Race against Time

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!

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

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!

Postscript

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

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.

An Empty Pipe

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

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

A Drug-Fuelled Paradise

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).

Ethical Dilemma

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

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.

The Database

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

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.

Nungwi and Real-Live Economics

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

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"

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.

“You are no longer tourists”

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

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...

Dying Babies

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.