The bus to Idodi

Last weekend Anette and I traveled to Idodi, 90km northwest of Iringa and 20km outside Ruaha National Park, where Anette helped facilitate a head teacher’s meeting for Friends of Ruaha Society at Idodi Secondary School. In a Land Rover the trip takes about an hour and a half, but I went by the only public bus that serves the villages near Ruaha and it took me five hours.

It was the worst bus I’ve yet been on in Africa – listing heavily to one side, holes rusted in the floor to give you a good view of the road beneath your feet, every window shattered like broken ice on a shallow pond. The window in my row of seats was half knocked out, the remaining glass turned inwards and barely hanging on, threatening to fall on and slice the next passenger. Large pieces of glass were scattered all over the floor of the bus, which had not been cleaned out in years.

First we waited at the bus station for a half an hour as the engine roared and smoked and I watched the rain slant through my broken window and soak the seat next to me. Then we started moving, but it was only to drive 20 meters back into town to a gas station, where it took us a half hour to fill up our 100-liter tank. As we waited, I watched a young man fill an old container with petrol and tie it fastidiously to the frame of his bicycle, and I wondered what would happen if he were to fall off his bike.

Finally the tank was full and off we drove, but alas, it was back the 20 meters we had just driven to stop for more passengers to cram themselves in like sardines. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud as I realized that after an hour we had gone in a 40-meter circle and were no closer to our destination. But such is African transport, and I was happy to be going out to Idodi.

The road is paved until about 15km outside of Iringa, and then it gets rocky and sandy, which is the rainy season means rocky and muddy. After two hours of being bounced around I was positive I couldn’t hold my bladder in such conditions any longer, and I prayed that we would get stuck so I would have a chance to get out and pee. My prayers were answered, for soon thereafter we heard a CLUNK and felt the whole bus grind to a halt. Sure enough, we were stuck in the mud and I was overjoyed. I navigated my way down the aisle over 50kg bags of maize flour (used to make the Tanzanian staple ugali) and plastic bags bursting with tomatoes and onions sold by side of the road vendors, and I leapt into the bush to relieve myself.

The driver and his crew were obviously prepared for such delays because they immediately broke out the shovels and began digging away to level the mud underneath the giant bald tires of the bus. After about ten minutes half the passengers got behind the bus and began pushing as the driver revved the engine. Slowly the bus lurched over the humps of mud and with the passengers jogging alongside we made it to drier ground.

At another one of our unplanned stops I saw two hands grab onto a window from the outside, and then watched as a man hoisted himself onto the roof of the bus. A bicycle was then lifted up to him and we took off down the road. I forgot all about him until about fifteen minutes later when the emergency hatch opened and suddenly two legs were dangling above my head - the guy jumped down from the roof, through the hatch and into the bus at speed!

My only regret is that I did not have our camera with me, so I will have to keep the images of rainy, muddy Iringa as seen through a jagged windowpane in my head until our next bus adventure. For those who know Spanish, this picture of another bus will provide some laughs - the "super ugly" express!

A Child Soldier in Sierra Leone

Upon returning from Idodi yesterday I read the last two chapters in A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah, published just last year. It is one of the most gripping, horrifying accounts of war I’ve ever read, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about Africa. I shudder to think that I was barely aware of situations like Sierra Leone and Rwanda when I was in high school; people my age trying to survive in those countries were exposed to the absolute worst of human nature, while I was afforded the privilege of a safe suburban upbringing.

Is it the accident of birth, as my grandmother used to say, that determines who experiences what in this world? To a certain degree I believe this to be true, which is why it is so important to travel – in books, on foot, in movies, or by dalla-dalla – and get a sense of what other people’s lives are like. Here are some other books I’ve read this year that have given me insights into the African experience:

When Victims Become Killers (Rwanda) – Mahmood Mamdani
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (historical) – Walter Rodney
Into Africa (Livingstone & Stanley) – Martin Dugard
The Zanzibar Chest (Ethiopia, Somalia, etc.) – Aidan Hartley
The Africa House (Zambia) – Christina Lamb
Dark Star Safari (Cairo to Cape Town) – Paul Theroux

CAC Swimming Champs '08

The Capital Athletic Conference (MD, DC, VA, PA) Swimming Championships finished up last weekend, hosted by my alma mater St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Six years ago, when I was a student and swimmer there, we couldn’t have hosted the event because we had just one 25-yard pool. Now there’s a state-of-the-art natatorium and SMCM have become annual hosts. Our women did well, the men are improving, and no one in the CAC this year beat my times from 2002: 59.29 in the 100 breast and 2:10.07 in the 200 breast. One year I’ll make it back for Alumni Day to see the new pool and see if I can still hang with any of the current swimmers.

Citizen Journalism: uandishi wa kiraia

Last Wednesday my senior classes were honored to have Maggid Mjengwa, Tanzanian journalist and blogger extraordinaire, talk to us about citizen journalism. He took this picture, and here's what he posted in Kiswahili on his blog about the visit:

Leo nilipata bahati ya kualikwa Iringa International School kuongea na wanafunzi wa sekondari juu ya dhana uandishi wa kiraia (Citizen Journalism). Natumia fursa hii kuwashukuru wanafunzi hao kwa kuniuliza maswali mengi na kushiriki kikamilifu katika mazungumzo yetu. Wengi wa vijana hao pichani wana blog zao.

Rough translation: Today I had the opportunity to visit IIS and talk to the senior students about citizen journalism. I would like to thank the students for asking many questions and participating actively in our talk. Many of these youths have their own blogs.

You can visit my students' blogs, which they created in our IT class, by going to http://globalfriendszone.blogspot.com
From this student's site, there are links to all the other students.

Ole Einar Bjørndalen

I know it's quite a leap from Kenyan violence and sustainable development to the relatively esoteric sport of biathlon (skiskyting) but if this blog is to be a reflection of my life and interests, then this post is long overdue. I moved to Norway in January 2004 to live with Anette and was immediately drawn into the world of biathlon. I quickly realized that Ole Einar was one of those athletes at the absolute pinnacle of his sport - so good his every move seems effortless, head and shoulders above the rest of the competition. This was also the time that I learned to cross-country ski (at the age of 24!!) and as my love of zooming through the snow-blanketed Norwegian forests grew, so did my love and respect for the sport of biathlon.

Four years later I'm as mad about biathlon as I was about baseball as a kid growing up in Maryland. Although I'm living in Tanzania and don't have a TV right now, I still managed to check the results of the recent IBU Biathlon World Championships online. Ole took gold in the pursuit, but was surprised by his 22-year old teammate Egil Hegle Svendsen in the sprint and the mass start. It was an auspicous week for the future of Norwegian biathlon, and should make for an exciting '08-'09 season leading up to the next Winter Olympics in Vancouver in 2010.

As I was digesting the news of Svendsen's improbable victories over his mentor, I realized why baithlon has smitten me the way it has - it's so much like swimming! For fifteen years I trained alone in pools all over the East Coast and lived for those few minutes of all-out competition at championship events. Although my teammates are lifelong friends and we shared the unique camaraderie of training and competing together, swimming is ultimately not team sport, it's intensely personal. There's no comparison to football, baseball, basketball, etc. So when I watch Bjørndalen gliding through the forest, then stopping alone to shoot down his targets before his competitors arrive, I get flashbacks of the 200 breast, my pull-outs, my turns, my strokes per length, and I am transported in that way that only sports can trasport a person - to the sublime!

So here's to Biathlon, Norway, Swimming, and the endless pursuit of self-improvement. It took me 15 years to break a minute in the 100 breast, and Ole Einar's got his eyes on gold in Vancouver.

The keys to sustainable development

Relationships and time, according to Andy Hart, are the two essential ingredients in a successful development project. So we learned today on our Geography class trip to Ismani village, located half an hour outside of Iringa on the tooth-rattling road to Dodoma. Andy, a British veterinarian and CMS missionary whose wife started Neema Crafts, took five students and me to see his development projects in the village, which include chicken vaccinations, cattle dip tanks, solar water disinfection, solar panel distribution, and most recently, bat farming.

Chicken vaccination is always the first project Andy implements in a new village. The average family in rural Tanzania usually keeps at least six or seven chickens, but is rarely able to increase that number because 60% of the chickens die every year from Newcastle disease (kideri in Kiswahili). For 2,800 Tsh, or about $2, Andy buys a vial of vaccine in Iringa and takes it to a village. There, he trains a local team to be vaccinators and community organizers. The team goes around to all the houses in the village and tells the families to keep their chickens inside that night; the next morning, the team comes to each house to catch and vaccinate the chickens.

Catching chickens, as anyone who grew up on a farm will know, involves diving behind chairs, under beds, and even climbing into cupboards. Once all the chickens have been vaccinated in this manner, the team has not only performed an invaluable veterinary service to the chickens, but they have (unbeknownst to the families) been able to assess the poverty level of each family in the village by looking for radios, lamps, water filters, and other possessions that indicate standard of living. If something troublesome catches their eye, they simply ask the family for a cup of tea, and then sit down to talk about it.

Once Andy chased a chicken into a grain silo and found a seven-year old child lying in the dark in a straw basket. The boy was born disabled so the family hid him away - common practice in a country with no social services and massive prejudice against disabled people. The neighbors didn’t even know the boy existed. Now, after two months of physical therapy, the boy is able to walk and will hopefully begin school soon. Contrast this with the highly paid mzungu who drives up in a shiny Land Rover to ask the families why they are so poor. Get it? Relationships. Catching chickens is everyday business, and villagers helping vaccinate chickens talk more honestly with each other than they ever would with an outsider with zero knowledge of their community.

The results of the vaccination program are astounding; many families see their chicken population quintuple within four to six months. Once these families have thirty or forty chickens running about the shamba, their children’s protein intake increases, which in turn improves their performance in school. Some families are inspired to entrepreneurialism, selling chickens for pigs, and pigs for cell phones and tin roofs that won’t leak during the rainy season.

Because of its quick, concrete results, the chicken vaccination program is the perfect way to gain villagers’ trust, and more importantly, for them to develop a new outlook on their own possibilities. With more money, a more comfortable home, and healthier children, villagers are much more inclined to listen to the next project Andy proposes, like cattle dip tanks, for example.

Cattle Dip Tanks

When Andy first started working in Ismani five years ago, the cattle dip tank that served the surrounding villages was falling apart. When the villagers came to him and asked how they could get a new one, he invited all the cattlemen to a meeting. Sixty four cattlemen showed up, and instead of being given a handout, Andy told them to go back to their villages and see if they could rustle up the materials – sand, bricks, wood, tin – to revitalize the dip tank. His only contribution was a few bags of cement from town. Three weeks later, the new dip tank was servicing 500 head of cattle per morning.

Now, the surrounding villages only lose three head of cattle per year, compared to 105 per year before the tank was renovated. Furthermore, the tank is making a handsome profit (about 200,000 Tsh per year) for the council of cattlemen elected by their peers to oversee it, and they are planning use this money to protect the spring from which everyone in the area gets their drinking water. My students and I crouched down at the spring, which is nothing more than a faint trickle, and tried to scoop up the water with our hands – no luck.

Andy explained to us that the cattle arrive first in the morning, drinking, urinating and defecating in the water, and then the villagers come to fill up their water jugs by using their hands or small spoons. One can imagine the extra hours of work this entails, not to mention the deadly diseases passed from home to home by this water. The council’s plan is to create three concrete tanks that will fill up overnight, so that the cattle can’t get to the spring in the morning and the people can simply turn the tap and fill their jugs in a matter of minutes.

The Tanzanian government, interestingly, has also launched a campaign to renovate dip tanks, but in contrast, they use 10 million Tsh - per tank. As much of that money goes to outside contractors and corrupt officials, I doubt there is any money for the local to reinvest in frivolities like protecting their drinking water.

SODIS: Solar Disinfection of Water

SODIS solar disinfection of water is perhaps the cheapest and easiest to implement of all Andy’s projects: fill a bottle with water, leave it in the sunshine for a few hours, the water heats up, the parasites die.

I’ll get to the specifics in a bit, because it’s a bit more complicated than this, but consider the fact that most African villagers use charcoal (which means they cut down all the trees in their shamba) to make their water safe for drinking. Now consider that more women and children die in Africa each year from smoke than from malaria. No, I don’t mean cigarette smoke (thankfully, this is one category in which Africans are world leaders) but smoke from cooking fires, which is inhaled at close range by women and children on a daily basis. One-week old babies, wrapped tightly against mother’s back as she stirs the evening meal, are powerless to stop the smoke from entering and destroying their tiny lungs. Respiratory systems are severely damaged, leading to an overall reduction in immune system efficiency and an ultimate death from flu or pneumonia.

Can these deaths really be prevented just by putting bottles out in the sun? Andy believes so, and so do the thousands of villagers in the Iringa region who he has helped to begin purifying their water by using SODIS technology. Ideally, the bottle should be between 1 and 2 liters in capacity, and should be placed on a strip of corrugated metal to help the water heat up faster and more thoroughly. This allows the water to reach 30 degress C, at which point all harmful parasites die. Two hours of direct, hot sunshine will do the trick, but six is better.

But where can the villagers get corrugated metal and plastic bottles? Half the mud huts in these villages are roofed with corrugated metal, so there are always scraps lying around, and there just so happens to be a spring water-bottling factory (Maji Afrika) not 30km outside Iringa. These bottles are usually chucked from bus windows (like the blue plastic bags that blight the gorgeous African landscape) or into burn piles where they leach their poisonous chemicals into the atmosphere one way or another. So instead of degrading the environment with these bottles, we can actually beautify the land and save people’s lives while we’re at it.

Andy has introduced this concept to dozens of local schools, ensuring that each child places a full bottle of water on the roof of the classroom in the morning, so that when school ends he or she can take a bottle of clean water home for the night. Anette and I have been using SODIS here at home in Iringa for several months now, and we would like to help students at all 23 of FORS’ schools in Idodi and Pawaga to do the same thing.