Happy new year: a dog on a T-shirt
A festering thread from 2022 about an act of kindness in 1993-4, and a resolution for me for 2025. Salvaged from the foul smelling wreckage of Twitter. 'Archived' (ha!) here for... my kids?
In 1993 I was in Zanzibar during my year of (mosquito related) PhD fieldwork in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Gazing down pit latrines1.
I also visited Mr Mitu's spice garden2 and got talking to a couple - a Canadian woman and a British man.
The man wore a t-shirt - a cartoon dog carrying a pint of Guinness.
1/8
18 months later I was in Vancouver for a conference, presenting my scintillating student paper about community-based mosquito control. After the conference I had a week of holiday, but very little money.
Skint, burnt out, a bit depressed.
2/8
I was on a bus back to my hostel and saw a t-shirt that seemed familiar - a cartoon dog and a pint of Guinness. The t-shirt had a man in it.
Did I recognise him? Hhm. Maybe. Maybe not. But I thought I recognised the t-shirt.
The man stood up to get off the bus. It was not my stop.
3/8
I did a most unlike me thing - I jumped up and followed the t-shirt dog off the bus.
Then I got cold feet. What was I doing, following a possibly familiar t-shirt off a bus, thousands of miles and many months away from where I might have seen it?
4/8
And the t-shirt was obviously a freebie, a pub giveaway. There would be tens of thousands of them in the world.
I was an impetuous fool and would now have to buy another bus ticket.
5/8
But i followed the t-shirt for a few yards. I coughed. Then coughed again (in 1994 coughing to attract attention was still permissible). It turned. With the man too.
I said 'Nice t-shirt. Were you in it in Zanzibar last year, in Mr Mitu's spice garden?'. The man said.....
6/8
'No.'
7/8
Haha. 'Yeeees?'. He looked a bit worried. So I explained that we had met, and he - Russ - took me home to meet his wife - Steph - and I stayed with them for a week, and we went hiking, rescued a baby bird, ate great food... one of the kindest things that anyone has ever done for me.
8/8
My resolution for 2025 is to be a bit more like the man in the Guinness dog t-shirt.
9/8
Postscript: of course, these «amazing» coincidences are usually not that amazing. Zanzibar and Mr Mitu’s famous spice tour were exactly the kind of thing that visitors from Europe and North America did when they were in Tanzania in 1993…. Not least because we all used the same guidebook.
It seems hard to believe now but one of my reasons for being in Zanzibar was to look into lots of pit latrines in search of polystyrene beads. There was a trial of a new intervention to reduce breeding of Culex mosquitoes in wet latrine pits using a thick layer of expanded polystyrene beads - the sort used to fill bean bag chairs and which are hellishly hard to control if they ever escape into the open air.
Culex mosquitoes did not spread malaria but were the vector for filariasis and also were by far the most common mosquitoes in urban Dar es Salaam and were hellish nuisance biters - disturbing sleep and giving some children around 100 bites per night. A major argument for facilitating the use of bed nets, on top of tackling malaria.
Mr Mitu’s tours have been going for over 50 years, it seems… https://extensionembed.wanderlog.com/place/details/35479 and https://www.mstreacyloves2travel.com/tanzania/stone-town-asante-sana