End Game

I’m sitting at the Benedictine Beach House (what a saucy trio of words that is) in Mtwara with the salt wind blowing through the room like a school of ghosts. Bottle of water on my right and eight moist spiral notebooks on my left, full of nearly illegible scrawlings penned in the backs of Land Rovers bump-bumping on red, courduroy roads or in sweaty hospital hallways crowded with people sprawled on floors. There’s a jar of peanut butter here, nearly empty; a $10 wrist watch I bought at Zeller’s for this trip that is returning to its raw materials: petroleum, tin, thread; a pile of pongy seashells; some clothes I’d like to set fire to; my smudgy computer; and thou.

In fewer than 48 hours, I’ll be on a plane to Zurich and then Frankfurt and then Ottawa. It’s time to go home. You know why? Because these girls are waiting for me.

Maggie and Daisy

As you may know, or not know, Scott Portingale and I were sent to Tanzania to track down CUSO-VSO volunteers and profile them for fundraising and volunteer recruitment. We’ve spent the last six weeks meeting two dozen teachers, doctors, nurses, and consultants of all stripes who came here for the same reason I did—to help. But help what? Help whom? Help how? Development is a tricky business. You take s step forward, you take two back, then one sideways, maybe one forward again, back one, two forward. It’s like dancing. Sometimes it’s awkward and the music sucks and you wonder why you bother trying. Sometimes you discover a rhythm you never knew you had and suddenly, you’re gliding around the room. That is, so long as you have a partner.

The key to development here, in my barely informed opinion, is letting go of every notion you have about Africa, emptying your mind of expectations, preparing yourself for the unexpected and—this part is important—instead of trying to “help” someone, just share what you’ve got. Share ideas, share stories and eventually, skills.

The thing about sharing is, others share back. That was the most common message we received from volunteers: “I gained far more than I gave.” But of course. Tanzania has an older, richer culture than Canada. But isn’t it telling how we don't expect our gift to be returned. Not from Africa. Western arrogance, I guess. And ignorance. Most people here don’t have a TV. They build their own houses from homemade bricks, for god’s sake. They feel the earth under their bare feet. They grow things, make soap and drive like crazy people. It’s anarchy sometimes, sure. But there’s something damn fine about it too. It’s in your face, unmediated. People grow up learning to take care of themselves instead of expecting the state to do it for them.

Now before you start saying, “Gregoire, that’s a load of sentimental crap. Tanzania’s one of the poorest countries in the world, you said it yourself!” Right, right. But poor why? It’s complicated. Poor in what way? In sustainable, indigenous economic development. Poor where? In the classroom and in the maternity ward. Now ask yourself this question: Am I poor? Poor in experience? Poor in knowledge? Poverty is not just about money. Poverty is an unexamined life. And development? Well, that happens to you, too. I encourage you, one final time, to visit the CUSO-VSO website and job board if you think you might want to step onto this whirling dance floor. And if you can’t manage to go overseas yourself, help someone else go by making a donation (click the donate button below). I’ve seen what north-south collaboration can do. It’s money well spent.

(Cue the hippie drums and Joan Baez.)

OK, here’s a picture of a stag beetle we found outside the beach house. Don’t be too impressed. It was dead. Still though, ain’t she a humdinger?

Here’s something even better, the view from the beach house where I sat drinking coffee and writing stories about inspiring people for the past three days while Scott got stung by a jellyfish—TWICE! His arm swelled up something awful. Poor dear. We made up for it by drinking Serengeti beer and eating the biggest plate of fish and chips we could find. Take that, Indian Ocean, you duplicitous turquoise temptress.

Mtwara Beach

And here’s the end of my journey. I've eaten mangoes until my skin is orange and I still want more. I've supped on fish at roadside vendors with the flies and the ants. I've embraced the noise and fumes of Dar and languished in an ocean that was, at times, actually too warm to refresh. I loved the pili-pili chili sauce and the Africafé instant coffee and also all those sweet bananas. I've slept poorly, ate richly, sweated profusely, sunscreened lavishly, inquired incessantly, and written thousands of words. Some of them were here, to you. 

What will become of this virtual monologue, I can’t verily say. Don’t worry: I won’t bore you with tales from the Canadian suburbs upon my return. But who knows? Maybe we’ll do this again sometime.

Thanks for listening, er, reading.

Maggie and Daisy: I'll be home soon.

And to Dan, who made this all possible : I love you. 

Abbeys, oil and ants

It turns out the Vodacom USB modem I got to be connected to y'all here in TZ does not work everywhere. There's a dead zone, just north of the Makonde Plateau, just north of Mozambique, in fact, in Ndando and Nyangao, where you become completely out of range. So I've missed you all, terribly. However, what you lose in virtual relations, you gain in fleshy ones.

But first we had to get there and as usual, the journey would not be complete without hijinx! And hilarity! In this case, we flew to Mtwara, a lovely community on the southern coast of Tanzania where women and babies die at alarming rates. We came down here to find out why and we met a Liverpudlian pediatrician named Jim Pauling who talked about neo-natal risk factors and mothers-to-be who ignored warning signs or else had no money or transportation to hospital or who for other reasons, just waited too long to come to hospital and died as a result. And all those babies who died in the womb or got born and then just died, overnight, before the mothers could take them home.

We'll get to that. First, a nice Swiss lady named Cristiana who spoke more languages than I could count and who volunteered with an awesome NGO named Interteam picked me up at the airport and offered to drive us the two hours to Ndanda, our first stop. She had to run some errands so she asked if we would mind if she dropped us at THE BEACH for a few hours. Hello!? We frollicked in the baking heat with the sea sponges and hermit crabs and starfish until it was time to go.

Cue the hijinx. Tanzania—you frisky soul! Never a dull moment! We go to three gas stations to fill up for the journey. No gas. We get to the fourth and final one and sure enough, petrol. And also 75 piki-pikis (motorcycles) a half dozen dala-dalas (buses), some three-wheeled bjajs, several trucks and more than a dozen cars, all waiting patiently, and some not so patiently, in line. Some of the bikers had been waiting since morning and it was already 3 p.m. They were getting angry. Drivers stood around the pumps in mobs, shouting and gesturing, some of them kinking the hose when they thought the person had taken enough, worried the supply would run out before their turn. It was like a scene from Mad Max. This is what's coming people of the world. A glimpse of our future when we run out of oil.

Wish I had my bicycle

After two hours, we got our gas and departed, hoping to make it to Ndando and the Abbey at St. Benedict's before dark fell on the windy, bumpy, dangerous arteries that comprise Tanzania's highway system.

Not only did we make it there, we made it in time for supper! Gotta love those Benedictine Brothers and Sisters! Ndanda was great: 40-foot mango trees and three-inch long praying mantises and five-inch-long geckos and spring water that runs into the Abbey so that you can actually turn on a tap and drink the water without boiling it. Heaven.

Then we went to Nyangao where the aforementioned Dr. Jim has been volunteering with VSO with his pharmacist volunteer wife Pam, an unbelievably dedicated young couple saving lives every day. For those who know me, you know how my twins had to stay in hospital for a few months after they were born 7 years ago because they were premature. We saw what passes for neo-natal care at St. Walburg's: four tiny babies in tattered, open air incubators sitting under heat lamps like so much meatloaf being kept warm in a restaurant kitchen. None of the lamps have consistent heat so Jim is constantly moving the cribs a little this way, a little that, so they don't get too hot, or too cool. It boggles the mind. A pair of twins had been born at 1.5 pounds a few days ago, one survived the first night and the other did not. The mother was sanguine, happy to have one baby at least. Jim has developed a newborn checklist that nurses must now consult when a baby is born to determine whether the baby should be admitted or sent home with mom. Admissions have tripled. Last year, 1400 babies were born at St. Walburg's and 75 were admitted. This year, more than 200 will be admitted. And most of them are living.

Bodacious Baobab Tree, Dar es Salaam

I'm back in Mtwara. Back at the ocean, thinking about the snow which fell on Ottawa yesterday and the sweat that once again, trickles down my spine and saturates the elastic of my bra and makes my fingers slip across the tracking pad on my computer. Snow. Imagine. Snow would kill the ants. ANTS! OK, I've been pretty good with the bugs in Africa which, like everything else—the beer bottles, the seed pods, the leaves, the baobab trees, the patience of the people, the sunsets—are all enormous. I saw a roach at the abby that was seriously 3 cm long. I thought it was a mouse. Some of the ants are really big too but the worst ones are the teeny-weeny ones. Aphid sized. And insidious. I had some crackers in my backpack which I placed on the floor at Jim and Pam's and the next morning, the bag was invaded. I had to take everything out. If only we could harness that kind of global mobilization It was annoying, but also marvellously impressive, like hail when you're walking.

Sure it's tough living with lots of ants and no internet, with lots of heat and no gasoline, but frustration is OK. It's good to be delayed and distracted and thwarted or else how would you appreciate every last damn thing you've got?

Passports? What passports?

I've got to be honest with you, I almost cried today. And not in a good way. And it would have been ridiculous because I was in a bloody airport, of all places. But you know how travelling for work can just grind you down? I got ground down. Now I know what an organic, fairly-traded, darkly roasted coffee bean feels like after it's gone through the espresso maker. Spent.

I just want to say, before continuing, that it's OK. Everything worked out splendidly because of an amazingly patient and heroically helpful ticket agent who works for Precision Air in Tanzania. I also want to admit the whole saga happened because I'm a dumbass. But mistakes happen when you've been on the road for weeks and you've got a million TZ shillings in brown envelopes, separated into stacks of 100,000s and you're trying to keep too much information in your head. There: my pathetic excuse. Feel free to reserve sympathy.

So we were supposed to fly away from the big mountain tomorrow. That was the original flight plan. But in my head, I'm already planning my next and final trip, to Mtwara, and I know I have to get back to Dar to give receipts from this trip, hand over unspent money, get another stack of money and a pair of plane tickets and a roster of interviews planned and then top up our phone and internet credits, buy a jar of peanut butter, do laundry in the hotel sink, and get on the road again this weekend. Anxious to get this list of tasks under way, I neglected to consult the ticket from our current excursion.

So... we take a cab to the bus terminal in Arusha, take an hour-long bus ride to Kilimanjaro Airport which was delightful and I read a newspaper. It was such a relaxing calm-before-storm kind of thing. At the ticket counter, they tell us we're booked for tomorrow. Bloody hell! She's right! Oh no. The nice lady tells us to stand to the side and perhaps she can get us on once everyone's checked in. Time passes. The line grows. Eventually we manage to catch the lady's eye again. We hand over our original tickets and passports. She gets a colleague to process our boarding passes. But in the middle of doing so, he starts shouting in Kiswahili and sort of pushes our stuff aside and starts processing the next person in line. This is what I imagine he said, "Crazy mzungus! You don't know how to read! Go soak your head while I talk to competent customers."

It's now about 20 minutes to take-off. Our nice lady friend grabs our info once again and tries to get another person to help, and then another. More yelling in Kiswahili. Mzungus and other foreigners looking sheepish and bewildered. Us smiling furiously to appear supportive and also casual and friendly, the kind of strangers you really want to help. 15 minutes to take off. Our bags are sitting ominously on the weighing machine.

Miracle! Boarding passes! Bags tagged! We're on our way! We thank our lady friend who hustles off with a blaze yellow vest on - she's needed on the tarmac. But... where's our passports? No one knows. No one knows?? Na wewe kachaa? Are you crazy?

Lady friend is gone. Can't go through security. We hear the loudspeaker announce final boarding call. Noooo! We've come so close!!! I'm standing with Scott's heavy camera bag while Scott, in a cowboy hat, runs around frantically, talking quickly in English to everyone so that absolutely no one can understand. I see the vignette from afar, repeatedly: Scott, hands flailing, pointing to passport, other person, raising eyebrows, confused. He returns, sweaty and unpassported. Then, out of the corner of our eye, we see a man we met on the bus hand something to our lady friend near the boarding gate. Scott plows through security and there's a half-hearted, "hey," but no one stops him. He's a cowboy. On a steel horse he rides. Miracle! It's his passport! Why was it outside on the ground? Must have slipped out of lady friend's hand earlier. Yowsa, that was close.

Is mine there too??? No. Wha? Scott, wild-eyed, determined, runs back to Precision Air counter and apparently steps behind where the ticket agents are to snoop around. A woman holds up some other burgundy passports, from Europe and such (why are there passports back there??). Nope, not Canadian. Suddenly, he sees mine on the floor with discarded papers and other detritus.

Miracle again! He comes running back, victorious! We take our computers out of our knapsacks and take off our shoes and empty our pockets and take off watches, hustle through security and then we collect all our stuff and race out the door. I hug our Precision Air friend. I hug her again and again. She says, "You're mostly welcome," which is funny. I know what she meant but in her heart, she was probably thinking, "that was more work than I really wanted to do today." Personally, I think she had a crush on Scott. (Must have been the moustache.)

That's it. That's the whole damn thing. No wait, there's a footnote. As we sat on the plane, alternating between suppressed hysterical laughter and catatonic release, decompressing with a can of cold beer, listening to K'Naan sing, "And every man who knows a thing knows he knows not a damn, damn thing at all," and looking dreamily out the window and egads! The clouds which had shrouded Kilimanjaro the entire time we were here, opened up a sliver to reveal Kili's frosted peak. If you look hard, you can see it here.

there it is, peeking up above the clouds...

And that's the end of the story. Well, this chapter anyway. The story goes on, as you know, with me falling down and getting up and so on. I really must put this computer away. Weird power surges are giving me forearm shocks. And so it goes...

Eating grasshoppers and waiting for Kilimanjaro

Here’s how you get to Mount Kilimanjaro from Bukoba in one day. You don’t. Your first flight to Mwanza gets delayed a couple of hours so you miss your connector to Kilimanjaro Airport. So first you have chapatis and tea at the Airport café and then you try to figure out what to do with the next three hours. You read. You nap. And when you get peckish, you dig into the grasshoppers. Crispy on the outside, sort of chewy and nutty flavoured on the in. 

Crispy goodness!

 

They sell them by the handful at the Bukoba market in huge plastic bins: smoked, salted, pili-pili (hot and spicy). You see fellas sitting on the ground, in the middle of a ring of what appear to be shards of transparent plastic. It’s the wings they’re pulling off. (At this point, the insects are dead but I can’t tell you how they become so.) A gust of wind sends the wings fluttering once more, as if to mock their newfound incapacity. The green bodies, an inch to an inch-and-a-half long, are then fried up with the aforementioned seasonings and sometimes smoked over a wood fire. I had a plain salted one. It was mild flavoured. Bits of the crusty body got caught in my teeth which was somewhat disconcerting. I passed on seconds but my photographer friend Scott ate a few handfuls, lamenting the absence of beer. He said they were filling, but greasy.

Our flight to Kilimanjaro the next day was swell. We got a good view of Mount Meru, her first cousin, but Kili was shielded in cloud. Even still, her most expansive base, sitting as it does in the middle of tortilla-flat land, blatantly insinuates her upper girth: 5,895 metres above sea level. There is no mistaking her claim to fame as the biggest mo-fo mountain around.

Met a guy named Don on the plane. He’s a tour operator out of Arusha – takes tourists to Ngorogoro Crater, Serengeti, up Kili. He came of age during Nyerere’s presidency when school, even university, was free. We talked a lot about what’s happened to his country since then, how Nyerere’s socialist vision of equality for all has been perverted by greed and self-interest. How discoveries of gold, diamonds, Tanzanite, natural gas and oil ought to help raise the standard of living instead of lining the pockets of the rich. But he seemed defeated somehow. I wished I’d had some grasshoppers to offer him but Scott had them in his bag. I told him I’d met the most amazing people here, that they never complained, that they endured their lives stoically. He said maybe that was the problem. He said maybe people should get angry so things could change.

Then he saved Scott and I a $50 USD cab ride by driving us to Arusha for free. He said “you’re welcome” even before I thanked him, as Tanzanians always do. I thought maybe that’s the problem: centuries of hospitality have invited endless exploitation. I thought of all the people taking from Tanzania, then and now, from within and without. But I also thought, if I was stranded and penniless here, someone would take care of me because that’s what they do. And that’s why, to bring it full circle, CUSO volunteers are here. They’re just trying to pay it forward, and back.

 

All I ever hear: redemption songs

One degree south of the Equator

For real, that's where I am. And you'd think it would be hot, but no, not always. Every day a puzzle. Should have packed more than one long-sleeved shirt. Gregoire! Research! (I love referring to myself in third person. I imagine the voice of J. Jonah Jameson from the Spiderman cartoon. Parker!)

We are 3,750 feet above sea level here on the grand shores of Lake Victoria and she's downright chilly at night, and when it rains, which it does regularly, it being the "short rainy season" (short meaning showers) as opposed to the "long rainy season" (March-April when it rains all day). But it's maddening because once the rain stops, the sun comes out and there you are wearing that equatorial sun like a lead vest once again. I'm either shivering or sweating. Maybe I've got malaria?

Anyway, here's what all that rain and sun means... green, green and more green. There's coffee here, pineapples, plantains and other banana varieties, eucalyptus trees, cyprus pine, day lilies (just like home!) cassava, sweet potatoes, passion fruit, mango, papaya. List goes on people. Read it and weep, whiteys.

And speaking of whiteys, I finally took a break from writing (five stories done already!) to get a little exercise and stave off utter obesity and constipation from so much starch in the diet. Our most lovely hotel is on a steep hill so I got some great views on the way down town and knew that on the way back up, I was going to throw up, er, I mean, get a good work out! Here's the view from up here to down there, in Bukoba.

So I'm walking around town on a Sunday in a very religious region of Tanzania thinking I could do a little shopping but of course, nothing is open. Gregoire! Rookie mistake! I'm feeling conspicuous, being the only white face around. People stare at you, and I mean stare, open-mouthed, head following you as you go by. And sometimes you hear it, once you pass. Mzungu. Basically it means "whitey." Some pale faces get offended and sure, it bugs me a bit. I mean, really, when some guy outside a shop starts shouting, "Hey, Mzungu, come to my shop. Mzungu! Mzungu!" does he think I'll actually go or is he just making fun of me? It doesn't happen often. The people of Tanzania are some of the warmest, most hospitable of any I've met anywhere. And a smile and few words of Kiswahili goes a long way in these parts. Still though, it's tiring being the oddball for hours on end. Kids following you in little packs, touching your clothes, wanting everything you represent: money, escape, prestige, Europe.

Say, wait a minute, is this what it's like to be... different? To be... foreign? Mon Dieu! What simplicity is home, where you look like everyone else or, in my case, slightly better than everyone else (titter, titter). How we are oblivious to the plight of the stranger, the one who talks funny and looks weird and doesn't understand anything we say. Me for instance, here. And a Tanzanian, for instance, in Miramichi. We should all feel this, people. It might build a little empathy.

OK, enough Kumbaya, I met a taxi driver yesterday who said his name was Honest. I yelled "Yer Lyin'" And he said, "What?" And I said, "Lying, not telling the truth." And he said, "What?" And I said, "Samahani, rafiki, ni sawa (sorry, friend, it's OK)." (At least, that's what I think I said. Maybe I said, "My cloud wears table shoes October." Or maybe even something rude.) He just kept driving. Probably thinking "crazy mzungu." Who could blame the poor guy?

My jokes don't go over well in Bukoba. Anyone here from Cleveland? Can you hear me at the back? Is this thing on?

Drove out to a place called Rubya, south of Bukoba through the most amazing green hilly landscape I've ever seen. Don't look it up. It's not on many maps. The place was positively lousy with plaintain and pineapple groves, grazing animals. The red-red earth made me think of PEI. Minus Anne. We visited a guy named Jonathan Coolidge from Boston who's been volunteering as a teacher for about 7 years. He made us stiff black coffee and he said stuff like, "When I was in Mongolia, Richard Gere came with the Dalai Lama to reintroduce Buddhism," and "When I was in the Ukraine talking to three hundred firefighters who'd helped put the fires out at Chernobyl." Dude was righteous. You know, in a good way. He gave us so much food for thought, I won't have to eat-think for weeks. Days like this just fill you up.

Oh, and here's a picture of a pterydactyl. I mean, stork. They're scary big here. (OK, future edit: I've been told by some people here that this is a pelican. I'll see if I can clear this up. Whatever the case, they're like helicopters when they take off.)

Night-night from whitey.

On the road again

To get to Bukoba, on the west side of Lake Victoria, second largest freshwater lake in the world after Lake Superioryouareinferior (that was a little shout-out to the excellent singer/songwriter Rae Spoon), you have to drive an hour and a half through rush hour traffic in downtown Dar es Salaam with our most excellent driver Remmy (Mchaga man) who taught me how to count to ten in Kiswahili (moja, mbili, tatu, nne, tano, sita, saba, nane, tisa, kumi) and also how to say, "Are you crazy??" to the driver next to us. "Ni wewe kachaa??"

When you get to the Julius Nyerere Airport, named after Tanzania's beloved first president, you have to eat awesome samosas with pili pili sauce and wait for garbled Kiswahili over the tinny loudspeaker and try to pick out the word Mwanza. When you hear it, or think you hear it, you walk past multiple air conditioners spewing out moist, refreshing air, into the tunnel and into your Precision Air Boeing 737. If you're sitting on the right side of the airplane, you will see Mt. Kilimanjaro in the hazy distance. If you're sitting on the left side of the plane engrossed in Aiden Hartley's epic African war correspondant saga The Zanzibar Chest, sipping cold Sprite, you will ignore the oohs and aahhs and continue reading about his time in Rwanda. (heavy sigh)

When you get to Mwanza, you will walk through arrivals and because you're a punctual, rule-following whitey, you'll go directly and proudly into departures (where you will be asked to remove your flipflops for security, but told you can keep your half full water bottle) and then you will sit in a small, crowded security area nearly two hours before your flight, wondering why you didn't explore a bit of Mwanza right outside the door instead of sitting here with nothing but English-dubbed Indian soap operas on TV.

Then, when you're lulled into a stupor by your own deep, coursing thoughts about African history and colonialism and your hands are greasy from spicy peanuts a woman will walk into the area and say a bunch of things in Kiswahili and hopefully you'll recognize the word Bukoba and you'll leap up and join the queue heading to the second leg of your journey, across the giant lake and so far north you're nearly in Uganda.

(Pause, there's a crazy big flying bug in my room and I need to deal with that. Samahani. It appears to have nestled into a light fixture up high on the wall. I think I'll be OK. Maybe it eats mosquitos. Maybe it eats mosquito nets. Great. Can't unthink that. OK. Everything's alright. I just killed it with a New Yorker. Flushed it down the toilet and noticed another one flying around the bathroom. Got that one with a flip flop. Noticed another one in the shower stall. Can't do it. That's enough bloodshed for one night.)

So here I am in Bukoba, land of big flying bugs. It's lush here, in the mountains. I had to put a shawl on to eat supper outside. First time I've felt "chilly" since I arrived here. I hear it goes down to 18 at night this time of year. Positively freezing to the locals who wear jackets and hats. Looking forward to meeting some inspiring volunteer Canadian teachers and doctors and nurses and another Kenyan microcredit advisor helping out a coffee cooperative. Fresh local coffee tomorrow. Wow.

Meantime, here's what a lot of toilets look like in Tanzania. Mom: look away. This is not for you. Have you looked away? OK, everyone else: this is called a squat toilet, for obvious reasons. It's not so bad really. Makes me think of camping.

And here's our favourite take-out joint in Dar where they make that crazy scrambled-eggs-french-fry-barbecue-chicken-veggie-and-hot-sauce concoction I've been telling you about. Tanzanian poutine.

Alrighty, time to clean up the millipede I killed by accidental stepping upon and it's into bed, under the net. The bugs are my friends. Om. The bugs are my friends. Om.

What do I know?

Here are a few things I’ve learned so far in Tanzania.

Mosquitos are smaller in Tanzania but fly faster.

Drivers of three-wheeled taxis (the ubiquitous bjaj) can, in fact, drive on the sidewalk with impunity and people like me, who might formerly be adverse to such a thing, are in fact so grateful to those drivers, they'll give them extra money, or even an awkward cross-cultural hug, to find ingenious and sure, possibly dangerous and certainly discourteous, shortcuts through Dar es Salaam’s perpetual gridlock.

Women dress modestly here, but so grandly. How is it that they can shuffle through dust and garbage, never break a sweat or get dirty and always look like a million bucks? One reason might be that many of the clothes around here are individually made by some seamstress down the street who rents a hole in the wall, plugs in an old sewing machine and manages, with scraps and thread, to weave together the most stunningly tailored ensembles. I feel like a slob most days (see post on sweat nest) especially when I walk past a crowded bus stop full of men in pressed shirts and women in flattering fashions.

Poverty breeds ingenuity. If imported clothes are expensive, sell your own designs and make a modest living. If the power goes out every day, buy a gas stove or cook with wood. If people don’t have fridges, set up a shop in a busy area and sell cold drinks. If building materials are expensive, collect scraps and sell them on the street. You might feel sorry for Tanzania but in some ways, you oughtn’t. Their ability to make something out of nothing, to find substitutes, to recycle and reuse, is unparallelled in my experience.

There is a dignity here. Sure there’s government corruption and stagnation, sure the streets smell like sewage sometimes and more than 2 million people have AIDS and too many babies die at birth and life expectancy has been stuck at 50 for far too long but there is humour and comraderie and commitment to family and an iron will. Some day, when the right leaders come along, this country will be strong and viable. It’s got to happen, eventually.

Eating French Fries makes you smart. I know, it’s crazy, right? But it’s true! I’ve been eating street fries, or chipsie as they’re known here, nearly every day and I’m totally smarter than when I first got here. I can even calculate the currency exchange without a calculator, people.

Washing clothes with shampoo in your hotel bathroom sink doesn’t necessarily clean them. I ran out of camp suds so I started using shampoo but really, it wasn’t working. I bought a bar of laundry soap for 70 cents CDN and that seems to be dispelling the daily sweat nest quite nicely.

Saying tafadhali, or "please," is often considered rude because it sort of means, "Hey, pay attention!" or, "Do this right now!" Sure wish I'd known that before throwing the word liberally into stilted but good-intentioned attempts at Kiswahili communication. Oh the sticky snares of linguistic nuance. Fall down. Get up. Repeat.

Making peace with the sweat nest

I don’t wear clothes in Tanzania. I wear a sweat nest. It’s here, in the damp textiles that hang limp from my shoulders and hips, that I carry 12 hours of human sweat daily, its weight and odour evolving as the cruel equatorial sun climbs higher and higher. I’m not bragging about my sweat nest. I’m just acknowledging it.

Air conditioning here and there temporarily relieves my burden but mostly, my sweat nest just grows, announcing itself about mid-day with the first whiffs of hygenic malfunction. My sport sandals are no longer wearable. Their scent is so offensive I must find vinegar to soak them before they permanently imprint their fungal essence on my tender soles. And oy vey, you don't know from chafing. I'm chafing in places that ought not to be chafe-able

This morning, at 7 a.m., it was 30 degrees Celcius and the humidity was 92 per cent. You can drink the air. It collects on your body, generously helping to augment the sweat nest. Salt lines appear across my chest and back like lace which sometimes make the sweat nest fetching, though sadly, not always.

Money, kept in pockets—the sweat nest inner sanctums—becomes pulpy as it migrates from one nest to another thus spreading human fluids liberally throughout the tropical population like TB, or olive oil. You pull soft wads from folded places, grimacing and apologetic, and hand them to street vendors who tuck them into their own sweat nests and then hand you your food.

Some Muslim women have supersonic sweat nests hidden in folds of black polyester which cover them from head to toe. My sweat nest is not nearly so impressive. But today, I watched a mosquito drown in my bosom during a mid-day phase of sweat nest construction. Take that, malaria!

Here's a snapshot of what people tie to the tops of buses. 

And here's what I thought would be the last thing I saw before dying in a head-on collison on the road to Mkuranga when I realized the car was being towed. My sweat nest got a good boost there, I can tell you.

Usiku mwema (good night)

Lisa

Zanzibar, you really kill me (part 2)

Seriously, folks, you’d have to see it to believe it. The most stunning coral beaches and the most abject poverty.

We arrived in Zanzibar on Saturday by ferry and the whole time, I’m thinking of that horrific ferry accident two months ago between Zanzibar and Pemba Island. The government finally released the figures this month: 

619 people pulled alive from the water

203 dead bodies recovered

2764 people still unaccounted for.

For comparison, 1,517 died in the Titanic.

It was during Eid, the celebration to end Ramadan, and families were returning home to Pemba. According to the report, the ferry was only supposed to carry 610 people. It had more than five times that. Moms, dads, old folks, kids.

We’ve only been in Zanzibar a couple days and already, you can see how that happened. You want anarchy? Here it is. The streets, built between huge stone buildings 200 years ago, are fit for horses and carts, not two-way traffic. Throw in the donkeys, bicycles, motorcycles, scurrying children and herds of Italian tourists grazing on photo ops like hungry zebras in the savannah and it always seems like one gasp away from disaster.

Venture outside of the tourist mecca of Stone Town and you’ll find streams of Muslim school girls and boys in stained and fraying uniforms. The girls, with their cream hijabs, look like dwarf nuns. They run in highway ditches, barefoot, on their way to school where they sit on the crumbling concrete floor with no books. An average class at the Bububu Primary School had 125 students. At the front, on the only chair, was a bored, underpaid teacher with a stick in her hand for whacking. It looked like a prison.

Bububu Primay School Grade One equivalent

Everywhere, little shops 20 feet X 20 feet, sell two bottles of hair dye, a tube of dusty toothpaste, a couple pairs of plastic flip flops made in China, cell phones made in India, sunglasses from Korea and second-hand clothes from Canada (saw a guy in a Brampton shirt today). Fruit stalls everywhere—a dozen sweet fingerling bananas for 50 cents CDN, coconuts, okra, tomatoes, the tangiest oranges and papaya.

$1 CDN dollar is worth about 1,700 Tanzanian Shillings. No one takes credit or debit, of course, so you’ve always got about 50,000 shillings in your pocket at any given time, mostly in 10,000 and 5,000 notes. Like any devalued currency, the smallest bills, the 500s and 1000s are hard to come by so the change you get back from a purchase is approximate, at best.

The power goes down for an hour or so every day. People sell everything, everywhere. Even when you’re waiting in traffic, someone taps your window: dress shirts? Plastic wall maps of Tanzania? Potato chips? Tanzania, with its high-end safaris and white sandy beaches, is a great place to visit. But you wouldn’t want to live there.

Government corruption is on the rise, decades of food and monetary aid haven’t worked, healthcare and education systems, though improving, are still substandard and lacking in basic supplies.

But I’ll tell you what is working: a village bank and co-operative farm in Bububu (pronounced with emphasis on the second bu, as in: Bu-BOO-bu), thanks to a Kenyan volunteer named Heshbon. He knows a lot about agriculture, microfinance and co-operatives and he’s setting up village banks all over the island where members pool their money then borrow it in turns to buy seeds, manure, farm implements and irrigation hoses. The farmers in Bububu have a community farm from which they sell fresh, organic vegetables to restaurants and hotels in the area. Brilliant. Easy. Done. I guess anarchy is good for something.

I’m hearing a lot of buzzwords lately: sustainable economic development, capacity-building, market linkages. International development is rife with jargon. But the premise is sound. In fact, it’s an old story: give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and feed him for a lifetime.

Forget aid. Aid just creates dependency—what little of it actually trickles down to the people who need it. Heshbon is taking two years off from teaching in Kenya to devise a plan to pull his neighbours out of poverty. People make the difference, not money. If you’re interested… go to the CUSO-VSO website and see what your skills can do or make CUSO-VSO your charity of choice.  One big world, getting smaller.

Zanzibar, you kill me

Never has a place so entranced and so confounded me. I'm going to write just a quick post because the power keeps going out. I'll write something longer and post tomorrow to thank you all for doggedly following this blog. I visited the last place where slaves were officially sold and it was right beside a building that now houses a thriving farm co-operative. How perfect is that? I met a man today who didn't have a place to live so he built himself a hut from wood he found and woven coconut leaves. He goes to school and studies by candlelight, when he has candles. And he uses a small solar array to charge his cell phone. Priceless.

Here's me on a beach in Jambiani on the east coast of the island, on my birthday. The Indian Ocean was turquoise and warm. The sand was silky white. I'll tell you more about my new best friends real soon.

stay tuned and pray for power
Lisa

Morogoro, success for tomorrow

If you think heading out of Toronto on the 401 on a Friday afternoon is busy, wait while I stop laughing. We left Dar es Salaam at 6:30 a.m. thinking we would beat the rush. No such luck. The beeping diesel parade took hours to put behind us and that was actually fast because Remmy, our driver (must get a picture of my Mchaga tribe rafiki) knows his way around these parts.

It struck me that as we demand greater environmental stewardship from our governments, we forget that Tanzanians and other poor populations are struggling just to eke out a meagre living and it would be impossible for them to abide by stringent rules drafted in the plush board rooms of Europe. In theory, I knew that before but now, seen through the colonial lens, it really sinks in. It doesn't get Obama off the hook like he says it should but it does make the issue even more complex to me.

Having said that, Tanzanians are starting to embrace off-the-grid technologies like solar energy simply because they can't rely on the patchy electrical systems here. Solar technology makes sense here at the equator. Now if they could just find money to expand the train system...

Once the slums and the vending stalls and the dalla dalla buses thinned out west of Dar, the land opened up and finally, we got a glimpse of what most of Tanzania looks like. Rolling mountains and trees and crops. Bloody gorgeous, y'all. The school for girls at SEGA put everything into perspective. We showed up and Fran Bruty, the volunteer we'd come to interview, beckoned us into a classroom of 13-15-year-olds who sang us a welcome song that was so rousing and animated, we were agog with admiration. The girls all come from dirt poor homes, some of them are HIV-AIDS orphans. One girl showed me a story she'd written in Kiswahili called "The Orphan Who Becomes a Princess," and she'd illustrated the cover with a drawing of what looked like Barbie.

The drive home brought first an ochre storm of dust and then the rains followed behind in sheets. Looks kind of spooky eh? Surreal actually. Note the mountain profiles in the background.

The three-hour drive from the morning turned into five hours coming home. When our exhausted Mchaga man Remmy dropped us at the City Inn Hotel, Scott and I left our gated, security guard entrance and went down to a street vendor for a crazy concoction of fried eggs, homemade french fries, skewered beef, cheese, and tangy vegetables all drenched in some kind of hot sauce. Tanzanian poutine! We each paid $2,500 shillings (about $1.50 CDN) and brought it back to the hotel. It's the best thing I've ever eaten. And since I'm getting absolutely no exercise, this kind of food is ideal for my girlish figure!

I know I promised pictures of Dar but we were outside the city all day and it was dark when we returned. Samahana (sorry). Tomorrow we pack up and head to Zanizbar on the ferry and maybe we take a day off. Or part of a day off...

njozi njema (sweet dreams)

Touchdown Dar es Salaam

Jet lag has subsided. Sweat glands are moderating. Head has stopped spinning. Team Tanzania has landed and the world is upside right again.

After two days of travelling, including a swell stop in Frankfurt where we snapped a few photos of the Occupy protest in the main financial square ...

We crashed at a motel soon after then flew to Zurich, Nairobi and then Dar es Salaam. The continent of Africa is so huge and diverse it's hard to comprehend. Mountains, deserts, coastal beaches, jungles, savannahs. In Tanzania alone, oil and gas exploration, offshore and on, gold, diamonds, huge tracts of arable land being bought up by multinationals. Kilimanjaro for goodness sake! So why are the people so poor? So where is the trickle down? Gated homes with swimming pools and people walking by barefoot with no teeth. Mamas cooking in the street with little gas stoves. Power outages a couple of times a day. Unpaved roads and cars beep-beep, beep-beep! And bicycles and buses that stop and start with the wave of a hand and three wheeled taxis and people carrying textiles in baskets on their heads and men pulling carts of bananas and watermelons. Everybody smiling and Habari asabouhi! (Good morning!) Muslims and Christians side by side, no problem. It's a symphony of mayhem. It's alive, brothers and sisters. Up close and in your face. Mesmerizing. Invigorating. Like nothing you'll ever see in Orillia or Ponoka.

Sorry no pictures of Dar yet. I feel like a geeky tourist when I pull out my camera but I promise my next post will give you a flavour of the city. Soon, I'll get a day off... For now, here's my hotel room bed with lovely mosquito net. I be the Queen of Sheba thus.

We've met some dedicated folks at CUSO-VSO and look forward to meeting more in the days and weeks to come. We're off to Morogoro on Friday (about three to four hours drive west of here) to meet with a volunteer who helps out at a special school for high-risk girls who drop out of school or who stumble on the cracks of poverty and never quite get up again. It's called the Secondary School for Girls Advancement or SEGA. It's only four years old but already showing amazing results. Then it's off to the magical isle of Zanzibar (!!) for about 5 days to talk to people who help farmers sell local produce to hotel chains and fishers to improve their crab harvest and people with disabilities to learn skills for employment. Oh, and apparently there are world class beaches there too. Sweet. Are you still with me? Stay tuned for the continuing saga.

Two days to lift-off

One of my oldest and dearest friends, Deb McGuire, whom I met while working in Iqaluit, Nunavut, in the early 1990s, sent me this homemade postcard with a quote from French writer André Gide. Up until now, I hadn't been thinking of the shoreline I'm leaving behind, just the adventurous new lands. With only two days to departure and just a few loose ends to wrap up, I'm now thinking mostly of Daisy and Maggie who will turn seven while I'm away. I'll miss them like crazy. But my brain is addled with dust and repetitive strain. Motherwriters need stimulation, a blank slate and the sound of unfamiliar voices. Plus, my daughters need to know that moms are more than just moms. That life is hard sometimes but nowhere near as hard as what most people live every day. That the world is big and strange, until you discover it for yourself. And that people everywhere deserve a safe, decent life. Makes me think of one of my favourite Dylan songs: Fat man lookin' in a blade of steel/Thin man lookin' at his last meal/Hollow man lookin' in a cottonfield/For dignity.

Anyway, look how happy I'll be in Tanzania! (courtesy of Maggie, 6) No dengue fever! No malaria! No E.coli in the ole' pipes! Put a pencil in my hand and point me down the road.

Intro

Welcome friends and family. Up until now, I've resisted the urge to create a web log but with my upcoming trip to Tanzania on Oct.15, I thought this would be a great way to tell everyone about my humble adventures in sub-Saharan Africa.

Here I am with fellow Canadian journalists, filmmakers and photographers who will be travelling to Tanzania, Burkina-Faso, Ghana, Ethiopia, Honduras, Bolivia and Cambodia on a volunteer contract with CUSO-VSO. Below me, in the jaunty hat, is Scott Portingale, the Edmonton-based artist who will be joining me in Tanzania. (Photo Credit: Miguel Hortiguela, pictured here in red)

CUSO, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this year, was formerly known by its full name: Canadian University Services Overseas. In 2008, it merged with Volunteer Services Overseas (VSO International) which was launched in Britain in 1958. Back then, both organizations were popular with university students who would often take a year off between school and work to volunteer in a developing country.

Today, the average age of CUSO-VSO volunteers is 42. They are educated and highly skilled midwives, nurses, doctors, teachers, bankers, business people, civil servants, youth workers, HIV-AIDS specialists and disability consultants. They are, in fact, you.

CUSO-VSO attracted me because they don't send money to countries in need, they send people. Those people work with in-country organziations and local volunteers to impart skills and facilitate change. Most volunteers go on one- to two-year placements. My six-week gig will involve tracking down those Canadian volunteers and telling their stories. I'll be based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's largest city (3 million people) on the coast, facing the ancient spice island of Zanzibar.

Tanzania's 43 million people are about equally split between Muslims, Christians and followers of indigenous spirituality. They come from 130 different ethnic groups and speak mostly English and Kiswahili. Although it has never experienced civil war, it is one of the world's poorest countries. About six per cent of the population have AIDS and nearly 60 per cent live below the poverty line.

Tanzania is home to one of the oldest known prehistoric sites on earth at Oldipai (formerly Oldivai) Gorge and also the great Serengeti plains. Soon, and for six weeks, it will also be home to me. Witness the transformation from cocky Canuck to heat-exhausted nomad. As Neil Young says: walk with me. Countdown to departure: 10 days.

Kwaheri, rafiki.