For Jacqueline Rose, a volunteer this past August, involvement has taken the form of collaborative research with three fellow students in her Agroecology and Watershed Management class, offered by the Environmental Studies Department at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Jacqueline and Nima Khalily, Melissa Rhoads, and Parker Welch have written a paper, unpublished so far, which they hope could lead to a research grant.

If their “Solutions for a Healthier Watershed and Safe Drinking Water” does bring in funding for Jacqueline—and perhaps Tiffany Wise-West, a 2010 Karimu volunteer—to return to Dareda Kati for additional study, the villagers could reap huge benefits. Jacqueline and Tiffany probed Dareda Kati’s watershed, and the villagers’ uses of it, carefully during their ten-day visits. But the brevity of the visits frustrated them and they knew they could have accomplished much more during longer stays.

Without even trying to do full justice to the work by Jacqueline and her colleagues, I’ve included excerpts from one key section below:

“While the international development agencies potential for providing assistance may seem greater than a small-scale NGO’s, often that is not the reality. . . According to [the World Bank’s] website, ‘support for rural water is now channeled through national planning,’ which they claim helps to localize decision-making to ensure that the appropriate resources are devoted to appropriate projects. . . The reality is that international planning and bureaucracy can fall victim to uncertainty, poor resource allocation, and misappropriation of funds. . .”

Jacqueline and her colleagues admit that the World Bank worked with Babati District officials to “pipe water from the Endala River to a holding tank that feeds an irrigation flume” and that the “tank also supplies piped, untreated drinking water to Ufani School and Ayalagaya Village.” However, the residents of the village “claim the project was never completed and that another mile of irrigation was planned.” Furthermore, the “community did not give any indication of direct participation in the project.”

In contrast, Karimu’s small-NGO “model of aid emphasizes community-led adaptive planning through direct communication and relationship building, and creates change by localizing to the extreme. Funding goes directly to the village, point to point. Without the overarching goal of development and international trade to interfere with directly stated community requests, the projects that are most important to the villagers are given priority.”

I’ll end there because it gives me the chance to point out that the “projects that are most important to the villagers are given priority” precisely by you who continue to donate so generously to Karimu—for which the villagers and I thank you.—Don Stoll

Yet we merely borrow our generosity from our donors—and especially from Ken Terry and Debbie Burns-Walton. They own a Santa Cruz-based company, Quantaphy, which makes dyes used in medical testing to help distinguish between positive and negative results. We have just found out that, for the second year in a row, Ken and Debbie will match every dollar given to Karimu up to a total of $20,000.

The donating needs to happen fast, since Ken and Debbie have set a deadline of midnight on December 26. But their pledge gives Karimu a pretty good chance of satisfying the following needs of our Tanzanian village friends during 2012:

• $48,000 for two more duplex-style teacher houses;

• $4,000 to give the medical clinic its first toilet and sink;

• $3,500 for textbooks for Ufani Primary School;

• $1,000 for another year of special-needs education;

• $900 for another year of teacher development;

• $700 to feed children who now go hungry at school.

In case Ken and Debbie decided, on a whim, to change their company’s name to Karimu, I don’t think Marianne and I would have any right to complain.—Don Stoll

Though Marianne and I live and work on Staten Island now, on weekends we nearly always take the ferry to Manhattan. On yesterday’s glorious Indian summer afternoon we took the subway with our two daughters, who are visiting from California, all the way up to Amsterdam and West 110th, in Greater Harlem. There we went, for the second Sunday in a row, inside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which disputes the honor of being the fourth largest Christian church in the world—and the largest Episcopal church—with Liverpool Anglican Cathedral.

Since the previous Sunday, St. John’s activist congregation had sanctioned installation of the Council of Pronghorn: the skulls of twenty-three pronghorn antelope, mounted on weathered fence posts supported by discarded tractor discs and arranged in a circle of perhaps forty or fifty feet in diameter. One or the work’s creators, Terry Tempest Williams, has written that the pronghorn skulls “bear witness” to Wyoming’s natural-gas industry, now “on overdrive” in order to “fuel our economy, pay for our education, and pay for our lifestyle” (http://invokingthepause.org/blog/council-of-pronghorn-progressive/). Live pronghorn, “frozen in fear,” had “haunted” her and her collaborators, Felicia Resor and Ben Roth, as they all witnessed the “black scars of the open pit mines,” the “burning slag ponds,” and a “forest of lodgepole pines, once green, now red, dry and dusty, a result of local warming.”

At Karimu we work with the villagers of Dareda Kati, but without presuming to oversee them. Many have expressed their eagerness to use the cooking stoves, yet many more have said nothing to us. Maybe some who have said nothing have no intention of using the stoves, and maybe some who have shown excitement will lapse back into the comfort of cooking the old, familiar, lethal way over open fires. Even deadly familiarity can give us comfort: Marianne likes to point out that tens of millions of Americans continue to make unhealthy food choices, in spite of decades of public health education programs which Karimu could never rival. (How many millions of Americans still smoke cigarettes?) So I worry a little that our cooking stoves might become Dareda Kati’s discarded tractor discs, littering the village’s maize fields and crude dirt paths.

But then, as I recall the power of the Council of Pronghorn, I turn my attention from the tractor discs to the antelope skulls. Those could be the skulls of villagers, dead prematurely from respiratory disease caused by open cooking fires. I think also of the forested escarpment towering above Dareda Kati, increasingly scarred not by pit mines, but by women and girls who ravage it for firewood that the stoves could preserve. And I think that we at Karimu have no choice other than to do our very best with the villagers and to hope for the best.—Don Stoll

Pole pole: money from Karimu’s donors for a hundred stoves has gone out and the villagers we work with will finally see those first hundred stoves in the next few weeks. Shouldering a pile of firewood for a couple of miles might take years, rather than weeks, to break down the spine of a young girl; in fact, she will probably have matured into an old woman—or an exhausted middle-aged woman that American visitors mistake for an old woman—before she can no longer straighten up. And standing among the fumes of an open cooking fire at every single meal might take years, rather than weeks, to destroy one’s lungs.

So I suppose our friends in Dareda Kati Village can wait out several more weeks, or even months, if the wholesale supplier needs that long to find the second hundred stoves for which Karimu has the money. I suppose also that if the villagers can wait, then so can Karimu.

Pole pole.—Don Stoll

Their students included Avery Henderson, Jeannice Turner, Londale Theus, and Olivia Trevino, who coped so graciously with being held up for an extra day in Tanzania after our other volunteers had returned to California. But all the Long Beach students contributed so much to the success of our work in Dareda Kati Village that I believe any of them would have accepted one more day in Tanzania in stride.

To make amends satisfactorily to Anne and Bill, I should point out that they brought their students not only to help with construction at Ufani and Ayalagaya Schools, but to take a fully accredited, three-unit university course called Theatre Today (THEA 3241). Though I will owe Anne and Bill another apology if I get this wrong, I’m pretty sure that this course, which they plan to offer again next summer, is open to everybody and not just to CSULB students. But www.csulb.edu/international will correct any misinformation I have given.

Anne wrote in an e-mail from a few days ago that she and Bill envision having their students “build in the mornings and in the afternoon” while also “carrying through with educational initiatives that further Karimu’s mission. . . and CSULB’s through working with the secondary and primary students” at Ayalagaya and Ufani, respectively. Last month Headmistress Catherine of Ayalagaya Secondary School showed strong interest in the basic theatrical work that Anne and Bill and their students did at Ayalagaya. Because the meager budgets of Tanzanian public schools give Catherine and her colleagues no money to allocate for the arts, offering THEA 3241 in Dareda Kati Village every year could make a big impact on her students and on the younger ones at Ufani Primary.—Don Stoll

So waiting until three-thirty this afternoon to fly to Nairobi in order to make our connection to London is okay. Except that our plane stops abruptly as it rumbles toward takeoff; the pilot has discovered a technical problem. We return to the boarding lounge—or holding cell—for a wait of indefinite duration. Eventually we learn that our plane must be grounded for repairs and that Precision has no substitute aircraft. The seven-forty flight to Nairobi, now rescheduled for eight o’clock, will carry only those passengers from both the three-thirty and the seven-forty who still have time to make their connections out of Nairobi; passengers from the three-thirty and the seven-forty not traveling beyond Nairobi need to get on the ten o’clock flight. Yet when the five of us try to board at eight o’clock, we are turned away and told, mysteriously, that we’ve been put on the ten o’clock.

I had managed to defer gratification of my young companions’ appetites with promises of superior food in the Nairobi airport, but now they have reached their limit—or breached it in the case of Londale, a six-foot-six vegan for whom finding sufficient calories is always a challenge on this relentlessly carnivorous continent. We leave our holding cell, climb some stairs, and order dinner (my treat) in Mt. Kilimanjaro Airport’s only restaurant.

Dinner never arrives. A woman from Precision Airways comes huffing and puffing up the stairs to tell us that we must go right away: we’re on the eight o’clock flight after all. She disputes noisily in Swahili with our waiter and then shoves her way into the kitchen—to find out how far along our meals are, I suppose. We listen to the Swahili coming out of the kitchen get faster and louder. She emerges to pronounce the verdict: I should pay half-price, or twenty dollars. And then as I trail my more nimble companions down the stairs the waiter catches up to me and grabs my arm: what about the sodas and bottled water we had consumed? I still have a number of hundred-dollar bills left and one ten-dollar bill, but no time to make change. So I hand him the ten for our five dollars’ worth of drinks.

Out on the tarmac, the agitated face of Upenda, the Precision agent who had arranged our blissful night at the Kia Lodge, signals a problem: since the plane has only four open seats to accommodate our group of five, she needs to pull one already seated passenger off the flight, and she doesn’t have a plan. I tell her a true story:

“Last year this same flight was also overbooked by one. So the pilot chose one of the people in our party to sit in the cabin next to him.”

Upenda’s tense expression doesn’t change.

“The pilot you have tonight goes strictly by the book. He’ll never accept that.”

It turns out all right, though. The flight attendant gives up her fold-down seat for Olivia, a theater director and actress who is completely comfortable as she sits at the front of the plane, facing all the other passengers. She smiles and waves at everybody.

Things go smoothly to Nairobi and then all the way to London, where I make sure that Olivia and her friends get their boarding passes to fly to Los Angeles before buying them breakfast and saying goodbye. My own flight heads to San Francisco.

Only one further misadventure waits for me. An hour or so out of Heathrow, the Virgin Atlantic flight attendant serves me a disappointingly small meal. But one of the qualities of the Tanzanians that I admire is their resistance to whining, so I make the best of my pasta and meat sauce and try to eat my few grapes and apple wedges slowly. Suddenly the flight attendant looms over me.

“There’s been a terrible mistake, sir. You received the child’s meal that was intended for this young lady!”

I follow the line of the attendant’s finger and see, three seats to my right, tears streaming down the face of a five-year-old blond girl.

“Don’t fret, luv,” the attendant tells the little girl. “We’ll find you another meal and load it up with lots of extra sweeties.”

The attendant snatches my tray before I can claim the apple juice or the gingerbread cookie. I imagine teacher Edward watching me take even more food out of the mouth of a child and I am grateful for the attendant’s quick hands.—Don Stoll

]]> http://dstoll49.wordpress.com/2011/08/27/tanzania-diary-august-19-3/feed/ 1 dstoll49 http://dstoll49.wordpress.com/2011/08/26/tanzania-diary-august-17-august-18/ http://dstoll49.wordpress.com/2011/08/26/tanzania-diary-august-17-august-18/#comments Fri, 26 Aug 2011 15:06:14 +0000 Don Stoll http://dstoll49.wordpress.com/?p=896 Continue reading →]]> August 17: Fifteen minutes’ drive below the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater—which someone has described as a giant bowl into which God poured His most beautiful wild animals—our four-by-four stops in the bustling town of Karatu. Next to the first set of speed bumps we encounter coming into town, Bumps Café was opened last spring by an American woman named Tina and her soft-spoken Masai husband, Wantay.

Within the next few weeks, Tina and Wantay will sell us at their cost, seventeen thousand shillings (or just over eleven dollars) each, two hundred Envirofit cooking stoves. The sale, and distribution to the villagers Karimu serves, await solution of some minor logistical problems by our Board member in Tanzania, Joas Kahembe. I still think, as I had before leaving California on the first of August, that September or October looks probable.

Tina shows us a stove and explains how she will demonstrate its correct use to four or five villagers bused to Karatu by Joas; they will then teach their neighbors who receive the stoves how to maximize their fuel-efficiency and their smoke-reducing properties.

For Tina and Wantay, even their for-profit sales of the stoves don’t yield much because they know how little cash their intended customers can spare. So we hope our safari driver, Moses, makes good on his promise to spread the word among other drivers about Bumps’ French press coffee—in a country where one must almost always settle for instant coffee—cleanliness which extends to the restrooms, and fairly quick wireless Internet. For making the Envirofit stove available across a wide swath of Tanzania at an affordable price, Tina and Wantay deserve to prosper.

August 18: The ouster this evening from our Kilimanjaro-to-Nairobi flight of two of our African-American volunteers looked briefly like the punchline of a running joke that had originated with our reception in Dareda Kati Village exactly two weeks ago. On that morning the villagers responded coldly to our four African-Americans, mistaking them for Tanzanian translators or safari guides too proud to speak Swahili to poor country people. The villagers’ gradual discovery that not all Americans are white (which I later noted in my speech at our farewell ceremonies) broke the tension.

Now, by the time Jeannice Turner and Londale Theus learn that they will have to fly out of Africa tomorrow, one day late, the villagers’ pleasure in their discovery had become clear to all of us, and some of our white volunteers can jokingly tell Jeannice and Londale that “we knew the Tanzanians didn’t want you to leave.”

Then Precision Airways lets our two other African-Americans board, while bumping me and a couple of other nonblack volunteers, Avery Henderson and Olivia Trevino. So I guess the five of us share the honor of being liked best by the Tanzanians. But whatever affection the Tanzanians have for us, compelling them to cling to us for one more day, cannot rival the respect we feel for them.—Don Stoll

For days, he had been intent on giving some material reward to Marianne and me despite our insistence that there was no need. As yesterday’s speeches and music and gifts and feasting and photographs wound down, he finally made a specific suggestion: would we permit him to buy us a liter of water?

We didn’t need a liter of water, but accepting one would salve Edward’s conscience. So he pressed a ten-thousand-shilling note into my palm—enough to buy ten liters and equivalent to almost seven dollars, a substantial sum for a Tanzanian primary school teacher.

Although seven dollars meant a lot more to Edward than it meant to Marianne and me, by this time we did not doubt that we ought to accept his gift.—Don Stoll

This doesn’t mean that cellphone-banking is not the wave of the future in sub-Saharan Africa, only that Africans need more education in the uses and misuses of current information technology. Most residents of Dareda Kati’s subvillages lack electricity in their homes and even some of Daniel’s teaching colleagues have no idea what a movie is. So they figure to be relatively susceptible to IT fraud and therefore relatively cautious about using current technology.

But this morning Daniel told us a story that explains the need for such technology here. Once a month he must travel for an hour or more by bus to Babati in order to collect his salary from the nearest ATM. Earlier this year, however, one of Babati’s frequent power blackouts disabled the ATM on the afternoon of Daniel’s arrival. Unable to afford an overnight stay in any of Babati’s guesthouses, he simply returned home, empty-handed, on the next bus.

In the afternoon, Islam spared Marianne and me the pleasure of slaughtering two chickens presented to us by Ufani School’s head teacher, Paul Yoronimo. Paul had given us the hen and rooster for our community dinner. Alert for an escape route, though, we realized that our translator Yusufu Ramadani, a Sunni Muslim, probably would refuse to eat an animal slaughtered by non-Muslims.

Yusufu didn’t disappoint us—which we can say also of his translating and of his tireless work in the construction of teachers’ apartments at Ufani and Ayalagaya Schools. Yusufu’s family is the only Muslim family we know of in this area, although we’re sure there are others. (The single mosque is tiny, but still too big for Yusufu’s family alone.) Today more than ever, we’re grateful for them.

August 13: Edward, one of the teachers at Ufani School, broke our hearts today by insisting that he must give us something even though he has nothing to give.

No matter how many times Marianne and I assure the villagers that all we want from them is devotion to improving their lives and the lives of their children, it doesn’t sink in with some of them. Telling Edward this today only provoked more embarrassing praise.

“Do you think,” he asked in all sincerity, “that I can ever become as good a person as this: wanting just to give and never to receive?”

If only I were as virtuous as Edward imagines that  am!

August 14: On this night, our last in the village, our volunteers shed many tears.

But those only came following the laughter. Josephus, who revived and continues to lead traditional dance here, visited our cafeteria with three of his most athletic comrades, Petro, Esther, and Martina. Standing, but with her upper body parallel to the floor, Martina led some of our younger, more fit volunteers in a dance, borrowed from the Goro tribe, of which a Victorian traveler might have written that “decency inhibits a more exact description.” I content myself with relaying Dr. Susan Hughmanick’s joke: “I’m worried that somebody is going to get pregnant.” (Susan specializes in obstetrics and gynecology, so that would have been all right.)

At the end of the night the four dancers walked out into the pitch-dark toward their homes, having politely but decisively refused our offer of payment. Because they possessed only one flashlight among them, Marianne and I and Yusufu, our translator, accompanied them part of the way with a flashlight of our own. Through Yusufu, we learned that earlier in the day Petro had taken his youngest child, who is not yet two, to the Catholic hospital and received a diagnosis of pneumonia.

Petro could have justified taking payment for his dancing by telling us about his sick child, since neither treatment at the Catholic hospital nor transportation there is free. But, like teacher Edward, he wanted to give us something.

August 15: My entries for the last few days have been sparse, so I need to do some catching-up—in particular, to make sense of my remarks at today’s farewell ceremonies, reproduced below.

On Friday the twelfth, Daniel Amma led Marianne and me on a one-mile walk past Ufani Primary School to visit Bacho Primary School. Bacho School is in far better condition than Ufani was when we first saw the latter four years ago: Bacho School is fully roofed and has cement floors, doors in the door-frames, and wooden shutters for the glassless windows. But the walls are unfinished inside and out and the students don’t have enough desks or textbooks. It’s a school we probably would already have helped if, in 2007, we had toured it rather than Ufani and if the community had asked for help. Yet we have also seen Dareda Kati Primary School, a short walk from Ayalagaya Secondary School and in worse shape than Bacho School.

Just as we have come to understand that doing what we can for our friends in the community can’t mean drawing the line at assisting Ufani and Ayalagaya Schools, we also see now that bringing clean water to Ufani School won’t satisfy the water needs of the entire community. Awareness of this has been unavoidable almost from the start of our visit due to complaints by villagers for whom a long hike to fetch water from Ufani School is out of the question.

Then on Saturday the thirteenth some of the villagers led Marianne and our cheerful, insatiably curious water specialist, Jacqueline Rose, to a spring with the potential to stream water to a large area far from Ufani School. Why, the villagers wanted to know, does Karimu have no plan to pipe water from this spring and to clean it up prior to tapping?

Knowing about this question and about the needs of Bacho and Dareda Kati Primary Schools gives context to my speech which follows (and which Daniel Amma translated into Swahili as I spoke):

“Out of the thirty-one foreigners visiting your village, you have one from Japan and two from England, but the rest of us—all twenty-eight—come from the United States of America. In America, many people are afraid to travel to Africa. Our volunteers, though, having enjoyed the beauty of your land and its people, as well as the overwhelming hospitality of this village, will from now on shake their heads in wonder when they think about those Americans who fear Africa.

“Therefore one of the benefits of travel is clear: the traveler can learn important things about faraway places. Another benefit of travel, however, is that the people who host travelers can also learn about far-off places. For example, this year your village has seen with its own eyes that not all Americans have white skin. In fact, the number of Americans with black skin is something like thirty million—only a few million people less, I think, than the entire population of Tanzania.

“But you cannot learn everything about people who visit you just by watching the visitors. Sometimes the visitors must tell you about themselves, so now I want to tell you a little bit about us.

“First, please do not think that we are rich just because we come from America. I think none of the Americans here are rich. Some of the university students who have come here from California had to work very hard for the money they needed to pay for this long trip.

“And for much of the last year, Marianne and I had no jobs. That is why we traveled all the way to the United Arab Emirates and the Sultanate of Oman: we could not find jobs in California. Yet we still cannot find jobs in California. For this reason, in a few days we will go not to California but to New York, five thousand kilometers away from our home and our children. At least in New York, so far from our home, we have found jobs.

“I tell you these things not so that you will feel sorry for us. I tell you so that you will understand that we are not rich, that Karimu is not rich, and that therefore Karimu cannot help satisfy all the needs of this village at once. We want, for example, everyone in the village to have clean water, and not just the people who live close to Ufani School. We want all the schools in the village to be better, and not just Ufani School and Ayalagaya Secondary School.

“However, I want you to understand that it is not our riches that allow us to bring better schools and mosquito nets and clean water to you. We do not have riches, but we have a profound love for your village, and it is love which gives Karimu its power.

“Some of you know the great words in praise of love which St. Paul wrote in his First Letter to the Corinthians, in the thirteenth chapter. Paul wrote there that love never fails. We believe that, because of our love for you, Karimu will not fail you.

“But in that same letter Paul also wrote that love suffers long, that love is patient. I think that if Paul had written in Swahili, he would have written that love goes pole pole [slowly—a frequent expression among rural Tanzanians, who seldom have reason to hurry].

“So I beg you to believe not only in the success of love, but also in the patience of love. If we unite in love and show patience toward one another, in time we can succeed in improving more than two schools and in bringing clean water to more than one part of your village.

“The Book of Ecclesiastes reminds us that ‘To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven.’ Please give Karimu time to achieve its purposes.

“For many of us, visitors and villagers alike, today is—referring again to Ecclesiastes—a time to weep. But please let us make this afternoon also a season for rejoicing.”—Don Stoll

We had already heard—for example, from a young man named Yusufu Ramadani who works mainly as a laborer but sometimes as a replacement teacher at Ufani, and currently as one of our translators—that even absolutely pure water could not attract those villagers who, like Yusufu and his family, live far from the school. (People in the village are accustomed to making tough decisions about how hard they will work in order to avoid illness. Yesterday Yasenta and Léoncé suggested that boiling their family’s drinking water is a chore they are not willing to perform; without a modern stove fed by gas or electricity, after all, boiling water becomes a grind.)

In the near term, unfortunately, Karimu might have a hard time raising the money to run more than one pipe from the water tank that we plan. Maybe we can add more pipes in the future, but for now the villagers might have to satisfy themselves with the knowledge that at least some of them, especially the children and teachers of Ufani School, will get sick less often.

At the end of the meeting the men’s group and the women’s group, separately, each expressed their gratitude for the six hundred and forty mosquito nets that Karimu delivered last year, asserting that many fewer villagers have suffered from malaria than in the past.

August 11: Peggy Seltz has joined us on this visit to Tanzania, as she did two years ago. Peggy made the award-winning film, Until We Meet Again: Building a School in Tanzania, about Karimu’s work and is shooting more footage now. This morning she films students in Standard VII, the highest level of primary school, as they read aloud the letters they have written to middle-school students in Santa Cruz, California.

One student after another declares his or her wish to become a teacher. I suppose this is partly because Ufani Primary School’s teachers make excellent role models. But the children’s rural isolation—evident also in their nearly unanimous choice of ugali, or cornmeal mush, as their favorite food—exposes them to few career possibilities other than teacher. Nevertheless, four or five out of thirty-eight children say they want to become doctors and one girl startles us by saying she would like to be a pilot.

(Eight days later, four Cal State-Long Beach theater students and I will wait for hours and hours to fly out of Mt. Kilimanjaro International Airport. One of the students, Olivia Trevino—in fact, a recent graduate—observes that the children cannot grasp the possibility of “dreaming of a different life.” Olivia, a gifted novice director, points out that none of the children she met at Ayalagaya Secondary School wishes to be, or even understands what it could mean to be, a director or actor or sculptor or writer. “It’s such hard work to satisfy the necessities of life,” she says, “that they have no time left to dream.”)

These are the children of subsistence farmers. Not a single child out of the thirty-eight confesses an aspiration to farming.—Don Stoll