Cars and Trucks and Things that Go, Part 3: Caving in to the Car

My last entry, on dala-dalas, is something of a elegy.  About a month ago, we bought a car—this lovely 2001-ish Toyota Cresta with only 35,000 km on it (the proverbial grandma car that was only driven to the mosque and the market).  It was less a desire to have a car than a desire to stay healthy during this time of no electricity and no running water for most people.  We didn’t like dala-dalas enough to want to risk riding on them if cholera or some other public health risk breaks out.

So we’re car owners, and the American part of me does love the freedom that comes with being in control of our own transportation and being able to zip over to a beach on a weekend.

But it does come at a price.  Now, rather than being with everyone on the dala-dalas, we park our car in the public lot several blocks from our apartment, and we tip the guard there to watch our car, and we pay the car-washer there to keep our car looking spiffy clean.  We’re contributing more to the local economy, but we’re also separated from it to a much greater degree than we were for the first five months we were here.

And although our new car has air bags and seat belts, I’m not sure that we’re safer from road hazards than we were in the dala-dalas—or vice versa.  Dala-dala drivers have been on these roads since they were riding on their father’s bicycles. I’ve had a driver’s license since I was 16, but I never learned in driver’s ed what to do when the car behind me is nudging me to pass between a well-populated bicycle and dala-dala on our side of the road and there is an oncoming army truck, or what to do when the ox in front of me suddenly breaks free from its cart and driver.  All things considered, driving on the left side of the road is the easiest part of driving in Tanzania!

So we’re now right there in the midst of the gritty, scary, Richard Scarry world, but it’s hard not to feel like there’s a loss, as well.

Cars and Trucks and Things that Go, Part 2: Dala-dalas

My favorite modes of trans-
portation here are the ubiquitous dala-dalas, the public buses that transport the preponderance of the people and produce on the island.  Dala-dalas are pickup trucks that have been converted into buses with wrought iron bars supporting a roof that has drop-down plastic sides for when it rains.  Inside, there are benches on three sides, and on the back there’s a step and hand rails for the conductor (and sometimes a few extra people) to hang on.  The buses are all numbered with the routes that they drive, and there are regular stops where people know to catch the bus—although it’s often difficult to find space on a dala-dala if you try to get on in mid-route.

Each dala-dala is licensed through the state, but it’s operated by an indepen-
dent owner who is licensed to drive on a particular route at particular times of day.  Each dala-dala has a driver who sits up in the cab with two or three passengers, and a conductor, who rides on the back step, collects fares, and signals to the driver when passengers want to get off—usually by rapping loudly on a metal bar with a coin (handy, since the fare for most routes is 250 Tshillings, consisting of the large and noisy 200 Tshilling piece, plus the smaller septagonal 50 Tshilling piece).

Because the drivers/
conductors keep the money they get on the routes, it’s in their best interest to have a full load at all times.  So the dala-dalas don’t move until they’re full, and they generally will take as many passengers as are willing to get on—and that’s a lot.  The legal limit for most dala-dalas is 20, but I’ve been on ones with as many as 30, if there are kids and babies on laps.  And that’s not counting chickens and 5-gallon drums of smelt or anchovies on the floor or bicycles and bundles of sugar cane on the roof.  Early on, I was surprised when a bunch of people got off a crowded dala-dala seemingly in the middle of nowhere, but it made sense in a minute when we got to the police checkpoint where the people were counted.  Then, a few hundred feet down the road, the same passengers (a little winded this time) got back on the dala-dala and we continued on.

The dala-dalas are sweaty and dirty, and they sometimes break down on hills or have smoky exhaust, but I’ve found them to be among the most comfortable places here.  Unlike in taxis, where the price is however much the taxi driver thinks you can pay, the price on a dala-dala is fixed.  And even though we wazungu (foreigners) sometimes get odd looks on dala-dalas, the people who regularly ride our route to the boys’ school know us and accept us and have even stopped laughing at our inexpert Kiswahili.  It’s sustainable transportation.

Cars and Trucks and Things that Go

For those of you who haven’t been or encoun-

tered children in the past forty years years, the title of this post pays homage to one of the great works of children’s literature, Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things that Go. I read the book hundreds of times with my brother when I was growing up, and I have read the book at least as many times with my own children.  The frenetic action of the book, along with the pleasure of finding where the character Gold Bug is hidden on each page, never wanes.  So much is happening!  There are so many different ways to get around! Bicycles!  Double-decker buses!  Pickle cars! Hammer trucks! And the hazards in the road are equally prominent.  Watch out for the oranges spilled all over the road!  Watch out for the nails! 

Much as I love this book, it had never occurred to me that the world of Cars and Trucks and Things that Go might offer a representational view of any real-world setting. . .until Zanzibar. 

The modes of trans-
portation here are among the first things that struck me—literally—in the first week that we arrived, when I was bumped into by a car on the road (a not-so-subtle reminder to mind my status as a pedestrian and to keep my feet on the dust rather than on the pavement).  There is a distinctly Darwinian philosophy of traffic safety here, and we learned quickly to be survivors, pedestrians though we are.  On the narrow streets of Stone Town, the adept pedestrian knows to listen for pikipiki (moped) motors in the near vicinity, as well as for the bicycle bells and the kissing sound that is the equivalent of saying “beep beep.”  Watch out!

Beyond Stone Town, out in the wider roads of Zanzibar, there are not only pedestrians, bicycles, and pikipikis, but also hand carts, donkey and ox carts, cars, trucks, presidential motorcades, trucks with AK-47-toting soliders, and dala-dalas.  A gritty version of Richard Scarry’s world. 

The vast majority of travelers on the road here make very efficient use of resources—out of necessity.  Most wheeled vehicles have at least two passengers—including bicycles. During commute time, especially, it’s common to see a dad and three kids on a bicycle (two on the cross bar and one on the wheel guard) on their way to school.  Or, later in the day, a dad and a mom and an infant on a motor scooter. 

Given that my own children are still (at ages 8 and 10) skinny enough that they’re required in the United States to sit strapped into booster seats, it took some getting used to to see wee babes here on motor scooters—the lucky ones strapped into 1980s-era Baby Bjorns.  And I’ve yet to see anyone wearing a bicycle helmet. The traffic police here are, like Richard Scarry’s Officer Flossie, unarmed and out in the open rather than in their own cars.  I’ve not seen any speed limit signs anywhere, which is just as well, as the police could never catch up with a speed violator.

But, despite the extreme contrast with the American sense of trans-
portation safety, people here know the system and it mostly works, even if the traffic lights don’t.  

Reading the Writing on the Wall

Now that the power blackout makes Internet, television, and radio hard to access, it’s helpful to be able to read the writing on the wall—literally.  And all over Stone Town, there is writing on the wall—in Kiswahili, English, and Arabic, and sometimes all three.  Plastic lighted store signs here are very rare, and wooden signs are only at posh tourist places.  But many corner stores have painted signs, sometimes with pictures representing what the business does or the soccer team that the owner supports.

There are also painted signs with religious messages in a few places—some very stylized, like this one outside Hamani Baths, one of the many ruined relics of the 19^th century and better economic times in Stone Town.

What I find most fascinating, though, is the chalkboard-style writing on walls.  There is a black paint here that’s marketed as chalkboard paint, and there are large and small black squares around town that serve as newsboards, usually with soccer scores from the British Premier League.  Our favorite of these is the one by “Tulia” and “Poa,” a large chalkboard space that is meticulously updated with soccer match times and, later, scores.  Recently there’s also been a witty update on how many more days of “trial in error” there is predicted to be until the electricity is to be restored.

Until then, the writing on the wall will be updated constantly, while there will remain the static banana leaf picture posted over this public outdoor television by some industrious banana leaf art entrepreneur.

Snack Foods of Stone Town

(This post dictated by Calvin) In Stone Town, there are many different snack foods that kids buy with their own money, including Chama, Ringos, Nice, Milk & Malt, Glucose, and Sweet & Salt.  They cost 200 T Shillings, or around 14 cents a package. You buy them at little general stores called dukas.  There’s one next door to us that’s run by a teenager.  This is a picture of our friend who owns the duka where we usually go to to buy water and snacks.  You can also buy expensive locally made snacks at my favorite restaurant, Radha Foodhouse (see the picture of their case here).  They cost 2000 T shillings, or around $1.40, but they’re bigger than the others, so they’re not really so expensive—and they’re better.

I recommend Chama, Sweet & Salt, and Nice.  Chama is like little grits balls with flavoring.  Ringos is the same.  All the others are various kinds of cookies.  Nice is my favorite and is a coconut-flavored cookie. 

Dreams and Nightmares

Calvin is a pretty self-reflective kid (well, usually).  He’s been thinking a lot in the past day, and he helped crystallize for me some of what I’ve been thinking about the meaning of this year.

Yesterday at school, his teacher asked him to help out with teaching other kids how to use PowerPoint, and then later asked him to referee a soccer game.  These both are pretty big jobs, and Calvin took to his new responsibilities thoughtfully (or at least he did in his retelling).  He said to me, “It was hard to get my work done and to help other people do theirs!” and “It was hard to be fair at the soccer game, when I really wanted my team to win!” (the kids’ school is divided into two “houses”: Mamba and Simba, and anytime the kids play a game, those are the two teams).  But even though it was hard, Calvin really enjoyed it, and as the boys were getting ready for bed, Calvin was full of questions for me about what you have to do to become a teacher and whether there are jobs for people that combine his different interests (wildlife science teacher? aquatic biology teacher?).  He’s really thinking about how his experiences here might lead him to his life’s work.

This morning when I asked Calvin how he’d slept, he said he’d had some terrible dreams—not like the monster nightmares he sometimes has, but bad dreams about real things.  He’d dreamed that when we got back to America, all of our friends and relatives (including our dogsitter and our dog) had thought it was such a good idea to live abroad that they’d moved abroad for a year or more!  Oh no!  And then he’d fallen back asleep and had another dream, that when we got back to America, there was no electricity!  Oh no!

Those are Calvin’s dreams and nightmares, but he’s clearly working through some of the same things as we all are.  Thanks to all of you for reading the blog and keeping us connected with home.  We hope to make good use of this year—and that the elements of home that we’re missing most will be there when we return!

Obamamania

Today, in honor of the first anniversary of President Obama’s inauguration, I’m posting about Obamamania.  Probably half of the time when I say I’m from America, people here respond with one word: “Obama!” There are Obama kangas (colorful traditional fabric), there are Obama wallets, there are Obama bumper stickers, there is even a line of Obama clothing.  I’ve missed tons of pictures of Obama ephemera when I haven’t had my camera handy and/or haven’t been able to photograph discreetly, but here are a few.

Although Americans are not universally loved here and although I have heard concerns voiced about the corrupting influence of American culture on young Muslims, Obama is loved—because he’s black, because his father was African, because he is familiar with Muslim culture.  To many Africans, Obama is the home town boy who made it big, and regardless of what he does during the remainder of his presidency, the very fact of who he is has endeared him and America to many Africans.

A very special offer--for you!

Happy Revolution Day (Jan. 12)! This year we're celebrating our usual holidays in new ways and are discovering some new ones, as well.

We have a very special holiday offer for you!! Oscar and Calvin have started designing these crazy cards in Microsoft Word, and we thought it might be fun if they actually sent them.

Their card-designing started with a series of very traditional (and amazing) holiday cards designed using Microsoft Word shape art, and they've transformed into a couple of series of other cards--even if they don't design more, we have enough to last for a whole year now.

So send me your e-mail address and your preference for one or more of the following periodic card services if you would like to participate in our special offer (I'm their mom, of course, but I think the cards are pretty cool).

1. Oscar's holiday card series (on holidays, as appropriate)
2. Calvin's ancient civilization card series (on about the 15th of the month)
3. Oscar's curio cards (on about the 15th of the month)
4. Calvin's monster cards (on about the 30th of the month)
5. Oscar's video game-inspired cards (on about the 30th of the month).

Hope you'll take advantage of this very special offer!  To participate, e-mail me at my junk-mail address, jnchristoph@hotmail.com (I can't find a way to put my e-mail up here securely, and I'm being cautious about receiving spam--not from you, of course! In general, the hotmail address isn't one I check a lot.)

Literacy, Part I?

For me, one of the most exciting events of our stay in Zanzibar has been the visit on Saturday to a little school in the countryside, where a colleague of mine will be running a family literacy project, funded by his successful grant proposal to the International Reading Association.

 

The project is designed to give kids a solid start toward lifelong literacy by encouraging them and their families to read for fun. That’s challenge enough in the United States, where there are plenty of books and most adults can read well.  Here, where there are so few books and where fewer parents can read, it’s a daunting task, indeed.

 

But the project is terrific.  It will provide books to kids and it will help teachers and parents to develop low- and no-cost learning opportunities (things like making books out of cardboard and writing down stories—the kinds of things my kids have been playing with since we’ve been in Zanzibar). And low-cost is definitely important; the kids who showed up to school for the information meeting (on a Saturday, no less) were interested and excited, but neither they nor the school had writing utensils for them to fill out paperwork. So we scraped together pens from purses and bags and managed to get the job done. 

I was pleasantly surprised pleased to see my tax dollars at work there, as well.  Although the school was by no means luxurious, the well-tended teaching aids in the resource room at the school were funded by USAID (notice the beautiful hand-made supply checkout list on the blackboard behind the USAID-stamped chair).

I had a fantastic time—not least of which because I was able to talk and listen successfully in Kiswahili for almost 5 hours.  I’m so excited about participating in this project, in whatever way I can, and I hope to write more soon about my work there and about my own developing research on adult basic literacy.

Hamna umeme. (There is no Electricity.)

I’d hoped to write about the electricity situation when it was all just a distant memory. Unfortunately, the entire island of Unguja (the biggest island in the Zanzibar archipelago) has been without power since December 10, and it looks like we’ll be without electricity for some time now (the latest word on the street is until mid- to late-March).

Official and unofficial reports of when electricity will return have changed from day to day, and there are rampant rumors about what caused the power outage in the first place and who is to blame. Sometimes we hear power will return in two weeks, sometimes we hear that the U.S. government is building a new electrical line to the island, and sometimes we hear that one European government or other has sent huge generators to power the island (this last one is my favorite—I imagine huge, benevolent Godzilla-sized generators coming in to the port of Stone Town to save the day). It helps to be amused by the reports because finding accurate news is difficult.  There are no English newspapers on Zanzibar—the only place where this is a big news story—and even people who are fluent in both English and Kiswahili seem in the dark about what’s really going on.  As best I can tell, though, we have no power because there are not redundant electrical systems here; if one thing goes wrong with the island’s power supply, chances are the whole island will lose power—much like the old-style Christmas lights would short out entirely if one bulb was out.

So we wait.  In the mean time, the blackout is taking its toll on the island, where the use of electrical appliances is relatively recent but has become pretty widespread within the past 30 years:

• air pollution and continued deforestation from the increased use of traditional charcoal for cooking
• noise and air pollution from the gasoline generators that the lucky few have (our apartment building has a small generator for charging batteries and for a couple of hours’ worth of lights/fans, and almost no one has power 24-hours/day)
• fuel shortages
• higher gas prices (at about $4/gallon and rising)
• higher consumer good costs (because of the higher cost of transportation and production)
• business distress (if you’re eking out a living sewing piecework on a sewing machine or are baking birthday cakes in an electric oven, then there’s no money for a generator, which means no money to run the business)
• water shortages (people who don’t have generators no longer have power to pump  running water in their homes)
• higher prices for water, both bottled and at public spigots
• setbacks in education (schools are considering closing because there is no water—the boys’ school has a generator and won’t close, the university currently has a generator running 9-5, and Brady’s evening tutoring program will likely stay open if we can find money for a generator for lights) 
• higher risk of sanitation problems with the water shortages
• higher malaria rates (people are getting lax about sleeping under mosquito nets and keeping screens on windows when those layers of protection mean less fresh air to make sleeping conditions in the tropical summer more comfortable)
• higher risk for heat exhaustion

We have six more months planned here: Can we make it if we are able to keep powering up computers to work, if we can manage to sleep in the heat, and if we have an escape plan if the public health situation worsens?  Or do we give up? Alternatives we’ve considered are to try to go to mainland Tanzania (where there is power) or to go home and forego our plans for research, more traveling, and the World Cup (we have tickets!). 

In thinking through options, we realized that we’re not going to get a chance to be in East Africa again for a long time, and we have a lot invested here—in Zanzibar, specifically.  We like our neighbors, the boys like their school, we have fulfilling jobs and research to do here, and Zanzibar is a pretty safe place to be by East African standards. And cheesy though the Fulbright goal of achieving “mutual understanding” is, the attempted airline bombing last month reminds us of the importance of Americans living and getting along with people in Muslim societies. So, we’re sticking it out.  But if you have a spare Godzilla-sized generator (or better yet, a Mothra-sized solar generator), I know a place that could use it.

Our new kitchen cabinet