Tanzania

WHEN THE bombs exploded in Kenya and Tanzania, I was already agog over new and past reports and studies that reflected pointedly the contradictions of modern America. A recent study by the U.S. Agency for International Development reported the astonishing fact that the United States spends less than one-half of 1 percent of its gross national product on foreign aid, lowest of any other industrial power. That's contrary to what a majority of Americans believe -- most think the figure is at least 10 percent.

Dr. Leslie Mancuso, 50, is a world traveler, but most of her destinations are not exactly haute couture hotspots. "I just got back from Ghana, the Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso. I leave in a month for Malawi, Tanzania and South Africa," says Mancuso, the head of JHPIEGO (pronounced ja-pie-go), a Johns Hopkins affiliate and international health group that focuses on improving access to medical care for women and families in developing countries. "We're the jewel of Baltimore, and we've been here for nearly 35 years," says Mancuso, who joined JHPIEGO five years ago and lives in Fells Point with her husband.

ARUSHA, Tanzania - In the first case of its kind since the Nuremberg war crimes trials after World War II, an international court here convicted three Rwandans yesterday of genocide. The trio used a newspaper and a radio station to incite machete-wielding gangs that slaughtered about 800,000 Rwandans, mostly of the Tutsi minority, over several months in 1994. A three-judge panel said the media executives had used a radio station and a twice-monthly newspaper to mobilize Rwanda's Hutu majority against the Tutsis, who were massacred at churches, schools, hospitals and roadblocks.

ZANZIBAR, Tanzania -- The long-neglected house fell during heavy rains a few months ago, leaving another ragged gap in the labyrinth of narrow streets and alleys where Arab, African, Indian and European traditions have long mixed. The three-story house was a remnant of the era when Zanzibar's Stone Town ranked as East Africa's leading exporter of spices and slaves. The rubble of coral stone and twisted mangrove beams is a reminder that the town's unique legacy is slowly being lost. "We are in a race against time," said Mwalim A. Mwalim, director of the government conservation authority.

Her job description might be "trying to save the world." She spends almost 300 days of the year on the road lobbying, lecturing, fund-raising, educating and overseeing conservation projects, and is remarkably chipper, considering the state of the planet. At 68, Jane Goodall still looks like the ponytailed young woman who, 39 years ago, came into our living rooms in a National Geographic documentary about her groundbreaking study of a chimpanzee troupe in Gombe National Park in what is now called Tanzania.

ZANZIBAR, TANZANIA / / It's 6 a.m., the sun is about to catapult above the horizon, and trays with the makings for coffee and tea, along with tins of sweet cookies, appear quietly and almost magically on the verandas of the thatched-roof Matemwe Bungalows on the northeast coast of Zanzibar. A woman wades in the low tide water below, hunting for seaweed to sell. Fishing boats, some of them with sail -- called dhows -- and smaller ones called ngalawa, propelled by poles in the strong arms of fishermen, pass by, heading for the deeper waters beyond the reef.

ARUSHA, Tanzania -- The wheels of justice move at their own pace in this remote, dusty place, home to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, though better known as a tourist ++ layover for safaris to the Serengeti and treks up Kilimanjaro.The tribunal has only one courtroom, so the three trials under way have proceeded intermittently. The phones work only marginally. The hallways in the Arusha International Conference Center, a crumbling concrete behemoth, are dark and, though mopped on occasion, dingy and full of potholes.

ARUSHA, Tanzania -- When Canada's Gen. Romeo Dallaire gave his testimony last month, he could not hold back tears.Wiping his eyes with a handkerchief, Dallaire described scenes of horror and his own powerlessness as Rwandan killers in 1994 unleashed one of the worst mass crimes since World War II -- three months of systematic slaughter that left nearly a million people dead.For the general, who was the U.N. peacekeeping commander in Rwanda during the genocide, blame lay with the international community for not stopping the killing.

— The look of joyous disbelief on Lisa Jones' face was similar to those worn by previous winners of Washington College's Sophie Kerr Prize. But everything else leading up to Tuesday's announcement — from the afternoon trip over the Brooklyn Bridge to the National Book Award winner pulling Jones' name from his blazer — was a departure from the past. Instead of receiving the nation's most lucrative undergraduate literary prize before a crowd of cap-and-gowned college kids in Chestertown, Jones won it in the capital of the publishing world, with the Hudson River as a majestic backdrop.

ARUSHA, Tanzania -- One night when Neema Laizer was 14, her father announced that she had to go live with her new husband and his two wives the next day. Nobody asked the seventh-grader how she felt; it did not matter. But Neema, sensing her life was about to end, refused to submit. With help from her courageous mother and an uncle who was a priest, she fled her family's rural compound that night. Driven over bad roads to this city near Mount Kilimanjaro, she ended up at a center that places girls in schools and keeps them safe from forced marriage.