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.
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.
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