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.
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