Hot topic

Energy plans often leave me stumped

I was recently walking home from work when I looked-up to see that my walk had become a little sunnier. The trees lining the road leading to the post office had been chopped down in the name of road expansion; women were hacking the stumps to bits with axes and machetes, stumps elsewhere smoldered to make charcoal, and women walked into the distance with bundles of wood on their heads.

With those trees gone, where will people go to get wood next? This morning – when I woke to the sound of a woman pulling branches out of a tree in my backyard – I may have been given an answer.

Before catching a flight to the US recently, a friend of mine stopped by my house to ask a few questions about his destination. He had fascinating and insightful questions, including whether there are roads in the US like the wavy dirt road to Lugufu (a local refugee camp). I assured him that there are roads like that in the US, but to give him a better sense, I showed him photos I had taken back home. One was of a long, empty highway headed in the direction of Crater Lake. “There is no dust on the road,” he said, “no garbage. Is that primary forest?” “Yes,” I said. “Here, people would use a road like that to get firewood,” he told me, “they would cut down all the trees.”

One challenge is that while people need trees to stabilize watersheds and protect soils (not to mention for carbon sequestration), they also need wood to cook dinner at night. And the short-term need to put dinner on the table naturally trumps long-term concerns. Forests in the Northeastern US once shared a similar fate.

I have often pondered what will happen when the world's oil runs out, even while sitting behind the steering wheel of an idling vehicle. In a similar way, people here must see fewer trees and furl their brows at the thought that they will have to walk farther to get their wood – and know that one day those resources may be ashes, too.

Forever and ever (amen)

Swahili hymnal

“What does one wear to a Maasai wedding?” I asked the other morning, trying to picture the day ahead.

The idea of a Maasai wedding was full of intrigue for me. A friend told me that cattle and chicken would be blessed at the end of the marriage, thereby bringing a higher price for them at auction; another led me to believe that cows’ blood and milk would be served. I was writhing in anticipation.

But the one I attended was different. No cows’ blood, only Christ’s blood.

A white short-bed truck arrived with Maasai singing in the back. Behind the truck was a four-wheel drive vehicle containing the bride and groom, both of whom were carried into the church and seated adjacent to the altar.

“Is she wearing a wig?” a man asked as we peered through the cinder-block windows. Apparently the minister – who is American – threatened not to marry her if she wore a wig. “He likes to keep things traditional,” the man explained to me.

But I became confused as to which tradition they were trying to preserve. Attending a service led by an American, reading from my Swahili hymnal, taking communion, commenting on how white the bride’s dress was: it just didn’t feel Maasai enough for me. Where was the ceremonial necklace?

“Does the church have a stance on the dowry system?” I asked another minister, knowing the bride had been purchased for twelve cows, which seemed more offensive than whether the bride wore a wig or not. “I think the church tries to stay out of local customs,” he told me.

But I wasn’t placated. I was torn between two things: wanting to know that Maasai traditions are able to coexist with German ones, and yet wanting to believe that Maasai traditions which counter basic human rights (i.e. the dowry system, female circumcision) are no longer practiced. And while my logic seems straightforward, it is the same logic invoked by many other well-meaning people. The fallacy that my strongly-held beliefs should be imposed elsewhere.

I needed to talk with someone about this, so I sat down privately with the minister tonight. I explained my conflicted feelings and asked about how the church incorporates Maasai culture into its services. His face lit up. “I was as disappointed as you were,” he said referring to the wedding. He expressed concern that people may think that because they are getting married in a church they need to have a “modern wedding,” with make-up and wigs and mosquito netting around the bride's face. He wants to ensure that Maasai culture continues to thrive in local churches - a tall order, but I am hopeful he can accomplish this.

He also told a story: a few days ago he was walking in a village and was called over to attend a ceremony. It was a coming of age ceremony for young girls. “As many cattle are slaughtered now as ever, so the grandma’s are happy,” he explained, “but they don’t circumcise the girls anymore. That’s a decision they made as a congregation. We just advised them.”

And whether it’s right or not, I feel better knowing this, too.

So what does one wear to a [Lutheran] Maasai wedding?

• If you’re me: a button-up shirt and the cleanest pair of trousers you can find.
• If you’re the choir: beautiful purple and blue fabrics with long beaded earrings and heavy jewelry with jangly bits.
• And if you’re the bride: a white dress and veil – and yes, a wig. Because it’s not up to us to decide how she should spend her wedding day.

From kitchen counter to counter politics

In Tanzania, it is said that the value of a woman depends on how well she can make chapati. Perhaps that is why there are so few female political leaders in Tanzania. I mean, I have heard of “kitchen table” talks with candidates, but I don’t think the candidates usually do any cooking at them.

The US Presidential election is a popular topic here. After all, one of the candidates traced his lineage to Kenya (and I’m not talking about John McCain, although I’m sure his lobbyist friends would tell him he did for a favor).

So what do people think about the fact that the US is entertaining the idea of a female President?

• It is ok for a woman to be President because Presidents generally rely on their advisers, and those advisers can be men.
• It is generally not ok for a woman to be President, but Hillary happens to be married to Bill, so in this case it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.
• If women can’t make simple decisions around the house without consulting their husbands, how can they lead a country?
• Women should be President, but they will never get elected (said by a woman).
• Women shouldn’t tell us what to do, they should be told what to do. That’s why they can’t be priests, either.

Sure, I collected these thoughts in Tanzania. But don’t you think we could get similar responses in the US? Perhaps in pick-your-battleground-state?

I have been dispirited to see Hillary’s campaign slipping under the mercurial currents of popular opinion. I value her politics, but I also can't help but wonder what sort of ripple effect an effective female president in the US might have, perhaps in places as far-off as Kigoma. Sure females have led countries before: Israel, India, the UK, Norway, Pakistan, Argentina and the Central Africa Republic to name a few. But people still seem dubious that a woman could lead the US. I guess a part of me wants to prove them wrong (my arguments about Margaret Thatcher are admittedly half-hearted), and my blind optimism about Hillary is that she could do the job.

The barrier separating men and women in Kigoma often seems like more of a brick wall (the kind found in kitchens) rather than a glass ceiling. The question is: if the US were to elect a female President, and that female President were to do a good job, would some of those brick walls start to sway, or are there too many chapatis holding them up on the other side?

World Pax

What does Pax see?

Earlier this week, I met a chimpanzee named Pax, whose name means “peace” in Latin. In an ironic twist of fate, Pax was emasculated during a brawl in his youth, leaving him without reproductive organs. And yet Pax prevails to this day.

It is interesting to me how easily peace can be emasculated. Traveling over the past two weeks, I have been shocked by the events taking place in Kenya. At times I have found myself asking taxi drivers “What is the news on Kenya?” instead of “How much will it cost to the post office?”

If you are reading this site, you probably have access to major media sources (radio, TV, newspapers), and you no doubt have seen photos of people fleeing their homes or lying motionless in empty streets. I have unfortunately had relatively little access to news, but I have had the chance to talk with people – including a few who have fled Kenya – to get second-hand news and stories about what is taking place there.

The facts are heart-wrenching: a church burned while dozens of women and children were trapped inside, police not only shooting protesters but kicking them when they fall, and “neighbors looting from neighbors,” as one woman reported wearily on Al Jezeera. At least six hundred people are dead; about a quarter of a million are homeless, and still the unrest continues.

I have asked many people to help me put this conflict into perspective, asking lots of "How?" questions of people I meet. Regardless of the answers – tribal politics exacerbated by age-old tribal clashes – they still don’t explain how the conflict turned so violent.

“It’s the 1.5 million people living in the slums that are the problem,” one woman told me, explaining that Kenya's poorest have nothing left to lose, and as a result they keep fighting. But does poverty really strip someone of their humanity? I certainly hope not.

Seeing Pax this week reminded me that humans did not invent warfare. Jane Goodall discovered chimp warfare years ago. It was one of her breakthrough discoveries. But Jane has been quick to remind people that humans are not chimpanzees. Unlike chimps, we have complex brains that enable us to overcome our impulses and do what we know is right. We may want to strangle someone who voted for the other political candidate, but we don’t actually do it.

And yet, apparently we do.

Reports from Kenya have been horrific and shocking, but the storyline is not new. Nor were these political prerogatives invented by headline predecessors such as Northern Ireland, China or Rwanda. But I continue to hope that one of the things that separate us from Pax is our ability to lift above our impulses and achieve true peace, but the will has to be there for us to do it.

Otherwise, we will continue to create peace in name alone; and when peace is just a name, there is often little peace at all.

The long road home

Moments before we got stuck in the mud

While it took us about 11.5 hours to reach Katavi on our way down, it somehow only took 8.5 hours on the way back, and I have the welts on my bum to prove it. I guess there are advantages to having Spanish men drive when there are Spanish women in the other vehicle. We flew with such velocity that when we hit pockets of mud it would cover our vehicle, causing us to drive blindly until the wipers could clear our view.

Ryszard Kapuściński once wrote this about the Serengeti:

“…As if one were witnessing the birth of the world, that precise moment when the earth and sky already exist, as do water, plants, and wild animals, but not yet Adam and Eve. It is this world barely born, the world without mankind and hence also without sin, that one can imagine one is seeing here.”

When I first read this passage, I circled it in my copy of The Shadow of the Sun, thinking it was one of the most beautiful and original observations I had read about nature.

Beautiful it is, but I realized on the road to Katavi just how naturally this cascade of thoughts can fill your mind in unspoiled landscapes. Our road was often the only sign of civilization, and it winded through seemingly endless woodlands, with vistas hiding tantalizingly behind the trees. And then occasionally the trees would break and a valley would spread at our feet, with tree canopies extending as far as the eye could see. There were mammoth rocks, patches of grassland, and at their banks, the Malagarasi River.

This world “barely born” seems perfectly without sin. In the presence of this landscape, one can imagine any number of the continent’s stories coming to life: Karen Blixen soaring in Dennis Finch Hatton’s airplane and saying “Yes, I see;” humankind waking to stretch its first legs; unimaginable beings from times gone by lifting their heads at waterholes to roar at the sun. It was overwhelming to see that this landscape still exists; it was an Africa that I thought - and feared - survived in books alone.

I learned last week that there are plans to significantly improve this road, perhaps even pave it. In fact, we had seen evidence of this in the piles of gravel and road crews we occasionally encountered on our journey. This is in addition to plans to create and pave yet another road that will slice through the ecosystem.

I fear what this new chapter will bring for the landscape. After all it has seen – climate changes, species come and gone, the tectonic shifts – I wonder what the knell of the diesel engines will bring.

As we drove home, I thought about what it will mean if humanity returns to the land that once cradled it. Have we learned our lessons, or will we simply bring our sins back to the land from which we came?

World without sin

Powerful

Two of the eight generators in Kigoma continue to limp along, making the evenings exceptionally dark here – unless you live in my part of town.

At a neighborhood meeting last Friday, my neighbors and I met to revisit how effective the generator has been for our neighborhood, and whether the restricted number of hours is enough to give us an adequate supply of water. One of my neighbors mentioned that she thought someone had visited the power company to find out why our neighborhood was so powerless when, it was implied, so many people in our neighborhood are seemingly powerful.

“That doesn’t seem fair,” I said, “we already have a generator.” Many people in town can’t afford these contraptions. Shouldn’t the priority for power go to the people who are totally without, rather than those who have a generator but would prefer to save money on fuel?

For the past couple of nights, we have had power nearly every hour that I have been home – and apparently throughout the night as well. This morning my front porch was scattered with the carnage of bugs that had been attracted to our porch light during the night.

The divide between the haves and the have-nots is always underscored in times of scarcity; times when the haves can afford to pay a premium to access what is left of a resource. Perhaps I am oversensitive to the idea of my neighborhood getting what one friend said is “our fair share.” But I am terrified at the thought that one of my neighbors might have greased a palm to help ensure that we get more than our fair share, because there is nothing fair about that.

I curled-up to read a book last night at ten o’clock, guilt-ridden at the thought of the many families that had spent the evening without the light from a single bulb, while lights blazed in every room in my neighborhood; feeling a little ashamed that I lived in an area that has so many provisions and yet seems so unprepared for shortages; but knowing that at any moment I, too, could be hurled back into the dark.

Powerless

Sorry to have kept you in the dark over the past couple of weeks, but you see I have been in the dark, too. There has been a scarcity of power recently, which means a scarcity of many other things: internet, foods requiring refrigeration and water, to name a few. To make matters worse, our town is running out of soda and beer. In other words, we have a crisis on our hands.

But you wouldn’t know it by walking past the Tanzanian energy company. I strolled by last week and saw more activity happening outside - in the form of guards slouching against the fence and laughing - than appeared to be happening inside. Six of the eight generators for our town stopped working earlier this month, and while spare parts exist, they don’t exist in Tanzania, and rumors suggest that it will take months rather than weeks to fix them.

The guards are ostensibly protecting the Power Company from some sort of attack, but I couldn’t help but wonder who is working on the inside to protect the machines from their most recent fate: negligence. What’s the point of guarding something that isn't maintained adequately to ensure that it's worth protecting?

I suddenly understood why the guards were laughing.

I am lucky (well, relatively speaking). My neighborhood met and agreed to pay exorbitant sums of money to keep a generator working for eight hours per day for the houses on our patch of the hillside. But what about everybody else? Water is already scarce in our town, and without power to keep water pumps pumping, people are having to venture further and further to get their water. Many people are now venturing into my backyard to fill their buckets, emptying the tank for my neighborhood which is being filled by the generator my neighbors and I are paying to run. (I just don’t have the heart to stop them; everybody needs water.)

For me, the major inconvenience is an increase in the number of bugs that fly into my hair when I write by candlelight at night. But for many people this isn’t just a matter of comfort, it is a matter of safety and public health.

I hope when the spare parts arrive from Holland there is an instruction guide that will show the Power Company how to maintain the equipment they have. Because the next time these old machines breakdown, there may not be spare parts to fix them.

Precious cargo

We had already picked-up a number of people and bags of fish on our three-hour journey from Sunuka to Kigoma, but as we rounded the top of a hill just after crossing the Malagarasi River, we were asked to transport something I could have never expected.

I saw six men carrying a wooden platform with a colorful wooden mat. I recognized the design immediately, having seen it used in several funerals near Kigoma. Her name was Asea and she had suffered complications in childbirth. “Could we take her to town?” her brother asked. Men reorganized luggage in the back of the flatbed truck and laid her over bags and backpacks, putting her head in the lap of a mama who would accompany us to town. Other men – mostly those already on our convoy – piled in the back, offering no comforts to Asea or the mama, and holding as tightly to their social roles as they did to the side of the truck as we sped our way to Kigoma – two hours away – only slowing for military road blocks.

In the double-cab of the pick-up truck, the driver started shouting about something. A mother riding with us began yelling back. The guard we had in the front seat – to protect us from rebels and bandits – just sat there, his semi-automatic weapon bouncing between his legs as we bumped our way down the road. The children looked around, stared at me, smiled. I wondered if I was the only one in the car who remembered the precious cargo we were carrying in the back.

I found myself getting angry at the circumstances - that medical care is so poor in rural areas that women die unnecessarily from maladies that could otherwise be cured; that the roads are so bad it is difficult to get someone the urgent medical care they need. I had met a young man earlier that very day who had pointed out the Doctor in his town to me, commenting that the man had traded the town’s medicine for beer. I was suddenly angry at that Doctor, too, even though he had nothing to do with this woman. And I also found myself saddened that community had piled Asea into the back of our truck without so much as a kiss on her cheek, a last grasp of her hand or a whispered goodbye.

Once we reached the hospital, a Doctor met us at our truck and suggested we drive around to the back. We then carried Asea’s body into the postmortem wing of the hospital and laid her on a white-tiled table where Doctors hoped to save the precious cargo she was carrying – the baby she still had inside.

“OK, Robert, let’s go home,” the driver said to me cheerfully as we walked out of the postmortem room. I nodded my head quietly; and as I buckled my seatbelt, I looked back into the hospital where Asea was finally resting, wondering under what circumstances the local attitudes toward death became so blithe.

The Liemba

The Liemba at dawn

The trip was off to an auspicious beginning when the crew of the Liemba started playing the Titanic theme song shortly before we steamed our way out of the Kigoma harbor; although after twelve hours of Celine Dion, Westlife and what one friend calls "Tanzanian hip-bumping music," the sudden sinking of our ship was the least of my concerns.

I was excited about traveling on the Liemba because it is such an unlikely scrap of history. The Liemba (nee Graf von Gotzen) was Germany's secret weapon in the first naval battle of World War I - a battle which occurred, oddly enough, in Lake Tanganyika.

The battle over Lake Tanganyika was a fight for the strategic control over central Africa. In the book Mimi and TouTou Go Forth, Giles Foden explains that the Germans needed to maintain their control over German East Africa (now Tanzania) to ensure that they had a supply of boh cotton (previously imported from America and Britain) and exportable goods such as tobacco, tea and spices to generate revenue for their Imperial government and to fund its wars (not to mention the manpower they could ship to Europe to fight in the trenches for the Germans).

Hearing reports of a German steamer on the Lake (the reports were actually about a smaller vessel, called the Hedwig), the British sent two small armed motor boats (the HMS Mimi and HMS Toutou, French for "meow" and "woof-woof") to sink the Hedwig, which they did in a bay just north of Kigoma. But once the British troops saw the Liemba, it sounds like they tucked their tales and ran, and attempted to gain control of German East Africa by land instead.

If this theme sounds familiar to you, it's probably because you saw the film The African Queen. In the film, Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn wind their way down rivers to reach the lake, where they plan to sink a ship called the "Louisa" - a story based on the British hunt for the Hedwig, and their surprising discovery of the Liemba once they arrived. I have been told that the beautiful ship they find at the end of the film is in fact the Liemba herself, but it has been years since I have seen the film, so I cannot verify this.

In real life, the Liemba has sunk twice. First it was scuttled by the Germans in the mouth of the Malagarasi River after the Hedwig was sunk; they oiled-up the metal parts and hid the ship at the bottom of the lake, intending to reclaim it after they won the war.

The second sinking was an accident: it slipped under the currents while in port during a storm. Winston Churchill ordered that it be resurrected, and it has been operating ever since.

Today when people talk about the Liemba, they talk less about its ascent through the annals of history and more about the descent taken by passengers when disembarking the boat. Because the lake is so shallow near the shore, when the Liemba reaches most ports of call (with the exception of Kigoma and two other major cities with ports), it is simply parked in the lake where small wooden boats swarm its hatches and people jump in and out of boats, tossing luggage and parcels and children about, and bartering over the price to get back to land. It is a chaotic scene with the ship's horn serving as the starting pistol: people yell, push and jump from the Liemba into the smaller boats and from smaller boats into the Liemba. I watched anxiously at the first stop, knowing that the next morning it would be my turn to jump.

Any discomfort or anxiety I felt about my chosen method of travel quickly melted away as I enjoyed one of the most beautiful sunrises I have ever seen while clutching the Liemba's railing. As the National Parks boat I had boarded pulled away, I stared back at the Liemba, thinking about the incredible role she has played in history and all of the exciting battles and excursions she has made over the years; grateful to have been able to join her on one of her many voyages.

A fishing boat at sunrise - an incredible view from the Liemba

Ivory irony

I was buying toilet paper this past weekend and the woman asked me “Unaomba tembo au waridi?” Did I want the elephant roll or the rose roll? What a silly question, I thought. “The elephant roll!”

Elephants are highly regarded in marketing here. A popular Tanzanian cement company is called “Tembo Cement.” The local bank calls their credit card the “Tembo Card.” And the logo of the Hilltop Hotel features a giant elephant with massive ivory tusks – a creature which seems as likely to walk the hotel's grounds as a woolly mammoth.

The elephant image appears to be successful at marketing a variety of products associated with size and strength. But it is an unfortunate irony that elephants haven't been more successful at marketing the intrinsic value of elephants.

The last elephant near Kigoma town was probably killed at least two decades ago, during a time when they were associated less with toilet paper and more with wrecking gardens and ivory payloads. Today some elephants live in the southern part of the Kigoma region, but only a few remain, and they are getting fewer.

I spoke with a colleague about this over tea this morning. “Burundi is the number one exporter of ivory on the black market,” he told me, “and that’s a problem because they don’t have any elephants left in Burundi. So that means they are coming down to Kigoma, killing our elephants and then hiking back through the forests to Burundi with the tusks – hiking for weeks at a time if they have to. You’d be amazed at how quickly someone can hike with a huge ivory tusk over his shoulder.” It seems the heavier the tusk, the lighter the poacher is on his feet.

I attended (and presented at) a series of meetings last week that discussed the challenges and opportunities for conservation in an area south of Kigoma. I learned that the population of people in that area is still relatively small and disbursed, and that it is possible to help these communities live in harmony with the animals in the region, including elephants. But a proposed road has the potential to change all of that, slicing through the ecosystem and bisecting the migration routes elephants have used for generations.

Are elephants in the region being replaced with Tembo Cement? And if so, will the children of tomorrow know that elephants once roamed where concrete is being poured today?

My colleagues seem to think it is possible to meet the community's needs and to save room for wildlife, such as elephants - but we don't have time to waste. As strong as elephants may seem on a bag of concrete, they are not stronger than homemade shotguns or the will of consumers to collect ivory (on the international scale) or to buy meat (at the local market). So until a shotgun replaces elephants as the marketing symbol for strength, elephants will continue to be driven off their land by the very products their image is helping to promote.

I am not a Tanzanian, but I do think there needs to be a place in Tanzania for elephants beyond cartoon images on cookie boxes. If that is going to happen, a lot of work needs to be done to market elephants for the sake of elephants. And if that doesn't happen, I fear that one day Tanzanian students will sit in a concrete classroom eating elephant-shaped cookies and open their textbook to find these magnificent beings sharing a page with their woolly ancestors.

Language of coffee

If French is the language of love, then Spanish must be the language of coffee. I know this because a woman from Lima was recently in town advising the coffee-production efforts north of Kigoma. I had a chance to meet with her and a couple of her colleagues as they rated the coffees in the region, and they showed me how it's done.

Two of the people in the room were professional “cuppers,” trained in the art of evaluating coffee, similar to sommeliers in the world of wine. They take a spoon of coffee and slurp it loudly and quickly, letting the taste fill every corner of their mouth. They then swirl the coffee around for a few seconds and spit it into a bucket. Then a spoonful from the next cup, and on and on.

It is a rather loud and somewhat disturbing process, with so much slurping and spitting happening you almost forget this is how million-dollar cash-crops get started.

There are different criteria that are used to rate coffee. On the day I was observed the cuppers, they were ranking coffees based on five measures: aroma, body, flavor, acidity and aftertaste. It was incredible to watch three people in the room taste and rank coffees, and compare notes that were miraculously synchronized with each other. "Cup four of coffee eleven had a light essence of cassava to me..." "I said that, too!" were the types of comments you heard as they compared notes. They turned to me, "What did you think of the blend?" I searched for flavors of chocolate or honey or fruit - since they seemed to find fruit flavors in so many of the coffees on the table - but all I could come up with was "it tastes hot."

This is what I learned: first coffee cherries are picked, then the seeds are shucked from their fruit and washed and fermented – the latter step taking somewhere between 18 hours and three days, which I believe helps to finish removing the pulp from the seed. The seeds are then dried and tumbled to remove the outer-shell of the coffee seed, called “parchment.” Seeds are then hand-sorted to ensure no parchment makes it into the roaster, and they are sifted through screens which allow small or fragmented seeds to fall through (apparently they have poorer flavors). What is left is roasted, packaged and shipped to coffee drinkers from Bubango to Bellingham. All that just for a cup of coffee.

The woman from Lima spoke so beautifully about coffee I almost forgot she was speaking in English. Between the "chocolate aromas" and the "essences of honey," I wondered how I had ever ruined a cup of coffee with caramel syrup before. And while it's not yet a language I totally understand, I am willing to take the time to figure it out.

God's will

I went to a funeral earlier this week. It was the fourth funeral or wake I have attended since I arrived less than two months ago. While waiting for a car to go to the burial, a friend of mine said to me “when God decides it’s your turn to go, there’s really nothing you can do…"

I was speechless. The thing is, this wasn’t the first time I had heard that phrase. It wasn’t even the fourth time. And I was concerned to hear someone so well respected spreading a philosophy I believe may threaten the wellbeing of the people who live here. Let me explain.

The principle seems to be this: God won’t take my life before it’s my time – regardless of whether I wear a seatbelt, or use a mosquito net or practice safe sex – and when God decides it’s my time to go, there is nothing I can do about it.

I understand that it’s not my place to attach value statements to the beliefs of others - who am I to judge? But this particular belief system worries me because I believe it gives people an excuse to live their lives without taking responsibility for how their actions impact their lives and the lives of others. I also have a problem with the notion that God is somehow in the business of taking lives - which seems an odd hobby for someone who's moniker is "the Creator" - but that’s a different matter.

I discussed this with one of my friends while walking into town this afternoon. How can NGOs here help reverse the chief threats to people's wellbeing when highly respected members of those NGOs are perpetuating belief systems that seem to devalue the precautionary measures they are distributing? He completely understood. He gave me a great anecdote. When he goes home, he often has to tell his mother to shut the door to his sister’s bedroom at night, or else the mosquitoes will get her, and she will be at a greater risk of getting malaria - which is too often a death sentence for children under the age of five. “Oh, no,” his mother tells him, “God won’t take her life unless it’s her time.”

There was a similar story when I traveled through Dar when I first arrived in TZ. I was told that Mothers were not using car seats because, they said, if God wanted to take their baby, they wanted it in their arms when it happened. Car seat companies had a hard time convincing mothers that if they used a car seat maybe God wouldn’t take so many of their children. The story went that car seats only started to sell when one manufacturer had them blessed by a Priest.

One of the first times I heard the phrase was when I was talking to another respected community member who grew-up in a local village. “Did you swim there as a kid?” I asked. “Oh, lots,” he said. “Were there crocodiles there then?” “Oh, yes.” “Weren’t you scared?” "Why would I be scared? If a crocodile ate me, it would mean God had decided it was my time to go."

Perhaps that kind of blind faith is comforting when, as one person told me, death is "so simple here." But I am concerned because it seems that this blind faith may actually be part of the problem. A big one. Malaria and HIV/AIDS are killers, and it requires precautions to keep from contracting them. Those precautions - mosquito nets and condoms - are becoming increasingly available, and yet the death toll keeps rising. Over one million people die every year from malaria; that's more than twice the toll a generation ago. So what are we doing wrong?

If we are going to make an impact, I think people need to take responsibility for the choices that they themselves make. Until they do, I fear that all of the money and medication and condoms in the world won’t be able to abate these threats in any sort of long-term way. And for someone like me, who came here hoping that a little work and money could go a long way, it is disheartening to see that one of the chief barriers to our success may be paradigms of the very people who need help.

Just burn it

The fire approaching our house

“Don’t worry,” is what I believe the guard was telling me in Swahili, “we won’t let it get past here.” I walked out of my house this morning to find a part of our yard on fire, and land in front of our house singed from a fire earlier this morning. “Why are they burning the bushes?,” I asked my roommate. “My gut tells me that whatever reason they give you, they are really doing it because of the snakes. I heard them talking about them this morning.”

Taking initiative is good, I wanted to tell the guards, but destroying habitat is bad. Fewer snakes near houses in a part of the world where there are about 197 known species, of which 47 are believed to be toxic to humans, sounds objectively like a good idea. But not all snakes are bad, and in fact many species, including some of the poisonous ones (and a good conservationist would say all of them) are quite good for a variety of ecosystems, including backyards. I know one couple who say they breathe easy when they have a cobra in their yard because cobras are territorial and help to keep the really scary snakes – like puff adders and black mambas – at bay.

But how can I justify letting our guards burn the land around our house – habitat for an endemic species – when at the very same time I am at the office working to help turn a charred landscape back into habitat for a different species? Who’s to say that the species I am trying to help is any better than the snakes around my house?

These are questions I pondered this morning as my yard continued to go up in smoke. The problem, which I am now complicity contributing to, is that burning seems to be the solution to too many challenges here. It is used to dispose of garbage – a fact I bemoan when walking through clouds of burning plastic on my way home from work at night. It is also used to eliminate tall grasses around people’s homes, to help keep bandits from sneaking-up on them; to generate new grass for cattle to graze, as the grasses here tend to store enough energy to regenerate once every dry season if burned; and to clear land for cultivation. Whether someone is getting rid of something or making room for something else, it seems that too often the mantra here is: just burn it.

I was once enjoying a sunset with friends when a blaze began on an adjacent hill and spread quickly. As we wondered how far it would reach and how fast, I asked “why do people here build fires that seem designed to spread out of control? Why isn’t just burning their land enough?” The female in the group rolled her eyes and said, “They’re trying to look macho.” And if the camping trips I have taken with my friends in DC are illustrative of the male mentality here, we are lucky there aren’t garbage bags full of propane and twenty-something Tunisians in Kigoma.

Another friend added that clearing land by burning is technically illegal now, so when people burn their field they also tend to burn their neighbor’s for good measure. That way if the police come to investigate, they can say “don’t look at me – Achmed started it. Just look at his land!”

This concerns me because so much of the landscape we are trying to conserve is land that was once fertile forests and is now barren and scarred from fires. To clear land for cultivation, people usually set fires to remove brush, grass and snakes. But too often those fires are not controlled, and in the dry season they can spread and destroy ecosystems tens of kilometers away from the region that will be cultivated. I have seen huge hillsides lining the lake that show no signs of cultivation, but which are totally destroyed from the fires that regularly sweep through the area.

And because the top soils are thin on the hillsides, agriculture can usually only be sustained for a handful of years before the top soil washes into the rivers and settles at the bottom of Lake Tanganyika. And when that happens, the families must move their crops to an adjacent slope, where first they have to clear the land, and the cycle continues.

Luckily the fire at our house is a small one, and is being monitored and beaten with a mango branch whenever it wanders beyond the “snake zone” (and if that is not the case, you can imagine what I will be writing about on Monday). But I have to wonder, if every household were to burn their shrubs, and communities continued to burn so much of their crop land, where would all the snakes live? Suddenly the couch at the Kigoma airport doesn't seem like such an unsuitable habitat after all.

The charred ground below our mango tree

"Water, water everywhere...

...and not a drop to drink.”

Whoever wrote that must have visited Kigoma once.

Outside my window lies 17% of the world’s fresh water. Lake Tanganyika fills a deep pocket of the lower end of the Great Rift Valley, the divergent plate boundary for the African and Indian tectonic plates. I have heard that a seismograph in Burundi has registered up to 60 earthquakes in the lake per day. If this rifting continues, one day Lake Tanganyika may become an ocean.

The lake is very deep, with depths reaching 1,470 meters (4,823 ft) in the northern basin of the lake, not far from where I live. So with the world’s second largest freshwater lake at our fingertips, why do so many people have to live without their basic water needs met? How is it that many people who live on the shore of Lake Tanganyika only consume about 25 liters of water per person per day – well below demand – whereas the US average, from New York City to the green lawns of Arizona, can and do consume 350?

I attended a lecture last night by a Tanzanian hydrogeologist who explained his hypothesis for why this is the case:

- Power outages; in order for 65% of the demand for water in this community to be met, the current water pumps would need to operate for 20 hours per day. Instead, they run for 18 hours per week, due largely to the scarcity of power.

- Inadequate and aging infrastructure; not only are there not enough pipes to circulate water through the community, but the pipes we currently have were laid in 1960 (and retrofitted in 1985), and it is estimated that 45-55% of the water that passes through them is lost to leakage (compared to the global average leakage rate of 10%).

Pollution is likely also a factor, as the water at the very edge of communities is so often polluted, and at times contaminated with cholera.

And let’s not forget the crocodiles. They are not common here, but a few rumors are probably all it would take to keep people away from the lake shore for a while (that's all it would take for me!).

So it is a tragedy and an irony that so many people go without water when water is in such abundance here. The good news is that there are Tanzanians who understand these issues, and who are bringing them to the attention of the officials who need to hear them.

Last week, men began digging-up the road which runs in front of my house; and last night on the way to the lecture, I noticed pipes lying next to the channels dug in the road. So it looks like part of the matter is already being addressed.

Hopefully additional taxes (including almost 30% of my salary) will go to employing people to continue to build the local infrastructure. Because everybody needs water.

Gratefully, history has also marched on

There is history wherever you go. Lucky are the travelers who find the right people to tell them about it.

This past weekend, we had two visitors from the US, and on our way to take them back to the airport, we stopped to pick-up a man who works at a local museum; a man who had kindly agreed to give us a tour of his museum that day. On our way to the museum together, our passenger said, “Let’s stop and see the roots of slavery on the way.”

The deepest roots of the slave trade are in West Africa, where twenty men boarded a Dutch vessel bound for Jamestown in 1619. But two hundred years later, the appetite for slaves had reached East Africa, and Sultan Seyyid Said of Zanzibar made slavery an important part of commerce in the lands he controlled. As the demand for slaves increased, Arabs began stretching further inland – taking with them, as one person told me, “Islam, and slavery.” By the early 1840’s, the Arabs had reached Ujiji, the town directly adjacent to the city where I now live, and Said was selling 40,000 slaves per year.

We drove to a community in Ujiji that looked like so many others, and our passenger (who is close friend of my roommate’s) led us between the wood planks and tin roofs to a small plot between a few homes. Large, solid rock formations grew out of the ground, with grasses growing between fissures and garbage piling-up in the cavities. “These are the foundations of the building that held the slaves,” we were told. It was here that they lived until it was time to march to the Coast, toward Zanzibar, where many of them would remain and work on the island's burgeoning clove plantations.

Kids came running out, and parents began to join them. We were led to a yard shared by a set of homes (I was later told that the front house was likely the husband’s, with the other structures each belonging to a different wife; yet another legacy of Islam). The yard had a deep pocket, where the wall was retaining a yard on one side and collecting trash on the other. It wondered: who had gazed upon that wall, and what thoughts must have been spinning in their head?

Ujiji was a hub for slaves collected from communities around Lake Tanganyika, with many shipped across the lake from Congo. In exchange for the men, Arab merchants traded flint-lock muskets, gold, and white fabric with local Chiefs. Such were the commodities used to barter for human lives.

The men were then connected using wooden “trees” – thick yokes around their necks – and marched to the Tanzanian coast: a path that I am told was at least 1,000 km long. On their journey, the story goes, slaves planted mangoes to provide shade and food for those who would follow; and to this day, mango trees apparently transect the country all the way from Ujiji to the coast, outlining the slave’s route like a lightening bolt.

We stood on a dusty road in Ujiji where kids played, women carried water and men sat in small groups in the shade. The road was flanked by old mango trees on each side. “This is where their march began,” our passenger told us. This is the first of the 1,000 km.

My eyes stretched to the end of the trees, where the road stopped and an unpredictable landscape started. I wondered what it must have been like to navigate that landscape wearing a wooden yoke, never knowing how many kilometers and mango trees lay ahead. This is a part of the history of the slave trade that I had never thought much about; so much of my education began with people boarding a ship. But with the foundations of the slave trade in East Africa at my feet, I could feel the history marching over me.

As I walked back to my friends, the sounds of the street began to fill my head again. I tried to return the smiles of kids on the street, wondering if they had any idea what had happened on the ground where they now played.

Sounds of sunrise

Whenever I wake-up some place new, my mind slowly becomes aware of its surroundings in the moments before I fully awaken. It struggles to identify and recognize the sounds outside – the water, birds, or maybe cars – and to establish my bearings based on what it hears. The sounds are different out there, my mind muses, Where am I? This doesn’t feel like my bed. This sounds far away. I must be far away. It's coming back to me now: I live in Tanzania! Ah, that’s right, now it makes sense... and I drift back to sleep.

But my subconscious is now becoming highly tuned to the sounds of pre-dawn Kigoma.

The first notes to waft into my room – and my consciousness – are from the rustling of leaves outside my window. There are diurnal winds in Kigoma that are extremely predictable during the dry season – blowing from the land to the lake before sunrise, and from the lake onto the land between two and three in the afternoon. During the lake’s gasp for air in the morning, the winds blow right through my room, with gusts shaking the trees and chilling my skin. I reach for the blanket to cover up, and rollover, knowing that dawn is near.

Moments later I hear the wavering, sing-song voice of a man. I wake-up a little more and recognize the sound as that of the Adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, being recited by the muezzin at the mosque up the hill. “Allah is the greatest,” he recites, “Make haste towards prayer; prayer is better than sleep.”

On the horizon, the first rays of light must be warming the sky. The birds in the tree begin to stretch their feathers. The first to greet the dawn is the unusual-sounding bird that makes a whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop-hop sound. I try to visualize the bird, and picture it having a big red crest of feathers on its head. The message is returned by a garbled whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop-hop, but the sound is distorted; I imagine it being the bird equivalent of someone talking to you from the bathroom while brushing their teeth. “What?,” the first bird seems to be saying. “I SAID whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop-hop!” the second bird replies.

Then the less exotic birds chime in: the whistling sound of something that might be Alexander’s Alakat, the chirping of a bird that reminds me of home, followed by the crowing of a neighbor’s rooster.

Every city sounds different in the morning – with different scores and different soloists. But Kigoma seems special: the vibrating leaves are somehow always on cue; the Adhan creates a hypnotic second movement, and because its sound is carried on the wind, it always seems to crescendo with the leaves; and finally, the rousing rhapsody of the birds, who are the final harbinger of morning – telling me it is time to wake-up.

I love to lie in bed and enjoy this early morning symphony, knowing that soon the music will be replaced by the voices of goats and two-stroke engines, and the crunch of gravel under the feet of guards doing their rounds. I lie there with my eyes closed and savor the sounds, and once I am fully awake, I get up and join the chorus.