Samahani na chakula

Hi everyone, (It’s terribly presumptious of me to assume an audience after we’ve gone so long without posting, I know. We will try not to abuse you so in the future, dear audience.)

I’m sorry that we haven’t posted in a few days. There was an internet outage which started in the middle of our session last Thursday and continued through the weekend that prevented us from updating. We’ll try to make up for it this week. Today, I'm posting an entry from last Thursday.

June 8^th, 2006

As of last night, Eleuthera, Caitlin and I have been in Tanzania for week. I can already tell that our stay is going to go by too quickly. Since we last posted, we've gotten into a routine of going to Swahili class in the morning, and exploring Dar in the afternoon. In between, Musa (a university student here who is our guide) takes us to canteens to eat lunch.

Lunch consists of a protein portion and a carbohydrate portion. The protein options are chicken, fish, nyama, and beans and we eat them with chapati, wali (which is boiled rice, but is somehow much tastier than rice in the United States), and ugali. It may sound like there is not a lot of variety, but there are actually twelve different combinations and I've never been much for culinary variety. Chapati is my favorite in terms of taste, but ugali is definitely the most fun to eat. It's a thick rice-like porridge that you roll into a ball with your right hand and then dip in stew or pick up beans with. As you can imagine, the novelty of food you are supposed to play with is going to take a while to wear off. The first time I ordered ugali, I needed a spoon to eat the stew with and the waitress laughed at me. I thought I was getting good at it today at lunch, but then Caitlin found a chunk of ugali in my hair. Thank you, Caitlin.

Swahili classes are going well. See Caitlin's entry for more general information on our classes. Tim is catching up very quickly even though he came in late. Even though Swahili is supposed to be a perfectly phonetic language, I still manage to pronounce things wrong. The other day, the professor picked up my Swahili text and asked me if it was his book. "No,” I said, "That book is not your toilet. That book is my toilet." This mistake is remotely understandable because the word for toilet, university, and a common preposition all sound very similar. However (and I'm only pointing this out because Eleuthera would otherwise), I didn't actually need to use any of these words in my sentence. On the bright side, I think I'm making progress.

After class today, we went to look at the University of Dar es Salaam. It had a very beautiful campus. It rained a little today, and it was so green there. I had fantasies about doing a post-graduate year there, which shows just how much I like Tanzania so far.

In the evenings, we usually hang out at Inno's place and talk about Tanzanian politics and history, economic development, Swarthmore gossip (reheated from freshman year when everything was more dramatic), or the Amazing Life of Innocent Bash. The capitalization isn’t hyperbole; the topic deserves its own post, so stay tuned.

I am continuously surprised by how cheap labor costs are here. Goods are a lot cheaper than the U.S., but the biggest difference seems to be in wages. I should have been able to predict this after taking International Economics, but I'm still struck by how stark the contrast is. Caitlin broke her shoe a few days ago, and our security guard took it to be fixed for about 200 shillings (15 cents). In Dar, a good salary for maids and security guards is about sixty dollars a month, and seventy five for private drivers. Although the costs of living are lower, the fact remains that the number of people in poverty here is very dramatic. I'd seen all the numbers before, but am just begining to understand what they truly mean.

I'm reading Africa Unchained right now, which is very critical of the efforts of early African leaders to industrialize. I'm a little skeptical of the author's assertion that there is something inherently good and African in the peasant that is lost in conventional industrialization/modernization processes, but it's a very interesting book.

As a side note: During a brief water outage, I learned to take a bucket shower! It was actually very refreshing and made me feel like a character in an adventure novel. Happily, our water is working again now, although I think Inno had to destroy any working relationship he had with the landlady in the process.

Huu (?) weekendi, we are going on a day trip to Bagamoyo, the old German capital of Tanzania.