Tales from Tanzania

Last night, I witnessed one of the oldest rituals in the history of mankind: a man paying a prostitute for sex.

I think it was the first time I had seen the transaction happen up close. I was out for drinks at a bar near my house with a few friends, the spot I mentioned a few weeks ago as being infamous for elderly white men picking up young, gorgeous Tanzanian women. We were sitting at a table outside, and I watched an older white guy scope out the scene, nurse his beer, smoke his cigarette. And then, he simply pointed at one of the women sitting at the table next to mine, and gestured that she come towards him. There was no pretense of flirting or buying drinks or anything. They negotiated in whispers for a few minutes. And then they left, hand in hand.

The whole thing really freaked me out, but it got even weirder when a Tanzanian friend said he ran into one of his classmates from primary school on his way to the restroom. He said he couldn’t be sure, but he was almost positive she was also a “lady of the night,” as he termed it, given what she was wearing and the people she was sitting with.

She told him that because she saw him sitting with a bunch of Americans - me and a coworker - things must be going well for him, and he should give her money for a drink. Funny how circumstances sent two childhood friends in such different directions: one with a degree from the University of Dar es Salaam and a successful job at an international NGO, the other a hooker catering to creepy wazungu.

A friend just emailed me this article from an April issue of the New York Times Magazine. I remember taking a brief look at it, but reading it again after witnessing Tanzania firsthand is pretty enlightening. As overwhelming as the poverty seems sometimes, I’m also reminding myself not to underestimate African ingenuity in challenging circumstances. It gives me a little faith that development can happen.

I’ve actually started following some interesting bloggers who write about technology and Africa. White African is one I’ve been reading for a while, and he also manages a really innovative website called Ushahidi that utilizes cellphone technology to track post-election violence in Kenya.

I also like AfriGadget and Africa Unchained, which is edited by the director of the TED Global conference that took place in Tanzania last year. Google just opened its first Africa office in Kenya, actually. Given that in my past life I was a marketing executive for Google — I just love their products that much — I think there’s a lot of potential for what the company can do on this continent. (One interesting, and important, example is using Google Earth technology to follow janjaweed violence in the Darfur region of Sudan.)

When I first arrived in Tanzania, my handy Swahili phrasebook taught me the basics for ordering things in a restaurant: “Nataka maji. Nataka chakula.”

The book I have translates that as, “I’d like water. I’d like food.” I thought it was straightforward and courteous, made a little more formal with a “tafadali” - please - tacked on to the end.

So I’ve been using “nataka” right and left, until some Tanzanian friends had to gently tell me, “Mara, you’re being a little bit rude.”

It turns out my Lonely Planet phrasebook is really for Kenyan Swahili, which is apparently much more blunt than Tanzanian Swahili. “Nataka” actually translates to “give me.” I had dinner with a friend of a friend who has been in Kenya for the past year, and when he said “lete” - another term for asking for things - to the waiter, our Tanzanian friends winced because he had basically commanded him to bring over a pizza.

In Tanzania, it’s much more polite to say “naomba,” which translates as, “I beg you to give me.” Every Tanzanian I’ve met is defensive about how much more civilized Tanzanian Swahili is than Kenyan. We’re just more polite down here, they say.

The Swahili might be polite, but the dalla-dalla etiquette sure isn’t. Dalla-dallas are the minibuses that go all around Dar es Salaam, grungy vehicles that are somewhere between the size of a minivan and an American city bus. When I took one home on Friday afternoon, I was prepared to squish in amongst the businesspeople and schoolchildren, but I wasn’t prepared for the fight I had to put up to actually get on the bus.

It seems like there’s a transportation shortage around Dar es Salaam, and the terrible traffic flow around the city doesn’t help things. So when a dalla-dalla comes, you gotta battle your way for a spot. I saw young men shove older women out of the way as we all ran to the place where the Masaki dalla-dalla pulled up. I carried my laptop case in front of me with one hand, and with the other, I pushed. And hard. There was no chivalry or consideration that I’m five feet tall. It was everyone for himself.

Once I made it on the dalla-dalla and had a chance to slow down and think on my commute home, I was kind of shocked that I had it in me to elbow other human beings for a spot on the bus. But this morning, on a much quieter ride in to the city center, I saw a teenager on her way to school give up her seat for an elderly woman. Maybe there’s some sense of courtesy on the dalla-dallas - at least when the traffic isn’t too bad.

There comes a point in every young, idealistic, left-wing nonprofit worker’s life when she has to admit the inevitable: maybe we can learn something from the business world.

Don’t worry, I’m still as liberal as they come. I still believe in, ya know, helping people. But as I’ve been trying to digest the last couple of weeks in the most intense poverty I’ve ever seen, I think we need to take a lesson from the Tanzanian cellphone companies.

I didn’t go to Wharton or anything, but these companies are some of the most innovative and prolific I’ve encountered. Everyone has a cellphone. Seriously. They may live without electricity, without clean water, without infrastructure - but they’ve got a little Nokia.

So if we can barely get life-saving drugs out to the villages, what are the cellphone companies doing differently?

There isn’t much local economy to speak of in southern Tanzania. As I’ve mentioned before, the only real industry is cashews, a cash crop that’s harvested raw in the region and quickly exported for processing in Asia. The only local people who participate in the industry are the farmers.

The cellphone companies manage to take advantage of what tiny local economy there is, however. At every roadside stand and tin-roofed shack, there are clean and modern signs proclaiming “Vodacom” or “Tigo.” You can buy airtime vouchers - little scratch-off cards that give you more credit on your phone - in the smallest of villages. There are some really inventive “businesses” that have developed around the cellphone culture: guys who walk around with solar panels so you can charge your phone, makeshift repair shops on the side of the road, a service called “M-Pesa” (M(obile) Money) that allows you to transfer money via cellphone.

I’d be interested to learn more about what infrastructure there is for getting airtime vouchers and cellphone paraphernalia out into the middle of nowhere. And I’d also be interested to learn what’s stopping the medical community from doing it just as well.

I wish I could say I’m sad to leave Tandahimba behind, but I’m really not.

It’s been hard — not so much the water and electricity and crappy food, but being the only Westerner around can really wear you out. I met a Peace Corps volunteer who has been working in Tandahimba for the past year, and he seemed remarkably positive and spoke some amazing Swahili. I don’t think I could survive like he has.

That being said, I’ve learned so much in the few weeks I’ve been here and I’m looking forward to getting started on our patient transportation projects. I’ve had a lot to think about, and there will be more blog entries coming.

For the time being, though, some more pictures!

Some kids on the beach in Mikindani:

Me and Nsajigwa after an epic papaya-picking adventure in Luagala:

A beautiful baobab in Mtwara Town:

The most useful thing I brought with me to Tanzania?

Nope, it’s not hiking boots or Kashi bars or bug spray. (Okay, the bug spray is pretty useful, although it doesn’t seem to do much good.) It’s earplugs.

You’d think I’d be able to sleep really well out here in Tandahimba. No noisy clubs or loud music, no cars or bright lights. Only the African wilderness and me, right?

But getting a good night’s rest is surprisingly challenging. So that’s where my earplugs have saved me for the past couple of weeks.

First of all, sharing a bed with two other girls just… sucks. If anyone needs to get up in the middle of the night it’s a big ordeal, finding a flashlight and avoiding the rats. And it’s funny - everyone put up a big fight when I said I would be happy to sleep on the sofa. I’ve done it a million times and genuinely don’t mind, but this seemed barbaric to them. But on the other hand, it doesn’t appear to be rude or abnormal for my two roommates to talk on their cellphones in the room while I’m sleeping. Guess roommate etiquette is very different here from what I learned freshman year in the Quad.

Things are also noisy because we don’t have any windows, only screens and metal bars. That means all the neighbors’ dramas are delivered straight to our bedroom, 24 hours a day. We get the everyday noise of cooking and laundry, and we also get the guys riding by on bicycles trying to sell charcoal or bananas. You might imagine that everyone goes to sleep early to maximize the daylight hours, but apparently people find plenty of things to do into the wee hours of the morning - even without electricity.

And then there are the chickens. Roosters do actually crow in the morning. But they also seem to crow all night. And there are dogs, and cows, and goats. And the blaring Congolese music. Where it comes from, without electricity half of the day, I have no idea. It’s there, though, from 6am until late at night.

The water saga has begun.

“Saga” is the general term that my roommates use for everything in Tandahimba - all the little problems that aren’t so big in and of themselves, but over time, they add up. It takes the tone of a mild epithet. Instead of “damn,” it’s a muttered “saga.” This is, after all, what they call the “saga area.”

August and September are very dry here in the Siberia of Tanzania, as one American I met recently put it. It’s rained once since I’ve been here, and it was only for an hour or so. Dar es Salaam felt tropical and humid. Down here, I feel like I’m in Botswana again, although there’s a wider variety of equatorial fruits available here. (That’s one of the perks of the Mtwara Region - papaya and coconut and banana whenever I want!)

So finally, the water saga is upon us. We don’t have running water in the house here, so my roommates have established and elaborate system of buckets and pitchers that keeps water within its designated use: shower, toilet, cooking, cleaning, laundry, and so on. I once almost dipped the shower pitcher into the big tubs of clean water, and everyone started screaming at me for coming so close to soaping up our water for rice and tea. It makes me think about how much I take water for granted back at home.

We get water delivered a couple times a week from a guy nicknamed Books, a Mozambican with no teeth and a sturdy bicycle on which he carries giant tubs of water. I’m not entirely clear on where Books gets the water, although the other day we took a bike ride down to the “creek,” a dusty valley pockmarked with wells where people were digging for water. I have a feeling that’s where my showers have been coming from.

And now, all of a sudden, there isn’t any more. I have plenty of drinking water, because there’s a steady supply of bottled spring water that’s delivered here from Mtwara. But there isn’t any other water. My roommates seem surprisingly nonchalant about this, and I can’t tell if it’s because they think it’s going to rain or because they’re just going to suck it up and pay outrageous prices to buy water from far away. I feel vaguely panicked about the whole thing. Guess we’ll have to wait and see how dirty we’re willing to get - or start paying $5 a shower to bathe in Ndanda Springs Mineral Water.

In less than a month!

I’m in Mtwara Town for the weekend, again, for the wedding of the brother of one of my roommates, one of the HIV educators in the fellowship program my organization runs. Lots of fun, lots of dancing, lots of pink satin and tulle, lots of extremely loud Swahili gospel music. I can’t really figure out why the music was so loud, but it was the same thing at the wedding I went to last month. Guess it compensates for awkward silences during the hours-long ceremony, which lasted from about 6pm to 12am last night. Also, another interesting tidbit: it seems that the main function of the best man and maid of honor is to wipe the sweat off of the faces of the bride and groom.

A lot of you have asked exactly what I’m doing down here in Tandahimba, as I told everyone before I left I was going to be living in Dar es Salaam. Again, I’m a bit paranoid so I don’t want to talk too much about the work, but I’m only here in the Mtwara Region for a few weeks to do an asssessment of patient transportation options. Then I’ll be heading back to Dar for a bit, and dividing my time between Dar and Lindi, the region right to the north of Mtwara. (And is perhaps known for being the second least developed in Tanzania.) If all goes according to plan - and believe me, plans change very frequently around here - we’ll be implementing our transportation program in certain districts in the Lindi Region.

I should get going to catch the extremely unreliable bus back to Tandahimba. We waited for three hours in the morning yesterday, and it finally showed up with no explanation or reason why it was so late. We managed to get seats, which was a great thing, because the bus quickly fills up with standing passengers and various live animals.

It’s made me think, though, that maybe living here is actually making me more selfish instead of less — on the metro in DC, I wouldn’t have thought twice about getting up and giving my seat to a woman with a baby or an elderly man. But the bus ride from Tandahimba to Mtwara Town is so bumpy and unpleasant and hot and smelly and crowded that if I get a seat, it’s mine the whole way.

I usually have no problem being a whipping boy for the United States. I figure it comes with the territory, and I manage to not take things so personally. People around here have a love/hate relationship with my homeland. They love to complain about Bush and the war in Iraq and general American arrogance… Yet they always seem to ask me if they can join me on my return flight back home or if I can help them get a visa.

I wasn’t willing to put up with the anti-American sentiment the other morning, however, when we were walking to the hospital and we passed a group of Muslim women in head-to-toe veils, with only slits open for their eyes. Hilda told me that she heard women weren’t allowed to wear veils in the American Embassy - she said she had a Muslim friend who worked for the Centers for Disease Control and was told not to wear it when she entered the American State Department complex in Dar es Salaam.

America has many problems, but such clear-cut religious intolerance is not one of them. And yes, that does make me proud to be an American.

1. People walk really, really slowly around here. We would get trampled in New York or DC.
2. Everyone litters. And that includes me. It’s been a weird psychological thing to make myself do something I’ve been trained to avoid for my entire life, but there is no alternative here. There is no garbage collection. We have a hole behind our house for big bags of garbage that we generate from cooking and cleaning, but for everyday scraps of paper, it’s your pocket or the road.
3. People wear watches that don’t work. I think they’re basically worn as jewelry. I’ve seen dinky digital watches in the villages, and big gold bling on some of the hospital staff. But rarely do they seem to actually tick.
4. Think gas prices are bad in the US? Try Tandahimba. The cost per liter is about 2,200 Tanzanian shillings. That’s about 8,500 per gallon. Which translates to about $7 per gallon. No wonder the hospital is always struggling to pay for fuel for its ambulances and vehicles.
5. There are a million ways to say hello. I thought I had it down from the beginning:
Hujambo? = How are you?
Sijambo = I am fine.
Jambo = Hey!
But then, it turns out, there are a bunch of other ways to say hello to people. I’ve learned a few, but every time I think I have them all memorized, it turns out there’s another greeting, with its own specific response. I’m no linguist, but perhaps this is connected to how important greetings are, in general? I can’t go anywhere without getting introduced to five or ten people and going over the basics of who I am, where I’m from, etc. And usually, I am left awkwardly holding the person’s hand during the entire exchange.
6. I have made more children cry in the past two weeks than I have in the rest of my life combined. They burst into tears because they have never seen a white person; they run in fear and hug their moms. This afternoon on the way back from the hospital, my roommates started playing with a small girl on a too-big bicycle. I asked if I could ride the bike since I haven’t found any small enough for me, yet, and she obliged. And as I started to ride off down the road, she collapsed and started wailing because I hadn’t explained well enough that I intended to bring it back. I know it’s nothing personal, but it does kind of wear me out to be a constant source of fear for little kids.