When one thinks of Africa, what is the first thing to come to mind? Is it the amazing animals and the stunning natural beauty or is it starving children in countries run by military dictators? We see so much about Africa through our media, but whether it is Bono, Invisible Children, NPR, or Discovery Channel, we are shown things to bring up a desired reaction. There was a moment when I was with some fellow volunteers socializing with some of the locals, one of the volunteers was having pictures of her taken with one of the children. The child was quite large, a sign of wealth because the family had more than enough to feed the child, and the volunteer was commenting on how her friends back home would not believe that she was actually in Africa because they were expecting to see malnourished children. The three months I spent in Tanzania helped me gain a better understanding of Africa, the rest of the world, and myself.
When I came to Tanzania I came with all kinds of ideas of how I would help to better people’s lives. I found that there were many people who were grateful for your help, but just as many who wanted to take advantage of it. There were people who would beg for money but then there were those who would sell tourist trinkets. These vendors were persistent, if you told them you didn’t want anything they would continue to try and sell you something acting as if they didn’t understand you, if you kept walking they would follow you, and if you bought something from them the next day they would be there again. This time they would say they needed the money to pay for something like the doctor bill for his friend who broke his leg and if you bought something from him again he’d be there again the next day, but this time it would be money needed to buy medicine for his sick mother. Eventually I came to the realization that if you give money then you don’t know if it will be used properly, if you give objects then the person you’re giving them to may come to expect things from you and become dependant; the best way to help someone in need is to teach them a skill that allows them to make a better life for themselves. There was one woman who was taught to make corn bread cakes and from this she began to sell the cakes through her village and now she owns many of the homes in her village. Some people might say that it’s selfish just to teach someone a skill, we have so much and they have so little and teaching them a skill still makes it so they must struggle to make a life for themselves while we live such an easy life. There was an organization of women with AIDS who made money for themselves by making various clothing and fabrics and one of the volunteers from Cross Cultural Solutions wanted to help them buy new sewing machines and other materials for their business and so donated a large sum of money, but instead of using it for materials the head of the organization took the money for herself to start her own business and the women’s organization told Cross Cultural Solutions to no longer send volunteers to help them. As pessimistic as it sounds, you can never be certain about how much you can trust someone, especially when those people are economically desperate. In desperation good people will do bad things.
I also observed among the locals that when someone was extremely poor they could still find happiness in small things. On television we see the ads for charity organizations that want to feed the hungry in places like Ethiopia and the images they show are of people who look absolutely miserable. Not to argue that those people aren’t actually miserable in their situation, but it gives us the impression that everyone in Africa is like that. There are large amounts of people who live in the city but don’t have enough money to have a decently sized home and so live in the equivalent to a storage unit. Within this room, which is usually no larger than seven square feet, people will fit as much as they can inside and activities like cooking and cleaning are usually done outside. To most of us such cramped living conditions would be one of the worst ways to live, but for most Tanzanians that’s not what defines happiness. Tanzanian culture emphasizes the importance of family and community, so happiness is usually derived from things like seeing relatives and friends. On the other hand, American culture emphasizes the importance of self-improvement and competition and so we derive our happiness from what we feel like our status is, which is usually defined by how much money and how many things you have. Finding happiness in things is shallow and temporary and usually leads to having to frequently get more in order to keep us happy, sometimes to the point that it can be called an addiction. Tanzanians can become addicted just like anyone else, but for most Tanzanians their economic standing has no direct influence on their happiness.
My own materialistic American mindset also influenced my expectations. At first I thought that nearly everything would be mud huts and that wild animals would be roaming around everywhere. I turned out to be living in more of a metropolitan area with a fair deal of infrastructure. Most homes had electricity, but most of them had a hole in the ground for a toilet. I was surprised by people’s body odor due to lack of bathing because of minimal running water, but I was also shocked to see ice cream being sold in stores. My expectations of Tanzania and how it really was were somewhat parallel, I expected a lack of various necessities and yet I expected luxuries, something that I now see as being utterly ridiculous. But even though Tanzania is a third world country that is lacking a large amount of seemingly required technologies people still have cell phones and DVD players, listen to western rappers, and watch British football games. Once I found out how Tanzania really was I began to understand the true scope of globalization. Globalization isn’t only limited to western businesses selling products that diminish local culture, it is an integration of the entirety of western lifestyle into another country. Corporations are not the only contributors to globalization, tourism causes hotels and other agencies, like safari companies, to try to make an experience with all the comforts of home and so go great lengths to provide any luxury a tourist might request. Charities come in wanting to help but by the western standards of what people need to have a better life.
As misled as I was about the Tanzanian way of life, so were the Tanzanians about my way of life. Most of the only Westerners that they encounter are tourists and usually they have large sums of money to throw around to go on safaris. Because of this many Tanzanians think that Westerners don’t have to work for money, that they earn money out of leisure. But they were shocked by the reality; in Tanzania you get up to go to work when the sun rises and you close up shop and leave work when the sun sets and so many were surprised when they heard that nearly all Western societies have their workers come in for a required amount of hours and get paid less if they work less hours. They were also surprised that there were poor people in America; many were under the impression that every citizen had more money than they knew what to do with and they were shocked to hear that thieves also existed in America. These misconceptions about Western tourists explained why some people would come to tourists begging for money. In their minds these tourists have more than enough money and the only reason that they aren’t sharing any is because they’re greedy.
As I mentioned before, Tanzanians generally would not want American work hours. There are many aspects of Western life that Tanzanians are happy to do without and most of that revolves around the phrase “hakuna matata” which means “no worries.” This is a phrase that is frequently uttered by most Tanzanians and it basically displays the Tanzanian mindset of taking it easy. With our busy life style of scheduling nearly everything in our lives and rushing from one thing to the next, many tourists find it comforting to come to a much more laid back society. But “hakuna matata” can also be blamed for something taking much longer to finish than usual. Say there is a road that needs to be repaved, the workers might say, “hakuna matata, I’ll get to it tomorrow” and stop half way through repaving the roads. As another example, when I was volunteering at a juvenile hall I went with one of the children to his court hearing. Many people who commit a crime in Tanzania must wait for a long time to even be proven guilty, they will be asked to come before the court and then be turned away, being told to come back at a later date. The boy I was with had been awaiting trial for eight months; we had to wait for hours before he was admitted into the courtroom, only to be told to come back in a few weeks. Additionally, part of the reason we had to wait so long was due to there being only a handful of judges that worked with juvenile cases and the judge who had been assigned to this boy had been taking time off and they needed to find a replacement judge. Apparently the judge’s wife had a child, but he had been taking time off for over ten months. As exasperated and frustrated this made me feel, many of the locals just shrugged it off saying that was how things worked there. It angered me that so many people with such big responsibilities would put it off for so long.
There were multiple things I had trouble adjusting to while I was in Tanzania, but one cultural difference I didn’t have any problems with was the hospitality. In Tanzania you are a bad host if you don’t offer food or drink to visitors and it is an insult to not accept. Whenever the other volunteers and I came to visit one of the locals they would offer us something and I would readily accept, but some of the other volunteers would decline the offer. They would later tell me that they thought it was inconsiderate of me to eat their food because I have plenty of food for myself and they might not. But if you don’t accept food when someone offers they feel that you think their food is dirty or something is wrong with it, which I explained to the other volunteers in addition to asserting that I never asked for seconds, I did what was polite without taking advantage of their hospitality. Much of the manners of eating in Tanzania are centered on portraying you don’t think the food is dirty, which is the opinion most tourist have of Tanzanian food. There are a few things that could be better, like the fact that meat and fish is sold in an open-air market usually with many flies landing on the meat. But most of the Western world sees Africa as an extremely dirty place and though the standards of hygiene are different, it doesn’t make Africans dirty by default.
As much as we wanted to help people in Tanzania, many of the volunteers had an air of entitlement and acted as if they deserved better than everyone else because they had money. There was one volunteer who had bought a three hundred dollar dress specifically for the trip and decided to donate it to one of the locals when she left. To her that must have seemed a very humanitarian thing, but most of us were thinking that three hundred dollars could have been put to better use by helping to buy food or clothing or paying for children to go to school. There was another volunteer who went on safari and complained that for the price she paid to go on the trip, she shouldn’t have to put her own tent up. Some of the volunteers seemed to have come to Tanzania not to help others but to help them feel good or just to see the sights. It can be debated over whether or not any of the volunteers had truly come to Tanzania completely for selfless reasons, but there were some who didn’t seem to have anyone in mind beside themselves. It was from this that I not only learned that there are wrong ways to help people, but there are also wrong reasons to help people. Invisible Children was a film that effectively helped people empathize with people in Africa, but it seems that some people will then go about “helping” people because they feel guilty and think that if they put in enough time then they won’t have to feel bad about their wasteful lifestyle back home and forget about the stirring images they saw in the film. I wouldn’t want to turn away help just because a person wants to help for selfish reasons, but sometimes those people end up being detrimental more than anything else. When someone volunteers for completely selfish reasons they usually want to find the quickest way to make them feel like they helped out and this can lead to them hurting the volunteer organizations efforts and hinder their progress.
There were also people who came to try to get away from something back home. For some it was finances or responsibility and for others it was escaping the social dramas of their friends and family. One volunteer was spending three months in Tanzania and before had spent three months volunteering in Peru. It later turned out that she had just graduated from high school, was taking a year off of school and was indecisive about what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. Her parents were pressuring her to go to college and she had been traveling in an attempt to avoid making a decision on if and where she would go to college. A few volunteers had ranked up huge amounts of credit card debts, usually by traveling so much. Some had lost their home or their job and they felt like putting their life on pause and going to another country. One of the problems with that was that these people usually ended up ranking up even more debt from all the tourist activities they took part in while they were there. It almost felt similar to the mentality of. “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” it seems that tourists extend this to almost anywhere that isn’t their home. There was actually a big problem of the female volunteers getting romantically involved with locals. The women were motivated largely by wanting to experience something “exotic,” while the local men find white women to be very attractive and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of their motivation was rooted in the possibility of getting some money. Cross Cultural Solutions generally discouraged against this because they were rarely healthy relationships, it led to some men becoming economically dependant on women who were really only looking for a temporary thrill, and there was even incident where one woman had been involved with multiple men, who all tried to come visit her at the same time. Non-volunteers are not allowed within the CCS compound for security reasons and these men did not know about the others being involved with the same woman and when they found out a fight broke out in front of the compound. The CCS security had to go out and break up the fight, the woman was asked to leave, and the reputation of CCS was damaged among the community.
Upholding reputation is important for CCS in Tanzania. There are so many different volunteer organizations and not all of them have the same intentions on how to help, some do nothing more than exacerbate things, so locals need to be mindful of volunteers and make sure they continue to uphold their promise to the community. I was always conflicted with some of the religiously affiliated charity organizations in Africa, it seemed that it would be too easy for such an organization to begin spreading religious indoctrination. There were two orphanages that I spent some of my free time volunteering at while I was in Tanzania, Upendo and Tuleni, Upendo was church run while Tuleni was just run by a woman named Mama Faraji. Upendo also had a school attached for educating the orphans, but as I spent time there the children seemed really mistreated by the women working there. While corporal punishment is accepted as the norm in Tanzania, these nuns occasionally would use excessive force hitting the children or would hit them for what seemed to be no reason. The children were given three meals a day of ugali, a type of corn paste that is a staple in Tanzania, and beans with some milk to drink, we later found out that the milk they had during their meals was the only liquids the children were given. The women working there did this because they didn’t want the children to wet themselves throughout the day, but when I came to visit they would wipe the sweat off of my body and then lick it off of their hands, that’s how dehydrated they were. Most of these women weren’t nuns but just local young girls who were working there to learn how to be a proper mother, as you can see they weren’t doing a very good job.
Then take Tuleni, which was nothing more than a house one woman owned and decided to make into an orphanage. The building wasn’t nearly as nice as Upendo and sometimes the children would have to share one bed between four or five people, but it was obvious that all the children were happy and loved. The people who worked at the orphanage genuinely enjoyed being with the children and they were all properly fed and hydrated. Mama Faraji was always smiling and doing everything she could to make life better for the children; she made money by raising pigs on a property nearby the orphanage, she came to visit the children often and would play games and sing songs with them, and on Easter she made a big feast for all the children, played music, gave out candies, and had special games. Upendo is a place with the claims of goodwill and helping others, but really falls short of what they claim, while Tuleni never makes any claims but goes above and beyond what is expected of them. I also feel that the school at Upendo is an opportunity to religiously indoctrinate the children from a young age instead of giving them the freedom to choose their own beliefs when they get older.
Nearly all the volunteers, including myself, came to Tanzania with the idea that we were going to make a difference. By the end I wouldn’t say that we had lost that drive, but it had become much more realistic, we knew the effect that one person could have. One person does have the capability to change someone’s life, for better or worse, but one person cannot solve every problem. While I was volunteering at the juvenile hall there was so much I wanted to do for those kids. I wanted to give them better beds, education, hygiene, food, shoes, there was seemed to be no end in sight. But I learned that I was only capable of so much, if I tried to do all that I wanted I would only end up flat broke and completely exhausted. At first I bought soap for the children so they could wash their clothes, but soon everyone was asking for soap on a daily basis. Then it was shoes; the kids kept coming to me asking first aid for their injured feet, so I bought shoes so they could all have protected feet. But then the shoes would be broken in a week or a new kid would be sent to juvenile hall and he would want shoes. Eventually I learned to stop buying them things directly; instead I set up a garden. I talked to the warden about the large amount of property behind the building that wasn’t being used for anything and we decided to make it into a small farm because the warden told me about how the government funds for the prison weren’t enough for properly feeding the children. I went out and bought seeds for maize, beans, peanuts, and zucchini. My hope is that it will make enough food to properly feed the children, but also generate enough seeds so that there can be food for next year.
When I didn’t show up to teach the children at juvenile hall they would be locked in the bunkroom for the entire day. The place reeked of urine from the bathrooms that were directly connected to their bunkroom and had no ventilation. When they were locked in there was no one watching over them so there is a lot of fighting among the kids with no one to break it up. There wasn’t much I could do to change those situations but I wanted to make it at least more enjoyable to be in the room they spend most of their time in. The children loved Bob Marley, nearly everyone in Tanzania did, and so I painted “let’s get together and feel alright” across the wall in their bunkroom. They really seemed to enjoy it and it helped them learn a few more words in English.
At one point I met some Pakistani men who had moved to Tanzania and started up some kind of business. It seemed odd to me that of all places they would choose to move to Tanzania; I could slightly understand with the men who had come from some of the Arab countries, they had left because of war, but others had grown up in England and decided to start a business in Tanzania. Part of it was because they said that they just enjoyed the Tanzanian lifestyle more, much more relaxed compared to a place like England, but I also realized that I was shocked because of my American perspective of a place like Tanzania. If you asked most Tanzanians they would tell you that they wouldn’t want to leave home and move to America, they know that life might be better for them there but most of them just couldn’t leave their family. I realized that Tanzania wasn’t a place that needed to be saved, people were able to find happiness there, but they did need help. I stopped seeing myself as some kind of valiant selfless person rushing in to save the needy, but just another human being offering a helping hand. These people who had moved to Tanzania had the same love for the country as the locals, they had found a way to make a living and were just enjoying life.
But life in Tanzania certainly isn’t easy. When I first arrived it was supposed to be the beginning of the rainy season, but it wasn’t until two month later that it actually began to substantially rain. Before I came to Africa I never understood the true significance of a drought, with sprinkler systems and running water in every home we don’t really care whether it rains or not. But in Tanzania most farms don’t have an irrigation system and depend on the rains to water the crops. It rained a few times a month after I had arrived, but these were brief sprinkles between days of extreme heat. Some people would get excited by these rains, thinking that the rainy season had finally come and sow their seeds, but then the heat afterwards would dry the seeds up so they would never grow. For some people, they only earn enough money to buy enough seeds to feed themselves for the next year and so when all their seeds have dried up there’s nothing left for them, no more seeds to plant and no money to buy more seeds. I had never experienced a situation where rain decided whether or not people would have to deal with starvation for the next year. Rain always seemed like something petty, even obnoxious, but for these people a lack of rain could completely ruin their life. Once the rains finally came it was pouring, so much that one night there was a flash flood. The next morning a whole section of the CCS compound’s fence was missing. That was also when we learned that most of the piping system in Tanzania is made with ceramic pipes, which were broken during the flash flood, so now those few who had running water had to go without. The cruel irony was that without rain was the threat of starvation, now that the rains had come the flash flood had washed away people’s crops and sometimes even their entire house. Some of the locals joked that people had prayed too hard for rain and so they got too much. I was thrown off by a society that was still at the will of nature and I found that many of the locals cared more about their effect on nature because of it. Every local I talked to attributed the drought to global warming, but also they didn’t really have the luxury to live greener. In Tanzania people will burn their trash, but if they don’t there’s really no other way to get rid of it, cars in Tanzania spew smog but it’s the only cars that are even available. But also Mount Kilimanjaro was a daily sight in the city I was living in and there had been a visible change in the snowcaps in the past few years, Mount Kilimanjaro was a symbol of the people and so this change in the snowcaps was important to everyone. Not to mention that the glacial melts fed all of the creeks and streams that some people depended on. Climbing Kilimanjaro isn’t nearly as significant any more because the peak is no longer covered in snow, there’s still some but the peak used to be completely snow covered all year round.
So what did I learn, what had changed when I got back home? I observed some of my fellow volunteers return to their normal lives as if nothing had happened, almost oblivious to the fact that they had been to a country so different from our own except that they got some great pictures. There were so many memorable, once in a lifetime experiences that there is no way I couldn’t have been changed by my trip. The most common thing you hear from people is that they learned to not live such a wasteful life because they saw people who had so little while we have so much. While this is good to recognize, it still something of a shallow observation. Such a mindset still sets them at a different level, lower, than us when we really need to see them as equals. The reason that many Third World nations are in such economic desperation is because Western countries, like the US, don’t see them as equals and exploit them for whatever resources they can find. Being less wasteful because you observed poverty doesn’t make anything better for those who are poor, it just means that you feel guilty and make yourself feel better by some small act. I try to live my life in a less wasteful way, but I also try to avoid supporting any organization exploiting Third World nations, the only problem being that there are hardly any organizations that don’t profit off of some countries exploitation.
On a more personal level I became much calmer. I saw that there were so many things that I had worried so much about that had no real impact on the rest of my life. I began to think of things on a much larger scale, worrying about getting a job instead of getting a girlfriend or buying food instead of buying video games. But you could say this is just me becoming more mature, but I feel being completely on my own in a place entirely unfamiliar to me was necessary for me to be able to mature. Becoming close with some of the people in Tanzania also helped expand my viewpoint of the world, but it also helped me understand how to do the same for others. Many people don’t care about what goes on in the rest of the world, not because they’re callus but because they just don’t think about other parts of the world. It’s hard to make someone feel that what goes on in another country is important if the country isn’t frequently on their mind. People hear the number of people killed by AIDS or malaria or genocide and they don’t pay much attention to it because all it is to them is numbers. If you want someone to pay attention to a cause, give it a face; that’s why charities trying to feed starving children in Africa are well known to the average person, because it shows the actual children. We are much more likely to want to help one person who we can see than a hundred people that we read about. Much more people would support environmentalism if they saw first hand the drastic effects climate change is having on the rest of the world, but it still won’t be effective until you have a person who is currently suffering because of this change. So the most important lesson from this whole journey is the effect of an individual. We don’t have the power to change the world like I had thought when I first arrived in Tanzania; but we each create a ripple through our actions, no matter how small, which can lead to much larger changes. When I first arrived I thought I could change things right away and do it all on my own, but I learned that my own actions could start something that could lead to changing someone’s life. The best way I could help was to contribute something that was likely to lead to something better, teach English or math, teach how to sew, give seeds for crops.
Teaching is really the best contribution a person can make to someone in need and not just traditional school education, any form of knowledge given to another person can lead to multiple possibilities. Impoverished nations usually have a large uneducated population and because of this they are more likely to be manipulated and taken advantage of by others. The rampant spread of HIV is due to a lack of proper HIV and sex education; in such an uneducated environment people will believe witch doctors that tell them that having sex with three virgins will cure your HIV. When someone has been properly educated they are less likely to believe such superstitions and generally become more likely improve their state of life; the best way to aid a suffering community is to educate the masses.
No comments:
Post a Comment