Maintenance

It is a fairly effective rule of thumb when visiting a city in Africa and looking for a place to stay not to ask for the best hotel but for the newest one. If open for less than a year, even the most basic hotel can be a pleasant place to stay. But the quality seems to tend to deteriorate rapidly thereafter; once broken, items in the rooms are rarely fixed, and if so, creative jerry-rigged arrangements are the norm rather than the exception.

We had a new daladala station open here 6 weeks ago paved with laid bricks and with raised islands to channel the buses. I was paying more attention to it than usual on my way home the other day and noticed that most of the concrete curbs along the raised islands are already chipped, crumbling, or missing, the casualties of foot traffic and the weight of too-wide buses attempting to force their way through. Only faint vestiges of the yellow stripes on the curbs remain, having been completely rubbed away by a combination of bus tires, shoe soles, and the gritty dirt that seems to cover everything here, despite the best efforts of the tireless women who toil in the hot sun as street sweepers. The whole station looks as though it could have been built decades ago and neglected ever since. 6 weeks--somehow I find that a bit disturbing!

Paul Theroux in Dark Star Safari (a rather sensationalist and stereotyped account of an journey across Africa by a rather unlikable man, but somehow memorable) laments that the school library he helped to build and set up in Malawi as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s has been looted for its books and left to decay. Theroux was far from the first to observe that things tend to fall into disrepair in much of Africa over time, but the Western world has tended to be content to stereotype this tendency toward entropy as a consequence of some culturally imbedded laziness or carelessness. Few people ever bother to look beneath these easy—-but oversimplified and very often wrong—-explanations. Surely there are lazy and careless people here, but Tanzania is no more special in that regard than the rest of the world!

Many, many people work extraordinarily hard to maintain their property in Tanzania. I have seen spotlessly tidy homes here, where floors are swept daily, clothes are washed by hand (each article meticulously ironed), and every item dusted daily. Even the sandy ground in my housing compound is swept to clean up the debris each morning. I would argue that laziness is certainly not the culprit in most cases (indeed, any impression of laziness one gets is generally explained by high rates of unemployment and a general shortage of jobs). Some actions I have observed may seem careless on the surface—such as daladala drivers driving over curbs, or people discarding their trash in the streets—until one considers that the daladala driver’s livelihood depends on extricating himself from the traffic jam as quickly as possible to pick up more fares, even if that means driving over curbs, and the fact that Dar es Salaam has no trash pick-up service, few public trash cans, and most trash is tossed into heaps and burned.

A significant fraction of the challenge of maintenance in Africa must be attributable to the poor quality of many of the materials from which buildings are built and the hot, wet, muddy climate. I often wonder how different Tanzania, Africa, and much of the developing world might look if only good quality cement, asphalt, and high quality paint were the norm (or even available). It is not uncommon that a road can be paved and have crumbled to bits within a season. Certainly, building to last is not impossible: the tarmac airstrip at the airport is miraculously smooth, and there are some roads that seem to last for several years. But this takes incredible investments of engineering, inputs into importing or producing quality materials, and the advanced equipment to do a good job. In just a year or two, a new building’s exterior paint is likely to be faded, chalky, dirty, and covered in mildew. Large cracks in the concrete of even the fanciest and newest buildings here are not uncommon.

Paying for and seeing a construction project through here presents other feats of coordination. It can take months or years to obtain permits, build, and finish a structure here. Since credit is difficult to obtain and interest rates are extremely high, most people build homes as they can afford them, meaning that many homes languish as cinder-block shells for years, crumbling in the sun, before enough money materializes to afford a roof, a cement surface on the walls, doors, or screens/bars on the windows. It is no wonder that it is hard to tell the difference here between a home completed 2 years ago and a home completed 20 years ago – indeed, ground might have been broken for both in the same year!

Yet another aspect is economics. Put simply, maintenance costs money and time, and it is hard in a country where the average income is a few hundred dollars per year for many people to afford the time and money to invest in maintaining their homes and businesses. Buying powerful and effective cleaning products is expensive; it is no wonder that many cleaning solutions are used sparingly or diluted with water (as is paint, for that matter). Ultimately, for the lower and middle class here, the effort needed to survive–-whether survival takes the form of pounding cassava or working long hours in a low-paying, unskilled job–-can easily trump the priority of a fresh coat of paint on the walls or mending a cracked windowsill.

Surely even these musings hardly provide a comprehensive explanation for why maintenance is often a losing battle here in Tanzania, but it seems only fair to recognize people's extraordinary efforts to work with what they have.

Errors of omission

One very important part of my life has been largely missing from these posts. I left a life I love dearly at home to occupy a strange new world here alone, one that oscillates between exotic and absolutely exhausting. And one very important person in that life -- my husband -- can't be here with me. I have joked to my friends here that “When I said ‘I do,’ I didn’t mean I do want to live a year without my husband!” In an absolute sense, Matt’s and my being apart now is voluntary, in that of our own free will one of us could get on a plane anytime and rejoin the other. But the painful calculus that went into making this decision rendered it the most logical option. Staying the course on significant investments of time, money, and effort will hopefully help us gain enough freedom and flexibility to live simpler lives long-term. But that is not to say that every day apart isn’t tremendously painful after putting so much effort these last seven-plus years to build a life together. We are certainly fortunate to have the benefits of multiple forms of fast and affordable daily communication – email, Skype, phone, text messaging – but all of these fall far short of being together, and I would never recommend this arrangement to anyone else.

Thankfully, after a number of trial-related tribulations at work, Matt was able to visit me for the holidays, including miraculously making a 6-minute connection in Zurich after a delayed flight from New York just to get here on time. We stayed in Dar for a few days so he could see my life (meet my friends, visit my office, see where I lived), and thankfully the weather cooperated so he was able to see Dar at its muddiest as well as Dar at its hottest, both of which are endearing characteristics! On Christmas Eve, we escaped to Zanzibar for 8 days, spending Christmas in Stone Town and New Year’s Eve on the beach on the East Coast at Matemwe Beach Village, the same place we stayed when we visited Zanzibar 4 years ago while living in Ethiopia. The beaches, scenery, and architecture on Zanzibar are breathtaking and almost stereotypically an exotic paradise. It’s hard to leave once you get there [the pictures below give a glimpse].




The fusion of Arab, Indian, and mainland African influences, particularly in Stone Town, is fascinating and beautiful.


We had wonderful multi-course dinners each night in Stone Town, one served sitting on pillows at low tables in an atmospheric Zanzibari-style rooftop deck [picture below is me there with the Indian Ocean in the background], and a formal Christmas dinner in a hotel on the beach with the windows open to the seabreeze, candles in hurricanes, and a Swahili gospel choir performing outside. Being a seafood lover I was in heaven. It felt like a true escape from the pressures of both our lives.



In the planning stages, we had had high hopes to go snorkeling or diving, take a tour of Zanzibar’s famous spice plantations (especially cloves, vanilla, and cinnamon bark), see dolphins, or take a forest tour to see monkeys. As it happened we didn’t do any of those things at all, as we were more than content just being together unfettered by schedules or obligations. Our rooms in both places were peaceful, spacious retreats and we rarely ventured out except to eat or walk on the beach, content to spend the days together making up for time apart. Below is a picture of Matt looking more relaxed than he has been in years!




On one occasion when we did venture out, Matt got a very memorable, if injurious, massage in a beach banda (hut) by the hotel masseuse. Having had a startlingly similar experience at a hotel in Ethiopia, he promises to write a guest blog entitled “The Lesser-Known Perils of Massage in Developing Countries.” At Matemwe, we were fortunate to have the run of a huge Swiss Family Robinson-style bungalow suite with a lounge area with swing-beds, and a very imaginative layout including open-air toilet and shower and a complete absence of straight lines, including, as it happened, the posts that held the thatched roof on the whole structure, which torqued rather noticeably after some strong winds one night while we were there [picture below]!

We had a curious monkey come visit one evening, swinging through the posts of our thatched roof and clearly perturbed we were there. Matt promptly ceded control of our suite to the monkey, retreating to the (ceilinged) bedroom. Monkey 1, Matt 0.

I couldn’t have asked for a better Christmas present than to have Matt visit me, and while he is no longer physically here with me in Tanzania, he needn’t be absent from this blog…

Whatever the opposite of a White Christmas is…

Better late than never, right? I have a backlog of blogs I've written but not had time to upload... and I am shamefully late on the Christmas greetings!

Some of you have asked about Christmas here in Tanzania. Context clues when Christmas is approaching are few but oddly garish in tropical snow-less countries like Tanzania. Thanks to healthy trade with India and South Africa (and increasingly, China), we suffered no shortage here this holiday season of gaudy foil banners, tinsel, lights, cheap plastic ornaments, and unattractive plastic foil giftwrap to herald the glorious occasion of Christ’s birth. The intense heat, palm trees, and mud conflict with most stereotypical images of the Christmas season, seemingly provoking the irresistible urge to set out brash, non-biodegradable reminders of the holiday season.

Examples? A stubby—and slightly off-putting— 4’ mzungu Santa Claus figurine greets me with an electronic wave and a goofy painted-on grin outside the grocery store next to my favorite café. An ice-cream bike (yes, the Good Humor Man doppelganger in Tanzania works sans van, vending slowly melting treats from a bike-mounted cooler) rides by, emitting a shrill synthesizer version of the first two lines of “Jingle Bells” (the verse, not the chorus) on a persistently annoying loop. Strings of multicolored lights are everywhere, wrapped on trunks of palm trees along shop roofs, anywhere where there is electricity and spare disposable income. Even though I have no love for artificial plastic trees, the spirit was infectious, and I admit I was tempted to buy a small one here, if other Tanzanians hadn’t beaten me to it and bought the stores out. The Christmas spirit is alive and well here in Tanzania. We just have mud instead of snow.

Bre and Josh hadn’t executed any grand plan to decorate the house for Christmas, so they were surprised one evening to hear a loud thud outside followed by a car speeding off down the road in the dark. When they went out to investigate, they found a large loose evergreen tree had been lobbed over the gate, a last resort for delivery by our friend Paul after numerous efforts to rouse our guard from his slumber had failed. So the house was filled with the fresh scent of some unknown genus of evergreen, the look completed with a couple of 99-cent stockings from Target (as above, think garish/gaudy/China) brought by my husband Matt who came to visit me here for the holidays. And the highlights of my Christmas Santa bag, ferried over by my American Santa Claus/husband were beef jerky, Velveeta, stretchy headbands from Target, old shirts of mine that still smelled like laundry at home, a french press, old magazines, The Office on DVD, Skittles, nice-smelling girly things and a jar of pesto from Trader Joe’s.

Matt and I left Christmas Eve for Zanzibar – he had brought along a string of LED lights, which converted the palm in our room into a stunning Christmas tree (picture below). The hotel where we were staying in Stone Town (Zanzibar Town) had also caught the spirit, baking star-shaped cookies that said “Merry Cris” and “Merry Christas.” Even though Zanzibar is overwhelmingly Muslim (>95%), many people we passed wished us a Merry Christmas, as if sensing how difficult it might be for us wazungu to remember in such an exotic venue. But walking the narrow, dark streets of Stone Town, noting the faded splendor and Arabian influence in the ancient buildings, we found it strangely easier to imagine Christmas in Bethlehem than in America. It struck us as ironic how Christmas imagery is incredibly Western-centric (or perhaps Northern-centric, given the evocative association with snow), given that the Middle East two millennia ago hardly conformed to the Norman Rockwell or Currier & Ives stereotypes that come to mind during the Christmas season, even here in Tanzania.



Wherever you were for the holidays, I hope the spirit of the season depended on something much deeper than decorations or weather patterns. (A belated) Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!