Zanzibar

I’m discreetly posting from work. Shhh. Having internet access on these computers is a mixed blessing. On one hand, it makes getting World Bank documents and recent statistics a lot easier. On the other hand, there is just so much else to do on the internet…   In other news, we discovered a canteen at work that serves rice and beans and curries.

 Right now, I am doing research on the distributional consequences of the EAC within Tanzania. Right now, I’m trying to look at the mechanisms other regional groups use to distribute costs and benefits. It’s been very interesting but I am not sure I am at all useful. ‘Direct service’ might be more fun, but it wouldn’t make much sense because unemployment is so high. I think the way in which I could be the most ‘useful’ is probably writing grant proposals for ngos because there are so few people here who can write well in English. At any rate, I’m learning a lot. Tim and Caitlin are researching the cashew industry in Tanzania– the country exports a lot of cashews to India, a major processing center, but efforts to increase domestic processing have been difficult. Eleuthera is researching the effects of language policy in Tanzania.

We went to Zanzibar the weekend before last and spent one night in Stone Town and one night on the beach. Most of the women there covered their heads (only about 40% do in Dar) and a lot of women wore buibui (like burkas). They still found ways to decorate and express themselves– sequins on hemlines, henna all over their hands. I can understand the appeal of the buibui; people seemed to treat them with a lot more respect than other women. I think laws that enforce burkas as a dress code are repressive but am becoming more sympathetic that the clothing itself could be empowering in some societies.

We ate dinner at a street market on the Indian ocean, where one could buy lobster, shrimp, and other fancy things from the ocean like octupus for less than fifty cents. I had a “Zanzibari pizza” — sort of an omelet inside a chapati– which cannot compete with ‘American” pizza. (Ohh, cheese…) We drank sugar cane juice (extracted by crushing the cane) flavored with ginger and lime juice. It was surprisingly delicious. There were laturns and small fires everywhere.

The night we stayed on the beach, we went swimming in the Indian ocean at midnight.

Tim’s parents are visiting right now. Having them here makes me miss my parents. They were in South Africa for a few weeks– Tim’s dad was lecturing at a linguistics conference and they came up here to visit for a week.

I think Dar might be a hard city to visit for a short period of time. There are some cities that are obviously beautiful, and then there are other cities where you have to look a little bit harder to find the beauty. Dar is a run down city without impressive or elegant buildings where nothing looks new. Unlike so many of its neighbors, Tanzania hasn’t suffered under self-aggrandizing leaders who erect monuments to themselves. There’s no Taj Mahal. The beauty in Dar is definitely in the people.

Like good Tanzanian residents, we’ve all become obsessed with the World Cup. Now that it is over, we spend a lot of time reading rumors about Zidane in tabloid-y papers. The last game made me sad. I was also hoping Italy would go offsides more because it was funny. If anyone wants to suggest a premier league European team I should support in the fall, I’d appreciate it. I’m trying to figure out post-graduate plans that will enable me to help Tanzania AND accidentally wind up in South Africa just in time for the 2010 World Cup. Suggestions?

Update: Last night, as a World-Cup-Substitute, Caitlin read the Da Vinci code aloud for three hours. Eleuthera and I had never read it before. Tim’s mother had brought it to Tanzania with her and hurried to finish it before leaving so we could read it. Although it feels less geo-political and there are no penalty kicks, it is equally gripping.

Tutaonana

Today was our last day of Swahili class. It's hard to believe that we have already been in Tanzania for three weeks. Richard gave us an exam which was a little bit of a surprise. Eleuthera was quite sure that we were going to have one but the rest of us didn't believe her. Richard promised he wouldn't put any vocabulary on it that he "was sure we didn't know," and he was true to his word, although there were definitely some conjunctions that weren't particularly familar.

In some ways, my Swahili is improving. I can read ads now and sometimes understand the focus of other people's conversations. I used to struggle because the Swahili 'r' is not at all like an American 'r' and whenever I tried to roll my 'r's I wound up with a French 'r.' Although Eleuthera assured me it would be cute if I spoke Swahili with a French 'r,' I'm subbing in 'l's instead as some Swahili speakers (mainly ones from the Northwest?) seem to do. If anyone asks, I learned Swahili up near Lake Victoria.

Eleuthera can communicate almost anything in Swahili at this point as long as she has the vocabulary. Last night, she had a long conversation with our security guard about what we could do for his sick mother using the subjunctive. She makes up for it by consistently talking about which teams she is 'voting for' in the World Cup instead of 'supporting.'

Along with the rest of Dar es Salaam, we were pretty excited for the USA Ghana match yesterday. As far as I could tell, we were the only ones at the restaurant who cheered when the U.S. scored (and Eleuthera abandoned us to cheer for Ghana, the traitor). A Canadian woman sitting near us felt bad and bought us drinks. Although we were all a little disappointed to see the U.S. lose (especially Tim, who intially picked the U.S. as one of his teams), everyone here is so excited about Ghana that it is contagious. When Ghana won, they started playing 'One Love' in the bar which was cute.

Tomorrow, we are taking a six am bus ride to Arusha, a city in Northern Tanzania where most safaris start. From there, we are going on a five day safari to Lake Manyara, the Serengeti, and Ngorogoro Crater. Being me, I'm secretly more excited to see Arusha, which is the seat of the East African Economic Community, the city in which the Burundi peace accords are being negotiated, and the place the Rwandan genocide tribunal is being held than I am to see Ngorogoro Crater. However, seeing (baby) elephants, lions, giraffes and zebras sounds amazing, even if they aren't the epicenter of East African conflict resolution. Caitlin has never been camping before, which certainly adds to the excitement.

After that, we are spending a few days in Arusha before heading back to Dar and starting our internships. We will be interning at the Economic and Social Research Foundation of Tanzania (www.esrftz.org). During our time in Arusha, we are probably not going to be able to check email but we will write very exciting posts about the safari when we get back, I promise.

Bagamoyo and Bongo

I'm writing this post with a little frusteration, because I already wrote it once but it got deleted when I tried to post it. Serves me right for not saving in Microsoft Word. You are all probably tired of hearing about our technology troubles by now, but I just don't seem to be able to escape computers that erase my stuff!

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Saturday, we took a trip to Bagamoyo, which is about an hour north of Dar es Salaam. Bagamoyo was the German capital of Tanzania under colonialism and was also a major point in the East African slave trade. Slaves from mainland Tanzania and Kenya were held in Bagamoyo before they were sent to work on plantations on Zanzibar, the Middle East, and islands in the Indian Ocean.

After eating lunch in Bagamoyo, we visited an old Catholic church that had been converted into a museum on the slave trade. Outside the museum was a tower were Dr. Livingstone's body rested for a night before it was shipped back to England. As we were leaving the museum, we saw about a hundred and fifty school children in white and marroon uniforms, waiting to go in. They were very excited to see us, and wanted to kiss our hands. I'm making a connection that isn't really there, but it was sad to leave a museum on slavery to see students who wanted to kiss our hands just because we were white Americans.

The bad condition of museums here also makes me sad. The museums we have visited all have very good content, and the staff seem very knowledgeable, but the displays themselves are falling apart. The text is peeling off the faded construction paper it was mounted on, and the English translations are sometimes too convulted to understand. It would be irresponsible to spend a lot on museums in such a poor country, but it's still sad that the children of Tanzania see such a run-down version of their history.

After the museum, we went to a crocodile zoo, and then to Kaole. At Kaole, there are ruins of two mosques dating back to the 13th century. By this point, Musa's eight year old niece, Anita, was getting bored, so I taught her how to take pictures with my camera. She was much better at it then I am. If you see any photos from my trip that aren't blurry, she's probably the one who took them. To her credit, she was very patient for most of the trip, although I expect her 'fall' in a puddle at the end was more of a 'jump.' Luckily Eleuthera had an extra towel.

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Sunday, Inno took us to have lunch with his colleague, Joseph. Joseph lives in one of Dar's many poorer neighborhoods. (Can you still call them slums when that's where most people live?) He and his wife and three younger children all live in a two room cement house with a tin roof. Inno says that when it rains (an everyday occurance here in June) their house floods because there is nowhere for the water to go, so they have to bail it out.

They were so happy to have us over, and cooked us a delicious lunch of wali and stew. They didn't eat with us, but just watched us eat. They insisted that we drink bottled water and beer with our meals, expenses that must have used up a fair portion of their monthly earning. Joseph's brother spoke very good English, and told us how excited everyone in the neighborhood was that Joseph was having Americans over for lunch. He said America was a good friend to Tanzania. (Tim asked Inno about this later, because such a pro-American attitude surprised us. Inno said that most Christians in Dar were very pro-American although there was more diversity of attitude among Muslims.)

Earlier that day, Inno had told us that bongo was local slang for Dar. Bongo means brains, and people use the term because you have to have brains to survive in Dar. Joseph's brother echoed this sentiment. "To survive here is very, very, very difficult," he said. "Life is very, very, very difficult. And yet, indeed, we do survive."

When Joseph first recieved a cell phone for the work he does with WILMA, Inno was frustrated because Joseph never charged his phone. Later he found out this was because Joseph didn't have power in his home, and was ashamed of his frustration. Since then, he and Paul Armington have given Joseph seven hundred dollars to buy a plot of land and build his own house. Inno says Joseph cried when he gave it to him. Right now, they are working on the roof.

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I wanted to write more about Swahili class, Kuinduchi Beach, and the National Village Museum, but I'm almost out of time. Hopefully, we will post again soon.

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.