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.