Picking Corn

June is harvest month here in Iringa, so today Anette and I put our hands to good use by picking corn, a first for both of us. Planted by hand just before the December rains, the corn matured in March but has since turned brittle brown and yellow. I had been wondering why people hadn’t harvested the ears before now, so this week I asked the woman who bakes our bread and lives on a good-sized shamba next to my school. She told me that for making ugali, the Tanzanian staple food, it’s best to wait until the corn has dried before you pick it. When she told me that she was going to start her harvest this weekend, I asked if we could lend a hand.

This morning when we arrived she was already out picking corn, so her seven year-old son led us through the rows of stalks to the far end of the shamba where a group of people were working, talking and laughing together. A sister and some other relatives had come into town for the harvest, and they were all happy (if a bit surprised at seeing wazungu - white people - in the shamba) to have two extra pairs of hands to help out.

Picking corn is not nearly as difficult as the preparation for planting corn, so we learned quickly. We were each given a small, flat stick and shown how to use it to cut open the dry leaves encasing the ears of corn. After opening the leaves all we had to do was twist the ear until it came off, then toss it into one of several piles scattered among the rows. Within five minutes we had learned the Kiswahili words for stalk and row, and we kept smiling at each other thinking how good it felt to have the sun on our necks and our hands busy with something other than a laptop.

We chatted with those nearest to us as we worked our way down one row and up the next, exchanging information about farming methods in our respective cultures. Everyone was shocked to hear that we harvest most of our corn by machine in America; they understood how tractors could prepare the land and do the planting, but to do the harvesting, too?! “What a life!” they exclaimed.

After about an hour and a half, our friend recognized that our pace had slowed considerably, so she invited us to take a break when we came to the end of our row. As we walked back to her house she showed us bean, pumpkin and potato plants growing happily at random throughout the cornfield. For the next couple of hours we sat and talked with her while waiting for the midday meal.

During this time, of course, the others continued their work in the field. The housegirl (Tanzanian term for domestic help) stopped picking corn so that she could prepare our food, and immediately after serving us she traipsed back out into the shamba (not having eaten) to help the others bring in the day’s harvest. So as we sat comfortably drinking our tea and digesting our meal, the others were walking back to the house with 50 to 70 kilo bags of corn on their heads.

I’ve accepted that I’ll never be able to carry heavy things on my head, and that most African women are stronger than I’ll ever be, but my hope is that by simply pitching in we at least gain a bit more respect from the locals. We also become familiar with the details and the cycles of life in Tanzania. For example, we’ve enjoyed eating ugali with our hands ever since we came here, but today we learned about the whole process of how it goes from the stalk to our stomachs.

When the heavy bags of corn are brought to the house, they are beaten with sticks to break the kernels off the ears. A pesticide is then applied to keep the insects away and the bags are brought periodically to the local mill, where it costs 800 Tanzanian Shillings, or about 75 cents, to grind a 20 Liter bucket of kernels into flour. The flour is then taken as needed for ugali, which is made by boiling the flour slowly until it all sticks together and forms the distinctive big white ball that accompanies almost every meal here. Fittingly, we left the shamba with an invitation to eat the ugali that will be made from the corn we picked today.

One Last Field Trip

On Friday I took twelve of my middle school students to Ruaha National Park for the culmination of our semester-long research project on Ruaha ecosystems. As on all field trips I’ve led, I was quite nervous before and during the trip but tried my best not to show it to the kids. Not until we were a few minutes from home yesterday did I relax and think to myself, “Wow, we made it!”

On previous field trips I’ve never had to worry about my students getting eaten by lions, but nonetheless, there is always an element of anxiety when removing students from the confines of the schoolyard and becoming surrogate parent to a group of teenagers. Despite the headaches of planning and permission slips, these trips are highlights of the school year for both students and teachers. For example, all I remember about 8th grade is that we went to Williamsburg and several romances blossomed and wilted all in the same weekend. Oh, I also remember it was the year I started doing poorly in math.

As a teacher at Berkeley High, my first field trip was a short outing to see “Calivera,” an exhibition of Mexicali Day of the Dead altars. As my 6th period class descended the escalators of the Berkeley BART station to ride the train a few stops south to the Oakland Museum, I was convinced that they were going to rebel and escape to San Francisco, leaving me to call their parents and send out various search parties. To my relief, the only student who went missing showed up later with a good explanation.

On May Day 2007, a colleague and I carried out our ambitious and slightly crazy idea of taking all 60 of our freshmen to an immigrant rights rally in San Francisco. Amazingly no one got lost, and we had an incredible day that included a walking tour of the Mission District murals, which tell the story of the Latino experience from the pre-Colombian era to the present day. What my students probably remember most is chasing each other around Mission Dolores Park before the rally.

When I came to Tanzania to teach in a small international school I imagined peace and quiet - a welcome change from the craziness of American public schools. I didn’t think my field trips would be as adventurous, but it turns out that bringing 12 students 120 kilometers over a very rocky road and sleeping overnight in the bush is just as challenging as taking 60 kids to and from SF on the BART.

Food, for example, is a minor detail of American field trips because we can buy it everywhere. But in Tanzania, there’s no stopping at Subway or McDonald’s. My boss and I had to go the Iringa market to buy 5 kilos of rice, 3 kilos of peas, 3 kilos of potatoes and assorted veggies and fruit so that the students would have food on the trip. When we arrived at our campsite, I had to use my not-yet-there Swahili to arrange for a “mama” to cook our food, and of course we haggled for a quarter of an hour over the price. But these are the details and differences that make Tanzania so endearing.

With the food arranged, my mind stopped running through all the possible scenarios of what could go wrong, and as we set out on our afternoon game drive I focused in on the faces of my students as they waited for their first glimpse of Africa’s famous animals. Surprisingly, four of my students had never been to Ruaha (or any other national park) so I was excited to share in their first experience of this incredible wilderness. “Look, the giraffe is eating an acacia tree!” exclaimed one of my students. “Yes!” I thought to myself, “they’ve actually understood my lessons on species interaction and food chains.”

On our first drive we saw elephants, buffalo, impala, zebra, hippos and crocs, but the highlight was coming around a corner and meeting two huge bull giraffes standing with their bodies pressed against each other, heads side by side. I’d never seen this before, and I wondered what they were doing. All of the sudden they both stumbled and the bushes shook, and I thought they were being attacked by a pride of lions. In the next instant, one giraffe quickly swiveled his head and swung it like a hammer, smashing it into the neck of his rival.

The sound of the impact was frightful, and we all sat with our mouths open and hearts beating fast, awestruck witnesses to a rarely seen behavior. Fatigued by their efforts, the two bulls stood breathing heavily for about half a minute, and then they began again. Their necks were elastic as pulled toffee, but their skulls pounded against their bodies with thunderous force. It was a moment none of us will soon forget – we were 10 feet away.

Our only “complaint” as we went to bed was that we hadn’t seen any cats, but as luck would have it we heard that distinctive roar close to our camp as dawn broke, and sure enough we encountered a pride of 20 lions on our early morning drive. As my students can now attest, there is nothing quite like seeing your first lion.

When we pulled into the school driveway yesterday, I felt a great sense of relief. The students were exhausted from the excitement and the long, dusty ride back home, and so was I. Reflecting on all the field trips I’ve taken in the past few years, I realize that all the planning, logistics and temporary parenthood have been well worth it.

Tanzanian English

Swahili is a most adaptable language, originating in Zanzibar and along the Indian Ocean coast from a blend of Arabic and the many Bantu languages of Tanzania. Over the past hundred years (and especially since WWII) Swahili has adopted many words from English.

As a teacher of English as a foreign language, I have total empathy for those trying to learn the rules of English, which are as nonsensical as the rantings of the Mad Hatter. As if our grammar rules weren’t confusing enough, our pronunciation and non-phonetic spelling are simply diabolical. For example, why are rough and through pronounced differently? And what about the obsolete silent “K” at the beginning of so many words, like knock, know, knee, etc? I could go on, but you can find further examples in many different books and websites.

Tanzanians have modified many English words for the Bantu tongue by spelling them phonetically. For many words, they have changed the final “er” or “or” to an “a.” Therefore, I am Mwalimu Alexanda and my father would be Christopha. So, can you guess what a meneja is? A manager. How about a dereva? Driver. We also have kompyuta, opereta, kondakta, vocha, trekta, pancha, mota, and bia for computer, operator, conductor, voucher, tractor, puncture, motor, and beer.

Anette and I have a good laugh each time we encounter a new word and scratch our heads for several minutes trying to figure out what it means, until it dawns on us that it’s just phonetic Tanzanian English masquerading as Swahili. One we couldn’t figure out by ourselves was “Kariakoo,” Dar es Salaam’s central market, named after the WWII-era British Carrier Corps station. Carrier Corps = Kariakoo.

However, the most comical feature of Tanzanian English must be its use in business brochures, which attempt to advertise the quality of a certain product or service. As an ESL teacher, I always scan such brochures for ESLisms such as “Chicken in sweat and sour sauce,” that we were once served in a Dar hotel.

This morning I found two brochures lying around the house and I burst into laughter upon reading them, so I thought I’d share them with you. Anette thought it would be insensitive of me to publicize these mistakes, but my colleague from New Zealand asked her, “Well, what do you all do for a good laugh, then?” For Norwegians, I submit that it is watching foreigners (like me) flailing about in skis for the first time. For us native English speakers, as we are in the unique position of watching every other culture in the world try to learn our language, pardon us for our mirth.

Example #1: A brochure for a game park on the coast. It reads, “Imagine a confusion of nature of such intensity that crocodiles vie with coral reefs and lions roar at lionfish.” And later, “visitors can explore a surprising confusion of ecosystems.” The confusion is obviously that the author meant to use “profusion,” but must have been scared by the lionfish.

Example #2: A new guesthouse has just been built across the street from our compound. It is immaculate from the outside, and the rooms are exquisitely clean and tastefully decorated. Anette and I realized that we’ve been here a long time when we planned a trip just to see the new rooms, and then talked excitedly for an hour afterwards about how clean they were.

Unfortunately, the English on the brochure for the guesthouse doesn’t quite match the physical standards of the building:
“Our guestrooms feature comforting appointments such as color TV with many channels to choose.”
“Our toilets are well cleaned. This shows how we do care for your health.”
“No water shortage. We have big water tanks to make sure no water problems.”
OK, no big mistakes here, just endearing syntax. But here is the piece de resistance:

“Cloth washing machine is here to make sure your clothes, bedshits and blankets are clean all the time.” Bedshits?!! Well, at least they’re trying to keep them clean!

Stranded in Mafinga

Good roads are supposed to be a sign of “development.” Tanzania has great roads; they were the first thing I noticed when I arrived here ten months ago. “This is incredible, nothing like the giant pothole catastrophe of Senegal and The Gambia!”

But last night as I was hurtling along in the passenger seat of a beat-up old taxi at 110 km per hour, straining to make out potential obstacles in the dim yellow beams being eaten up by the blackness beyond, I had an epiphany: good roads, which allow people to drive faster and get places quicker, must be accompanied by good lighting and good signage, neither of which are features of the Tanzanian “barabara.”

Now why was I going so fast in a taxi at 9pm driving away from my home, Iringa? Because my friend Andy Hart got a puncture (apologies for all the British English I’m picking up here) and was stranded somewhere outside of Mafinga, 86 kilometers to the southwest.

His cell phone battery lasted just long enough for him to tell his wife his approximate location, that his spare tire was locked to the back of his car, and that the key had broken off in the lock. Rather than panic, Susie called a cab and asked me to accompany her on the long trip.

Our driver, with his chronic hacking cough, was hunching over the wheel with a torch (flashlight) every ten minutes or so to check the dials on his darkened dashboard. My stomach touched the roof of my mouth every time he floored it on the straightaways and downhills, and I thanked God for my seatbelt as I stared out at the enormous black night.
(Most vehicles here don’t have seat belts, and when you do find one it almost never buckles).

It is bitterly cold in the Southern Highlands now, and at an altitude of 5,000 feet Iringa gets constant gusts of 15-25 knots or more. Fortunately Andy’s car has heating, and he was waiting inside when we found him by the side of the road. Having had no luck flagging down cars after his puncture (no one likes to stop after dark) he was hoping we had come with a spare tyre. We, however, had no luck in getting a spare so late at night.

Although the tyre was deflated and mangled almost beyond recognition as a circular object, Andy resolved to drive his car as slowly as possible to a friend’s house and leave it there for the night so it wouldn’t get looted. I switched cars to keep him company as we crawled and bumped our way at 2km per hour for 45 minutes until we reached his friend’s house.

We pounded on the gate to wake the guard, whose distinctive white sandals I soon saw under the rusty iron gate as he came to let us in. White sandals mean Masai, but this particular Masai was also wearing…a bow and arrow slung around his shoulder! Something about the sight of the blood-colored robes draped so easily about his body, and the bow and arrow hanging there as they have for millennia, made it the perfect African ending to our evening adventure.

For Andy and Susie, last night doesn’t rank anywhere near their top 100 adventurous moments in Africa. Among other harrowing events, Susie has been shot at by drunk policemen in Uganda, Andy has walked for miles in the dark, starving, sick and lost, through Central African jungles, and together they drove away at dawn in a caravan to escape the post-election violence of Nairobi. For us, I’d say last night makes the top 40.

Flamenco in Iringa: A first?

Dear readers, please forgive the self-indulgence, but this post will not give you any further insight into Tanzanian culture – I simply want to talk about my first solo guitar performance, which was tonight.

Organized by Susie Hart of Neema Crafts (one of the greatest development projects on the planet) the evening featured five amateur acts: two pianists, two guitarists and a gospel choir. It was held in a tiny church that was tastefully decorated and lit with candles, and there were about 75 people in attendance (yes, it was almost the entire white community of Iringa, but hey, this is where we live).

The night began with a young pianist from the UK, followed by a German classical guitarist, and then a German pianist. After a short intermission for cake and sodas, I was up. I had already gone through all the stages of nervousness that are so familiar to me from my years of swimming – the butterflies, the bad stomach, the cold sweaty hands, etc. – so all that was left to do was to play. Problem is that cold, sweaty hands go away when you hit the water and your body takes over, but this time I had to rely solely on my freezing fingers.

Somehow, I made it through my four pieces (Sevillanas, Siguiriyas, and two Alegrias) without any major mistakes and I was quite loose and happy when I reached the finale: the (in)famous mariachi song from Desperado, which I played and sang at Susie’s request. I was grateful for the warm applause, and felt downright giddy as I took my seat next to Anette in the audience.

Egotistically, I’m wondering if this is the first flamenco performance Iringa has ever seen. We know that there are, and have been, plenty of Spanish NGO workers and missionaries here, but classical music nights in Iringa are as rare as Africans who don’t pick their noses in public, so maybe just maybe, this is some kind of a first.

Anyway, I’d like to close by thanking my three flamenco teachers – Juan Jose Socorro de Ayamonte, Torcuato Zamora de Washington DC, and David Gutierrez de Berkeley. I also have to mention Jake Thomsen, who’s been teaching me about music ever since the days of Meridian, and my voice teacher and choir director from St. Mary’s, Michael Ryan and Larry Vote, respectively.

What I want to express by mentioning all these people is that we really can’t do anything alone in this life. I derive the deepest pleasure from learning from other people, being inspired by them, emulating them, and then putting my own twist on it until it rings with the sound of my own voice. I’d like to think that all of my teachers were here with me tonight, helping my fingers on their way across the fretboard.

Idodi: A Village Film Show

Yesterday Anette and I squished into a cab after work with our three flatmates (all teachers at my school) to ride out to Idodi for a village film show. For several years now, Friends of Ruaha Society (FORS) has been showing environmental films in their 24 villages – at the primary schools during the day and outside for the whole village at night.

As always, we were greeted with incredible generosity and kindness – sodas to start, then a steaming pot of the Tanzanian staple ugali accompanied by perfectly done beans. Scooping out big portions onto our plates, we all dug in with our hands - some (yours truly) more messily than others - and thanked our hosts, two friends of ours who teach at the secondary school, for their hospitality.

After eating we walked through the school compound to the sports fields, which were glimmering green and gold in the late afternoon sunshine. Hundreds of students were gathered at the various pitches, running about cheering and wearing their colorful school uniforms, different colors for each class. The setting is incredible; the fields are on a plateau above the school with a panoramic view of the valley below ringed by green mountains, and Ruaha National Park just on the other side.

All week at the school they’ve been having an inter-class competition; the winning team will be presented with a cow which they will then slaughter themselves and enjoy eating. With this incentive, the teams were engaged in the most serious of friendly competitions: netball (the Tanzanian schoolgirl’s sport) volleyball, and of course, football. As the football match ended 2-2, the sun slipped behind the mountains and dusk was gathering in the long grass. We walked down from the fields to the center of the village, where the film show was just beginning under the starlit sky.

The projector, laptop and speakers were hooked up to the battery of the FORS Land Rover, and the screen was the side of a whitewashed, thatch-roofed building. Three hundred or so people encircled the screen, children sitting on the ground in front, an elderly man in a white robe and white kofia given a chair of honor at the front of the crowd, the rest standing.

Our Tanzanian colleague stood up in front of the crowd to say “karibuni,” and to explain that the film shows are a part of FORS’ environmental education program - more than just an evening of entertainment. We showed two films in Kiswahili produced by the African Environmental Film Foundation, the first about the elephants of Kenya’s Tsavo National Park and the second about the recent drying of the Great Ruaha River. For people who’ve grown up without electricity, TV and movies, it was a spellbinding two hours, and for us, it was a joy to stand there with them and share in their reactions to the films.

“EEH, EEH, EEH!” uttered the villagers each time they saw a lion, hyena, buffalo, hippo or crocodile.
“TSSSCH” a collective sucking of teeth signaled their disapproval whenever slain elephants appeared on the screen.
“EEEEEEH!” a cry of amazement upon seeing the thousands of tusks collected by park rangers.

One of our teacher friends asked me, “Is there still poaching in Ruaha National Park?” Another asked me, “Do you have elephants in America?” A little girl in front of us exclaimed, “All the fish are DEAD…no good.” A man to our left saw the river sweep away earth and grass from the banks and said, “Erosion. Hmm.”

Contagious bursts of laughter accompanied scenes of a baby elephant being covered with a blanket by its keeper, an orange-headed agama lizard hopping bravely across rocks in the river, storks and herons stealing fish from the crocodiles. In such moments, the power of these film shows was evident.

Although these people live on the border of Ruaha, many of them have never had a chance to visit the park and see these animals. Whenever the smallest children saw a lion on the screen, they grabbed each other and pointed at the screen while saying excitedly, “Simba, Simba!”

Seeing their joy and fascination during the film shows, we can imagine how happy these children will be when they see these animals in real life. This is why FORS conducts educational safaris: so the children and teachers of the primary schools in these villages can experience the spectacular wilderness and wildlife of Ruaha with their own eyes.

Last year FORS took 3,500 students and almost 200 teachers into the park, and this year we hope to take even more. Starting in September, Anette and I will be joining the schools on these safaris, and we’re looking forward to sharing an even more intimate experience of Ruaha with the people of Idodi and Pawaga.

Bagamoyo: Police Violence

In our last two posts we’ve tried to describe the heady atmosphere of Bagamoyo, a small windswept town on the Indian Ocean that is home to many of Tanzania’s most talented artists. Sadly, all is not as calm, creative and carefree as it seems.

When we were last there we met a young man with several gaping wounds on his shins.
Shocked that no one else seemed alarmed by the bright red holes in his legs, we asked him what had happened.

Apparently he was in a minor car accident on one of Bagamoyo’s sandy roads. According to him, it was clearly the other driver’s fault, but he quickly realized that the offender was paying the cops to get off without a penalty. When he pleaded with the cops not to let the offender go, tempers flared and a fight broke out. The young man was subdued, arrested, and taken to the police station, while the other man drove away.

At the station he was taken into a room and beaten by several policemen with heavy clubs. Six weeks later, when we took this picture, his wounds still had not closed. Apologies if the picture is too intense, but we feel we should report on what we experience and let you, our readers, do the interpreting. Although we’re trying to focus on the positives about Africa on this blog, we don’t want to do so at the expense of reality.

After the attack he was released, whereupon he went to the hospital. The hospital couldn’t do anything for him – every time they bandaged the wounds, the gauze came off within hours due to a combination of the heavy bleeding and the hot weather. So one of his friends, an old Italian man who runs a hostel near the beach, treated him with an antiseptic cream that turned his wounds a cough medicine red.

I grew up in a world sheltered from violence of this kind. At the sight of his wounds I became nauseas. I tried to imagine how I would have felt, what I would have done, had it been me curled up in that jail cell trying to escape the blows of the notched ebony clubs.

I’m tempted to say that this violent episode isn’t even that “severe” compared to the rape epidemic in the DRC or the murder of half a million Iraqis, but who can quantify the psychological effects of physical violence? The fact is that this young man’s psyche has been permanently altered and he no longer feels safe in his own town.

Yes, violence and oppression are facts of life in communities all over the world, and police violence certainly occurs with more frequency than is reported. The young man in this story had actually witnessed a police beating in Sweden prior to becoming a victim himself. He usually splits time between Canada and Bagamoyo, living in each place for half a year, but he now says he won’t come back to Tanzania for a long time. He’s currently looking for a human rights lawyer who will take on his case, but even if he finds one, it’ll be his word against the machine.

Bagamoyo’s Artists

Each time we are in Bagamoyo we take ngoma lessons. Ngoma is a Kiswahili word that encompasses drumming, dance and traditional music. Ally Zakoo and Shabani Mbatta (whose father is a teacher at the College of Arts) know ngoma inside out – they were born in Bagamoyo and have been playing the traditional music of Tanzania their whole lives. Now in their mid-twenties, they have set up a drum and dance workshop to teach cultural history and social issues to local schoolchildren.

Ally and Shabani play with incredible skill and pure joy, and they make their own drums; we play amidst piles of coconut wood shavings in the shade of a mango tree. On our last trip to Bagamoyo, Anette and her brother André played every day and gave excellent performances at the end of each lesson. After three days with these master teachers (who don’t have teaching degrees, mind you, just an infectious passion for what they do) André went from total beginner to confident drummer.

Vitali Maembe is a different kind of ngoma artist. A unique singer-songwriter in his early thirties, he writes socially conscious songs dealing with corruption, political violence, poverty and AIDS, among many other themes. A radio station in Dar “lost” his album after the firing of President Kikwete’s cabinet, and at a recent performance attended by several government ministers the microphone was taken away from him when he began singing ‘Afrika Shilingi Tano,’ a song enumerating the reasons Africa is perpetually drenched in blood.

In one part of the song, Vitali describes a conversation between Chinua Achebe and a writer from Sierra Leone, who laments that the white man came and killed his father and raped his mother. Chinua responds: “at least you haven’t lived to see the day that your own African people do those very same things to your family.” I guess this type of honesty isn’t what government ministers want to hear.

Vitali is also a painter. He sketches his ideas whenever they come to him but only paints once a year, filling 30 or 40 canvasses during a two-week reverie. His paintings depict the same themes that are present in his songs, and they are wonderfully colorful and sensual.

Mwandale Mwanyekwa is a sculptor who studied in Bagamoyo and is currently featured with other women in an exhibition entitled “Women are Creators” at the National Musem of Culture in Dar es Salaam. It’s hard to say what was more beautiful, her style or her art. Her clothing, jewelry and sculptures are all expressions of the same spirit – the spirit of the African woman, strong and beautiful.

The exhibition was unique because only female sculptors were represented, and all the pieces focused on the world seen from a woman’s perspective: the special relationship between a mother and her child, daily tasks such as fetching water or cooking, all done with a baby wrapped to her back. One of her most striking pieces was a wooden African continent on which she carved her own profile encircled by the words “Women can create change.” As she told us, the goal of her art is to empower women by celebrating their strength, grace and wisdom, qualities that are imprinted in each of her sculptures.

Artists like these are fundamental to change in any society. Where would we be, for instance, without Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Neil Young and the countless other musicians who helped change American consciousness in the 1960s? Artists, like all people, draw inspiration from working together, and as their ideas merge and evolve, events like Woodstock are born. For this reason, Bagamoyo’s College of Arts is so important to the future of Tanzania - all the more so because there are so few schools like it in all of Africa.

Ally, Shabani, Vitali and Mwandale all studied at the College of Arts and have worked together on each other’s projects, just as Federico Garcia Lorca, Luis Buñuel and Salvdaor Dali formed their artistic identities while living and working together at La Residencia at the University of Madrid in the 1920s.

Much of Garcia Lorca’s energy in his last few years was spent touring with his theater company to culturally isolated parts of rural Spain. Interestingly, graduates of the College of Arts are meant to take their art to other parts of Tanzania to give workshops and set up schools of their own. Unfortunately the government doesn’t have the money to employ many of the graduates, but judging by the enterprising nature of Ally, Shabani, Vitali and Mwandale, Bagamoyo will continue to produce amazing artists for generations to come.

Bagamoyo: The Berkelee of Tanzania

A crescent moon of sand reaches gently out into the Indian Ocean as if trying to touch Zanzibar, 20 kilometers to the east. Palm trees with gracefully arced trunks line the beach creating the perfect sunset panorama. Fishermen sit on buckets scaling their fish while women crowd around in their colorful kangas bargaining for the best price. A 15-foot hammerhead was caught today, sprawled on the beach it still seems alive with otherworldly power. A herd of insanely long-horned cattle are driven down the beach and into the surf by a couple of barefoot teenagers. Having never seen cattle on a beach, we asked the locals what was happening.

“They’re going onto the boat.”
“The boys?”
“No, the cows.”

In Norway, picturesque cows dot the mountainsides that crash down into the fjords, and you can imagine that if a Norwegian farmer ever decided to move his cattle by water, he’d have a big iron ship waiting to transport them. But this is Bagamoyo, Tanzania, East Africa, and the boats here are still made the same way they were thousands of years ago. The long wooden dhow with its single sail gave medieval Arabs supremacy over the Red Sea trading routes, and is still used daily along the Swahili coast from Somalia to Mozambique.

Historically infamous as the starting and ending point of the Arab slave route across Tanzania into Central Africa, Bagamoyo (which means “lay your heart down”) is fast becoming one of our favorite places in Tanzania. We first came here in December on the recommendation of my good friend Jake Thomsen, who found out about Bagamoyo when he came to Tanzania in 1999. Jake took six weeks of drum lessons and was told by his teacher of a music school where the students start their day by drumming on the beach at sunrise, singing into the wind, then diving into the ocean. He then called his parents and said he wouldn’t be returning to Brown for his junior year.

Fortunately for me, Jake came back and taught me how to play the djembe. After college he enrolled at the Berkelee School of Music and I was enticed to move to Boston so I too could play music 8 hours a day. Bagamoyo’s Chuo cha Sanaa (College of Arts - LINK) is Tanzania’s answer to Berkelee. Founded in 1981, it is one of very few arts colleges in all of Africa. Its teachers comprise the Bagamoyo Players, who have performed the music of Tanzania’s 125 ethnic groups at concerts all over the world. For those interested, I highly suggest that you download their 2006 release “Tramo” on iTunes.

Every year, the College of Arts hosts the Bagamoyo Music and Arts Festival (LINK), an event that draws performers from all over Africa and tourists from all over the world. It’s a week of round-the-clock performances and bonfires on the beach, and we’re determined to make it this year. It will be October 14-18, anyone want to join us?!

As if this weren’t enough to make us fall in love with Bagamoyo, it turns out that Norway has been supporting the College of Arts for about a decade now. There is an exchange program for students and teachers of the University of Stavanger to study and work in Bagamoyo, and NORAD (LINK) money helped produce the “Tramo” album. Consequently, many locals know how to say “kjempebra” and “tusen takk,” and we share many a laugh while sitting under the stars at the local café, mixing languages after a day of drumming and singing.

Ruaha: Most Beautiful Place On Earth?

Ruaha National Park after the annual rains is an absolute Garden of Eden, a living landscape in the peak of health and beauty. Its lifeline, the Great Ruaha River, which has dried up every year since 1994 due to environmental damage caused by rice farming and cattle grazing, was flowing at full capacity when we visited this weekend.

The park is 50,000 square kilometers of natural stillness; the only sounds are wind and water, birdsong and animal call. Elephants spend hours every day rejoicing in the river, trumpeting their delight. Giraffe and zebra congregate by the hundreds along the riverbank to graze on the effusive greenery.

Guidebooks tell you not to come in the wet season because the bush is so thick that animals are difficult to see. Maybe we got lucky, but in addition to the grazers we saw thirty lion, three cheetahs and a leopard in a baobab. Of course, we wouldn’t have seen half of these animals without the incredible eyes, experience and instincts of our guide and driver, who has become a good friend since our first safari.

He routinely spots animals that are completely camouflaged, hiding in thick bush, or lying down behind baobabs - at a distance of 100 meters while sitting down and driving!
But then again, he is an extraordinary man by any measure.

After graduating from primary school at the age of 12, he spent the next ten years of his life working as a gardener and caddy on a golf course in the tea-estate highlands of Mufindi. He learned so much English from the golfers that one day his boss asked him if he wouldn’t like to take a new job as a guide in Ruaha.

This was in 1984, when the first tourist lodge in the park was being built. 24 years later, his knowledge of Ruaha is unparalleled. Having learned about local flora and fauna from his uncle as a child, he studied field guides late into the night in his first years as a guide, and so learned to recognize thousands of plant and animal species, and name them in three languages: his native Hehe, Swahili and English.

We look forward to each safari with him because we learn so much and because he radiates kindness and positive energy. Now in his mid-40s, he is happily married and has four young children who want to grow up to be park guides just like their dad. His kids love watching the DVD we made after our first safari – it was the first time they had seen their dad on the job, and they constantly rewind it to see him driving the Land Rover. One of his dreams is to bring his whole family to Ruaha.

We’ll be offline for the next couple of weeks as we travel to the coast and then up north for our first look at Serengeti and Ngorongoro. World famous though they are, we’ve heard about the hordes of tourists and vehicles, and wonder how anything could possibly beat being alone with our friend in the sanctity of Ruaha.

Corporal Punishment, Cell Phones and the Student-Centered Classroom

As in most countries in the world, students and teachers in Tanzania are late to school every day. Here, however, tardiness is the surest way to receive a beating – if you are a student. Tardy teachers are rarely if ever reprimanded. This reminds me of American teachers who talk on their cell phones in class yet have no scruples about confiscating their students’ phones. Where’s the justice?

As a teacher who’s confiscated many a phone, and whose colleague once flung an old cell phone across the room so it shattered all over his dumbfounded students (who thought it belonged to a classmate) I’m not advocating for a free cell phone policy in our schools. I do, however, support equity in the application of certain rules for teachers and students. “Do as I say, not as I do,” has never worked for anyone I know.

Teachers, although underpaid and overworked, are respected role models in all human societies. Julius Nyerere, the “father” of Tanzania, is often referred to as Mwalimu (teacher) and his picture is still displayed prominently in every school and public building in this country.

I just read that some NYC schools are considering paying teachers $125,000 per year, and this I heartily applaud. Others are considering giving students financial incentives for good academic performance, and this I vehemently disagree with. In my opinion, the deepest learning comes when students are internally motivated. Motivation, like intelligence, manifests itself differently in every student, and it also changes over time.

Teachers, therefore, must be able to gauge the interests of their students and structure school-time accordingly. Administrators who have wrongly conceded to paying students who perform well are undermining the teaching profession and giving in to the material culture of America. It would be unthinkable for Tanzanian students to receive money for stellar academic performance. In fact, most Tanzanian teachers refuse to attend workshops unless they know they will get paid (this is a huge problem for NGOs trying to disseminate ideas here).

This brings me to the question of participatory learning, and ultimately, participatory living. American schools are some of the most creative in the world, and for all we do wrong, most teachers I know try their best to engage students and help them to take responsibility for their own learning. Our students rarely hesitate to question the teacher or speak their truth in the classroom, for they know the classroom is theirs.

Tanzanian students, on the other hand, rarely speak up in class. If they do, they may get beaten for giving a wrong or inappropriate answer. Tanzanian law mandates that no more than four strokes per offense be doled out to students, and only the headmaster is allowed to give beatings. Few if any schools actually adhere to this law, in fact, some have creative ways of getting around it. If a student is to be beaten, he or she will often receive two or three strokes from one teacher, then get passed on to several others.

The reason for this discipline is not just numbers. Sure, some may argue that hitting is the only way to maintain order in a class of 120. However, the passivity of so many students cannot solely be explained by fear of punishment; it lies in culture and the educational system itself, which still operates on 19th century assumptions. Add to this the appalling and inexcusable lack of resources, and you get crippled classrooms.

Anette astutely observed that the level of control exerted over students in school stands in stark contrast to the enormous responsibilities – and trust – that Tanzanian children are given every day. Where in America do you see a four-year old child shopping for the family needs at 9 o’clock at night? You don’t. We’re too paranoid and America is too dangerous - a cozy symbiotic relationship that keeps people in fear of each other and the world. In Tanzania, children are cared for by the entire community and there is very little violence on the streets.

Tanzanian children run their family’s shops, are used to hours upon hours of manual labor, and are respectful of their elders. By doing all of these things they earn the respect and trust of their communities, and are never “babied” the way so many American kids are. Why, then, don’t Tanzanian teachers entrust them with similar responsibility in the classroom? It’s a question that will take more time for us to figure out, so please stay tuned.

The Primary School Blues

My last post was about a public school in a relatively wealthy village; last weekend I had lunch with three friends working for CIDA in poorer villages in Iringa district, and they gave me an even bleaker picture of public education here.

Primary schools are the most neglected because they are free for all Tanzanians; consequently, families don’t feel that they are losing anything by keeping their children home to work on the shamba. This is of course true of many migrant and farm-working families in the US and all over the world; when the harvest needs to be brought in, all available hands must help. Indeed, our summer vacation is a holdover from a time when a majority of Americans lived on farms.

However, students aren’t the only ones who skip school to work on the shamba – teachers do it, too. On any given day several teachers may not show up for work because they have decided to stay home and do the weeding. If none of the teachers show up (and this happens all too often) the students just sit idly on the dirt floor of the classroom or run around in the schoolyard. But they do stay close the school in hopes that their teacher will show up.

At one primary school Anette visited with FORS, teachers sleep on the classroom floor at night because they don’t have money for a hut. The day she showed up school was closed because it was payday for teachers in Iringa town, but as soon as the car came within sight of the school dozens of children came running up to the car, waving their reused notebooks in the hopes that they would have school after all.

Again, cultural relativism is necessary in thinking about this situation: primary schools average 100 – 120 students per class and teachers are barely paid enough to stay alive. So if you were faced with the choice of going to work to teach 120 students with no books and no blackboard, or weeding and watering your shamba to make sure you’ll have enough food to survive the hungry season, what would you do?

Tanzania’s current primary enrollment is between 80-90%, but the secondary enrollment is a mere 25% (http://www.tanzaniaembassy-us.org/government/). Of these 25% most are boys; because of traditional gender roles, girls are expected to the bulk of the work at home. Some families want to send all their kids to school, but simply cannot afford it and thus prioritize the boys.

The good news is that those who do study at the secondary level benefit from smaller (70) classes, more resources and more teachers. Most teenagers in Iringa town go to secondary school, and many of our friends here are studying at one of Iringa’s five universities. Two college students in Dar started a website called JamiiForums, a free speech free-for-all whose discussion board debates about corruption led to the recent firing of many top government officials.

Contrast this with the fact that after independence most African countries had so few highly educated citizens that important jobs in business and government were often filled by people with a primary school education. Zambia had about 1,000 high school graduates in 1961 – imagine running a country with that talent pool. Uganda’s Idi Amin completed 7 years of education and later joined the army – a deadly combination.

With the Kenyan political crisis now diffused, thanks in large part to two highly educated Africans - Kofi Annan and Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete - East Africa can continue the vital work of addressing the challenges, like high quality education for all, that all societies struggle with.

A Public High School in Rural Tanzania

Idodi Secondary School serves 800 students from several villages on the outskirts of Ruaha National Park. 500 of these students are boarders, and their colorful school uniforms are eternally strewn over every bush and branch near the dorms, hanging out to dry after a thorough hand-washing. The boarding students receive three square meals a day, lining up by the hundreds (see pic) at a long tin-roofed shack under which ugali is cooked on small charcoal-fired stoves. On a good day the school has 15 teachers, so average class size is about 70. On pay days the school shuts down because the teachers have to take the long bus ride to Iringa (read my last post) to get their money.

At Idodi Secondary as at every other African public school, teachers beat their students. Our host, a 26 year-old social studies teacher, seemed young and progressive enough to understand our opinion that beatings are old-fashioned and harmful to the kids. No way. When you’ve got a class of seventy students and four books to share among the lot of them, beating is the tried and true way to maintain order. Besides, he said, he never feared the beatings his teachers administered to him when he was young - in fact, it made him study harder.

Perhaps that is why, as evening fell and the generator switched on, hundreds of students gathered in the dimly lit classrooms to continue studying well into the night. Or maybe it was that those students didn’t get a chance to look at the books during class time.

For me, cultural relativism is vital to thinking about this situation. I come from a country where a teacher would quickly be jailed for striking a student. I also come from a country with a stranglehold on the world’s resources, whose privileged students are coddled from birth to ensure they make it into $40,000 a year schools, and whose minority students are devalued at every level of the educational system. With so much, we achieve so little. Classrooms are filled with the latest technology, yet few students can be convinced that school is a place they might enjoy, let alone a place where they might choose to spend hours studying every evening.

Maybe it’s just human nature – the more you have, the lazier you get; the less you have, the harder you work. The sad thing is that even for those Africans who graduate from university, paid work in their field is often impossible to come by. I’m reminded of the Zambian trucker who gave us a hitch back to the TZ border. A trained social worker, he was forced to start his own trucking business because of lack of work. Not that there’s not a need for social workers in Africa, there’s just no one to employ them. So now this well-educated man drives his dangerously old truck 1800km twice a week from Tanzania across northern Zambia to the DRC and back, peddling dried fish, soap and candles to a people whose government can’t meet their basic needs for safety and sustenance.

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.