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….