wrong busses

Spent the day riding buses to wrong places today. I’ve gotten maybe overly calm about this. I got on the bus and realized it wasn’t going to go where I thought it was and decided I’d just see Ubungo once and for all and know where this place is where so many busses go. Forty five minutes later, we had passed out of any area of town I was familiar with, and I realized what a thin line of Dar I navigate never moving far from the coastline and mostly tracing the edge of the city. The bus though went through Kinondoni and Sinza, past miles of the same variety of shops, shuffled into a new order every few miles…used clothing, pharmarcies, plumbers, furniture makers, fruit sellers, cloth sellers and small restaurants…and every once in a while the road elevated enough that I could see down past the front row of shops and into a sea of corrugated roofs fit so close to each other that from above maybe they would all look like crooked roof tiles on the same house. To just ride along on the road and realize I haven’t a clue what’s in there...makes the idea of research seem silly.
I corrected my bus problem by getting a taxi to take me back to where I was originally headed…the UN information centre. I wanted see what sort of stuff they may have in their library. Maybe it was the bus ride, but the UN information centre just seemed so sad. I walked in and wandered the stacks of pamphlets published by the UN in the last twenty or so years. Coffee farming, Sisal farming, “groundwater and society”, “vulnerability and property rights of widows and orphans, women and informal entrepreneurship, … all these 80 page pamphlets floating around here perhaps the only proof of projects proposed or finished. Packed as tightly as those houses. Calling the UN ineffectual is certainly not an original critique …just seemed particularly apt as I tried to thumb though all the skinny little multicolored bindings.
On the way home, on another bus going to the wrong place, it was getting near rush hour and more people were selling things in the street…pillows, apples…my favorite though was a guy weaving between cars trying to sell two copies of a book I just barely saw the title of…Research Methodologies.