.. and, though the pictures from Washington, D.C. and environs look mystical and lovely, I am not sorry that all we got was rain, followed by a cold but sunny Sunday, perfect for reading the New York Times, making Valentines, attending a free family day at Duke’s art museum, and contemplating our first Superbowl in years.
So, what do we think of choosing a family-friendly town with good schools and a mild cost of living so that we may work independently, often in pajamas (and sometimes overseas), and otherwise enjoy the pleasures of family-time, good food, a new house, and exploring unknown (local) places?
We think it is great.
Perhaps there should be some high-level consultations between Tanzania and Canada concerning the issue of unhealthy obsession with the perceived power, influence, and arrogance of one’s immediate international neighbor. In the 15 years that I have been, let us say, observing Canadians, I do believe there has been a shift toward greater national confidence and a keener sense of identity in the True North. Less and less, Canada defines itself in terms having to do with the country to its south than it did in the not-so-far-back days of relentless complaining about “sleeping next to an elephant.” (Sorry, Canadians. Of course, I exaggerate … a little.) I do wish Tanzania, with a larger population and a landscape every bit as beautiful as Kenya’s, would take a lesson from the Canadians in Bucking Up.
I first became aware of Tanzania’s Kenya complex while visiting, during a work trip last year, a high-ranking Kenyan immigration official. Those Tanzanians, he chuckled, they are obsessed with keeping Kenyans out of their country. Growing serious, he told me that Kenyan businessman seeking to travel to Tanzania must churn through a cryptic and protracted visa process, and travel permits ultimately issued are invariably designed to last for extra-short periods of time (way shorter than those issued to Rwandans and Ugandans). A truck carrying goods from Nairobi to Dar es Salaam must switch drivers (from a Kenyan to a Tanzanian) at the border, he said. And single safari vehicle cannot roam from the Masai Mara national reserve in Kenya to the Tanzania’s Serengeti national park, the official told me – rather, a second (Tanzanian) tour guide must be enlisted. All of this, despite Tanzania’s charter membership with Kenya in the East African Community, which is modeled on the European Union and calls for free movement of all members’ citizens across its territory.
Is this true, I wondered, do Tanzanians actively resist their Kenyan neighbors, as a matter of policy and practice? In fact, it seems that they do. Under Tanzanian land law, foreign ownership of real property is banned, chiefly out of fear, I learned, that Kenyans will swoop in and buy everything. In discussing regional economic cooperation with one Tanzanian woman with a very substantial policy job, she confessed that she does not like attending meetings with Kenyans, because they always dominate the conversation and make her feel … she then shrunk into her chair to show me how they make her feel. Though not the whole story, I attribute Tanzania’s national wariness over Kenya to the latter’s high comfort-level with free-market Darwinism, versus its own relatively recent emergence from a severely protected socialist society.
Over lunch at our final roundtable, I queried three young Tanzanian men about how they feel about Kenyans. “They speak better English than we do, so I think they can take over our businesses and get all the good jobs,” said one. “They’re rude,” said another (a comment that reminds me that I ought to write separately about the Epic Politeness of Tanzanians).The third fellow just laughed and nodded his head vigorously. A colleague overhearing the conversation chimed in, “Oh, Kenyans drive Ethiopians and Ugandans mad, too.”
At about that moment, it occurred to me that I had not, among the scores of Tanzanians I met with during my visit, heard a single word of approval for Barack Obama, whose name produces effusive praise in most other countries I visit. Of course! The man is a Kenyan.
Tanzania was wonderful, but I am so happy to be heading home tonight. My excellent family seems to remain quite in tact, with plenty of snow fun in my absence.
This time tomorrow, I will be on my way home, but I can only think, at the moment, about tomorrow’s roundtable discussion. Each of the more than 300 people our Tanzania team has interviewed over the last two weeks is invited to come to hear about our preliminary “findings,” and then to tell us what they think about those.
Around 125 people have said that they will attend. I am, of 10 members of the team covering substantive topics, a victim of affirmative action — that is, as the “token woman” on the team, it seems like a good message to include me among the three speakers for our presentation. Ah, well. The exercise is good for me, I suppose, but I do get butterflies.
I am also a victim of Too Much Information. We are covering no fewer than 14 specific aspects of Tanzania’s agriculture sector (and its relationship with law and institutions). To boil down all that we have learned into something more than banal generalizations is a nearly overwhelming challenge! But we have been working for three days on this gig, so I expect the morning will go as well as … well, as well as one could hope.
I had a nice visit today with my sister-in-law Joy’s friend Viv, a lovely Dutch woman who began work at the Tanganyika International School [correction: International School of Tanganyika] at the same time Joy did, 11 years ago. Viv remains at the school, having built a life teaching math and traveling to exotic places, and, more recently, parenting an adorable toddler.
I specifically requested the “Joy and Bobby tour” — that is, a glimpse of the main haunts of Joy’s three years and Bobby’s one spent in Dar es Salaam. Without need for further explanation, Viv began by showing me their old apartment within a darling, heavily treed quadrangle of wooden homes, situated on the lower school campus, once a swinging habitat for single teachers, now an attractive place for families with small children. She then drove me up “the peninsula” to the upper school where Joy worked. The trip took us along the stunning beach road framed by homes of diplomats and punctuated by a number of new high-rises that indicate that, despite extensive poverty, Tanzania has some serious pockets of new money.
TIS [correction: ITS], with its white walls and sloping rooves, looks like a very nice place to go to school, and I enjoyed thinking of how it compares to Cairo American College. Where CAC fights for every blade of grass, IST is lush and green, and a much denser campus. Come to think of it, I don’t believe I saw any playing fields or a track, although there is a pool tucked in at one end of the campus. The gymnasium and theater are charming wooden structures, though each could use a bit of updating.
Viv showed me the “before” and “after” of where IST parks its guidance counselors. Whereas Joy once had an office in a far corner of the school (and a couch that was, I am told, suitable for between-class naps), new construction would have brought her to the very center of campus, not far from the iron statue of a giraffe.
Finally, we went to lunch at a pleasant shopping center down by the beach that, I am told, Joy and Bobby would remember. I mildly broke my vow not to buy anything (just earrings) and enjoyed perhaps my best meal to date in Tanzania, a grilled whole fish with some sort of tasty sauce over rice.
I watch quite a bit of it when I travel. Normally, the network’s international programming is incessantly repetitive and generally terrible. The earthquake in Haiti, though, has kept its best players busy over the past two weeks with fresh news, and the coverage has been riveting, even discounting for melodrama.
And I really appreciate Christiane Amanpour. I love her goofy bangs, perfect French pronunciations, and sharp questioning of high-level ministers and diplomats. I especially admire her veritable closet full of colorful, multi-pocketed shirt-jackets. That woman is the Anti-Tart.
Top 10 reasons why:
10. I really don’t feel like addressing the question, “Where are you going to put that?”
9. So much of what is for sale in Tanzania is similar to what I bought plenty of last year in Kenya.
8. My children are no longer charmed by treasures from my travels.
7. Masai warriors are scary.
6. Although I would purchase a seisel mat in commemoration of the seisel farm I visited, the chance to get one has not presented itself.
5. My house is too small for more stuff.
4. We already own some nice things from Tanzania, thanks to Joy and Bobby’s former life there and Peter and Lois’s visit in, what was it, ‘01?
3. Airport chocolate is a more popular gift item than trinkets.
2. My husband has made it clear that he does not wish for me to become “third-world woman,” either in dress or in home decor.
1. I am saving up for a new porch.
.. and when I say “poor,” I mean “without money,” as opposed to a dearth of other kinds of riches found in Tanzania, such as natural beauty, simplicity, and kindness.
But when I say “poor,” I do mean poor. Perhaps in Cambodia I have seen families that live as close to the bone as they do in the central portion of Tanzania. I think, though, that what I found here is truly the least privileged I have ever seen in terms of access to life’s key needs and wants — clean water, “finished” housing, electricity, and, yes, food. Visiting the Morogoro region where the primary crop is corn, it appeared to me that, at least during some seasons, all that the people eat is corn. The only supplements to the diet that I could see were mangos, bananas, and a few pineapples, sold at meager shacks. We saw a few pumpkin plants tucked in between rows of corn, but they were far from even flowering.
On an adorable toddler who ran to join a large group of children watching my team’s visit to a maize farm, I saw my first distended belly. Looking more closely at the children, I noticed a few eyes and mouths that seemed not quite right — they had been stressed or stunted, probably, by malnutrition. An article in today’s local paper reported a government assessment that people in this region in fact suffer from a lack of protein and access to green vegetables.
There is one luxury item (and critical work tool) in Morogoro’s rural areas that struck me as more available than what I have seen in some other places, such as Rwanda or Ghana: Bicycles!
A three-hour drive inland, midway between Dar es Salaam and Dodoma, Tanzania’s oft-overlooked capital, lies charming Morogoro, population 210,000. Framed by craggy mountains, this relatively tidy town is bustling with activity (insofar as Tanzanians bustle, which is not especially).
Morogoro reminds me of the mythical “small town America” of the 1960’s (see my previously registered thoughts on Petersburg, Virginia), one with a multi-faceted downtown, where all the services that one might seek – the post office, the library, the municipal court, the fertilizer shop, the dressmaker, the bus station, the banks, the handful of lawyers, and so forth – are within walking distance of one another. Students in their uniforms pass through the center, on their way to one of several primary, secondary and vocational schools; there is even a small teacher’s college. A longer walk takes you to a light industrial zone, an area where corn is milled and marketed and other activities, such as furniture-making, automobile-fixing, and even commodities-trading seem to take place. Train tracks also run through Morogoro, and one can almost imagine a train chugging through – although, these days, this never happens. Tanzania’s large, influential agricultural university sits just at the edge of Morogoro, lending prestige and an educated group of consumers to the colorful mix. Tiny and mid-sized farms also surround the town, although the quagmire that is legal land ownership in Tanzania means that far less land gets farmed than one might expect.
Back in town, there are a number of hotels, ranging from the very, very modest to the genuinely ambitious. The one where I stayed reminds me of the funky socialist structures we used to see in Macedonia. Indeed, Hotel Morogoro, which consists of four or five round buildings with high ceilings that slope dramatically along with beautifully tended gardens, was constructed and owned by the socialist-era government. After the mid-nineties, it was privatized, virtually abandoned, and then finally rehabilitated, capitalizing especially on the steady flow of foreigners who pass through town, typically for the purpose of international assistance projects, as opposed to garden-variety tourism. Tourists are likely to pass through Morogoro on their way to the National Park that lies about 60 minutes west.