On the Other Hand

 

Many of you pointed out to me or have remarked that my outburst of negativity in January deserves a gut check.  If I hate it so much, why am I here?  Many have offered advice and comfort, good advice and real comfort.  I got 3 valentines, two very wonderful handwritten letters and a surprising care package from my sister Becky.  (Surprising not because she isn’t caring, thoughtful and generous, but because it came out of the blue.)  My latest bout of gastro-enteritis solved itself with Pepto-Bismol and BRAT (no antibiotic intervention required),  and, after a spate of truly horrible hot steamy days and nights, the weather is a bit cooler  now as we progress toward rainy season.  For these and other reasons I ‘m in an incredibly cheerful mood, and thought that it was time for On the Other Hand:  Ten Things about Tanzania that I Love. 

Not a complete list, and only so far.  But I don’t want to bore you, my faithful readers.

1.        Packeties.  You have to understand that booze is more sinful here in TZ than it is in the US.  There are many fundamentalist Christians and Muslims who practice abstinence, and women in general are not culturally ‘allowed’ to drink.  There are, of course, many alcoholics, and alcohol abuse is evident, especially in places where jobs and money are scarce. 

Ambivalence about liquor leads I think to a manner in which hard liquor is served in TZ that I find convenient and worthy of importation to America.  Packeties are plastic sachets (little packets) of TZ-made liquor.  The type equivalents are rough:  Konyagi is ‘gin’, Valeur is ‘brandy’, and Zed is, well, flavored ‘rum’, I guess.  The packets are 500ml, a ‘tot’ or shot.  Available in bars and by the box of twenty at liquor stores, for the Tanzanian it means that there is no ordering of ‘mixed drinks’ in a bar, or, as we used to say in Waco, liquor by the drink. The barmaid brings you a soft drink and a packetie.  As a service, she will cut it open for you, but she is not ‘serving’ liquor. For me there is the advantage of inventory and portion control. You count up how many empty packeties you have, and that’s how many drinks you’ve had.   Keeps me honest, especially when I ‘m trying to keep it to 1 at cocktail hour.

They are also cheaper to buy than a bottle of booze.  The general TZ Rule of Pricing applies:  if you have enough money to buy a lot, you can afford to pay more.  In other words, the reverse of volume discounting prevails.

The portability is especially appealing. No need to carry a glass bottle around, or transfer to a flask.  Going to a BYOB party?  Packeties can be tucked in pocket or purse, and they make excellent falsies.  By the time you are not false advertising, the guy who may be attracted by said false advertising is probably too drunk to care.  You certainly are.

Finally, they can be stored in any corner of the freezer, a boon when ice is at a premium and a cold libation a must.

The downsides are few.  The obvious one is that this is Tanzanian booze, not aged in the barrel or anywhere near that.  Kinda raw. So you need to mix with a soft drink, fruit juice, or tonic for a palatable highball.  My personal fav is Valeur with Coke and a squeeze of lime.

Also, and this harkens back to the ambivalent attitude about drinking that prevails, they are not sold in dukas or in grocery stores.  There are also not many liquor stores, although you can buy them to carry away at bars.  The advantage there is that they cost hardly any more by the piece in a bar than they do when you purchase a whole box (see:  Rule of Pricing, above).

Also, they are hard to open.  It almost takes more than teeth, and with a knife you are going to have some spillage.  The plastic is extremely durable, thick and tough, due to the corrosive nature of alcohol, I guess.  Rule of Thumb, your Leatherman or Swiss Army knife should be equipped with scissors.

 

Other things I love about Tanzania are:

 

2.       Fresh fruit and minimally processed raw nuts.  Mangoes, bananas, passion fruit, watermelon, grapes, even apples, and berries in season.  Almonds, cashews, peanuts, walnuts.   All widely available ripe and delicious.

3.       I love having clothes made to order from colorful cotton cloth.  Also purses, head wraps, and napery.

4.       Care packages from home.  Although, I think I have enough Q-Tips, thank you guys.  I have about 2 thousand.

5.       Almost all the native trees have flowers.  Jacaranda, cassia, kapok, jasmine, mlonge, flamboyant, bottle brush.  All colors, all shapes, all sizes. I’m sure you know in the abstract that Africa teems with life.  Usually, this means bugs, and maybe snakes.  But it also means plants.  They strive and compete for a place here, and for trees that means big, attractive flowers.  The accompanying birds are incredibly varied and fun to watch, too.

6.       Things really are cheap, and when you find the sweet spot between serviceable, durable and extremely affordable, that’s a good place to be.

7.       I love being part of the Peace Corps.  I thought I would, and I do.

8.       Tinga Tinga paintings.  They make me smile.

9.       I love living out in the country.  This is probably the only time I will ever do it unless I move back to the farm in Waco.  (Possible, but not likely.)  The stars and moon, the quiet, the big vistas, the rambles over trails and little country roads.  Getting up early, not watching TV, and country people all add to my pleasure.  I think a lot about the farm in Waco, and my grandparents’ life there.  All good, all extremely good things.

10.   The love I feel for my students makes my heart feel wonderful.  It may be healthy, even, but anyway, I love the love.

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Compare and Contrast

As many of my 16 or so readers know, my daughter Josie recently took a teaching job with a company called Maple Leaf Schools, and moved to China, to a small city of 3 million near the Russian and North Korean borders.  We’ve had a couple of Skype conversations and several really nice emails.  Of course I would be interested in her new job even if I wasn’t myself 1) overseas and 2) teaching for the 1^st time (if you don’t count Sunday school.)  Josie and I always have a lot to talk about, now it seems that we have so much to talk about that I miss her even more.

We’ve been talking a lot about settling in and first days of school.  Settling in has included some very similar experiences, like gastro-enteritis (pole Neal), smelly bathrooms (nobody does plumbing like Americans, we rival the Romans in that regard), kitchens which don’t feature ovens, and buying new stuff to outfit a new home.  In my case, I had 10 weeks of being mama’d by Flora Maringo, who the Peace Corps wisely engaged to introduce me to the mysteries of the Tanzanian household.  So when I moved into my own apartment at SEGA I was at least ready to sort out taking care of myself in the manner afforded by the country.

I also made friends with Tasmin, who is Arabic but born in Morogoro, and who keeps a shop on the Dodoma road.  Her establishment is 8’ by 8’ and all four walls and 3/4’s of the surface area are stocked to the ceiling with all manner of cooking and household wares.  I tell her what I want, she has a boy scramble up a ladder to fetch what she has to show me, I make my selections and when I am finished she gives me a little discount on the jumla (final bill). Nothing is of very high quality.  Forks bend when you eat, glassware is fragile, plastic fades immediately and becomes brittle, tupperware tops don’t fit.

Josie and Neal, on the other hand, went to Wal-Mart, and IKEA in Dailin.  On their way home they stopped at Starbucks.  They bought exactly the same stuff, dish drainers and waste baskets etc., that you or I would buy in the US.  They are living in a big apartment on the 7^th floor of their building. (Are there still any clay and wattle huts in China? There are certainly no high rise apartment blocks in Morogoro.) In their city there is all manner of American-marketed fast food, and, although I haven’t heard this, I expect that American culture is widely available:  clothes, movies, video games, music.

This is not the case in Tanzania, except maybe for the clothes.

Today, I am sporting a new outfit which I picked up, literally, at the Saba Saba Soko.  Saba means 7, and the Saba Saba is a flea market that operates on Sundays, about a mile from the big downtown soko, the main food market.  Many of the items sold at the Saba Saba are new, but mostly people go for the clothes which are sold from big jumble tables and on the ground.  The stock arrives in huge bales wrapped in plastic sheeting, as big and heavy as cotton bales.  The covering is carefully opened and hundreds of items are dumped all together, ready to be picked over and purchased for as little 20 cents apiece.  The clothes have been fumigated and maybe even washed, most have all their buttons and only once in awhile will you find anything that is too stained or ripped to be worn. A fellow PC vol and I had a fun morning recently standing side-by-side with Tanzanian girls and women, pawing through hundreds of blouses, dresses, skirts and jackets, while we tried to ignor the noisy hawking of a teenager with a battery-powered PA horn, standing on the pile of clothes and calling us ‘My Mother’ or ‘My Sister’ while shouting his wares. You try on the stuff when you get home, and, of course, all sales are final.  My rayon long skirt, made in Indonesia and marketed by Nordstrom, and my black cotton peasant blouse, made in India, cost $1.55.  I had great luck on that shopping trip:  7 tops and 3 skirts for 8,000 shillings, about 5 dollars. And every item was donated by the good folks of North America.

Everyone that I know at school and in town wears either traditional Tanzanian clothes, kanga and kitange, or, in the case of the white collar men and women, Western style clothes, in styles that Ron Burgundy would have approved.  But most of the people struggle for work, and  for money, and wear cast-off clothes.  It is hard to go anywhere without seeing a T-shirt from a major US university, or advertising a North American team, product, or clothing company.  Sometimes the results are arresting:  the beggar wearing a filthy Harvard sweatshirt, the man pulling a 2-wheel cart in a Ralph Lauren Polo T-shirt.

The difference, I guess, with China is that in Tanzania these markers of our culture have no meaning to the Tanzanian.  They are worn innocently. I imagine that, in more ways than one, China and the US are partners in the global dispersion of North American culture.  Tanzania is the end of the line, and doesn’t seem to have much say.

I often ponder the economics of the Saba Saba enterprise. Of course, it helps if the ‘source’ of the goods drops it in the Goodwill box, if you turn back the capital clock to zero, so to speak. But, imagine.  There is a designer in New York or LA.   Her company designs a shirt at a price point Nordstrom or Old Navy can sell, in a color and style that will be popular that year.  The specs are transmitted electronically to a manufacturer in Pakistan, or Guatemala, and the shirt is produced in a factory there, often using fabric from another country.  The manufactured items are inspected, labeled, priced and shipped to America, where the shirt is displayed, advertised, maybe marked down. Sold, it is worn, successfully or not, and eventually discarded.  To be fumigated, sorted, baled and shipped to Africa to be sold yet again for a pittance in a flea market.  Only then, after another life with a boy who sells packets of peanuts for a dime at the dala standi from a woven tray on his head, when it’s in rags and scraps, does that human article pass out of human hands.

So many jobs, so many stops and transactions. And someone is living on  it at every stage.  Literally around the world.  Frankly, my head spins.  Does that make China seem nearer, or farther away?  Hard to say.