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.