The humble art of the bucket bath

Water is a precious commodity in much of the world. Even water that isn’t exactly potable. Or transparent. Or nice-smelling. Just water that is wet is often good enough.

In a country like Tanzania, where the coastal areas receive 43 inches of water per year and mud is such an integral feature of the landscape for several months of the year, it is sadly ironic that water should still be such a precious commodity. Dar es Salaam has a fleet of bright blue trucks labeled “Maji Safi” (Clean Water) that drive all over the city delivering water to—and other blue trucks labeled “Maji Taka” (Dirty Water) taking effluent away from—homes that aren’t connected to the city water supply.

The lightweight plastic bucket has revolutionized life for people in much of the world, especially in Africa where water can be the limiting factor between life and death, and where distances from water sources to homes can be large. In many African societies it is women who assume the laborious job of carrying water to their homes, often atop their heads. Even small girls can carry more than their weight in water on their heads – an admirable feat in my opinion, as I seem to trip over my own feet even without a heavy burden on my head.

Those who can afford to keep water around do. Many households keep large black plastic cisterns of sizes ranging from 1000 liters to more than 50000 liters in the yard or on the roof. Since the problem seems more one of distribution than pure scarcity (there is plenty of rain, too much mud, and not enough water for daily life), I am a particular fan of rainwater catchment systems, which work if you have a decent roof surface area and enough money for the pipes to collect runoff from your roof and channel it into your cistern, from which it is pumped into your home or drawn from a spigot at the bottom of the tank.

It has been good preparation for my life ahead doing fieldwork to get used to bucket baths early. For most of the past 3 weeks there has been no running water, a problem Shekha attributes to the road work going on in the area. Indeed, there is frequently pooled water in the streets from broken pipes, yet none in the house (again, a distribution problem!). So we have been taking bucket baths for the past three weeks. The picture above is the actual bucket and the actual bathroom.

Bucket bathing is something one easily gets used to, and seeing how little water is required for an adequate bath has made me painfully aware how much water is wasted in showering, particularly showers of the 30-minute-plus variety. One morning I woke up, sweaty from the night before without electricity, to find not a drop of water in the buckets in the bathroom, and no idea where the neighborhood communal tap was to retrieve water myself (this is a task Ahmed typically performs). Then I remembered a single 12-ounce bottle of water in my room from a conference the week before. Believe it or not, I took a whole bath with 12 ounces of water (of course, I had to use the first 6 ounces 3 times!). While it took a lot of effort and wasn’t particularly pleasurable, it sufficed, I was clean, and it gave me a new appreciation for the kinds of things we take for granted – and the resources we waste – on a daily basis.

Taratibu

While pole is the most commonly used word here to describe things as “slow,” my new favorite word is taratibu. Like a few other words in the very plastic and flexible Swahili language, taratibu has the multipurpose ability to function as several parts of speech (note that there are 22 different meanings returned on a search on the Yale University Kamusi Project website: http://www.yale.edu/swahili), among them:

• Adjectives: slow, composed, self-possessed, systematic, orderly
• Adverbs: carefully, systematically, quietly, in an orderly fashion
• Nouns: composure, collectedness, self-possession, method, structure, procedure, system

You get the drift.

The proverb Haraka haraka haina baraka (“things done in haste bring no blessing,” the Swahili equivalent of “haste makes waste”) is treated here as an almost inviolable code one should live by. I get weird stares all the time for walking quickly, a practice I just can’t seem to find the time or desire to change. It has often been written that in Africa time is conceptualized differently than in the West, and some scholars have speculated that it is tied to whether or not that time has a monetary value (i.e., wasting time means losing money). Perhaps the differences have been overblown, but there certainly are differences. Waiting and relaxing, practices that may have originated out of necessity and survival strategy here, have over time become exalted as almost spiritual virtues here. The relaxed pace of life is one of Tanzania’s greatest draws, particularly if you’re a tourist seeking to escape from the stresses of city life in America or Europe. The easy, convivial way people interact here presents a welcome reprieve.

But if you are trying to live in Tanzania and are beholden to a perhaps more Western sense of the value of time and efficiency (which I am, thanks to the terms of my grant, my degree program, and the fact that I left a life with another sense of time behind to do this), then the relaxed pace has its pluses and minuses. One minus being that one is no stranger to procedures. Confronting the labyrinth of rules and procedures to begin to get permission to do research here has revealed to me how ironic but also oddly apropos it is that taratibu means both “slow” and “procedure.” Most procedures are slow, usually the brainchild of a vast, multi-personed bureaucracy. Getting a residence permit, for an example, involves inputting a maximum of a one-page form into a computer, paying a fee, and stamping my passport. But the process requires going to the Immigration Office three times (once to drop off paperwork, once to pay, and once to pick it up), each visit spaced approximately 1-2 weeks apart. Extend the same logic to getting a driver’s license, paying utility bills, registering a business, getting a phone line installed, or renovating a property, and you can see why things happen a little slower here than what I’m used to.

But Heinz Law applies: good things come to those who wait. I got my residence permit and national ethical approval on the same day last week, so I'm ready to roll!

[NOTE: The picture at the top is of a giant tortoise on Prison Island, off the coast of Zanzibar, where I went for the Sauti za Busara (Voices of Wisdom) Festival two weekends ago. I would like to say I saw the tortoises personally on Prison Island, but I missed the boat...I must have been on Tanzanian time!]

A spoonful of sugar...or honey...

Ahmed stood before me while I sat on my bed, his tall, lanky frame leaned jauntily against the desk. In his right hand he held a small ceramic pot, a half-smile playing on his face. He was carefully stirring a dark, viscous liquid, lifting the metal spoon and pausing as the liquid ran off the spoon, blending the bowl’s contents. At first I wondered if he was just preparing a snack for himself, but then I remembered he was fasting today (Ahmed is an observant Muslim), and the sun had not yet set far enough for him to sate his hunger. I began to suspect the mystery concoction was for me, as I had been coughing and feverish all day. Sure enough, he offered me the bowl.

“Is this dawa [medicine]?” I hesitantly queried as I peered inside, lifting the spoon to test the texture of the strange liquid.
“Yes,” he answered.

“Dawa ya kienyeji [traditional medicine]”?
“Yes.”

“There’s a lot in here.” I couldn’t help but grimace. How, feeling so horrible, would I down a half-cup of this ‘medicine’?
“Yes, but you don’t take it all now. Some now, some later,” he assured me.

I still wasn’t convinced, but I sensed I had no choice unless I intended to offend. “What’s in it?” I asked, dubious. Would it turn my stomach (as had the lemon-juice-and-salt medicine for stomach upset I had been force-fed in Ethiopia)?
Ahmed wrinkled his brow. “How do you say, the thing made by bees?”

“Asali,” I guessed, offering the Swahili word.
“Oh, yes, honey. And garlic. And ginger. And black pepper.”

“Garlic??” I asked, incredulous.
“Yes.”

“Really, garlic??”
“Just try it. This is a medicine taught to us by The Prophet. It will help you, Inshallah,” he responded solemnly.

Dubious, I hesitated before taking a spoonful and allowing it to slide down my throat, truthfully more afraid of the garlic than anything else.

Not bad, actually. Honey here has a kind of smoky aftertaste, but it wasn’t any more unpleasant than Robitussin.
I dutifully swallowed another spoonful.
And another.
And another.

“This will really help my pain here?” I asked, pointing to my chest. “And here?” clutching at my aching throat.
“Yes, Inshallah.”

“Have I taken enough?”
A grin widened across his face and dissolved into mock sympathy. “I suspect you have already overdosed. I myself only take two spoonfuls!”

“You know, you really must stop drinking cold water. That is not helping you. And neither is having this fan on.” With that pronouncement, he switched off the stand fan, the only modicum of relief I was feeling from the oppressively still, hot air in the room. Shekha and Zoela echoed their concerns about using the fan.

After I thanked my mganga (traditional healer) for the dawa, I was left to rest. Shekha felt my forehead and announced that she was taking me to the doctor the next morning if I still had a fever. She’s had more than her share of encounters with illness and death, and after she lost an mzungu colleague suddenly to malaria several years ago, she doesn’t take any chances anymore. Including drinking cold water or using fans when sick. It is amazing how both spiritual and physical causes and treatments for many illnesses are understood to be intrinsically bound, even as allopathic medicine use increases here.

I don’t know if it was the dawa or the NyQuil I took shortly thereafter, or the threat of going to the doctor, but I felt considerably better in the morning. I went back for more dawa the next night. And it worked.

Inshallah.

Unafanya nini? (You're doing what?)

Given the fact that I’ve now spent almost 4 months in Dar es Salaam, it would be reasonable to ask, as several of you have, “But I thought you said you were working in Lindi and Mtwara?” Yes, those 100+ interviews with rural women still loom large on my radar screen, but before I can start my research, there are a lot of hoops to jump through, and that means navigating two very complicated bureaucracies (those of Tanzania and Johns Hopkins). I’m glad there are no windows to jump through, because I might have seized that opportunity on a couple of choice occasions in the last few months. There are two main classes of hoops: 1) getting a residence permit to clear me to do research in two specific regions of the country, and 2) getting ethical approvals from a number of different committees in the US and Tanzania. Even after waiting 4 months, I haven’t yet received my residence permit OR full ethical approval, and so can’t get started on the interviews.

Emerging unscathed from one’s struggles with the system seems very much a function of luck, and I’ve had more than my share of bahati mbaya (bad luck). A wayward letter of support got lost on someone’s desk in a government office 10 weeks ago, delaying my research permit by 2 months and, because a research permit is a prerequisite for a residence permit, delaying that too. Cross your fingers that I will get it before my visa expires next weekend! On top of that, the coordinator of the ethical committee here at my organization was brand new, and her learning the ropes delayed my proposal by a month. To add insult to injury, the ethical committee at Johns Hopkins just transitioned to a new online system this fall and the automatic classification system initially misclassified my proposal, delaying the review on the US side by more than a month. Bahati mbaya!

Facing known delays and wanting to do more with my time than just learning Swahili, I’ve gotten involved in a lot of the other newborn health programs, policies, and research that are ramping up here in my organization and at the national level, which includes key stakeholders including the Ministry of Health, WHO, UNICEF, and Save the Children. This has been my first exposure to the national policy and planning environment and a great learning experience. Working with a couple of other staff here, we got a 3-month mini-grant from Save the Children to analyze existing interviews that contain information about pregnancy and birth from several different regions in the country. The project has been a great introduction to the culture and reproductive histories of women in Tanzania, particularly in the area where I will be working. The mini-grant supports an assistant and a consultant to help go through and analyze the interview transcripts, which has meant that I needed to be in the office every day to train and supervise them.

Needing to be at the office meant that spending 3-5 hours commuting every day no longer made sense. Josh and Bre were very generous to house this wayfaring stranger for three months, but it made sense to move closer to the office. So for the month of February, I have moved in with one of my Tanzanian co-workers, her sister, and her nephew in a small 2-bedroom cottage in a shared compound 10 minutes’ walk from my office. No more daladalas or 40 minute slogs through mud on rainy days! They have been incredibly hospitable to me, giving me my own room (I suspect that I am sleeping in one of their beds but they are too polite to tell me whose) and sharing meals. I have also learned a lot firsthand about how relationships work in Muslim families and the richness of Swahili culture that I had only read about before. Living with them is something of a cultural exchange: I made tacos for my adoptive family last night and my co-worker’s sister, Zoela, remarked that she has never even tried mzungu food before.

I’m heading home to the US in a few weeks for a two-week visit before jumping into the fieldwork component of my research here, so my days left in Dar are numbered. It’s a much-needed visit to see Matt, my family, my dog, and my friends; to take a few warm showers; to take in a lot of cheese, chocolate, and wine; and to gear up for the next 6 months. Before I head home, I’m trying to line up a couple of research assistants for my fieldwork, as well as the specific logistics for how I get to and how long I will stay in each village, how I will charge laptops with no electricity, how to approach interviewees, how to manage my project budget, and what kinds of training I need to do before launching headlong into data collection. Overwhelming, especially as I am anything but a natural manager of other people (and Matt can tell you that planning ahead is not my cup of tea). But I’m spurred on by the hope of finishing everything by my anniversary in August…

So that’s my long-winded update – I’d love to hear what all of my friends are up to!