Work Like Mama Africa

 I must be fascinated by laundry.  This post is 2 attempts to describe what household water is like in Africa:  First,  I want to set down what I do on Sunday morning, on my 1 day off.  Please remember that here with my host mama there is a maid in the house, and electricity.  Also a gas stove to cook inside, appliances, television and plenty of water, even if it is a little dirty, and not safe to drink.

I wash a small load of laundry:  First, heat a liter or so of water to boiling on the stove.  Mix it in a bucket of cold water to which you then add laundry soap and non-chlorine bleach.  The soap is super full of surfactants and water softener so that it will clean the clothes.  Put the clothes in the bucket of warm soapy water.  Agitate by hand, bending over at the waist for as long as your back will let you.  The water turns red from the dirt in the clothes.  Scrub dirty spots between your knuckles.  Wring out the soap as much as you can and put the clothes in another bucket.  Then put cold water in that bucket to rinse.  The dirty water goes down the drain in the choo, where you are performing this operation. 

Rinse the clothes in the bucket, then wring them out again and rinse them again until the water is clear, maybe 2 more times.  Remember, you didn’t carry the water for this operation into the house, the maid did that.  All you have to do is put it in the bucket and pour it down a drain when you are finished.  Still for a couple to T-shirts and some underwear you are bending, stooping, wringing and carry pounds and pounds of water.  I made the tactical mistake of taking my bath this morning before I started to do this, and by the time I take the clothes outside to hang them on the line, I am dripping with sweat, and my back is in spasm. 

When the clothes are dry, or dry enough as the case may be, you iron them.  Every single piece.  This is because flies lay their eggs on the drying clothes, and if you put them on damp or fail to iron them, the larvae will survive and maybe bore into your skin to pupate.   Again, in this modern house there is electricity, an electric iron, and an ironing board. So I feel very lucky to have these modern conveniences.  Tonight, my clothes will be clean and wearable.  Time estimate, about an hour for the washing and an hour for the drying.  A small load, just a couple of t-shirts, a nightgown, some underwear. 

Now imagine you are Mama Africa.  You haul the water from an outside cistern or tap (when it is running.)  Maybe you haul it from a dirty river or stream, or you haul the clothes down to the stream itself.  You don’t have too much soap, maybe a bar of Fels Naptha (lye soap) and no bleach.  You don’t have hot water.  You scrub the clothes with your fists, or with rocks and your fists, or on rocks.  You dry the clothes and then burn charcoal in a brazier to heat an iron so you can kill the bugs on the clothes.  And you do this for all the laundry of your household, because you do the laundry.  Your husband and your sons and small children don’t, and your bigger daughters are away at school or working, or already married.  You wash, and iron, sheets, towels, work clothes, school clothes and table cloths, every week. 

Thinking about it this way, I am so grateful for my mama (landlady), and for the Peace Corps, which matched me up with her.  I believe Mama Flora really understands how incredibly sheltered and spoiled I am, and she still takes care of me, she doesn’t despise me or hate me.  And I think about Mama Africa, and everything the women on this continent do to keep things going.  No wonder they sometimes look at us carefree mzunza’s, especially the older ones who aren’t even pretty, with suspicion and distrust.  Are we not an admonition?  Or crazy to be here not as tourists, but trying to live?

Mama Flora & Water 

Mama Flora Maringo is 43 and pretty, with soft brown skin and expressive eyes.  She looks alert and smart, but she sings and dances and smiles a lot.  She is single.  Without having discussed too much with her the history of her life, I believe she has never been married.  Her mother is alive and lives in an apartment for the elderly in town.  She has an adopted daughter, Nasra, and she also supports the 4 children of her sister, who passed away 4 years ago from an infection acquired after a C-section.  The baba, their father, is “underemployed” as we would say. The baby, Bessie, is the light of Flora’s eyes.  Flora still misses her sister, her dada, I can tell. 

Flora works hard.  She has a job for a local telephone & communications company.  This keeps her busy Monday thru Saturday.  She also has a guesti or guest house, with 8 small rooms on the property here where her house is.  There is one permanent resident, a good looking young man who teases me about my Kiswahili, and many other people who come and go, mostly young Tanzanians who are traveling, looking for work,  heading somewhere for school or just seeing  another part of the country. Flora tells me that when the local University is in session, which it will not be until Fall, the guesti  fills up with students and  the place is a lot more lively. 

Also on the property is one of 2 small businesses Flora owns and manages.  These are called stationary dukas or shops;  they sell paper, notebooks and school supplies, and offer copying, printing, binding and internet services.  The one here is very small, but still employs full-time a lovely young woman named Grace, whom I talk to as I come and go.  Grace also watches the house during the day if no one else is home, and keeps the keys.  I have taught myself to tell her in Kiswahili that I need the key, or that I am dropping off the key, and what time I will return.  She keeps track and reminds me in a gentle way if I am late.  Mama’s other business is a stationary duka at the University, which she says is a much larger operation, but which only makes money when the students are in town. 

Mama is a woman after my own heart.   The Peace Corps couldn’t have picked a better Home Stay Mama for me.  I hope I have made a friend for life. 

Today, Mama made homemade donuts called andazi for breakfast, and a delicious smoothie-type juice from sweet alligator pears (parachichi) and passionfruit.  I mix a little yogurt in mine and smack my lips as it goes down.  Flora, Nasra and Rehama, the house dada (sister), or house maid, are used to it, but Rehama’s son Hamidi’s eyes widen a little when he sees me spoon in the yogurt;  he doesn’t like yogurt and gives me the universal kid expression for ‘yuck’. 

It is Sunday, so of course I am doing laundry.  I’m getting the hang of it now, and do it entirely outside, and entirely with cold water.  I have not yet started using Fels Naptha, or a bar of lye soap, but I’ve seen Flora, Nasra and Rehama using it and it makes some pretty good suds.  Now, after 6 weeks of laundry, cooking, and bathing, I know much more about water and how it affects the lives of my Host Family.  

First, there are a couple of things that would apply anywhere.  Flora lives in the suburbs, a newer part of town.  So water is not as established here as in the Center.  Second, Morogoro is a growing community, because of its cooler, elevated location, view of the mountains, and proximity to both Dar and the capital, Dodoma.  The increase in population has resulted in a stress on the water system.  

When I arrived in mid-June we were at the tail-end of the rainy season.  It rained, hard, 2 or three times a week.  At those times, water came gushing out of the taps, at high pressure, and very dirty.  Rehama  used 5-gallon buckets to haul it to large plastic lidded garbage cans in the pantry so as to let the dirt settle out of it before we used it.  At the same time, I now know, Mama was storing water in her cistern, located out by the front door, collecting water from the city pipe when it was flowing.   The cistern is made of concrete and lined with sheet metal, contains 600K gallons, and is, I think, unusual, none of the other host families seem to have one.  In this country of everything being constructed laboriously by hand, this cistern must have been made by men with tools:   back hoe, welding, concrete construction.   I have come to see it as very impressive. 

There is also a 2,000 gallon black plastic storage tank of the roof of the house, supplied by city pipes, but I think the water pressure must be very high to get it in to the tank, as there is no pump or other way but water pressure to lift the water into it. It is hooked downstream directly to the house taps.  We checked it this morning, however, and it is empty.  I don’t think It will be in use again until the rains return in November or December. 

None of the water I am describing is potable.  We boil and filter city water for cooking and drinking. 

Since the first part of July, we have had no rain.  Our taps have not run at all since last week.  Mama says they will not run again until November.  No more water from the city.  Now, we haul all our water for laundry, cleaning and bathing from the cistern into the house in plastic buckets.  This morning, for the first time, Mama went out and bought potable water.  She brought it home, 12 litres or about 25 pounds, in a plastic bottle, like you would use in a water cooler, on her head. (I rushed for my camera but didn’t get a picture in time.)  From now on, Mama says, she will buy our drinking and cooking water.  Too much time, and gas, to heat up water from the cistern, which also smells pretty bad.  

So, Mama is lucky in some ways, because she has her big cistern.  Although she can’t take advantage of city water in the dry season when it does flow because the water pressure is too low, from what I have heard, water pressure is dropping all over Kola Hill.  Some of my fellow PCT’s and their host families already don’t have enough pressure to get the water into their houses;  they must go out to a tap in the lowest part of the yard.  On Tuesday, while we were at school, a truck mounted with a loud speaker passed by, telling us that water was to be rationed, only 3 days a week for each neighborhood.  I am now wondering what other families are doing to get their water.  Do they have pumps?  Wells?  Cisterns underground, like Mama's, that can't be seen from the road?

The funny, or maybe sad, thing is that Morogoro is, it appears to me, in a huge watershed, with hundreds of thousands of acres of water coming off the mountain draining to the city during the rainy season. And it rains, hard, every day during the rainy season from November to January and in April and May.  But in this otherwise bustling, growing and peaceful place, there are no dams, no reservoirs.  It makes me wonder if the electricity will become sporadic as the water drains away, since there can be no hydro-electric generation in the dry season if there is no storage of water.  I’ll be leaving in a week to go to my school site, so I won’t know.

As with everything else I have experienced in Africa, there are no easy answers.  I tell Mama about American water companies, public and private, and how dams and wells are built, and how the water runs all year long to every tap in my country, unless there is a bad drought.   Another way in which my country sounds miraculous to the African.  Mama is happy and content with her life, she doesn't want to go anywhere, she just wants what every Mama wants, to get Nasra and her nieces and nephews through school, and settled. She would also like a car, and a flat screen television. Still, America must sound to her like some unknowable paradise. Just as I couldn’t really imagine this place until I came here, so must the US seem to her.