The Best American Travel Writing 2013

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  “Maybe so,” I say, “but I did tell Madame Kashe at the Wasso Hospital we were coming today, and I promised to visit her. So I think we need to go there at least to say hello to be polite.”

  Jotham counters, “We will not have time to go tonight, I think, since we will have to find a hotel and something to eat.” We check into a small guesthouse, and Jotham negotiates the price from $15 to $10 a person. A man promises we’ll have hot water, which Jotham seems to really care about, and the man begins heating a barrel of water with charcoal. After an hour, the water is only tepid, and Jotham insists that we cannot go to find Madame Kashe until it’s hot enough to bathe.

  My mobile phone rings: it’s Madame Kashe calling. “We are waiting for you here,” she says. “When are you coming?” I explain we’ve checked into a guesthouse and are waiting for hot water to clean off the grime of nearly two days of travel.

  She asks me why I went to a guesthouse. “We have hot water here. And food, and beds.” It dawns on me that when Madame Kashe told me we would be welcome, she was inviting me to stay at the hospital, apparently in guest quarters.

  I apologize for the misunderstanding and hand the phone to Jotham. He speaks in Swahili for a few minutes and then hands the phone back. I say, “I think we made a mistake, and I really think we should go see Madame Kashe now.” Jotham surprises me by agreeing—maybe it’s the promise of hot water—and we wrap up in our warmest jackets and head into the suddenly cold desert night.

  Madame Kashe greets us outside what appears to be a chapel and welcomes us inside, where we find a table set with steaming food.

  A tall, baby-faced young man sits in a corner, speaking softly to another man and woman, both middle-aged. The young man comes over and introduces himself as Gedeon Omari, a doctor at Wasso Hospital. Madame Kashe asks us about our trip and asks me what I think of Mwasapila. She makes it clear she is fond of the healer, but skeptical of his cure and adds, “I like how they’re taking care of Babu now! He seems much more energetic. He looked wasted before.” The food is delicious, and Madame Kashe invites Jotham to take a hot shower in some other part of the compound, which he gratefully accepts.

  After a long meal, when I think we may be preparing to go to bed, Gedeon addresses me directly. Speaking very softly, in English, he asks me what I’m hoping to achieve. I speak slowly and match his quiet tone. “I have heard about Babu, for many weeks now. And I’ve talked to many people who tell me they have been cured of minor ailments. But I haven’t spoken to anybody who has gone to see him for more serious conditions. Like cancer. Or HIV. So I want to talk to people who have and find out what their experience is.”

  Gedeon introduces the other man and woman, who have said almost nothing. He explains they are his clients; both are HIV positive, both are taking ARV therapy. Each visited Mwasapila in November 2010, months before he became famous. After drinking the medicine, they stopped ARV treatment for a matter of weeks. Their CD4 counts began to drop, so they resumed therapy. Both appear to be lucky—discontinuing ARVs can allow the virus to develop a resistance to the drugs—but both feel healthy after resuming their ARV treatment.

  In the car on our way back to the guesthouse, Jotham clucks his tongue and tells me that neither patient seems to have strong faith.

  The next morning, we meet Madame Kashe and Dr. Omari again, and this time I interview three patients. The first, Margaret, has type II diabetes, but her blood sugar has normalized since drinking Mwasapila’s liquid last fall. She also lost over 50 kilograms. Gedeon and Madame Kashe both suggest that she continue a low-sugar, low-starch diet.

  The other two patients have similar stories to the two I spoke with the night before, the difference being that they both have marginally improved CD4 counts.

  Jotham watches the interview with decreasing interest from the side of the room, and when he steps out to make a phone call, I ask bluntly: “Do you know any HIV patients who went to Babu and got sick or died?” Gedeon tells me that just three weeks ago, a man from Wasso died. I ask if he was friends with either patient, and it turns out he was the secretary of their HIV-positive support group. They say he was a good man and a friend.

  His name, as it turns out, was Francis Tesha.

  A few days later, I speak with Francis’s sister Flora over the phone and hear his full story. She tells me that shortly after Francis left the hospital in February, he was struck by another bout of opportunistic infections and left bedridden. He lost all hope. He couldn’t eat and refused ARVs. He coughed constantly from tuberculosis. Flora recounts, “We brought him to the hospital on April 12, and this time, he did not get out until he died.” Now Flora tries to warn people away from Mwasapila. “You can’t stop someone from going to Babu, but the fact is that all of the people who went to drink the medicine regret it now. Many of them have died. I get so angry when I see somebody going there to drink that medicine.”

  My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.

  —Hosea 4:6 (quoted in an editorial in a Kenyan paper, advising people not to visit Mwasapila)

  On my second-to-last day in Tanzania, I meet with Dr. Paul Kisanga at Arusha Lutheran Medical Centre. Unlike most Tanzanian hospitals, which could be movie sets for A Farewell to Arms, ALMC is a freshly painted steel-and-glass building, in which a director could film an episode of House. A large bronze plaque hangs on the wall with the names of dozens of donors, many of whom are Lutheran congregations in small towns in Minnesota.

  Dr. Kisanga wears a dark, closely tailored suit, and I notice an iPad on a stand in his office. He is gracious but obviously busy. Like the Wasso district medical officer, his answers are politic. He reminds me that his hospital is part of the same Lutheran diocese as Bishop Laizer, who has enthusiastically promoted Mwasapila, and tells me, “As a medical scientist, I have no reason to think this works. However, we have a few people in the last three months with improved hypertension and blood sugars.”

  He tells me about a formerly diabetic patient whose blood sugar has been normal for several months. “She is the wife of one of the staff here.” Kisanga makes a phone call, and a few minutes later, a white-haired man appears in a black shirt, white clerical collar, and glasses—the Desmond Tutu look. He is Reverend Gabriel Kimerei, the hospital chaplain.

  Reverend Kimerei has known Ambilikile Mwasapila since 1974, when the former brick mason, not yet known as Babu, enrolled in a seminary program. Kimerei was his theology instructor. “He was a very quiet student. You wouldn’t know what he was thinking, but if you asked, he always gave you the right answer.”

  Kimerei speaks near-perfect English; he studied theology in Iowa in the 1960s. He is an enthusiastic believer in Mwasapila’s cure. “My wife has been tortured by diabetes for twelve years—swallowing the drugs every day.” Kimerei’s wife went to Samunge in February. When she returned, she stopped taking her oral antidiabetics. She eats a low-sugar, low-starch diet, and, according to Kimerei, “she is doing well, she is doing very well, but she checks her blood sugar every week.”

  Kimerei acknowledges Mwasapila’s cure doesn’t work for everyone. In April, when Dr. Kisanga and other ALMC colleagues told him that some patients who abandoned medication were suffering, he proposed they take a trip to Samunge to speak to the healer. Kimerei says before their visit, the Ministry of Health tried to convince Mwasapila to instruct his visitors to keep taking their medications until they were sure they were cured. “He would not agree. He wasn’t happy about that.” But when Reverend Kimerei, Dr. Kisanga, and two colleagues spoke to him in April, he was swayed by his former teacher and agreed to change his instructions.

  It appears as of July, Mwasapila continues to honor the letter of the agreement, telling people they may continue taking medications, even though he says it will be as effective as “swallowing clay.”

  According to Reverend Kimerei, there are a half dozen HIV-positive patients in the local Lutheran parish who are completely cured. His colleague, a local minister, says they have already tested HIV n
egative. Kimerei graciously begins making phone calls, and an hour later, he has arranged for me to meet with an HIV patient who has recently tested negative. She is going to retest tomorrow at the hospital, and I am invited to witness the test.

  The next morning, Reverend Kimerei and I drive to the church to pick up a girl who looks about 16. She wears a green T-shirt and khanga—a skirt made from decoratively printed fabric—and she keeps her eyes to the ground. I introduce myself and she asks me, through the translator, to change her name, so I will call her Alma.

  We drive back to the clinic, where a female doctor takes us to a small room. I take a seat next to a cardboard box labeled HIV PREVENTION—CONDOMS. The doctor introduces herself, saying, “I’m Lucy, or Sister Mulingi,” in Swahili, and introduces another man and woman, who are apparently counselors. She asks a series of questions, which Alma answers in a soft voice.

  Alma first learned she was HIV positive in 2005 but has probably had the virus from birth. Her father died in 2001, and she lives with her mother, who is also HIV positive. Twice a day, she takes ARVs issued by the clinic, and she has never stopped, even after visiting Mwasapila. Sister Mulingi asks, Does anyone, any friends at school know about your problem?

  No.

  That’s good—we must help you avoid discrimination. Did you go to Samunge?

  Yes, I went to Samunge in March.

  After you came back from Samunge, did you take another test?

  No.

  But based on your belief you hope that you’re healed?

  Yes.

  Would you like that we establish your status at this moment?

  Yes.

  There are two possible results. The first result could show that your blood is still infected with the HIV virus. The second one could show that there are no traces of the virus in your blood; that would mean you’re cured.

  If it comes out without traces of the virus I’ll be very happy.

  Sister Mulingi takes Alma from the room to administer the blood test. A few minutes later she calls Reverend Kimerei and me into a larger room. Alma is sitting on an examination table, and I sit next to her. Also in the room is a male doctor, the two counselors, and the translator, Jackson. Sister Mulingi stands in the middle of the room and then announces, dramatically in English, that the test results are positive. Alma still has HIV. She repeats the results in Swahili for Alma, who nods her head slowly. The male doctor explains that at this clinic, they have tested over a dozen people who have been to Samunge and all of them are still HIV positive. Reverend Kimerei furrows his brow and says, “That is strange because the volunteer I spoke to said she was tested and she was told she was negative.”

  I ask Alma how she feels about the test result. She answers very quietly in Swahili. I feel just fine. I was just fine before, and I am still okay.

  I can’t say for certain that Mwasapila’s cure doesn’t work. I can say that every account I heard about somebody being cured by Babu of HIV/AIDS turned out to be either impossible to verify or verifiably untrue.

  Two doctors at separate hospitals confirmed they had multiple patients who, like Francis Tesha, went to Samunge, stopped taking ARVs, and got sick and died. Pat Patten estimates that several hundred people have died that way, and based on my small sample, his math seems conservative. Perhaps the number would be higher if Reverend Kimerei and Dr. Kisanga hadn’t insisted Mwasapila allow patients to continue taking Western medicine.

  On the other hand, there were numerous accounts of people claiming to be cured of stomach ulcers, aches and pains, insanity, and even diabetes. Multiple people echoed Dr. Kisanga in saying they had patients whose blood sugar had normalized after taking Mwasapila’s medicine.7 It is tempting to think of the hundreds of thousands who visited Samunge as dupes, but many clearly felt better after taking the cure. And while I certainly didn’t find anything to support Mwasapila’s claim of a cure for HIV/AIDS, it took three weeks of intense effort—and a cultural background that predisposed me toward skepticism of faith healing—to feel secure in discounting Mwasapila. Most Americans wouldn’t spend three weeks investigating the widely believed claims of their respected family doctor. We trust our appointed healers, and Tanzanians trust theirs. After Alma’s HIV test, Reverend Gabriel Kimerei was troubled to hear so many people continued to test HIV positive, and embarrassed to have passed on bad information.

  “That embarrassment is to his credit,” Pat Patten tells me over the phone. Patten considers many Tanzanian leaders to be complicit in a prolonged series of exaggerations—if not lies. In a June newspaper editorial, he wrote about the profiteering of the bus, truck, and taxi drivers, as well as the entrepreneurs and builders who found business booming because of Mwasapila. He noted that the government charges a hefty tax to all vehicles bound for Samunge, and the Lutheran Church leaders “can now claim that one of their own, not a Pentecostal, is the preeminent religious healer in the country.” Many government officials had chosen to stake their reputations on Mwasapila’s cure and risked embarrassment if they were shown to be wrong. “All sorts of people benefit from these lies,” Patten wrote.

  But the voices promoting Mwasapila seem to have fallen silent. In the months since I left Tanzania, Patten says Mwasapila’s popularity has steadily declined. The Health Ministry still hasn’t issued the results of their study about the liquid, and the Lutheran bishops are no longer talking about the healer. “They ought to be embarrassed and ashamed,” Patten tells me, “and I think they’re hoping people will just forget.”

  I haven’t been able to reach Reverend Kimerei to ask about his wife or what he thinks now, but I have spoken to a friend—a safari driver who took three carloads of patients to Samunge in March and April. He was convinced Mwasapila’s liquid worked back in the spring, but he now says 9 out of 10 Tanzanians discount Mwasapila’s medicine. People may have felt better for a few weeks, he says. “But nobody who went there was cured. Not one.”

  SAM ANDERSON

  The Pippiest Place on Earth

  FROM The New York Times Magazine

  FIVE YEARS AGO, I flew to England to see the grand opening of something improbable: an attraction called Dickens World. It promised to be an “authentic” re-creation of the London of Charles Dickens’s novels, complete with soot, pickpockets, cobblestones, gas lamps, animatronic Dickens characters, and strategically placed chemical “smell pots” that would, when heated, emit odors of offal and rotting cabbage. Its centerpiece was the Great Expectations boat ride, which started in a rat-infested creek, flew over the Thames, snaked through a graveyard, and splashed into a sewer. Its staff had all been trained in Victorian accents and body language. Visitors could sit at a wooden desk and get berated by an angry Victorian schoolteacher, watch Dickensian holograms antagonize one another in a haunted house, or set their kids loose in a rainbow-colored play area called, ominously, Fagin’s Den, after the filthy kidnapper from Oliver Twist. The park’s operating budget was $124 million.

  Dickens World, in other words, sounded less like a viable business than it did a mockumentary, or a George Saunders short story, or the thought experiment of a radical Marxist seeking to expose the terminal bankruptcy at the heart of consumerism. And yet it was real. Its existence raised a number of questions. Who was the park’s target audience? (“Dickens-loving flume-ride enthusiasts” seems like a small, sad demographic.) Was it a homage to, or a desecration of, the legacy of Charles Dickens? Was it the reinvention of, or the cheapening of, our culture’s relationship to literature? And even if it were possible to create a lavish simulacrum of 1850s London—with its typhus and cholera and clouds of toxic corpse gas, its sewage pouring into the Thames, its average life span of 27 years—why would anyone want to visit? (“If a late-20th-century person were suddenly to find himself in a tavern or house of the period,” Peter Ackroyd, a Dickens biographer, has written, “he would be literally sick—sick with the smells, sick with the food, sick with the atmosphere around him.”)

  Well, despite its obvious ab
surdity, I wanted to go to Dickens World. I love Charles Dickens. I don’t mean “love” in the weak sense, the way people love frozen yogurt or casual Friday or the ’80s. I am—like probably millions of readers spread over many different eras—actively in love with Charles Dickens, or at least with the version of his mind that survives in his writing. (The man himself, as several new biographies remind us, was significantly harder to love.) Of all the mega-canonical writers, Dickens is the most charming. At a time of great formality in literature, he wrote irreverently, for everybody, from the perspective of orphans and outcasts. His best work—Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Bleak House—plays the entire xylophone of a reader’s value system, from high to low; you can almost feel the oxytocin dumping, sentence by sentence, in your brain. Taken together, his books add up to perhaps the most distinctively living literary world ever created. The chance to pay $20 to walk through a lovingly produced three-dimensional version of that world seemed (despite some nagging highbrow reservations) impossible to pass up.

  And so I went to Dickens World. This was April 2007: the best of times. The global economy was booming. The county of Kent, where the park is, turned out to be the kind of verdant paradise I’d only read about in Romantic poetry: wooded hills, chalk cliffs, and that classically deep, soft, green English grass punctuated by huge spreads of yellow flowers, like some bureaucratic deity had gone over all the valleys with a giant highlighter. Even the city of Chatham—Dickens’s childhood home, which had fallen on hard times—seemed to be coming up in the world. The city’s formerly derelict dockyards, where Dickens’s father worked, and where Dickens World was opening, were suddenly covered with cranes, the sign of a thousand real estate projects blooming. It was a time of investment, development, fortune, progress, joy—and Dickens World seemed to be at the heart of it.