ZANZIBAR

Zanzibar is about 1.5 thousand kilometres of coastline with tourists in hotels of different price categories, intertwined with small poor villages. One step out of the hotel and you're in the village. It's two worlds on the same tide line. Everyone is waiting for the water to come: kids, kiters, fishermen. Here, you live on a tidal schedule, like a woman in menopause. At low tide, the water goes so far out that the boats end up in the middle of the desert. And it feels like forever. Girls in beachwear freeze with their phones at the ready and greedily hold their boyfriends' hands to get them to take pictures as soon as the blue water returns.

 

I'm not a fan of beach vacations, so we often went on a scooter to the villages, sat under a tree, and waited for something to happen. Every time, one of the locals would come up to us and tell us a story. That's how we met Hasan. He showed us his house. “This is my wife and son. I work as a freelance electrician. I want to earn money and build a roof because our summers can be cold, as low as +20 degrees. I also want a second wife.” Most of the population of Zanzibar is Muslim. The number of wives is an indicator of financial security. If you have a second wife, it means you can afford it, so they always say: my name is so-and-so, I have this many wives and this many children. The next time we went to visit Hasan, he shared, “I've been thinking and decided that I want four wives, and I want them all to be different skin colours,” and he looked at me like this, implying. Now he writes, congratulating us on the start of Ramadan and asking when we will return to Zanzibar.

 

Every village has its own hangout place. We called this phenomenon “Baobab Club.” It is usually a meeting place under a big tree - a huge baobab or mango tree. Local men gather there and play some games, and on the tree hangs a scoreboard with the names of the players. In the richer villages, there is a TV in the tree, and everyone gathers to watch soccer or something else. At night, the TV is covered with wooden shutters.

 

There's blue water, there's white sand on the shore, and in the middle of the island, it's piercing red. There are a lot of children here. Many people catch fish and octopuses and then pound them with a stick for 3 hours so that the octopuses aren't rubbery and appeal to the tourists. Here, as it seemed to me, people know how to appreciate the little they have.