Welcome to Tanzania (Your Mileage May Vary): Week Two
As the natural wonder of a new and beautiful tropical locale slowly settles into quiet appreciation, you start to notice things. As I explore the city, the stratification in society becomes all the more apparent. The city has many large, shimmering high-rises bristling with Coca-Cola and life insurance adverts. Large obelisks singing odes to Western Capitalism and modern aesthetics. A stone’s throw away, hidden by a wall or a market, you will often find a slope or path that leads directly into a dense maze of poorly maintained shacks. Dar es Salaam is one of the most well mapped cities in Africa thanks to community input and crowd sourcing, a fact that African Open Data whizzes love to share. I doubt that it extends to these parts of town.
A lot of our time is spent in or walking through Illala District, which is generally regarded as a more middle or upper class area. Even here, the median monthly income is somewhere around TSH 22,300. That comes out to TSH 743 or about $0.35 a day. Throughout Tanzania, only 16% of urban dwellers have a reliable source of income. Due to complex land-use regulations, large swathes of the urban poor live in overcrowded, temporarily occupied settlements like the one we discovered behind Kariakoo Market last week. They are subject to eviction without compensation, at the mercy of floods, and in areas with a dearth of services and resources.
National statistics almost always paint a clear cut picture of a disparity between urban and rural health. But I’m starting to question the reality of the situation. For example, infant and child mortality is almost the same between the two populations and cities actually perform worse when it comes to neonatal mortality. For Tanzania at least, it seems that the urban-rural divide is closing and that intra-city disparities are not as represented.
The way people truly treat each other day to day is becoming more apparent. Yes, what I said before is still true. As a whole, Tanzanians are by far some of the nicest and most easy-going people I have ever met. However, there have been some appropriate checks to my previous views of life here:
1) If you are a tourist with money, people are going to be nicer to you. This is doubly true if you are a white tourist.
2) My slightly more complicated identity as an Ethiopian-American is essentially a wild card. The way I am treated as an American walking with other Americans is different than how I am treated on my own when they perceive me as a non-Swahili speaking East African which is different than how I am treated when I am perceived as Kenyan which is different than how I am perceived as a Tanzanian (which is even further complicated when I am falsely identified as Zanzabari). As we branch out into less touristy areas, my lack of fluent Swahili is a near constant source of disappointment for the locals, while for the other students a single word is enough to garner strong appreciation.
3) The violence, when it does occur, is sudden. We have witnessed mob justice carried out in the wake of what seemed to be an attempted robbery, a child washing car windows in the street be bashed in the back of the head with a brick because the man watching him was angry that the driver drove away without paying, and a woman begging be shoved, hard, into the dirt by a passing policewoman for no reason.
As of Thursday, September 3, I still have not left for Tanga due to “administrative issues”. I wouldn’t be surprised if this continues into next week. I have gotten approval and begun researching my health systems paper on the evolution, current status, and future of the Tanzanian mental health system. My research preceptor will be travelling with limited internet access till September 7, but with a little guidance over email I have begun looking through existing literature on Malaria diagnoses with rapid diagnostic tests and subsequent disease management on the periphery of the health system. Soon I will be making my own proposal to evaluate this in Tanga and Korogwe.
I am happy. I am learning. I am strengthening my abilities and resolve to shape and hopefully benefit the world around me. But there is a nagging feeling of guilt, one that I’ve been warned about many a time from people with eons more experience than I. A cognitive dissonance of sorts, spurred as we speak by the fact that I am saying that I want to dedicate my life to the betterment of those most in need and writing about urban poverty and health disparities on a $600 dollar laptop sipping TSH 2000 coffee in a café that looks nicer than many of my regular haunts back in DC while a block away I know that there is a child who would use that coffee money for a lot more than a bargaining chip for free Wi-Fi.
This isn’t a completely new feeling. I’ve experienced something similar for much of my life in DC. But the sheer extremity and pervasiveness of the poverty here is different. At home, a homeless person could, given the money and will to spend it in such a manner, grab a coffee and sit here just as I am right now. Here, I have no doubt the security guard with the imposing, sunlight devouring, matte black, pump action shotgun sitting across his lap would be on him within seconds.
After all, just yesterday, even a steward of the law saw fit to casually throw a woman to the ground like a piece of trash. Just for existing.
Lala Salaama from Dar es Salaam.
