Given Days

So...breasts. There are many of them in the world, they’re all around me, and they’re often out. Not like people go running around naked or anything like that. But nursing children has gotta be done, there ain’t no formula....and the women here are, as a rule, rather charitably endowed. Which means that during conversations, or even meetings, one of the most important skills for a Peace Corps Volunteer to cultivate is the ability to maintain eye contact...no matter what. It’s gotten to the point that Cirque du Soleil could be performing naked behind whoever I’m talking with. I might not be listening, but I’m looking you in the eye.

Legs, on the other hand, are a horse of a different color. Tanzanian women do not show their legs. Not their knees, not their upper calves. Doesn’t happen. And you just kind of get used to that. Then all of a sudden your boy is back in the United States, where the Bill of Rights specifically allows for the showing of as much upper thigh as possible. Not only is he back in the United States of Amazing, but he’s at a water park. Where people where bathing suits. And suddenly the eye contact skills come in handy once again. Not that I was ogling around ogling like a degenerate (maybe a little), but more that I had to fight the urge to tell half of the people I passed by that, for the sake of communal decency, they needed to cover up. Now. There were no Victorian bathing costumes handy, or I would have been slinging those babies like it was 1799.

Have been noticing a weird dichotomy in Tanzania. My work takes me into town fairly often. When I say town, I generally mean Mafinga or Iringa. Mafinga has maybe 50,000 people, Iringa maybe double that. Both have electricity, running water, TVs in most houses, a couple halfway decent restaurants, and a ton of bars. These people don’t grow corn. They buy it. Now most of the people who live in town either came from rural villages, or have family who still live there, or both. They travel vijijini (to the villages) pretty often, they know how to swing a jembe (hoe), and they respect the rural life, even though they don’t really want to live porini (in the wild). But not all. The weirdest thing has happened to me a few times. I’ve had Tanzanians, people who were born, bred, and have lived their entire lives in cities or bigger towns, absolutely bust a gut laughing when I tell them I live in a village. What do you use for electricity, they ask? I don’t have any, I say. How do you get your water, they ask? I carry it. Then they start laughing. They make jokes. How will you call us? Do you have cell service? Or do you have to climb a tree?

No. No trees involved. Thanks.

It IS funny. I get it. I come from a fairly developed nation, and the notion of me sitting outside, hand-scrubbing me civvies, still makes me laugh, even though I do it every Thursday. But this isn’t my country. It’s theirs. And the rural life is a foreign concept to them. So is the poverty. There’s this huge and growing disconnect between rural and urban Tanzania. 50% of rural households are designated as living in poverty, compared to 38% urban. 85% of the country’s poor live in rural areas. Health care is also far worse in the villages. So is education. So, oddly enough, are taxes. Rural Tanzanians pay a ton more taxes (for schools, water systems, road services, construction of village buildings, etc.), mostly because they are much easier to find then their cosmopolitan brethren. Tanzania had 8 million people 50 years ago. Now there are more than 40 million people, and a greater and greater number are moving into town every year (urban growth rate is 5%, rural is 2%). There was even a Tanzanian television show called Maisha Plus (Life...Plus) where they sent 10 urbanites off to live in the villages for a few weeks or months, and it was hilarious, because none of them had any idea what the hell to do (Paris, Nicole, anyone?). Development is good in a lot of ways. A good education, water, light, roads, none of these are bad things. But when I, who have lived here for 14 months, have seen and experienced a side of Tanzania that some Tanzanians are unwilling to acknowledge...I see a problem. When villagers who earn well under $2 a day are being governed exclusively by people with Landcruisers and refrigerators...I see a disconnect.

If you ever want an interesting look at a part of the world not all that far from me, read What is the What, by David Eggers. It’s written pamoja (together) with a Sudanese man, Valentino Achak Deng, who had to flee his country in the 80’s because of the widespread slaughter of Southern Sudanese by the North (this is, of course, ongoing, but we’ll set that aside for the moment). He paints a beautiful picture of rural Sudan, and he talks about an argument that gets right to the heart of the problem that a lot of development workers have. One rich man in his village buys a shiny, shiny, shiny, new bicycle. Nobody has ever seen anything this beautiful. Men are ready to divorce their wives and marry it (kidding). But then a debate breaks out in the community. The bicycle is covered in plastic wrap for transport. Many men in the village don’t want the owner to remove the plastic wrapping. Because then...the bicycle will get dirty. Whereas if we don’t remove the plastic...the plastic gets dirty.

This isn’t me being funny. There are plenty of bicycles I’ve seen in Tanzania with the plastic wrapping still on, where it’s been for years. It’s tied up somehow in this belief that if the thing itself is never tarnished, it’s still perfect. Even if it looks horrible. And I get it. I got a new pair of running shoes for Christmas, and I took a picture of them, before I ran them into the ground. And my villagers don’t have cameras. But where we get into trouble is when this desire to preserve the perfection of things overrides the desire to use them. Another story (this is third hand, so the details might be a bit sketch): an aid organization, in another country, gives a village school a set of colored pencils and a coloring book for each student. The organization comes back a couple years later, and one of the reps who was there for the last giveaway asks if the kids liked using the coloring sets. The head teacher of the school smiles, nods, and leads the aid worker to the storage room, where we find, of course, all the coloring sets sitting, unused, in their original wrappers. We are saving them for a special day, he says. For kesho (tomorrow), maybe? But kesho never comes.

Would like to close this post with a little bit about a particular Tanzanian phrase that always strikes me deeply. Two or three times, when I have heard a friend talk about the death of someone close to them, they have said, “Mungu alimpenda mno”, or “nilimpenda sana, lakini Mungu alimpenda zaidi”. “God loved him/her too much” or “I loved him very much, but God loved him more”. One of my very best friends said that to me a few days ago, before going to the funeral of one of her old friends. There is something beautiful, I think, about death being treated like that, like a going home. We only have so many years, so many days, so many hours. And then they’re gone. I’m not sure what I believe. I didn’t come here to learn about faith, and yet faith is what more and more of my writings are about. Likewise, I didn’t come here to find my purpose, and yet the question following me every day is: what will I do with my given days? This time, this job, this side of life, have meant more to me than I can ever express in these many meager words. But it’s halfway over. Every new day is another step down the hill, not up it. But down the hill towards what?