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.