We recently received an excellent piece of news. Six weeks ago there had been a major power outage on Zanzibar and power was not expected to be returned until the end of July at the earliest. This had left the fate of the final 2 weeks of our trip in limbo as horror stories from people coming from Zanzibar were quite frequent. No food, no water, no electricity; all bad things. Then all of a sudden (if you can call a 6-week wait that) the power was back on. With our time in paradise secure trip morale was at an all-time high.
This was in sharp contrast with trip hygiene which had reached an all-time low. The 4-day trip back to Moshi, getting up at 6am every day and traveling had left us far too exhausted to shower (not to mention the thought of having cold showers again after 2 weeks of warm water). Having thrown out most of my dirty socks, I had been wearing the same pair for almost a week now an ironic twist of fate as they were now filthier than the ones I had thrown out. Once back at the hostel, we had no toiletries, towels, or change of clothes and we were nearing a full week without completely cleaning ourselves (there is always time for a rinse of the key areas). In Uganda I shaved for the 3rd time in 6 weeks, but on a busride my shaving cream exploded and after another 2 + weeks by beard was full. We epitomize dirt and dirt epitomizes us.
Our first day back in Moshi was supposed to be an office day but we decided to use it to stock up on souvenirs. Shopping in Moshi can actually be quite fun when you are interested in looking around/bartering and we picked up quite a few cool knick knacks for family and friends. Shopping in Moshi is hilarious. If a shopkeeper doesn’t have what you want he will run up the street to another shop that has it and bring it back. If the size is wrong, he will repeat the same. This has less to do with good service than wanting to get in on the highly coveted Mzungu commission which he is sure to miss out on if we find the product on our own. Unfortunately for most of the shopkeepers, we aren’t fresh off the boat anymore and having spent 2 months interviewing small business owners we know the actual Tanzanian price. We got almost everything for around 25% of the actual offered price. One good (and cheap) gift I picked up for a friend was an Arnold Swarzeneggar movie collection (63 Arnold Movies – many doubles – on 1 DVD). People walk around the streets of Moshi with 3 foot stacks of caseless DVD collections of new and old releases selling massive film collections for only $4. I don’t mind spoiling that gift because I’m fairly sure Colby MacIntyre will never read this blog as long as he lives. The rest of you will have to wait.
Our office day eventually led us to the internet café where we tried to catch up on e-mails and 2 weeks of world news. Checking my bank account I was very shocked to see that $225 had been debited from my account from an ATM transaction in which I had received no cash. I spent the rest of my day running back and forth between phoning my bank in Dublin and trying to sort out luggage with Precision Air. Noticing my frantic hustle, one elderly gentleman struck up a conversation with me. When he found out I was from Canada he told me he had been to Montreal once in 1976. When I asked him what for he told me he had boxed for Tanzania in the Olympics. Then he mistakenly took my attempt at a handshake as a request to start boxing my palm and threw a sequence of rights and lefts. He went on to tell me he was off to Italy in a week or so to study for his PHD in economics and we quickly discussed some of Tanzania’s first presidents economic policies. I could tell by the smell of beer on his breath that he liked to have the odd drink so I took down his number with the promise of grabbing a beer sometime and hearing some more good stories. On parting I asked him how he did in the Olympics, which he replied he won the gold medal. I went back to the internet café and looked up his name and when I received no hits, I googled Tanzania Montreal Olympics. Turns out Tanzania (along with almost every other African country) boycotted those Olympics and refused to participate. Despite his bullshit I was still tempted to go for a beer with him. Finally, I was eventually able to sort out my bank problem; Permanent TSB will put the money back in my account without investigation and if for some reason the Tanzanian bank disputes the matter they will take it back out. This was a level of efficiency which I was not used to and was quite shocking. I feel I will not be able to adapt to the normalcy of the western world when I return.
The next day was our first day back at WODEF. Katie had a bit of an upset stomach and flaked out, leaving me to visit the village by myself. She missed out on what might be one of the best WODEF days of all time. When we got to the village the WODEF group introduced me to some women working in the vocational training program. They had baked me a delicious cake and we sat and chatted over a tea for some bit. Then it was off to visit a few projects in the local market and beyond.
After visiting the usual projects (chicken, tailoring, and vegetable stand) we headed off for something a little different. Visit to not one but two Masai villages! The first village sang a song and gave me a traditional Masai neck circle bead thing and a necklace. Not to be outdone, the next village had a little ceremony for us and gave me a beaded Masai chief/elder’s stick. They thanked me for the work I had been doing for Widows, Orphans, and Disabled and told me I was now one of them and welcome in the Masai village at anytime. It was one of the nicest presentations I’ve received to date. Then they proceeded to shower our entourage with bracelets, necklaces, and anything else. After the presentation we sat and talked to some of the village elders about the little projects they run. I always enjoy visiting Masai villages because they have almost completely maintained all of their old traditions and have no western comforts. There are different mudhuts with thatched roofs for males, women and kids. Children still have ears stretched for ear rings, cheeks burnt to keep out mosquitoes, and men take on many many wives and have many more children (One of the guards at our hostel has 72 half brothers and sisters!). Then they either raise cattle or farm on their massive plains of land. It was definitely one of my favorite days at WODEF and a highlight of the trip.
I know Katie wants to write further in depth about our last day at WODEF but I suppose I may as well add my thoughts about 2 months spent volunteering. Some of the best days of my life were at WODEF but also some of the most frustrating and annoying. They are very unorganized and seem to lack any real direction. As notifications of grants would roll in (grants which usually were for organizations with quite specific and different goals from WODEF’s) they would attempt to tailor-make new programs at the last minute to try and receive funding. They are quite young and it’s hard to know how much of this is growing pains and how much is just a leadership issue. I also think they may have grown too fast, with over 10,000 members in 4 regions of Tanzania. It makes it difficult to provide any real benefit to the members when a small head office is stretched extremely thin. The way we were handled at first was extremely annoying, we were given no real structure, no program, and it took almost one month to figure out a general idea of how WODEF worked. At times it felt like we were paraded around as the great white hope, rich Mzungus here to provide money for schools, projects, orphans, and anyone else who should so feel the need to want it.
On the positive side I think the seminars we taught are very beneficial and important. Most project-operators we met would say that lack of capital is the only problem facing their business when for many of these people they have no discernable goals or ideas for what to do with money if they were to receive it. If somebody in the town has a successful project many identical copycats open up right away. None of the projects have any discernable difference and owners will just compete on price harming the shopkeepers. One village almost everybody had a chicken project, radically reducing the price of chickens and eggs while almost everything else has to be imported from Moshi, Dar Es Salaam and Arusha with steep prices, most of the economic benefits leaving the town.
Accounting for most people is limited to purchasing your supplies at the beginning of the day and what is left over in your hand at the end of the day is your profit. One woman we met told us how she had the capacity to sell an extra bag of maize a week but didn’t have the funds to do it as she was a struggling single mother. Then she listed off her expenses which included extraordinarily high cell phone and hair dressing costs. We showed her that if she reduces here cell phone costs to 75% of current levels and hairdressing to half that in just over 2 months she could buy the extra bag of maize herself and increase her weekly profit from just $1 to $25. Who knows if she decided to make those changes. These are all main themes we tackled in our lectures. Some people came up afterwards and heartily thanked us, said they were rethinking their whole business. The people here are very smart, they just need to be exposed to some new ideas and move away from thinking of more money as a solution to their problems.
I feel we gained infinitively more personally volunteering then we could ever possibly put back into it. Unlike many pretentious volunteers I had no delusions of grandeur heading into this and was not expecting to save the world through my particular experience. What I received from WODEF was an insight into the day to day lives and problems of Tanzanians far greater than I could have gotten from anything else. The education translated into some of my own ideas for development, such as the incubator projects and the bulk of our entrepreneurship lectures. I hope I will be able to put a few more ideas to work in the future. Some of the things we have seen and done will take a while to sink in. Hopefully they will allow us to make a more direct and meaningful contribution in the future.
Many of the problems we experienced with WODEF we shared with them on our last day and made some recommendations going forward in the future. They listened attentively, thanked us for our input and support to building a better group but didn’t ask any follow up questions. I was left unsure whether our feedback was actually received or if us talking was just a one-way street.
The rest of the week was filled with dinners with colleagues, friends, and assorted random encounters. It flew by far quicker than we had hoped for and before we knew it, it was time for our last day in Moshi.
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