Month: September 2010

an Aha moment

A post I wrote for the Sustainable Cities blog.

I had an “aha” moment the other day.

I was having dinner with some new friends. The person who sat next to me was an American who worked with the department of social work at the University of Dar es Salaam. Among all the interesting differences she learnt about social work in the US and in Tanzania, one in particular stood out in her mind.

Government-provided social safety networks are practically non-existent in Dar es Salaam – the government simply doesn’t have the funding to provide extra support. While North American social workers often refer patients to appropriate social support networks, Tanzanian social workers have to rely on informal ones.

Due to the social stigma attached to HIV/AIDS, often families will not care for the sick. Instead, Tanzanian social workers will take them to the “ten cell leader”, who cares for ten small groups of sick individuals. The end goal is to try to educate and convince the family to take the patient back into their care.

Then, the “aha” moment came.

To read the rest, please go to: http://blog.sustainablecities.net/2010/08/30/a-moment-of-clarity/

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Here’s a video I helped make for the UBC Dollar Project! Check us out :)

Sorry I can't embed it…

‘I beg you…’

I walk up to a store.

“I beg you for rice, beans, and eggs.” (Naomba wari, marage na mayai)

Don’t freak out, I’m not that low on cash yet.

In Tanzanian Swahili, whenever you ask to buy something at a store, you use the verb “naomba” which means “I beg.” As people keep telling me, Swahili in Tanzania is very polite, so polite that you actually don’t use “please” very often. I mean, I guess if you’re begging already, please is a bit over the top.

In Kenya, when you want to buy something, you would say “nataka” which means “I need/want.” And, I am told, Tanzanians consider this very rude. In general, people here tell me that Kenyans are aggressive and impolite.

A neighbour that’s aggressive and impolite? Sound familiar?

Whenever someone asks me aren’t Canada and the USA the same/very similar? I would compare Canada and the USA as Tanzania and Kenya. Neighbours, same language, similar culture, but very different. :P

P.S. In the other languages I know, in the same situation, you would say…

English: I want to buy rice, beans, and eggs.

Cantonese: I want to buy rice, beans, and eggs.

Mandarin: I want rice, beans, and eggs (-? I guess depends on where you are in China?).

Japanese: Rice, beans, and eggs, please (onegaishimasu – untranslatable. Used in different contexts for asking other people to do things for your favour. But you can also say you want to buy rice, beans, and eggs, I think)

So I guess, most of the languages I’m familiar with are quite blunt :P except Japanese.

First and current impressions

I had a long and interesting talk with one of my roommates last night. I don’t really remember the specific details since I was quite brain dead after a 12-hour work day. But I remember we were discussing about how we were adjusting to life here in Dar.

As I mentioned in another post, frankly, there wasn’t much adjusting on my side. This is way easier than how we lived in Kampala, which was my first time in any “developing” country. I still remember vividly how I felt in the first four weeks after I arrived in Kampala.

It was awful.

Don’t get me wrong, I was excited about the different culture, the intriguing sights everywhere, the interesting classes we were having, the people, the language, the nightlife…But it wasn’t easy.

Kampala is a very different city than Dar es Salaam, at least my experience of it. Kampala is less planned, less “developed”, less stable.

We stayed in a hostel that local students live in to attend Makerere University. It was right next to one of the unplanned settlements. When the rain came (and tropical rains are like nothing that I have seen before, it’s like half an hour (sometimes more) of a crazy Hong Kong typhoon without the wind), the water would rush pass our hostel like a river and accumulate in the unplanned settlement. The water would be a dark brown – who knows what is in there. When we visited an unplanned settlement a bit further away, we asked them what happened with the waste from the pit latrines that were built. “The rain takes care of it” was the answer. Flooding is no joke in Kampala; disease outbreaks are rampant and many people lose their homes.

The hostel itself was alright, minus the fact that no matter how much we cleaned, the room, especially the bathroom was still dirty. We had cold showers every day. We washed our own clothes by hand. We ate local food every day because it was prepared for us (I like the food, but it’s different). There was no internet (only very, very slow one at the university).

The city was littered with garbage, mosquitoes, and dust clouds. Trash burning was everywhere – I don’t think holding my breath when passing really helped me avoid the toxic plastic fumes. The potholes were so big on some of the roads that water would accumulate and it felt like you were going through a small pond. Constant “mzungu” (white person) calls were unavoidable, as with the hair touching and hand grabbing. Getting ripped off for taking transport was common practice. The pit latrines, when we had them during trips, were hard to get used to, especially the ones with lots of cockroaches.

And of course, there was the poverty that was so visible, yet so vast, that there’s nothing you could do but feel helpless.

I’m painting a very bad picture, aren’t I? But it’s true, those were my first impressions. And being very honest, I had about 3 weeks of a career crisis of sorts.

You have to understand, I have always felt a draw towards humanitarian work, sometimes it even feels as strong as a life mission I was born with. But here I was, in a place where I had thought I wanted to be, and all I could think about was life’s discomforts and feel guilty (well, that’s essentially what feeling helpless about poverty is about). How was I going to ever work in international development work again when I can’t even stand living a middle class life in Kampala? How was I ever supposed to help the marginalized when I can barely live in the same city as them, let alone truly experience their situation? I had major doubts, and it wasn’t pleasant.

Luckily, and surprisingly, all this almost vapourised after three weeks. All I could do at the time was remind myself that I could get through this, to not think about it too much and just concentrate on my learning. And eventually “their” way of life because “my” way of life. I stopped having a panic attack every time I had to cross a major road (those speeding cars are scary!). I took in, and enjoyed, the everyday life I saw rather than let my guilt get in the way. I saw more of the assets of this community rather than all that it was missing. (Come to think about it, it was very similar to the asset mapping exercise we did for our training in the downtown east side in Vancouver).

I’m still not very sure what happened, but I’m glad it did. I’m glad that by the end, when I went back to Kampala for 3 days after my 2 month stay in Tanzania, I actually missed it. I was so excited to buy a rolex (a chapatti and egg omelette roll that’s the most delicious thing ever)!

I’m glad to be here again. Especially without the career crisis feeling.

Work isn’t really work

It’s 2:40 am. A rooster is crowing outside my window. Who in the world thought about domesticating these birds?

Now that I’m up and unable to fall back into slumber, I might as well give you an update.

Work has been pretty crazy the last two days. But I’m really starting to see how I fit into the whole picture of SC’s work here; especially my role and involvement in the legitimisation of urban agriculture part.

Let me explain that.

Almost none of the farmers in the city (which there are A LOT, something like 40% of the city population is involved with urban agriculture in some form or another. But then, there isn’t really even an accurate number of how many people live in the city. Officially, there are 4 million inhabitants, but guesses can go up to 10 million. Dar es Salaam is *the* major city migrant workers go to; everyone comes here to try to “make it.” The number of unplanned settlements (new trendy word for slums) makes it hard to actually do a census. – phew, that was a long aside…sorry) have secure land tenure, meaning they farm on land that is not legally theirs. They could have asked for permission from the land owner, whether it is private land or the local government, but usually they do not have a formal contract for long term use. Hence, if the owners decide, they could be very quickly evicted.

As you can imagine, this insecure land tenure issue can bring about a ton of problems. Uncertainty (and it’s scary because this is your whole livelihood) for one, but also inability to invest in the land. For example, many of the farmers would like to irrigate with clean water (who wouldn’t?) but they can’t get any funding or help to install wells or boreholes because no one would fund a project that can be taken over by the land owners any day.

In fact, almost all of the complaints that the farmers have can be related back to the fact that they don’t have any ownership whatsoever over the land they farm.

So that brings us to why I do my work here.

In the short term, we’re trying to help these farmers with the issues we can currently address. Mainly, it’s about building their capacities, which is development jargon for training them in some skills or encouraging them to be confident in applying their skills (“empowering”). For example, right now we’re organizing a training week that includes workshops in marketing, entrepreneurship, and environmentally good practices (“agronomy” – for some reason, this is what they call it here). These are the top issues the farmers identified and we’re trying to help. We actually just had a very fruitful meeting with the trainers and farmer representatives yesterday. Very happy.

But the main reason I was happy about the meeting yesterday isn’t all because it seemed like the farmers are interested in the training. It’s because this training is the first step in getting towards our long term goal.

Eventually, one day, we hope to get urban agriculture land to become a legitimate land use in urban areas. In cities, land use planning involves “zones,” where places are left aside for residential housing, commercial activity, green space, public institutions etc. We want urban agriculture to become one of those zones. The problem with this in Dar es Salaam (and actually many places) is that city planners often fail to see why agriculture should be zoned in the city. There is still very much (as with most places in the world) a view that agriculture is completely a rural activity. (If you’re thinking, well, duh, of course farming is a rural activity, then I will have to explain in another post).

Which, you know, simply means that they are dismissing 40% of the city population’s livelihoods as irrelevant. Even if you don’t agree agriculture should be done in cities, shouldn’t the planning of cities be for the benefits of the inhabitants?

So on the last day of this training week, we are going to get a bit political (which is always interesting). We’re trying to bring together the head planners of each municipality (there are 3), heads of the municipal agriculture offices, representative from the national Ministry of Lands, Housing, and Human Settlement, and representatives from farmers groups. We’re trying to get a discussion going and give an opportunity for the farmers to directly converse with these government officials, who, frankly, don’t listen enough. Hopefully, we’ll also get a rough draft of maps of where areas of urban agriculture should be zoned.

I was very happy with the meeting yesterday because it seemed like we got our point across to the farmers that this last training day is going to be very important. Be prepared for it. Discuss with your groups and write down what your main concerns are. Maybe even draw a map of what you think should be zoned as urban agriculture land. Make sure you think about the bigger picture of urban agriculture in Dar es Salaam rather than just the group you farm with.

In a nutshell, minus all the political and human dynamics, that’s my job. In development jargon, it’s called “engaging stakeholders.”

Do you see why I enjoy my job? :)

Oh wow, the rooster stopped crowing. Maybe I can get a few more hours of sleep…

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