Fun in the Sun in Tanzania

You know how some kids, usually around twelve years old, go to camp in the summer for about six weeks? From everything I have heard, camp seems to involve spending most of the days outdoors, playing sports, doing crafts, hiking, building bonfires at night, making s´mores, and possibly partaking in a community project to help rebuild, let´s say, the wooden slotted house of the eighty-eight year old woman who lives alone in the middle of the country, having regretfully survived her entire family. I am sure many of you have fond memories of those days of yore if you were one of the lucky ones who went to camp. I, however, never took the opportunity to do so. But I think I finally have a good idea what it must have been like, because if you take your memories of yore and transport them six thousand miles away and fourteen years further on in your life, you will come close to remembering what my experience was like in Tanzania.

With a few small and many large aspects altered, of course. For instance, who needs s´mores (actually, the ingredients for s´mores are unavailable in Tanzania, but this is beside the point) when you can have a Redd´s instead, the most agreeable and tastiest cider ever produced?

So there I was, in Tanzania, now four months ago, being crammed, jolted, bounced, and sweated up the so called dirt road leading to the Amani Nature Reserve in the Usambara Mountains in the northeast of the country, a twenty five year old woman, having attained that age without losing much of her twelve year old camper´s who never was idealism nor gaining all of the weight of responsibilities that normally would restrain someone from chucking it all in exchange for playing concubine to a thousand mosquito sheiks and testing the theory that the sun can actually roast one alive.

While intriguing in themselves, these were not the expected not actual reasons for my having transplanted myself halfway across the world. Real reason number one-wanderlust, pure, unadulterated, and previously explained. Real reason number two- the urge to help people, people of a different culture to any I have known. And yes, I know how imperious and self-righteous my charitable urge sounds, and to make matters worse, I have to selfishly admit that working to alleviate poverty sounded a lot more satisfying and ultimately more exciting in Africa than in Nowhere, Texas (seriously, I think this is a name of an actual place) . And while I have no domestic work project to compare to my experience in Africa, I cannot imagine it would rival the impact of volunteering in Amani.

Amani is not a rural town, not even a proper village, and would be best described as a community, due to the widespread layout of the popuation and buildings. It has a priest, named Father Baruti, two churchs, a school, and, in the very loosest definition of the terms, a restaurant and discotheque. But please don´t picture in your mind these establishments one after the other on Main Street- think with more space, let´s be generous and say they were all located within at least five kilometres or three miles of each other.

Our job in Amani, ahh, here I must backtrack a bit to clarify who I was with since I am no Indianana Jones, venturing out all by myself to Africa. Adventuress, yes. Complete idiot, no.

Through diligent research on the information superhighway and in the old fashioned medium of books, I found an organization named Madventurer, based in the UK, which had several volunteer project options around the world. All projects involved teaching and building, and in my relentless pursuit to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, Madventurer´s Tanzanian project was the perfect fit since it was located in Arusha, the town at the base of Kili. (One of the huge perks of reaching the top of that helluva mountain is the lifetime pass to refer to it by that trite and colloquial nickname of Kili. Plus, it is just so much simpler to say and write than Kilimanjaro, well, for everyone, except evidently, Ernest Hemingway). So I signed myself right up, knowing that a little building work certainly couldn´t hurt my physical preparation for Kili. Lo and behold what should happen, but that two weeks before I was set to leave I find out the project site has been moved about seven hours away to Amani-no biggie, though, the people at Madventurer assured me my hopes of mountaineering could still be easily met. Too late to do anything other than go with the new flow, I was not entirely clear as to what the new project was going to be until I was physically in Tanzania. Nothing like the freeing feeling of going to Africa for six weeks without any idea what you have actually gotten myself into! Fortunately for me, and the other twelve volunteers, our two project managers spent the first day giving us an appreciated informational session.

To explain the project, as I was explained, we, the twelve English volunteers and me, the lone American, would be building a new workshop for the four craftswomen of Amani. Not as glamorous as a new school or hospital, I nonetheless came to see the integral good our work would do for the community as a whole and women in the community as a group.

Madventurer was headlining the building project in conjuction with another charity organization, Tukai, which had been working in Amani promoting better education for the past seven years. Tukai had made great strides, and the primary school of Amani had one of the highest passing rates in all of Tanzania. But the problem remained of what would all of the young teenage girls do after completing primary school when they could not afford to go to secondary school. The choices for a girl were two, either become a housegirl, which is barely worth the title occupation since the salary is so little as to account for nothing more than a life of glorified indentured servitude, or marry and produce a family on a husband´s wages which are not enough to support an individual, much less a wife and children. The prospects for a young girl were bleak.

Enter a rather seriously intense, or intensely serious, and passionate woman named Althea, one of the leaders of Tukai and an almost permanent fixture at Amani, who developed a pet project of sorts to help improve the circumstances of teenage girls. Althea, I have to add, was a force to be reckoned with. Imagine a kind and caring individual who has long ago, probably before birth, come to the conclusion that a sense of humour and the most basic level of vanity were a waste of life´s energies that should be instead devoted to aiding the plight of others. A saint, yes, but for however admiral her largess of heart was, that same organ could never be described as particularly light. In her spare time a few years ago, Althea began instructing four girls in the craft of making shoulder bags, dolls, and other cloth products using the readily available brightly colored and patterned cotton, native to Africa, called khanga and kitanga. The girls were quick studies and soon began producing lovely items that were taken back to England and sold for much more than the production price, but all profits went directly into the pockets of the craftswomen.

With this money as income, we were explained, these girls made a higher wage, maybe fifty times higher than they could have as a housegirl, and could give excess, a rare word in Tanzania, to their immediate and extended families, and suddenly more mothers would be able to buy food to nourish themselves and in turn their babies, who might then be strong enough to fight off malaria should they catch it, which is often times inevitable, and also have the means to get proper medical care when malaria strikes. Malaria, it should be noted, is the number one killer among babies under the age of one, as most of them are malnourished and simply do not have the strength to fight the disease. So you see, Althea´s project was the famous trickle down theory in practice-the living standard for the first four craftswomen had improved, along with that of their families. But why stop at offering only four girls the option for better paid work?

For one thing, there was physically no space. The girls were already living and working in a tiny mud hut to do their work, a hut the size of eight feet by ten feet, with red dirt floors that would transform into a lethal staining slop if it rained and a bag in the works happened to fall on the ground. They needed a new space, a better, cleaner space, and, while someone was at it, a bigger space so that more women could be employed. But with a charity organization already strapped and committed to education and a village that does not have money to feed every family, let alone build a new work space for craftsmaking, how was this space to be created?

Here is where Madventurers stepped in, recruiting money and thirteen able bodied youths, aged eighteen to twenty-nine, to accomplish what Tukai´s efforts alone could not.

So that was our project, every weekday for five weeks, trudging six kilometres uphill in the morning to get to the project site, doing seven hours manual labour, and then making our way six kilometres back down the hill every evening. Oh, and by trudging I don´t mean in a car or by any other form of transportation than your feet. I will now breakdown the description of our labourous tasks week by week.

Week 1 - morning tasks: take your choice between shoveling dirt into wheelbarrows, dumping and returning said wheelbarrows empty, rinse, repeat, hoeing uneven patches left by the shovel, and/or pick-axe higher ground in the effort to level the building site. Afternoon tasks: same as morning tasks. To break up the monotony of pain, though, there were a few times we needed to help load hundreds of twenty pound rocks into multiple wheelbarrows loads to move them from where the truck had dropped them down to the site, to be soon used in the foundation. Just for fun sometime, drop of twenty pound rock on your big toe or thumb. You´ll thank me for it-a pleasure you have surely missed having so far.

Week 2 - morning tasks: more leveling, although the mixing of cement for the foundation is now occurring, the transportation of which from the mixing site to the foundation is about twenty feet to cover and is taken in a metal pan about the size and look of a large wok, again, imagine squatting, picking up twenty five pounds of cement using the hindquarters, walking the twenty feet to the fundhi (more on who the fundhi are later), who empty and return the pan to you, rinse again, repeat again, over and over. Yes, it IS similar to doing squats in a gym, but like a hundred of them, with incredibly heavy and precariously balanced weights, too. I would love to say that at the end of the week I had developed a bum as tight as Madonna´s but that would not even be in the same continent as truth. Afternoon tasks: the same as the morning!

Week 3 - manual labour eases off a bit as leveling is almost complete. The focus now is on preparing the foundation walls in the trenches dug around the future building´s parameter, about two feet high. The fundhi primarily place the rocks and fill them with cement, we just carry the pans of cement and help mix it. But, week three is only two days long for me, as on Wednesday in the early morning myself and three guys leave to go tackle Kilimanjaro and we return the following Wednesday afternoon. But more on that experience at another time.

Week 4 and Week 5 - foundation is complete, leveling is finished, now the emphasis is on building the walls, filling the gaps with mortar (great fun- you use a palette knife like an artist), and putting together the infrastructure of the roof, of which all the wood needs to be doo doo mastered, coating each piece with an inky and oily black mixture to make the wood inhospitable to insects. Not as physically demanding as the first two weeks, but then, I had just scaled a big mountain, so everything does become relative.

By the end of week 5 our goal point in the new building had been reached; it had a foundation, four walls with five huge windows, and the pylons for the roof had been built and were ready to be placed. The next Madventurer group would continue on with our work until completion, finishing the roof, plastering, and painting what in a few weeks from the time I write this will be a great new building for twelve young girls, eight of them new and able to join the money making group due to our efforts. It is a great feeling to know that I have helped in some minor way, maybe given one woman a better opportunity than she would face otherwise, and for that I am proud and hopeful.

I will have to leave off here, for this entry, as my final week in Tanzania was filled with travel and relaxation, and I will cover it in my next entry, which will also contain a dictionary of important terms to know in Tanzania. For instance, dalla-dalla. It´s worth the wait, trust me.