Road to Zanzibar

New Blog

2012-01-16T02:56:00.002+03:00

I'm starting a new blog, called Uphill. You can also find me at caitlinmyles.com.

Recap

2008-09-05T01:44:00.010+03:00

This blog covers my eight-month internship in Zanzibar, Tanzania, from July 2007 to March 2008. You can find me in the present on my website. If you're interested in reading about my time in Zanzibar, here are a few highlights:

The final result of my internship in Zanzibar: the "Zanzibar Directory of Civil Society Organisations."
Some of my thoughts on development issues and poverty in general: "Poverty" - written on a day I was emotionally overwhelmed by poverty; "Too Many Numbers" - written on a day I was intellectually overwhelmed by poverty; and "Nungwi and Real-Live Economics" - my meandering thoughts on the trickle-down effect after a day at the beach.
On gender inequality, one of my favourite topics: "Gender Segregation." And, somewhat related, my observations of dress codes in Zanzibar: "Pondering Hijab."
My thoughts after reading two books: "Race against Time" and "Wonderland?"
Exciting travel moments in Zanzibar: "My First Car Chase" and "Pemba: Bumpy Roads, Octopus Curry, and Marriage Proposals."
And finally, one of my posts from India: "Beauty and Pandemonium in Agra and Delhi."

If you want to skip the reading, my photos from India and Zanzibar (as well as a few other places) can be found here: http://picasaweb.google.ca/caitlin.travel.

You can contact me at caitlin.blog@gmail.com.

Home!

2008-04-12T22:21:00.006+03:00

After a four-day journey, I am finally back in Montreal, which, compared to Africa and India, is very chilly and grey - except for all the Habs flags! One of the meals I had on my 18-hour train ride from Delhi to Bombay last Monday unfortunately made me ill, meaning the trek back to North America felt even longer than it had to (though really, the most tragic part is it meant I wasn't able to take full advantage of the open bar services on the four international flights I took since Tuesday).

I spent Monday afternoon wandering around Bombay in a haze until I realised I was ill; I visited the very interesting principal museum, formerly called the Prince of Wales Museum, and currently called something I can't pronounce, much less spell. On Tuesday "morning" at 2am after sleeping for about an hour, I just barely managed to stumble out of bed and wake up half the hotel staff demanding that they unlock the front door and wake up a taxi driver for me. Somehow, I made it back to Dar es Salaam without causing any major incidents (I had images of myself sprinting out of secure areas to find a bathroom, customs agents in rapid pursuit). 36 hours, one box of Digestives, and a package of oral rehydration salts later, I boarded my 10:50pm flight to Amsterdam. 24 hours after that, I landed in Montreal!

I won't write an insightful conclusion to this blog firstly because I am too jet-lagged to do anything of the sort, secondly because I'm still in denial about the eight months being over, and thirdly, because it would be far too formal for the hodge-podge of random musings, tourist snapshots, and mini-essays on development issues that this blog has been. Instead, I will redirect you to something much more amusing: my photos from India.

India

Beauty and Pandemonium in Agra and Delhi

2008-04-08T09:48:00.006+03:00

It's a minor miracle I've made it back to Mumbai, the fates seemed determined to leave me stuck somewhere; things started to go somewhat less smoothly once we attempted to leave Jaipur. Our intention was to take an overnight train to Agra on the night of April 1. We dutifully lined up at the train station, where the person behind the desk mutely handed us a form to fill out in response to our questions. We filled out the form and received our tickets.

What we didn't realise was that our train actually departed at 2am... on April 1 (a salient deail the apparently dumb ticket man omitted to mention). As a result, we found ourselves attempting to usurp some poor gentleman's bunk in the wee hours of the morning (after having camped out on the railway station floor for a few hours). When we realised our mistake, we dashed out of the train (it was scheduled to make only a ten-minute stop in Jaipur), and desperately searched for a bureaucrat of some sort - something usually not very difficult to find here, as we've discovered. Naturally, as with auto-rickshaws and McDonald's, the ubiquitous suddenly becomes non-existant when you really need it. Finally, we found a conductor, and fell upon his mercy - luckily he took pity on us, and found us two bunks, though we did have to pay a penalty fee amounting to twice the original ticket price.

Agra is much less dirty and its touts far less aggressive than I had been led to expect, though the air pollution is quite intense. This is bad for my asthma, but it's even worse for the city's many monuments. The most famous of these, of course, is the Taj Mahal, which most certainly lives up to all expectations - we even managed to pry ourselves out of bed at 5am and get there at sunrise. We also saw the Red Fort, and the "baby Taj," a mausoleum designed entirely by one of the Mughal princesses for her parents. We also made our way through a residential and very un-touristy part of town to find yet another Mughal tomb, though we did pick up a crowd of young children along the way (not the first time I've felt like the Pied Piper in the last nine months).

Our train trip to Delhi was made much less chaotic than it might have been by a very kind gentleman who helped us upgrade our tickets from "unreserved" to second class - "unreserved" means you squeeze yourself onto a wooden plank beside two or three families, or, if the train is crowded, you sort of dangle out the side somehow. This morning while pulling into Mumbai at rush hour, I saw inter-city trains with people literally sitting on top of the trains, clinging to windows on the outside, and even riding between the cars.

Interestingly, our friend on the train worked for a large American bank at its call centre, and he had several amusing stories to tell involving cultural differences and American slang and idioms. My favourite was a woman who was trying to delay payment on her credit card because her dog had died - to which my friend answered, perplexed, that he didn't understand why she was so upset about a dog, that in India several people die every day from starvation. Naturally the lady got quite upset, and my friend is now careful to express deep sympathy every time a customer reports the death of a pet...

Delhi was much more intense than Mumbai, even though it is apparently the smaller of the two cities. We were staying in New Delhi, the part of town built by the British after they razed part of the old town they didn't like. This area feels a lot like a North American city, but somewhat dirtier and with more beggars and way more people. Every large international store you can think of has found a spot somewhere in Connaught Place. The mandatory fast food chains are also there (as an aside, there is not a single McDonald's in Tanzania), as are an abundance of very good upscale restaurants, mostly filled with Indians, part of this country's booming middle and upper-middle class. Old Delhi, on the other hand, lives up to the image of India painted in movies - very crowded, extremely busy, dirty, and exciting.

Despite the fact that I like to consider myself a relatively seasoned traveler, I found Delhi quite stressful (though perhaps if I hadn't just come over here from eight months in Africa I would have found it less so). One major plus in Delhi was the metro system, which is very new, and rivals any of the European systems I've been in, though it's still quite small, as it's still being built.

Leaving Delhi was also challenging. On Sunday, Mahmud and I booked a hotel room for myself in Mumbai - I traveled back here alone, since Mahmud will be staying on in Delhi for some time. The next day, we phoned to confirm my reservation, which had somehow disappeared... I spent half the morning on hold with KLM attempting to reschedule my flight back to Canada (ironically, though the call centre was almost undoubtedly in Delhi and it was 10am, I was calling during off-hours, Eastern Standard Time, so it took me about half an hour to get through to someone). The other half of the morning was spent trying to reserve a room in Mumbai.

Finally, Mahmud and I made our way to the New Delhi train station, one of India's main stations, expecting to find a relatively calm square meter or so, and perhaps a restaurant to have lunch at (as had been the case in Mumbai). Instead, we found ourselves in a gigantic, packed, open-air railway station with no restaurant and definitely no calm square meters. We wandered around the maze-like grounds for a while, desperate at this point even for a McDondald's, before finally caving in and going all the way back to Connaught Place, where we did eat at the Golden Arches, I'm ashamed to admit. We then dragged ourselves all the way back to New Delhi train station, where we managed to find our way to the first class waiting room.

At about 4:00 (my train was to leave at 4:55), Mahmud offered to go into the main station to check which platform my train was leaving from. He came back somewhat confused, since my train number didn't appear to be on the board. After another trip into the station and back, we finally scrutinized the cryptic train ticket more closely, only to discover (of course) that we were at the wrong station. A mad dash across town in a tiny taxi ensued (with me laughing somewhat hysterically in the back seat - at a certain point there's just really not much else to do). We pulled up at the much nicer and correct train station, where there was a large restaurant area with several very decent-looking lunch options, and I made my train with about fifteen minutes to spare.

Eighteen hours later, I arrived in Mumbai. Tomorrow morning, I'm flying to Dar es Salaam (via Doha), and I'll be back home, nicely tanned, in (snowy?) Montreal on Friday evening. I have lots of nice photos from India which I will post once I'm home (and have a good internet connection). It feels very strange that my nine months abroad are nearly over - they've been everything I've expected them to be. But I'm also very happy that I'll be at home on Friday...

Jaipur

2008-03-31T17:59:00.002+03:00

After an 18-hour overnight train ride in second-class sleeper which was surprisingly less painful than I expected, partly thanks to the lovely family we met who fed us, we landed in Jaipur. The last three days have been a blur of forts, temples, and palaces, accented by a myriad of bright colours and incredible food. The state of Rajasthan is known to be one of the more colourful parts of India (literally), and it certainly lives up to the reputation: the entire old city here is painted pink, the shops are overflowing with beautiful fabrics, and there are plenty of curbside spice, vegetable and fresh flower vendors to brighten up the streets themselves. I've also seen a multitude of elephants (brightly painted and generally used to cart tourists around, though I also saw one ambling through traffic in town), camels, and monkeys.

I find the skills I acquired in Zanzibar warding off touts and haggling to be very useful - at one point I haggled with an auto-rickshaw driver (sort of a three-wheeled mini car) for about twenty minutes because he was trying to charge us more than we had agreed upon for a very bogus reason. Luckily some random passerby who was a self-described social activist assisted us in arguing our case, and I finally extracted the 10 rupees from the driver - about 25 cents - which was rightfully Mahmud's. That's 2/3 of a bottle of water or 1/5 of a cheap lunch he was trying to swindle us out of.

Despite the stress of the touts, the business of the traffic, the dirt and grime, and the large preponderance of beggars, I'm really enjoying India. The cost of living seems to be significantly lower than in Africa as well. Lunch in a clean, decent local restaurant costs about 1$, and a fantastic and large dinner in an upscale restaurant costs about 5$. In Zanzibar the same would be about 3$ and 8-10$ respectively.

Another highlight of the past few days was going to see a Bollywood movie yesterday in a beautiful old movie theatre; it really lived up to the word "theatre," too, with a huge lobby intricately decorated in art-deco style, and a seating capacity of 1,500 people. Despite the lack of subtitles and thanks to Mahmud's basic knowledge of Hindi, I mostly understood the plot of One, Two, Three, a comedy based on mistaken identity (with the mandatory musical interludes).

Tomorrow evening we're taking another sleeper train to Agra, where the Taj Mahal is located. I very excited to see this monument, which everyone says absolutely lives up to its reputation. After that we'll head up to Delhi for a few days, after which I will take an overnight express back to Mumbai to catch my flight back to Dar es Salaam, which feels worlds away now...

Bombay

2008-03-27T13:12:00.003+03:00

Yesterday at 4am I landed in the biggest city in the world, which most people here still call Bombay (the less Anglicised name "Mumbai" was adopted a few years ago). My flights with Qatar Airways was pleasant, and my two hours in the airport in Doha were mostly occupied by me staring open-mouthed at the goods in the duty-free -- there was just so much for sale, driving home how much less developed the economy is in Tanzania (if "developed" means having access to a slew of consumer goods). I even got a glimpse of the golden arches as we were taxiing after landing (there is not a single McDonald's in Tanzania, miraculously enough); ironically, it was poised just beside a huge and imposing mosque. Seeing The Simpsons on the flight to Bombay just capped off the feeling of familiarity - strange that I felt more at home as I headed East.

Bombay is significantly cooler than Dar es Salaam in March, thank goodness. I met up successfully with my friend Mahmud, and we both stumbled around the city somewhat dazed yesterday and today, both suffering from sleep deprivation and jetlag. The part of Bombay we have stayed in is the rich, business district, though there are still entire families living on the sidewalks. My initial impression (after a day and a half here) is that this city is a place of extremes. Poverty is much more "in your face" than in Dar, with homeless children and ramshackle huts everywhere, but it's also much richer than Dar, with a larger proliferation of European, North American, and Indian chain stores, expensive hotels and restaurants, etc.

Our wander through Bombay was colourful and interesting, the food is amazing, the shopping incredible (though I've been restraining myself in anticipation of Jaipur), and thus far, I haven't been ill. I was told that people either love India, or they hate it -- so far I'm in the former category.

Race against Time

2008-03-17T12:36:00.001+03:00

I had intended to start writing blog entries about the books I’ve read here, but I haven’t had nearly as much time to read as I had anticipated. However, I did finally read Stephen Lewis’ Race against Time last month, and it touched me profoundly. It was perhaps a crazy idea to read a book on the bleak topic of HIV/AIDS in Africa during my last month in Zanzibar (and in fact I started reading it while sunbathing in Nungwi, of all places), but instead of bringing me down, I found the book inspiring and hopeful.

Lewis is beautifully articulate and very thoughtful. By no means does he sugar-coat the HIV/AIDS pandemic, a crisis the likes of which the world has never seen before, and in many cases his descriptions and anecdotes are desperate and tragic. However, while remaining firmly down-to-earth, he manages to remain hopeful and even idealistic. Many of the people I have met who have worked in development for twenty or thirty years seem jaded or cynical; somehow, Lewis has eluded this.

Race against Time is the text of the Massey Lecture Series which Lewis delivered in 2005. He touches on a wide array of issues which are intricately tied to HIV/AIDS, but one of the issues he is most impassioned about and keeps coming back to is gender. It is his conviction that were women and men equally empowered in Africa, then HIV/AIDS would still exist as a disease, but it would not be a pandemic; as the former UN envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, and hence one of the world’s leading experts on the pandemic, I am inclined to believe him (and there are a slew of arguments in favour of this theory, which I won’t launch into right now). For many reasons, I have a great admiration for Stephen Lewis, but I admit that his position as a staunch feminist is what endears him to me the most; to have such an important, articulate, intelligent, knowledgeable person (and a man, to boot) openly and energetically fighting for women’s rights gives me renewed hope and motivation to attempt to do the same.

If you have not yet read Race against Time you should do so. Wrapping one’s mind around the extent of the crisis of HIV/AIDS in Africa is practically impossible, but somehow, Stephen Lewis manages to bring the story home with grace. This book eloquently addresses an issue that is defining the future of a very large portion of humanity, an issue which it is critical for us all to understand.

Kwaheri Zanzibar!

2008-03-11T00:05:00.000+03:00

A week ago, I said goodbye to Zanzibar, but not after spending my last weekend almost exclusively on the beach. On Saturday, we went up to Nungwi and relaxed at Cholo’s (one of the places I’ll miss the most), and then on Sunday, we did Safari Blue, a full-day excursion involving snorkeling, dolphins, a seafood barbecue on the beach, sailing in a dhow, and a swarm of Italian tourists. And then, on Monday evening, I flew from Zanzibar to Dar es Salaam.

I spent several days in Dar with Alex, who very kindly ferried me everywhere I needed to go. The highlight of these few days was the school Alex has been working at: a compound filled with happy children and happy grandmothers. The school is a project started by a group of grandmothers who are raising their orphan children (a phenomenon which is alarmingly common across HIV/AIDS-ravaged sub-Saharan Africa). The grandmothers themselves have started an income-generating project, making batik patterns on cloth (which I loaded up on).

Another highlight of my few days in Dar was having dinner in a restaurant called Spurs, which successfully recreates the atmosphere of a large, North American suburban chain restaurant (plastic booths, boring music, tacky decor and all). The added bonus in this place is the politically incorrect portrayal of “American Indians,” including a giant neon totem pole (I kid you not), and the fact that the Tex-Mex menu is written entirely in what I can only assume is supposed to be an imitation of a Hispanic accent. Perhaps in an attempt to ward off reverse culture shock (but probably more in an attempt to alleviate our guilt for spending the evening doing something so thoroughly un-Tanzanian), Alex and I made a very long series of snide remarks about the restaurant. But despite my disdain for the place, I was overjoyed when my nachos came, with real cheese and sour cream!

My plans for the six weeks following my departure from Zanzibar include five (and possibly seven) flights on four different continents, with a layover in the Persian Gulf. I very nearly missed the first of these flights (I literally sprinted for the plane), which took me from Dar es Salaam to Mtwara, the “capital” of Southern Tanzania. This part of the country is much poorer than the rest of Tanzania, with the exception of the three islands (Mafia, Unguja and Pemba), which continue to score the lowest on the poverty indicators. Compared to Zanzibar and Dar, Mtwara is extremely remote.

I am volunteering for two weeks with the Aga Khan Agency for Microfinance (AKAM), which is doing some very interesting work. Besides handing out micro loans, there are a number of original initiatives underway, my favourite of which is a project targeting the women who work in the cashew processing plants here (cashews are one of the region’s main cash crops). A needs assessment survey was conducted, revealing a demand for three large-ticket items: mattresses, bicycles, and roofing materials. AKAM has bought these items at a good price and in bulk. The women who want to participate (about 300 in all) receive the good and pay it off directly through their pay checks every week for six months. In the end, even with interest (2% per month), the cost of the items is still lower than it would have been for each individual to purchase the item herself at unit price and pay to have it transported. Bicycles in particular are very useful, as they greatly reduce the factory workers’ transit time to and from work, allowing them to do other activities instead.

Flight number two will take me back to Dar, where I’ll catch a bus to Lushoto (in Northern Tanzania) for some hiking over Easter weekend. Once back in Dar, I’ll catch flight three to India (via Qatar), where I’ll spend two weeks, then flight four will take me back to Dar once more. If I still have money at that point, I will fly to Arusha to visit Christina for a few days (flights five and six), and then, finally, flight seven will take me back home, via Amsterdam, hopefully late enough to have entirely skipped the nasty winter I’ve been hearing so much about from envious friends and family...

The Zanzibar Directory of Civil Society Organisations

2008-02-27T11:54:00.005+03:00

At last I can advertise the project I've been working on for the past eight months! Today we held the official launch for the Zanzibar Directory of Civil Society Organisations. This online database is highly detailed and fully searchable. More importantly, it is designed so that organisations which are not yet in the database or who need to make changes to their data page (or correct the grammar and clean up of typos) can do so online. I was very lucky to have Adam within ferry distance of me during posting, he's responsible for the website design and the database design; what he didn't do himself, he taught me how to do through long and detailed online chat conversations.

I'm very proud of this project, and based on its initial success, there is even talk of it being adapted to mainland Tanzania. It is the first attempt at creating an exhaustive, detailed registry of civil society organisations in Tanzania, and perhaps even in all of East Africa. This tool will allow organisations to find one another, facilitating partnerships between NGOs, leading to more efficiency and preventing overlap in programming. It will also enable smaller organisations to track down larger ones which might be able to provide them with funds, and it will enable large donor organisations to find small, grassroots CSOs to support and to partner with.

Hopefully as organisations update and add to their information, it will evolve into a comprehensive and fully accurate database. Here it is!

The First Two Weeks of February

2008-02-14T09:38:00.005+03:00

It's hard to believe I'm halfway through my last month in Zanzibar. The last two weeks have been very busy, in particular thanks to the music festival, Sauti za Busara ("Sounds of Wisdom"), which took place between February 7 and 10. I was very impressed at how professionally this festival was run, and I was blown away by a large majority of the acts, most of which came from across Africa.

The first act I saw was N'faly Kouyaté and his band Dunyakan, from Guinea. The main singer played a traditional kora wearing a beautiful traditional robe, which he threw off halfway through the act to reveal hip hop-style clothing underneath. Another favourite was the group Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni ba, from Mali. This group won the BBC World Music Award Album of the Year 2007, and I would definitely recommend picking up their CD if you can track it down. Eric Wainaina from Kenya was another highlight, as was Yunasi, also Kenyan (except for their French female accordion player, very reminiscent of The Arcade Fire). Jakamoyo was also excellent; the group from Bagamoyo, Tanzania, does very energetic traditional drumming and dancing.

Finally, there was the legendary Bi Kidude - "Bi" is short for "Bibi," a respectful term for an older woman, which also means "grandmother." This Zanzibari woman has been singing traditional Taarab music for the past century or so - her age is unknown, and guesses at it reach Biblical, or should I say Quranic proportions. She drinks beer, smokes cigarettes, and has an amazing stage presence and a deep, rich voice which I didn't expect to hear coming out of the very slight woman.

Besides the music festival, there were visits from several friends, including Alex and Adam, a dinner party, and a trip to the south of the island with a Zanzibari friend. Instead of describing all of this in great detail, I've posted pictures (which include photos from the music festival) in this album:

Last Month in Zanzibar

Postscript

2008-02-12T14:01:00.000+03:00

My father, always the academic, does research to write his comments on my blog. I particularly appreciated his input after my last post, and I thought it deserved to become a post of its own:

From Bob Myles:

France

Suffrage was extended to women in France by the October 5, 1944 Ordinance of the French Provisional government [7]. The first elections with women participation were the municipal elections of April 29, 1945 and the parliamentary elections of October 21 1945. Muslim women in French Algeria had to wait till a July 3, 1958 Decree [8] [9].

Declaration of the Rights of Woman, 1791
Written by Olympe De Gouge, 1791

Woman, wake up; the tocsin of reason is being heard throughout the whole universe; discover your rights. The powerful empire of nature is no longer surrounded by prejudice, fanaticism, superstition, and lies. The flame of truth has dispersed all the clouds of folly and usurpation. Enslaved man has multiplied his strength and needs recourse to yours to break his chains. Having become free, he has become unjust to his companion. Oh, women, women! When will you cease to be blind? What advantage have you received from the Revolution? A more pronounced scorn, a more marked disdain. In the centuries of corruption you ruled only over the weakness of men. The reclamation of your patrimony, based on the wise decrees of nature-what have you to dread from such a fine undertaking? The bon mot of the legislator of the marriage of Cana? Do you fear that our French legislators, correctors of that morality, long ensnared by political practices now out of date, will only say again to you: women, what is there in common between you and us? Everything, you will have to answer. If they persist in their weakness in putting this non sequitur in contradiction to their principles, courageously oppose the force of reason to the empty pretentions of superiority; unite yourselves beneath the standards of philosophy; deploy all the energy of your character, and you will soon see these haughty men, not groveling at your feet as servile adorers, but proud to share with you the treasures of the Supreme Being. Regardless of what barriers confront you, it is in your power to free yourselves; you have only to want to....

Woman is the Nigger of the World
John Lennon

Woman is the nigger of the world
Yes she is...think about it
Woman is the nigger of the world
Think about it...do something about it
. . .
Woman is the slaves of the slaves
Yeah (think about it)
We insult her everyday on TV
And wonder why she has no guts or confidence
When she’s young we kill her will to be free
While telling her not to be so smart we put her down for being so dumb
Woman is the nigger of the world...yes she is
. . .
Think about it...do something about it

Gender Segregation

2008-02-07T16:34:00.000+03:00

This is a topic that has been on my mind very often in the past seven and a half months. Be forewarned, this post is long and academic. My next post will hopefully be fun and colourful: as I write this, the Sauti za Busara ("Sound of Wisdom") music festival is starting up!

I have developed a deep empathy for people who are the victims of racism. Of course I have always deplored racism, as any rational person does, but it is only after living in Zanzibar for seven months that I believe can start to empathise. To write Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin, a white man from Texas, disguised himself as a black man and traveled through the Deep South in 1959, during the days of segregation. Griffin was treated as a completely different human being, though the only thing that had changed was his skin colour. He was treated first as a black person, and then as an individual. This, I think sums up racism. It also sums up sexism. In Zanzibar, society has treated me first as a female, and then as an individual; I am perceived by society as being a completely different human being. Coming to this patriarchal society as a woman from Canada has been an abrupt and shocking change, very similar to Griffin’s plunge into the Deep South as a black man.

There are of course differences between racism and sexism. To continue with the analogy, in the setting of institutionalised racism in the Deep South, black people were barred from using white public toilets, from going to white schools, from eating in white restaurants, and from sitting in certain parts of public busses. It is true that in Zanzibar, as a woman, I personally am not barred from most of these places (with the glaring exception of mosques, which generally do not admit women, Muslim or otherwise, except under special circumstances). However, on Zanzibar, I have the distinct advantage of being an outsider and a member of the “race” which used to dominate this country and enjoy privileges over the native inhabitants (and in many ways still does).

The story is very different for Zanzibari women. In general, the women of Zanzibar do not have the control over their own life and over their own individuality which I believe every human being deserves (as Amartya Sen might put it, they are lacking capabilities). Here are some concrete examples. At Bawani, the main Zanzibari night club, the only females in attendance are women from the mainland, white tourists, and prostitutes. Street vendors who sell coffee are an old and famous Zanzibari institution, borrowed from Arab traders hundreds of years ago; these curb-side coffee shops are social hubs, and they are exclusively populated by men. Vendors and salesmen are mostly male, and this is especially true the farther one gets from Stone Town. It is still not unheard of for school-aged girls to be kept at home, banned from education.

Unless we are to assume that women hate to dance, dislike coffee, have no interest in business, and don’t want to go to school, the conclusion is that many women are being barred from these activities. I have been told of a village in which an NGO attempting to assist women in setting up microenterprises failed because the men of the village blocked the project, saying that “a woman doing business is the same as prostitution.” I have also been told of parents who do not think spending money on girls’ education is a worthwhile investment, and instead choose to marry them off early. The result of these restrictions placed on women is gender-based segregation; this segregation is pervasive, and it is very deeply entrenched.

The difference between gender segregation in Zanzibar and racial segregation in the Deep South is that in Zanzibar, the segregation is not institutional. Instead, it is cultural: it is based on social convention and tradition. The controlling power, the origin of this type of segregation, is not a separate population living in a wealthy neighbourhood half a city away, or sitting in a separate part of the bus. Instead, the repressive power is living in your house, sleeping in your bed with you. It’s also in you, because women are as engaged as men in building and maintaining social convention. I would argue that the fallout of gender segregation in Zanzibar is very similar to that of racial segregation in the US. In the States today (and this was even more true in the years after segregation), African Americans are, on aggregate, less wealthy, less well-educated, less healthy, and less powerful than white Americans. Exactly the same can be said about women in Zanzibar (and indeed in most of the developing world).

A more immediate result of gender segregation, and one I have had direct and extensive experience with, is that men and women do not interact the same way that they do in Canada. Unlike in our isolationist society, it is common for strangers here to strike up a conversation on the street or the dala dala. However, I have found it difficult to have an innocent conversation with a man I don’t know; there is almost always an underlying tension resulting from the gender imbalance. In most conversations I’ve had that have lasted longer than thirty seconds (the time it takes to get through the initial greetings stage in Swahili), the conversation has veered toward marriage. This usually leads to a winding discussion which is frustrating to both parties, since we’re squinting incredulously at each other over a gaping cultural divide. I have been jealous of my male friends (also Canadians) who have visited me and have easily gotten into nice, friendly conversations with random people on the dala dala or in the street. No matter how long I live here, no matter how culturally immersed I am, no matter how fluent I become in Swahili, those kinds of conversations will remain refreshing exceptions.

My constant dilemma here has been to attempt to strike a balance between maintaining my integrity and my values and being culturally sensitive. While I have often felt like reacting with anger or frustration to comments or questions that would be considered outrageous and verging on sexual harassment in Canada, I also recognize that such comments and questions are seen as perfectly innocent and sometimes even gracious in Zanzibar.

The good news, though, stems from something I mentioned before – that the controlling power in this segregated society lies partly within women themselves, in that they too influence social convention. This leaves hope for change. And in fact, there are the beginnings of change on Zanzibar – perhaps the most hopeful hint I’ve seen to that effect is the tiny, all-male Village Development Committee in a desperately poor and very remote village in Pemba which has a campaign to promote sending girls to school rather than marrying them off at ages as young as 12. Another sign of hope is in a friend of mine, a smart, independent, outgoing young Zanzibari woman who has a full-time job, is involved in the arts, and even plays on the Zanzibar women’s football team (the very existence of this team is yet another sign of hope). It is in people like this that hope lies; I just hope change will come about quickly enough.

Christmas in Africa, Part 4: New Year's Eve in the Serengeti

2008-01-15T17:32:00.000+03:00

The last part of my Christmas vacation still seems a bit surreal. At 7am on Dec 30, six of us drove off from out hotel in Arusha in a converted minivan and headed out toward the Serengeti. We drove for many hours, first stopping on the ridge of Ngorongoro crater, and then crossing a large part of the Serengeti (which means "endless plain" in the language of the Maasai). Words and photos can't describe how stunning this part of the world is.

Standing on the ridge of Ngorongoro crater feels somewhat like peering down into Eden from above. Because it is so well-enclosed geographically, the crater feels quite small, although it is actually 610 metres deep and 260 square kilometres in area (this is from the Wiki article). The promise of zebras, elephants and giraffes makes the whole experience just a little more surreal - that is, if the Maasai villages scattered en route didn't max out the feeling already.

From the ridge of the crater we made our way to Olduvai (or "Oldupai") Gorge, where 3.6 million-year-old hominid footprints were found. This is the general area where it is believed our ancestors first came down from the trees... From the cradle of humanity we proceeded to the Serengeti, which really DOES go on forever. We camped under the spectacular stars, and spent New Year's Eve trying to stay awake until midnight, at which point we weirded out some Portuguese safari-goers by singing Auld Lang Syne (it only occurred to me halfway through the song that this is a distinctly Anglo-Saxon tradition).

In terms of animal sightings, the highlight for me was the lions. We saw two packs of them, and were able to get quite close. We were also lucky to spot a rhino, of which there are only about 25 left in Ngorongoro crater. We also saw a leopard which actually came down from its tree and crossed the road in front of us. There were plenty of elephants and giraffes and zebras, and we even saw some birds that were literally the size of human beings (they made me think of pterodactyls).

And yes, there was much singing of songs from "The Lion King" during safari. That movie has really done a number on the North American psyche (between having "The Circle of Life" stuck in my head for three days and having every salesman in Stone Town cheerily call out "Hakuna Matata!" to me for the past seven months, I've developed a passionate distaste for the movie).

Some more photos from safari are in this album (which I linked to in a previous post):

Christmas in Africa

Want my job?

2008-01-15T14:18:00.001+03:00

The Aga Khan Foundation Canada is now accepting applications for its internship program for 2008-2009. The application deadline is January 28, 2008.

Christmas in Africa, Part 3: Santa Finds Bububu

2008-01-11T09:20:00.000+03:00

On Christmas Eve, eight Canadian interns and sisters/cousins of interns met up on the beach in Nungwi, in the north of Zanzibar, for a dinner of fish, octupus, rice, "Cholo's sauce," and "potato of the day." The delicious meal was prepared by the rasta/beach boys who operate and, I believe, own Cholo's, quite possibly the chillest bar in the world (which is why Rebecca and I find ourselves inextricably drawn there every couple of weekends). All of the bar's furniture (tables, benches, etc) is made out of old boat parts, and the bar itself is the former hull of a large boat. The tips jar is an old toilet hoisted up on one of the pillars supporting the roof over the bar, and empty bottles are tossed into an old bathtub and a hammock.

The bar is entirely open-air, except for a few palm shelters. There are several hammocks along the beach, and there's a decorative motorcycle strung up in one of the trees on the beach. The bar even has a beautiful Zanzibar door, which stands completely isolated in the sand, facing the Indian Ocean. The proprietors live on-site in various makeshift shelters, ranging from a tent to a tree house, and they will let you sit in their hammocks all day and not pressure you to buy anything from them ("it's cool, man!" is a frequent refrain).

They have yummy tropical mixed drinks made from fresh fruit with juvenile names ("Passion under a Palm Tree," "Banana Blow Job," etc.), and, best of all, they have the best selection of music I or any of my friends have encountered in any bar or restaurant across East Africa, an eclectic mix made up of music taken from the iPods of patrons (mostly young backpackers and NGO types).

Christmas day was great; we had a large party of people over for a very good dinner. The next day, A few of us headed to the East Coast, to a village called Bwejuu, where a friend's family owns a beach house which was very kindly loaned to us for a few nights. Our van broke down halfway there and we had to hitch a ride in an empty bus that randomly came along, but we made it eventually. Along the East Coast, the tide goes out so far that you can wade out for maybe a kilometer without the water going above your knees. The women in the village take advantage of this to farm seaweed, which they then sell in town.

To get back to town, we walked (slowly) through the very hot village, attracting a crowd of young children who all wanted to hold our hands. We stood around waiting for a dala dala, but instead got a lift from two guys in a minivan. It was a very unusual ride: the guys were very nice (no marriage proposals, they gave us a fair price right off the bat, and they actually apologized for having to stop to get gas), their new van was in impeccable condition and much more comfortable than a dala dala, and they played good music all the way back to Stone Town.

Christmas in Africa, Part 2: Pemba

2008-01-09T17:17:00.001+03:00

The day after the wedding, we flew to Pemba for a week of exploring. It turns out mid-December is clove harvest time: there were cloves drying on mats and sheets of plastic by the roadside all over the island. In Mkoani cloves even lined the curbs and the medians in the road. Pemba is a pretty interesting place to travel in; there are perhaps a dozen tourists on the island at any given time, the people are far more conservative than on Unguja, and they are also much poorer. It's also extremely lush and beautiful, so the sweet smell in the air caused by the cloves just added to the storybook feel.

We went snorkeling on a spectacular reef just off Misali island, which it took us over an hour to get to on a small fishing boat. Unforunately we had both forgotten our sunscreen, which had unpleasant results. In Mkoani, we stayed at the guest house with the stupendous view and the fantastic octopus curry which I had visited during my last visit to the island.

We happened to visit Pemba during Eid al-Adha, also known as Eid al-Hajj, the celebration of the end of the period when Muslims visit Mecca. We stayed in a nice hotel with air conditioning, hot water, and cable TV, and all of the local channels were carrying footage from the Hajj, which was very interesting.

Sikuku lasts a few days after Eid - I haven't pinned down the direct translation of the word “sikuku,” I think it means “festival” or “celebration,” usually used in conjuction with one of the Eids, but I also heard it referring to Christmas celebrations. Because of the holiday everyone was out in the street and dressed beautifully. On the first day of sikuku, we rented a motor bike and drove up to the Ngezi Forest Reserve in the north of the island, which was spectacular. We attracted a LOT of attention from the crowds out celebrating. Adam described part of this bike ride nicely in this blog post.

Alex, another friend of mine, is now in Dar es Salaam on an internship (seems everyone is coming to East Africa these days). This is his blog. Also, I have finally finished uploading my many photos from the Christmas period (below), including some great safari photos, and there are two more blog entries to follow very soon!

Christmas in Africa

Christmas in Africa, Part 1: The Wedding

2008-01-08T17:33:00.001+03:00

I was lucky enough to be able to take the last three weeks off and thoroughly enjoy the holiday season in a very unorthodox way. It also meant I was largely away from the Internet, though I did stop into Internet cafes a few times to clear my inbox of the 500+ Facebook notifications wishing me a Happy Birthday and Merry Christmas (thank you, by the way!). Now I’m finally sitting down to update my blog... Photos are in the lengthy process of being uploaded.

On December 15, I was one of five non-Africans at the wedding of my colleague Christina’s brother. Rebecca and I had outfits made for the occasion (the fabric cost about 20$, and the labour, about 7$). The ceremony was very interesting: there were four couples being married simultaneously, each with their own colour-coordinated wedding party and marching-band-in-a-pickup-truck. After the ceremony, women from one of the “rival” wedding parties started rolling around on the ground in a form of celebration which still remains very mysterious to me. We made our way to the reception hall in a rented bus packed with family and friends of the bride and groom, all of whom started singing African hymns in multiple-part harmony.

The reception itself was a blend of tradition and modernity. One of the more distinctive traditions was the wheeling out of a (dead) goat, which was described to us as a cake, leading to much confusion and discussion of semantics. The conversation went something like this:

- Is that a goat?

- It’s a cake.

- Oh, so it’s not a goat.

- Yes.

- Wait, so it is a goat?

- Yes. It is a cake.

- A cake made out of goat?

- Yes, it is a goat.

- ...

It turned out that it actually was a goat which, following the bride and groom’s local tradition, had been slaughtered for the wedding and was then served for dinner, along with a massive and delicious buffet of traditional foods.

Another interesting tradition was the elaborate way in which the gifts were presented: each gift was brought forward in a slow procession by the group of people presenting the gift. Much to the other guests’ amusement, the “Zanzibar” group included six wazungu; we processed, in time to the music and with much embarrassment, to the stage at the front of the reception hall, where we presented a blender to the bride and groom. Yes, a blender; some clichés you just can’t get away from, even halfway around the world.

Pictures from Bububu

2007-12-06T14:46:00.001+03:00

I finally got around to taking a series of photos at and around my home in Bububu. Karibuni!

Daily Life in Zanzibar and Bububu

Weekend in Dar es Salaam

2007-11-27T15:28:00.000+03:00

I spent last weekend in Dar es Salaam with Rebecca and Adam. Zanzibar is a fantastic place: the people are extremely welcoming and kind (except for the touts), the food is great, Stone Town is bursting with colour and beauty, and the beaches are the nicest I've been on in my life. However, the island does tend to get a bit claustrophobic after a while, and after two solid months since my last trip away from Zanzibar (going to Pemba doesn't count), I really needed to get to a big, noisy, bustling city, eat some pork, buy some cheap beer, and wear a sleeveless shirt.

On Friday evening, I had Lebanese food, which I've been fantasizing about on and off for about a month now. Hommos, taboule, and garlic butter have never tasted so good to me. On Saturday, we went to the Movenpick, a huge five-star hotel, to check out their breakfast menu (another thing I've been craving is a big greasy bacon-laden breakfast). We gave the 16,000 Tanzanian Shilling breakfast buffet a pass - that would have been about double what we each paid for dinner the evening before. Instead, for a fraction of the price, we got fancy cappuccinos and lattes, pastries, and mini bacon and ham quiches, satisfying five different cravings in one sitting.

We then made our way by daladala across the sprawling and extremely hot city to Mlimani City, a huge Western-style mall which sits, mirage-like, on a little hill above a landscape that otherwise resembles something out of Blade Runner, or perhaps the desert planet in Star Wars. The contrast between outside and inside the mall is a shock to the system, both physically and psychologically. Adam summed it up well in this blog post. The mall does contain one thing of interest though, besides its mega-stores, expensive cafes, and sanitized, air-conditioned environment: a movie theatre.

Each of us shelled out 7,000 Shillings and we saw The Kingdom, which I'd never heard of before, being somewhat out of the loop pop-culture-wise. After nearly five months here, I am clearly not used to the Western Movie Experience any more, and I'm still undergoing heart palpitations from all those explosions and shoot-outs. It was also disconcerting that I understood bits of what the bad guys (in this particular film, Saudi terrorists) were saying, Swahili having borrowed a great deal from Arabic. It was a fun movie, mildly nuanced (very mildly - just enough to prevent us from walking out, though Jennifer Garner nearly did the trick), and with plenty of cool special effects. Also I like Jamie Foxx, and there was one good line about French Canadians, so the movie did have some redeeming values.

On Sunday afternoon, we had a very nice lunch with Adam's host family out in a part of (huge, sprawling, never-ending) Dar called Tabata. Getting there was quite an adventure, we were in a daladala that even on a Sunday was so over-crowded that at one point, there were five people hanging out of the doorway as the bus careened along the roads. The food was exceptional, Adam's host family lovely, and the hour-long interview on CNN of vapid Criss Angel a painful reminder of the less-than-fantastic side of Western culture.

And then Rebecca and I boarded the ferry for Zanzibar as eagerly as we had boarded the ferry departing it. Nothing like a huge, hot, bustling, busy city to make you appreciate quiet, colourful Stone Town and Zanzibar's beaches...

One thing I don't appreciate here though: the bugs. Last night Christina, my Tanzanian roommate, rescued me by killing a huge spider in my bedroom. More cause for heart palpitations.

Also, I have a little thing on my desktop tracking the temperature both here and in Montreal, and I don't know who has it worse...

Montreal: Feels like: -15.4°C
Zanzibar: Feels like: 39.1°C

My First Car Chase

2007-11-21T08:59:00.000+03:00

Nothing like being pursued by the cops to wake you up on a Monday morning. Kent and I had waited an unusually long time for a daladala, and so naturally when it arrived it was jam-packed even more than usual. We were late for work though, so we wedged ourselves in, bent over double (especially Kent who is significantly above 6'), clutching our bags and laptops. I eventually secured a spot on the wheel hump.

In Zanzibar there are police checkpoints along the major roads (all four of them) where daladalas are made to pull over and be checked out for "safety reasons." The driver is supposed to be wearing a seatbelt (a rule that is actually quite consistently obeyed), the daladala is not supposed to be overcrowded, and there might be a few other obscure rules.

As usual, our daladala was pulled over at the Bububu police checkpoint, at which point a bemused-looking officer started to count the bodies squashed into the vehicle. Some of the people around me sniggered. Then, for some reason, the daladala pulled away from the checkpoint. I thought the cop just didn't care, or knew the driver or something. But all of a sudden, passengers started shouting "He's coming!" I followed their stares out the back window and saw two cops on a motorcycle in the distance pursuing the daladala.

The driver floored it. We whizzed along the road, with amused passengers spot-checking for the cops. Then the daladala turned abruptly onto an unpaved road, and then turned again into a sheltered area between some houses. The conductor hopped out of the daladala and edged along the outside wall of one of the houses, carefully peering around the corner to see if the cops had followed us.

When he was confident we had not been seen, we drove off again... only to be stopped by the two now very out-of-sorts cops. As soon as we stopped, several people leaped out of the vehicle and others rearranged themselves on the seats around me. It happened so quickly that if I had blinked, it would have looked like the daladala magically went from dangerously overcrowded to just normally overcrowded.

The driver and the more corpulent (and hence I assume the more senior) of the two police officers proceeded to shout at one another for a few minutes while the passengers around me just laughed some more. The cop took down the names of the driver and the conductor, and then... we were on our way! It is quite possible a bribe passed hands and I didn't see it (I've never seen it in Zanzibar, which doesn't mean it isn't happening, of course). But from my perspective, it looked like the driver got a good talking-to and was sent on his way. Just another Monday morning in Zanzibar, I guess...

I'm woring on taking a series of photos of my house and neighbourhood in Bububu, hopefully they'll eventually make it onto my blog. The bugs are a lot bigger in Bububu, but this BBC article made me realize how lucky I am to be ONLY dealing with fire-ants, 15cm-long millipedes, and 7cm-long cockroaches, not the "monster millipedes, huge cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies" referred to in the article...

Also, for your amusement, a screen shot from my application to a grad school in the UK (click on the image for a bigger view). For some reason the applications to schools in the US and, it turns out, the UK, ask for your "Ethnic" origin. The application I filled out for a school in the US was pretty basic, with options essentially boiling down to a) White, b) Black, c) Asian, d) Hispanic, e) Other, f) Prefer not to say. But this application is downright confusing for someone who isn't from the UK (and this school gets a lot of international applicants). The link on the left of the form did not provide any clarification at all.

After some searching on the internet I now know that "Irish Traveller" is actually a distinct ethnic group in Ireland (here I thought an Irish person on vacation suddenly switches ethnicities). I'm sure there's also a reasonable explanation for "White Scottish," though if there are Scots of other colours (blue, perhaps?) they really should have their own checkboxes as well.

I nearly put down "Other White Background: Canadian." But that probably isn't specific enough for them, and "Canadian" isn't an ethnicity, really, so I went back a few generations and put "Other White Background: Irish/Italian." But if you're going back, why not go back all the way? I should have put down "African: Somewhere around the Great Rift Valley."

Or, since ethnicity and race are all made-up and self-defined concepts anyways, perhaps I'll start self-identifying as "White and Black African," or maybe "Bangladeshi." Maybe I should have put myself down as "Other Mixed Background," since, after all, Ireland and Italy are quite a distance apart. Or do they only mean people with ancestors of different skin tones? This is all very confusing. And I thought race relations in the US were complicated.

Habs

2007-11-09T14:35:00.000+03:00

I blatantly stole this from Adam's blog, but in my defence, I was the one who suggested he take the photo. This man is a fishmonger in Darajani (the main market in Stone Town), and I seriously doubt he's ever watched a hockey game in his life. But Go Habs Go!

Weekend in Jambiani

2007-11-06T12:00:00.001+03:00

I was going to write a long and elaborate blog entry about last weekend, which I spent with Adam and Rebecca in Jambiani on the East Coast. However, Adam's blog entry does the trick, so I thought I'd link to it instead of writing one of my own...

From the Tropics to the Sub-Arctic

2007-11-02T08:42:00.000+03:00

My friend Alex is currently doing his master's at McGill in Atmospheric Science. For the past week, he's been doing field work in Iqaluit, Nunavut, and he's blogging about it here.

I've received lots of compliments about my photos of sunsets and beaches, but Alex's fieldwork photos and his photos from his walk in Sylvia Grinnell Territorial Park show that ice and snow can be just as beautiful. Here's my personal favourite (click for higher resolution):

Pemba: Bumpy Roads, Octopus Curry, and Marriage Proposals

2007-10-31T12:15:00.003+03:00

I flew to Pemba on Thursday morning expecting to have only one full day’s worth of work, and, as I was returning on Sunday evening, two and a half days to explore Unguja’s sister island in the Zanzibar archipelago. However, I had not properly estimated the time it would take to traverse the less-developed and hillier island. Though it is only about two-thirds the size of Unguja, Pemba has fewer paved roads, and some of the organizations we had to visit were in extremely remote parts of the island. On Friday, for example, we found ourselves driving down what I can only describe as a foot-path, not even a meter in width, in a clunky but reliable 4 by 4. This vehicle amazed me several times throughout the day as we scaled up and plunged down muddy and bumpy inclines which I thought for sure would leave us stranded in the middle of the lush tropical forest which covers the island.

The villages we visited were so isolated that many residents were as amazed to see a car driving around as they were to see a white woman gripping on for dear life inside the car. In several villages, children ran out of their homes when they heard us coming, waving and screaming greetings, then started galloping after us once we’d passed them, chasing us until we outpaced them, and making me feel rather like the Pied Piper. Once, we gave a lift to three schoolboys on their way to class, who for some reason thought every word of Swahili that came out of my mouth was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. They were extremely excited to be in a car as we bumped along past their less lucky classmates who had to go to school on foot.

The work which I had expected to last one day actually lasted two and a half, but I felt lucky to be able to see parts of Pemba that tourists never visit, and which I wouldn’t have been able to see on my own. Also, for the first two nights of my stay, I was put up at a government-owned factory which processes cloves into oil, and which happens to have a guest house for visiting officials and government employees. I was given the VIP suite (a “state room” I was told): it had hot water, air conditioning, and a TV, all of which made me extremely happy. As there isn’t much to do in Pemba in the evenings (particularly for a lone mzungu female staying out of the town centre), I took full advantage of the air conditioning during my long evenings in.

On Friday, I had a half day to explore Chake Chake, Pemba’s largest town. I visited an interesting museum set up in an old Portuguese fort, and I wandered around the town, where people seemed surprised to see a tourist. On Saturday, after visiting one organization in Mkoani, Pemba’s port town, I also took a wander. I first found the town’s only guest house, located on a hilltop, affording it the most stupendous view. I ordered lunch, exceptionally good octopus curry and freshly-made chapatti. The meal took an hour and a half to prepare (all too common in Zanzibar), but it was well-worth the wait (which I spent lounging in a hammock, staring at the ocean, and finishing Dubliners). During my meal it started to rain torrentially. I waited out the downpour, and then I went for a stroll along a muddy road, chatting with fishermen and farmers, and attracting quite a bit of attention from children along the way. Thankfully, I didn’t slip and fall on the wet, clay road while gaping at the Eden-like countryside.

I was warned repeatedly throughout the weekend that it was “not advisable” for me to go about on my own – those dangerous ten-year olds lurk at just about every street corner. In fact I felt quite safe the whole time I was there, perhaps even more safe than on Unguja, because I attracted so much attention that if anything had happened to me (abduction by pirates perhaps?), there would have been several helpful people standing around staring. Nonetheless, many gallant men, obviously concerned above all for my safety, used the excuse to give me their phone numbers so that they could swoop down and rescue me should the unforeseen occur. It did not; the only time I felt even mildly in danger was when I was nearly run down by an ox.

Despite these grim warnings, I rented a bicycle on Sunday morning and headed out for the east coast of the island. Even on Unguja, a white woman on a bicycle alone is something of a spectacle (a common, bemused question Rebecca and I have received when biking around is “where are your husbands?”). I zipped along the nicely-paved road heading east, proudly passing other bikers, and only coming across a handful of cars and daladalas the whole time. After twenty minutes or so I realized why all the other bikers were going so slowly, when I started to feel light-headed from the heat. I also realized that the fact that I had forgotten my sunscreen in Unguja was going to pose a problem. As well, I learned quite quickly that besides toilet paper, cold drinks are also extremely difficult to find in Pemba. However, I managed to track down and chug two bottles of warm, sugary “orange drink,” which kept me conscious long enough to make it to the town of Vitongoji, and then to the dirt road leading to the beach.

On this road I amused myself by giving feminist backtalk to a boy I met, who declared he couldn’t live without me and wanted to marry me. I refused, telling him I didn’t want to get married. I repeated this to him several times in both English and Swahili, but he seemed unable to accept or comprehend the fact that a woman would not have marriage as her ultimate ambition in life, and so finally I told him he was too young for me and therefore I could not marry him. At this point he asked me if I had a “little sister,” and when I said I did, he asked if I would “give her” to him. I got a bit angry at this point and asked him what the heck he meant by that. Apparently he was hoping I’d call up Emily then and there and tell her to book a flight to Pemba and leap of the plane into a blissful life of matrimony with this guy.

Thankfully, we reached the beach at this point, and mercifully, he actually left me alone when I asked him to (I have found men in Unguja to be somewhat less able to take a hint, even when the “hint” takes the form of “I want to be alone now.”) I relaxed on the beach for a while, watching the boys and men fishing in the low tide. One kid sat in the hot sun for perhaps two hours digging worms out of the sand.

Finally I started to head home. Unfortunately, my bike had other ideas – the chain came off and got stuck in the gears three times before I made it back to the paved road. I was bailed out the first time by fishermen, the second by a group of young boys, and the third by a man on a bike. Finally, I managed to hobble back into Vitongoji town, where I bought chipsi maiai again (Pemba’s culinary scene doesn’t offer quite the variety that Unguja’s does). I also had a warm Coke, which is highly disgusting, don’t try it – it fizzes up in your mouth and feels like fur.

Luckily daladalas in Zanzibar have a roof on which you can throw cargo, so I tracked one down and had my bike hoisted and strapped on top. I sat around and chatted with a group of men at the daladala stop waiting for the daladala to leave – they found it very amusing that I could speak some Swahili. Being white and, hence, an outsider, allows for the bending of gender and other cultural rules – no self-respecting Zanzibari woman would have sat around with these guys and chatted, and they probably would not have found a Zanzibari woman very interesting to talk to. During the ride home, I responded to the conductor’s proposal of marriage in the same way as I had previously, that I did not want to get married. He seemed extremely perplexed.

With a medium sunburn and still no husband, I packed up and returned to Unguja. However, I have every intention of returning to Pemba soon to explore the island further.

Photos!

Pemba, Zanzibar

P.S. Happy Halloween - while there will unfortunately be no Time Warp for me this year (it turns out I forgot my fishnets in Montreal), this hilarious, very relevant (to me), and highly descriptive (be forewarned) article provided me with a good Halloween gross-out.

An Empty Pipe

2007-10-30T09:00:00.000+03:00

Here’s a poignant metaphor for botched development projects for you. The development committee in one of the more remote villages I visited in Pemba insisted on bringing me and the two ministry officials I was travelling with to see their attempt at providing a safe water supply for the village (“safe” meaning the water is piped or the source enclosed, not that the water is safe to drink). They had been given sufficient funds to build the following (click on the links for photos): one small cement building; one long pipe leading from said building up a steep incline to the village; a bunch of valves and taps for said pipe to control the water supply inside the little cement building. What they are missing the funds for: one water pump.

As a result, the pipe sits there, rusting away, taunting the women and children who cross it every time they are sent down to the village well to collect water in large buckets. The initial phase of this project was funded by a large, very well-known international development organization. Unfortunately, without the funds to proceed to the second, and, might I hazard, more salient phase (namely, actually getting the water out of the ground), the pipe lies empty. I was told this project would cost about USD 12,000, which might seem like a tidy sum, but as development projects go it’s not all that much. And it would service a number of villages that, in the meantime, have to send their women and children (who should be doing other things – like learning to read, for example) scrambling down to a well to fetch water for cooking, cleaning, bathing, and drinking.

On a more positive and completely unrelated note, here are some photos of an idyllic, nearly-deserted beach Rebecca and I stumbled upon about ten days ago:

Scenes of Zanzibar

Poverty

2007-10-29T14:07:00.003+03:00

It’s been a long time since I’ve been shocked when faced with poverty. Not that I have extremely extensive experience in the matter, in fact I’ve been sheltered from the very worst kinds of human suffering. I’ve never been to a refugee camp, for example, and I’ve never witnessed inhumane violence or its immediate effects first-hand, thank goodness. (I had written here before I’d gone to Pemba that I’d never seen a child suffering from extreme malnourishment, but unfortunately this is no longer the case.)

However, I have gotten to know people who live in floorless shacks made of corrugated metal or rickety planks just barely held together. I’ve been to tiny villages and, worse, the bateyes in the Dominican Republic, where people live in conditions comparable to those in Sub-Saharan Africa (I can now say this for a fact). I regularly visited a village where many people’s biggest aspiration in life is to one day be able to build their children a house made out of cement blocks (which would have a chance of surviving a hurricane). I’ve seen babies that have a high probability of dying preventable deaths in their first five years of life, and very young mothers who have a high probability of dying from preventable causes while bringing more babies into the world. I have read, absorbed, and seen first-hand the facts and figures that describe poverty. And yet every once in a while, even after I have grown to think I am somehow impervious to the strange mix of guilt, anger, fear, and despair that are all too common when witnessing extreme poverty, I am once again bowled over by the inhumanity and injustice of it.

Last week I (finally) got to really get my hands dirty (literally) doing field work. I chose a random sample of the NGOs in our database to verify that the data is correct. To do this, I managed a team of people who phoned 68 organizations in a day and a half, checking up on some of the more important facts in the questionnaires that were sent out to them. From those 68, those which were unknown to NGORC or to the Ministry of Good Governance, or those which appeared to be missing information in some way (lacking contact information, no budget disclosed, etc.) were singled out for physical verification. It is known that a certain percentage of organizations registered under Zanzibar’s Civil Society Act are what are informally referred to as “briefcase NGOs,” that is, they have registered with the government, but they sit around not actually doing any activities and hoping funding will mysteriously blow their way. Hence the need for follow-up for this database: we don’t want any “briefcase NGOs” on our list.

There were 20 organizations in all to be visited, spread quite evenly throughout Unguja and Pemba’s districts. The organizations ranged from tiny village development committees, to an organization that runs kids' football teams in a poor suburb of Stone Town, to an organization that provides people with vocational training in weaving traditional Zanzibari vikois (kind of like sarongs) using a large, foot-pedalled loom. None of the organizations I visited was a “briefcase NGO.” In fact, I found most of the people I met inspiring, especially the members of the village development committees. Most of these committee members live in extreme poverty, yet they are trying against all odds to bring about this elusive thing called “development,” whether by attempting to establish a safe water supply for their village, or by trying to convince parents not to marry off their daughters at ages as young as twelve (up from nine in the past), and instead send them to school.

Nonetheless, this hopefulness was tempered by the extent of the poverty I witnessed in the last week. My whirlwind tour of Unguja and Pemba was peppered with a procession of children in rags, and their homes, mud huts which we wouldn’t deem fit to hold livestock in Canada. One village in the remote northern part of Pemba was particularly poor. There, we attracted a crowd of extremely ragged children, the youngest of whom had distended bellies from malnourishment, come to stare open-mouthed at the strangers, and in particular at the mzungu. I believe I was in the only structure in the village that was not made of mud, namely the office for the small village development committee. Their proudest accomplishment was bringing a safe water supply to their village, which took the form of an above-ground pipe about ten centimetres in diameter which snaked its way along the dusty ground between the huts. In this village, as in others I visited, people were as surprised to see a car as they were to see a mzungu.

This post paints a particularly grim picture of my past week. In fact, overall, I come out of this week of intensive field work more hopeful and with renewed purpose and energy (except for today, as I’m suffering from the after-effects of a strenuous bike ride on a hot day and a forgotten bottle of sunscreen). And it wasn’t all poverty and bleakness: I will write a post soon about all the fun I had in Pemba and pictures will follow.

Project Visits

Photos!

2007-10-19T09:54:00.000+03:00

As promised...

Eid ul-Fitr

Daily Life in Zanzibar

Scenes of Zanzibar

Eid, Clubbing, Bububu, and a Presidential Decree

2007-10-17T12:15:00.000+03:00

So much has happened in the last two weeks that I haven’t had any time to write about it all. I think that I’ll start by describing my day on Monday.

On Monday morning I woke up to the sound of sparrows, children, and goats, and to the sight of vegetation out my window. This is noteworthy because for the past three and a half months, I’ve woken up to the sounds of crows (an animal I now abhor), traffic, my neighbour’s television and morning conversations, and to the sight of the stone walls of Stone Town out my window. I am now a proud resident of the town of Bububu (pronounced boo-BOO-boo – emphasis on the second-to-last syllable, just in case you were wondering). My roommates and I have moved into a nice, though somewhat run-down house in this sleepy village by the sea, a fifteen-minute daladala ride out of bustling (comparatively speaking) Stone Town.

We moved in, making the biggest splash possible, of course, starting last weekend with Rebecca, Kent and me in the back of a giant, bright blue pickup truck, lounging on our newly-bought couch set as it was driven to our home, and ending last Sunday with us carrying three mattresses on our heads down the unpaved road to our house. Word traveled very quickly, and by the end of the day on Monday, no one in the neighbourhood seemed at all surprised to see three wazungu wandering around, and the children had mostly stopped asking for money.

Back to Monday morning. I woke up around 8am, not having set my alarm, since the previous evening around 7pm Kent had received a text message from his boss informing us that the President of Zanzibar had just declared Monday a national holiday (on an unrelated note, I now think the President of Zanzibar is a wise and knowledgeable man and I would definitely vote for his re-election if I could). The reason he declared Monday a holiday is because the first day of Eid ul-Fitr fell on Saturday (well, it actually depends who you ask, but the official consensus on Zanzibar was that Ramadan ended on Friday at sunset, so the first day of Eid, or Sikuku, was on Saturday). Consequently, Friday was not a holiday, and clearly the president felt we really should get a three-day weekend (very wise and knowledgeable of him), so he gave us all Monday off.

Eid, by the way, was great, although I think I had built it up a little too much in my mind (a certain close friend of mine who shall remain nameless had led me to believe the streets would be running red with the blood of slaughtered animals – this did not happen, to my great disappointment). We sat on the beach at sunset on Friday spotting for the moon with a bunch of fishermen (the appearance of the first sliver of the new moon signals that Ramadan is over), and when we did see it, promptly celebrated (sans the fishermen) at Livingtone’s, expat hangout extraordinaire, and, later, at Amore Mio, our favourite Italian restaurant. On Saturday, we invited some kids we know over and gave them toys, candy and coins, which is what you’re supposed to do on the first day of Eid. Everyone in the streets was dressed beautifully, with the men in crisp, new, white robes and kuffis, the women in new, sparkly, colourful scarves and dresses, and the kids in lovely new outfits, including many adorable princess dresses on the girls and adult-style African suits on the boys.

On Saturday night, we had dinner at the night market along with the rest of the population of Zanzibar – I’ve never seen it so crowded. Afterwards, we went clubbing at Zanzibar’s one disco, which was populated mostly by men (a large proportion of them local), with lots of expat and non-ethnically-African women (what I’m getting at is my assumption that local Muslim women aren’t allowed out, but the men are – a total guess on my part, but, I think, an informed one). The party continued on Sunday, though we missed a lot of it, since we had to move.

All this to say: I slept in on Monday, and I was very glad to be able to after such a busy weekend. After getting up, the three of us did some shopping for the house, and then Rebecca and I headed to Nungwi for the day. Nungwi was as surreal as usual, with its pristine beauty and beach resort feel. As usual, we sunbathed, swam in the turquoise water, lay in hammocks drinking beer, and chatted with rasta guys who work at the bar we frequent, Zanzibari women trying to give us henna tattoos and braid our hair, and Maasai warriors trying to sell us necklaces and bracelets. When we’d had enough of the stress of trying to decide whether to dry off in a hammock or go for another swim, we went to catch the daladala home.

Daladala rides are lots of fun in Zanzibar, and they can also be dangerous. The typical Zanzibari daladalas (there are also daladalas which are regular minibuses) are essentially extra large pickup trucks with a U-shaped bench on the truck bed, and covered with a roof. They are always over-packed, have no seatbelts (naturally), and usually go too fast on the too-narrow road, which is already packed with people, bicycles, animals, cars, trucks, and other daladalas. However, this particular ride felt a bit like being crammed into a Grand Prix race car with twenty other people. I was not alone in my thinking, as about halfway through the trip, after careening particularly precariously around a corner, the other people in the daladala started yelling and banging on the side (signalling the driver to stop), and asked (or rather ordered) him to drive more slowly. You know you’re going too fast when the locals think you need to slow down.

We made it home in one piece, and we decided to have dinner in a local restaurant a five-minute walk from our new house. The owner, Michael (or “Meica,” as he pronounces it), already knows us. He served us the meal he had going that evening, which was green banana and beef stew (actually much tastier than it might sound) for 800 shillings, or about 75 cents. As we ate, we watched Chinese state television which for some reason was playing on the Zanzibar airwaves yesterday – it’s a shame the CBC doesn’t carry Chinese state TV from time to time, just for kicks, it’s really quite interesting. We also chatted with two Maasai warriors who had sauntered in, spears, robes, dangly earlobes and all, to have dinner, and we attempted to converse with another man whose English and Swahili were both totally incomprehensible to us.

Afterwards, as we stumbled along the unlit, uneven dirt road back to our house, we saw a field full of fireflies. As Rebecca put it, the island she’s been telling people “sparkles” for the past three and a half months actually DOES sparkle. Now, I’m back at work, extremely happy to be living in Bububu, and ready for the next four months and a bit…

Photos will follow shortly!

A Cultural Faux-Pas

2007-10-01T12:29:00.000+03:00

The other night, after enjoying a wonderful meal at my friend Ibrahim's house to break the Ramadan fast (the post-sunset meal is called "futari"), Kent and I set off to buy some power vouchers, as our electricity count was nearing zero. We walked the fifteen minutes or so to the power voucher place, where there was a very long lineup. The voucher place (I don't really know what else to call it) has strange hours during Ramadan; it is closed from the early afternoon until about 8pm, so anyone who ran out of power while cooking their evening meal had to wait until later to buy more, hence the rush right around 8pm.

Kent and I positioned ourselves at the back of the line, receiving the odd glances we always get when we're somewhere wazungu don't usually find themselves (such as a daladala, deep in the market where tourists rarely venture - in fact, pretty much anywhere outside of Stone Town or a tourist beach). After a few moments, a man on a motorcycle who was not standing in line beckoned to Kent. He went over, leaving me alone.

Then, one of the men in front of me said something to me in broken English about a second line, which I didn't understand. Luckily, Kent came back over and told me that the man on the motorcycle had explained that there was a separate lineup for women. Incredulous, it took a third person to confirm this and the realization that I was indeed the only woman standing in the lineup of twenty or so men to convince me that this was true.

One of the men who told me I was in the wrong lineup shoved his voucher bill and money into my hand, asking me to help him skip the line. I very shyly made my way up to the payment window, past all the other people, feeling very rude, fully expecting to be told not to skip the lineup. I was worried they would think I was trying to skip the line because I was a mzungu, this concept of a "second lineup" still seeming very bizarre to me. Instead, the men in front said "mwanamke!" ("woman!"). The men shuffled aside to let me through, and I paid for both myself and the man at the back of the line.

I couldn't believe it: it was actually a cultural faux-pas for me not to skip the line. I went back to Kent after paying with a huge grin on my face and asked one of the men who'd spoken to us why there was a separate lineup (though I had already guessed the answer). He explained that as Zanzibar is a conservative Muslim society, men and women do not mix very much. His exact words were actually something like "since we are Muslim, we respect women" - I tried not to take offense at the implication that non-Muslims don't respect women. I actually don't think he was taking a subtle jab (ahem, Adam?) at the West or at non-Muslims, as his English wasn't very good.

The segregation of men and women hasn't been evident to me except in certain specific situations, such as village meetings and classrooms, where men and women (or boys and girls) sit on separate sides of the room. Standing in line with all the men is the first time (that I know of) that I've broken a cultural rule (at least a rule from which wazungu aren't normally exempt, such as covering one's head). Luckily, when set right, it worked to my advantage...

I've added a number of photos to this album:

Daily Life in Zanzibar

A Drug-Fuelled Paradise

2007-09-24T11:35:00.000+03:00

BBC News has a story today entitled Zanzibar: A drug-fuelled paradise?

Drugs are something I've heard a lot about since I got here. Marijuana is very easy to come by, probably easier than alcohol, which, when abused (and it is abused here, as it is everywhere), is worse. I've heard that coke and heroin are also readily accessible (and the article above corroborates that). There is a regular handful of local men who stumble around Stone Town all day, very worse for the wear, obviously either high, drunk, in withdrawal, or some combination thereof all the time. They try to extract money from tourists either by outright begging or by charging a fee for "helping" them. They can also get aggressive if they are turned down, and it wouldn't be a great leap in logic to assume that they would turn to petty crime to fuel their addiction.

Apparently drug abuse in general has been on the rise on this island in recent years, a phenomenon many people blame in whole or in part on the booming tourism industry. While I like to joke about the "impostafarians," most of whom are harmless and quite friendly and cool, their presence (which I suspect is also on the rise) does signal a larger, underlying problem. I also suspect that for a good number of them, marijuana is by far the softest drug they consume. Their tendency to date and befriend (and, sometimes, leech off) tourists also suggests that this problem is closely associated with the tourism industry. This, added to the definite lack of trickle-down of profits from the industry, leads me to believe that Zanzibar would be better off with fewer resorts, tourist restaurants, and bars (the latter two of which I nevertheless continue to frequent - call me a hypocrite, but I like my Italian food fixes).

Lunch Special Ops

2007-09-20T09:00:00.000+03:00

The first week of Ramadan is now over. My fellow non-Muslim interns and I have been covertly (not really, our colleagues all know where we're going) sneaking home for lunch every day. We cooked up a couple of tons of pasta salad on the weekend and we've been subsisting on it during daylight hours. I've made a mental list of the few restaurants that remain open during the day (with suitable visual barriers between the clients, mostly wazungu, and public view). There is a buzz of activity every morning before dawn (when you eat Daku, the pre-dawn Ramadan meal). This morning I was woken up around 4am by the call to prayer at the mosques near my house.

The walk to work is a lot calmer these days, since all the food stands have dematerialized and most of the shops are closed until mid-morning. At work, the Muslim tea lady still serves me tea and water, though I try to close my door or be discrete when I'm drinking anything.

By mid-afternoon, everyone starts to slow down considerably. My Swahili classes have continued, and my teacher has a hollow, desperate look on his face until sunset, at which time he disappears and then reappears much enlivened. The working day is shortened during the Holy Month - my working hours have been shifted back, so I start at 7:30am (way too early for me), but finish at 3:00pm. Productivity also declines by mid-afternoon, though I've been surprised at how good-humoured people remain. I know if I hadn't had anything to eat or drink in ten hours or so I'd be in a terrible mood.

The lead-up to sunset is exciting - the shops close up, men rush off to the mosque, and people everywhere scurry home. I was on a daladala the other day just before sunset, and everyone was excitedly asking one another where they were going to break the fast. Restaurants and food stands come to life and people frantically start cooking (Futari, the post-sunset Ramadan meal), and the smell of roasting meat is everywhere - I don't know how people wait until sunset, even when I'm not hungry, that smell makes me want to eat! In the market, where a temporary cafeteria has been set up, women stack plates upon plates of food on long, wooden tables, and then sit and watch them until the sun has set. The exact moment of sunset is heralded by the town's biggest factory, which rings its siren (usually signalling the beginning and end of the working day for the factory workers).

Right after sunset, everyone seems just a bit more energetic and happy. The guards who stand watch outside the banks, hotels and houses in Stone Town all take a break to eat. The restaurants all open and are flooded with people, and the mosques are packed. It's been a fascinating fist week, and I'm already looking forward to Eid ul-Fitr, probably the year's biggest celebration.

P.S. Happy Birthday, Dad! I love you!

A Zanzibari Wedding

2007-09-14T09:52:00.000+03:00

Last week, Rebecca and I were invited to the wedding of Rebecca's colleague's brother. Kent was invited too, but as it turned out, the event we went to was for women only, so Kent ended up sitting around outside for a while before going home. Rebecca and I felt extremely awkward as the only two wazungu crashing this wedding, especially since Rebecca's colleague is a man, and so was not there to explain who we were. We were welcomed though, and we had a great time.

The ceremony we were at was actually not the main ceremony. The first ceremony, which was religious and more traditional, was held at someone's house the previous week, and only Rebecca was invited to that portion of the wedding. This portion seemed to be purely a party for women, and a photo shoot. The women all sat on the floor on straw mats in a large hall; people sit on the floor during many gatherings, including ceremonies, meals at home, and in the classroom - sitting on the ground for up to several hours at a time does take some getting used to!

The wedding was an incredibly interesting mix of traditions. There were around 100 guests, plus three (!) video cameramen with large, television-style cameras with very bright lights, as well as a photographer. All four frequently focused on the same thing, so it was a bit like being at the Oscars. All the women were dressed beautifully, and although they all had their heads covered (including Rebecca and myself), several had bare arms, and some of the younger ones had veils that were essentially transparent over dresses that would rival Canadian prom dresses. Many wore makeup and high heels, and their very colourful dresses and veils were lovely, many of them decorated with sequins. Rebecca and I felt quite frumpy and under-dressed.

There was a traditional band made up of teenage boys and girls, some of whom sang, and some of whom drummed. They alternated slower songs with faster ones, and during the faster songs women got up to dance, waving money around to encourage the performers. Afterwards, a woman went around and put perfume on the back of each guest's hand if she wanted it. We all received ice cream, a chicken skewer, and, at the very end, a loot bag with a can of soda, a bottle of water, a little plastic container with snacks in it, and a paper napkin with "Happy Wedding" written on it.

When the band was finished performing and while the food was being passed around, the DJ played a bizarre club mix; it was Western-style music but sung in Arabic. I half expected the women to whip out glow sticks. Then the bride came in, preceded by a flower girl. Both were dressed in very Western wedding clothing, with Cinderella-style gowns and hairdos, and with only Cinderella-level modesty, which I found surprising. They slowly proceeded to the front of the hall to a decorated stage, the bride trying to look miserable (I think she was supposed to appear unhappy about leaving her family to go live with her husband), but not pulling it off very convincingly.

Once the two women were on the stage, the groom and (I assume) his best man, wearing tuxedos, followed suit. Dozens of camera-toting women, along with the three video cameramen and the photographer took probably hundreds of photos of the bride, the groom, the flower girl, the best man, and people whom I assume were the bride and groom’s parents. Then all the guests slowly filtered out once they had received their loot bags.

Pondering Hijab

2007-09-13T09:46:00.000+03:00

Hijab really just means to cover or screen in Arabic, so it refers to modesty by any definition, though in the West is often used to refer to the headscarf worn by some Muslim women. I'm still trying to get a hold of the modesty situation here in Zanzibar, which is about 97% Muslim. Of course modesty is most evident in women's dress, though men here generally don't show their knees or shoulders. There is a male equivalent for the headscarf and other robes: many men wear the kufi (a small cap), and a few wear a long, traditional white robe, especially on Friday (the Muslim day of prayer). However, this seems to be largely optional, though most men wear traditional clothing to pray at the mosque (from what I've seen and heard, women simply aren't allowed into the mosques here in Zanzibar...). The dress code is much stricter for women, of course, and I'm not a fan of the double standard.

Just about all women and girls cover their heads, but uncovered forearms and half calves (especially while sitting down) seem to be acceptable. Moreover, young girls will often wear a headscarf, but have a knee-length skirt and completely bare arms under their veil. Also, many girls run around with their dresses undone in the back (I don't know whether it's because the clasp is broken because the dress has been worn by so many different girls, or because it's more comfortable). The headscarf is part of the school uniform for girls starting in preschool (and the kufi and white robe is the uniform at some schools for boys, which is REALLY cute on a four-year-old). Outside of school, girls up to the age of ten or so sometimes play in the streets without their heads covered.

Especially in rural areas, most Zanzibari women wear colourful kangas over their heads and wrapped around their waist over a skirt. Perhaps the strangest site I've seen with regards to hijab was a woman with her head covered and wearing the jilbab (a long, black, sort of jacket worn over the clothing in public by some women - the woman pictured in the Wiki picture I've linked to is in Stone Town!). Meanwhile, her daughter, perhaps four years old, was wearing a tiny mini skirt and a halter top, which I think is inappropriate for a child that age.

Perhaps 10% of women cover their faces with a niqab while in the street, though many will uncover their faces when in a restaurant, at work, outside on their doorstep at home, or in a dala dala, even if men are present. Male presence doesn't seem to be the determining factor for how much women cover, it seems to be more of a public-private thing. This reminds me of the traditional casa-calle (house-street) divide in Latin America, relegating women to the private sphere (casa), and largely keeping them out of the public sphere (calle - though this has changed significantly in many parts of Latin America).

Because Stone Town is so culturally diverse, people are quite tolerant with regards to dress. Indian women wear traditional saris, which sometimes bear the midriff, and they don't cover their heads. African Christian women dress just like they do in Dar es Salaam: usually knee-length to long pants or skirts, and tops that range in modesty from blouses to halter tops. The Maasai wear their traditional robes, and tourists can get away with just about anything, though most make an effort to be somewhat culturally sensitive (however there are a loutish few who walk around Stone Town dressed like it’s a beach resort).

Personally, I usually make sure to cover my shoulders and knees, though I could probably cover less and still feel comfortable. I also sometimes wear a scarf around my neck or shoulders when I wear a shirt that's more low-cut (I found before I left that it's actually quite difficult to find women's shirts in Canada which are both not low-cut and which cover a good part of the shoulders and upper arm). As it is, I never feel uncomfortable in town with my head uncovered, and when I go to the rural areas on project visits with work, I seem to be considered appropriately dressed with a long skirt and my elbows covered.

This may change in the following weeks, since Ramadan starts today. Apparently everyone dresses more modestly during the Holy Month (though I haven't noticed this yet). Tourists have already started thinning out as well (since the European vacation season is over), so I will start to stand out more in Stone Town. Rebecca and I will have to decide whether or not to change our clothing patterns during our walk to and from work (and our sprint to and from home to eat at lunch time!).

Walking to work this morning, all of the usual food stands were gone, and all of the stores were closed. A square that's usually buzzing with men having coffee in the morning was almost deserted. And Christina and I spent an hour driving all around town this morning trying to find open stores to buy refreshments for a meeting at work. I’m excited about Ramadan, it's going to be very interesting, and I will probably be blogging a lot over the next four weeks...

Plenty of Photos

2007-09-12T16:29:00.000+03:00

To lighten the mood a bit after the two depressing posts below, I've uploaded some (mostly) happy photos in two albums. They include more photos from the beach (two beaches in fact, Nungwi and Coconut Beach), two photos from a wedding (which I will blog about soon), and some photos from Monday and Tuesday, which I spent in the field. NGORC is doing a baseline survey, and I went with the team to start inputting data immediately, which will have saved us a lot of time. Specifically, I was inputting data into my laptop while four other people conducted interviews in Swahili. I was sitting cross-legged on mats and balconies, shooing away chickens and goats, shielding my laptop from the occasional sudden tropical downpour, and saying "jambo!" to curious children.

Scenes of Zanzibar

Daily Life in Zanzibar

Ethical Dilemma

2007-09-12T14:39:00.001+03:00

I had an interesting ethical dilemma about two weeks ago. Rebecca and I were eating dinner at home, watching Pride and Prejudice on my expensive laptop in our luxurious (though bare) home, and I thought I heard a knock on the door. We opened it, and a woman was standing there. She was small and frail, she had bloodshot eyes, and she looked like she was in pain. She started telling us a story in broken English about how she has cancer, and she said something about "too much bleeding" in the vaginal area. She showed us some tatterd medical papers (that were dated 2006, but that could have been the original diagnosis for cancer for all I know, they were in Swahili), and she said she needed 40,000 shillings (about $35, not THAT much money, even to an intern) to travel to Dar es Salaam the next day and to pay for a medical procedure. There is a tradition in Zanzibar (so I've been told) whereby people go around collecting money when they're very ill. On the other hand, there is also a tradition of scamming gullible people who seem like they have a lot of money (and we do have a lot of money, relatively speaking). Either way, she was a whole lot poorer than us. What would you have done?

Too Many Numbers

2007-09-12T14:35:00.001+03:00

This week I was asked to compile a summary of some statistics pertaining to the two districts the NGORC is focusing on this year. In doing so, I rooted through the 2004-2005 Zanzibar Household Budget Survey. The Survey was very thorough and had a number of ingenious indicators which provide a well-rounded quantitative look at Zanzibar. It also drove home how real poverty is here.

The food poverty line in Zanzibar is Tsh 12,573 for 28 days; this is the amount of money which statisticians have calculated an adult needs to spend in four weeks to consume enough food to be properly nourished. This 28-day budget translates into about Tsh 450 per day, or about 40 Canadian cents. For comparison’s sake, on Zanzibar, a small meat samosa costs Tsh 200-300, a very small loaf of bread about Tsh 250, and one mishkake (three or four tiny pieces of beef on a skewer, I usually eat three or four mishkake at a time) costs Tsh 100. I regularly pay between Tsh 3000 and Tsh 4000 for a large lunch from a local restaurant with meat, rice, beans, vegetables, and a drink (a nice meal in a tourist restaurant costs two to three times this much).

Of course food costs less when bought in the market and prepared at home (though not much less, when you factor in the price of charcoal or wood used for cooking), and the price of food is probably slightly lower outside of Stone Town. However, I could not see myself surviving on the food I could buy with a mere Tsh 450 a day. Despite the fact that the sum is already very low, the report found that “One in 8 Zanzibaris live below the food poverty line.” In the rural areas, this poverty headcount ratio climbs to 15.93% on average, and in the poorest district in the archipelago, a full 33.35% of the population regularly does not have enough food to eat even by this meagre measure.

Even more telling is the basic needs poverty headcount ratio. The basic needs poverty line is Tsh 20,185 for 28 days, or about Tsh 720 a day, about 66 cents Canadian. This is supposed to include all basic needs, such as food, housing, drinking water, clothing, medication, etc. I won’t even tell you how many times over I spend this much in a week. Nonetheless, the report found that “Almost half of the Zanzibaris fell below this basic need poverty line.” In the rural areas, the number is 54.61%, and in the poorest district in Zanzibar, it’s an astonishing 74.23%.

By this measure of poverty, any family earning over Tsh 720 per capita per day is considered “non-poor”; that translates into a household earning of just under $100 Canadian a month for a family of five – if both parents and three children collectively earn $101 Canadian in a month, they are considered non-poor. I can assure you that even accounting for cost of living differences, this is extremely little money. Of these “non-poor,” only 34.9% have “private piped water in housing” (i.e. they have a tap somewhere in their house – this doesn’t mean they have a sink, a shower, or a flush toilet, which is a real luxury). Another 18.9% are lucky enough to have access to “private piped water outside housing unit” (i.e. they have an outdoor tap).

The numbers go on, and on, and on (percentage of literate adults in rural areas: 65.1%; percentage of literate female adults in rural areas: 58.5%; secondary school net enrolment ratio in all of Zanzibar: 33%; in rural areas: 27%; percentage of household with electricity in rural areas: 7%; percentage of households using a toilet in rural areas – including outdoor pit latrines: 50%; percentage of households in all of Zanzibar with a member with a bank account: 6.2%). These statistics are hard to fathom: two out of five rural women cannot write their own name. More than nine in ten households outside the city don’t have electric lights. Half of rural Zanzibari households have neither a flush toilet nor an outdoor pit latrine (i.e. an outhouse). Even in urban areas, over 93% of households don’t have even one member with a bank account – this makes sense, since even if you’re above the “basic consumption” poverty line, you probably don’t have enough money left over to open a commercial savings account.

The extent of poverty on Zanzibar is daunting, and Zanzibar is in Tanzania, which is one of the less badly-off countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. “Less badly-off” is, of course, another euphemism like “non-poor”; this is, after all, a country where 21.8% of children under the age of five are underweight, and where more than one in ten infants will not live past the ripe old age of five.

Wonderland?

2007-09-11T17:07:00.000+03:00

(I’ve obviously been in university for too long if I can’t read a children’s book without over-analyzing it. It was definitely time for a year off academics. Bear with me on this one.)

I just finished reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Although I brought a small suitcase full of books, these are the first books I’ve fully read in my two months here (two months and a week today actually). For some reason I’d never read the Alice books before, so I’ve now filled what was probably the biggest gap in my reading of classic children’s literature. This version was particularly interesting – it was annotated, and by a philosopher who dabbled in popular science (his name is Martin Gardner). This is actually fitting, since Lewis Carroll was himself trained as a mathematician – something I never knew, but which makes a lot of sense, considering how many complex and subtle jokes and puzzles he inserted into his books.

Gardner drew some analogies between the text and formal logic, mathematics, chemistry, and even (to my delight) physics. If Carroll had not been a mathematician (and a rather strange man on top of that), I would have found these parallels extremely far-fetched. However, the links do make sense, and I’m sure many were put in consciously by the author (especially the references to formal logic). Perhaps the most interesting puzzle Carroll slipped in is in Through the Looking Glass, where Alice is of course caught up in a giant game of chess. Carroll actually based the action of the story on the solution to a particular chess problem which he presents in the preface; he even made sure that Alice never interacts with a character (most of whom are chess pieces) who would not be on a square immediately adjacent to hers in the game.

I think my reading the Alice books while in Africa is also particularly fitting. The schism between the Developing and the Developed World is perhaps as acute as that between Alice’s reality and her Wonderland. I’ve been thinking about this since I finished the book (I know, I’m a nerd, I can’t help it). The thing is, I can’t decide which side of the looking glass Africa is on and which Canada is on. At first glance, I would say Africa is Wonderland* – I’ve mentioned before the seeming lack of logic here compared Canada. Zanzibar in particular is a place that often reminds me of a fairy tale or a children’s book, it is so exotic and different probably from any other place on Earth, being at the cross-roads between Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. In fact I was particularly reminded of The Chronicles of Narnia the other evening for some reason when I got lost in the maze of Stone Town in the dark again.

On the other hand, Zanzibar, like the rest of the Developing World, has much more than its fair share of stark “reality” – how can a place where need and hunger are such an unfaltering part of daily life be compared to Wonderland? (Though I suppose Carroll’s Wonderland is a rather dark place at the same time as being a place of fantasy, so perhaps the analogy does fit.)

Canada, on the other hand, like the rest of the Developed World, is a place where things seem to work in an orderly way most of the time, and where logic tends to prevail. However, it also resembles a mythical land of plenty, where the vast majority of people always have enough (and often too much) food, live in large, comfortable homes, own cars, have steady jobs, and, most incredibly of all, have enough disposable income to buy loads of unnecessary things, like DVDs, meals in restaurants and drinks in bars, way more clothing than they need, and vacations in faraway places. This sank in thoroughly the other night when I was showing a young friend photos from Christmas, including a shot of the mountain of gifts under the Christmas tree, and a nice trip I took to New York over the break (this same friend turned 15 on Saturday, but his parents couldn’t afford a cake or a gift, so Rebecca and I took him out for ice cream and pizza). And so I don’t really know which mix of sanity and fantasy is more like a Wonderland.

* * *

*Case in point: Halfway through writing this blog entry last Saturday, Rebecca and I went to have lunch. On the way to Lookman’s, one of our favourite local restaurants (they have the best vegetable samosas in Stone Town), we ran into an impostafarian Rebecca discussed politics with in Swanglish (broken Swahili and English) at a bar last night. He joined us for lunch, and after the meal he beckoned us down a street and we followed (random episodes happen so often here you end up just going with the flow without thinking twice). He brought us to his home, which at first I took for a nice rooming house. We sat down on a couch next to a cabinet full of odd antique knick knacks; on the wall a tortoise shell looked right at home between two Italian-style painted dishes.

Our friend disappeared and we heard a strange sound like a blender, and he then produced very good coffee which he had roasted and ground himself. He proceeded to smoke a joint while we drank our coffee. We discussed various things, including how he plans to fast during Ramadan, which starts next week. Then he showed us around the place, which, it turned out, was a guest house owned by his family, but which is not currently being used (though we didn’t understand why). About half of the rooms were beautifully painted and had themes. My favourite was a room where the bed was built into a boat, the walls were painted as Stone Town seen from the sea, and there was a life jacket hanging on the wall. Another room was painted a bit like a cave, with real branches incorporated on the ceiling. We went back downstairs, finished our coffee, and went home. I think the most surprising thing about it all was how normal it seemed.

In case you haven't seen enough sunsets

2007-08-29T18:01:00.000+03:00

I've uploaded a few snapshots I took last night of a particularly spectacular sunset:

Scenes of Zanzibar

The Database

2007-08-29T11:31:00.000+03:00

As promised, here is an account of the project I am currently working on with Christina. I hope you're not overwhelmed by how exciting this is.

The Zanzibar Archipelago has an unusually high number of registered NGOs, or Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) as they're generally called here, especially considering its relatively small population (Wikipedia puts the population of the entire archipelago at just over 1 million). Most of these CSOs are very small, though a number of large international NGOs are also represented on the islands. Why there is such a high number of CSOs per capita escapes me. It could be that there is simply more of a culture of building community groups to solve communal problems, or perhaps there is more need here on the islands than there is on the mainland, therefore justifying a higher number of CSOs. It's also possible that international NGOs are drawn here because it's such a nice place to live...

Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive registry of all the CSOs on the archipelago. This means donors and researchers have a hard time tracking down local-level CSOs, and, more importantly, CSOs have little recourse if they wish to forge partnerships or avoid overlap among themselves. All CSOs have to be registered with the Registrar General in Stone Town, but the records they keep are all hand-written (making it next to impossible to search within them), and they contain only basic contact information which is often incomplete. The NGORC wishes to collaborate with the government to build a comprehensive database of all the registered CSOs in Zanzibar, including information about their area of focus (e.g. health, education, microcredit), their target groups (e.g. women, youth, farmers), their objectives, past projects, etc.

In theory, this project started when I arrived here at the NGORC. However, the project didn't really get off the ground until this week for two reasons. First, Christina, my fellow intern, had to be liberated from her position as stand-in receptionist until a new receptionist was hired (this finally happened in mid-August). The project could not begin without Christina because she speaks Swahili, and I don't. Second, we were waiting for the appropriate government office to actually give us access to their records, and this took quite a bit of time.

In the interim, I've been working on a variety of short-term projects. I've also been refining the skeleton for the database. I'm using Excel, and I've taught myself how to code in Visual Basic in order to make Excel do things in a more intelligent way. I've actually been having a lot of fun with this. Who would've thought my programming skills acquired in the physics lab at McGill would come in handy in Zanzibar?!?!

Finally, last Monday, Christina and I were brought over to the Ministry of State (President's Office), Constitutional Affairs, and Good Governance. We met with the Minister of Good Governance, who was very upbeat and eager to get the project started. We were then shipped over to the Registrar General's office, where we sat down with the Registrar General himself for a meeting to kick off the project. The building was quite Dickensian - think Chancery in Bleak House, for anyone who's read the book or seen the excellent miniseries. There were stacks of hand-written records leaning precariously all over the place. It was a large, old building, that might have been a fort or something similar at one point, because the ceilings were at least twenty feet high. Just before entering the Registrar General's office, we passed a small partitioned office with three women typing furiously on typewriters.

After our meeting, we were handed two dusty, disintegrating ledger books which contain the handwritten registry of CSOs in Zanzibar since 1995, the year the act requiring CSOs to register with the government was passed. Christina, a gentleman from the ministry's office, and I spent most of last week entering the data from these books into the computer. It was long, tiring, and tedious work, but I feel that we accomplished something useful.

The number of CSOs registered with the government (including some CSOs that were on the previous Excel list but for some reason were not in the handwritten registry): 555, now alphabetized from Accra Zanzibar to Ziwani Islamic Association. The number of these CSOs that actually have a mailing address (i.e. a P.O. Box): 400. The 155 that do not have P.O. Boxes may simply be tiny community organizations that couldn't afford to rent a P.O. Box, or they may be "briefcase NGOs," or NGOs that exist only on paper and don't actually do anything for anyone. In any case, since there is no other contact information for them, they will not be included in the final database.

In the coming days, Christina and I will print 400 envelopes and 400 return envelopes. We will photocopy our four-page questionnaire 400 times (using the office photocopier that does not collate or staple), then we will stick 800 stamps and stuff 400 envelopes. We will then mail them all out, and wait... hopefully, a good percentage of the questionnaires will actually come back to us within a month or so of the deadline (the end of September). When they do, we will input the data into the new database, and the hope is that, eventually, we will have a quasi-exhaustive registry of all of the CSOs.

And that is the exciting work I've been doing here. I'm actually enjoying what I'm doing (except for the data entry part last week, but that was a crucial part of this registry). I feel that this project will make a serious contribution to what NGORC does, and hopefully it will assist CSOs and donors in their ability to connect with other CSOs in Zanzibar.

NGOs

2007-08-24T11:30:00.001+03:00

I've been busy this week! With serious work! (Though I've also been doing arts and crafts which are nonetheless seminal to the development of Africa, but I won't bore you with those details) Some of my friends (ahem, Alex) have been starting to wonder what exactly it is I do here besides go to the beach. So I will eventually describe the project Christina and I are working on, though it's probably not the most fascinating thing to read about. But before that, a tangent about NGOs in general (partly adapted from an email I sent Eliott, thanks for the inspiration!).

The large majority of development projects created and funded by people in Developed Countries have failed - this has actually been quantified; statistics were quoted during our month of training in Ottawa, but unfortunately I don't know the figures myself. During training, one of our facilitators commented that "everyone thinks they can do Development." What he meant was that many well-intentioned rich people think they know what's best for poor people on another continent; they think they can leap in and fix things, because they're smart and efficient (usually they are), and they know what to do to "solve" poverty (usually they don't). Yet for some reason poverty persists.

William Easterly discusses this at length in The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, a book largely about why Western aid efforts have failed (which I've still only read a few chapters of, but which I will write about more if I ever finish it; I'm not reading as much as I had anticipated). One of the things with which Easterly faults projects run by well-intentioned rich people is a lack of accountability: if a development project fails to raise people's standards of living (which is the long-term intended impact of any development project), no one will be held accountable. The intended recipients won't be better off, a whole bunch of money that could have been spent differently will have been thrown into the black hole of inefficient aid, and there could even be a host of negative externalities that in fact make people worse off (there are countless example of this - here's one of my favourites; USAID seems to have a particular knack for this type of grand failure for completely asinine reasons).

I'm becoming more and more convinced that the West's role in development has to be one of signing cheques to Southern NGOs, ones that are run by people from the country they're serving. These are the NGOs that actually know what people need, know how to implement it in a way that will not be disastrous (the number of aid missions gone horribly awry is frankly depressing), and know how to be efficient and sustainable, because they don't have any money. Also, people who work in Southern NGOs get paid Southern salaries (unlike yours truly for example).

Esperanza Internacional, the NGO I worked with in the Dominican Republic, is a good example of this. Although it was founded by an American and it survives on private donations from wealthy Americans, it is entirely managed and run by Dominicans, from the receptionist all the way up to the country director (foreign volunteer interns excluded, of course). Bangladesh has a whole slew of extraordinarily successful home-grown NGOs, the most famous of which is probably Grameen; BRAC is another fantastic example. From what I've seen so far, the Aga Khan Foundation is also very good at ensuring that its country branches are run top-to-bottom by locals, or at least by people from the Developing World. Southern-run NGOs just seem to work better.

This is not to say that Westerners working in Southern (I love the inconsistency in the terminology) NGOs are bad or harmful. On the contrary, I've met several Westerners working in NGOs here who are doing an amazing job. Additionally, I don't mean to convey the idea that Western-run NGOs don't ever work; several large, international NGOs are doing a great job, for example, when it comes to raising awareness in the West, which can lead to increased donations. Occasionally, increased awareness in the West can push Westerners to pressure their leaders, who in turn may pressure foreign governments to make changes of their own (I'm thinking in particular in the domain of human rights and women's rights). But overall, I do believe that NGOs born, raised, and managed in the countries which they serve are the way to go.

Unfortunately, the problem with this realization is that it could make me (someone from a rich country interested in working in development) obsolete... However, I believe there is still a role in the Developed World to make aid more efficient for the recipients: the amount of documentation and the number of forms required by local NGOs to prove their worthiness to their various donor countries and agencies is Dickensian. There should be a standard, unified system, but instead each donor has its own very specific and lengthy set of requirements. Moreover, aid is almost always tied to socio-economic or political interests. By tying aid to prescriptions that rich countries think will solve poverty, or, worse, to conditionalities that serve only the best interests of the donor country, aid becomes self-serving and can even become self-defeating.

Prison Island

2007-08-20T15:47:00.000+03:00

Just to be original, I thought I'd write about... my weekend! On Saturday, Rebecca and I decided to head over to Prison Island to observe reptilian and sub-oceanic wildlife in their natural habitat (i.e. we visited a tortoise farm and went snorkeling). We contacted a good friend of Kent's who is involved in the tourism business, and he put us in touch with a fisherman who would bring us to the island (without ripping us off); it's very common for fishermen to take tourists places on their boats when they're not fishing.

By coincidence (this island is really very small), the fisherman, Mohamed, turned out to be the uncle of a boy named Ahmed whom Rebecca and I met on the beach in Stonetown in July. Ahmed and a group of his friends had sat with us for quite a while teaching us Swahili. Ahmed (who is fourteen but looks about eleven) got us to ask if he could come along, and Mohamed agreed, which made everyone very happy: Ahmed got to visit Prison Island for free (he got in as our official guide), and Mohamed, whom I assume has seen the tortoises on the island far more times than he likes, got to relax instead.

The tortoises were huge. We got to feed them spinach, and I apologized profusely to them for being raised in captivity and being poked by tourists incessantly. On the plus side, they're relatively safe from poaching (though apparently the population does decrease mysteriously every year), and they get fed lots of spinach. Their average lifespan is 65-95 years... and I think they essentially never stop growing, because the biggest males can weigh up to 250kg!!!

The prison on Prison Island was built initially to hold slaves. However, abolition came into effect before it was ever used as a prison (thank goodness), so it was instead turned into a quarantine station in the late 19th century during an outbreak of the Plague. It must have been a dreary place back then, but now it's been beautifully painted and turned into a luxury hotel.

We spent the non-tortoise portion of the day lying on the beach and snorkeling. I was stung by jellyfish for the first time, in fact several times, but it was very anticlimactic. We also sat around in the fishing boat for a long time chatting with Mohamed and Ahmed, both of whom were very fun. They tried to improve our Swahili, and they even taught us a few swear words (very useful, but which my dear teacher Mr. Farooq would definitely not teach us). The pair also managed to produce food seemingly out of nowhere, after I discovered that nothing for sale on the island cost under 13,000 shillings!

The ride back was very choppy, and the boat was flying all over the place. Mohamed kept trying to reassure us that we were in no danger of capsizing ("hakuna matata!"); he erroneously read our thrilled expressions as ones of fear. To top off the day, Rebecca and I discovered the best hamburgers we've had on Zanzibar; they actually tasted like what we expected them to taste like, and they weren't even extraordinarily overpriced.

I'm back at my desk now with only a mild sunburn. Rebecca and I shared our photos this weekend, so I've uploaded a bunch of new pics, many of them taken by Rebecca, in the following four albums:

Prison Island

Jozani Forest

Scenes of Zanzibar

Daily Life in Zanzibar

Another Episode of Caitlin's Weekend Adventures

2007-08-14T10:36:00.001+03:00

This blog is turning into a regular account of Caitlin’s Weekend Adventures. I can’t help it though; my weekends are consistently really awesome! And I have proof in the form of new photos taken over the last week:

Scenes of Zanzibar

I’ll skip the expat party I wound up at on Friday night, and the hours I spent lazing on the beach on Sunday, and go right to Saturday’s activities. On Saturday afternoon, Rebecca and I rented bicycles and explored the area south of Stone Town. We decided to do some off-roading, which, it turns out, was not a good idea: the unpaved roads in Zanzibar are not dirt, they're sand. This, combined with our rickety, one-gear rental bikes, made us even more of a spectacle than we would normally have been - and two white women biking alone in non-mzungu territory makes for one heck of a spectacle, whether they're flying off their bikes or not. Women in general riding bikes is extremely rare here, although we did come across one young Maasai woman on a bike on Saturday.

After we got back onto the paved main road, we ended up biking onto a military reserve by accident; there seem to be a lot of military bases on Zanzibar – the island has its own military, since it’s a semi-autonomous republic, and I guess the concentration of army bases is high simply because the island is so small. We got nervous after about five minutes (technically there was a no trespassing sign, though it was faded, and it could have been referring to a side-road, and not the main road). We turned back, but the soldiers who were sweeping dirt under a tree just waved back at us cheerily. We trespassed on someone’s property trying to get to the beach, but their watchman didn’t like that, so we continued on our way. After a while, we did manage to find a meter of beach to plop down on, astonishing the fishermen in the area. Right then, as I sat staring out at the Indian ocean, the mangroves, the dhows, and the bewildered fishermen, it hit me that this is probably going to end up having been one of the coolest years of my life.

Logic

2007-08-14T10:18:00.001+03:00

The last part of Adam’s latest blog entry reminded me of a comment that struck me and that I’ve been meaning to include in an entry for some time. Adam referred (very eloquently, I might add) to the fact that very little tends to make sense here in Africa - anyone who’s spent any time in a Developing Country will know what I’m talking about, and anyone who hasn’t will find it hard to understand what I’m getting at. In Canada, we’re used to everything being structured and well-defined. Buses run on time (give or take fifteen minutes), on set routes, with set fares, and you’re usually not sitting on someone else’s lap, watching the street go by through the hole in the floor, dodging live chickens, or hanging out the door gripping on for dear life. Prices generally are fixed; they don’t depend on your skin colour, or the language you speak, or your gender, or how aggressive you are. Getting from Point A to Point B usually involves a smooth trip on public transit, or a cab ride which you’re confident won’t end with you being totally lost, ripped off or, worse, mugged. Piling seven people into a car is a rare and strange thing (right, Eliott?), and involves watching out for the cops who are concerned for your safety, and not with extracting a bribe from you. Plans you make for next week, or for tomorrow, or for lunch, generally tend to pan out as expected.

None of this is true here. Because I’ve spent lots of time in Developing Countries, the lack of consistency in my daily routine has become commonplace and no longer astonishes and delights me the way it did on my first trips to Latin America. As a side note, I have mixed feelings about referring to these regular hiccups as delightful – it strikes me as condescending to refer to what is actually the source of inefficiency and constant frustration for many people as delightful, merely because I’m not under the same kind of pressure to survive that most people are here, and can afford to be a few minutes late or to be ripped off or bribed for what amounts to pennies for me. Nonetheless, once it sinks in that you're not in Canada and therefore not expecting everything to run smoothly, the little surprises are delightful, if you're privileged enough that they don't ruin your day; they make the daily routine interesting and different (as long as you have a sense of humour and an endless ability to be self-deprecating).

Despite the fact that I’ve gotten used to the lack of logic here, every once in a while something particularly out of the ordinary does catch my attention (soldiers sweeping dirt under a tree, for example, or, yesterday, a man on a bicycle balancing a huge, beautiful, model ship on his shoulder). This brings me back to the comment which was made to me and which I found particularly apt. During our first week in Zanzibar, we were introduced to a number of people involved with the Aga Khan Foundation. When we asked one of these people, a native Tanzanian, how to be successful while working in a Developing-Country NGO, he replied that giving up on logic was the most important thing. He said that if we saw a man walking down the main street in Zanzibar in 35-degree heat, wearing a snowsuit, ski boots, a ski mask, and carrying skis over his shoulder, and our reaction was simply to shrug and laugh, rather than become astonished and confused, then we were well on our way to being able to function properly in Zanzibar.

Even More Interesting Blogs

2007-08-14T10:16:00.000+03:00

I’d like to point you towards two very good blogs if you’re interested in reading more of this kind of thing. Adam, one of my close friends from Montreal, has just arrived in Dar Es Salaam on a six-month internship with VSO Canada. His blog promises to be amusing and interesting, and it can be found here. Second, one of my fellow Aga Khan interns in Nairobi, who in the relatively new journalism stream of the internship, just got a story published in yesterday’s (Monday, August 13^th) Globe and Mail. Unfortunately he was asked to cover a very sad story for them, and the back-story as well as the article can be found on his blog, here.

Busy at Work

2007-08-14T10:04:00.000+03:00

Sorry for not writing in my blog more recently, I was quite busy at work last week. The length of this entry will hopefully compensate – in fact, this entry ended up being so long that I’ve now split it into several posts for you greater reading pleasure. This post will hopefully show you that I'm doing things on Zanzibar other than lolling about on the beach.

The NGORC is constantly scrambling to meet reporting deadlines, since it is plagued with the normal problems of just about any NGO – high staff turnover, a slow working pace (especially from people outside the organization who are crucial to the completion of certain projects), lack of funding (that’s a big one), etc. I spent much of last week laboriously editing a report that the NGORC had done by an outside organization on partnerships between NGOs and the government. It was a very interesting and informative report, but the English was unfortunately very poor, so I ended up basically re-writing it, sentence by sentence.

I got through about two thirds of the roughly 120-page report before I was asked to shift my attention to another task. The NGORC is currently conducting a baseline survey, in order to assess what specific needs small, local-level civil society organizations (CSOs) have. Providing resources to tiny CSOs is the main raison-d’être of NGORC; they run training sessions on everything from leadership skills to basic accounting. The CSOs they serve typically have on the order of 20 members and are involved in everything from income-generating activities (like the women’s soap cooperative we visited in our first week here) to raising awareness about HIV/AIDS in the local communities.

NGORC also runs a resource library here in the office in Stone Town. However, most of the CSOs are actually located in relatively distant rural areas, and so NGORC is planning to set up a similar resource centre in a rural area in the north of the island. Before doing that, they’re conducting the survey to find out what would actually be useful to people. The baseline survey involves going to the field and interviewing members of CSOs and other village organizations. I accompanied the team on one such field trip last Friday, which was very interesting, though I was of extremely little use since I speak essentially no Swahili beyond “hello, how are you, my name is...” and “that’s too expensive!”

The information collected (by hand) during these surveys had to be turned into quantitative data and entered into the computer, so that it can be analyzed in order to produce useful results. Unfortunately, the person who was to do this analysis had set Tuesday (today) as the deadline for receiving the work (the deadline had already been pushed back a few times). So we scrambled to enter the data from nearly 100 four-page surveys into an Excel sheet. Luckily this is where my computer skills came in handy, and we actually got the work done more quickly than expected. Now that the report has been handed in, I once again have very little to do, except try to install a printer they have lying around the office, but for which the installation CD has gone missing (as I mentioned before, I have become the resident computer geek here, and I’ve actually been relatively successful at fixing problems that have popped up). So I decided to update my blog in the meantime...

Italian Food, Monkeys, and an Enchanted Forest

2007-08-06T15:01:00.000+03:00

It’s a shame I’ve gotten into the habit of writing my blog on Sunday evening, all I can write about is how great my weekend was. I’ll try to write halfway through this week to vary it up a bit... Too much tourist stuff, not enough development stuff...

On Friday, Rebecca and I decided we were tired of the usual rice, chapatti, and mishkake (i.e. meat on a stick) for dinner. A typical breakfast for me has been a chapatti and a samosa with tea, along with the multivitamins I’ve started taking for the first time in my life. I occasionally switch the samosa for a doughnut, just for some healthy variety. Lunch – the largest meal of the day here - is usually rice and meat, though we’ve found a few places that will serve up a large portion of vegetables as the main course; my favourites dishes are pilau, biryani (quite different from the Indian biryani), and coconut curry (mmmmm) at Passing Show restaurant. Dinner is almost always rice, or chapatti, or naan, or fries, and more meat.

I’ve been told by several people that women travelers tend to put on weight while in Africa – I can see why. Mysteriously, I’ve also been told that men travelers tend to lose weight... With that (well, actually, more my teeth and the risk of diabetes) in mind, I’ve also had to cut down on my soda consumption; I’d been having at least one a day for a few weeks, but I’m now proudly on the wagon.

Don’t get me wrong – I love the food here, it’s amazing. Besides the dishes I mentioned above, which are traditional Zanzibari food, I’m also especially fond of chipsi na maiai, which is mainland food – chips and eggs, sort of an omelette with fries (I know it sounds gross, I mean so does poutine, but it’s so good, and if you get a Coke to wash down the grease and salt it’s amazing!). I’m also really looking forward to tring out kiti moto in Dar, which Kent vividly described in his latest blog entry. But I’ve heard that the one thing people miss most when they’re traveling is familiar food, regardless of how great the local food is, and this has been my experience in the past. So once in a while, Rebecca and I go all out – we hit the market, buy a ton of vegetables which we pathetically try to bargain for, and have a veggie bonanza (thoroughly cooked, of course), usually with leftover rice from lunch.

Anyhow, on Friday, Rebecca and I had tired of the high-carbs, high-protein, high-grease scene, and we didn’t feel up to cooking, so we decided to try out one of the Italian restaurants on the island. Despite all my complaining in recent blog entries about the tourists here, globalization and tourism came through for me on Friday, while I enjoyed my penne with tomato and basil sauce (with REAL Parmesan cheese, and they unwisely left the whole dish of it in front of us), bruschetta, and red wine from South Africa. Then we visited the other Italian-run business, a cafe that makes gelato. If you’ve been to Italy, they even import those little plastic spoons they serve gelato with... I checked, the writing on the spoon was in Italian, they were definitely straight from Italy; they’d probably come over with the latest plane-load of tourists. Rebecca and I then proceeded to make the night thoroughly shameless, and we watched a chick flick with Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore on my laptop.

We were on a roll, so on Saturday afternoon, we took a daladala to Jozani Forest, a state park. The trip was so much fun; getting out of Stone Town is refreshing. It’s nice to feel like a bit of an oddity on the daladalas too, instead of like a boring tourist in town. The park was incredible – it was like walking through an enchanted forest – we literally were expecting dinosaurs to come crashing through the woods at any moment. Instead we just saw monkeys. They were Red Colobus monkey to be exact, and they are indigenous to this island. We also visited a mangrove forest, and we saw heaps of delightfully weird vegetation and bugs. We even saw these little tiny frogs, no bigger than my finger nail. They were hopping out of the way every time we took a step down the trail we were following, I actually thought they were spiders at first.

On Saturday night, we had dinner and beer (expensive, as usual) with some friends, also YDP interns. And then on Sunday, Rebecca and I finally knuckled down and hit the beach at Bububu again.

Photos from the forest expedition are in this album:

Jozani Forest

I've also started a new album with photos of the beautiful carved doors and other decorative things I see around Stone Town. It's no wonder the town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Doors and other Decorations

Finally, I've added photos to this album, which I've renamed "Daily Life in Zanzibar" - MY daily life, that is, not by any stretch the daily life experienced by the majority of people living here. It contains photos of my apartment, my neighbourhood, my office, and the food I eat.

Daily Life in Zanzibar

Beer

2007-07-30T09:03:00.001+03:00

Going out for a beer in Stone Town is a bit of a feat. Local bars are essentially nonexistent because the population is 97% devoutly Muslim (I’ve heard the figure quoted at 99%; I guess it depends if you count the expats and tourists or not). The exception are the bars run by the Rasta guys, of which I think there are two; we haven’t tried them out yet, but we will eventually. Beer, wine and liquor aren’t available in the stores either, with the exception of one liquor store which never seems to be open, on Tourist Boulevard (my favourite pet name for a street that runs near our house).

As a result, for a post-work beer, we’re pretty much limited to the mzungu hangouts. The problem with these places is, first of all, they’re very expensive. A domestic beer typically costs 2,500 shillings, or about $2.50 Canadian (on the mainland, a local bar will sell beer for around 800-1000 shillings, or $0.80-$1.00). Mind you, by Canadian standards, this is still a good price, and we’re not penniless (in fact we have generous living stipends). Also between the heat and the anti-malarial drugs, one beer has about as much effect on us as two or three back home. So the steep cost is an easily-overcome problem.

The second problem with these haunts, however, is that they’re inhabited exclusively by tourists and expats, and it feels like a cultural cop-out every time I go to one of these places. Friday offered an extreme example of this. We’ve been frequenting a bar called Livingstone’s quite regularly (irony never killed anyone), and we decided we wanted to try out one of the other six or seven bars in Stone Town. We settled on Africa House, which, during British rule, was THE British hangout, then known as The English Club. Now it’s a very pretty and expensive hotel, beautifully decorated in 1930s colonial fashion, and it has a lovely bar on the second floor overlooking the sea. Kent had seen the bar the previous Friday when he’d been trying (in vain) to track down a bottle of wine for a mini dinner party we hosted with some Tanzanian colleagues.

Kent and I were delayed at work longer than usual, and when we finally got to Africa House, Rebecca met us at the top of the stairs leading to the bar with a look somewhere between amusement and disbelief on her face. She’d been there a few minutes waiting for us, and she led us to the bar area, which was jam-packed with wazungu watching a musical performance. It was purportedly some kind of traditional tribal dance (and it may very well have been, for all I know), but it involved loud drumming, grass skirts, painted faces, big smiles and jazz hands... Imagine the typical portrayal of Africans in a movie from the 1930s or 1940s, and this is what we were watching. And all these people were sitting around sipping their drinks, taking photos of the magnificent sunset, and casually watching this spectacle. Irony nearly did kill me that time. It was like we’d just entered some sort of Bizarro World, or a time warp back to the colonial heyday of Africa House. I expected Groucho Marx as Captain Spaulding to be carried in on a sedan chair at any moment, or maybe Bob Hope and Bing Crosby from Road to Zanzibar...

We stayed there for about five minutes, gaping at the scene, and finally we decided to leave. We moved on to another, even more expensive beachfront hotel; it was equally beautiful to Africa House, had the same demographic mix, and the waiters were all dressed in quasi-Arabic clothes (think Arabian Nights). There was a much more demure musical performance, which consisted of six musicians playing what might have been traditional music – though it might just have been what tourists expect traditional music to sound like; it’s all about supply and demand, after all. If Africa House was Road to Zanzibar, this was Casablanca: still stereotypical and colonial, but slightly less painfully so, and much classier. We wanted a beer, so we stayed, though I felt like I had to talk in a hushed voice, be careful not to swear, and drink with my pinkie up.

Of course the beer cost us an outrageous 4000 shillings, so we sat there for as long as we possibly could, trying to get our four dollars’ worth. We watched the sun set over the Indian Ocean as dhows sailed lazily by on their way to port, and we commented for the umpteenth time that we can’t believe we live in this stunningly beautiful place. All in all, it wasn’t a bad Friday evening. And it’s also made me feel a lot better about going to Livingstone’s, which I think is about as close to “local” as we’re going to get on this nearly-dry paradise island.

Another African Blog

2007-07-27T14:29:00.000+03:00

My fellow-intern at NGORC, Christina, has now started up a very interesting blog as well. Click here to view it. Christina is from mainland Tanzania and is a Young Development Professional (YDP) intern. The YDP programme was started up a few years ago to mirror the IDM/IMM internship (the one I'm doing), only the interns come from Africa and are posted in their home countries. Just like us, they had intense training together (only it was in Nairobi, not comparatively tame Ottawa), and they're scattered around East Africa. I'm sure she and Moses, my other blog-writing colleague, would appreciate feedback from Canadians!

Three Weeks!!

2007-07-26T11:47:00.000+03:00

I can't believe I've been here for three weeks, the time is really flying. And this was the adjustment period! Culture shock is scheduled to start setting in soon... I'm awaiting its arrival with bated breath...

This week I've been quite busy at work (except for today). I'll be working on a project that involves creating a database of existing NGOs on the Zanzibar archipelago (i.e. Unguja and Pemba). There is a directory from a few years ago that lists 237 NGOs, but apparently there are actually on the order of 3,000 (NGO is a bit of a catch-all term, and many of these NGOs only exist on paper, so it will take some rooting around to figure out what's what exactly). I'm also doing a bit of data analysis - something I've never been formally trained in, and for which I don't have the proper software, but I'm winging it (my physics training is actually coming in handy here - how strange is that?).

The only caveat to this project is that its undertaking depends on the occurrence of two events. Fist, the NGORC has to hire a new receptionist, thereby liberating Christina, my Tanzanian intern counterpart, to work on this project with me (especially with the Swahili!). And second, the government ministry that is supposed to allow us to access the current data on all the registered NGOs actually has to come through and literally let us into the documents room so we can start rooting around (at least this is what I gather will eventually happen, with any luck). For the moment, I've designed a very pretty database framework, and I've developed a questionnaire to be sent to the NGOs with the help of my colleagues. All we need is the go-ahead!

Amusingly, I've become the resident computer geek here - it's amusing to me because by Canadian standards (or at least by the standards of my science and engineering friends), my computer skills are maybe slightly above average. Now I'm being called upon repeatedly throughout the day to help people with computer problems. Rebecca and I were discussing how obvious the computer literacy lag is here; while I've been pecking away at a keyboard since I was four or five (I used to play this awesome game on my dad's monochrome PC [monochrome, 64K PC with a 10' screen, and he was super excited to update to 128K, I've just been told] when I was little), the vast majority of people here can't afford a computer; also, I suspect that most of the people here who do know how to use computers probably didn't start using them until they were in high school or even university. This will probably change in another generation or so, at least for kids able to go to decent schools, now that computers are becoming more mainstream. This is particularly true if One Laptop Per Child has its way... though this is a programme I have very mixed feelings about (but I'll save that discussion for another day).

In my role as resident computer geek, I spent some time last week showing two of my colleagues how to create blogs. Moses has already started posting, and if you're interested in reading something about Africa and Africans actually written by someone who's FROM here, you should check out his blog (I think he will alternately post in English and Swahili; right now he has an interesting post responding to a BBC item in English, and I'm sure he'd appreciate comments). Once Christina starts posting I'll put up a link to her blog as well. Note that the term "abroad" (in "Interesting blogs from abroad") is now relative...

p.s. I added a few more photos to this album:

Scenes of Zanzibar

More photos

2007-07-25T16:37:00.000+03:00

Here are a few more photos I've posted, of my hardship living conditions and my dreary weekend activities:

My tough, tough life in Zanzibar

Nungwi and Real-Live Economics

2007-07-23T09:40:00.000+03:00

This weekend, we visited Nungwi, a town in the north of Zanzibar with stupendous beaches (development work is so trying at times). I went with Rebecca and Dave, a friend of a friend, and we had an excellent time. We took an uncomfortable and squished two-hour daladala ride there from Stone Town, which basically consisted of benches on the back of a truck (it was so much fun!). When we got to the town, we walked a good ten minutes through the very normal-looking village of Nungwi to get to the beach area (by normal-looking I mean it looked just like the other villages I’ve seen so far on Zanzibar, namely unpaved streets, very basic housing and infrastructure, etc.).

On the beach, there are a number of very nice hotels, resorts and restaurants, all frequented by Mzungus and all at Mzungu prices. But it was the weekend, so we splurged ($5 for a pizza and $2.50 for a beer still won’t break the bank, even on an intern’s stipend). We found a room at a very run-down guest house not right on the beach, with a double bed for the three of us (it was a long night), fist-sized holes in the window screens (but I brought duct tape!), water that we had to ask to have turned on every time we wanted to flush the toilet, and a very decent mosquito net.

We spent the afternoon on the beach, and the evening in a very cool bar run by “impostafarians” (African guys who dress up like Jamaican Rastafarians and smoke way too much weed – our guest house was also run by an impostafarian, and it took him much too long to form even semi-coherent sentences). Perhaps the coolest thing I saw all weekend was four Maasai guys in full traditional robes shooting pool and smoking cigarettes at a beach bar. Rebecca and I desperately wanted to take a photo, but we couldn’t do it subtly enough...

We had some good food (with cheese! and vegetables!), some good beer, and lots of interesting conversations. We swam a bit, though it rained on the second day, and it only got sunny as we left to go home. Walking from the expensive and prosperous beach area back through the village got me thinking though... When I took the introductory microeconomics course at McGill, the thing I delighted in the most was how applicable it was to daily life (please note I was also taking courses along the lines of signal processing and linear algebra which, in comparison, don’t pop up too often on the evening news). I find that economics is even more tangible in daily life in a developing country.

My first experience with this was in 1994, when my family was in Mexico for Christmas and the peso dropped spectacularly (the reasons for which depend on who you ask, but I like to blame the IMF, whether directly or indirectly). I remember people crowding around currency exchange bureaus in a panic the evening of the crash; the next day, after I laboriously trudged to the store in the pounding sun for a box of juice, it turned out the price had gone up by a peso overnight, and since I had brought exact change for yesterday’s price, I had to go all the way back home and make the round trip again (I was ten, so it seemed really far). And that was the first time the IMF ticked me off, though I didn’t know it at the time.

Economic volatility is evident in the coinage in Tanzania. Just like the Mexican Peso, the Tanzanian Shilling tanked as of the early 1980s, going from about 8 shillings to the US dollar in 1980, to about 195 shillings to the dollar in 1990, to about 800 in 2000, to about 1275 today (according to Penn World Table). As a result, coin denominations here start at 5, 10, and 20 shillings; however, as my friend Dave noticed, all of these tiny coins (they’re virtually worthless) were made before 1994. Coins made after 1994 start at 50 shillings, now worth about 5 cents. In the 1980s, you could actually buy something with a 5 shilling coin, but now even the cheapest thing I can find (a little cup of coffee from a man on the street) costs 50 shillings.

Finally, Nungwi could be used as a case study for the thesis that the trickle-down effect is a myth. For those unfamiliar with the concept, the trickle-down effect essentially states that if a country’s aggregate wealth increases (i.e. its GDP), even if the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few (i.e. the rich), it will eventually “trickle down” to the poor through investments, increased job opportunities, taxes and government expenditure, etc. This perfect-market model has been used to justify things like giving incentives to rich investors to build swanky beach resorts, restaurants and bars.

Unfortunately, in reality, profits are not re-invested, but are expatriated by the foreign owners of these swish places; the few jobs that are offered pay poorly and often don’t even employ immediate locals, who generally don’t have the necessary skills (e.g. a working knowledge of one or two European languages and formal experience in the service industry); if taxes are paid (a common incentive for foreign investment is the waiving of property and income taxes), it is assumed the government spends the money on programmes to assist the poor, when in reality such programmes are often low on governments’ lists of priorities.

In short, though Nungwi has operated as a beach resort destination, popular among Europeans, probably for some time now, Nungwi village remains pretty much the same as any other village in Zanzibar. A popular analogy for the trickle-down effect is if the sea level goes up, the little boats rise along with the big ones (the dhows rise along with the luxury liners?). As Dave aptly put it though, the problem is when the water rises in the private swimming pools, nothing really happens to the little boats...

Logistics

2007-07-19T10:53:00.000+03:00

Basic logistics in a Developing country (or in any new environment for that matter) always provide for entertainment and good blog tidbits... For example, electrical appliances are very interesting here. Normal plugs are Great-Britain-style three-pronged and rectangular. However, several appliances (my cell phone charger, the kettle we bought, the television back in my hotel room) have two round prongs instead. You can either buy a bulky plug adaptor to plug these in, or, as I learned two days ago, you can cut the power going to the outlet (they all have an on-off switch), stick a pen into the ground prong to push down on this little mechanism, allowing you to jam your two-pronged plug into the outlet. It works great!

Another example: our washing machine provided me with a headache and Kent with much amusement. I thought it had been set up properly, so I dumped my clothes in the washing tub, and turned on the tap to fill it up (it's a special lower-tech kind of washing machine, the same kind I saw used in the Dominican Republic). Once it was nearly full, I tried turning the tap off... but to no avail. I frantically yelled for Kent, who sauntered in very calmly and told me the repair man had had to shut off the tap with a wrench earlier that day. We ended up cutting off the main water supply to the kitchen (and I hope we didn't deprive the rest of the building of water at the same time). At least I could do my laundry, I thought. Unfortunately the machine was not working, as I found out when I turned the dial and it only responded by humming intensely. I ended up doing my laundry by hand, hunched over the open washing machine; it was sort of a North-meets-South moment of irony.

Powering your house is also interesting. It's pay-as-you-go here (as I think I've mentioned already). This was emphasized when my fan abruptly stopped turning around 4am one morning. We all had to go to work, and so we didn't have time to run around figuring out how one tops up one's electricity supply. Over 24 hours later (thank goodness I brought a flashlight), we finally spent part of the work day going out to buy electricity vouchers.

They say one of the most important features of someone who wants to live and work overseas is a sense of humour (or perhaps an ability to be self-deprecating?)... I wholeheartedly agree.

Response to "Polygamy on the Island"

2007-07-17T15:59:00.000+03:00

Kent (my fellow-intern and roommate) put an interesting post on his blog recently about polygamy. Click here for the full post.

It turns out the debate we were having after our discussion with Mr. Mjaka hinged on a misunderstanding: Kent said he congratulates people on having many children, but I understood that he congratulates people on having many children and many wives. While I'm not opposed to the former, I am opposed to the latter, since it implicitly condones polygamy, to which I am now unambiguously opposed (I say "now" because I've literally made up my mind firmly about this topic within the last week; while I have yet to talk to any of the women involved in polygamous marriages, the way the men talk about their multiple wives really does objectify them).

Despite this misunderstanding, I thought I would chime in on one of my favourite topics, namely gender equality, and perhaps attempt to answer the questions Kent finished his blog entry with:

"Is it selfish to not be confrontational for the sake of getting work done? Should it be the role of relatively inexperienced youth interns to challenge the norms of their host organization and country by speaking publicly against them? Can Westerners truly speak with moral authority on the issue of gender equality? What do you think?"

First of all, I would not advocate confrontation, especially as a young intern, as a woman in a very patriarchal society, and as an outsider culturally. Also, I agree it is important to get work done, and as long as the issue at hand does not adversely affect the work, then the work should take priority over one's need to get on a soap box. I would, however, broach the topic privately if I got to know someone well, and especially if I was asked for my opinion on the matter (and yes, those who know me might call my particular style of argumentation "confrontational," though I would rather call it "lively"). On a professional level, I think it will be hard for me to keep quiet when gender equality is touted as a "cross-cutting issue" if I feel that it is being abjectly ignored, but so far I haven't been in that situation.

As for the question of whether Westerners can speak with moral authority on the issue of gender equality, I would say unambiguously "yes" (though I really don't like the use of the word "Westerners," I would say any person who believes in gender equality, i.e. any feminist, can speak with moral authority on this issue). We love to beat ourselves up as Westerners and people from the Developed World due to some Dependency Theory-inspired feeling of collective historical guilt, and we have a tendency to bend over backward in order to be culturally sensitive; this can lead to dangerous degrees of moral relativism. I think there are some issues which I can say, despite my youth and relative inexperience, are absolutely right or wrong. Gender equality is one of these issues.

I didn't think I'd be opening this can of worms so soon on my blog, but here goes (and this is not directed toward Kent, who has so far proven very enlightened on the topic of gender equality, this is just something that really gets me going). I've had something of a feminist epiphany in the past year, starting with my experience in the Dominican Republic, an extremely machista society, where being a woman makes you the constant (and I mean constant) target of catty remarks and lewd implications. Moreover, I was working in microcredit, targeting mainly women, so I got a great inside view of how Dominican society tends to treat its poor women. Finally, I was living with a very enlightened family, and my friend Danely did not hesitate to make her feminist opinions known to me, opinions based on her lifelong experience in an inherently unequal society.

Upon my return, I wrote a thesis on the role of microcredit in empowering women, and when you start to do concrete research it becomes blindingly evident that women are at an extreme disadvantage worldwide. They make up the majority of the world's poor; they're harnessed with dependents, meaning they have more mouths to feed (especially in machista cultures such as the Dominican Republic where female-headed households abound); on aggregate they have lower health standards, lower levels of education, and lower expected earnings.

A few other incidents in the past year contributed to my "epiphany." I saw the incomparable Stephen Lewis talk at Concordia, and he said that if we only took away one thing from his speech, it should be that feminists are right, that gender inequality has fuelled the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa (and if anyone knows he does), and that people (women and men) should not feel they must be defensive about being a feminist (I've tried to take his advice).

Another series of "incidents" solidified my stance when I discussed the issue of feminism with male friends (university-educated, supposedly-enlightened, Western male friends, I might point out). I'm sorry to say that several of their responses really angered me and made me even more sure of my position (though to give my male friends credit, there are probably as many as not who see eye-to-eye with me on these issues). Many of the men I have spoken to claim feminism is no longer relevant, or is archaic, and that sexism no longer exists. Not only are they closing their eyes to the issues of sexism and gender inequality which remain ingrained in Canadian and "Western" society (which are perhaps harder to see from the stance of the dominant gender...), but they're also ignoring the vast majority of women on this planet who live in abject poverty.

Many men I've spoken to bristle at the very mention of the word "feminism," since it has been so often unfairly associated with bra-burning, man-hating lesbianism. As a side note, I had an interesting debate on the definition of the very word; my definition (and, it turns out, the proper, dictionary definition) of feminism is the belief that people are and should be treated equally in all spheres of life regardless of their gender - feminism doesn't mean women are better or that men are bad, nor does it mean men and women should be treated the same. It merely means we should be seen as equals. Using this definition, anyone (female or male) who isn't a feminist (in practice if not in nomenclature, since the term is still so inflammatory) won't earn my respect, since they believe that for some reason I am inherently less valuable or worthy than my male counterparts due somehow to biology. But I'm getting seriously off topic.

The point is, while debates may remain about such issues as whether capitalism is better than socialism, or whether unstable pluralistic democracy is better than stable one-party rule, or whether separation of church and state is better than theocracy, I think the issue of gender equality is unambiguous. As long as fully one half of society remains subjugated to the other, Development (however you want to define that) will not come about. How gender equality is achieved, and what "equality" means exactly, is perhaps culture-specific (this could be the topic of a whole post, if not a whole dissertation). But to answer Kent's original question, yes, I believe "Westerners" (I would rather use the term "feminists," because there are many non-Western feminists) can speak with moral authority on the question of gender equality. I think it is right, and I think generally historically the "West" has done a better job than the rest of the world at bringing about gender equality, though it is still very, very far from perfect.

I have an office!

2007-07-17T11:56:00.000+03:00

I've just moved into my new office, and I have a good Internet connection. I wrote up the two posts below offline over the last few days, and I've just uploaded a few photos:

Scenes of Zanzibar

I'll be uploading more photos and adding links soon!

“You are no longer tourists”

2007-07-17T11:49:00.000+03:00

Last Thursday I was handed my passport by one of my supervisors (it had spent the last two days at the immigration office). In it, I now have my official exemption stamp, meaning I have residence status, and my work visa. I am now officially an expatriate, and a resident of Tanzania.

We spent last week visiting projects supported by our three organizations around the island. I've posted a number of photos from our visits:

Project Visits

On Monday, we visited two programmes run by AKF Tanzania in Zanzibar. The first is a teacher training school, focusing on training high school math and science teachers. The second project, called CREATE, works with children, and to me, one of the most interesting projects they run is a series of two-day science camps for girls (I was naturally very excited about this). Big surprise: girls aren’t encouraged to go into science and math in this country. CREATE is trying to change that.

On Tuesday, we visited three projects supported by the NGORC, the organization I will be working for. The NGORC specializes in training community-based organizations (CBOs) in various skills to increase their capacity. This buzz-word actually means that CBOs who approach the NGORC are given training in management, leadership, accounting, business planning, etc. The results of this type of work is of course longer term and not very tangible, but it was nice to visit the groups that have received support from the NGORC and have benefitted from it over time. The first group we visited was a women’s cooperative which makes spice soaps and sells them to the resorts, which then sell them to tourists at an outrageous mark-up I’m sure; it would be great if these women could sell their products directly to mzungus (a polite term for white people), cutting out the middle-man.

The second CBO we visited was a youth group that has made several changes in their community, from starting up a garbage collection service to setting up training for village people to break into the thriving tourism industry in their region. Finally, we visited a sea turtle aquarium, where turtles are protected and studied. The people who run the aquarium were trained by the NGORC and are now running the aquarium as a tourist attraction as well as a centre for study and conservation, and their business has grown substantially since their training.

On Wednesday, we visited a number of projects run by the Madrasa Resource Centre, where Rebecca will be working. These visits probably provided the most sheer enjoyment, since they involved hundreds of extremely cute nursery-school children. The MRC has set up a number of pre-schools on Zanzibar in response to a high failure rate amongst poor children, who aren’t prepared for primary school. At the madrasas, the children learn basic literacy (in Latin and Arabic letters) and numeracy, and they learn some English words as well. The focus on sustainability and bottom-up organisation were very evident at these schools.

AKF attached itself to the informal Koranic Madrasas which already existed around the island, and convinced community members that it was important to offer their young children secular education in addition to the traditional religious education. The kids generally spend the morning in nursery school, and the afternoon in the Koranic school. The religious schools have benefited from the shared facilities often provided by AKF, and the communities have most definitely benefitted by seeing more of their kids succeed in primary school (and, I assume, beyond).

The schools are run directly by the community; each community organising committee decides what the school fees should be (and children whose families cannot pay are exempt as much as possible). The committee also hires teachers and determines their salaries. The teachers are exclusively women, except for a pilot project on Pemba Island, where, as our guide told us, they are trying to see if men can make as good teachers as women. On a side note, the teachers are also very poorly paid; it’s really a family income supplement more than anything else. The MRC’s role in all this is primarily to train teachers.

The last project we visited last week was a clinic. AKF is big on public-private partnerships, which in this context means a partnership between the government clinic and AKF itself (we’re not talking big business). AKF started working with this clinic, starting up a records system. They’ve provided management training, they top up the salaries of the doctors and nurses who work there, and they provide a night watchman. They’ve also encouraged the clinic to start charging minimal lab fees (which again are exempt when people are unable to pay). In return, they’ve been able to offer a much wider range of lab tests, for which there had been great demand.

Currently, the clinic’s pharmacy offers medication for free, thanks to sponsorship by the Danish government. The AKF is trying to introduce fees there as well, however, in the interest of sustainability: they would like to reduce reliance on outside donors. They also have a phasing-out plan, whereby the hospital management will eventually be taken over by a community organisation committee. Once again, sustainability and bottom-up community ownership are key objectives.

On Sunday we took a daladala up the coast a few kilometres to the nearest clean (ish) beach. We were the only wazungu on the daladala (not surprisingly), and we ended up in Bububu (I love that name). We wandered the beach during low tide, watching the fishermen repair their nets and fix their boats (I guess they were fixing them, I know nothing about fishing it turns out). We stumbled across two wazungu sunbathing (fully clothed, since there were lots of local people around). There were in fact only two guest houses/hotels on the entire stretch of beach, and its main purpose is really fishing. We just sat on the sand and read and chatted with some kids while the tide came in.

When the tide was finally high, we went back near the guest house and crept out of our clothes and into the water with a total of four other bathing-suit-clad wazungu (the beach was pretty much empty besides us at this point). The water was incredible, and we tanned between the fishing boats. Eventually young boys started to trickle back to the beach (a few of them sat on an overturned boat and just stared in seeming disbelief at the crazy nearly-naked white people, who were not long in covering up again). In the evening we met up with two of our Tanzanian colleagues and visited their house. All in all it was a great end to the week!

Mzungu Land

2007-07-17T11:48:00.000+03:00

My first week and a half in Africa have been very different from what I had imagined. We were treated extremely well in Dar and for our first week in Zanzibar, staying in very nice hotels with air conditioning and televisions in the rooms, etc. We’ve now moved into an immense, beautiful apartment in downtown Stone Town. Our direct neighbours are mostly expats and rich Tanzanians, except for the one or two run-down buildings inhabited by less well-off Zanzibaris. We’ve been provided with a washing machine of all things (which we haven’t figured out how to use yet), an air conditioner in the cavernous and entirely empty living room, two bathrooms (though one of the toilets doesn’t flush), and a hot water heater which is not connected in any way to the spray hoses we use as showers. We have electricity now that we were shown where to buy the vouchers; electricity is pre-paid here and state-run, with a 20% value-added tax right off the top (ouch).

Stone Town is overrun by tourists. It’s hard to go a block without being offered a taxi, a spice tour, a trip to one of the islands, or, on one occasion, “company.” Wazungu are everywhere, and we’re constantly being scalped by street vendors. Even when we’re not, we’re victim (as the locals are) to inflated prices caused by the upsurge in fuel prices and, more significantly, the preponderance of tourist dollars floating around here. The upside to all this is we’re not lacking anything materially; I can buy Herbal Essence shampoo made in the United Arab Emirates at a ridiculous mark-up, beer can be bought at a high price in numerous tourist bars (though it’s not available at any kind of local price, since the locals mostly don’t drink), and we had a great though expensive pizza dinner the other night with heaps of cheese (thank God) as a farewell dinner for a friend of Rebecca’s who was in town.

The incredibly huge downside to all of this is I still feel like I’m in Canada in many ways. A hotter, dustier, somewhat more exotic, and definitely more labyrinthine Canada (I’ve popped out of the maze that is Stone Town in completely the opposite end of town I’d meant to pop out in more than once); but Canada nonetheless. In the Dominican Republic last, my experience was quite the opposite: I spent the first two months speaking entirely in Spanish, living and working with the locals. A decent slice of pizza was a huge pleasure, and when my Canadian friends arrived in my last month, it was a treat to speak English again. I was totally immersed in Dominican culture, and in retrospect I realise I soaked it up. It was definitely difficult to be detached from nearly everything familiar to me, but the experience had such value.

While my objective in the DR was cultural immersion, my hope in Zanzibar is to really apply my skills and get some development-related work done. In the DR, the actual work I did could have been done by just about any conscientious (and, I admit, fluent Spanish-speaking) person. In Zanzibar, the “cultural experience” is by default secondary to the work I actually hope to get done. Nonetheless, I think my biggest challenge here will be to physically locate the local culture, to actively break out of the tourist cocoon. Many of the interns from my programme are in isolated places with few tourists. Their challenges will resemble mine from last summer; emotionally they will probably have a harder time than we will. But in order to experience anything at all of cultural immersion here, I think we’re going to have to be extremely pro-active. We’ll be working against the tide of people flooding from the mainland to Zanzibar for a nice weekend on the beach...

Update

2007-07-15T05:55:00.000+03:00

I haven't had much time to post to my blog in the past week, so I thought I'd do a quick update. On Monday I'll be able to access the Internet with my laptop, at which point I'll upload a few posts I've been working on offline, and hopefully some photos (which will make you jealous, be forewarned). But for now, here's the news in brief...

We spent the week visiting various AKF-related projects around the island, and meeting various AKF-related people, all of whom were very interesting. The overall impression I get of this NGO and the NGOs it supports is extremely positive. The focus on sustainability and bottom-up organization in particular is evident throughout the projects I've seen and the people I've spoken to. We've also been taking Swahili lessons in the afternoons. The lessons have been extremely intense and very well-taught, but I still feel like I only know a handful of words. Hopwfully that will change soon!

We've moved out of our swanky hotel ("Safari Lodge") and into our swanky apartment (more on this in a future post, probably entitled "Moral Ambiguity"...). Today we went to the market and didn't see a tourist or a white person for ten to fifteen minutes, which was refreshing (more on this as well). We bartered for a number of household goods in pathetic broken Swahili ("Swanglish"), except for Kent, who is relatively conversant, having studied in Dar Es Salaam for eleven months two years ago. We then proceeded to clean our filthy apartment from top to bottom. Tomorrow, we're heading to a beach that's clean enough to swim at, in a place called Bububu (hehe - I love it). It's supposed to be a short daladala ride from the centre of town.

So far, no amoebas, no malaria, no robberies. All is well!

I've added a link to the blog of my fellow intern and now roommate, Kent. His blog is called Zanzibar Mzungu. We'll probably be blogging about much the same things, but if you're interested on a different perspective on what I'm experiencing you can find it there. I've also finally figured out how you can call me. From Canada, and using a phone card, dial 011-255-77-386-6496. And PLEASE remember I'm seven hours ahead (there's a big orange clock on the left sidebar to help you). I'll put up a permanent link with contact information soon.

Alive and in Zanzibar

2007-07-07T20:59:00.000+03:00

I'm in Zanzibar at last! The Internet is slow and I don't have much time, so I'll be brief. The trip was VERY long but uneventful (I think we were in the air for a total of 17 hours). In Dar Es Salaam, we got introduced to various Aga Khan projects and people, including the country director (originally from India), who seems very nice and extremely competent. Today, we went to Bagamoyo, a town not far from Dar, with one of the Aga Khan employees as well as a Tanzanian intern. It turns out that based on the success of the Canadian internship programme (which has been running for many year), the AKF decided to start a similar programme for East Africans. There are four interns on Zanzibar, and two in Dar, and the one we met in Dar was very nice. Anyways, the German government was based in Bagamoyo when they were in power here. The town also has a very long history associated with the slave trade, and, interestingly, the abolition thereof (slavery was only made illegal in Tanzania in 1922!). Before abolition, missionaries (I believe mostly Lutheran) who opposed slavery would ransom slaves (that is, buy them) and set them up in these little "freedom towns" (I think that's what they were called), where they would live what appears to have been normal lives. The museum we were in depicted former slaves receiving schooling and technical training, and apparently they were not even forced to convert to Christianity, so kudos to those missionaries.

In the afternoon we took a flight to Zanzibar in a plane that seats 12 (I was extremely excited at this, it was awesome). We're being put up at a very nice (in fact quite luxurious) hotel for our first week here, then we're going to find an apartment for the first two or three months. After that, we will be moving into a house right in downtown Stone Town that has been donated to the Aga Khan Foundation. After a very nice chat with our direct AKF contact here (our boss, but also our "big brother in Zanzibar" as he put it very kindly), we headed out to the night market. By this time I was in total sensory overload. It's hot but not too hot (being winter), and it's dark and the streets are narrow and winding. The population is predominantly Muslim, so the women are covered in colorful and sometimes sparkly scarves, and many of the men wear long white robes and colorful hats. We heard the call to prayers from a few mosques from our hotel. The night market is absolutely amazing. I got a fat crab's claw, some meat on a stick and a chapati for something like $3.50 Canadian.

And then we looked for an Internet cafe and found one! I'm going to stop now, since our time is running out. I now have a cell phone, I'll evenetually put up a link with contact information. Sorry if this post has been a bit incoherent - I'm still in a jetlag/I-can't-believe-I'm-in-Zanzibar haze. I'll write a more eloquent post later....

Passport and Interesting People

2007-06-21T04:12:00.000+03:00

I now have my passport and my plane ticket in hand, which is SUCH a relief. We Tanzania interns have had the hardest time with visa requirements. The forms have changed since last year, so we initially filled out the wrong ones (or an insufficient number of forms, perhaps). This year they also decided to ask for a police check and a graduation certificate. As a result, we were the last ones to get our passports back (most people got theirs back a week or so ago). The residency permit will apparently be handed to us tomorrow, so everything's set! I've also been cleared medically (for the insurance provider), after a debacle with late and incomplete forms and botched tests...

I've met two very interesting people today, and they're representative of the range of fascinating people I've been meeting all month. The other Zanzibar interns and I had lunch today with the AKFC programme manager for East Africa and Asia. She was very interesting and was able to tell us a bit about the organizations and the places we're going to. Even more interesting (in my opinion), she just got back from working for an NGO in Palestine! She lived in the Palestinian-controlled part of Jerusalem (from what I understood - I think she mentioned that it was East Jerusalem, and she spoke about harassment of the locals by the Israeli army - forgive my ignorance on jurisdiction in Jerusalem matter, I'm sure Mahmud will correct me :P). Anyways she worked in towns all over Palestine. When we asked her about security, she said the only times she didn't feel secure were when going through Israeli checkpoints (and this is as a white North American), and when travelling or commuting through settlements. She also couldn't take public transit because of a rash of bus bombings, but she drove herself around. It was a very interesting lunch.

Then this evening, I decided I needed Indian food (I'm missing my bi-weekly fixes in Parc Ex already!). So my friend Karine and I went to a restaurant unfortunately named "Nagina" (they really should have consulted on that name). We were comparing travel stories, and the server politely asked if we were in the tourism business (he thought Karine was a flight attendant for some reason). When we told him we were interns with the Aga Khan Foundation, he lit up. It turned out he is Ismaili, and he proceeded to chat with us for about an hour! I've had very good experiences with the Ismaili community thus far, the overall impression I get from them is that they place a high premium on education, and that they are very service-oriented (he told us that the secret to happiness is to serve humanity - quite a nice message to live your life by!). He was very eager to tell us more about the Aga Khan's work and the religion and way of thinking in general. It was such an interesting encounter!

I can't believe I only have two more days here, the month has gone by so quickly, though slowly at the same time... the training has been very intense, and I spend a lot of time just thinking about getting on the plane to go to Zanzibar. But I've made some amazing friends (it's hard to believe I won't see many of them for a long time), and I feel I've received excellent and valuable training. I've also made several contacts, and I've been exposed to the "real world" of development work in Canada, which is both exciting and discouraging at times... but either way, it's given me a lot to think about.

I've got a whole bunch of different lists going in preparation for my trip, and one of them is a list of books I should bring. Apparently books are extremely hard to come by where I'm going, so I'll be bringing a stack with me. I'm hoping for a mix of voluminous fiction (I'm thinking Dickens here...) and thought-provoking non-fiction. I'd love any suggestions you might have!

"Strange Visitors"

2007-06-19T03:47:00.000+03:00

I was forwarded an exciting email from a contact in Tanzania. The three Zanzibar interns will be given an in-country training in Dar Es Salaam, and we now have a potential itinerary for the first full day. We land in Dar at 21:55 on July 5 after having left at 6:40pm on July 4, Montreal time... it's going to be a loooong couple of days. We are (hopefully) being picked up at the airport by a very reliable driver whom the Aga Khan Foundation has been using "for many strange visitors," according to the email... and we will probably look and feel VERY strange upon landing, so I guess this isn't far off. There's a photo of me and other future "strange visitors" on the right, at the cocktail we had in our second week here.

Our day will include introductions to a bunch of people at the AKF office in Dar, an overview of AKF's programmes in East Africa and in Tanzania, registration at the Canadian High Commission (so that they know where we are in case they need to evacuate us!), the buying of cell phones, lunch at a restaurant, and visits to the Aga Khan University. I'm predicting exhaustion and a VERY good sleep on the night of July 6! Luckily it will then be the weekend, which I assume we get off. It sounds daunting for a first day in Africa, but I can't wait! I'm getting more and more excited, and more and more nervous too...

Dying Babies

2007-06-14T04:10:00.000+03:00

I thought it was time for a downer post after all this optimism. This is, after all, a blog chronicling the beginning of my career in development, an inherently depressing subject overall (I've just had dinner with some friends who are also very involved in development, and we were talking about how sometimes you get stuck in the mindset and see everything from a development perspective... definitely not good for one's sanity!).

Anyhow, my friend Mahmud is keeping a very interesting blog, and he wrote a recent post ("Milk formula Murder" - great title) about big companies pushing formula feed over breast milk in the Philippines. Not only are they essentially lying about the inherent superiority of formula feed, but they are also pushing it to the poorest (and least educated) people, who of course can't afford clean water.

The result is that desperately poor, ignorant, but well-intentioned mothers feed their babies formula mixed with non-purified water, of course leading to widespread infant deaths from diarrhoea and dysentery (not to mention they're buying the formula while the breast milk is free, so they're probably compromising their own nutrition by spending money on the formula instead of good food).

This is of course reminiscent of the scandal in the 1970s largely associated with Nestlé, which was doing exactly the same thing. Right off the bat, I feel uncomfortable with anyone trying to tell women what to do (or not to do) with their breasts (whether it's the pro- or anti-breastfeeding lobby); that the information these companies have been spreading is scientifically wrong is even more appalling.

The blog entry jumped out at me because we'd actually just gone over the Nestlé scandal briefly during one of the sessions here (I can't remember in what context). But yesterday, we had a woman come in to talk to us about health in general in developing countries, and while most of the statistics and facts she presented were things I'd already seen before, one of the graphs she showed us bowled me over. It was set up like a population pyramid, with age groups on the vertical axis, only the horizontal axis wasn't population but percentage of total deaths. The numbers were for Sierra Leone (where another friend of mine is living right now and also keeping an interesting blog). The bottom age group (between the ages of 0 and 4) represented over 50% of all deaths.

I've been trying to track down those numbers all evening and I haven't had any success, so I can't corroborate this, but it certainly got me thinking. Infant mortality is a problem that I find particularly haunting. On an ideological level, infant death is not prioritized because the victims are voiceless; because these are babies and infants we're talking about, it also falls under the rubric of women's issues, which is low-priority for much the same reason.

Perhaps even more enraging than the shunting aside of the issue for these reasons is the fact that many infant deaths are easily preventable. The WHO's 2006 Mortality Country Fact Sheet for Sierra Leone, the country with the highest infant mortality in the world, outlines the causes of child deaths. The three top causes of neonatal deaths are severe infection, preterm birth, and neonatal tetanus. This last one (which caused over 1 in 5 neonatal deaths in Sierra Leone in 2006) is usually due to infection of the umbilical cord after it has been cut with a non-sterilized object or after animal dung has been placed on it (I don't know why this is done). Neonatal tetanus could therefore be reduced and even eliminated if women were taught to use a sterilized blade to cut the cord (immersion in boiling water would work!) and that animal dung on the umbilical cord is not a good idea. It's a question of teaching something to women; not rocket science, but evidently not high on many people's priority list.

For the under-five mortality, a quarter die from pneumonia, 22% die from neonatal causes (that is, they never made it past a few months), and the third cause of death for kids under five in Sierra Leone: diarrhoeal diseases. So the baby formula companies obviously have a niche market that they're playing into here.

What enrages me so much is if women were taught to use clean blades, and if they were then provided with purified water (and not fed disinformation by corporations), you could cut down on nearly 25% of under-five deaths. My back-of-the-envelope calculations say that this would have equalled nearly 15 thousand children in Sierra Leone in 2000 alone. That this number of babies are dying from easily- preventable causes is unconscionable.

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Footnote: the back-of-the-envelope math (sorry, it's the physics student coming out in me). All based on WDI stats. In 2000, the crude birth rate was 46.8 births per 1,000 people. A population of 4,508,987 people means about 211,067 babies were born. With an under-five mortality rate of 286 deaths per thousand children under five (28.6% of children don't make it past the age of five!!!!), this means about 60,365 children under the age of five died in 2000. 24.4% of that (20% of the neonatal deaths from tetanus, which corresponds to 4.4% of under-five deaths, plus 20% due to diarrhoeal diseases) is 14,729 kids.

Hype

2007-06-08T04:13:00.001+03:00

I'm starting to get very excited about going to Zanzibar. On Monday evening, we had dinner with the returning interns who were abroad until a few months ago, and we three Zanzibar interns had a slew of questions for the two girls who were there last year. I've learned a lot of very practical things which have really set my mind at ease - a random set of examples: the office I'm working at does not stay open on Saturdays; hair elastics and bug spray are hard to find on the island, Tampons and sunscreen are not; my office is air-conditioned; I need to bring 20 or so t-shirts, since I'll want to change them multiple times a day and I'll be washing them by hand; you have to go to the store to buy electricity (I think you feed tokens into a machine or something); covering your head on the way home from work can cut down on the female tourist harassment (something I am definitely used to after the Dominican Republic). All very good things to know! Also apparently last year the two girls hosted eight of the AKFC interns at Christmas, and we've put out an invitation to everyone for this coming Christmas...

I've also just found out that this year's three Zanzibar people (obviously including me) will have a week of training in Dar Es Salaam, and a week of intensive language training (in Swahili). We're also planning to take regular classes throughout the internship. Even more exciting, someone has just donated a house in Stone Town to the Aga Khan Foundation, and we may very well be living there, although plans are never set in stone (so to speak...). Adding to my excitement is the fact that my cousin Jenny just gave me photos she took when she visited me in the Dominican Republic almost exactly a year ago, and the beach photos are making me seriously want the sand and the surf... I think I lucked out big time with this posting!

The first two days of training here were all about cultural adaptation, and one of the things we did which I found very useful was a graph (yay! a graph! I'm such a physics student) that plots your general mood versus time; the overall trend is a large dip about a third of the way through the placement, due to culture shock. The period just before departure is a total roller coaster - one minute you're super excited because you've just spoken to people who spent eight months where you're going and loved it, the next minute you're low because you just thought of all the people you're going to miss... I'm definitely going through that (though there have been more highs than lows in the past week). The graph was also useful in retrospect; I applied it to what I went through in the Dominican Republic and it really quite accurately fits my emotional state last summer. It's nice to have the culture shock phenomenon validated, and it's nice to be prepared for it even more this time. I think sitting on the beach (see visual aid on the right) with a beer will be a VERY useful culture shock mitigation tool... I can't wait!

Week One

2007-06-04T04:06:00.000+03:00

Week One has been great, we've done so much that I feel like I've been here a month! From Wednesday to Friday, we had sessions with Ian Smilie, who is one of the Canadian leaders in the NGO world. We talked a lot about the role of NGOs (and CIDA), their effectiveness, Northern versus Southern NGOs, the relationship with governments and the importance of neutrality (and more importantly the perception that an NGO is neutral). On Saturday, we had a seminar on international careers, and today, we participated in the World Partnership Walk (where the photo on the left was taken), which was a lot of fun.

We learned a lot about the downsides of NGOs from Wednesday to Friday. One theme we touched upon was the problem of funding - in the words of one of the guest speakers, the Tsunami was the first ever adequately-funded relief effort, and Tsunami relief raised record numbers of donations... A huge problem for NGOs is earmarking - where a donor (be it a private donor or a government) specifies where their money should go, thereby deciding that the starving kid in Kenya is more deserving of food than the starving kid in Namibia. This issue is called proportionality, that is, funds should be given in proportion to need. Instead, NGOs are often forced to spend money based largely on geo-political factors (e.g. Canada has spent a ridiculous proportion of its total aid money in Afghanistan and Iraq recently; also many countries tend to spend much more money on former colonies and protectorates, so for example Palau, a tiny former U.S. protectorate, gets a hugely disproportionate amount of funding from the United States).

We also discussed whether Northern NGOs are still relevant, especially since Southern NGOs are now popping up and often doing a damn good job at development work (the organization I worked for last summer was a Southern NGO, and the one I'll be working for in Zanzibar is a Southern NGO as well, though it's funded in part by a Northern NGO). Some northern NGOs are turning into mere sources of funding for these new Southern NGOs. We also touched upon the fact that while the North has been in the development "business" for a long time, nothing's really changed all that much, and in fact the raw numbers are getting worse. In fact, a large proportion of development projects fail outright.

Despite this depressing look at one of the sectors I may very well end up working in, one of the hopeful things I did gain over the three days was a relatively clear Northern NGO success story. Ian Smilie has been a leader in the Kimberly Accord process, during which the African diamond industry started to be seriously reigned in. Many people have seen the recent movie Blood Diamond (which Mr. Smilie criticizes for not actually saying very much at all about Africa and the situation, though it does raise awareness and, according to him, scared the heck out of the diamond industry - I haven't seen the movie). Diamonds have not only been mined under extremely inhumane conditions, but they have also served to fuel numerous brutal conflicts, including the particularly gruesome one in Sierra Leone, which Mr. Smilie knows a lot about (he lived in Sierra Leone for a while). The Kimberly Accord has set up a good system to begin to ensure that diamonds are mined under better conditions and that their trade is better regulated so as to curb the use of diamonds to fuel conflict.

This whole process was brought about almost exclusively by NGOs. The diamond mining companies are now all onside, as are almost all of the diamond-trading and -mining countries; the accord basically ensures that a diamond is traceable, from the mine all the way to Tiffany's, whereas in the past diamonds were bought and sold without question. A very high percentage of diamonds are now mined and traded legitimately. Additionally, Northern NGOs are keeping the pressure on countries and companies that have not signed on to the accords or that break the rules. They do this in part through the Diamonds and Human Security Project, which publishes papers and does reviews of the industry, basically acting as a watchdog. While Mr. Smilie admits that the process is not yet airtight, I really think this is a positive and important thing that a group of Northern NGOs has been able to do.

Rabid Whales

2007-05-31T20:04:00.000+03:00

We had our medical talk yesterday evening, and apparently you can get rabies from any mammal that carries it - dogs, monkeys and bats are the big things to avoid. Rabies was on the VERY long list of diseases and illnesses that were presented to us, most of which I'm immunized against or know how to avoid. As for malaria, apparently I'll need a hell of a lot of tonic water to give me enough quinine to ensure immunity, so the crazy-pills it is. Actually I tested mefloquine for three days and had no side-effects. Oddly enough, women are more prone to having psychological side-effects than men, and these side-effects usually come in the form of vivid dreams. At least that will make for some interesting blog posts.

This followed the insurance talk on Tuesday evening, in which I learned that should I get hit by a bus, the bits of me will be scraped up and repatriated (phew, that was such a pressing concern for me), and my beneficiary will get $50 000. I am also covered for injury or death resulting from passive involvement in a conflict, but not active participation, which means, in the words of the insurance guy, that I'm expected to run AWAY from a riot, and not take up arms with a rebel faction in an attempt to overthrow a dictator. So much for that plan.

Training, Day 1

2007-05-29T00:29:00.000+03:00

I've settled in to the residence at the University of Ottawa, and I'm very impressed by the facilities. I'm in a two-bedroom suite with another intern, and we have our own bathroom and kitchenette (minus a stove unfortunately). The group of 25 interns is fantastic; everyone's bright and enthusiastic, and it's also a varied group in terms of professional and educational backgrounds. Today and tomorrow we're doing a session called "intercultural effectiveness training," which means we're covering everything from how to deal with culture shock to how to try to uncover what's behind societal norms and conventions. The facilitator is fantastic and has endless funny and meaningful stories from his own experience, and I've found the session very useful and insightful so far. I think everyone has, even though probably 80% of us have already had overseas experience and have therefore already dealt with cultural change and culture shock on some level.

I'm extremely impressed with the Aga Khan Foundation and with the training so far. The month is really a gift to us, since it may or may not be directly applicable in our upcoming internship (though the culture session is sure to be). We have sessions coming up on very practical topics, from conflict resolution and rural development to board accountability and results-based management. Most of these topics have not been covered by my IDS training, simply because they are so practical and management-related. We even have an event coming up (called the "Press Club Event") at the Mariott, where the Aga Khan Foundation has invited a whole bunch of people from CIDA and other development-related agencies and organizations, specifically so that we can network and meet people in the field. This coming weekend we also have an international career seminar, purely geared toward what we might be doing with our long-term after the internship is over. And on Sunday, we're all participating in the World Partnership Walk.

Tonight I will hopefully get some studying in for the GREs... I'm actually not the only person studying for them here. Coincidentally, I know another one of the interns from a science/leadership camp I attended when I was 16 (hard to believe), and he's cramming as well. Afterwards I will be watching the game, which will hopefully be the first in a four-game sweep by the Senators. Go Sens!

An Explanatory Post

2007-05-21T21:27:00.000+03:00

My sister insisted on the title of this post... I've changed the name of my blog in homage to the great work of cinematography of the same title. You can check it out on IMDB if you're interested. It involves Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and two con-women they randomly pick up (one of whom is played by Dorothy Lamour), as they trudge across Africa, supposedly on their way to Zanzibar (though they seem to have entirely missed the salient fact that Zanzibar is an island). It's great. Bing gets carried through the jungle by Africans on a sedan chair, Dorothy (or her con artist partner, I can't remember) gets sold at a white slave auction, and Bing and Bob find themselves, I kid you not, in a giant pot over a fire about to be consumed by cannibals. Needless to say it's racist and misogynist (even for a film made in 1941), but Bing can sure carry a tune... I think (hope?) my eight months in the country will bear absolutely no resemblance to this film. I just like the title.

Another Blog

2007-05-21T04:13:00.000+03:00

Yesterday I got official confirmation that I am indeed graduating from McGill, thereby closing one chapter of my life (though this still hasn't really dawned on me yet), so I thought this would be the right time to start my new blog. I've been agonizing over formatting, the title, and other details, but I decided to put up my first post and deal with that later, so expect the blog to change gradually. I'm also going to progressively add informative links about the organization I'm working for, the programme I'm participating in, and my location (I hadn't even heard of Zanzibar before I was offered this job).

As you may know, I have been chosen to complete an internship with the Aga Khan Foundation of Canada (AKFC). I'm leaving for a month's training in Ottawa on May 27th. I return to Montreal around June 22nd, and then after two weeks of (frantic) last-minute prep, I'll ship out to Africa. I have a week's training in Kenya along with the other East-Africa AKFC interns, and then I'll leave for Zanzibar, an island in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Tanzania. Specifically, I will be living and working in Stone Town.

This all still seems very far away for me, and in fact I'm still jet-lagged from my two-week vacation in Europe, a very generous graduation present from my amazing parents. If you want to see some jealousy-inducing photos from my trip, visit the "Photos" link on the left, or click here:

Europe

I will be posting photos on my Picassa Web Album throughout the trip (if my Internet connection is fast enough!). For the moment I will end this post and write again when something interesting happens...