It takes a village?

Seen through new eyes of someone expecting a child of my own, it is fascinating to observe parents in my study villages. Right now the young woman who does the cooking in the house full of teachers where we are staying is here playing cards at 1:30 am. I haven’t seen her 2-year-old baby in hours. The baby doesn't have a father around that anyone knows of, so the baby isn't with him. The few times I have seen him today he has been covered in dirt, not wearing any pants, and he has received nothing but scoldings and spankings from his mother (granted, one of these times was for peeing and then subsequently pooping while eating on the floor of the house here, so it came a little closer to justified). Most of the day he is running around the village by himself or with other young children while his mother works. Sometimes he is in the arms of a neighbor or his grandmother. She works 10-12 hours a day to be a good cook, and I realize there is a trade-off between time spent working and time spent with children, and survival (in this case, employment) always wins out over the desire to be a better parent. The concept of parenting in the sense I am accustomed to doesn't really apply here. People are hoping their kids just survive. The woman who cooks here is fairly representative of young mothers in these villages.


Yusufu, the cook's 2-year-old son


Rukia with her baby and 2 village children

In the interviews we do, women are constantly mentioning how the reason they want babies is to play with them and hold them, but are also quite blunt (and unanimous) that children’s real value is that they grow up and do things for you. By helping with the arduous physical work of living, children make life easier. But the lack of a concept of parenting—a particular issue with boys here, who are not generally considered to be of future benefit in cooking, cleaning, etc. and so are left to play, unlike their sisters, who are raised helping their mothers with daily chores—could in part explain why development is so slow here.

Children, especially boys, raise themselves here, usually in groups of other children. Irene mentioned that yesterday she did an interview next to a house where the mother had gone out to the farm in the morning and had left her children at home. Not wanting to neglect them, she left a pot of ugali (thick corn grits) for her children’s lunch. When they got hungry, the children went to get the pot, carried it outside, ate their fill, and carried the pot back inside. These “children,” Irene reported, were really infants, just 11 months old and barely able to walk!

Many children are not in school because few families have the money for school fees, and some don’t see the point when a child must pass an exam and usually get a scholarship just to get admittance into secondary school (the equivalent of American high school). University education, while free at public universities, is even more competitive, and there are plenty of university graduates who can’t get jobs. The more attainable and sure economic value of children is as manual laborers on farms and in the household, and most parents have little or no education, so the focus is on having enough to eat, not on the distant and uncertain goal of higher education.

There is a social as well as an economic component to the lack of parenting. Respondents have often mentioned that women who have abortions do so because they want to remain mwali, that is, a young and sexually free woman. Many young women have children but choose to spend their time as they please while their children are raised by others or left to run around by themselves. Notwithstanding the clear-cut division of labor in raising children (what raising is done is done by women), fathers are often absent, as they may be crop traders who travel frequently, men who spend their days and nights drinking pombe (coconut liquor), men with co-wives and thus several different households often in several different villages, or mere casual partners of women.

Seeing children here still melts my heart, and seeing in person how difficult survival is for them given all the threats of disease and injury they face is very difficult. Their mothers too have the short end of the stick, with more work than they can do in a day, little control of economic resources, and a host of threats to their health and well-being as well. But it is still hard to wrap my head around the many differences in parenting between my world and this one. Apparently the oft-quoted “it takes a village to raise a child” is an African proverb, and I don’t doubt it, but sometimes I wonder just how much of their full potential many children reach when the people who raise them are focused on other things most of the time. I wonder how much more these children could attain if their parents and other caregivers were motivated and educated--and genuinely able--to care more about their development, learning, and character.

Luxury accommodation

We just returned to the south to resume the second phase of fieldwork and found that all the guesthouses in the village where we had intended to stay were full to the brim with workers from my organization who are conducting a 250,000 person survey in the region. Apparently they are so many, they are sleeping on grass mats on the floor of the local school as well. Desperate and rapidly becoming impoverished from what was already a $60 taxi ride, we headed north to the next town (Lindi, which I blogged about in November) and following the recommendations of 3 people, chose a local guesthouse called “Another Coast.” The solitary perk is that I think I can hear the ocean from my room. Then again, it could also be a distant generator or a lorry truck. I can’t be sure.

For my $6 per night, I get the following amenities:

· A door that doesn’t open all the way because it hits the bed. Said bed has a hard-as-rock pillows on it, a single sheet, and a gorgeous Chinese vellux-like plush blanket.
· My very own bathroom with squat toilet, constantly dripping shower, and wall-mount sink. Of course, the brilliant architectural design means that the first footstep you make into the bathroom is into the squat toilet hole. To make a good thing even better, I just accidentally peed on the cuffs of my pants while at the squat toilet because they weren’t hiked up far enough. And of course, no soap or toilet paper. Always a pleasure.
· A TV (which all Tanzanians will tell you is the hallmark of a quality guesthouse, a very special amenity even if it only has one channel, as most do). But mine only turns on if the bathroom light is turned off. When on, it apparently has a short because it stays on for about 5 seconds—just long enough to verify there is only one channel—and then turns off.
· Mosquitoes galore. There are at least 25 mosquitoes in my room before dusk, in a room that has been closed up all day, and to make a good thing better, the mosquito net has holes in it. Breaking out the sewing kit now…
· High-gloss paint halfway up the walls (this actually is a perk because unlike normal Tanzanian paint, it is scrubbable).
· A squawking newborn in the lobby across the hall, the baby of the receptionist. Makes me thrilled to have my own on the way.

No wonder this place is a tourist Mecca (don’t all of you dream of visiting Lindi?). Permit me just a little sarcasm, I need it right now.

Burn, baby, burn!

In Tanzania, the answer to unwanted trash is simple: incinerate it. In the good old days, this probably wasn’t too problematic, seeing as trash was largely confined to coconut husks, animal bones, sticks/wood, and vegetable waste, which burn relatively cleanly. Controlled burning of undergrowth as a wildlife management strategy probably also has its place. But the modern era has brought flammable chemicals and plastics to Tanzania, as well as increased population density, and I am not so convinced that incineration is the best policy anymore.

In villages and towns, each house has a burn pile within a few feet of the house, and people tend to live fairly densely, so in the spirit of sharing, neighbors breathe each others’ trash-smoke on a daily basis. Smoke from coconut husks and cleared grass is one thing, but smoke from vaporized plastic bags and water bottles is entirely another, and sets me into choking coughs, blackening the insides of my nose. There is no escape.


Burn pit behind a house where we stayed

Matt noticed when we were at the safari lodge how the landscape – our view of the mountains was breathtaking – was marred by smoke from dozens of small fires. Some of the smoke is trash fires, others are fires set to clear underbrush in cashew orchards and to manage game. But there is so much burning in rural areas that many times you can’t see the sun set below the horizon, you see a hazy orange orb slip beneath the smoke layer.

The situation isn’t unique to Tanzania. When we lived in Ethiopia there was one day per year that everyone burned all the extra trash lying around, which made the air gray with smoke so thick that you could feel the particles settle on your skin. It puts “Code Red” air quality days in the US to shame. We heard that this day was an annual observance, the brainchild of an expatriate almost a century ago who was concerned about the poor sanitation standards in the city and was trying to encourage people to get rid of trash that could breed disease. Fair enough, in a city of 100,000. But in a city of 4 million, and when said trash includes tires, plastic bags, and petrochemicals, the strategy leaves a little to be desired.

I certainly have reservations about burying trash, the preferred method for trash disposal in the West, given that we make so much trash, and that it is made from all sorts of synthetic compounds not good choices for oxidizing into the environment. But imagine what our world would look and smell like if we burned all our trash!

Bush plane

Have you ever taken a ride on a commercial plane without going through security, having anyone check your ticket, having someone load your bags on the plane, or using a bonafide runway? We hadn’t either… until our trip back to Dar from our safari at Selous Game Reserve. It was Matt’s last day in Tanzania, and because of my illness we had bumped our safari back a day, giving us just a few hours between our flight back to Dar and his flight home to the US.

First, a primer on air transit in the bush. In the bush there are no airports. There are airstrips. “Airstrip” is a very loose term that generally indicates a cleared, rectangular area of comparatively level ground on which there may or may not have ever been asphalt/cement/other hard substance.



There are a number of airstrips around and in the Selous Game Reserve, but as luck would have it, the one closest to our lodge was undergoing renovations (a good thing, apparently, as we were told that the previous year there had been an accident and a woman had died. Just what you want to hear before taking a trip in an 8-seater Cessna.). We drove past the airstrip on the way and said renovations seemed to be limited thus far to about 12 pickup-truckloads of red clay dumped at regular intervals along the ground.

The managers at the lodge had forewarned us that the trip to the next closest airstrip was 2-2.5 hours, but the perk was that the route was straight through the game reserve, in effect a 2.5-hour goodbye safari. Though the sun was high when we set out on our odyssey, meaning many of the animals had gone off in pursuit of shade, we still saw a good number of giraffes, impala, and zebras along the way, which was a lot of fun.

As we got deeper into the park we noticed smoke rising along the horizon in the direction we were heading and joked morbidly that perhaps that was our plane. But as we got closer we drove directly into the smoke a few times and realized the bush was literally on fire. Encountering another Land Rover from a ritzy game lodge along the road, we learned that the fires were set intentionally to clear out some of the undergrowth so new growth in its place would keep the animals in the park from migrating elsewhere. But conditions were so dry and windy that the fire was getting more difficult to control, and had jumped across the road in several places during the night. Matt astutely observed that there were no park game wardens out monitoring the fire, but this lodge, because of its proximity to the blaze and vested interest in preventing the lodge from burning down, had at least 3 Land Rovers riding around, radioing, and calling in backup.

A few minutes later we arrived at the airstrip, which turned out to be no more than a small thatch-roofed banda with a bench underneath, and a long cleared section of bush. Upon closer inspection we noticed that the banda was cheerfully, and hyperbolically, labeled “Beho Beho Camp Departure Terminal” on one side and “Beho Beho Camp Arrival Terminal” on the other.



Having arrived the responsible 30 minutes before our flight, we sat down to a picnic lunch and waited for the plane. Departure time came and went. We waited. And waited. A couple of times the Land Rover we had come in took off down the runway to chase away any encroaching game, which apparently pose a danger to landing planes, and we got our hopes up that the driver knew something we didn’t. Forty-five minutes later panic started to set in so we asked the driver who had brought us if this wait was normal. He said yes, but because we had changed the date of our ticket, we weren’t so sure the pilot hadn’t just forgotten about us. So we sat down to wait some more, but after another half-hour we were both clawing the (nonexistent) walls of the banda. Matt was entertaining nightmare scenarios of not making his international flight. Recovering from distended kidneys and with a growing belly, I personally was dreading having to go back and spend the night at the lodge again, which meant 5 more hours of bumping through the bush, and was querying the Lonely Planet guidebook about how much it would cost to stay at Beho Beho Camp nearby for one night. Short answer: the price would make your jaw drop. It was out of the question.

Right about the time I reached my wit’s end and started pacing, I heard the hum of a single-engine plane in the distance and saw the glorious sight of a Cessna coming in for a landing. Without ceremony it plopped down, taxied toward us, and turned around with propellers running. Matt observed that the plane didn’t say “Coastal Aviation,” the company our ticket was booked with, on the side, which confused me a little. We stood there dumbly, waiting for instruction, when we noticed the pilot in the cockpit was waving us to come around. We walked around the other side of the plane and the pilot opened his hatch and hopped out. He casually said, “Hey there! Are you going to Dar? Wanna come along?” I looked at Matt and whispered, “Are you sure this is our plane? It seems like a charter!” Matt looked at me and calmly answered, “Don’t ask any questions. We’re going to Dar.” Matt then grabbed our bags, opened the cargo hold himself and tossed them in, and we got onboard.




The overhead views were incredible – vast swathes of untouched land, blue-green mountains and bright puffy clouds, undulating patches of green and brown on the ground, studded with palms, baobabs, and acacia trees. Forty minutes later we were on the ground in Dar, having landed on the taxiway rather than a legitimate runway. We hopped out, grabbed our bags, and waved to the pilot, who waved back and then taxied off to some other informal destination. We still aren’t 100% sure that that was our plane, and we still have our unused tickets. But no one asked any questions, so it was just as well.







And we were just in time to grab a cappuccino and an hour or so together before sending Matt on his way, our last-ever goodbye in this Tanzanian chapter of our lives.

Safari!

I haven't gotten my act together enough to write an entry about our safari. Suffice it to say the Selous Game Reserve was amazing -- so many animals in such a vast, unbounded space. For now, some pictures for a preview will have to do.


Matt at breakfast


Our overpriced stone bungalow


Impala


Pair of curious giraffes


Another curious giraffe


Elephant storming off after we interrupted his digging in the riverbed for water


Matt enjoying the bumpy ride in the Land Rover


Yes, we really were this close. And he didn't care.


Crocodile! (One of MANY in the lake)


On the boat, safe from the crocs


Family of hesitant hippos


Skittish zebras


Warthog family


Back at the lodge with our driver/guide Rama


On an early-morning walking safari

Gari la moshi (Smoke car)

To kick-start our safari, we were the proud holders of first-class train tickets from Dar to the game reserve. For someone like me who never travels first-class anything, that seems a rare privilege, at least on the surface of things. To my initial delight, I also learned our tickets made us eligible to sit in the first-class departure lounge. This lounge turned out to be a musty old room painted in outlandish shades of turquoise and gold with banks of black leatherette chairs tilted at a 45-degree angle, and packed with a number of passengers who may or may not have actually had first-class tickets, but some of whom were definitely suffering from the effects of illegal drugs, severe tuberculosis, and/or an uncontrollable habit of leering at us. The first-class bathroom had one stall that had been so elegantly designed that there was no way to both sit down (or squat) and close the door, and there was no water, soap, or a trash can in sight. Nice touches.

Matt loves trains--here in Tanzania a train translates as gari la moshi, or "smoke car"--as much as or more than your average little kid, largely because it’s such an efficient and real-time way to travel, and who doesn’t love the rhythmic clacking of a train car along the rails? When it came time to board the train, you could see the excitement in his eyes, even as we were jostled among the stampede of passengers (first- and second-class) flooding through the doors of the station toward the quay.

Just to be clear, first-class train travel in Africa has absolutely no frills except for lessening the chances that your cabin will have more people and bags in it than is spatially possible. Tanzania has only two rail lines, both headed vaguely east-west, and only one train on each line an average of three times per week, so everyone in the station was waiting for our train that afternoon. On the TAZARA line, the rail line that provides a critical linkage to ocean ports for landlocked Zambia, first-class travel for a 4-hour trip cost about $11, which gets you your very own Chinese-made garishly-colored velour blanket to sit on, one small bottle of water, and a seat in a cabin with a maximum of 4 people and any children and baggage that might be traveling on their tickets. We settled into ours, along with an older gentleman and his young son (perhaps grandson), and another gentleman. They had brought bag upon bag of goods with them, stacked above our heads and filling the pulled-out couchettes to capacity.



When the train started rolling, we stared out the window and let the hours while by. Cheap beers and sodas didn’t hurt. Matt quickly made friends with the young boy in our cabin, despite the language barrier, and both enjoyed sticking their heads out of the window. Though our train was an express train, it still stopped from time to time, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, often at villages or crossroads lacking even a station.



We had been informed to disembark at Kisaki, but we weren’t due to arrive until after dark, so we wondered if we might miss our stop. As it turned out, the conductor gave us ample advance notice, and as the train screeched to a halt at Kisaki, we got ready to get down on the platform. Only there was no platform. There was only about a 4-foot drop from the train car to the bare ground. It was pitch black but for a few candles held by waiting vendors hawking fruits and snacks to passengers through the windows of the train for pocket change, We somehow both negotiated the drop in the dark, and then started following the herd of people walking along the gravel, dirt, and railroad ties alongside the train, presumably toward a station we had not yet seen and someone from the lodge who was to meet us. The only wazungu in sight, we were heckled the whole time. Matt managed to navigate this treacherous path with a 50-pound suitcase. We had been met initially by one man who seemed like a tout, muttering something unintelligible. Several others kept hollering, “Taxi?” “Guesti?” (“Guesthouse?”). We expected a signboard, an official T-shirt or nametag or something, but there was no such greeting in the chaos. As it turned out the initial tout was our driver after all, and we eventually sorted everything out and hopped into the Land Rover to make our way through the darkness to the lodge.

Even dogs don't get this sick...

One of the last places in the world I like to be is in a hospital. Add to that being in a hospital in Tanzania, and on top of that having a life-threatening illness, and the combination is as close as I have gotten in awhile to living hell. The whole experience was further enhanced by the fact that the week and a half I spent sick and recovering coincided perfectly with Matt’s visit here. Even better, he got to spend his birthday in the hospital wondering if his wife and/or unborn child were going to die.

For a few days as we traveled in an area without medical services I had been treating an infection I had presumptively with the antibiotics I carry, but by the time we got to Arusha for what was supposed to be a few days of relaxation to celebrate Matt’s birthday, my fever was going up, not down. Once it topped 102.5 (high fever is dangerous in pregnancy), we decided we needed to do something, so we went to the clinic in Arusha, where I was treated by none other than a Dr. Exorbitant (his real name). Completely self-important, he suited his name to a tee, ordering every test in the book – “just so people will know I thought to check that” – including a pregnancy urine test and an ultrasound. He didn’t believe that I was 15 weeks pregnant, despite my assurances to him I had been going to antenatal care in Dar es Salaam. The upshot is that Matt got to see the baby on an ultrasound. By the time we got back to our hotel I felt like death warmed over and crawled into bed to wait for the medicine to kick in.

But that night the useless antibiotic I had been prescribed had failed to bring any relief, and my fever shot up again. Quivering with chills, I was ordered into a tepid bath Matt had prepared, which felt like ice water torture. Care from Nurse Matt and a little acetominophen brought down my temperature. Our room and the place we were staying were lovely, and leagues above the other places we had stayed in Kilwa and Mtwara, so neither of us wanted to leave. But the fever came back in the morning, and we knew we had to fly back to Dar es Salaam, having spent only 24 hours in what is undoubtedly the most beautiful part of Tanzania. Dar’s infamously horrible traffic showed no mercy, even for a pregnant woman with a high fever, and it took an hour to traverse the 6 miles to the clinic. By this time I was pallid and shaking uncontrollably with chills, so the nurses whisked me back to an examining table and piled blankets atop me. Fever 104, pulse 120. After the lab work I was sent in for an ultrasound, and the looks on the nurses’ and doctor’s faces were somber. Before she put the wand on my belly she told us that I had septicaemia, a systemic blood infection, as a complication of a kidney infection. If I hadn’t come in for treatment the infection would have killed me in a matter of days, and my fever already posed a serious risk to the baby. To our relief, the baby appeared fine.

I, however, was not fine, and they told me I needed an IV drip for dehydration and a course of IV antibiotics, so we should plan on staying the night. After getting the IV (preceded by some urgent texts to my sister and her doctor-boyfriend in America to make sure the drugs were safe in pregnancy), I bedded down for the night on a hard examining table (that's me in the picture below), and Matt curled up on the counter next to the sink with a couple of sheets and a pillow. Friends came bearing dinner for Matt and get-well wishes for me, which helped lift the mood. My fever spiked to 104 again 6 hours after the IV, and I grew terrified the drugs wouldn’t work. The fever was not responding to acetominophen so I got a shot of something called Diclo-Denk in the butt, which worked beautifully. The next day was Matt’s birthday, and I woke up feeling much better and hoping I could go home so that we could go out for dinner or something. To my despair, the fever returned again, almost as high as the night before.



I got IV after IV, but the fevers kept coming in waves. Matt got progressively hungrier, sleep-deprived, and more strung out worrying about me, the lack of hygienic practices in the clinic, watching my IV for air bubbles in the line (and there often were), making sure that the medicines they were giving me were appropriate, and helping explore options for possible medical evacuation with the US Embassy. I must have started to get better because when friends showed up with pizza and groceries, I ate almost the whole pizza. I was still getting chills and fever, though, and so we begged for another antibiotic injection and settled in for another night. The nurse on duty that night, named Severa, was wonderful to both of us. She dramatically sang Happy Birthday to Matt, we introduced her to Pringles and M&M’s (Matt’s birthday treats), and she unobtrusively kept a close and watchful eye on my IV the whole night. (That's the two of them goofing off as she sings in the picture below). The recurrent fevers seemed to be getting steadily lower.



The next day my vein had given up the ghost and collapsed, so the fluids from the IV were causing my hand to swell up like a zombie. I was hoping to be discharged and so I asked for the IV to be removed. No fever, and a positive fetal heartbeat, so I was discharged that afternoon with oral antibiotics. Though I still got another couple of fevers over the next two days, they were much lower, and a hospital bed just can’t hold a candle to a real bed next to one’s husband. We managed to postpone our pre-paid safari by a day to give me time to recover. To make a long story short, I’m now fine, and we’ve postponed Matt’s birthday to August. And I’ve sworn off getting sick anymore in developing countries.

Surprise!

Finding out you are pregnant in the middle of the bush makes for a good story, if nothing else. In April, I had been wondering and hoping for several weeks but the two home tests a friend gave me came out negative—turns out they were expired by 4 years!—so my hypochondriac tendencies had me convinced that I had some rare untreatable disease causing my bizarre symptoms (some clues in my blog entries re: food).

While collecting interviews during the first phase of my fieldwork, I went to the small regional hospital in Lindi Town to meet with two German doctors about my dissertation research. Matt had mentioned that if I did happen to be pregnant they would be good contacts to have, and so I casually mentioned after our meeting that I suspected I was pregnant but hadn’t been able to find an accurate pregnancy test. One of the doctors said that the hospital is completely out of pregnancy tests right now (not unusual in these parts), but quickly volunteered that they do have an ultrasound machine, and would I like a scan? Part of me hesitated – no time to mentally prepare – was she really serious she would do an ultrasound right now? Right here, in the middle of this open-air hospital with signs everywhere posting “Free services for mothers and children”? But the suspense was killing me, so I accepted.

With German efficiency, almost brusqueness, she walked me the 50 feet to the radiology ward, a tiny 2-room concrete building with a worn red tile roof and the words “X-Ray 1” painted in large black letters on the outside. (Picture below) Inside was a completely modern setup that belied the humbleness of the outside. Almost as soon as I laid down, she had the ultrasound wand on my belly and on the screen we saw a tiny little jellybean with stubs of arms and legs, and a heart fluttering like a bird’s. I was almost embarrassed to register my awe out loud, with the doctor being so businesslike and matter-of-fact. The only thing I could say was “Oh my God.” It was certainly not the hand-holding cliché of movies, where two loving parents-to-be tearfully struggle to comprehend the miracle displayed on the ultrasound screen, but it was still mind-blowing. (Matt called 10 minutes later, as if on cue, so I could share the news). Thanks to the German-ness of it all, the whole process took less than 5 minutes. Everything looked normal and I am feeling fine. And very grateful to those two doctors.



Matt and I have jokingly teased that I should bring back a baby from Tanzania… I just didn’t expect it would be inside me!