Habari za sikuku?

Every time I would see someone wearing a t-shirt that is obviously from North America because it says ‘YMCA,’ or ‘North Idaho College Wrestling,’ or ‘YMCMB,’ or a picture of bugs bunny with ‘Six Flags’ or my favorite: ‘Tim Horton’s’, I would get excited. It was absolutely amazing to see clothes that I donated to charity were actually being worn by people in Zanzibar – I was making a difference every time I cleaned out my closet. Little did I know, the used clothing industry was doing more harm than good.



Pink 'North Idaho College Wresting' tee



Bales of clothing are exported to developing countries where they are sold to second hand dealers with a three to four hundred percent profit. So, people that do not have jobs are starting used clothing businesses. Over the years, this has caused textile manufacturers and retail clothing businesses to go bankrupt because it is cooler to wear used Western clothing. The problem:  The countries are losing what was once one of their biggest exports – clothing. This further feeds into the increasing debt problems faced by many African countries. This documentary focuses on Zambia and is definitely an interesting take on the life of a basic tee. Check it out: Tshirt Travels Documentary. 

This week was Eid ul Adha – the festival of sacrifice. It is the festival celebrated by Muslims where we remember Prophet Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son in the name of Allah. In turn, Allah replaces his son with a ram and thus began the tradition of sacrificing a goat during this Eid. I saw the remnants of sacrifice as we were coming back from our morning run with goat blood on the streets as early as 7am.  In the afternoon, there was a young group singing and playing instruments outside our window which was highly entertaining...who needs hip hop anyway? We went to check out the Eid fair at Jamhuri gardens and at Mnazi Moja stadium where families and kids were enjoying the Eid celebrations dressed up in their nicest outfits. Bright colors with lots of sparkles! There were numerous stalls selling toys and cooking food, but they were all serving the same thing. There were swings set up, jungle gyms and trampolines – a great holiday for the kids!  During Eid, adults give children Eidi, i.e. a small sum of money as a present. A few kids come to our door saying ‘sikuku’ which means holiday and greeting us but were really asking for money. This was a common occurrence with kids we had met thus far on the streets coming up to us saying: “Give me money,” but happened even more so because of Eid. Overall, I was glad to have spent Eid in Zanzibar and witness the liveliness of the sikuku.

Make-shift swings at the Eid fair

Selling toys at the Eid fair

I got a guided tour of the Aga Khan Mosque, the oldest one in Africa, over 175 years old and admired the detailed wood carvings and the history of the uses of the mosque. We spent the rest of the weekend as typical tourists staying at a beach resort in Kendwa on the north side of the island where the monthly full moon party is held. We saw Michael Jackson come back to life, local Tanzanian dancers and held a snake. It was a great way of escaping from our escape.

Chilling with a snake at the full moon party

The Real World

The week started off with a BANG. Literally. One afternoon at work, I heard a loud ‘boom’ and was assured that it was nothing. I believed my coworkers.  I later found out what was common for Zanzibaris  was not so common for me. As we walked by the market we saw the roads blocked off and about three or four small enclosed fires in the middle of the road. We quickly avoided that route. The ‘booms’ kept going sporadically for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening. We found out that a Muslim cleric had been kidnapped and the party he was leading, Wamsho, was rioting so that he would be released. The police, in an effort to disperse crowds, were releasing tear gas grenades and firing gun shots in the air resulting in the loud ‘booms’ we kept hearing.

I was told everything would be back to normal the next day, so I went to work. Turns out nobody showed up, so I went for coffee with one of the other volunteers – bad idea. As we were walking towards my street, someone yelled ‘DANGER,’ we heard a loud boom and a crowd of people running in our direction trying to get away. We turned back immediately and went to the tourist side of town where there were no riots and took refuge at one of our friend’s hotels with a beautiful rooftop view of the city.  The ‘booms’ got more frequent but at least they were in a distance.  A few hours later, as the ‘booms’ subsided, we made our way back, with two bodyguards, to my apartment and I shut myself in vowing never to leave again as we had heard the rioting was going to get worse. The city was shut down – stores, markets, offices…everything. Thieves were taking advantage of the chaos in the city and ransacking stores.

Debris from the riots

After another day of staying in, I woke up in the middle of the night to some chanting and the nightly mosquito bites, even with mosquito nets. I had never heard the rioters chanting before, so I began to imagine the worst. Anything could happen at 2am. In the morning, however, I woke up to find out that the cleric Farid Sheikh who had disappeared was quietly dropped off on Kokoni Street (same street as my Swahili class) in an unmarked car and the ‘chanting’ I heard was actually them celebrating. What a relief. Life would be back to normal now.

On a more positive note, we went on a trip to Prison Island, which was never actually used as a prison but was later used as a quarantine island to keep diseases off other British territories in East Africa. We also started Swahili classes this week so as to better communicate with our coworkers and have conversations with people we encounter. Our teacher’s name is Mama Aunty, and she fits exactly that description. She is strict but very friendly and has been teaching foreigners for over 12 years. Maybe I’ll write my next post in Swahili …who am I kidding?!

Prison Island Tortoise Conservation Area

 On the weekend, as part of an impact assessment of my organization, UWZ, I went to the village of Kitogani on the south side of Zanzibar to visit Toti. We yelled ‘hodi hodi,’ meaning ‘May I come in?’ and were welcomed inside her hut where she put out a straw mat on the dirt living room floor for us to sit. The entire hut consisted of an undersized living room and two small rooms on either side one of which was used to cook. Toti began telling us about her life and how a number of years ago she had received training on how to make wicker baskets and started her own business. Since then she has been making bags, pouches, wallets, bangles, placemats, laptop bags and my favorite of them all – wicker guitar cases! She said she sold about 10 bags a month, 30 pouches and lots of bangles. The other items are all made to order. Her clients were hotels that sold these products to tourists.



Toti, showing off her guitar case



 She was very energetic and proud in telling us about how she went to Pemba (another Zanzibari island) to train other women to create these wicker bags and how she was able to showcase her work in Rwanda. She started this with the help of UWZ that provided her with the initial training on making these bags, and more recently to provide her with the support system to improve by assisting her to access grants, and providing marketing and bookkeeping workshops. This just goes to show that as much training as you provide someone, it takes a hardworking person to actually apply it and make something of it by using the techniques they have learnt. That was Toti, a woman with a disability that wasn’t going to stop her.

She had a number of new ideas and was constantly looking for ways to improve her products and stay competitive. She has been so successful that she has saved up enough money to buy land for a store of her own which is even bigger than her home! It was amazing and inspiring to see Toti’s success in her business and how she is willing to work hard and achieve a better life for her and her family and how UWZ has helped her with this. Toti is one of the few examples of a true success story stemming from development aid in Tanzania. Unfortunately, these success stories are not so common but they do instill hope for the agents of change.

Toti's store (a work in progress)

Paradise, here I come!

Today was the day we were going to Zanzibar.  Oddly enough, the one thing I was looking forward to most was unpacking; finally I wouldn’t have to live out of a suitcase. We made our way to Zanzibar, which is about a three hour ferry ride from Dar es Salaam – it was refreshing to be by the water and we even saw some dolphins along the way. After going through immigration (yes, we had to go through immigration even though Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam are both in Tanzania, because Zanzibar wants to separate itself from the Tanzanian mainland and become an independent nation), we were dropped off to our apartment. We came in and were pleasantly surprised – the place has four bedrooms for the two of us!  It also has a refrigerator, a stove, cable television, and a washing machine, all of which are considered luxuries in this part of the world. My roommate is Celine, she’s one of my colleagues from Deloitte, and I am delighted to be living with her. From now on, when I say ‘we,’ I am referring to Celine and myself.

The first order of business when we got to our place was finding a place for lunch. We went to a local restaurant across our apartment, Lukmaan, with our landord’s agent, Nasser, where we chatted with him and exhausted his entire English vocabulary. We then took a stroll through the market (more on this later), and then went to our respective offices to see where we would be going on Monday morning. I met my manager Donald, who spoke English well. I later found out he had studied in Germany and spent a considerable amount of time doing professional Swahili to English translation. This meant I wasn’t going to feel isolated in the office because of the language barrier. I was thrilled. During the week, I also met with the Chair of the Board and the other members of the Board which is made up entirely of people with various disabilities to discussion their vision of the organization and plans for the immediate future and where my role fit into that. Overall, the week was successful but I realized everything moves very slowly out here, so I will have to adjust to the ‘pole pole’ (slowly) lifestyle.

After having had our fifth meal at Lukmaan’s in the span of three days, we decided it was time we started cooking. Once at Darajani market we entered a narrow doorway and almost fainted by the strong stench of seafood.  Inside the market, there was a variety of different type of seafood – types of fish, octopus, squid, sting ray, and I think I even saw something that resembled a shark. As we continued the market tour, we also saw a similar area of meat and another area with live chicken. Doesn’t get much fresher than that folks! Next up were the fruits, veggies, and lots of spices (something Zanzibar is famous for).  

We did the spice tour on the weekend and a myriad of spices and fruit on the spice farm, including nutmeg, cinnamon, lemongrass, passion fruit and cocoa used for a variety of different purposes including medicinal, cooking and exporting. We visited the slave caves; Zanzibar has a rich history of slave trade. This particular cave had one hundred slaves living in it at any given time that were transported to the slave market by dhow (wooden boat) based on the demand. We ended the weekend with a trip to the north coast to visit Nungwi beach and watched a Masai football (i.e. soccer) game to get us rejuvenated for another week full of adventure.

Let's get together and feel all right.

Mambo! I have officially survived my first week in Tanzania. Things have been off to a good start, what with meetings tons of volunteers, learning about the Tanzanian development context and trying some Tanzanian food, I can say that it is certainly going to be a fun filled adventure.  I will be volunteering on the island of Zanzibar in Tanzania for three months through CUSO International, also known as VSO in the UK. It is a pretty neat organization that sends skilled volunteers from different parts of the world to developing countries by matching their field of expertise to the needs of organizations it partners with in the respective country.  During my placement in Zanzibar, I will be working as a Management Advisor with Umoja wa  Watu Wenye Ulemavu Zanzibar (UWZ), or the Association of People with Disabilities Zanzibar.

We arrived in Dar es Salaam City, where the VSO office is located, after a long flight from Toronto where we had a day long layover in London, most of which was spent in the Yotel sleeping. The Yotel is a mini hotel at the airport with cabins that look like they are from a cruise, not a nice one! We took the Heathrow express and ventured out into the city where we met Paddington Bear and had crab cakes at a pub near the Marble Arches after the obligatory London phone booth photo shoot.

During the flight, the attended insisted on giving me a special meal, so at meal time I got my food well before anyone else around me. I definitely hadn’t ordered the meal, but I wasn’t complaining. The next morning, after a tiresome flight we made it in to Dar es Salaam where we waited about an hour for our luggage to arrive. We were greeted by two volunteers, Barbra and Margaret, based in Dar and Kagera (a city in Northern Tanzania) respectively. There were 15 volunteers on the flight and one small bus, so it was a tight squeeze with the luggage in the aisles but we managed to make it to our hotel. Let’s just say we got to know each other REAL well along the way.

  

The next morning was our first day of a week of In-Country Training (ICT) which started off as: “Let’s scare these volunteers by telling them everything that can go wrong and see how they react.” That was resilience training. The week went on, slightly tamer as we were overloaded with information about development and details about housing and other logistics.

A member of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) talked to us about the role of Canada in Tanzanian development and how the international development realm has moved from backing government actions plans to increasing project based funding. This means that instead of supporting and then evaluating the government’s programs, funding is now given to specific projects created by the government and civil society organizations based on their impact. Tanzania for many years has been characterized as the ‘darling’ of the international donor community. Close to 40% of its budget is funded by outside donors. Despite increasing aid efforts, Tanzania is still one of the poorest countries in the world. 34% of the population lives off less than $1 a day. 75% of the population relies on agriculture, but this is growing at a much slower pace than any other industry and productivity is extremely low. Only 3% of the arable land in the country is being used for economic purposes. On the other hand, 60% of the population owns a radio and 46% of the population owns a cellphone. Mobile banking has been growing exponentially with people being able to transfer money and pay bills simply by providing a cellphone number.

 We went shopping at the expat mall, Mlimani City, where we bought a couple of essentials and got our internet and phone sorted out. This was the place to go if you missed anything from home – anything BUT a bathing suit. I was going to be living on an island with numerous beaches and alas, I had forgotten to pack an essential. Thus began my quest to find a bathing suit.

On Thursday, we went to the VSO office for training not in our usual private bus but in a very colorful public mini bus, referred to as a daladala. The name originated as the price for riding the bus used to be a dollar, so people went around yelling ‘dolla dolla’ and the name stuck. It is important to note that the price to ride is not a dollar but 300 Tanzanian shillings which is about 20 cents. We walked to Posta station and waited patiently for the daladala. The daladala follows no schedules so you never know how long you have to wait for the next one but they all have names on the front so you know which route its going to go. The daladala showed up after 15 minutes and the entrance was immediately surrounded by a crowd of people pushing and shoving each other to get in. Oh, I forgot to mention, no one lines up. We were told to be aggressive if wanted to get in so I was ready to fight.  After some serious elbowing, I got on the daladala but didn’t get a seat. Atleast, I was on. I held on for dear life as the daladala got so packed that there were people hanging from the door which remained open during the entire ride. Packed like sardines, we made it to our destination and were relived to get some fresh air that didn’t smell like sweat. All in all, we survived unscathed.

At training later that day, we learned about the role of gender in development and gender disparities in Tanzania. 30% of women have no primary school education compared to 17% of males. In rural settings, 1 in every 2 females is abused. The statistics are disheartening. The office of UNwomen is shared with the VSO office so I met a volunteer working on a project to train uneducated women on solar engineering using practical methods and another on educating rural Masai women. After a long week of training we went out to the harbor to enjoy a nice meal and then headed to a party hosted at the CIDA compound. I found it quite ironic that a development agency owns a compound with a tennis court, swimming pool, bar facilities as well as a playground. With a live band, hors d'oeuvres, and lots of Canadian conversation, I ended my week in Dar es Salaam.