I am because YOU are.

Hello all. Since the last post, much has happened here although time seems to have slowed down. Right now we are staying on the Africa Inland Church (AIC) Compound in the guest house of Bob and Esther Jeffers, a missionary couple who have served in Tanzania for 30 years and are full of interesting stories about life in the wild. Apparently Tanzania has modernized quite a bit even in the last ten years, and at its worst (the late 80s/early 90s) the socialist government of Tanzania had even shut off its borders to trade and it was impossible to buy anything (except locally grown fruits and vegetables) in the stores. Bob and Esther have been incredibly hospitable and have opened their home to us and have shared many of their stories and insights into what we can expect when we get to Kahunda and begin our work.

Now life in Mwanza is interesting. Like Dar there are frequent power outages, but unlike Dar there are also frequent water outages. In fact, in our first six days here we’ve had running water twice, both of which times we managed to nab a cold shower. But when it is about 30 degrees plus every day, two showers in a week is not enough. To drink water here is also an event. First the water has to be boiled for 20 minutes, then run through a triple layered filter system, than shocked with a sterilizing fluid. Because this process takes such a large part of everyone’s day, no one was impressed with me on the first day that the water stopped working when I used a full cooler of the drinking water to flush the toilet. In my defence, they may have been even less impressed if I had not, but live and learn.

The guest house here is nice. We have our own room with a little kitchenette and dining room, shower and bathroom. Small but “gezelic” (spelling?). There are a few downsides to this place though. First, the neighbour’s cows, which seem to be in perpetual labour, are about 20 yards from our window and let out blood curdling moos every 20 minutes. Then there are Bob’s demon-possessed dogs which are right outside our window. Now these would not be so bad if it were not for a homeless man and his Dog who decided to put together a makeshift home of plastic bags and logs right outside our window on the other side of the wall around Bob and Esther’s property. As I type this, these dogs are already going at it. On top of all of this, there is the Muslim call to prayer over the mosque loudspeakers that reverberate off the rocky hillsides and lake water with stunning clarity. The noise is an unbearable cross of Bollywood and Machiavelli.

Ok, but enough whining. Things are looking up. Mwanza, as I said earlier, has a much more provincial feel than Dar Es Salaam and Vanessa and I have felt much more secure in traveling outside of the gated communities of CRWRC and into the city. We walk each morning for our Swahili lessons – a good 20 minute walk into town – with incredible views of Lake Victoria and its many islands and Granite hillsides. (Not to mention the plethora of Birds to see on the way – see pictures.) Despite this being the rainy season, we’ve only had a few brief showers and mostly sun for which we are thankful – especially because the rains can really make the roads quite bad, and in some places inaccessible.

Learning Swahili is fun because there is only Vanessa to laugh at me brutalize words like Nne...pronounced “NN – Nay” (means ‘four’). Our teacher is Mr. Gaudence. Actually it may just be Gaudence, but we’re both still unsure if that’s his real name. It, apparently, means happy, which is fitting for this guy because he laughs a lot, and usually for no apparent reason. We both laugh with him with that “I-have-no-idea-what-is-so-funny” look in our eyes, which just gets him to laugh harder, with his nostrils flared and this almost nervous look in his eyes. I hope to get to the bottom of this soon.

There are many things that are interesting about Swahili, from the little bit we’ve learned to date. First, where English has separate subject and verbs, the Swahili combines them to form a single word and, depending on which of the eight noun classes it is in, will follow a different set of rules for how to make the word. So, par exempla, when we say “It was” we separate the subject “It” from the verb “to be” and change the verb to “was” to indicate a past tense. The Swahili make all of this one word. “Kuwa” is the infinitive form of “to be” and “i” is the Swahili subject form of “it”. In order to make the verb tense past they add “li” as an infix. (Suffixes go after, Prefixes go before, and the Infix goes – you guessed it). So to say “It was” you’d say “Ilikuwa”. This comes in handy in many of the simple dialogues since KUWA, like our “to be,” is the most used verb form in the language.

Another interesting aspect of the Swahili language is the length that formal greetings take place.
Typical conversation:
Person A: Hodi! Hodi! (Knock! Knock!... Can I come in)
Person B: Karibu! (Welcome!)
A: Hujambo? (Jambo = the news or issues, u = subject form of you, H = negative indicator.... So, there is no news or issues with you?)
B: Sijambo. Na Wewe? (Sijambo = yes, there is no new news/concerns with me. Na Wewe = And you?)
A: Sijambo. Mama Hajambo?
B: Hajambo. Na wewe, wtotos hawajambo?
A: Hawajambo. Na wewe...
(now I think this can go on indefinitely, but what they do is ask about the issues or concerns with each other’s mother, brother, sister, grandparent, cousins, nephews, roommates... ad infinitum)
B: Habari za hapa? (loosely translated: How is here? How is your place?)
A: Nzuri Sana. Na Wewe, Habari za huko? (How is there?)

(This proceeds into asking each other how their home is, how their work is, how their morning is..etc. and responses range from Nzuri = good to salama = peacefull with kabisa or sana added to mean “very’ or tu added to mean “just”)

Quite interesting, and, Gaudence says, the reason that many Tanzanians are usually late for meetings and events is that they spend 30 to 40 minutes of their walk to work engaging in these dialogues. But things are changing.

One morning on our way home from class two small girls in matching school uniforms followed behind us, whispering and giggling. Getting the feeling we were being followed, Vaness and I turned around and tried to strike up a conversation with our newly acquired Swahili. “Hujambo?” we tentatively asked. “Sijambo” they giggled, along with a string of bouncing noises we didn’t comprehend. Then in English, “Do you have cents sir? Cents? Money?” Later in the week, we drove with Steve to buy some new laying hens for his place and were swarmed by a group of young boys asking for money. In Swahili, Steve berated them for asking us for money before they had even properly greeted us. The traditional forms of greeting are an important custom of tribal life and reveal the interdependence of social networks that make up the identity of most Tanzanians. A common phrase among the Tanzanians which highlights this is “I am, because you are.” Yet such disregard for custom is becoming the recent trend among the Tanzanian youth and is indicative of a turning away from the importance that community and social networks have played in tribal Tanzanian life and a move towards (what is typically viewed as Western, especially American) form of individualism. Of course, such a division into either/or arguments is an inaccurate simplification; in fact, the money that they are asking for is (if obtained) used to support the individual’s network of friends and extended family.

I can sympathize partially with the youth, especially after living in a culture where you really only greet those on the street you know, and even then a curt nod and simple “hello” does the trick. It’s fast, efficient, and wards off any unwanted small talk. But perhaps this breakdown in communication has become such a normalized part of my world that it no longer is the problem it perhaps once was. In fact, if I think about the recurring topic of discussion concerning the damaging consequences surrounding Internet communication technologies, I wonder if all the worry and concern will be laughable in ten or twenty years time. This isn’t to say that the breakdown isn’t serious. It is in Canada (and the larger West) as it is here in Tanzania.

Both experiences with the begging children brought to my mind a letter written by Julian Barnes in his “Letters to London”. Barnes writes that he remembers how at each Christmas, carollers would come singing down the London streets, stopping door to door in order to spread the Christmas cheer. However, by the late 80’s he noticed a subtle, but important, change in this Christmas ritual. The carollers no longer sang for the sake of singing, but would come to the door, palm extended, waiting to be paid for the goods they were delivering. Carolling had become a business transaction of sorts. Make of Barne’s account what you will, but the turn to capitalism comes at a cost. In “Choruses from the Rock,” T.S. Eliot gets at this when he writes:

When the Stranger says: ‘What is the meaning of this city’?
What will you answer? ‘We all dwell together
To make money from each other’? or ‘This is a community.’

Barnes’ letters were written as a running commentary on what he perceived to be the negative social repercussions that supply side taxation and trickledown economics had had in England. In Barnes’ book, he claims that the rich got richer while the poor got poorer. But is that the case?

I am no economist, but perhaps – as the clichés go – the sacrifice that capitalism makes is a loss, or rupture, in the social fabric into which man was created to live. It places primacy in the individual and self-interest over genuine altruism. When this becomes a structure for a moral code, as is the case with Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, almost anything an individual wishes to do is permissible.

But don’t get me wrong; when the ideas behind socialism and the ideas behind capitalism gain legs, the race is not even a contest.

Here is a fascinating excerpt from an interview Thatcher gave with the magazine, Woman’s Own that begins to explain how what is commonly (at least from the Academics I studied under) believed to be the endemic problems of the Capitalist agenda:

There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no Government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then to look after our neighbour

Unfortunately this is often where Thatcher is most misrepresented, but I think what she means here is that in order to look after our neighbours we first have to make sure we have looked after ourselves; in other words, the best (and only) way that one can truly look after their neighbour is if they are looked after themselves. As far as that goes, it makes sense. Here in Tanzania, according to the stories of missionaries who have been here the better part of 30 years, people feel obligated to look after their neighbours to the point where they will do so even if it means they do not know where the money for their next meal will be. This is the tribal system of social economics: If Joe gets paid Friday and Lucy and Alice know this, they can ask for money and he is obligated to give it to them, even if he knows the likelihood of seeing that money again is nil. If someone in the community is industrious and makes some money, he is perceived to owe his larger community. This is why it is hard to get ahead, because once you do you are quickly taken back down to the common denominator. Also, people simply do not live for tomorrow. They live for today. If they have a debt that must be paid Sunday but their brother asks for money Saturday, they will give the money without hesitation. Now in part this may be a strong application of the passage about looking to the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, but one of the many things separating us from the animal and plant kingdoms is the ability to have a savings account.

This whole way of thinking seems to me unfortunate and frustrating to say the least.

Change is slow. Partly because Tanzanians who grow up in Tanzania do not know any other culture and resist change and partly because the few who go to the States, Canada, or Europe to study rarely return. Another part of the problem, I think, is the confusion Western missionaries face in regards to offering solutions. The top-down approach of missions has been abandoned for something more symbiotic, but this shift seems to have created some ambiguity as to where, when, and how someone from the West can make suggestions about another culture’s problems without being patronizing? Even before this can be done, though, a problem has to be identified and labelled as such? Is the problem even a problem, or is it merely an aberration from what we consider normative?

Here is a passage from Cannery Row, a book given to me by a friend before leaving. At first I was a bit annoyed with Steinbeck’s style, by the end I was more than annoyed with his rather dark vision of life that is whitewashed with his turn to the basic relationships that unite people in a community. Despite my cynicism of his overall worldview, I think he takes up the debate I’ve been thinking about the past week (but in the American context) with incredible insight:
“It has always seemed strange to me,” said Doc. “The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we that we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”

Is Steinbeck right? Is self-centredness implicit in a system that places a lot of stock in individual production and consumption of goods? Are these two visions mutually exclusive? They may be now, but they weren’t always.

Can things improve? Can we use words such as “better” to compare cultures or must we be trapped in the relativistic vocabulary of “difference” only? Personally I think both need attention, and the problem is not either/or but a question of when. When do we draw a line and say this practice is problematic and here is a possible solution? When do we embrace the difference of another culture and celebrate the diversity of God’s kingdom? In the aforementioned poem by Eliot he goes on to provide an image in which individuals and, by extension, cultures can grow and change. They must, like the Jews under Nehemiah, build with the sword in one hand and the trowel in another - constantly uplifting that which is good while warding off the evil from within and without. But again, this puts us in the categories of Black and White, categories that demand a universal or normative standard. An unsavoury concept to many.

Ok, so that’s a tangent, but one that has flavoured the conversations we have had over the past two weeks. If any readers have thoughts, questions, concerns, or insights, I am all ears. Type away.

Oh, and this Saturday Steve, from CRWRC took Vanessa and I to the Serengeti. Hope you enjoy the pictures.