I stopped posting rather abruptly in the last days of my study. A combination of no internet access and too many things to do!
An update for the curious:
I had a baby girl named Amelia in mid-December 2007, and will defend my dissertation on her first birthday. She was born at our home with highly skilled nurse-midwives. That fact alarms a number of people in the US (who don't realize the training or equipment of the particular group that helped me deliver Amelia) and in Tanzania (who don't realize that a home birth in the US isn't necessarily anything like a home birth in Tanzania). She was born with the easygoing temperament I saw in so many children in my study area. Life with her has changed beyond my wildest expectations.
Spending a year away from my husband was harder than either of us expected, and something I could never do again. Still, every now and then I miss parts of my year in Tanzania. I miss that life was simpler, even though it was harder. I miss Indian food (though I still don't miss rice, beans, and greens). I miss being able to speak freely and quickly in Swahili... even though I still understand it my tongue seems to have become stuck after a year of atrophy. I miss the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean. And I miss my friends, some of whom may never meet my "field baby" Amelia who was knitted together in a rugged place in Africa. I hope she can return one day.
Monday, October 06, 2008
Monday, July 30, 2007
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.
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Yusufu, the cook's 2-year-old son
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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!
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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.
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Yusufu, the cook's 2-year-old son
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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!
.jpg)
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.
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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!
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.
.jpg)
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.
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
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
Friday, July 27, 2007
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.
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!
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Zoo animal
To be completely honest, I’m starting to get tired of feeling like a zoo animal.
In some ways the notoriety is completely like being a local celebrity. A few weeks ago I got on a 20-seat bus (which, like daladalas with 13 seats, usually hold at least twice that many people), and was shocked that the conductor of the bus knew my name. I had never seen him before. At first I thought he was saying a Swahili word that sounded like my name, but sure enough, he was saying “Rachel” and asking how I was. He must have known about me from a previous village – word travels fast. Ever since, every conductor on every bus along that road that I have boarded has known my name. Talk about a small world!
Another example: in the village where we are staying now, I was sick with a fever for a few days and lost my appetite, so I stopped going with Irene on our nightly foray to eat rice and beans on the street at a picnic table by lantern light. Everyone started asking “Where is the mzungu?” Irene explained I was sick, and ever since everyone—all complete strangers—has been asking if I am feeling better. Thankfully I have a huge stash of granola bars and dried fruit and nuts!
Already I’ve had to bow out of observing many of the interviews we do because we have determined that my presence there alters their quality – including respondents’ answers and the number of distractions – considerably. When I am present at an interview the assumption is that I am a doctor – what else would a white woman interested in health be doing in a village? Clinic cards come out spontaneously, and answers to wide-open questions are short, like answers you would give to someone in authority. All of these actions run counter to what we are exploring, which is how women understand and experience their own reproductive problems, in their own words. (Though certainly their hopes and expectations are highlighting an area of great need in this area – the need for affordable, good-quality medical services). In addition to my presumed clinical identity, my presence at a house for an interview is occasion enough for parades of curious “visitors” – hardly the ideal situation for private interviews that delve into a woman’s marital, sexual, and reproductive experiences.
Why can’t we just shut the door and go on with the interview? In Tanzanian culture it is the height of rudeness to fail to welcome someone – however unannounced the visitor – to your home. If a person says “Hodi” (basically “hello, may I enter?”), you have to say “Karibu” (“welcome”), then drop whatever you are doing to greet your guests. So a parade of people then enter, some just to gawk obviously at the mzungu, some to try to sell me things (an old lady tried to sell me a pile of oranges mid-interview), some try to show me to their children, some come bringing gifts of corn and rice, some invite me to their homes, some ask if I will be their girlfriend… suffice it to say I wish sometimes I could change my skin color. Obviously the interviews proceed with fewer interruptions when I am not there.
However, when I am not there, I have to be somewhere else in the village, and an unattended mzungu is an even more open invitation for unsolicited gawking and greeting. So I try to keep a low profile during the day, shutting the house where I stay and rarely leaving my room. In one house I even had to shutter the window because groups of kids kept coming by to spy and giggle, having cornered me in my room. Then I really felt like a zoo animal. I know sequestering myself is denying a level of cultural immersion I could be experiencing, but because we switch villages so often, the novelty never seems to wear off, and so the end effect is much too exhausting to engage with strangers for the whole day. I am a much more effective emissary from elsewhere when I’ve had my beauty sleep!
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My "cage" in the house where I stayed
In some ways the notoriety is completely like being a local celebrity. A few weeks ago I got on a 20-seat bus (which, like daladalas with 13 seats, usually hold at least twice that many people), and was shocked that the conductor of the bus knew my name. I had never seen him before. At first I thought he was saying a Swahili word that sounded like my name, but sure enough, he was saying “Rachel” and asking how I was. He must have known about me from a previous village – word travels fast. Ever since, every conductor on every bus along that road that I have boarded has known my name. Talk about a small world!
Another example: in the village where we are staying now, I was sick with a fever for a few days and lost my appetite, so I stopped going with Irene on our nightly foray to eat rice and beans on the street at a picnic table by lantern light. Everyone started asking “Where is the mzungu?” Irene explained I was sick, and ever since everyone—all complete strangers—has been asking if I am feeling better. Thankfully I have a huge stash of granola bars and dried fruit and nuts!
Already I’ve had to bow out of observing many of the interviews we do because we have determined that my presence there alters their quality – including respondents’ answers and the number of distractions – considerably. When I am present at an interview the assumption is that I am a doctor – what else would a white woman interested in health be doing in a village? Clinic cards come out spontaneously, and answers to wide-open questions are short, like answers you would give to someone in authority. All of these actions run counter to what we are exploring, which is how women understand and experience their own reproductive problems, in their own words. (Though certainly their hopes and expectations are highlighting an area of great need in this area – the need for affordable, good-quality medical services). In addition to my presumed clinical identity, my presence at a house for an interview is occasion enough for parades of curious “visitors” – hardly the ideal situation for private interviews that delve into a woman’s marital, sexual, and reproductive experiences.
Why can’t we just shut the door and go on with the interview? In Tanzanian culture it is the height of rudeness to fail to welcome someone – however unannounced the visitor – to your home. If a person says “Hodi” (basically “hello, may I enter?”), you have to say “Karibu” (“welcome”), then drop whatever you are doing to greet your guests. So a parade of people then enter, some just to gawk obviously at the mzungu, some to try to sell me things (an old lady tried to sell me a pile of oranges mid-interview), some try to show me to their children, some come bringing gifts of corn and rice, some invite me to their homes, some ask if I will be their girlfriend… suffice it to say I wish sometimes I could change my skin color. Obviously the interviews proceed with fewer interruptions when I am not there.
However, when I am not there, I have to be somewhere else in the village, and an unattended mzungu is an even more open invitation for unsolicited gawking and greeting. So I try to keep a low profile during the day, shutting the house where I stay and rarely leaving my room. In one house I even had to shutter the window because groups of kids kept coming by to spy and giggle, having cornered me in my room. Then I really felt like a zoo animal. I know sequestering myself is denying a level of cultural immersion I could be experiencing, but because we switch villages so often, the novelty never seems to wear off, and so the end effect is much too exhausting to engage with strangers for the whole day. I am a much more effective emissary from elsewhere when I’ve had my beauty sleep!
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My "cage" in the house where I stayed
Monday, May 07, 2007
Chickens
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The sounds of birds are everywhere in the villages where we are staying. But they’re not songbirds, they’re chickens – baby chicks cheeping on parade, roosters competing to win crowing contests, mother hens tutting to each other. (As an aside, I’m not sure I’ve seen a single songbird, but I have sighted an extraordinarily large hawk-like bird that purportedly eats – yes – chickens!).
Other than the dried fish I abhor, chicken, including chicken eggs, is the primary animal source of protein for people in the villages. Chickens outnumber goats and cows exponentially, probably because they take up less space and are fairly self-sufficient. They are still pretty pricey – about $2.50/chicken in most villages, which is a handsome sum for most people here. Many people can afford to eat chicken only once or twice a month. Chickens come in two varieties: kuku wa kienyeji (local chickens), preferred by most Tanzanians over the hormone-plumped kuku wa kizungu (foreign chickens) shipped in from commercial farms in Tanzania, for while kuku wa kienyeji in the villages are smaller and chewier, they have better flavor. Chickens are everywhere: you hear them rustling around in gardens, in the bush, pecking the dirt for insects and spare kernels of corn. Their sounds interrupt a good 80% of our interview tapes! It still seems dubious to me that people can know whose chickens are whose in a world without fences and nonstop egg-hatching, but people say they are like cats and never wander too far from their coop.
That is not to say that the chickens mind their own business. Chickens, especially hungry chickens, may well be the most meddlesome household animals I have ever seen. They invade houses uninvited if the door is left open, hopping up on tables and chairs. They gather close when you are washing dishes outside, hoping food scraps might be tossed their way (leave a pile of dirty dishes unattended for a minute and they will hop right on top, pecking the pile clean). One day I was cooking corn on the cob and left it covered and boiling on the charcoal stove outside for a few minutes – when I came back the lid had been pushed off and one cob rolled off the pile onto the ground. The culprit clucked with pride as he pecked at the corn. In addition to corn, they seem to eat almost anything, and have a particular penchant for coconut, cleaning the remnants of white flesh from the insides of discarded coconut shells. I watched a baby chick rolling around inside half a coconut shell, determined to get every morsel of coconut.
Chickens are also completely oblivious to their own mortality, becoming willing carnivores whenever chicken bones and parts are tossed out after dinner. When I first arrived in Dar, I saw a street vendor selling chipsi (French fries) and kuku (chicken) fried in oil. The precooked food was kept in a glass case on a table, under which pecked about 8 living chickens, wandering free. I thought in that moment how many Americans would be revolted, as we tend to feel discomfort associating the meat with the animal, inevitable in such close proximity, but I also thought it was bizarre that a chicken couldn’t sense certain—albeit eventual—death. In one of the villages, I watched one of the people we were staying with slaughter a rooster. It was a much less traumatizing event than I expected (having not grown up on a farm), because it was soundless. The rooster’s only angry squawks came when a young man selected him from the flock and picked him up. This man sat with the bird for a good 20 minutes, wearing a felt fedora at a jaunty angle and somehow managing to look oddly cool with this gigantic rooster on his lap, stroking the bird’s feathers like a pet. (I had no idea at this point that he would be dinner, I thought he was a pet – then I noticed another man sharpening a knife). This man then took the rooster, held him upside down, lay him quietly down on the ground, gently immobilized the rooster’s head and legs with his two feet, and cut off the rooster’s head with one clean, noiseless stroke. He stood there with the bird for a couple of minutes until it stopped moving – this rooster would have run around with its head cut off if given the chance. For all the noise and protests roosters can generate, the silence was palpable. A mother hen and her 8 chicks walked within a couple of feet of the slaughter, sensing no fear and expressing no curiosity. The men laughed when I asked if they noticed the rooster, and they answered, “Kuku hana kumbukumbu” (a chicken has no memory). I can at least affirm that chickens are not too bright!
The rooster was delicious, by the way – organic and free-range, and fresh from farm to table!
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Noise
Tiny villages in Africa, and tiny villages everywhere, are often depicted as the epitome of pastoral peace – animals grazing contentedly, women cooking with their babies asleep on their backs, men skillfully working their fields or building houses. Sure, the scene might be punctuated every now and then with the bright laughter of small children, but most of the sounds in the scene are tranquil ones, the soothing rhythm of daily village life.
The reality is that villages in Tanzania are louder—and to my Western ears, more grating—places than anywhere I have ever been. Somehow they seem even louder than Dar es Salaam! There are no “quiet hours” or noise ordinances, though the default is that things calm down somewhere around midnight and pick back up around 4:30 or 5 am (this does not in any way guarantee that someone will not walk by singing at the top of his lungs, drunk on pombe, that a heated argument won’t break out in the next room, or that a cell phone might ring at 2 or 3 in the morning). Suffice it to say that a peaceful night’s sleep is something of a fiction here, especially for a girl like me who needs 8 or 9 hours each night.
Right now, there are two roosters crowing at the top of their lungs outside my window, a child screaming defiantly at its mother, a woman laughing hysterically outside with the teachers while they cook breakfast, a couple of people shouting obligatory good morning greetings three houses down, and a radio on full-blast in the next room (it has been on at this level since 6 am) broadcasting a Swahili drama that currently involves a heated argument between at least 8 family members all yelling simultaneously, trying to decide how to get a woman in labor to the hospital. I would pray for a commercial break in the program, but the commercials are sponsored by 2 competing soft drink companies (Pepsi & Coke), and 2 competing cell phone companies (Celtel and VodaCom), and all seem bent on message repetition as the best form of outcompeting their rivals, meaning that the same four 30-second ads repeat ad nauseam. Emphasis on the nauseam.
Many Tanzanians I have been around appreciate a level of volume on electronics that feels just one decibel away from eardrum-blowing. Cell phones ring at top volume, as if one might miss a call if the ringing volume were one notch lower. Televisions and radios blare, and many of them blare the same snippets (ads, clips, program theme songs) over and over again – whether because of consumer demand or because of economic and sponsorship concerns, I don’t know. I doubt it would be so annoying if the sound were clear, but a lot of the televisions and radios here are either second-hand or very cheap fabrications from China, which means the speaker quality leaves something to be desired. Poor radio signal coverage and lots of broken or improvised antennas mean that the sound quality suffers even further. In a way, the scratchy, tinny sound of cheap speakers and weak radio signals is somehow atmospheric, the sounds so often portrayed on documentaries of villages in the developing world, but every now and then I dream of setting up an NGO to distribute radios with good speakers and to widen radio signal ranges just to introduce a new standard of listening quality!
Tanzanians have a very effusive and ebullient culture, and by and large seem unperturbed by chaotic or noisy environments. Boisterous shouting is a common feature of the music and raucous laughter a regular feature of conversations, so perhaps the loudness is just a natural outgrowth of this zest for living. But my introverted side sometimes needs a little escape…I remembered last night that I had packed a pair of foam earplugs from my flight over here… while they did not cancel out the cacophony around me, they thankfully dulled it enough for me to sleep a full 7 hours.
The reality is that villages in Tanzania are louder—and to my Western ears, more grating—places than anywhere I have ever been. Somehow they seem even louder than Dar es Salaam! There are no “quiet hours” or noise ordinances, though the default is that things calm down somewhere around midnight and pick back up around 4:30 or 5 am (this does not in any way guarantee that someone will not walk by singing at the top of his lungs, drunk on pombe, that a heated argument won’t break out in the next room, or that a cell phone might ring at 2 or 3 in the morning). Suffice it to say that a peaceful night’s sleep is something of a fiction here, especially for a girl like me who needs 8 or 9 hours each night.
Right now, there are two roosters crowing at the top of their lungs outside my window, a child screaming defiantly at its mother, a woman laughing hysterically outside with the teachers while they cook breakfast, a couple of people shouting obligatory good morning greetings three houses down, and a radio on full-blast in the next room (it has been on at this level since 6 am) broadcasting a Swahili drama that currently involves a heated argument between at least 8 family members all yelling simultaneously, trying to decide how to get a woman in labor to the hospital. I would pray for a commercial break in the program, but the commercials are sponsored by 2 competing soft drink companies (Pepsi & Coke), and 2 competing cell phone companies (Celtel and VodaCom), and all seem bent on message repetition as the best form of outcompeting their rivals, meaning that the same four 30-second ads repeat ad nauseam. Emphasis on the nauseam.
Many Tanzanians I have been around appreciate a level of volume on electronics that feels just one decibel away from eardrum-blowing. Cell phones ring at top volume, as if one might miss a call if the ringing volume were one notch lower. Televisions and radios blare, and many of them blare the same snippets (ads, clips, program theme songs) over and over again – whether because of consumer demand or because of economic and sponsorship concerns, I don’t know. I doubt it would be so annoying if the sound were clear, but a lot of the televisions and radios here are either second-hand or very cheap fabrications from China, which means the speaker quality leaves something to be desired. Poor radio signal coverage and lots of broken or improvised antennas mean that the sound quality suffers even further. In a way, the scratchy, tinny sound of cheap speakers and weak radio signals is somehow atmospheric, the sounds so often portrayed on documentaries of villages in the developing world, but every now and then I dream of setting up an NGO to distribute radios with good speakers and to widen radio signal ranges just to introduce a new standard of listening quality!
Tanzanians have a very effusive and ebullient culture, and by and large seem unperturbed by chaotic or noisy environments. Boisterous shouting is a common feature of the music and raucous laughter a regular feature of conversations, so perhaps the loudness is just a natural outgrowth of this zest for living. But my introverted side sometimes needs a little escape…I remembered last night that I had packed a pair of foam earplugs from my flight over here… while they did not cancel out the cacophony around me, they thankfully dulled it enough for me to sleep a full 7 hours.
Cooking lessons
[the charcoal stoves we used to cook]
Here in a tiny village called Nahukahuka, with no power or running water, we are staying with two secondary schoolteachers in a modest 3-room mud house with concrete floors. They have been incredibly generous to us, giving us our own room with a bed. Outside is a pit latrine with a palm-leaf privacy enclosure (picture at the end). In return for the place to stay, we have promised to cook for them while we are here. There seem to be no real restaurants or even much street food in Nahukahuka, with the exception of a banana-seller and a guy who reheats chunks of fried cassava, so cooking every night is our only real option.
Because there is no electricity and no cooking gas, all cooking is done either with firewood or using charcoal (mkaa). Because firewood is readily available in the forest, poorer people tend to use firewood. Cooking with firewood is a smoky affair and women who have cooked with firewood their whole lives tend to develop red, permanently irritated eyes that sometimes earn them a reputation of being witches. These schoolteachers we are staying with are comparatively better off, and they use chunks of charcoal placed in a concrete bowl, with three metal prongs on top to support a pot. The basic premise is something like a cross between barbeque-ing and campfire cooking.
Yesterday we cooked ugali (the staple for lunch), rice (the staple for dinner), squash greens, and a river fish and vegetable stew in coconut milk (which I would have loved but for the godforsaken fish!).
Preparing ugali is almost exactly the same as making very thick grits. You boil a small amount of maize flour in water, and when the mixture boils and thickens, you beat it with a wooden spoon to break up all the lumps and cook the mixture through. If it’s not thick enough for your tastes, you add more flour along the way and continue beating. No salt, no pepper, no nothing – I told Irene how we eat grits in America with salt, pepper, and butter and she thought that sounded crazy. When it’s finished cooking, you turn the mass out onto a plate and toss it up in the air so it lands on each side, eventually rounding the stuff into a ball.
When I learned to cook rice as a girl, I learned to carefully rinse the rice, measure the rice and water exactly to get the right ratio, add a little salt, bring the mixture to a boil, and then simmer at a very low temperature, covered, for 20-40 minutes depending on the type of rice. Stirring and peeking were off-limits and a surefire recipe for sticky, gummy rice, and too high a simmering temperature was a direct route to rice that stuck to the bottom of the pot and never cooked through. In Tanzania, all these rules go out the window – but I guess the normal rules couldn’t apply if you were trying to cook rice on a campfire! (The whole process starts with a tedious picking through the rice by hand to remove any stones, weeds, or unhusked rice grains, done on a large plate-shaped basket called an ungo). You still rinse the rice, but because you’re cooking over high heat, you stir the mixture constantly with a small amount of water, then add a little more water just before fluffing it and pulling it off the high heat. Then you take the pot and set it on the ground on top of a few pieces of charcoal, and on top of the lid you set a few more pieces of charcoal, to provide heat on both sides. Over the course of about half an hour, the charcoal bakes the rice completely.
Squash greens are hairy little buggers, and so you start by cracking each stem and peeling it back so that the hairy membrane on the surface peels off, making them more tender and mouth-friendly. They are then washed to remove the ubiquitous sand, then shaved with a knife into very thin strips. These are cooked with water and a little salt until tender. Then, in another pot, you fry onion and tomato in oil until the vegetables soften, and add to the greens. Then you add coconut milk and salt and cook until most of the liquid evaporates. Coconut milk here is made from scratch using an X-shaped stool called an mbuzi (a word which oddly also means “goat”); sticking out from one end of this stool is a platypus-bill-shaped serrated tool, which you rub half a coconut against over a bowl until all the coconut meat is ground up. Then you add water to the coconut meat, and after it sits a few minutes, you squeeze the meat to extract the coconut milk, and discard the meat. The coconut milk is a fatty layer that sits on top of the milk, so you take care to pour only the coconut milk into the food, and discard the remaining milky water. Very labor intensive process, but it deshrouded the mystery of how we get the coconut milk that comes in a can!
The fish sauce was very simple – fry skinned tomatoes and onion in oil until they form a sauce, then add coconut milk, vegetables (okra and eggplant) and fish and simmer until the whole thing tastes desperately fishy.
[the outhouse/shower]
Cooking one meal can easily take more than 2 hours even with 2-3 people cooking. The funny thing is that once we finished cooking, I had absolutely no appetite… though reports from our schoolteachers indicate the food was tasty…
Fish = homesickness
There is nothing like a steady diet of rice, beans and greens to make me miss home. Here in the villages in southern Tanzania, most meals are the same – rice, beans (on lucky days the rice and beans are flavored with coconut milk), greens, and a tomato-based sauce, that more often than not has whole small fish (samaki) in it. On lucky days the meat is chicken. Now I absolutely love fish, and some of the best fish I have ever had in my life has been here in Tanzania, fresh-caught from the ocean, but my passion wanes when said fish has been kept unrefrigerated and half-dried for days, and then transported in open trucks, to be sold several hundred miles inland in little piles set out on booths in the sun. Saying that dishes with samaki in them have a “fishy” taste is a massive understatement. But people here love it. A research colleague of ours arrived last night from Mtwara and brought Irene and me a gift of fish wrapped in newspaper, and the smell was so strong I had to beg Irene to take it away and hide it in her room. She held the oily package to her nose, inhaled deeply and said she couldn’t wait for dinner.
I literally cannot stomach eating samaki, which means that I usually have a choice of one of two meals: 1) rice, beans, and greens, or 2) rice, beans, greens, and chicken. On desperate occasions I will eat only greens and rice, or beans and rice. Occasionally ugali, a paste made from corn, something like thick grits, will be substituted for the rice, which is so bland that it does little to diversify the available flavors. I have skipped meals on more than one occasion, retreating to my room with a box of juice and a protein bar. What’s worse, I have daydreams now, starting as early as 6am, of eating fried shrimp po-boys with Remoulade sauce on crusty French bread, field green salads with fresh feta and apples and candied walnuts, pumpkin soup and rye bread, a Nathan’s hot dog in a squishy seeded bun, spaghetti with homemade marinara sauce and a glass of red wine, tomatoes ripe from the garden. And cheese. I really miss cheese. When Matt and I lived in Ethiopia a whole year, the only thing we really missed was Mexican food and a good burger. In Dar es Salaam there was enough diversity (and enough good Indian food) that again, all I really missed was Mexican food and a good burger. But here, in the field, even thinking about such foods is a recipe for homesickness.
Three and a half more months doesn’t seem so long, but when I consider that that is 220 of the exact same meal (not counting breakfast, for which I eat beans and a banana, and sometimes a chapati), August seems a long way away.
A world of spirits
People commonly explain all bad things that happen here in Southern Tanzania in one of four ways: 1) “bahati mbaya” (plain bad luck, which is most common, particularly for innocuous things), 2) “mipango wa Mungu” (God’s plans), or 3) “mashetani” (malevolent, invisible spirits), or 4) “wachawi” (witches, or bad humans, who cast spells on people). Sure, people often acknowledge that illnesses have direct medical causes, and relationship troubles can be traced to certain social events, but the spiritual realm forms the background of much discord and imbalance here that leads to misfortune of all kinds.
Irene and I had read through a lot of transcripts of interviews from this area before we arrived, and in those interviews many respondents mentioned the things people do to prevent themselves from becoming possessed by mashetani or becoming the victims of witchcraft, which frequently require consultations to a local healer (called an mganga or fundi), who chants spells and creates concoctions and medicines (sometimes herbal medicines, sometimes Islamic medicines, sometimes both) for people to take. Once possessed or cursed, people also consult the healer to divine how to appease the spirit or undo the curse. They exact significant sums from their clients, often just a hair cheaper than the cost of going to the hospital. It seems to me it makes for a very good business, and one that effectively competes for clients with the formal health system as well as religious counseling in most areas. Most babies under the age of two, and many women, wear mganga-made amulets tied around their necks, their waists, and their wrists (Even in church on Easter morning many of the Christian children were wearing these amulets). This is a world perceived to be full of threats, and so people try to protect themselves from as many of these threats as possible by as many means possible, which ironically sets God/Allah on par with the abilities of the local fundi.
[photo of a fundi]
As the South is an almost exclusively Muslim area, whereas the research team (my assistant Irene, as well the 4 guys on the larger project’s research team who we frequently travel with) is almost entirely comprised of Christians from Northern Tanzania, the contrast seems to have set us up for something resembling spiritual warfare. The whole team has complained to me of nightmares and strange things at night: Irene claims to have felt hands coming around her neck to choke her one night so she couldn’t breathe, and she swears she was not yet asleep when this happened. Albert says he saw a large dark object moving outside his room one night, and that the guesthouse where we are staying has a policy of not allowing lanterns to be kept on all night, which Albert and Irene believe is so we can’t see as many bad things in the night. One night a couple of weeks ago, Albert and Peter both claim to have encountered a being in their room one night and they swear they had to beat him to get him to go away. I don’t really know any other explanation other than that these are nightmares, simple manifestations of fear. Though in this less rational and individualistic world, sometimes I wonder if there could really be spirits out there, and what they are capable of doing.
Even the small and harmless take on new life in this spiritual realm. Irene had a rat in her room yesterday, munching on her soap and running around her mosquito net, and it made her so nervous she couldn’t sleep and she called me at 1 in the morning to come sleep in my room (which, thankfully, has remained rat-free the whole time). These strange goings-on make all of them rely heavily on prayer: Irene’s Bible is an amulet to her, and she frequently calls on the name of Jesus when she feels scared at night. For all her bravery and boldness, her one fear is the darkness, particularly sleeping alone in it, so she likes to sleep with the light on.
The strange thing is, though I too am a Christian, I feel oddly immune to this larger-than-life spiritual world. Most likely, I rationalize them away... in keeping with what I have been taught, I feel much more afraid of a vehicle accident or malaria. Certainly, I too have said prayers for safety, but I have had no nightmares, seen no strange things, had no trouble sleeping (okay, aside from the bat, but that was over soon and rationally enough). Irene says she thinks it might be that the mashetani are scared of an mzungu (white person)!
Irene and I had read through a lot of transcripts of interviews from this area before we arrived, and in those interviews many respondents mentioned the things people do to prevent themselves from becoming possessed by mashetani or becoming the victims of witchcraft, which frequently require consultations to a local healer (called an mganga or fundi), who chants spells and creates concoctions and medicines (sometimes herbal medicines, sometimes Islamic medicines, sometimes both) for people to take. Once possessed or cursed, people also consult the healer to divine how to appease the spirit or undo the curse. They exact significant sums from their clients, often just a hair cheaper than the cost of going to the hospital. It seems to me it makes for a very good business, and one that effectively competes for clients with the formal health system as well as religious counseling in most areas. Most babies under the age of two, and many women, wear mganga-made amulets tied around their necks, their waists, and their wrists (Even in church on Easter morning many of the Christian children were wearing these amulets). This is a world perceived to be full of threats, and so people try to protect themselves from as many of these threats as possible by as many means possible, which ironically sets God/Allah on par with the abilities of the local fundi.
[photo of a fundi]
As the South is an almost exclusively Muslim area, whereas the research team (my assistant Irene, as well the 4 guys on the larger project’s research team who we frequently travel with) is almost entirely comprised of Christians from Northern Tanzania, the contrast seems to have set us up for something resembling spiritual warfare. The whole team has complained to me of nightmares and strange things at night: Irene claims to have felt hands coming around her neck to choke her one night so she couldn’t breathe, and she swears she was not yet asleep when this happened. Albert says he saw a large dark object moving outside his room one night, and that the guesthouse where we are staying has a policy of not allowing lanterns to be kept on all night, which Albert and Irene believe is so we can’t see as many bad things in the night. One night a couple of weeks ago, Albert and Peter both claim to have encountered a being in their room one night and they swear they had to beat him to get him to go away. I don’t really know any other explanation other than that these are nightmares, simple manifestations of fear. Though in this less rational and individualistic world, sometimes I wonder if there could really be spirits out there, and what they are capable of doing.
Even the small and harmless take on new life in this spiritual realm. Irene had a rat in her room yesterday, munching on her soap and running around her mosquito net, and it made her so nervous she couldn’t sleep and she called me at 1 in the morning to come sleep in my room (which, thankfully, has remained rat-free the whole time). These strange goings-on make all of them rely heavily on prayer: Irene’s Bible is an amulet to her, and she frequently calls on the name of Jesus when she feels scared at night. For all her bravery and boldness, her one fear is the darkness, particularly sleeping alone in it, so she likes to sleep with the light on.
The strange thing is, though I too am a Christian, I feel oddly immune to this larger-than-life spiritual world. Most likely, I rationalize them away... in keeping with what I have been taught, I feel much more afraid of a vehicle accident or malaria. Certainly, I too have said prayers for safety, but I have had no nightmares, seen no strange things, had no trouble sleeping (okay, aside from the bat, but that was over soon and rationally enough). Irene says she thinks it might be that the mashetani are scared of an mzungu (white person)!
Super-sized
There’s at least one grain of truth in the stereotype of Africa being larger than life. On a continent where safari catalogues boast the opportunity to see the “Big Five,” I think it’s interesting that even the non-safari flora and fauna confirm the stereotype. There are centipedes and millipedes here as in America, though it is more common to spot them, perhaps because of their sheer size – the same millipede that might be an inch or two long in America is 8 inches long here and its shiny black segments almost an inch in diameter. (Having heard horror stories about the bite—or is it sting?—of one or the other of them, I keep a safe distance from both just in case). Moths and butterflies I have seen can have a wingspan of up to 6 inches. During the rainy season, snails abound, but here they are not the tiny, delicate creatures in paper-thin whorled shells I find in our garden at home. The snails that come out after it rains are at least 7 inches long, and I have often confused their discarded calcified shells for seashells, even 200 miles inland. They look almost like cartoon renderings of snails writ large, and their name (Giant African Land Snail) speaks volumes. One day last week when we were interviewing, my assistant Irene noticed a brown snake ahead on the path – while I have no particular phobia of snakes, this one was as thick as a man’s calf. Our best guess is that it was a python, but who knows if it is just what happens to your average garden snake raised on a diet of super-nutrients?
Two weeks ago, I was staying in a decrepit guest house, lying under my mosquito net and talking on the phone with Matt in the dark, when I began hearing an intermittent thunking, almost as if my ceiling fan was malfunctioning. When I turned on my flashlight, the thunking immediately stopped and a large object careened directly into my net, sagging a foot from my face. The outline was most definitely a bat, with a wingspan of 12-15 inches. (Apparently bats are drawn toward light sources!) He must have been napping between the interior shutter and the screen of the window, and so when I had opened the shutters for air before retiring to bed, he must have awoken and begun flying around, having a series of unfortunate collisions with my fan overhead. Matt (my internet-connected hero!) consulted Google, and divined that the bat was probably a fruit bat, which are one of the largest kinds of bats in the world. Coincidentally, fruit bats do not use sonar to sense objects in the night, which may explain his inability to detect the whirring death trap on the ceiling. I am sad to report that the series of ensuing events (including valiant long-distance problem solving on Matt’s part and some poorly-suppressed hysterics on mine, as well as continued fan-bat attraction) led to the injured bat’s untimely demise and unceremonious disposal outside. Rest in peace, giant bat.
Not only animals but plants are super-sized here. I have seen virtually all our houseplants at home growing here, only they are not the puny kind of plants that Lowe’s sells in 6-inch pots. Here, you find crotons that are towering 12-foot shrubs, and schiffleras 6-8 feet wide. I have seen aurelias that are massive trees (our aurelia at home is impressive for a houseplant, thanks to Matt’s green thumb, and yet in 5 years has only grown to be about 4 feet tall), and bougainvillea arbors that swallow whole houses.
I have yet to go on any kind of safari (that is a treat waiting for Matt’s birthday in June), but unless the giraffes, elephants, and wildebeests are much larger than at the zoo, there’s at least a small chance I will remain more awed by the sheer size of everyday animals and plants!
Easter
Irene is an observant Catholic and wouldn’t dream of missing church (and because none of the church services are in English, it doesn’t make much difference to me whether I go to a Roman Catholic mass or a charismatic Protestant service). So when Easter rolled around, there was no debate – we were off to Catholic mass. While I went to church occasionally in Dar es Salaam, I hadn’t yet been to a Swahili service in Tanzania, partly because I had been intimidated by the sheer length of the services, some as long as 3-4 hours, and partly because I had been sure I would be bored stiff by having to listen to a service entirely in Swahili.
We had tried first to go to Good Friday service but had finished our interviews late that day, and we arrived at the church just in time for the last hymn. The large Roman Catholic church (we were staying in a small village called Mtama) was set far off the main road. All the villages where we are working are almost exclusively Muslim, and so the number of Christians, mostly Catholics thanks to the missions set up in this area in the early 1900s, is rather small. The church building itself is a fairly large and imposing yellow-washed concrete structure, but the simple benches and kneeling boards inside hold no more than a hundred and fifty people.
We arrived on Easter Sunday morning at 10:30, when we had been told the service would start. The day was already swelteringly hot, and we had trudged through sand (there is a preponderance of sand in this area, even 100 miles from the sea) for 20 minutes to get there. After offering “Shikamoo”s (pronounced “shih’-ka-moh”, a term of respect for elders) to many of the older church ladies gathered outside, we found respite along a stone wall in the shade of a large locust tree. Just as in America, many of the younger girls and boys were clearly wearing new clothes (though these still likely second-hand, Africa’s biggest industry, albeit newly purchased), standouts in a part of the country where most clothes on most children on most days are little more than shredded rags. A pair of twin boys in primary-color-striped knit shirts and shorts, little girls in gauzy dresses with big clunky white patent leather shoes. We waited and waited and waited, and then Irene pointed at a house next door and asked the woman seated next to her whether that was where the padri (priest) lived. She answered no, that that was the home of the religion teacher, and that the padri lives in Nyangao, a town about 15 minutes away by car. After awhile, a man rode up on a pikipiki (small motorbike) with a helmet, greeted everyone in the churchyard, and walked inside. Preacher on a motorbike. Wonders never cease!
We went inside the church and found seats in front of a line of older ladies. The church was decked out for Easter, with large croton plants to either side of the pulpit, which was decorated with purple artificial roses and a couple of embroidered napkins. In a far corner leaned a scraggly artificial Christmas tree.
For being a small group of Christians in the middle of nowhere, the service was formal and the music was incredible. The padri, transformed now by having donned a long gold preacher’s robe and a tall white hat, led the procession, with a flank of altarboys behind, swinging smoky incense from a lantern distributing the familiar aroma of frankincense though the church. Frankincense has a scent that conjures up memories for me of Ethiopia, where it is ritually burned as part of the coffee ceremony. Four-part, five-part harmonies filled the church as people sang hymn after hymn by heart, the names of the hymns written in a column on a chalkboard on the side of the room, where the small choir sat, blending in with the congregants as they too faced the front of the church. I didn’t know a single one of the songs, but I didn’t care. The music was lilting, soothing, and encouraging. I closed my eyes and imagined the contrast of this worship with Easter church at home, and imagined God smiling at the diversity of styles of the joyful noises we humans make in thanks.
We had tried first to go to Good Friday service but had finished our interviews late that day, and we arrived at the church just in time for the last hymn. The large Roman Catholic church (we were staying in a small village called Mtama) was set far off the main road. All the villages where we are working are almost exclusively Muslim, and so the number of Christians, mostly Catholics thanks to the missions set up in this area in the early 1900s, is rather small. The church building itself is a fairly large and imposing yellow-washed concrete structure, but the simple benches and kneeling boards inside hold no more than a hundred and fifty people.
We arrived on Easter Sunday morning at 10:30, when we had been told the service would start. The day was already swelteringly hot, and we had trudged through sand (there is a preponderance of sand in this area, even 100 miles from the sea) for 20 minutes to get there. After offering “Shikamoo”s (pronounced “shih’-ka-moh”, a term of respect for elders) to many of the older church ladies gathered outside, we found respite along a stone wall in the shade of a large locust tree. Just as in America, many of the younger girls and boys were clearly wearing new clothes (though these still likely second-hand, Africa’s biggest industry, albeit newly purchased), standouts in a part of the country where most clothes on most children on most days are little more than shredded rags. A pair of twin boys in primary-color-striped knit shirts and shorts, little girls in gauzy dresses with big clunky white patent leather shoes. We waited and waited and waited, and then Irene pointed at a house next door and asked the woman seated next to her whether that was where the padri (priest) lived. She answered no, that that was the home of the religion teacher, and that the padri lives in Nyangao, a town about 15 minutes away by car. After awhile, a man rode up on a pikipiki (small motorbike) with a helmet, greeted everyone in the churchyard, and walked inside. Preacher on a motorbike. Wonders never cease!
We went inside the church and found seats in front of a line of older ladies. The church was decked out for Easter, with large croton plants to either side of the pulpit, which was decorated with purple artificial roses and a couple of embroidered napkins. In a far corner leaned a scraggly artificial Christmas tree.
For being a small group of Christians in the middle of nowhere, the service was formal and the music was incredible. The padri, transformed now by having donned a long gold preacher’s robe and a tall white hat, led the procession, with a flank of altarboys behind, swinging smoky incense from a lantern distributing the familiar aroma of frankincense though the church. Frankincense has a scent that conjures up memories for me of Ethiopia, where it is ritually burned as part of the coffee ceremony. Four-part, five-part harmonies filled the church as people sang hymn after hymn by heart, the names of the hymns written in a column on a chalkboard on the side of the room, where the small choir sat, blending in with the congregants as they too faced the front of the church. I didn’t know a single one of the songs, but I didn’t care. The music was lilting, soothing, and encouraging. I closed my eyes and imagined the contrast of this worship with Easter church at home, and imagined God smiling at the diversity of styles of the joyful noises we humans make in thanks.
Irene
Limited by my project budget to hiring only one assistant for my interviews—I had originally envisioned a whole entourage of transcribers, translators, and at least 2 interviewers!—I was worried about finding someone who could do the work I had in mind. I knew my Swahili wasn’t good enough to do the interviews I had proposed on my own, but I also didn’t trust that I could find people who could understand the kind of exploratory research I had planned. I have heard nightmares about researchers who hire qualitative interviewers who can’t seem to develop a positive rapport with people, who can’t think on their feet enough to recognize new and interesting topics that come up in interviews and follow new lines of inquiry, and who aren’t sensitive enough when talking about sensitive topics (a category into which sex and pregnancy loss, both topics discussed in my project interviews, fall). My worries were intense enough for me to lose sleep over, and after doing a series of interviews in January to look for possible candidates, I felt discouraged.
Irene came highly recommended, having been the superstar of my friend Anne’s research project, which wrapped up a week before mine started. Given the fact that Anne sang her praises high and low, it is not surprising that there was a bit of a fight for Irene, as well-trained qualitative researchers are hard to come by. Apparently I lucked out, considering that the other job offered a longer-term contract and was based in Dar, which would have meant Irene could have stayed at home with her 22-month-old daughter Lucy, whom she adores, and her husband Paul (whom she adores almost as much as Lucy). The job I offered required Irene to live in tatty guesthouses without running water or electricity, with an mzungu she hardly knew, moving from village to village each week for 5 months. (Very tempting, I know!).
Irene comes from the Haya tribe in northern Tanzania, from an area called Bukoba (famous for its bananas) near Lake Victoria. Her family is devoutly Catholic, and her parents are teachers. Her father values education above almost all else, having told Irene “your first husband is your education. Tend to that first and then you can consider a second husband.” Even though Irene and Paul were in love 4 years ago, her father forbid them from getting married until she finished her bachelor’s degree. It turns out it was Irene’s father and Paul who encouraged her to take the job I offered instead of the job in Dar es Salaam. Hers is a rare instance of women being encouraged to pursue their education and career, and at the rate she is going, she will go far, especially in her dream to study and work in rural community development.
Irene makes up for my inhibitedness with a mix of grace and boldness. The woman gets things done! In the first village where we stayed, the only food option at night was chipsi kuku (fried chicken and french fries). I told her I thought I would die if I ate french fries every day for a week, and she immediately scouted out several places that serve food at lunchtime and asked them if they would stay open late for a special contract. She then drafted an order for complete meals for a week – including lots of vegetables and specifying details as minor as the kind of fruit we would have for dessert and the kind of tea that would be served – and then bargained the price they offered down to an incredible deal, all with a smile on her face. She has a cheerful, gentle spirit, but underneath her jovial exterior, she’s also a hard-driving businesswoman and problem-solver.
I had originally planned to do 1 or 2 two-hour interviews per day, planning for long walks between interviewees’ houses and trying to set aside enough time each day to debrief together about how the interview went and what was learned. But Irene has turned out to be a powerhouse – we routinely do 3 interviews, and sometimes 4, including at least an hour and a half per day per interview to discuss the findings from the interview. But she is equally concerned about interview quality, and devours books I have brought on interviewing techniques and data analysis, and is very receptive to advice and training to improve each interview. Because of Irene (sometimes I feel I am just sitting there, understanding about 40% of each interview while I jot some fieldnotes), we are ahead of schedule, and can probably wrap up this phase of data collection 2-3 weeks early. The reward for both of us is a chance to return to Dar early, her to see her family, and me to see my friends and colleagues. We have our fingers crossed…
The picture at the top is Irene on her first airplane ride in her entire life – she watched out the window the whole trip from Dar to Mtwara and marveled at how the whole world looked flattened into a map of geographical features that she had learned in school, and her eyes grew wide as the plane shook when we flew through clouds.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Worlds colliding
ONE WORLD
THE OTHER WORLD
Being home for two wonderful weeks [during which I ate lots of cheese, soaked up time with Matt and my family and friends, and it snowed—twice!] and returning to Tanzania served as a potent reminder of how the world in which I am doing my research is utterly worlds apart from the world from which I come. Thankfully the boredom and otherworldliness of two back-to-back overnight plane flights provides something of a neutral buffer that prevents complete overwhelm of worlds clashing together, but it is hard to ignore the differences.
When you consider that more than 75% of the world’s population lives a life much more similar to people in Tanzania than people in America—meaning no climate control, no running water, sporadic if any electricity—and that our global ecosystem would rapidly collapse if every person in the world consumed as many resources as your average Joe in America, it really makes me wonder if our predictable, sanitized lives with reliable power we use with abandon, water we don't usually conserve, restaurant delivery, big houses, fast cars and paved roads, and ability to get almost anything we want when we want it (provided we have the cash or the plastic, of course) is something of an unsustainable illusion. It certainly is a marked contrast to the way most Tanzanians must live. And while I believe that American consumerism and materialism are just repackaged manifestations of the universal human tendency toward greed (most Tanzanians would probably behave the same way if their country were as materially rich as America), it is shocking to realize from a distance how unconsciously and exuberantly materialistic most of us in America really are, and how detrimental that worldview can be environmentally and ethically. Even those of us who live relatively humbly, whether for reasons of relative poverty, moral rejection of consumerism, frugality, or environmentalism still have a standard of living and comfort that far outstrips that of most of the world’s inhabitants.
That having been said, it unsettles to me to admit to myself how uncomfortable I can feel on both a physical and psychic level being in Tanzania. Surely a goodly portion of that feeling is due to being far from what is “home,” what is familiar, the people I love, the language I know, the tidy streetscapes, the usual scenery. And the oppressive heat and humidity and torrential rains certainly don’t help. But another part of my discomfort stems entirely from being accustomed to a life that is much more comfortable, sanitary, and leisurely than most Tanzanians could ever afford, and to admit to myself that no matter my enthusiasm for learning about Tanzanian culture and ways of life, I am, and will always be, much more at home in America than Tanzania. That cognitive dissonance means that there is a strange—and perhaps unnecessary—guilt I feel in seeking sanctuary in the lobby of a nice air-conditioned hotel for a few hours on a Sunday, knowing that this is a luxury afforded to only a few here. I am not alone: lots of expatriates here seem to indulge—whether periodically or regularly—in luxuries, sometimes as a “coping mechanism.” The urge to soak up modern conveniences is even stronger on the eve of leaving for 5 months to live in small villages, many of them without any electricity, running water, or telecommunications access. My anthropological sensitivities have made me startled to realize how I almost unconsciously depend on and enjoy modern conveniences—air conditioning, lights that turn on when you flip a switch, flush toilets, remote controls, washing machines, blenders, computers. In some sense, these machines and ways of living have become part of Western culture. The unsustainability of it all, and the fact that I am so accustomed to these things that if given the choice, I would pick a life with quite a few of these conveniences, even though it demands an unfair proportion of the world’s resources, is troubling. I do also wonder what the end goal of development really is -- and doubt that the world will really be a better place if it becomes more like America!
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