Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Bribes

Joe drove me to work this morning in his new car, a cute 3-door RAV-4 he bought last week with the help of our Tanzanian friend Billy. We have named the car “Ralph.”

Driving in this country requires knowing the tricks of the trade; not only to drive on the “correct” side of the road and car, but how to navigate the system, such as knowing where not to drive at night, keeping the number of a mechanic with you at all times, and dealing with cops when they pull you over.

Joe was pulled over twice last week. The first time was his lesson learned for what not to do: the cop saw him talking on his cell phone, motioned him over, and told him that they had just passed legislation, taking effect “tomorrow,” whereby drivers couldn’t talk on their cell phone. He told Joe to let him into the car so they could “discuss” this, and asked for his license. He then told Joe to meet him under a bridge (which he could do since he had his license) and asked for a bribe (50,000 shillings).

Rule #1: Do not make eye contact (we both wear sunglasses in the car now and I do my best to keep a poker face passing through check points…)
Rule #2: Do not let them into your car
Rule #3: Do not give anyone your real license (just a copy)
Rule #4: Do not give anyone more than 5,000 shillings

It’s ridiculous that they get away with this stuff on a daily basis, and that bribes are this commonplace. In Zanzibar this weekend, our taxi ride to and from the beach town included money for bribes, which even the local drivers couldn’t get out of paying.

Joe was adamant not to let it happen again to the magnitude of 50,000 shillings, and when he got pulled over the next day, the cop demanded to be let in, and so Joe guilt tripped him the entire way to the station, saying “I am doing good work here. This is very bad. You should feel very guilty. I am helping 45,000 people gain access to healthcare. Tsk tsk tsk.” And the cop, thinking he was a doctor, let him off for free.

Myers-Briggs

Having Joe as a roommate has been great – we dance around the apartment with shaker eggs, cook interesting concoctions and have people over for dinner (last night we had Jeremy over for peanut butter okra curry, kidney beans in a tomato-yogurt sauce, and breaded chicken), therapeutically write, and have introspective conversations customary to being abroad. Joe re-introduced me to the Myers-Briggs test, a personality test centering around four trait groups (16 types total): whether you are an introvert or extravert, think via sensing or intuitively (practical or a theoretical thinker), are a thinker or feeler (logical or emotional), and are a judger or perceiver (planner or more spontaneous). It seems to be an interesting way to group people, and describes personalities with seemingly more precision than say, horoscope groups.

Last night we looked up famous individuals in our Myers-Briggs types. Barack Obama, Martin Luther King Jr, and Dr. Seuss were all ENFP’s, like Joe. Jeremy got Jimmy Carter, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mahatma Gandhi, all INFJ’s.

I got Britney Spears, Ashton Kutcher, Michael Jackson, and Dan Rather, all fellow ISFP’s.

No comment.

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Power

We went back to Zanzibar this weekend for a super relaxing weekend in Paje, an east coast beach with a gorgeous view of the Indian Ocean.




While we were there, the power went out for a few hours both nights (and the hotel decided to conserve their generators). This wasn’t so bad for the few hours, but I learned that the entire island of Zanzibar (with around a million inhabitants) lost power for several months earlier this year. Additionally, only around 10% of Tanzania has regular access to electricity (which is a kind of vague term that may mean only 70% of the time). This statistic seems incredibly shocking, but sheds light onto why efficiency seems to be quite difficult to achieve.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Language dreams

Being abroad triggers something in the language part of your brain - people around you speaking a different language makes you want to speak it (or at least speak something other than the default of English), too.

They say that you're fluent in a language when you dream in it; my semester abroad in Spain culminated in a dream in "Spanglish." "Banglish" dreams fluttered about while spending winter session in India.

While I'm no where close to being even basic in Swahili knowledge, I wouldn't have been surprised if some of the everyday words heard on the street entered my mefloquine-doused dreams.

Instead, I had a dream in Spanish last night, a brief conversation with a friend while getting out of a bajaj. At least they're semi-acclimatizing?

Expensivity

A professor visiting Dar asked me earlier this week what surprised me the most about coming to Africa. I think it would have to be how expensive everything is and the fact that there is no "middle class" pricing. Huge disparities exist in everything, including living, transportation, food, etc, and phone, internet, and other commodities soak up shillings in no time.

A Tanzanian friend's interpretation was that Africa is transitioning between socialism and capitalism, and that it will take a few years for the market to work its magic. He also commented that the arrival of us "mzungus" has raised prices drastically. I'm wondering why the case is different in India and Asia, in that case.

Regardless, was not expecting to pay 120,000 shillings for 2 weeks of internet. Must stop video skyping.

Monday, July 12, 2010

Walking without crawling first

Natalie, Joe and I visited the orphanage again on Saturday, this time with Mary, the founder. Mary is an incredibly energetic Irish woman, a mother of nine, with honest opinions on everything and a heart of gold. She and her American husband have lived all over the place, including in India for several years, and have been committed to Tanzania for the last ten.

She told us how they set up the orphanage, and how they’ve slowly expanded over the last several years. A vast chunk of their budget goes towards medical care for the children: one of the kids was in the hospital with malaria when we visited, a decently common occurrence.

Mary told us about the devastating situations in which they found some of the kids, and went on about each of their individual personalities. Six kids of the bunch, she told us, are HIV-positive; most are on ARV’s and all have regular check-ups. They’re now healthy and happy individuals, and you wouldn’t be able to tell which are which. Spending time with the kids this week was great – we had brought them markers, and had a drawing session where they wrote their name and drew a picture. One girl even scrawled down, “Malaria still sucks,” a phrase she slyly saw printed on Natalie’s shirt.

Mary later made a comment about Tanzania that stood out in my mind: driving here is terrible, mainly because many drivers are lacking a sense of the space around them. At least in India, she said, there’s a method to the madness and drivers have figured out how to coexist together: there are unsaid rules, so to speak. Here, however, instead of slowing down when they see a pedestrian or a car in front of them, a driver may speed up. “And babies don’t crawl first before walking – the two are distinctly related in my mind, no coincidence,” she told us.

She went on to explain that babies spend a good chunk of their infancy tied in cloth to a mother’s back, and then at some point they are expected to teeter-totter around by walking. But, they haven’t yet developed boundaries at that point, or a strong sense of space without crawling.

Pole vs. Samahani

There are two words in Swahili meaning “sorry.” Samahani seems to mean that the person is genuinely sorry and indicates at least sympathy if not empathy.

Pole, on the other hand, while sometimes genuine, seems to mostly be used as an “oops,” or a sarcastic sorry, and is used quite a bit.

Example: someone knocks over water bottle, spills water all over the floor, and goes “pole” without cleaning it up.

Addresses

Just finished White Tiger, an interesting book told from the viewpoint of an Indian “entrepreneur” and driver. One point that stuck out in my mind was his description of Delhi, how many roads have names that no one actually uses or knows, and that addresses don’t really exist or stick. “A-block” may be next to “G-block,” house A-78 may be followed by G-238, and it’s not really an anomaly.

Dar has a similar situation. When I asked our real estate agent the street address, she said it’s (the name of our apartment building) on Haile Salaise Road.” (Mind you, this road is not a small one).

A lot of places in China apparently has two names – a Chinese and an American.

Not the case here, but it’s still challenging to explain where you’re going to a cabby (as would be expected without real addresses). Solution: figure out landmarks and add at least 15 minutes to travel time.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Internet

Apparently the internet carrier we use at our house is down due to the fact that they're having issues with the cable they use to bring internet from India. My first reaction was, they use a cable to bring internet all the way from India??

Apparently the founder of Kayak is working to set up wireless all over Africa. Good deeds.

The Dala Dala

Taking taxis around the city, the easiest form of transportation, is starting to add up. Since Joe and I moved to the peninsula (the “mzungu” part of town a little north east of the city), we’re a little out of the way from the city center where we work, and other neighborhoods. Cabs tend to cost around 8,000 shillings to get to other parts of the town (around $6), which adds up if you’re taking those 4 times a day or more.

So, we try to take a dala dala (a mini bus) to and from work. These cost 250 shillings, and are a decently direct way to downtown. The key is to catch them at the right time, or else they’ll be packed, or you’ll end up waiting a long time (I waited for 45 minutes to get a dala dala going to Posta on Tuesday).

I’m still not entirely sure how it works – there’s no formal schedule and half the busses don’t have their final distination written on the bus. Conductors yell out to the side of the street where the bus is going, and if that destination seems reasonable, it’s all yours to hop on. Additionally, you never know when the dala dala is going to pull off the side of the road and decide it’s time for a break. One dala dala I went on started steaming in the front, and the conductor just chuckled, poured some water into an unknown hole, while passengers watched inquisitively, and then the bus kept going.

Somehow though, locals just know where to catch them and which one to get on, and they expect the unexpected. And so the system functions.

Saba Saba

The seventh of July (Saba Saba) is a holiday in Tanzania, and they hold a large trade fair the week of and prior to the holiday, culminating with a day off on the seventh. I visited the fair with my supervisor here on Tuesday.

I wasn’t sure exactly what I was expecting – she had told me that the Ministry of Health had a booth there (and the City Council had provided posters on malaria prevalence), and that there were various vendors selling crafts. What we found was a large area full of booths and exhibits from all sorts of industries, including forestry, leather workers, food and cashew vendors, the military, etc. The panda rug Jeremy had bought last year was still there, and there was even a mini-zoo, with a giraffe, lion, leopards, hyenas, wildebeasts, and various other animals not-so-common in American zoos. An ex-president of Tanzania was visiting the same day as us, and a large procession marched around him as he visited the booths.

It was also cool to see the Ministry of Health section: PSI and various other public health organizations had set up booths of information (some in Swahili, some in English). There was a good amount of focus put on malaria: there was lots of information on it, including microscopes containing the malaria parasite to view, and they even had rapid diagnostic malaria tests set up for people to use.

Fourth of July in Tanzania

Independence day was spent in Zanzibar on a beach, so it didn’t really feel like a traditional fourth of July. However, last week, we got the chance to go to the US Embassy with some of our friends working at the State Department here. It was a sight to behold, I stepped in and immediately thought I had been transported back to the bay area. Families of all ethnicities ambled around the complex, the US ambassador was there in red, white, and blue with his family, and a buffet of hamburgers and fries awaited us. Desks inside the embassy seemed to be imported from the US: they even had the same phones as in “The Office,” and the same chairs we had at Mercer.

Marines sang “Proud to be an American,” and the dj played “YMCA,” and other straight up American tunes; I felt like we were in an awkward but amazing wedding, where some people danced all out with drinks in hand and others stared onto the dance floor.

The night culminated in fireworks, which could apparently be seen throughout the city. Not quite State College – top – ten- fireworks in America, but pretty awesome nonetheless.

T.I.A

A few of us went to Zanzibar last weekend, an awesome vaca of sorts from Dar. A few people had mentioned it as the perfect destination; Tom had advised me to go every weekend if possible in his “what you need to know about Dar” map he drew me before coming. It indeed lived up to this: Stonetown was a quaint town full of character and interesting architecture and trinkets, and the beach was blissful, with an amazing view of a very blue-green Indian Ocean. We’re planning to go back at least twice more in the next month.

While waiting the customary one hour for our food, only to receive a different set of dishes than what we had ordered, the term “T.I.A” came up: “This is Africa.” While this was the first time I had heard this phrase, it had been mentioned in other ways, such as “Africa Time” –

Definition: no time you have arranged is actually fixed (usually 30 minutes may be a good starting point to wait), and you may even end up waiting for hours on end for someone. This is slightly different from IST (Indian Standard Time), where things will inevitably start late, because with Africa time, it may just not end up happening.

Another friend had said that risk aversion goes away in Africa: again, the unexpected becomes expected, and you just gotta go with it. Defining this actually allows otherwise frustrating situations to be rather amusing – ie: it’s okay if your cab breaks down on the side of the road, internet in the entire country is out for a couple of days, and your power goes off for 24 hours. That’s why we brought flashlights ☺

The Market

Maria suggested that we should get clothes made here – tailors are relatively cheap, and that way we could pick the fabric and dress pattern of our choice. The cloth is cut into 6 meter increments, is about 10,000 tanzanian shillings (around 7-8 USD) and it’s best to find a partner to share the fabric with = two dresses of the same fabric. Brennan and I headed to the market, a twenty-minute walk from the project house in Upanga. I half-expected to find a large mainly-empty warehouse, similar to some of the markets in Thailand, with individual stalls for vendors, and customers haggling their way down to 1/3 of the asking price.

Instead, it was a sensory overload – cars speeding through the dusty, bumpy roads at a moment’s notice, scattering walkers and loungers momentarily; shards of glass and plastic buried into the sometimes-dry-sometimes-wet ground; people unloading packages with their leathered hands; women and men carrying heaps of kg’s precariously on their heads. Brennan and I hopped from stall to stall, looking for a pattern we both liked.

In India, many market vendors are very aggressive, shouting “Madam, Madam,” after you in order to get you to purchase whatever trinket they might be selling. They will put on an offended face when you suggest a price they deem too low, but may very well end up accepting that price eventually, with a toothy grin.

It was harder to bargain here for some reason. Vendors shooed us away when our price was too low, saying it was a fixed price. Perhaps it was because we didn’t know Swahili, or maybe just because it was semi-fixed. But that seems to be the case for most things: they don’t haggle, they either like your price or they don’t.

We then went to the tailor, and gave her a dress to work with. When we got the dresses back, they were a little on the large side, but rather interesting (and followed the pattern to the T + used our measurements). Must note to mimic pattern exactly for future reference.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Subway

The theory that all Subway sandwich shops in the world smell the same was disproven today. Pretty decent sandwich artists, but the Tanzanian Subway smells different.