Recent update
The Worth of a Day in Rural Tanzania
August 21st, 2007 by riffelma
When I left for Tanzania in the fall of 2006, one of my goals was to be able to answer a question that a student had posed to me the previous spring. We were talking about sweatshops and their characteristic low pay and difficult working conditions for ‘third world”? workers, generally the rural poor. The student took out his calculator and multiplied the meager hourly wages by days and weeks. Yes, this is very low, but it’s more than they have if they’re not working in a sweatshop, he suggested. And I knew that I had to find a way to explain why making more cash isn’t necessarily a good choice. I had to be able to explain it based on my first-hand experience. What I could read just wasn’t enough.
And so, for that and many other reasons, I journeyed to rural northeastern Tanzania for my sabbatical experience. I ended up spending nine weeks there between October 2006 and June 2007. This story is a mixture of my actual daily notes and my general observations as I stayed with the Pare’ people up in the mountains near the Kenyan border and with the Chagga people on the dry savannah south of Kilimanjaro. (hold your mouse over the photo for label)
Tanzania is a beautiful tropical land with baobab and acacia trees and bouganvilla and hibiscus in bright bloom. It is hot and daylight lasts only 12 hours here. What stands out most of all in my initial observations is the absence of infrastructure. “Infrastructure”? like water and electricity and streets and sidewalks and shopping centers and telephones and banks and gas stations. Not in rural Tanzania. The road we take to Usangi, the village in the North Pare Mountains, is paved for a small part of the way. But we wind up the mountain on dirt roads with cows meandering onto the driving surface and huge boulders perched at the edge of the single lane that circles up. We have hired a driver to make the trip. Local buses travel this route, too, but almost no private cars. There just aren’t many. We tell our driver that there’s no gas station in Usangi and ask if he has enough fuel. He nods. We hope he’s right. The trip takes us about two hours and we end at the home of my traveling partner’s good friend, Mama George.
My co-traveler, Ellen, lived in this village for a year in the late 1980’s, in the house next door to Mama George. Ellen came back to visit her in the late ’90’s, and has wanted to return one more time: Mama George is now 85. That’s a ripe old age for a country where the life expectancy at birth is officially 45.64 years. Mama George is the mother of 10 children, the oldest of whom is George. (In Tanzania, I am Mama Luci, after my oldest–and only–child. My having only one child is the subject of many questions, as is my habit of drinking tea without sugar or milk.)
The path in front of Mama George’s house is dirt with grass growing in the middle, hardly wide enough for a car. I doubt that many cars have ever traversed this path–there simply aren’t any cars around. There are people walking everywhere, all day, every day. And the paths here are steep. The village sits on a mountainside, part way down the other side of the mountain we have just climbed in our taxi. We have come from Moshi, the nearest large town, and paid $100 US for this luxury. That’s more than twice the monthly wages of a minimum wage worker in Tanzania. We are blessed. For many folks here, a trip of this distance would be impossible. And gas costs twice what it does in the U.S.
Mama George’s house is made of concrete with a corrugated metal roof. Both of those features identify this house as expensive. Less than half of all houses in rural Tanzania have metal roofs and only 25% have concrete or mudbrick walls. The more typical house is mud and stick with a thatch roof. This house is one of only 2% of rural houses wired for electricity–even so, just two light bulbs work. Most households use paraffin for light. And this house had running water at one time, but age has taken its toll and the water now comes out of a pipe on the way down to the main path. The entire neighborhood uses this water source, filling and carrying colorful 5-gallon buckets on their heads through the day. Less than one percent of rural Tanzanian households have piped water and less than half have access to water within 1 kilometer of their home. Only one-fourth have water piped to their village. So fetching water is a time-consuming daily task that also requires strength. Try hoisting a five-gallon bucket full of cold water onto your head and walking a mile.
And when you get home with your water, you can’t just drink it. It has to be boiled for 15 minutes before it’s safe to drink. Tanzanians, though they grow some of the world’s best coffee, are tea drinkers. Chai is brewed in every household every day. And you drink it with sugar (sukari) and milk (maziwa) from a local cow. Your own cow, if you’re lucky. Mama George has two. The cows live in the building right outside the house–the house and the building that houses the cows and the kitchen and the chicken house and the cho (outhouse) form the rim of a compound-sort of enclosure. The “courtyard”? in the middle is tamped down dirt. That’s where you sit and do your laundry in another five-gallon bucket and hang it to dry. The garden plots or “shambas”? are outside of this compound, sometimes very close as there are no “lawns”? here, but sometimes far away. People here grow almost all of their own food, using hand-made hoes and tools.
I’m ready for tea. In the U.S. I’m a certified caffeine addict, so I’m anxious to try the local brew. Tanzanians grow tea as well as coffee. But there’s no stove here or electric coffee pot. All cooking is done over an open fire–and that’s why you cook in a separate cooking building where the smoke and soot and ashes blacken the walls–and not in your house. The smoke doesn’t do your eyes much good, either, which accounts for the red eyes of many old women who have cooked all their lives over open fires. Here in Usangi, firewood isn’t too difficult to find. This is a very wooded mountain. But in the savannah south of here where I’ll spend 6 weeks next spring, firewood is scarce. It’s an incredibly time-consuming task to gather dead wood from the low scrub that grows in the red soil. Deforestation and the resulting shortage of firewood is a huge environmental challenge for Tanzania.
Here, the “houseboy,”? Andrew, gets the wood, splits it and starts the cooking fire each morning. Cooking pots are large, round, metal “bowls”? that sit on three stones over the fire. The first order of every day is boiling water. Andrew is in his late teens, from another village rather far from here. He is paid by George, the eldest son, to help out. He lives in a small part of the house that is separated a bit, and he plays his radio all day. Only 46% of rural Tanzanians own a radio. I didn’t see a single television in Usangi, and only the very wealthiest could dream of having a satellite dish or computer. About ten percent of the population has a cell phone now and cell phone towers are going up everywhere. Mama George’s house used to have a land line phone, but that was very rare. Most places don’t have telephones. Hers doesn’t work anymore. And somebody stole the cell phone that George bought for her.
Stealing here is not an unusual phenomenon. But it isn’t stealing like we think of burglary or robbery in the U.S. Everybody’s windows have bars (but no screens–hence the need for mosquito nets to sleep under). And all the doors in your house have locks. If you have something of value, someone who has less might take it. It’s not about crime as much as it’s about dire need. People have essentially nothing. And they need cash in order to buy the necessities that they can’t grow or make. Like cooking oil, salt, rice, soap, steel wool to scrub the cooking pots. If you’ve got something that could be converted to cash, you better guard it. I didn’t ever feel unsafe–it’s not about personal safety, it’s about material need.
Okay, so Barbra, Mama George’s granddaughter, is boiling water for chai this morning. In future days I will help carry water, but today is our first day here they’re treating us like guests. And no, I didn’t ever get a bucket up on top of my head, or even close, for that matter. Do you know how much 5 gallons of water weighs? Forty-two pounds. Obviously this life requires strength and stamina. It is Saturday, October 28. We decide to carry water to flush the indoor toilet that used to work. It’s either that or learn to use the pit toilets where you stand on a concrete slab and aim for a hole at your feet. (I did get much better at that later on.) “For breakfast, we have chai, peanuts, muffins (corn) and last night’s leftovers. Everyone talks, jokes, friendly family atmosphere. Quite a few relatives have come here to Usangi this week for a funeral. They’ve slept in Mama George’s house on every available surface. And they are talking about the deceased. As George tells me, ‘Death is very important to us.’ Mama George’s compound includes two rather elaborate graves–one of her husband and one of a daughter. The relative who died was buried yesterday at the home where she lived. We look at old family pictures and then at the pictures Barbra took of the funeral. Then they all leave.
We get ready to go with Barbra to “the village.”? (Usangi Town as I later learn it is called.) The little market is called Mombasa Market and it’s located before you cross the river. Shops here are shacks with open fronts. The path down to the village (very steep) was total mud after last night’s rain. Way treacherous to walk. I have no fimbo, (walking stick) and later it matters. We pass many “stores”? wearing kangas over our heads and shoulders since it’s still raining lightly. Barbra needs oil, soap, tomatoes, onions, steel wool, and rice. We also stop at the butcher shop (where whole animal portions hang) and Barbra buys meat, which the butcher hacks off. It’s an open air shop, like all of them. There is a license above the door. We know that meat is a rare part of a meal–that we, as guests, are being treated very specially. We would be happy without meat, but it is a gesture of generosity and welcome.
We move on looking for umbrellas to buy–as we approach a shop on slippery, deep mud, I lose my step and fall. Yuk! I’m up, not hurt, but muddy. Barbra and Ellen put me in an unoccupied shack where it’s dry and tell me to stay there. So I watch as they find umbrellas (which I will use as a fimbo). We meet aunts and cousins and walk part way with a male cousin and friends. It is enormously more difficult than I had EVER imagined to exist here. Few cars, no carts that I see, few bicycles since it’s so steep and rocky. In Dar es Salaam, the huge city on the coast where we spent our first few days, there were more cars and bicycles and many carts. Handmade wooden affairs that seemed huge compared to the small young men who pulled them. But not here in Usangi. The terrain is so challenging that folks can’t let their cows out to graze. So you see people gathering, then carrying large bundles of grassy vegetation on their heads– breakfast for the cows. Another time-consuming and labor-intensive task.
We are wet from the rain and I am muddy from my fall, but at least we avoid the ants today - they move in an “S”? stream across the narrow path. We were bitten last night. Remember to watch, Marlise, and don’t step on them! When we reach Mama George’s, we heat water to wash off (by bucket in the nonfunctional bathroom) and take the luxury of the indoor toilet (carrying water again).
Mama George is tending the cows. She gets 12 liters of milk each day from the cows. Cooking shed and cow shed are the same building, divided. The cooking room has the customary three stones with a fire in the middle, an old countertop, a sink, places to sit and stir, and two windows to let the smoke out. The walls are black with years of cooking over open fires. The wood fire here burns on the floor in the corner. The cattle are lowing, mooing. And I am now outside scrubbing the mud from my clothes in a bucket of water. It takes us 2 hours to do our laundry, hauling water, scrubbing, hanging to dry in the open area between buildings. We have tea in the middle of the process. Barbra is constantly cooking here and right now Andrew is splitting more wood in the cow shed.
People move along the paths of the village (which is very spread out) all day long in the daylight. They’re carrying water, wood, tending their plots (shambas), or perhaps just paying a visit like the man in training to be an “evangelist”? (elder in the church). Mama George is one of the ‘matriarchs’ of the village and many people visit her each day. She isn’t able to walk much since her knees are bad, so she doesn’t leave her compound. But ‘the village comes to her’ Ellen says.
I decide to draw a diagram of Mama George’s “compound”? so Ellen paces off some measurements. The house is 23 paces long and the north wing is 6 paces deep and about 12 paces long. The surface here is all rock covered with a thin layer of dirt. Rock sticks out everywhere. Nothing is really “square”? here, it’s all according to the rock. The kitchen window is the place where all cooking waste is thrown (seeds, peelings, stems) and the chickens handle it from there. And there aren’t any “lawns”? since every useable square foot of soil is planted in banana trees, maize, casava, beans, or sugar cane. Did you know there are twenty kinds of bananas? ‘Ndizi’ in Swahili. (Check the maps and diagrams page to see my diagram)
Mama George has two chickens (kuku), but has to buy eggs (mayai) now since a disease took many of the birds last summer. Egg prices have gone up to 100Tsh, about $.10 each. The cow (ngombe) and calf give three bottles of milk in the morning and three in the evening. Andrew sells 3 bottles a day for about 150Tsh each ($.15). I ask about other animals. There are goats and sheep, a few pigs, but there are more Muslims here than Christians. A few ducks and fish ponds (there are no fish in the river in Usangi). The garden (shamba, bustani) grows spinach, potatoes, 4 kinds of bananas, sweet potatoes, casava, chi cha (greens), maboga, maize, peanuts (caranga) and maharage or beans. Maize (mahinde) is THE staple. They grind the corn to make ugali or shell it and cook it with beans to make makonde or grind it and cook it with water to make ugee, a thin corn porridge, or roast the ear. I find that I like ugali and makonde. No spices here, even though Zanzibar and the spice islands are not far away. So I use salt (chumvi). The maize kernels are white and much larger than Minnesota corn kernels. I ask Mama George what she still needs to buy after harvesting her shamba. Oil, soap, steel wool, rice, meat, tomatoes and onions, fabric, and shoes, she tells me. National statistics show that rural Tanzanians devote 67% of their expenditures to food alone. And they grow most of their own food! The 67% tells you that they buy little else. Consumption as we know it in the U.S. is simply not possible here.
As a child Mama George (Naitwell is her birth name) walked down to the flat border between Tanzania and Kenya by Lake Jipe 5 days a week. It took 3-4 hours to get there. They had a field there that produced beans, rice, maize, casava, sweet potatoes, bananas and coconuts. They were always carrying something back. And back is up hill, up the mountain. With as much as you could carry on your head. And then you went to school. Lots of children in Usangi area go through standard 7 (the highest level in elementary school) and can’t go on. School fees and required uniforms are expensive and most folks just don’t have spare cash. Sixty-two percent of rural Tanzanian children age 5-14 work with their parents in smallholder farming or herding (down where the land is more flat). And only two percent of those age 14-17 are enrolled in secondary education. It’s a luxury–a great privilege.
Everyone in Tanzania grows up speaking their local dialect. Here in these mountains, it’s KiPare. Down on the savannah where I’ll spend time this spring it’s KiChagga. Swahili is the “official”? language for primary school and business and politics. And secondary school is taught in English. So Tanzanian students are completing secondary school in their third language. How many of us even KNOW a third language? The schools are a holdover of the British educational system, imposed during the decades of colonial occupation. (First, Tanganyika was the center of German East Africa, then, after WWI, a British possession, then merged with Zanzibar at independence in the ’60’s to become The United Republic of Tanzania. But the educational system still parallels the British one, complete with English as the official language of secondary school.)
While I’m drawing the diagram of Mama George’s home complex, I ask about daily activities. Gather and split firewood, wash and iron the laundry, go to the market for perishables, sell surplus that you produce, tend the garden(s), feed and tend the animals, mend and make clothing, cook (2 plus hours per meal to cook down corn, rice, beans, to trim and cut vegetables, make chai), grinding and drying grains and baking (no bread here, no stoves that would work, but they do make chapatis, and wheat comes from Arusha, about 3 hours to the west), repairing buildings, walking to everywhere (and everything is at least ½ hour away). And they do it all by hand. Only 2/10 of one percent own a tractor and 11 percent own a plow. I’m getting tired just writing about it. I get the diagram in pretty good shape, though. Later, back in the U.S., I transfer it to drawing paper and scan it. I’m having a devil of a time getting the pdf to open in this blog, though. (Check the maps/diagrams page)
For midmorning “tea”? we have peanuts and muffins and chai. For lunch we have rice, beans, stew (carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, meat, onions) and spinach, thin chopped and cooked some but not soggy. It is very good. Ellen has paid for everything at the market today, so we feel at least we are not costing $, just time. (In the U.S., time is money. Here, what is time???????) It is LIFE being lived, I think. From my time at the Mtakuja Secondary School on the savannah far south of here, I learn that life is water, too, and water is life.
After lunch we went out for a walk but rain began to fall, so we turned back. We return to visitors and snacks. It is Julius and Happiness and their son Kazeni. They had 4 children but one died. Kazeni is the youngest, about 3, and the oldest is 13, soon to be confirmed in church. Happiness was Muslim but converted to Christianity. She has fields by Lake Jipe, 2 ½ hours down the mountain (3 ½ back, uphill, carrying produce). She goes several times each week and Mama George watches Kazeni. Their house is nearby and there, they have cows and goats. Their 13-year-old is a girl. I have a 14-year-old daughter, so we talk a bit about teen girls. I can’t imagine how much more different two lives could be than those of our daughters. Happiness tells me “As soon as a girl reaches maturity, it’s a bad thing to go out with a guy because she’ll get pregnant.”? Local values and norms about sexuality are something I’ll learn more about later. And the risk of HIV. What I can tell is that young women here don’t have the control over their bodies and sexuality that my daughter has in the U.S.
Happiness was born at Mwanga and married an Usangi man, Julius, who is a farmer and a builder. Barbra sends Julius to the market and the rest of us stay behind. Another visitor comes–that’s 9 visitors today!!! I don’t know if it’s because today is Saturday or this is every day? I suspect every day - all the visitors are known well, they come in and visit, catch up on local stuff. There are no newspapers here or magazines. The houseboy has a radio on most of the day, but it’s music (he’s a teen). I didn’t see anything news-wise in Usangi Town. No papers or magazines. We visit late into the evening and I give Kazeni a pad of paper and pen to draw with. Mama George gives him a Fanta Orange soda, THE preferred treat in Tanzania.
It is still October 28. It’s dinner time. Food from lunch is stored in a cupboard in the cooking building - there is no refrigeration here, although I do see a refrigerator in another home. Likely a luxury. Even meat is stored in this cupboard at room temperature (remember, this is a tropical climate, days here are in the 80’s). We have the leftovers for dinner. There isn’t any take-out or fast food here.
Barbra, Mama George, and Happiness talk for a long time. Another woman joins them. Julius is still gone. They talk about birth–which, these days, is typically in the hospital, especially if you need a C-section. They say that a nurse (practitioner?) even does the operation. For an “easy”? birth, you’re out in 24 hours, but Mama George remembers being in the hospital for 24 days when Joyce was born (quite awhile back though). Mama George has had ten live births and two stillbirths. Children are weaned at 1 ½ - 2 years but some go to age 4. A baby’s first food is ugee and cow’s milk diluted with water. (Ugee is corn porridge). The woman next door has had two children but her breasts have produced no milk and she doesn’t have the money for corn flour. Ellen thinks Mama George has been giving her cow’s milk.
It’s kind of late now, but two more visitors stop by. By their head apparel, I’d guess they are Muslim men. We are not introduced and Barbra doesn’t know them either. They leave, but Julius has not yet returned. Mama George thinks he has stopped at a bar. The local brew is “pombe,”? and it’s made from sugar cane or bananas. You can get bottled beer “downtown,”? too, even cold beer for about 800 shillings a bottle (64 cents). Happiness and Kazeni go home–Kazeni clutching his new pen and writing tablet.
29 October, Sunday
We wake and wash our hair (yeah!!!!–that’s fetching water first and heating it over Andrew’s morning fire. It is bright and sunny and the path will dry before we walk to church. At 4:30 we will go to Pastor Marisa’s home for tea. Breakfast today is bread, muffins, peanuts, bananas, and yesterday noon’s stew. Andrew is with us for breakfast - he is a Catholic from far away, somewhere also in the mountains where they grow marinke, a kind of potatoes. They raise the same animals as here in Usangi. We don’t know Andrew’s age - Mama George and Barbra don’t either. He looks to be in his late teens, but that’s just a guess. I don’t know what the future is for young men like this.
Another visitor arrives. We’ve met her before. She is a very old woman. The news is that her grandson’s wife has returned to him. She beams. Mama Dora is her name. She wears two kangas, a scarf on her head, two mismatched flip-flops. She is an “auntie,”? some sort of relative to Mama George and Barbra. She and Mama George catch up on the local goings-on.
We walk to church. The church building is big, and It is full, and very hot. They have us stand up as visitors and some of the old folks recognize Ellen (who worked at this church 17 years ago). The service lasts for hours and Barbra and I leave for a walk through the nearby cemetery where her mother is buried, and then on to the bigger market in town. We return just before the service ends. After church, Ellen bids on a rooster (in-kind offerings are regularly auctioned off) and pays $37.50 for him…a month’s wages at the minimum rate. AND we get to carry him home. We stop to buy smoked fish, a favorite of Mama George’s, so that there will be no incentive to kill the guy for lunch. It’s still a hard sell. We have to admit that we aren’t used to getting that close to the food that we eat….so to speak.
Later in the afternoon, we take two different shortcuts to and from Pastor Marisa’s house - gorgeous scenery, through the shambas, over rocks, along ledges with incredible views, across the river via rocks. Past a sawmill (very small, 6 boards) and many household compounds with chickens, a dog, some cows. We pass brick-making areas and it takes us about ½ hour to reach his house. His home has a view of Lake Jipe and Kenya in the near distance. Breathtaking. We have pictures if they turn out. Pr. Marisa is retired, and is Ellen’s former supervisor. He and his wife offer us local peanuts, locally grown chai (very spicy), white bread with “Blue Band”?, the Tanzanian equivalent of margarine, and local honey.
On the way back, we stop at the aunt’s (the Kenyan woman’s) home. It is concrete with a metal roof like Mama George’s. Homes seem to have the same basic design, with closed (locked) doors on all sides of the room, leading to bedrooms. She had a wooden cupboard and a wooden china cabinet at one end of the room and a table/chairs at the other. There was a second “house”? located perpendicular, a kitchen across the way. Very rocky there, up high in the mountains. Dog, chickens, 4 cows, lots of firewood, two children about ages 5-6? Walls painted turquoise. Concrete floors, some painted, some not. Wooden furniture with cushions, arranged around the edges of the room, just like at Mama George’s and Pastor Marisa’s houses.
Back at Mama George’s, we have dinner (rice, fish stew, beans, cucumbers, oranges). Then two young men stop by. One is a shopkeeper in Usangi. Goes to Moshi to get clothing, etc., to sell here in Usangi. Has a shirt on with a saying about all the children in the world wishing to live in peace…Bob Marley, I think? He wears athletic shoes, red/white, baggy pants, western jacket. He sells kangas, shoes, other clothing. A young entrepreneur. He’s maybe 20? And Mama George, at 85, is his friend. She’s related to lots of folks in the community, too. This is what “community”? really looks like.
To get from Usangi to any large town requires a long bus ride, starting early in the morning. Ellen and I board the crowded bus at 7:30am and bump along down the mountain with about twice as many passengers as the bus’ capacity. A few hours later, we arrive in Moshi and we rent a room at the Uhuru hostel for ½ day so that we can take showers. I stock up on bottled water and get myself a cold Coke. But I imagine having to do this bus ride to a job every day. I don’t see how it would be feasible. When would you gather firewood and get water and cook food and tend your shambas and do your laundry and ironing? Tanzanians always look freshly-pressed and clean, a real feat in this climate and terrain, and time-consuming too. The bus costs 4,000 shillings each way, so you’d have to make enough money to pay the transport AND hire your usual daily work done. Yet I see folks making the trek. Their jobs must pay well, I think.
We leave Tanzania a few days later and come back to November in Minnesota. At the time, I don’t have plans to go back. But a private foundation needs someone to do an organizational analysis at a secondary school and I volunteer six weeks of my time in exchange for a plane ticket and food expenses. This time I’m in a dryland area, deforested, almost-bare savannah. Not enough rainfall here even in a good year, and erratic climate changes in the past several years have resulted in drought and hardship. I arrive in the middle of the “big rainy season”? in April, 2007. But there has been no measurable rain. And, aside from about three days of rain during the six weeks that I stay, there is none.
This is an extremely rural area, 25 miles south of Moshi, in view of Kilimanjaro. There are no villages like Usangi where homes are clustered together into a community. Dwellings are much farther apart, separated by brush, shambas and the occasional baobab and acacia trees. Fanuel, who has lived here for many years, tells me that this whole area used to be thick with forest. But no longer. Firewood is very hard to find and water is even more difficult. He is Maasai and, like most Maasai, he has a herd of cattle. He also lives in a concrete house with a metal roof and he has a well–marks of relative prosperity in this land. The Maasai are from the Arusha area west of here. The local folks are mostly Chagga. They cultivate crops on a small scale and might keep chickens or goats.
The people here are smallholder farmers just like in Usangi. But the crops that grow here must survive on much less water in much hotter temperatures. Maize is a staple, and the school I’m working with grows sunflowers for oil. The school also has a large garden that provides daily vegetables for the students. They eat the traditional corn porridge, ugee, for breakfast, ugali or rice with beans and vegetables for lunch, and ugali or makonde for dinner. The students have fruit once or twice a week. Papaya trees and banana trees will grow here, but you have to be able to water them. And water is a scarce commodity.
About 5,000 people get their water from the Mtakuja well. It was developed by the Catholic sisters who run the Imani Vocational Institute nearby. They got funding and got the well and pipelines going a few years ago, then turned the well and its governance and maintenance over to the villages. Since then, the local elected officials have occasionally held the water supply hostage to petty political disputes. And the power company that supplies the electricity to pump the water shuts off the power if the bills aren’t paid. The rural districts squabble over who owes how much and all in all, the water supply is spotty. Even at its best, the water is on for only 5-6 hours each day. And you still have to boil it in order to drink it.
While I was working at the school, we had no water for eleven days. That was a real challenge as students walked to whatever private wells they could find to beg water. Those less fortunate folks who live and work in the huge sugar plantation nearby use water from a dirty irrigation ditch. But, even so, the students at our school and the sugar plantation workers had water nearby. For many folks, the nearest water is a long walk. On several occasions, I walked to community meetings and to visit friends. When you’re walking through the low brush on dusty paths for miles in the tropical heat, you understand what a blessing a dependable nearby water source would be. But most folks have to walk to the nearest water source and carry it home. Makes for careful water use!
You depend on the rains to water your shambas (small fields or plots), but if you’re cultivating even a small garden of herbs or vegetables, you need a water source nearby. The water situation limits what you can grow and, therefore, what you’ll have to eat. Whatever you eat takes care and tending. Most folks here don’t eat much meat. If you have a meat animal, you sell it to buy the less expensive maize and rice staples. Or you keep it as a way to store wealth. The Maasai count their wealth in cattle. Only 6% of Tanzanians have a bank account, and the average household is 37 kilometers from the nearest bank. Some children have never seen currency, and most folks have very little cash.
Everybody goes everywhere on foot or on bicycle. A few men have motorbikes (pikipikis), but it’s rare to see a car on the dirt roads. Some of the schools own a vehicle, but the school I worked at had only a bicycle. Students walk to school if they’re able to attend at all. They arrive at 7:30am to clean their classrooms. School ends with an assembly at 4pm, then students head home. It gets dark by 6:30pm, and most households don’t have electricity, so they study by paraffin or kerosene light.
Every family that sends its children to school has that many fewer workers to tend its shambas or to sell or trade its surplus at a local market. So, even though schooling is very highly valued in Tanzania, sending your children to school is a costly decision. Still, each day we see hundreds of children in blue uniforms walking to the primary schools in the area. Some walk as far as six miles! Secondary students wear green uniforms with white shirts and ties. How anyone keeps a shirt white in this dust, I don’t know. The students at Mtakuja Secondary School where I am working wash their own clothes in a bucket and hang them in the trees to dry. Ironing involves filling a hollow brass iron with hot coals, then finding a table or bed to iron on without setting the place on fire.
The local water disputes require me to attend several community meetings. I walk, of course, and carry bottled water and an umbrella to avoid severe sunburn. There isn’t much shade here because the large old trees are mostly gone. There are a few left on the sugar plantation, but, the minute a big old tree dies or falls in a storm, hundreds of people descend on it with hand-made axes, chipping away at the massive trunk for useable firewood. As I walk down the road going west about ½ hour to the first water emergency meeting, I notice the huge ruts in the road. These are dirt roads, traveled mostly by the Maasai folks’ herds of cattle and by the local folks heading toward the tiny towns along the road. There might be a market where they can sell their produce or buy what they can’t grow.
A rural homestead (and they’re nearly all rural here, scattered throughout the brush at about 1/3 mile intervals, linked by narrow dusty paths) consists of a house, probably mud and stick or maybe brick. There are far fewer concrete houses here than in Usangi. But folks make and fire their own bricks out of the red dirt, so there are lots of brick structures. The house might have a thatch roof (constructed and maintained by the owners) ro a pieced-together roof of metal scraps held down by rocks or old bicycle tires. There’s always a chicken house built of mud and stick and a cooking building, mostly of brick. When you’re cooking with open fires all day every day, you need a fireproof structure. There might be an outhouse, but often not. Some of the small villages have community toilets. But there is no formal sewer infrastructure or waste disposal. Whatever waste you generate is yours to deal with.
I found that as a westerner, I generated far more waste than the local folks. I used baby wipes for bathing and I had Q-tips and kleenex along. I drank bottled water from 1.5 liter plastic bottles (2 per day x 63 days = 126 bottles from me alone). And I cooked with canned food and ate things that came in plastic containers and cartons and jars from a store. Most folks here don’t do any of that. I had shampoo bottles and deodorant containers and sunscreen spray cans and insect repellent in convenient little plastic spray pumps. It’s a real lesson in simple living to stay with people who use none of that. Tanzanians really don’t generate much trash. Waste baskets are pretty rare–there’s not much need for them. The school where I’m staying burns and buries its trash. And most of it consists of plastic bottles and the cans and baby wipes that I’ve contributed.
Smallholder farmers like this who don’t have bank accounts must provide for maintaining their buildings and whatever tools they own. So you often see piles of bricks off to the side–being made and stockpiled for the next repair or addition. Or scrap metal (but no cars) to make or repair tools. Or pieces of corrugated metal for when the roof (inevitably, during the heavy rainy season) leaks. You might see tall grasses bound in sheaves for animal feed. Or strong sticks being saved up for a fence repair. There’s no “Home Depot”? or “Menard’s”? anywhere in Tanzania, so people have to collect what they can to carry on.
At each dwelling in this flat rural area, you’ll find people, mostly women and children, but some men too. Men in Tanzania are often away tending their herds or working in their shambas, or operating some sort of small enterprise. The “informal economy”? provides them with opportunities to earn what little cash the family might have. Along the road, I see what look like roadside stands made of sticks and fabric. They might offer fruit or vegetables or bottled soda or roasted corn or cell phone cards. Now there’s a booming business–about 10% of Tanzanians have cell phones, and that’s 9 percent more than ever had a land line phone. You buy a cell phone for about $50 US and then purchase prepaid cards at 5,000 /= each (about $4). This is a huge investment for people with so little cash and folks were always asking me if I could buy them a phone card or transfer minutes from my cell phone. But every little kiosk that sells anything now also sells phone cards. Then there’s the matter of charging your cell phone. With only 2% of rural households having electricity, you have to be creative. More likely you just can’t use your cell phone often.
IMAGES
Eighty-nine percent of rural Tanzanians own their own land for agriculture. But it’s smallholder farming, subsistence farming. While the plots are not large, they are very well-tended. After all, your harvest directly determines what your family will eat. Women do much of the farming, with the children. And many folks walk long distances to tend their crops, doing all of the planting, maintenance, and harvesting by hand. This sort of subsistence farming yields much more abundance up in Usangi in the mountains where there’s enough rain. Abundance if you have enough human labor energy to till and plant and cultivate and harvest, that is. Here on the dry savannah, failed harvests are about as common as successful ones. And when harvests fail here, people die. Children stop coming to school. Life changes. It literally dries up.
IMAGES
Why would you settle in a place like this? Well, it’s a complex answer and it’s not pretty. After Tanganyika gained independence from Britain in the early ’60’s, the new president Julius Nyerere implemented the “ujamaa”? program. You can read all about it in the “background”? section of this blog. People were forcibly moved into artificial ujamaa villages in order to increase their agricultural productivity. It was a disaster. The school I’m working at is located in the “Mtakuja Ujamaa,”? the conglomeration of rural and tiny villages that is home to about 5,000 people. Many are Maasai, originally nomadic herders, and others are Chagga, sedentary subsistence farmers. The older people still remember being removed from their homes and communities and watching as their own government bulldozed their villages. The social cost of this “reform”? is pretty mind-boggling. After all, communities and ethnic groups provide the framework for people’s lives, their sense of values and their identity. Communities exert social control and tend to manage scarce land and water fairly well. But the government abolished all of the local councils and set up district governance. That survives today and is perhaps one of the reasons that political squabbles often affect more than just one community. For example, the snafu that resulted in 11 days without water at the school deprived all 5,000 of the ujamaa residents of water, while the dispute was between much smaller groups of people.
Okay, back to my original question. Let’s say a multinational corporation that grows and exports booboofruit comes along. They like your tropical climate and, since startup money is no barrier for them, they can dig wells and set up irrigation to ensure their crop. They just need cheap land and cheap labor and nobody hassling them about the pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers that they want to use to maximize profit. They visit Usangi, but that’s WAY too far up the mountain to make transporting booboofruit feasible. So they come down to the savannah. They cut a deal with the government to buy cheap land. After all, the government needs money as much as anyone. It’s economic development! Never mind that no Tanzanians will eat booboofruit. It isn’t native to this area and most people have never heard of it. This is an export crop. Exports=cash for the multinational corporation. YOU, my friend are the cheap labor.
And it’s your stream or well that their pesticides will leach into. And your already-rutted dirt roads that their trucks will use to transport the booboofruit to Dar es Salaam, where it will be shipped abroad. They get the land and put up a huge electric and barbed wire fence. Hmmm. An extra safe working environment, you guess.
They want to hire you! Here’s your CHANCE of a lifetime to earn wages, CASH. The pay is .12 per hour, depending on your productivity, 6 days per week, 7am-3:30pm. That’s $.96 per day US, about 120,000/= (Tanzanian shillings). (WalMart sweatshop workers in Nicaragua are paid .29-.34 cents per hour. In Bangladesh, workers make .16 cents for each college baseball cap they sew, for comparison.) But you’re in Tanzania, the third poorest country in the world. Life is way cheaper here. So they’re offering 12 cents per hour. Minimum wage in schools and official businesses is 48,000 /= per month (about $38.40–that’s 24 cents per hour). But the corporation that’s going to produce all of this economic development for the Tanzanian government doesn’t have to pay minimum wage because it’s not a Tanzanian company. It exists out there somewhere, or maybe everywhere globally, a multinational. All you have to do is get yourself to their work site and it’s only a 30-minute walk.
What factors do you need to consider? Well, if you’re a mom, as most Tanzanian women are, you need to figure out child care. There aren’t any day care centers in rural areas, and your mother died of HIV last year. But maybe you don’t have young children. If you’re fortunate enough to have your children in school, you need to figure out how to get water and firewood and make your family breakfast before you leave at 6:25am, just before dawn. You think you can be home by 4 or a little after, just 2 ½ hours before dusk. That might be enough time to gather extra firewood or replenish the water supply, but probably not both.
If you’re a dad, as most Tanzanian men are, you need to figure out whether this employment will gain you more cash than your informal cell-phone card business. But then you have to figure in the work in the shambas every day too. You won’t be able to do that. Can you pull your oldest son out of school to do the field work? Or depend on your wife to hoe the maize and ground nuts? It all depends. By the time the company takes out NSSF and payee, the Tanzanian equivalents of Social Security and income tax, you’ll probably bring home about $.81 per day or about 1,000/=. Could you pay someone to work in your shambas? Maybe 500/= per day? But who could afford to ignore their own shambas or children or school or whatever for 500/= per day? Hmmm.
If you’re 15 and your parents couldn’t afford to send you to secondary school (like 98% of Tanzanian children), you have the time. Right now you care for you youngest siblings and fetch water each day. You also grow eggplant in your family’s shamba, and you can sell those for 1,000 shillings each ($.80) if you can get them to market in the nearest town. But your family doesn’t have a well, and it’s been a bad year for rain. So your eggplant isn’t doing too well. Maybe if you take the job, you can save up for a private secondary boarding school–one where you’ll have all of your time to study and do well. Private secondary schools cost about 700,000/= per year. Let’s see….it would take you 700 working days to save up enough. OH, and then you’d have to figure in food and water while you’re at work. And no eggplant tending. So maybe it would take you 900 working days…..that’s 150 weeks…2.8 years????? What makes sense here?
And who profits from booboofruit production? Who sells the multinational corporation the fertilizer and the herbicides and pesticides that they will use to ensure production? Does the corporation pay for the water that they take from the wells they’ve dug and the irrigation systems that draw from them? Do they pay taxes on the land they’re using? Do the investors from around the world who have bought into booboofruit cover the costs associated with the pesticide runoff that flows into the local watershed? Or the herbicide or fertilizer runoff? Does the corporation pay taxes to the Tanzanian government to cover the road maintenance expense between the booboofruit plantation and Dar es Salaam? (About 500 kilometers) And who provides the trucks? And the fuel? It takes big trucks to transport this fruit, and they have to be refrigerated. Booboofruit spoils easily.
Aaah. The dilemma. The difficult choices. The lack of clear answers. The need for cash, for food, for water, for firewood, for shelter and family and community and survival. What do you think?
Posted in Uncategorized | |
Leave a reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.