The Best American Travel Writing 2013 (22 page)

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 negative. 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

FROM
The New York Times Magazine

F
IVE 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 absurdity,
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.

The only problem was that Dickens World didn’t open as planned.

Shortly before I arrived in Chatham, the park’s website announced (with all the sunny bluster of a Dickens politician) that it was “proud” to report that, instead of holding a ribbon-cutting ceremony as scheduled, its opening would be delayed for a month and a half. Instead of a functional attraction, I found a vaguely Dickensian construction site. The park is housed inside a big blue warehouse, and when I got there, teams of workers were filling all of its pseudo-19th-century nooks with litter and noise and tattoos and Mohawks and sexual novelty T-shirts (
Excellent Growth Potential
) and aggressive handwritten signs. (One of them, taped to a cinderblock wall, read,
NICK MY TOOLS, AND I’LL PUT A CHISEL IN YOUR THROAT
.) I got a tour from the park’s manager, who was wearing a hardhat and a reflective vest. He told me I couldn’t go on the Great Expectations boat ride because it was being repaired. (A worker later told me that it had broken down during a gala celebration the day before, forcing the local VIPs, he said, to put on big rubber boots and wade out through the water trough.) I couldn’t go into the haunted house, he said, because technicians were using special welding torches that might burn out my eyes. There was a red tractor working outside a miniature version of Newgate Prison. Extension cords squiggled all over the imitation cobblestones. Everything smelled powerfully like sawdust.

It was fascinating to watch. The laborers had been hired to do basically the opposite of a typical construction job. They were building squalor—making new things look old, clean things look filthy, dry things look wet, solid things look rotten. A worker named Phil explained to me some of the park’s technical aspects. The ivy was silk. The trees were polyurethane cores surrounded by sculptured plaster. The cobblestones were made from a latex mold of actual cobblestones. The moss was a mixture of sawdust, glue, and green paint—you stirred it in a bucket and flung it on the walls. The bricks were casting plaster that had been dyed pencil-eraser pink; they arrived in big rolled sheets that were bolted to the wooden buildings, in thin layers toward the top (where no one would touch it) and thick layers below—because, Phil said, kids tend to kick things. Later, professional scene painters came along to make the pink bricks look grimy, adding highlights to signify texture and smoke. The result looked so good that, when I got back to London, some of the actual Victorian-era brick and moss and ivy struck me as unrealistic.