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.