Day 34, revisited: Dar Reality Tour

Typing all of this from Rome...it was Tanzania just yesterday, but wow, it all seems dreamy now in this cool weather and pastel streetscapes...


So. Backing up a bit, I owe some details from the Dar Reality Tour, because it's too good to gloss over. Close readers will notice that I have dropped a word, both from the title and from my vocabulary. Certain parts of that tour, I will maintain, Never Happened. But, whatever mode of transport you choose, the Reality Tour was really great. This tour is run by a guy named Maja; he is a twenty-something energetic guy from Kilimanjaro, friendly, well-educated, committed to getting his hands dirty solving Africa's problems. He wears a Rasta hat. He started this tour because he knows that visitors and expats often see one side of Dar, but miss most of it, and all of the important parts. This isn't intended to be a favela tour, or a history tour, or anything like that- just a good range of sites showing vignettes of everyday Dar life. Maja has a good perspective, too, on the difference between outside intervention and grassroots action, and how the two can work together.

We started at a new market space- nicely built, good drainage, near a busy street- which was pretty dead. The planners hadn't really considered location, and market tradition, so nice or not, nobody's coming. It's not close enough to the neighborhoods and to the dala dala stops, and it's too wide and open, and the rent is high so people have to charge more for their products. The only people trying to sell here are the ones too new to the area to know better yet. Interesting. I was late to this stop due to transport issues but I think it might have been built with IMF funds- great idea, but not in context.

Next stop: the coffee sellers. This was my favorite. There are lots of guys around town selling little espresso-sized cups of strong coffee and sweet peanut candy. This is harder than it sounds, for many reasons, but mainly because they are carrying a coffee pot out away from their bodies on a hanging basket with live coals, and a bucket of water full of espresso glasses, and a tray of peanut candy, all at once. They also get up at dawn to start this process. They start with green coffee beans from near Kili, and roast them in a shallow pan over a small burner. When they're dark brown in about 10 minutes, they blow off the charred skin and grind them in a mortar and pestle. Meanwhile, over another burner on their porch workshop, they're making peanut candy from sugar, peanuts, and a handful of flour at the end, caramelized and rolled out on a wooden bench. We got to watch them do all this, and grind some coffee, and then try the coffee and candy. It's good- but the real point, though, is that this whole enterprise is a stepping stone job for newcomers. It's a long day's work, and work that makes you strong, for about 7 or 8 thousand shillings a day(maybe 5 or 6 dollars.) Novody tries to make this into a bigger business venture, because when you save enough money to move up the ladder to something else, it's expected that you train someone new to town to take your place. That person will almost certainly from your village, and it gives him a chance to make a start in Dar, too. Maja says there are a lot of small industries like this, each one perpetuated by cycles of folks moving to the city from the same village as well.

Next stop was a small neighborhood, where we were fed again. This time it was chapati, kind of like a thick tortilla, and mendazi, one of my favorite foods since I left home. It's a cross between a donut and a crumpet, barely sweet and spongy inside and crunchy on the outside. We fished these out of a bucket with a skewer. This is a neighborhood of Swahili houses, which are 8 rooms: 3 on each side of a small hallway, and two more across a small courtyard in the back. The front porch is for businesses; people either sell things at the front, like the food we tried, or rent the space out to others. 8 families live in these 8 rooms. I'm sure it's a little tight when everybody's home, but we went inside and it was really pleasant, especially the courtyard in the back.

On to another small neighborhood with a water problem. There's a stream running through a gully here, which has been stagnant and polluted for a long time. Maja has been working on this problem; the neighborhood first mangaged to build a small bridge across the gully. The second challenge was to get the water moving, which they have recently done thanks to a small donation from a film crew who was coming through the village. The still have a couple of obstacles- there's the issue of improving sanitation so that sewage is re-directed, which is a huge health problem. There's also talk of a big stream clean-up, and a campaign to get people to stop littering. Maja really wants to get the locals to take ownership in this part, which makes a big difference in follow-through. It's important to him that the neighborhood kids don't grow up learning to wait for outiders to come in and fix problems for them.

After the bridge we went to the big market. An African market is one of the busiest places on earth, and I am including Manhattan here. Piles of everything edible you can imagine is piled up, people jostling and crowding, hot and loud and smelly and everything else that a dynamic market should be. Maja showed us some local products, such as rolls of clay people buy either for vitamins or make'up, and a little bitter eggplant that contains quinine, so people eat it for malaria prevention. Behind the market is a clothing market, bundles and bales of goods donated from other countries. Lots of them are donated, but lots of them are sold. Here, people buy the nicest of the donations, fix them up, and sell them for a small profit in stalls.

There were a couple of stops after the market: a cloth seller, a traditional herbal healer who walked us through her garden, a corn grinding operation, and a cottage industry making handpainted fans. It's pretty amazig- people are really resourceful here, and interdependent, and making do with very little and living joyfully. I've been thinking long and hard about whether I would call this poverty, and how I feel about it. Is it poverty? Is it just less things, which is not the same thing at all? A different way of living? That, for sure. Certainly, from what I've seen in Dar, conditions are far better than they might be in, say, a Rio favela. People don't have much, but they mostly seem to have enough, and to know what to do with it. They share, they live in close quarters, it's an up-close and personal kind of community- but it's one that's functioning well, and allows for a lot of support and upward mobility and entrepreneurial spirit. It's not fair, I know, to try and parse this out through the lens of my experience and assumptions, but there's a lot to be learned here....still thinking.