Letter from Njombe Town

Last weekend, the campaign team and I made the two-day journey (on Tanzanian time, which is really a one day journey in normal time) from Dar es Salaam to Njombe, in the far southwest of Tanzania. I had loaded up my podcasts and my sleeping hat for the ten highway hours, but I ended up with my eyes glued out the windows for most of the trip. I saw Hillary Clinton (or at least the diplomatic motorcade of), as well as elephants, giraffes, zebras and gazelles, although I think the Hillary is not actually native to this area.

I also saw the most astounding poverty I’ve encountered in my life. On one of my free days in Dar, I visited a ‘cultural museum park,’ which exhibited various mud huts used by different tribes in the country. I toured each of the musty low-grass-ceilinged structures with a flashlight, and tried to imagine what it could possible mean when a sign pointed to two square feet of dirt floor and said ‘The Living Room.” But after all, it was a museum, and I like modern art, so mostly I was able to relegate it to an abstract ideas area of my mind and move on.

But all along the Tanzam highway, I saw villagers living in mud structures and collecting firewood. These mud homes weren’t even as nice as the ones in the museum, but were shabbily thrown together and covered with sloping straw mats. I watched small children chasing each other around the houses and women carrying bundles of rice or wood on their heads. Here was the abstract in reality.

Being in Njombe for the past week, I’ve also noticed the distinct and sometimes surprising markers of poverty in town life. The per capita GDP in Tanzania is $500. To drive myself crazy, I like to think about how my annual medical school tuition is $50,000, or 100 times more than what the average person here makes in a year. For the golden price tag of 50 grand, I am provided with the online password to a cache of lecture videos, about four school sponsored keggers, and the legitimacy to travel here as a summer intern. It’s a funny idea to imagine, on the one hand, a laptop with lecture videos that amount to my medical education, and on the other hand, 100 Tanzanians. Or, if you like, my Macbook, and two Tanzanians. Or my iPhone, and one Tanzanian. These comparisons make life seem so unbearably arbitrary.

So what is life like in a town with a per capita GDP of an iPhone? I think on of the first things I noticed going up and down the one road in town is the lack of any bookstores, or music shops, or art establishments. For $500 dollars a year, you don’t get any of these niceties. What you do get though, is a choice between 15 different churches in which to worship. The churches are invariably the nicest and largest standing structures in town, and their soaring spires make an odd picture beside small stands selling used socks and potatoes. Not surprisingly, everyone is religious.

Poverty also does not lend well to culinary creativity, and ‘Tanzanian cuisine’ consists of rice, beans, steamed maize called ugali, fried chicken, friend potatoes, fried eggs, and fried potatoes with eggs. Ordering at a restaurant means getting a plate of one of the three things they have, which rarely changes day to day. Amazingly, local people don’t seem to notice the monotony of it, and ask me sincerely if I’m ‘enjoying Tanzanian food.’

The government does not provide a garbage collection service. I didn’t realize this until one day when we were unpacking boxes and boxes of surgical instruments, and were left with a pile of plastic bags as waste. We asked some kids on the street to help us clear the mess, and a while later I stepped outside to discover them burning the plastic bags in a big pile in front of the house. I was overwhelmed by the intense smell of carcinogens filling my body, and I turned to a co-worker to ask what the hell they were doing. ‘What else do you want them to do with the garbage?’ she asked, bewildered. And then I realized, every household across town, and in the villages does this. This was the smell that I had noticed for days but couldn’t place. Njombe is developed enough to have Coke bottles and plastic wrappers, but not developed enough to have a central garbage service.

Hans Rosling has a great and simple idea about differentiating between the means of development and the ends of development. Healthcare, economic growth, stable government: these are only the means, and not the ends of development. They aren’t the things that make life worth living. But to have books, music, plays, cake, and lets not forget cookies, doughnuts, strudel, muffins, pancakes, turnover, and dessert sampler plates, etc, these are the things that really make people happy (or if you don’t like my hyper-western/sweets-centric value system, we can just say ‘culture’).

I think something that does amaze me about the local people I meet is that everyone seems pretty happy. Locals regard me with a confused look, but a simple hand wave and a ‘Mambo’ usually gets a big and ready smile. But still, I can’t imagine my childhood with no bookstore, no library, no music hall, no sports teams.

This post amounts to an ineloquent but realtime effort on my part to come to terms with the unfathomable differences between life here and my life waiting for me back home come August. But until I come to some kind of satisfying unified theory on this, here are some pictures of animals and such.



Elephants


Masaai girl herding cattle by the highway


Overturned truck with spilled cargo along the highway