THINGS ABOUT TANZANIA THAT PISS ME OFF*
1.
People
throw trash everywhere, and there are no cans, at all, for waste.
2.
Woman, who appear to have most of the jobs and
all of the domestic duties except hard physical labor like ditch digging (which still leaves plenty of physical labor,
believe me), get no respect from men.
Young pretty ones will get flirted with and
catered to, but that is to get them in the sack, and that’s not respect.
3.
Shopkeepers consider that the sidewalk in front
of their establishment is theirs for display, customer service, excess
inventory, etc. This leaves the
pedestrian in the street, not a safe place to be. (See next)
4.
There is a hierarchy of being on the street,
which goes like this: Trucks, then
buses, then cars, then motorcycles, then bicycles, then hand-pushed carts, then
pedestrians. It’s as if there is a caste ststem in which not having wheels
makes you an Untouchable. No crossing,
no matter how many pedestrians must use it, is safe for the walker, no consideration
or even quarter is given. To travel down
the street is to be constantly shunted aside by the merest sort of wheeled vehicle, and many
times there is no safe place to be shunted aside to. It does not matter if you are facing oncoming
traffic or not, you will still be unseen, ignored, turned in front of, in constant danger of
being run down or side-swiped.
5.
No napkins.
Ever. At nicer restaurants, they will bring a few to the table if you ask. Nevertheless, the country eats like Arabs,
with their right hands. Since services,
especially restaurant service, are
universally sub-par, if you choose to do so, you sit with your dirty hand
until they bring a wash basin, which may not
happen at all. Or there may be a dirty little sink somewhere, with no soap or
towel. Or, you can carry wipes, or a
handkerchief, or, as I have seen many times, wipe your dirty fingers on the
tablecloth. Yuck.
6.
No toilet paper. Ever, except in the nicest
places. Not only that, but public pit
latrines are gaspingly dirty, and rarely
have running water and soap I am
resigned to using them, but come on, do they have to be filthy? Don’t these people know ANYTHING about germs,
which are no respectors of the right/left hand dictum? No wonder there’s so much dysentery,
cholera, typhoid in the country.
7.
Maybe this shouldn’t piss me off, but people don’t
read books. Therefore there are no
bookstores.
8.
No Scotch Tape, and duct tape is so dear as to
be unaffordable on a Peace Corps salary.
Come to mention it, school and office supplies generally are just plain
crappy, that means pencils, pens, paper, notebooks, greeting cards, and there
is no such thing as index cards. The
exception is staplers, which are okay, and in constant use.
9.
No movie theaters except in Dar es Salaam. This is a deal breaker for me in considering
long-term residency.
10.
Boring cooking.
People, unsalted over-milled
hominy mush at every meal is just not appetizing. Besides ugali, there are about 3 recipes of
actual Tanzanian food: Meat stew made
with tomatoes and onions, pan-fried chicken, and greens cooked with onions. Oh,
and I am forgetting chapatti. Everything is cooked stove-top with lots of oil. There
ARE good and hot peppers, but you have to ask for them.
11.
And yet, they have satellite t.v., everyone has
a cell phone, they have Beyonce and JayZ and South African Soap Operas. They follow English Premier League
Football. Most middle-class people drink
water out of plastic bottles, which they then throw in the streets.
12.
They have something they call the internet. Teasers.
And please remember, this is my own list of things to be pissed off about. It's not the Peace Corps list, nor do they endorse it. They have their own, I'm sure.
No comments:
Post a Comment