A Farewell to Tanzania

I’ve been neglecting my blog a bit recently, in part because I haven’t been doing anything particularly blog-worthy, and in part because everything here is somehow absurd or challenging or worrisome or thought-provoking etc—from the Nakivale forced repatriation disaster, or my long, eventful busride back from Kigoma to dealings with the various forms of justice here, or my evolving opinion of the state’s role in development. So it turns out that suddenly it’s the end of my journey, as I’ve passed safely into the hands of Swiss Air, and I’m left trying to articulate a goodbye. Goodbyes are not one of my strengths.




There are a lot of things not to like about Dar es Salaam. It’s a hard place, gritty with dirt and crime and poverty. The city is mean in a way that I will never be. These characteristics can seem particularly harsh in the early days of culture shock, or when you’ve just had some of your most valued possessions stolen, as happened to me a few days ago. But despite all of the reasons to dislike Dar, it has won me over, and, as I sit in this bizarrely clean and air-conditioned airplane seat, I am deeply sad to leave.



So instead of thinking about the things I’ve lost, or whining about the fact that I was a mere twenty pages away(!) from finishing Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject, which I’ve been studiously underlining and marking for future reference, but which is now probably lying in a ditch somewhere since no thief would likely see the value in a scribbled-in book he can’t read, I’m going to focus on the wonderful things I’ve found here, the things I’m going to miss, the things that have changed my mind about my not-so-positive first impressions, and the things that will probably pull me back here some day in the future.




I will miss the brilliant, aquamarine blue of the ocean at Kigamboni, which makes you wonder, “How could I possibly want to be anywhere else in the world?” as you watch the waves crash gently down along the empty beach and contemplate whether you’ll buy a ridiculously cheap ice cream from the ice cream bicycles (or “bice creamsycles” as I think of them) now or later (or, in my case, both). I will miss sunset strolls down that beach, past the locals who cartwheel into the water and call out to the muzungu, to go back across the main road to the village where Bree and Alex live and where one small girl always approaches me to shyly grip my pointer finger while boys call out “give me money!”, or to catch a dalla-dalla back to Kigamboni town, which is lit at night by the candles of street vendors selling fresh calamari cooked in front of you on your way to the ferry back to Dar.




I will miss the smells of Africa. Multiple, conflicting, impossible-to-describe smells (the English language has fewer words to describe smells than any other senses) that fade as you adjust to them, and sink into your subconscious awareness. The smoky smell of morning in the village, cool with the promise of later heat. The stink of sewage, and garbage strewn in a muddy street. The distinct smell of body odor. The faint, elusive perfume of a flower in the humid evening. And more that I can’t distinguish or name, but which flood me with the contradictory thrill of being here, in Africa, and of their comforting familiarity every time I take a deep breath.




I will miss the faded, worn beauty of Dar’s old buildings. Celebrated neither for their history nor for the hodge-podge effect of old and new side-by-side, the pale blue or salmon pink buildings dating back to the 1800s are mostly ignored, orso it seems, coexisting with their uglier replacements and the newer, equally beautiful mosques. The dark lines of weather-worn age, the architectural equivalent of wrinkles, remind you of their pending demise—due either to lack of care or deliberate destruction to make way for new development.




I will miss hearing the Muslim call to prayer.




I will miss the fruit!! Do they even sell passionfruit in the US? And don’t get me started on the pineapple… Actually, let me amend that: I will miss all of the produce, its prevalence and the process of buying it. If I was charmed by places like West Side Market and Garden of Eden displaying their produce on the sidewalks of Morningside Heights as the sun seemed to draw out their aroma to entice passers-by, it’s nothing compared to the fruit and vegetable sellers here. It’s all so fresh and flavorful and adds even more color to the already-saturated scene of day-to-day life, laid out on mats on the sidewalks like a rainbow sea. I will miss the candles on the food stands at night, which make me think of those candles in churches.




I will almost miss the adventure of public transportation. It’s funny: when I was squeezed into the very back corner (where the window had come out, blowing such a thick layer of dust over me that I looked more orange than the cast of Jersey Shore) of the bus that rescued us when ours broke down, three hours into the journey from Kigoma to Dar, and I was worried about my backpack, which didn’t fit between my legs and was sitting in the aisle out of my sight, I texted Bree, “I hate traveling in Africa!!” Her response was, “Don’t worry, soon you’ll be back home and everything will be so easy and you’ll miss it.” And it’s sort of true. Fortunately, the MTA is doing a good job of cutting back on the number of subways in NYC, creating dalla-dalla-esque levels of cramped-ness – yay!




I will miss Kariakoo.




I will actually miss rice and beans. Is that weird? Wait, don’t answer that. But seriously, I’ve kind of been craving it… And pilau is now one of my favorite things ever. YUM!




I will miss the open, giving hospitality of the people who helped me—people who made my research and my travels possible, like Robert, Bree and Alex, Luke and Christiane, Obadiah, and others.




And many other things, I’m sure, that I won’t notice until I get home and don’t have them any more, or maybe even until I return. Like most experiences, my trip to Tanzania has had its ups and downs. My research was much less successful than I’d hoped, for several reasons, and I’m definitely leaving with many more questions, doubts and uncertainties than I came with. Overall, I’d say the experience has been humbling, in every possible way… but that’s a good thing! People like me (i.e. privileged and full of themselves) need to have humbling experiences more often! In the end, I’m really glad I came.

Thinking of Nabokov in Tanzania

“if, in the spiral unwinding of things, space warps into something akin to time, and time, in its turn, warps into something akin to thought, then, surely, another dimension follows—a special Space maybe, not the old one, we trust, unless spirals become vicious circles again”

In a week, I saw a cross-section of Tanzania. The drive from east to west, Dar es Salaam to Kigoma, cut diagonally through the country, through the vast, empty spaces dotted with the occasional town, and wove around the sporadic hills and towering mountain ranges. More revealingly, the journey from urban to rural brought me from capital city to quintessential African village with stops at each intermediate step along the way: Dar es Salaam to Kigoma to Kasulu to Makere. Each location brought me further from the comforts of home and closer to what some refer to as the “real” Africa, though I resist that equation of villages and authenticity (but sometimes find myself subconsciously buying into it).

I wrote at the beginning of my trip that I wanted to take Tanzania on its own terms, without comparison to Uganda and Rwanda. Nevertheless, at each stage in this progression, I found myself trying to fit what I was seeing into what I had seen in Uganda and Rwanda, trying to match each town or village to a parallel one in my previous travels. But nothing fit exactly and it felt like trying to hold onto water.

In Makere, the bizarre thrill of realizing that I can adjust (kind of, and a bit grumpily) to a temporary life without electricity, toilet paper, or running water (important in that order) brought back memories of Gulu and Nakivale. At the same time, this life was completely foreign, being so different from the other 20 years and 7 months of my life. Unfamiliarity clashed with familiarity as I simultaneously thought, “oh cool, I’m getting a chance to really see how other people who are completely different from me live” and “this is just like Gulu/Nakivale—and hey, why are you making such a big deal about reading by gaslight for two nights? You did that for a whole month in Gulu, silly.” When I walked past a large group of women and children singing outside a home, I thought (with the rosy tint of retrospection) of nights with my Acholi host family, Emma and Mama Winnie, when we would sit in darkness under the stars and Mama Winnie would lead us in singing, “My Jesus is Alive” while a pig wandered through the yard behind us and Nancy would tease us for our funny mzungu voices.

As refugees approached me on the path from Makere to Nyarugusu refugee camp to speak with me, I was almost back in Nakivale (and maybe Makere was the small town outside the camp where I stayed for a couple of nights while trying to arrange housing inside the camp). Even the red clay dust was familiar. Just like before, I groped my way through interviews in almost-correct French, and received many of the same answers to my very similar questions. At the same time, this village was neither Gulu nor Nakivale, and the little differences stood out, stubbornly refusing to allow Makere to conform to the neat categories I wanted to sort it into.

It wasn’t just in Makere, though it was there that I felt the disjointed dislocation of being in a place that didn’t quite fit any previous model the most. Every town feels vaguely familiar, like if I just catch it when it isn’t looking I’ll realize I’m really back in Kitgum, Uganda or that town where we always ate lunch on the road between Gulu and Kampala. But then there’s something a little bit different, a little out of place, every time.

A few weeks ago, RJS posted an article about culture shock in the comments of one of my entries. The article said that culture shock is a loss of meaning, and part of the process of negotiating and overcoming culture shock is the effort to find ways to make meaning for yourself, and I think my attempt to relate Tanzania to Uganda is my brain trying to make meaning out of my experiences in Tanzania.

In the same way that we look for patterns and recurring details in a text to understand what the author is trying to do, or compare similar situations across space and time to try to come up with a theory (both in hard sciences and in social sciences), we look for points of overlap in our lives—when one part of the pattern is superimposed on another—as if finding the thread that spirals through will give us the satisfaction of believing there is a purpose and significance to our individual existences. When these points don’t quite align, it’s harder to ascribe meaning, but I guess the point is that we don’t really want to come full circle anyways. Really it’s all about catching glimpses of comforting familiarity in new places and wondering if the thread is a precise spiral or just a wandering, erratic trail—if life can conform to artistic ideals, or if such organization is necessarily artificial by virtue of being ideal.

Children in Makere

When Tanzanian mothers want to scare their children into behaving, they tell them, “if you keep doing that, the mzungu’s going to come and get you!!”

And I almost have been the mythical mzungu boogeyman the past couple of days. Like the pied piper, I walk through the village with a growing swarm of children around me. One girl apparently told her friends she would follow me until she got to be just like me.

Some run away from me (one girl ran like her life depended on it while the whole neighborhood laughed at her; when she fell flat on her face, we laughed even harder), some run to me, trying to catch my attention, and all of them treat me like the best entertainment possible. It’s a game to chase after me and see who can get the closest before I look at them (or better yet, turn my camera in their direction) and they scatter.



On our first night in Makere, Robert picked out a “really nice” restaurant for us, though I was immediately skeptical because no one was eating there, and they were only serving rice and beans (fine by me, but Robert only eats ugali). Over the past day, their menu has expanded to include rice, beans, ugali and those nasty small fish with their shells still on that they buy dry and then cook in soup (as far as I can tell). Needless to say, I’ve been eating a lot of rice and beans the past couple of days.

Robert insists that we go back there for every meal—I’m tangentially wondering if he has a bit of a crush on the woman who runs it—and on our second night, the woman shepherded two bashful young girls to the bench of the other table to stare at us sit with the mzungu.

“Habarti?” I don’t know much Swahili, but “how are you?” is essential. Behind the glare of the room’s one gas lamp, directly in front of me, the girls are silent, either assuming that I’m not addressing them or too shocked to answer. I try again.

“Nzuri,” comes the timid, embarrassed reply, as the older girl, half hidden behind the younger finds her voice again.

“Nitwa nani?” I try to mimic what Robert says when he asks for people’s names. This is one of the cool overlaps between Swahili and Kinyarwanda: in Rwanda, I introduce myself, “Nitwa Danielle”

The older girl, bolder now, announces that her name is Kalega and her sister’s name is Epi (I think). We stare at each other in half-awkward silence, since I’ve used up almost all of my Swahili other than, “How is your morning?” which isn’t really appropriate at the moment. The girls are dressed in pale pink dresses, and the younger girl’s dress looks like exactly the sort of princess dress my four-year-old self would have absolutely loved to wear every day. I ask Robert how to say “I like your dresses.”

“Npanda mavazi zeno” It takes me a couple of tries, and I’m not sure my point gets across, because the young girl chirps up excitedly that her mami will give her clothes (or at least, that’s how I understood Robert’s translation). Their mother bustles in to wash some dishes in the corner and starts to tease the girls about how much they love the mzungu, how they’re going to dream about the mzungu, and what would happen to them if they went to the US.

The young girl has apparently decided that she wants to give me her dress, and sits there earnestly pulling the bows with a look of deep determination in an attempt to take it off while the rest of us try to breathe around our laughter. We tease her about what she will wear when she’s given me her dress, but she ignores us and begins to steadfastly brush the dirt from every inch she can reach, so that she can give me a clean dress.

Even though I usually think it’s creepy and disturbing when people here tell me they love me as soon as they see me, I’m going to chalk this one up to children being adorable, sweet, and sincerely giving.

Kigoma

So I spent one day in Kigoma, long enough to find out that none of the organizations I wanted to talk to could meet me until next week, and then decided to go to Kasulu, which is closer to the refugee camps and hosts a number of other organizations that work in the camps. In Kasulu, I spoke to a couple of really helpful people (specifically at World Vision and GTZ) and some extremely unhelpful, bureaucratic nincompoops (specifically at UNHCR and IRC), and decided that an even better use of my time would be to go to Makere, the small village on the edge of Nyarugusu refugee camp, where I can meet refugees without going into the camp. Now I’m back in Kigoma and happy to be reunited with the internet and electricity!

I’ve got a backlog of writing to do to get caught up on all that, but in the meantime, here’s the entry I wrote about my first day in Kigoma:

You know that feeling, “I must be the luckiest person alive”? That’s kind of how I felt on Tuesday morning, my first morning in Kigoma. I couldn’t tell you what exactly it was that made me feel that way—I’m sure it had to do with leaving Dar es Salaam on a good note, my optimism about the research I’ll be doing for the next couple of weeks, and the overwhelming familiarity of my African breakfast (too sweet tea and sliced bread with Blue Band, served on an awkwardly low table in a sitting room with gaudy, obviously fake flowers and those stupid lace doilies draped over the couches), but I think mostly it had to do with Robert.

Robert is my guide here, and he’s smart, fluent in English, cheerful, and one of the most genuinely selfless people I’ve ever met. Even down to the little things like making sure I have a place to sit, or begging me to let him do my laundry. He’s short, almost reaching my shoulder, and when he laughs, revealing his practically horizontal buck-teeth, his whole being goes into that laugh. He spent today taking me around to various organizations, introducing me to people, translating when necessary, and basically being exactly the kind of help I needed in Dar es Salaam. He’s so sincerely helpful and motivated to make sure things work out for me. I propose an organization to visit, and he jumps up excitedly and mentions two others that might be useful. When someone doesn’t answer my questions fully, he presses them for answers for me.

I’m living with Robert’s brother, a magistrate in Kigoma. His house is quite big, with electricity (which has already gone out twice, and I’m getting suspicious of its reliability despite their reassurances that this is a fluke), running water (though there’s a leak in the faucet, so I’ve been taking cold bucket showers from the collected water), and even a TV that was playing BBC news and the Cartoon Network this morning. So far they are refusing to let me pay them for accommodation or meals, but I’m hoping that I can find some way to repay their generosity—maybe I can donate to Robert’s NGO, Environmental Protection and Humanitarian Agency.

Kigoma is a small town right on the edge of Lake Tanganyika. It’s actually a lot bigger than it seems, at first, because it isn’t laid out the way we’d expect. A Western city that’s isolated and hard to reach by land, but situated at the edge of a body of water would most likely be centered along the coastline, so when you look at a map of Kigoma and see one main road that leads down to the water, it’s easy to assume that that’s pretty much the extent of the city. In person, it’s a nondescript road, with some small restaurants, a train station, a couple of internet cafés, and some shops—though it is one of the few paved roads in the town.

To either side of that road, the town sprawls up steep hills, and once you get up into the neighborhood where I’m living it feels a bit like a village. Houses are dispersed and farm animals outnumber people on the street The fresh breeze from the lake keeps the temperature cool while the sun beats down, and periodically you come around a corner and see a view of hills rolling into the lake, which stretches out as far as the eye can see (apparently it’s a ten hour boat ride to the Congo).

So at first, I thought that Kigoma was just one strip of road and rural, residential areas up in the hills. Soon I discovered that there’s a ton more activity further inland. The center of gravity, so to speak, is not along the waterline, but maybe a mile to the east. It almost feels like the one, paved road is a façade to trick the mzungu tourists into thinking there’s nothing here, and it isn’t until you turn down the alleyways that you find a bumpy, dusty backroad teeming with shops and activity, or at least one busy marketplace. Kigoma is also home to one of the world’s most spectacular sunsets. Tonight the sun became a brilliant red ball that slid by fractions into a blue haze over the lake, framed by hills on either side. /sigh/

I’m really excited to be here, doing research on refugees. I’ve realized that this is so much more what I’m interested in—the conflicts between different groups of refugees, how their displacement from their conflict influences their opinion of home and here, their relations with the local community, etc etc etc. I have so many questions. Unfortunately, I still haven’t managed to get a permit to enter the camps, so I have to rely on what I hear from the aid organizations working there. But I’m trying my best to find other ways (short of, you know, sneaking into the camp and risking deportation…)

I’ll be back in Kigoma next week to talk to organizations here and hopefully I can find some self-settled refugees. They have to keep a low profile, since they’re basically illegal immigrants, but I’d love to talk to them…

I’m still trying to decide whether I’ll stay in Kigoma until July 20th or 22nd, which would bring me back to Dar on either the 22nd or 24th. Not sure if I’ll have organizations to meet with there, or if I’ll just be hanging out in Kigamboni with Bree and Alex until my departure on the 27th – hard to believe my time in Tanzania is going by so quickly!

A Walking tour of Kariakoo

So I’m heading out to Kigoma, in the far west of the country, early on Sunday morning! I’m really excited. I’ll be there for at least two weeks, meeting up with the aid organizations working in the refugee camps in the region. I’ll write more about that later, but in the meantime, keep an eye out for increased political instability in Burundi following the sham elections, from which most if not all of the opposition parties have withdrawn and there are rumors that the main opposition leader may start fighting again. Chances are that more refugees will be headed my way, since Tanzania has always been the main destination for Burundian refugees. This time, however, Tanzania is threatening not to let them in, which could be a big problem.

In the meantime, I’m spending my last day in Dar (for now) soaking in as much of the craziness that is Kariakoo as possible, relaxing on the beaches of Kigamboni (paradise), and trying not to finish the new books I bought for Kigoma (likely devoid of any sort of decent bookstore) before I even get there. Fortunately the memory of the crap I had to read in the refugee camp in Uganda is enough to make me put down the book… I doubt there’s a worse book than Ben Carson’s disgustingly narcissistic autobiography (I mean really, the guy gives “autobiography” a bad name), but I’d hate to have to find out.

It’s strange to me that I’m already leaving Kariakoo. I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface here, though I could probably live here for years and still feel the same way. Yet another way in which it’s like NYC.

There are two downsides to having a really nice camera. The first is that other people don’t know how to use it, and the second is that it’s really hard to be subtle about taking pictures. Especially in a place where I stick out like a sore thumb anyways, where such luxuries are rare, and where people are suspicious of anyone taking their picture. The point is that there are some pictures I just can’t take, and it’s driving me crazy. Since I can’t show you Kariakoo, and it’s really a place worth seeing, I’m going to try to walk you from one side to the other. I can’t possibly do the neighborhood justice, but it’s the best I can do for now.

We start by exiting the apartment building where I’m staying, and greet the building’s security guard. We walk carefully into the street, which is dirty and a little bit wet, so watch where you step. It was paved not too long ago, but the rainy season destroyed it—to the left, there is a hole big enough to swallow a small car (Luke and Christiane have videos from their balcony of cars and buses getting stuck in the mini lake). Merge into the stream of pedestrian traffic and try to avoid being run over by a car—it’s technically a two-way street, but sometimes fitting two cars can be a tight squeeze. Across the street, there’s a stand selling phone credit and other random knick-knacks, and a row of large wooden carts. Wedged between parked cars on the side of the road is a man selling slightly under-ripe oranges from a tray on his bicycle. He peels the zest off with a knife and the smell of oranges fills the air as we walk past.

We reach the taxi stand at the corner, where at least ten taxis are parked and their owners call out “Jambo, mzungu! Taxi?” from the stoop of the corner store. This is one of the busiest streets of Kariakoo, traffic-wise. Dust and gas fumes make the air murky. A constant rush of two way traffic (technically it’s a two lane street, but there are usually at least three lanes. The intersection here can be really interesting, since stoplights and right-of-way rules are laughable ideas. Two lorries try to turn down the same street at the same time, as a dalla-dalla comes up from the other direction. The three stop and yell at each other, blocking the roads in all directions, so a taxi drives into oncoming traffic to get around the truck as a motorcycle weaves in between all of them. Now that the cars are busy working around this blockage, it’s a good time to cross the street—otherwise, you just have to walk into the taillights of a car and hope that the upcoming driver is patient in case you mistime your jay-walking. There’s a large gas station with tacky light-up palm trees and a bunch of employees in official-looking uniforms hanging out, joking with each other and trying to catch the mzungu’s attention.

After walking through the gas station, we reach an unpaved, bumpy road, which happens to be one of the most exciting in the whole city. Most of the Kariakoo-bound dalla-dallas stop along this road, so there are throngs of people waiting for their bus. The buses pull over wherever they get a chance (it’s loosely organized based on where the buses are heading), cutting each other off and keeping other drivers and pedestrians on their toes. In the evenings, there’s a crush to get out of the city (thank god I live in the middle of everything, and travel against the traffic most of the time) and the fight to get onto a dalla-dalla gets really brutal. I am now fully trained to participate in the Filene’s Basement wedding dress sale. Men meander through the crowds and buses with boxes of cold water bottles or trays of roasted nuts and cigarettes on their shoulders clinking coins loudly in their hands and/or making a garbled, nasally sound to attract the attention of people waiting for the bus to squeeze its way through the traffic.

We have to walk in the street, even though there are sidewalks, because the sidewalks are taken up by parked cars and motorcycles, people selling stuff, people sitting on benches, people waiting for buses, food stands, etc. etc. The shops along the road sell clothes, new and second-hand, plastic shopping bags, spare (possibly stolen) car parts, sodas, cooking oil, phone credit, snacks, tools, pirated DVDs, and just about anything. Outside of the big indoor market, there’s another taxi stand of some 20 taxis who offer me a ride every time I walk past, even though I turn them down every time, at least once or twice a day. There’s also a big sidewalk area, with a couple of carts selling herbal remedies and rows of vegetable vendors who lay their small tomato pyramids on mats on the ground. It’s an exercise in agility to weave through the shifting streams of pedestrians, around the vegetable mats and over a rolling onion that’s escaped its bright kitenge-clad seller.

A couple of days ago, as I was walking down this stretch of road, I heard some shouts directly behind me, and turned in time to see a crowd gathering around a would-be thief. Young men began to pour out of the surrounding streets to cheer on the fight, but I got myself out of there quickly. You see all sorts of people in this area, but not many police, except those who blast through traffic on their motorcycles, or the secret police, in their pick-up trucks (we can tell because we see their Kalashnikovs from our balcony).

The side roads behind the main market place are narrow dirt paths lined by market stalls and more vegetable vendors. Here your feet can get caked in mud, and people are usually quite surprised to see me wandering around. As we walk further down the road, away from the dalla-dalla stands and the vegetable mats, the pedestrian traffic thins. There are fewer carts selling sugar cane or blasting music and most of the women aren’t carrying anything on their heads. There’s still a trickle of people walking around the parked cars, and of course shop owners and their friends and customers sit out on the stoop. We reach Mnazi Mmoja park and there’s a tent where I think TVs and radios and electronics are sold, though to be honest, the ring of people surrounding it tend to obscure what’s going on, so I can’t be sure. There are usually one or two crippled beggars here, and another cart of herbal medicine. Cross another busy street, and we’ve reached my favorite street in Dar (though technically Kariakoo ended at the park).

To the right is a covered market selling grains and along both sides of the street is shelf after shelf, and cart after cart, all heaping with a panoply of delicious fruits and vegetables. Pineapple, papaya, passionfruit, mangos, grapes, oranges, bananas, tomatoes, avocados, limes, bell peppers, carrots, onions, and some I don’t even know the names of. A feast of colors and yumminess. Cars don’t typically turn down this dirt road because pedestrian traffic is so dense, so we only have to think about not bumping into people while staring at the fresh produce. We are starting to move into the oldest part of the city, and there are still some beautiful, run-down and crumbling old buildings with intricate carvings that have yet to be torn down and replaced by the ugly new monstrosities.

The call to prayer rises from the mosque to the left, and as we reach the end of this garden of Eden, there’s a book seller, with stacks of books four of five deep on the two large tables and displays along the back wall as high as I can reach. Ever wonder what happened to that old book on, um, anything (no, really, anything) that you gave away but weren’t sure if anyone would ever want it? It’s here. Along with every other obscure, misplaced, unusual and battered old book that no one wanted.

Visiting Keko

I have so much to write about from the past few days! It’s going to take me a couple of days to get caught up, but I’ll start with my visit to Keko.

On Tuesday, Christiane and I went to a seminar on hygiene promotion in Keko, one of the most centrally-located informal settlements. The seminar was conducted entirely in Swahili, so even though Christiane translated some of it for me, I was pretty bored (and let’s face it, “seminar on hygiene promotion” sounds pretty boring anyways). So I took pictures and wrote notes to myself about what I had seen on my way there and what was happening in class. I’ll share some of them here:

Walking through Keko: dirty streets with trampled garbage and roosters picking their way through the mud; tiny shops line the streets; we stopped for water at a place whose window shelves were littered with cheap plastic toys that recall McDonald’s happy meals: “mchina, mchina, mchina,” says Hemedi, our guide. As the wind blows dust from the streets into our eyes and mouths, he laughs to me, “Squatter street!” At least two men have asked to marry us already.

In class, participants are asked to write what they want from the seminar, what they don’t want, and their doubts about the project. A good twenty minutes is spent reading each person’s response out loud and writing each one on a sheet of paper taped to the chalkboard – a boring and time-consuming process. Attentions begin to wander (mine, especially). A man reads the newspaper, people whisper to each other – feels just like home!

At the same time, it’s funny how different education is here compared with the US. It gets me every time. Like right now they’ve written most of the lecture on a paper and people are copying it word-for-word. Ah, now the organizers have moved one of the posters to the back, and people complain that they were still writing. They’re told “if you want to write every word, you should come tomorrow morning because now we want to talk.” I’m seriously impressed. Of course, now that the leaders are just talking, no one writes a word.

We stand up and I’m suddenly aware of how sore my butt is already from ten minutes on the uncomfortable bench. Oh dear. The leader asks if there are different kinds of trees (yes). We’re told to stand a certain distance from each other: far enough to put hands on hips—a huge luxury in Tanzania! We’re led in miming fruit-picking from the branches of a tree, a motion which apparently includes twisting the foot opposite the reaching arm and shaking the butt in a way that looks playful and cute on the more callipygian and painfully awkward on us sore mzungus.

Suddenly, everyone is clapping and singing a song about not sleeping in class! It boggles me that every single person joins in enthusiastically and with no sense of irony or resentment. It reminds me of some of the difficulties we had with teachers in Gulu, Uganda, who thought that we should know an arsenal of games and songs to keep classes lively. I noticed at the group meeting I went to in Tandale last week that sometimes people would all start flapping their hands in the direction of the person speaking. Christiane explains that this is called “giving someone electricity.” I’m not totally sure if it means they agree with the speaker, or like what they are saying, or what. The class applauds when someone gives a correct answer (and by “applauds” I mean “rubs their hands together for a minute and then claps them together loudly once, pushing the top hand in the direction of the person they’re applauding”)

The wind blows strongly in the trees outside the classroom. This bench is really uncomfortable. Children run around outside, yelling. A few stare silently at us from their position under the tree a few yards from where Christiane and I are sitting. Then the more rambunctious gather and yell to each other about the mzungus. It occurs to me for the millionth time that school would be a lot more interesting if I could amuse myself with taking pictures in my real classes, too!

Christiane, Hemedi and I snuck out during the class soda break, and walked through part of the settlement. I stared at the shacks and marveled that they manage to stay standing. There are people everywhere, but not like in Kariakoo, where most people bustle around like it’s Times Square. Here they stroll casually, or sit outside their shops, or play with other children or try to sell stuff. We stop at one of the water taps, where a woman tells us that the water pressure wasn’t strong enough for the tap to come out of the ground, so they had to dig a hole around it and stick in a bucket to collect the water. From there, she scoops the water out by pitcher into her bucket. As the water trickled out from the tap, we could see that it was going to take her a while. We could also see the stacks of buckets lined up around the tap: about 40 people were waiting for their turn.

Hemedi took us to his mother’s home, and I took pictures of the adorable children who stared at us with wonder as we waited for our host to finish her midday prayers. She welcomed us warmly into her one-room home (about 3m by 3m). Inside, the standing room was about 1m by 1m and the rest of the space was taken up by two short beds, a couch for visitors, and a stack of cooking utensils and plastic buckets. I couldn’t communicate, but her sincerity in offering us six of her hen’s eggs couldn’t be anything but heartwarming.

The settlement is slowly recovering from the rainy season. We saw a house that had been completely washed away—all that was left was the crumbling stone jetting out from the wall of the house next to it. Christiane tells me that during the rains, water ran through the settlement like a river, and the houses in the valley were flooded chest-high. Now the trash that people just dumped into the flowing water rests wherever the water left it… I can only imagine that this must be what New Orleans looked like after Hurricane Katrina.

Into the slums at last!

I finally got to visit not one, but two informal settlements this week! On Wednesday night, Christiane brought Luke and I to Keko, where she’s done a lot of her research, and we watched the Germany-Ghana soccer game at the community police station. We were outside, in the dark, with about 60 other people crowded around one TV in a space roughly the size of my dorm room last semester, and it was a great way to watch the game. Most of us were cheering for Ghana, but there were a surprising number of Germany fans, and the interactions between people were the best part of the evening. Everyone was so into it! And they kept up a banter that, from what I could infer and what Christiane translated for me, was teasing in a really good-natured, inclusive way (Ghana supporter: “You’re so loud, you should go into the valley and cheer from there!” Germany supporter: “But I have to be here with my mzungu friends!”) A sharp contrast to the very boring England-Algeria game I watched at the fancy mzungu hotel where Bree works.

Then on Thursday, I went to Tandale with two guys who work for Luke and can more or less speak English, between the two of them. Tandale is a sprawling informal settlement of one-storey homes and some shops. It feels a lot more like a village than a city (no concrete, everyone knows each other, you walk through your neighbors’ plots to get places—in sum, the line between public and private is blurred/nonexistent), but much more closely-packed. Houses are small, so a lot of daily life happens outside by the sides of the narrow, not-quite-roads. Women sit outside, trying to earn a few thousand shillings (about $2.30) cooking basic Tanzanian food or washing used water bottles. People were generally quite willing to talk to me after my guides introduced me, though we did get yelled at by the head of the prostitutes for trying to talk to one of them during peak mid-day hours—but even she told me I could come back at night or in the morning if I wanted.

The main problem I ran into was that there really aren’t any aid projects in the informal settlements. I mean, I had kind of figured that out, but I still didn’t quite make the connection that it would be really hard to ask people about how much of a say they have in projects that don’t exist. I think I need to change the kind of questions I’m asking, or the way I’m looking at my overall question. Overwhelmingly, the help that people want is money to start a business—a remarkably internally-driven perspective on improving their lives (even they’re if appealing to me, an outsider). They do talk about the other problems of the settlement like hospitals and roads, but the solution they want is money for their own initiatives. I wonder if the difference between this outlook and that of the refugees in Uganda is due to the fact that slum-dwellers don’t see their living situation as temporary, or feel the same longing to return to their home country. Or does it have to do more with living in an environment devoid of aid projects and the message that they need someone else to come in and do everything for them?

It’s interesting that when asked “who do you think should provide water/build a secondary school/improve the hospital/etc?” the answer was always, unequivocally, the government—and the government is responsible, but it’s surprising to me that no one suggested that an aid organization could do it, especially given the general disillusionment vis-‡-vis the government. Almost no one said they were planning to vote in the next elections; instead they laughed at me and told me they didn’t trust the government, because it had forgotten about them.

I’ve been thinking about why there aren’t more aid projects for the informal settlements. African slums are somehow less romanticized than Asian slums (with the exception maybe of Kibera in Kenya). Instead, the West glorifies the small African village, devoting tons of energy and resources to projects for the rural poor and practically nothing to those who leave the villages. It’s like, the city is the realm of the rich, where businessmen and UN people can live in posh neighborhoods with beautiful houses and fancy cars and almost no contact with poverty, which only exists Out There, in the pure, innocent, backwards rural villages. (That said, I don’t think it’s a bad thing that people living in informal settlements want their government to help them, instead of NGOs).

After a surreal weekend in mzungu-land (I went to a movie! Like, in a mall and everything! Bizarre), spending time in these settlements has felt refreshingly “real,” as much as I hate that term. I’ve been having a strange bout of Gulu nostalgia, something I never thought I’d say. There’s something about the sound of a rooster crowing that completely brings me back there, though.

Ventriloquism in Refugee Boy

I don’t have much new to say about Tanzania, and it’s a little hard to write intelligently while Swahili rap music is blasting outside of my window (never mind that it’s 2:30am—or that the song’s chorus is “Mambo vipi [what’s up?] I’m a star” over and over again…) but I do want to talk about this book I just finished reading, Refugee Boy, by Benjamin Zephaniah. I picked it up from the awesome bookstore, having already finished all three fiction books I brought with me and not really wanting to delve into Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject yet (though now that I’ve also finished both of my new books from the bookstore, I guess I have to…) Anyways, I got it because I’ve been on the hunt for stories from a refugee’s perspective, preferably those told in the voices of refugees themselves.

Zephaniah isn’t actually a refugee, and I don’t think he’s from Africa, but it’s still interesting to see him try to represent the refugee experience through the fictional story of an Ethiopian-Eritrean boy. Alem is persecuted in both Ethiopia and Eritrea for having mixed parents until his father leaves him in Britain, where an organization helps him find a foster family and apply for political asylum. Zephaniah writes in the introduction,

For Refugee Boy I borrowed from the many stories that I have heard, and created a story that I believe many refugees would recognize. I would hope that anyone who reads the book would think before they accuse refugees of looking for a free ride. We all want to live in peace, we all want the best for our families. The Celts, the Angles, the Saxons, the Jamaicans are all refugees of one sort or another. What kind of a refugee are you? And what are you scared of?

Since I just spent a semester reading autobiographies/first-person narratives and dealing with these questions of representation, I noticed that Zephaniah borrows from autobiographical tradition in a couple ways. First, in claiming that refugees will recognize themselves in this story, he establishes that he has some right to speak for them. This is a lot like the way Rigoberta Menchu speaks for indigenous Guatemalans, except for the fact that she was actually an indigenous Guatemalan and Zephaniah isn’t a refugee (but the latter doesn’t claim that this is his experience). The second thing he does is claim that the reader will recognize herself as well—encouraging us to engage in autobiographical reading as we go (and since we’re all refugees, that means that he is too, and therefore it’s ok for him to speak on their behalf). Just like an autobiographer, Zephaniah runs into the tension between individuality and generalizability, but in order to assert his authority, he has to prioritize generalizability.

(Uh, ok, judging by the sounds outside, I think someone is killing a cat. Am a little concerned.)

I have to give Zephaniah a lot of credit for recognizing the limits of his ability to speak for his character. The book is written almost entirely in the third-person, and while we do hear a lot of Alem’s point of view/inner thoughts, the author backs off at really emotional moments that are clearly outside of his personal range of experiences. Usually bad news comes in a letter and Alem gets to read it and react before we find out what it is. The author doesn’t try to express how Alem is feeling during traumatic moments: we see his physical reactions but the emotions behind them aren’t explained to us. We have just as much insight into his well-being and psychological state as the nice British foster family he lives with does.

But there are two chapters written in the first person: the first is his testimony, given to two people who work for an organization called the Refugee Council (this organization really exists and its contact information is given at the back of the book, which gives a slight impression that the book is meant to be an advertisement), and the final chapter, entitled “Let Me Speak.” These chapters both begin with “My name is Alem Kelo” (which is also the last line of the book) – a bold way of saying “this is my voice,” given that it isn’t, in fact, the voice of Alem Kelo. I don’t have a problem with the first of the two chapters, since it reflects the amount of information that would be available to the judge deciding his case. This is the only time in the asylum process when the voice of the refugee is allowed to come through: when they are explaining why they are refugees. They are only allowed to use their voices to self-define as refugees.

The final chapter is a bit trickier for me. It’s a statement asserting the personhood (as opposed to the mere refugee-ness) of the protagonist: “Look at me, look at all the things that I am capable of, and think of all the things you could call me – a student, a lover of literature, a budding architect, a friend, a symbol of hope even, but what am I called? A refugee.” This is the only time when I think it’s a bit of a problem for Zephaniah to manufacture the voice of a refugee, in part because Alem in the story shows no desire to make political speeches of this sort and is pushed into doing so against his will.

There are four poems at the end of Refugee Boy, in a section called “Refugee Writes.” Not totally clear if these poems were in fact written by refugees or are also fictionalized, but I’m inclined to believe the former. I don’t know why, but for some reason poetry seems to be the vehicle of choice for refugees’ voices.

There’s a lot of scholarship about how refugees are silenced by virtue of their being labeled “refugees,” and there’s even some scholarly literature about how that scholarship excludes refugees’ voices, but so far I have yet to find anyone who really engages with texts written by refugees – except for poetry. Peter Nyers’ Rethinking Refugees is a great example of a book that excoriates other scholars for not effectively taking the opinions of refugees into consideration, but then only devotes a few pages to looking at a couple of poems written by refugees. (N.b. it’s also a great example of a book that should never have been published without a real editor going through it: Nyers completely misinterprets international law, and writes such NONSENSICAL CRAP as “For instance, conflict within the refugee community and between refugees and the local community surely represent a qualitative difference than does the presence of agents of genocide.” Gahhhhhh!). Anyways, my point is that for some unknown reason, either refugees don’t write anything other than poetry or nothing else they write is ever publicly available.



In terms of the political aspect of the story, the book is a call to think about the way we treat asylum seekers and immigrants. Zephaniah writes, “When I hear politicians saying that we are being ‘flooded’ by refugees, I always remind myself that each ‘refugee’ is a person, a person who for some reason has left everything they know and love to find safety in a strange and sometimes hostile country.” This is definitely a perspective that gets drowned out in the xenophobic reactions to outsiders who dare to enter our zones of privilege. Sorry, but we don’t have any more of a right to safety because we happen to have been born in a certain place at a certain time.

Zephaniah partially succeeds in showing the inhumane way in which refugees are treated, but probably doesn’t go far enough. The book is a children’s story, a fact which doesn’t diminish it in the slightest, but I do think it’s convenient that Zephaniah gets to use the child to embody the innocence of the refugee population. Alem is kind of a poster-boy for refugees (“look at this cute, intelligent, well-behaved, innocent little child! How could you possibly advocate for kicking him out!?”) Because Zephaniah chooses to use this plot device, he probably doesn’t really convey the confusion and overwhelming-ness of the process of applying for asylum: most of these complications are dealt with by the Refugee Council and a lawyer. And I can only imagine how difficult a process it is… I mean, even the much, much easier tasks of renewing my green card and applying for American citizenship have been frustrating and a bit confusing (and I am incredibly privileged for a number of reasons, especially including the fact that I don’t look or sound like a foreigner). For some insight on the experiences of immigrants in the US, look here and here and here and here. I’d also highly recommend the movie “The Visitor” which deals with some of the same issues.

Why I need to be patient

So research is going, or at least, going on Africa time. At the moment, I’m facing precisely three problems with this first half of the research:

1. I can’t figure out which organizations work in informal settlements, let alone get in touch with them.
The Citywide Action Plan for the Upgrading Unplanned and Unserviced settlements in Dar es Salaam says, "There are at least three distinct projects aimed at improving water and sanitation in unplanned areas in Dar es Salaam... [One of these projects] involves three international organizations: Care International, Plan International and WaterAid Tanzania.” Care Int’l doesn’t give a phone number, email address or physical address on their website, and I’ve been trying to get in touch with WaterAid for days. Shockingly, Plan International has all their Tanzania contact info online!
Me: “Hello, is this Plan International?”
Woman #1: “Yes”
Me: “My name is Danielle [blah blah blah]. Does your organization do any work in informal settlements?”
Woman #1: “Yes”
Me: “Great! Would it be possible for me to meet with someone to talk about your organization’s work in informal settlements?”
Woman #1: “Uh, you want to talk to someone regarding the informal environment?”
Me: “…Regarding informal settlements”
[muffled sounds]
Woman #2: “Hello?”
Me: “Hi, my name is Danielle [blah blah blah]. I was hoping to talk to someone about your organization’s work in informal settlements.”
[silence]
Me: “Does Plan International work in informal settlements?”
Woman #2: “No.”

2. It’s really hard to find things to take photos of for BGI
Me: “I’d love to come see one of your projects sometime!”
WAT guy: “Hmmm… I can’t think of anything to show you. If you’ve already seen [other organization’s work], that’s probably the best thing”

3. There are several other researchers in Dar, all of whom are following the same trail of contacts.
Me: “Hello, is this [municipal leader]?”
Guy: “Yes, who is this?”
Me: “My name is Danielle—“
Guy: “How do you have this number?”
Me: “Rachel at City Council gave me your number”
Guy: “Oh! Yes, yes, I remember you! So I will see you when?”
Me: “Um, well…”
[momentary debate over whether to try to explain that he has no idea who I am or take advantage of his willingness to meet with me]
Me: “I’m free this afternoon, or tomorrow.”
Guy: “Ok, I will see you tomorrow. Ten o’clock?”
Me: “Great! Where?”
Guy: “At the office. See you then”

Oh, and the not speaking Swahili doesn’t really help much either. Anyways, time to fall asleep listening to the sounds of the neighborhood (at the moment: some distant yelling, Celine Dion & R Kelly belting out “I’ll be your angel,” and those blasted horns—if you’ve been watching the World Cup, you know what I’m talking about, and I can promise that they’re every bit as obnoxious in person as they are on television).

From Kariakoo to Sea Cliff Village

I’ve moved out of the hostel! Yay! I mean, the hostel was fine, and I met some wonderful people, but I hated knowing that anyone in the surrounding area who was friendly to me couldn’t be trusted, while the people who could be trusted (i.e. hostel staff) were so unfriendly. In that neighborhood, it’s a job to hang out around the hostels and “make friends” with the backpackers and travelers and try to take advantage of them. But I’m out of there now!

I’m staying with a German couple who have been in Dar for six months and who live in this great apartment in Kariakoo, which is a huge market-like neighborhood near the city center. It’s a little disappointing not to be living with Tanzanians, but it just hasn’t worked out. Christiane and Luke speak Swahili very well (she’s fluent and he’s learning), have that ease of people who are clearly comfortable in their surroundings. It’s really nice to be able to talk to more people who know Dar and its inhabitants, and Christiane is doing research for her PhD on housing microfinance in informal settlements – making her an infinitely useful source of information. From the balcony of the apartment, we can look out over the sea of metal-sheeting roofs to watch the day-to-day bustle of the city and peer down into the homes of our neighbors as the noises of their cooking, conversations, and screaming babies drift through our windows. The call to prayer rises from one of three nearby mosques every so often, and last night the funeral prayers lasted for hours. For pictures, go to Christiane and Luke’s blog here.

There aren’t any mzungus in this area, other than us, and it’s a shame for them, because they miss out on what seems to me the most “real” part of Dar I’ve seen so far. Not that the city center area wasn’t real, but it was shaped in a lot of ways by the hostels and the nice hotels. Here the city ignores its visitors and gets on with life, selling whatever people will buy, narrowly avoiding dalla-dalla collisions, and honking, yelling, jostling, greeting, clinking coins, etc etc

Luke drove me through the “nice” part of the city yesterday, to (I kid you not) “Sea Cliff Village.” Suddenly we were in American suburbia. Sprawling plots of land featuring huge houses—palaces, by Kariakoo standards—walled off from the world by high-security fences that are only necessary because there’s no life in the area (I’m sure the dark, empty, gate-walled streets are terrifying in the night, but only because there are no people!). To be fair, some of the older buildings in the posh neighborhoods are a lot more like what I expected to find here, and they are beautiful.

The “Village” reminded me of Wrentham Village outlet malls, or of shopping areas around Tucson, Arizona. We went to a newly-opened, glistening mall with if-only-that-was-ironic kitschy Greek statuettes, where Luke is providing the ex-pat children some much-needed boredom relief: after seeing something similar in South Africa, he’s constructed a pool of water with huge person-sized balls that kids get inside and play in. I’m doing a bad job explaining it, but the kids seem to have fun. And those kids! The preteens in their booty shorts (never mind that the majority of the community is so Muslim the mall isn’t allowed to play music) look like they walked out of my middle school. Well, ok, my middle school is never going to be that diverse, but still! I had always thought that it would be so glamorous to grow up moving all around the world (“well, then we moved to Tanzania for a while, and then we lived in [insert exotic country here]…”) but now I think I understand. These children haven’t lived in Dar. They’ve lived in a nowhere, a falsely recreated New America, that doesn’t belong anywhere—not here in Dar, but not in the US either.

Which isn’t to say that I’m not also sheltered, here in the aloof top floor of our apartment where I can safely spy on the outdoor kitchens, where mothers stir ugali (Tanzania’s version of Uganda’s posho) and girls wash laundry in those ubiquitous plastic buckets. Just… it’s surreal to go to a place where you could almost forget you’re in Africa, if it weren’t for “Lake Tanganyika” outside the entrance, as Luke calls the giant pool of muddy water flooding the street, thanks to the mall’s poor drainage system.

Dar grows at an exponential rate: Christiane and Luke point out buildings that have been completed in the past six months or so, and it’s astonishing. One is inclined to compare it to Shanghai, or other parts of China, but I think the wealth gaps are much, much greater, with the wealthy being almost exclusively the Indians and the politicians.

The growth is already causing problems. The road system simply can’t handle the amount of traffic as it is, and 500 new cars are registered every day. Like most cities that have developed since the invention of the car, you can’t really get anywhere in the city on foot—a fact which is endlessly frustrating for someone who’s used to Boston and NYC! But you can’t really get anywhere by car, either, since there are about 15 major roads (“major” here meaning “tarmac-ed but now deeply potholed after the recent rains”) in the city, and the traffic on these roads sits at an absolute stand-still for hours. I’ve never seen traffic so bad, and it can only get worse, as far as I can tell. Boosting the dalla-dallas won’t improve things since they drive on the road, and in fact cause a lot of the traffic when they pull over to make a stop. Underground subways aren’t really feasible (or so I’m told) because of the dirt quality. They need to do a proper job paving all the roads, and a floating, zip-line public-transportation system, or something. Wish I knew more about urban planning.

Optimism

Well my first set of pictures for BGI are uploading now (and good God it’s taking forever!!!) so I figure it’s time for an update. Plus, maybe if I stop opening up new web pages, the uploading will go faster. It couldn’t go much slower.

The past week has been pretty slow, on the whole, but there were a couple of highlights. Sunday was a fantastic day here. I woke up around 5:30 to the sound of chanting going down the street outside my window, groggily wondered, “what the hell?” and went back to sleep. Or at least, to half-hour increments of sleep: the chanting kept coming back – is this a protest? A political campaign? A traveling church service? Soccer hooligans? Finally got up and got ready for a morning of taking pictures around the city center. The streets are remarkably empty--peaceful even!--on weekend mornings, and Netta had agreed to go with me. We stepped out of the hostel entrance and were nearly swept away by a rush of young Tanzanian men, chanting and running. The crowd had grown since the first group had run past my window, and now it seemed to stretch on forever. We asked the hostel staff, and they explained that this is just something people do, a fun Sunday morning activity. Why anyone would choose to go running in the middle of such a swelteringly hot morning is beyond me, but Alex says he used to do it in Zambia.

Anyways, we set out to take pictures and ended up seeing a monkey! A whole bunch of monkeys, in fact! Hanging out by the side of the road, and clearly not very intimidated by us. I was also surprised to run into a State House and a Parliament building, given that the government is based in Dodoma, the nominal capital of the country, but that was less exciting than the monkeys. There are some quite pretty streets lined with trees, next to some not-so-pretty streets lined with garbage heaps and construction sites.

When I got back, Bree told me about this soccer (er, “football”) match on Monday night between Brazil and Tanzania with fairly cheap tickets (at least, by Western standards. They were still pretty expensive for Tanzanians.) Apparently Brazil is really good or something, so I agreed to go, even though I know almost nothing about soccer (Bree: Who are you going for in the World Cup? Me: Uh, who’s playing?). The game ended up being great fun, though I realized afterwards that I’d (embarrassingly) had the teams mixed up… I was wondering why Tanzania was beating Brazil so handily!! Clearly, I shouldn’t bother cheering for any team other than the Red Sox. Anyways, we went to go buy tickets to the match on Sunday morning, and discovered the amazing bookshop mentioned in my last entry and the beautiful streets of the Indian zone. The class division between Indians and Africans is so clear, and I wonder how much the two groups talk about it...

After buying tickets, and my first trip on the public bus, we got on a ferry to go to the beach on a nearby island! The beach was so, so beautiful: soft, cool sand, warm water, ice cream stands, and very few people. I couldn’t imagine anything better than running into that water. The six of us (representing five different countries – felt very international) stayed on the beach chatting and watching the sun slowly set, before we walked back through the stands selling familiarly tacky beach gear, which looked like the sort of things beach resorts try (unsuccessfully) to recreate to look “authentic” and “charming.” We got back to the ferry stop and the market there had come to life. We ate street food, including calamari cooked in front of us, and enjoyed the bursting energy. Ferry was packed, then unpacked, and we were let loose among the fruit vendors lining the walk back to the city center. I can’t put my finger on exactly why the whole trip was so perfect, but I’m hoping to return many more times.

The other main highlight of the week was finally connecting with this organization, Center for Community Initiatives, which is the subject of my photo essay thing for BGI this week (and probably for another couple of weeks, too). Their organization is so exciting! I know I’m getting a pretty biased picture, since I’ve only really got their word to go off of so far, but the programs and approach sound so perfect! Like if I had to imagine exactly how assistance to slums should be done, it would be pretty close to what this organization is doing. They’re essentially a micro-lending/savings program, but they use the savings schemes as a foundation to organize networks of people and empower them to start improving the community. They teach community members to conduct massive surveys, so that the community holds interviews with each household. CCI recently went to every neighborhood in Dar and compiled massive amounts of information on all of the informal settlements in the city. I can’t wait for it to be published. Anyways, CCI also teaches people how to analyze that data and use it to decide on the community’s problems and priorities. I’m particularly interested in their community policing program, supported and trained by the state police, and in finding out where the drawbacks are (since there are always drawbacks…)

They’re eager to help me – or at least, to show off the work they’re doing – and the head of the organization, Tim, is so infectiously enthusiastic that it’s hard not to feel like I’m actually getting somewhere. Yay. Now I just need to work on getting out of the ex-pat bubble and talking to more Tanzanians….

Culture shock

It has come to my attention that my previous conception of culture shock was ridiculous. I used to think culture shock was just a fun, enlightening experience of discovering differences (“oh hey, look at that! They sing and dance a lot more here!”) or, more seriously, a realization that one’s own culture was flawed in some newly-visible way (“Woah, the US is even more wasteful than I realized!”). While both of these processes are definitely part of, or at least can complement, culture shock, they don’t really get at the heart of it – the frustrations, the unmet expectations, the nagging sense that you’re trapped in a giant game of “one of these things is not like the others” and you are that different thing.

And it’s that kind of culture shock that’s hit me here in Dar es Salaam these past few days.

The city, or what I’ve seen of it, is really different from what I expected. Since cities that are on a body of water are always more beautiful than those that aren’t, I figured Dar, a coastal city, would be nicer than Kampala or Kigali, both of which I liked. Plus, there are beaches! I’d read that the city has zones of different architectural styles, based on the colonial division of the city into the European, Indian and African regions. So I thought the diversity would, as it did in Nakivale, add texture and complexity (or maybe it’s just that New York is so heterogeneous that it feels more familiar?). I had heard that Tanzanians don’t really like mzungu’s rushing in to “save” them, and recalled my relief at the pride of the Rwandans compared to people in Northern Uganda.

These things (or at least the first two) may be true of the city as a whole, but I’ve only seen the city center, so far. The ocean isn’t incorporated into the city in the way it is in Boston, for instance, and the official beaches (the only safe places to go to the beach – elsewhere it’s isolated and dangerous) are a ways away. I went to what I’d been told was the main road of the Indian neighborhood, only to find that it looked just like the rest of the city center: full of boring, monotonous architecture, chosen for its price rather than its aesthetics. Farooq, the very nice(1), middle-aged guy who runs the internet café at which I’ve already become a regular with a discounted rate (one of the highlights of the first few days) said that all of the big buildings in this area have been built in the last five years, and that until recently, the five-storey “tower” we were in had been the tallest building around and people came from miles away to see it.

I’ve since been directed to a street lined with temples, which is beautiful and much more what I expected to find here, but for the first couple of days, I was really disappointed. I’m realizing (in one of those “duh” moments) that it doesn’t really count as diversity if the different parts are kept separate, instead of, say, bumping into each other on the street.

As far as the Tanzanian resistance to foreign assistance, I have definitely seen this, but it hasn’t been the welcome relief it was in Rwanda. I often wonder if I would have felt the same way about Rwanda if I had gone there first. I still think that the relationship between Tanzania and the West is very different. It was rare in Rwanda to encounter the sort of grumpiness and, at times, outright hostility I’ve seen directed against foreigners here. This has been by far the most jarring culture shock – the not-so-friendly reminder that “you’re not one of us.”

But I hope these things will pass. I can’t expect to love something the moment I encounter it. In the meantime, “Africa time” is frustrating (how could I forget??) and my delusions that I could just waltz in and get started on my research right away have been swept away. Some recent progress gives me hope, though.

On a similarly positive note: I’m still in the hostel for now, but I’m meeting a woman I may move in with later today! While I’m looking forward to interacting with more Tanzanians, it’s been really nice to meet other travelers from all over (a few Canadians, an Israeli, a Kiwi and her Zambian boyfriend, an English couple, a German…).

Also, today we found a fantastic bookstore! I want to buy the whole thing! There are all these African books you could never find in the US. Wonderful.


(1) Part of me suspects that I like him in large part because he lived in Germany for a long while, and knows how to make mzungus feel welcome.

Welcome to Dar es Salaam

Just a quick update to say that I’ve arrived in Tanzania and some first impressions.

I’d like to take Tanzania on her own terms, without comparing it to Uganda and Rwanda, but it’s so hard not to make those comparisons, and I guess it’s inevitable, to a certain extent. So far, Dar es Salaam reminds me of Kampala, though it may just be that the force of the first impression is equally powerful – maybe by the time I reached Kigali, I was so used to certain regional qualities (like the humidity and the smell) that I didn’t notice them. But as soon as I stepped off the plane, that spicy, humid smell that I’m beginning to associate with Africa assailed me once again. The drive from the airport brought on flashbacks of my first drive from Entebbe to Kampala, as the balmy night air swept its sharp, complex aroma into the taxi.

I’m staying in a hostel at the moment, where I’ve met a few really nice girls who have been in Dar for almost a month, and who are set to show me around. The hostel seems to be right in the middle of the downtown, so everything is really convenient – I got all my errands (changing money, buying a SIM card and plug converter, and now internet) done in one quick outing this morning. More later.

Oh! I can also report that Zurich is charming, with a hodgepodge of architectural styles and lots of tiny cobblestone alleyways and pedestrian walkways and LOTS of Lindt chocolate. Not sure how one navigates the narrow alleys with all that chocolate around, but it does lead me to believe that Zurich would be an excellent place for me to live, if only I spoke any German.

Tanzania!

Welcome back to my travel blog! Last fall I used this site to write about my study abroad experiences in Uganda and Rwanda. You can still read all of those entries here, but now I’m going to be writing about my travels in Tanzania this summer.

So what am I doing in Tanzania, anyways?
I’m here for eight weeks, thanks to a fellowship with Beyond Good Intentions, and a grant from the Tow Foundation (through Barnard). Beyond Good Intentions sends fellows to various countries around the world to do research relating to aid effectiveness and create photo essays or other digital media projects, which will be posted to the group blog every week (and when I know where that is, I’ll post the link here). The Tow Foundation gave me the grant to do research for my senior thesis. I’m hoping to compare the way aid organizations work with slum-dwellers and the way they work with refugees. My current plan is to spend four weeks in Dar es Salaam (doing the slum-dweller part) and then four weeks in the northwest part of the country, where most of the refugee camps are located.

Why am I comparing slum-dwellers and refugees?
I was kind of blown away when I was doing preliminary research and found no scholarship comparing these two populations. There are a lot of striking similarities between them. Both groups live in precarious, transient situations, and share many of the same problems, including substandard housing and a lack of clean water, electricity, sanitation and other basic services. As a result, the international community has typecast both refugees and slum-dwellers as passive, voiceless victims. States see each population as problematic, since refugees are not legally protected under the modern nation-state system and slums reveal the state’s inability to provide for all of its citizens. I think that if these populations can establish agency, they will be able claim their human rights in ways that passive victims can’t. I’m interested in how aid agencies can help people to do so, instead of reproducing images of helpless victims.

Of course, there are fundamental differences between slum-dwellers and refugees, and those differences make the comparison even more interesting. Slum-dwellers, unlike refugees, are citizens of the states they live in and hold legal claims on their governments. Since refugees are stateless people, holding no claims to protection by either their country of origin or the foreign government under which they now live, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) becomes their “government,” since it’s responsible for managing and providing services to refugees. However, this is a government that’s accountable not to the governed, but rather to its own headquarters and donors. So I’m wondering how much citizenship matters, and how UNHCR compares to the Tanzanian government. Can the international community translate effective approaches to promoting agency from one group to another?

Why Tanzania?
This trip is going to be really different from my semester in Uganda and Rwanda, because I don’t know anywhere near as much about Tanzania as I do about the other countries. In some ways, this is kind of nice, because I have fewer expectations, but I’m definitely looking forward to learning more about the country and sharing it here. In the meantime, here’s some background:

Tanzania is on the East Coast of Africa, surrounded by Kenya and Uganda (to the North), Rwanda and Burundi (Northwest), DRC (West), Zambia and Malawi (Southwest), and Mozambique (South). The country includes the island of Zanzibar, although there are some disagreements between Zanzibar (which would like more independence) and the mainland (which would like to maintain control). I’ve heard that Zanzibar is stunning, and an easy daytrip from Dar, so hopefully I can go there sometime!

A speed-read through the country’s history: Some of the earliest humans walked the earth in what is now Tanzania. Much later, Indian traders came for ivory and slaves. Later, the British had established control over Zanzibar, the Germans had nominal control over the mainland, and the two countries agreed to split the territory, creating the current border between Tanzania (German) and Kenya (British). The British took Tanzania back from the Germans after WWI. Anti-colonial sentiments were popular, and led by Julius Nyerere, a school teacher who had been educated in Uganda and Scotland. The British pulled out of Tanzania (1961) and Zanzibar (1963), but, like most recently decolonized countries, there was very little infrastructure and very few educated people. Nyerere became president, and formed the United Republic of Tanzania with Zanzibar, after a violent and bloody coup broke out on the island shortly after independence.

Ok, this is the part that’s really interesting. Nyerere was a fascinating leader: he embarked on an ambitious (socialist) project, known broadly as ujamaa (familyhood). He felt that Africa should try to create a society based on mutual assistance and economic and political equality. His Arusha Declaration set out to instill a community self-reliance, with people around the country helping their neighbors, rather than dependence on foreign aid. The greatest accomplishment of his policies lies in the high rates of education during his rule, which led to a broad School children were taught to identify themselves as Tanzanians with a shared language (Swahili), instead of by tribe. For this reason, there is almost no tribal or religious conflict in the country. I can’t wait to find out more about this when I get there.

Of course, in some ways, Nyerere’s policies were an abysmal failure: by 1974, the economy was shrinking, and continued to do so for 25 years. The country is now deeply in debt, and critics argue about whether the situation is better or worse for the IMF’s structural adjustment program.

One of the most fascinating and terrible aspects of ujamaa was the villagization project. Nyerere thought that communal farming would lead to a massive increase in agricultural production, so Tanzanians were encouraged to reorganize themselves into communal villages. Very few people did so voluntarily, so the government began forcibly displacing 80% of the population, causing all sorts of human rights violations and unnecessary suffering, while also completely disrupting agricultural production. In the end, most people reverted to subsistence farming, and the project was a failure. What’s interesting about this initiative is that it represents another example of governments trying to impose legibility – trying to order the population in a way that allows better control. This is discussed much more in-depth in Seeing Like a State, one of my favorite books (which I highly recommend to, uh, everyone). States, and more recently NGOs and international organizations, all over the world have embarked on these massive projects to help people, which backfire, because they are also designed to impose an order that doesn’t accord with normal, disorganized human life. Refugee camps are another example of such a project.

As I was reading about all this on the plane, I was struck by how completely Nyerere’s goals matched with current Rwandan President Kagame’s. I’ve written more about this in previous entries, but basically Kagame, just like Nyerere, wants to try to create a unified society that does not define itself by its ethnic or tribal groups. Like Nyerere, he has established one-party rule (de facto, at least), using similar justification to Nyerere’s claim that, “The only socially defensible use of ‘we’ is that which includes the whole society.” Furthermore, many of Kagame’s policies rely on increasing control over the population: a recent, hotly debated article in the NYTimes on his relocation of supposed/suspected street children to a vocational training camp is suspiciously similar to villagization, for example.

All of this adds up to make Tanzania a really fascinating place, and I’m looking forward to my arrival there soon! In the meantime, I’m off to explore Zurich during my layover.

Well, I assume no one is checking this blog anymore, but just in case, my pictures are posted online! You can see them here

Enjoy, and thanks for reading!