May 2008

By the time this is posted, two months and half of the research will have been completed in Rufiji, and we’re now in Dar to rest (OK, so now we’re leaving our Dar rest…we’ve been bad at this blogging thing), check email, talk to family and friends back home (JP: Melissa, I was so excited to talk to you last time I almost peed my pants), and drink cold beer. When we were in Iringa, we befriended a man who lives in Dar with his wife. He is Irish and she is French and they’re in Tanzania for a couple years to work, he for TechnoServe (a very cool NGO that just received a huge Gates Foundation grant) and she as a health economist. They are great to hang out with and have insisted that whenever we’re in Dar we have to stay at their house. It sure beats a crowded, noisy hotel. Plus it means we get to cook and listen to music on their very loud speakers. It’s a nice break from bucket showers- even though I admit I kind of enjoy bathing with a 10 liter bucket. And we’re going to have to (oh, our tragic lives) visit and maybe even stay over at the acting Belgian Ambassador’s place. We hitched a ride with his wife when we first arrived in Rufiji (she was tagging along with some of the Embassy’s staff who were meeting to discuss the new Eastern Selous Wildlife Management Project) and she insisted we visit. The Belgian Ambassador also heads up their technical cooperation agency, so it’ll be interesting to chat with him about all we’ve experienced here.

In the village Mtanza-Msona, we share a blue and white, three-room house with a young schoolteacher named Fatuma. The house is the only cement brick and tin roof house aside from the village office building and the school. We like the house but we also share it with a thousand bats, several mice that rotate occupancy on a fairly regular death schedule (not our doing), 4 million flies, geckos, and lizards. We’ve already tried once to get the bats out by plugging holes with cement but they’re sneaky bastards and found another way in. We’re mostly able to keep the mice out of our room at night by stacking papers by the door, but they still make it in sometimes to wake us up by skittering across the headboard, and pose for our headlamps before falling to the floor in shock. They are pretty big mice, dark with big ears. Nick calls them cartoon mice. There are resident geckos in our room that are warmly welcome. They hang out on our window screens patiently waiting for flies and tsetse flies to walk into their mouths. Every time they catch one, we cheer. The flies are so, so annoying, and they are in endless supply here. You’re constantly swatting. Of course now, when they land on us, we’re not as quick to swipe them away as when we first arrived – something to think about when we see flies sauntering calmly into and out of people’s mouths during our interviews.

Mr. Msuya shares the house with us, too, after he left the neighbors shack due to a persistent mouse problem. Mr. Msuya… where to start. Once upon a time we went to the district headquarters in Utete to get official permission to carry out the research in Rufiji. A letter from the Council for Science and Technology in hand, we met a nice official named Abednego who promptly called the Mkongo District Official, Mr. Msuya, back from Dar where he had just arrived that morning, in order to help us with the research. That much you know already. We thought he would come escort us to the villages to introduce us to the important people and help us acquire a suitable assistant. Instead, he waltzed into the REMP library where we were sorting through documents and chatting with a couple people about our research, and offered his service for four to five months in a boastful, now clearly ‘Msuya’, manner. He was going on “leave” from his district duties to help with our research, which is strange considering that he is essentially the government representative for hundreds of thousands of people in the upper Rufiji. Clearly, our research is more important, and we greedily stole him from his service to the country. Actually, after a while, we realized that his assistance might be beneficial both to us (he could facilitate interviews and research logistics, and his English is quite good) and to him (he could learn a lot about some of the most pressing problems facing the people of Rufiji). A partnership was forged, and now we regret not bringing a video camera to document the character that is Mr. Ally Msuya, District Official, a “very important person who people should fear.” He is a 56-year old former schoolteacher from Kilimanjaro (Pare tribe). He was a successful teacher, which you intuit from his interactions with children. He is not cut out for government business here – he readily admits that he wishes he was teaching. He’s perfectly competent, and we don’t need the several testimonies we’ve received about his caring, energetic commitment to the people to understand that he is the kind of representative this forgotten district needs. He has welcomed us warmly, won’t leave us alone with exaggerated claims of danger (invoking 9-11 more than once), weathers our flaring tempers each time he is 6 hours late for meetings or work, flirts to break every firm and angry glare given to us by waitresses, hostesses, and receptionists, at times too impressed with status while at others quick to call an inflated individual ‘a problem’. He’s a wonderful translator and facilitator in the interviews—surely due to his experience as a teacher. He rides his big green “Better” motorcycle throughout the sandy river basin (because the government doesn’t give him a vehicle – the governor of a district with one of the worst roads in the country should be at the top of the list for a vehicle, but instead he’s stuck on his bike, rain or shine) and is known for his armed intervention to kill the old lion that killed 27 people in 2002-2003. He has two wives and 10 or 11 children (we can’t get the count right, and he’s seems a bit slippery with the number), including “the mzungu”, a 7-year old with albinism. All in all, we owe a lot to Msuya. He’s been a great friend and enormous contributor to the research.

Fatuma has been here for a year and she hates it. She’s 21, has a baby who lives with her parents in Tanga, and a fiancé in Morogoro. We can’t figure out her deal, but we’re been told that Rufiji is the destination for those near the bottom of their teaching classes—a senseless strategy: deliver the most uninspired to the very place in Tanzania that needs inspiration. We wouldn’t call Faturma incompetent, but we are comfortable characterizing her as uninspired…and a tad volatile. We love her, though, and will be sending her a care package full of books when we head back to Rufiji in a week, and with our sidekick, Mr. Msuyaa (more on him later), work towards getting her transferred (something she normally wouldn’t even be able to apply for until 2010). We have some justification beyond her boredom: the equally volatile head schoolteacher propositioned her to be his lover when she first arrived in the village and has held her denial against her ever since. We bought Fatuma 6 chickens as a gift for helping us out so much while we’ve been here. She’ll be able to eat fresh eggs or sell them when she wants—a big and one of the only moneymakers here. Unfortunately, we think she might hate them (she said she wanted them, though!). They’ll probably get eaten by baboons soon, or else she’ll just sell them and get the money. Oh well. We like having them around, though even the most passionate animal lover can’t help but hate a rooster that lives within 50 yards from the house. Every morning around 4:30AM he crows once, shuts up for about 45 minutes and then starts crowing until we let him out of their closet, which is usually around 7AM. We took a hilarious video on our camera of the rooster going crazy – please ask to see it when we return.

Fatuma sells ubuyu, which is the dried fruit of the baobab tree cooked together with red dye and sugar. The school kids love it and every morning starting around 7 kids run up to our house yell ‘Hodi!’ followed by ‘Ubuyu!’ That’s it, no ‘Good morning’, or asking nicely for the treat. Fatuma tries to teach them good manners but so far I haven’t noticed any difference. With us, sometimes she is intent on doing everything for us, shooing us when we attempt to cook or clean, and other times she mutters about the misfortune of landing this new role with our arrival. We’re stuck during those bad times. Part of it is that she (and all others here, of course) thinks we can’t do anything. When she’s in a good mood she’s fun to be around, when she’s in a bad mood, world look out (JP: Reminds me of a sister of mineJ, hehe…and Nick when he needs a lollypop or something).

Fatuma is an amazing cook though. Her coconut rice might be the best thing in the world and Jess’s new favorite dish. We eat lots of rice, ugali, greens (like potato leaves, cassava leaves, pumpkin leaves, and spinach), okra, and beans or peas. The farmers have just started to harvest crops so vegetables are slightly easier to find these days than when we first got here two months ago. Then, one could really only find corn meal, rice, dried beans that give you dangerous gas, illegally harvested fish, and chickens that die on your doorstep. We had to bring most of our food from Ikriwiri, about 90 kilometers away (You might ask, What do people here eat, then? And we respond, Good question!). Chickens: Whoever you buy the chicken from brings it over with its legs tied up, squawking and wings flapping. Once it’s drained and the feathers are plucked, it looks less like a live chicken and we, the consumers, feel a little more at ease. We know that many reading this have had intimate experiences with their food, including their meat. We both feel that it is important, both for personal development and health and for future food and environmental security, for us all to attempt to resurrect more direct relationships with our food. Chickens have taught us a little bit –or, rather, they have contributed to a mountain of unresolved questions about human and non-human life. The meat is tasty but because the chickens are older and have actually gained some muscle living lives outdoors, it’s tough to chew. Here they eat the roosters, not the hens, and they also call the roosters ‘cocks’. The first time we ate chicken here, Jess was watching them pluck the rooster when the guy who helped slaughter it turned to her and asked if I she had ever had ‘fresh cock’. She couldn’t answer the question because she was too busy cracking up. So now of course we have taken every opportunity to use the word cock: ‘Wow, look at that big cock’; ‘Mr. Msuya wants a big cock for dinner’; ‘Mr. Msuya, you’re like a big proud cock’…and the list goes on.
The fish we’re less fond of because they taste exactly like the muddy river from which they’re hooked and netted. So we stick to the veg. And coconut rice. Jess will dream about that for the rest of her lifeJ.

Every morning we get about 10 minutes of nice, quiet, morning time just as the sun is rising, in between crowing sessions and before kids start crying and all the radios turn on full blast. Mr. Msuya wakes up and immediately turns on his radio. He doesn’t adjust for his own ear, but rather cranks the familiar black box to deafening, crackly levels. It’s never a clear radio station either and every minute or so fades out to white noise. The transistor radio culture is a mystery – making noise, in general, is a mystery. If there is cultural protocol, we have yet to understand it. Even if somebody happened to be bothered by, say, loud sex in the middle of the night, let alone a blaring radio, he would never say a thing. But, the thing is, we’re pretty sure it takes an earthquake to bother people. (NP: A story from Uganda. I had found an old, beat up, stringless junior guitar with mouse crap in the body up at the station. My dad sent some nylon strings, and I happened to get it in working order to bring down to camp. One day we had an early return to camp from the gorillas, and were all looking forward to a restful afternoon. The ranger that week was an older guy we named after the oldest gorilla in the group, Matu. He caught sight of the guitar, snatched it and started playing a 10 second riff that he had learned in a barracks somewhere in East Africa. After about (no joke) 2 to 3 hours of the same riff, I heard a mumbled, “Stop!” from one of the tents. Tibenda had had enough, and I was shocked. The man didn’t stop. I don’t think he heard Tibenda. It remains the sole incident in all my time over here when someone voiced their annoyance about noise. Granted, I usually don’t say anything, either, because I’m terrified of breaking some cultural taboo, which, again, I’m not sure even exists.) Anyway, Africa is not a quiet place, and you just have to get used to it. Around 7AM the school kids start singing and running to school. They run in two lines from the village center, past our house, to their school. It’s nice to hear their songs in the morning. We went out one morning to watch them, which surprised many of them and broke their rhythm and enthusiasm. There are 300 students at Msona school, which goes up to Standard/Grade 7. Three hundred students are taught by 5 teachers: the head teacher, the English teacher who never says anything, Fatuma who hates being here and just spent the last week in her bed instead of teaching, an older teacher who is drunk all the time, and Mr. Saidi who’s probably the most responsible out of the bunch but he can’t really teach 300 kids on his own. Today there were no teachers in the school and all the kids just left. Most of the teachers were outside watching the troop of baboons in the field eat discarded corn husks. There are about 30 baboons that occasionally wander past our house and the school and Mr. Msuya and Fatuma like to throw old cassava root, interspersed with curses and laughter, at them. Everyone hates baboons here because they steal chickens and eat crops. We just heard today that sometimes people set a trap with of food mixed with cement to kill them. There’s got to be a better way to do it. There’s also a juvenile vervet monkey hangs out around the village. She is a ‘pet’, meaning someone stole her from her mother and then sold her. Sometimes she comes around our house to hangs out on the backyard wall. She’s afraid of us, for good reason, but one morning we were able to get close to her by bribing her with bananas and coconut shavings. We want to groom her and remove the collar they put on her – she’s a village monkey for life, though she does seem to have some foraging skills.

Several of the folks here stop by once in a while to say ‘Hi’ and then struggle through a half English, half Swahili conversation. Two guys, Moshi and Mashaka, swing by the most (Mashaka means “Worries” – we’ve interviewed people with names that translate as “Bad”, “Not good”, “I don’t care”, and “Scandal”, but also “King”, “Gift”, and all the other good things in life). Moshi works at one of the safari camps in Selous and knows a bit of English, and Mashaka is a fisherman and one of the first villagers we interviewed. Ramadhani is an older man who has brought us bananas as a gift and just likes to check in on us to make sure that ‘no one in the village is annoying us’. Mtou is our most permanent fixture. He’s the local traditional doctor and botanist. We’ve hired him to help round up interviewees and visit farms to take GPS points and notes. He’s hysterical, and one of the nicest guys we’ve met. He doesn’t know much English, just a few words and sentences, but when he hears Msuya say a word he knows (and some he certainly does not know), he immediately repeats him and affects that he knows exactly what the conversation is about. His favorite word is ‘specialist-ee for’, which he no doubt learned when someone said that he is a specialist for traditional medicine. He has taken the word to new heights: “That lady, specialist-ee for sister”, meaning “That woman is my sister”. More intuitively, it’s used like “Shrub, specialist-ee for snake bite”. “This stick, specialist-ee for build house for chicken.” Another thing that everyone says is ‘nani’ which means ‘who’ but they use it in a way more like ‘what’s its name’/‘what’s your name’. For example, “Bring me that, nani” or “You, Mr…Nani, come here”. It’s how we say “like” way to much. Just like…like that.

Our neighbors have a bunch of kids that always yell to us, “Bye-bye Mzungu!” We’re still trying to teach them that first you say, “Hi”—and also that our names are not Mzungu—but none of it ever really sticks. The only other thing they know in English is, “What is my name?” to which we tend to reply, on days when we’re not in a playful mood, “I don’t know.” Of course, “What is your name” is the correct way to ask the question, but it’s often of no use to try to teach a group of mutually confident kids who respond to spotless Mzungu-Swahili by laughing and running ten meters as if they’re provoking a drunk man who has lost his motor functions (which they do here, too). Some of the really young ones are totally freaked out by us and scream – eventually, you might get them to chill out. Our two favorites are Aggi and Ally. Aggi is one of the school teacher’s kid and we’re not sure where Ally lives but he’s always finding his way to our kneecaps, smiling the greatest smile in Mtanza-Msona.

A couple weeks ago Msuya, Mtou, and we took the motorcycles to the farms in a place called Baweni (translated as something like “wetland”). It took us about an hour the first day to get there, through sand pits and mud holes. We fell off only once in a sand pit that day but the second day we bit it twice in these awfully sticky mud holes. Falling off wasn’t all that bad but pairing it with relentlessly biting tsetse flies who attack at full force as soon as we slowed down made it terrible. Those flies hurt. Essentially they are like deer flies, but they sometimes carry sleeping sickness – though, here, we are told they don’t. They are why the people here don’t keep livestock. Baweni is an interesting place, open to the massive sky and far enough removed from the already remote village center of Mtanza-Msona to give you a feeling of great isolation. You drive (or, for most, walk) through thick miombo wood and grassland, first on a fairly clear road which then turns to grass and sand and mud. Eventually, you emerge into an expanse of rice paddies and small mud houses. Nick and Msuya did interviews and Jess and Mtou walked to farms through flooded and muddy rice fields taking the GPS points and notes and meeting farmers, all the while trailed by a line of little kids. Two of those little kids stuck around for a whole day and made sure that they got to carry the umbrellas. One little boy, Shukuru (which means ‘to be grateful’), hung out with us all day and at one point saved Jess from getting lost and wandering through the huge rice fields. He’s a bright and cheerful 8 year-old who has never been to school. He and Jess spent one afternoon writing words—he would point to something he wanted to know, Jess would double-check the Kiswahili word in the dictionary and then draw a picture and write the word underneath. Then he’d grab the paper and start copying. He would have continued all day if we didn’t have to leave. Shukuru is an orphan who lives with his old grandmother at the farm. We’ve always discussed sending someone here to school, and as we spend more time discussing livelihoods and development and drawing a picture of the village, the value of education becomes clearer and clearer to us—not only to individual children, but for the future security of everyone here (and everywhere, for that matter!). Oh, how we take our education for granted. Taking a quick look at the data (100 2-hour interviews so far), the village is comprised of an adult population with an average educational attainment equivalent to grade 6, and that’s in schools chronically deficient in resources and creative lesson plans. Clearly, this translates into a dangerous lack of confidence, vision, independence, and innovation as household leaders and members of a community. In more than half of the interviews we’ve labored over questions like, “If this community government had the money, what would you suggest they invest in to help Mtanza-Msona prepare for future droughts?” A pretty straightforward question posed by an expert in Kiswahili (Mr. Msuya, we’ve said, couldn’t be more Tanzanian if he tried) to those who know the land and their lives better than anyone, yet more often than not we’re met with blank stares. Some simply don’t understand the question, while others, it seems, have never been asked their opinions about things. Whatever confidence a visitor might lack in dictating what is best for the security of people far from where he or she grew up is strengthened by a quickly-assumed conviction that poor education in an integrating world will lend to stagnated or worsening health levels and less than happy lives. How do you build a society of individuals that value leadership as an honor and duty rather than a path to hard cash?

Anyway, after meeting his grandmother and talking with the both of them, we decided to semi-adopt Shukuru and pay for him to go to a school in Dar es Salaam. He’s going to come with us the next time we go to Dar and we’ll spend a day shopping for his school gear and then drop him off at a boarding school. Because he used to be a head teacher near Dar, Mr. Msuya has many connections with the schools, so we’re pretty sure we’ll be able to get Shukuru enrolled midway through a term. It’ll be fun to go shopping with him, and hopefully he’ll enjoy being in school. We had originally asked him why he wasn’t in school, and if he wanted to go. He said, yes, and disappeared, reappearing one hour later with his grandmother in tow. He’s got a kind of initiative lacking in many young kids here, and we’re excited to open a few doors for him. He used to live in Dar so we aren’t worried about him having culture shock moving from an isolated farm to the craziness of the big city.

Mtanza-Msona is a small village (425 households) but many of the people farm far from the main village, so it seems like the place is huge. Baweni is farthest hamlet from the village center (15km), and others cross the river by canoe to get to their farms. The canoe crossing can take up to an hour and a half depending on the strength of the river, and after arriving on the other shore, one might have another 10km hike ahead of him or her. One visit to the farms—plagued by pests (this year termites, last year mice, every year elephants, birds, those devil baboons, and the errant killer lion), scorching sun, more frequent droughts and the errant killer flood, a paucity of modern inputs, and hot and malnourished farmers—and you’re acutely aware of how hard these folks work. That said, there is the odd comment – which we’ve heard from more than a couple smart Tanzanian NGO workers and public officers – that ‘these people are lazy.’ What we think is going on is that the youth population is the problem—they don’t like to farm and can often be found lounging in crooks of trees listening to the same ‘bongo flava’ songs throughout the day. We wonder how the introduction of modern pop culture in Tanzanian society, at least as far as the radio and maybe a visit or two to the Dar clubs and pool joints, is affecting cultural norms that once stitched together small communities and dictated productive effort. It’s got to be tough to be a young guy wanting to dress like the young Tanzanian rap stars and live the lives of the Africans in the Premier League that he sees on the satellite TV owned by the churlish head teacher when you know that your family’s two acres of corn require weeding today, tomorrow, next year, and fifty years from now. How does one make sense of the cultural revolution happening in a stagnant, traditional rural Africa?

How do you organize your community when there is no culture of dutiful leadership and public service, efficiency, and innovation and when the central means of subsistence requires the population to be scattered, unorganized, and incommunicado?

The research has been going well, although not without frustrations. We seem to be able to hit a stride for three or four days before coming to a screeching halt. Jess had to do several of the interviews because Nick got malaria and had to stay in bed battling a 102° fever. The medicine now for malaria is really strong and he started feeling better after only one day. It’s not fun to be sick or have to care for someone sick when you’re this far from home. Nothing feels in control, and if things got bad the closest, good hospital would be 8 hours away in Dar es Salaam. And we’d have to go on a motorcycle. My fingers are crossed that neither of us get really sick while we’re here (that one’s for you, Maria and Jeannie).

Over the last two weeks we’ve been bumming around Dar es Salaam and hiking in the Usumbara Mountains, but all those adventure stories will have to wait for the next posting. Now, we’re rushing to pack and catch the bus to Rufiji for our final month stint. This time we’ll be in a village called Ndundunyikanza. Say that five times fast.