making his hands imitate an airplane taking off and then he fell back into his seat with a thud and a groan from the old springs.

We stared at each other in silence.  The children scattered back to the television and argued over the best viewing spots.

“Thank you,” said Sherif with a sharp nod.

“No problem,” I replied.

Should he have thanked me?  I should have expressed my gratitude towards him. He shared with me his thoughts and dreams, which were from a reality that I had never considered. 

I didn’t understand how to make sense of his life in the context of my world.  Other than the desire to leave our homes, we had very little in common, but this shared emotion was enough to make me wonder how he would survive if he did not leave.  

My muscles became heavy.  Exhaustion obstructed my thoughts.  I excused myself to go to bed and slipped around the children sprawled on the ground. Why weren’t they at their homes?  Then again, I had such a hard time remembering who was a part of the extended family living here that this apartment could very well be their home.

I walked past the kitchen.  Inside it Sherif’s aunt, great-aunt and other female relatives were still working.  The kitchen had a door that opened onto the street.  A light breeze carried a small amount of smoke from the charcoal cooking fire indoors.  The orange glow of the fire and the weak ceiling light bulb were not bright enough to clearly illuminate the women’s efforts. 

After collecting a bar of soap, a towel, toothbrush, toothpaste and bottled water, I went inside the bathroom that was a single concrete room with two stalls made from a dividing concrete wall and two wooden doors.  The one on the right was the squat toilet with a bucket of water and scoop next to it for washing yourself and your hands after use.  Toilet paper could clog the narrow pipes.  The stall on the left was the wash area for clothes and bodies.  The clothesline across the top was bare. 

Crouching next to a green plastic washbasin, I washed my face.  A couple of other tubs and buckets stood next to the wall on the left hand side, which had a small bronze faucet a foot off the ground.  Muhammad’s wife filled the containers every morning from the water tap in anticipation of the random shutting off of the water pipes during the day.  It usually was the second sound in the morning after the prayer call from the mosque down the street.  I brushed my teeth with the purified water in the bottle.

Back in my room, I lay down on the bed underneath my mosquito net.  Stars shown in the clear night sky through the window that had black iron bars but no glass.

Just above the TV’s drone was Sherif’s voice.

In a forceful, warm tone he chanted his two favorite lines from Tupac Shakur.

“I want to live / I want to give.”

He said this rhyme over and over again in the steady slow rhythm of the waves lapping against the boats in the harbor.