local transport

Top: Typical (although light) Dar traffic
Middle: a daladala
Bottom: CRUNCH! Pole (Swahili for "sorry") to the guy who thought the daladala wasn't going to cut him off.

Pictures 1

Top: A lychee from a local market. Apparently, you're not supposed to eat the seeds....
Middle: Women cooking at the Kivokoni fish market in Dar. We ate lunch here, and 3 days later, our GI tracts seem to be fine!
Bottom: Sister Hilde showing the children at the community center in Singida the scales we gave them for tracking the effect of food aid.

I Want a Fast Machine

After riding in what I can only describe as a school-bus with bench seating, for over 12 hours, we made it to Dar, as Betsy previously mentioned; I made a promise to my butt that I wouldn’t do that again until the Danforths arrived in April. Instead, we’ve been exploring Dar in what the locals call, Dala-dalas. They are actually old Japanese school buses, when I say old, I mean really OLD, shipped over and repainted with their destinations and sometimes their ‘mottos’. The paint-jobs look to be somewhat half-hearted as most of the Japanese cartoons are still visible under the section of bus they neglected to cover. Needless to say, these buses were not meant to have anyone over 5’-6” tall or heavier than 150lb. Again, just as everywhere else transportation takes you in this country, recommended capacity is merely a suggestion and rather a game to see how many more people they can stuff onto one of these things.
Today as we left Posta, the dala-dala we were riding “British Airways” crashed! The driver, if you can call him that, of “British Airways” (it is the name of the bus) rammed a Toyota Prado (a small SUV) while attempting to execute a 180 degree turn with roughly 40 people in a Japanese school bus. Needless to say, we didn’t make it and the Prado was smashed into the under-carriage of the bus. Luckily, Tanzania has a road-justice system, where a bunch of on-lookers ran over to assess the situation. After about 30 minutes of bickering back and forth, they came to the conclusion that the SUV driver was at fault since the dala-dala was larger and therefore he should have moved out of the way. A somewhat backwards system and I’m pretty sure the driver of British Airways would have had his license revoked in the US, but it was effective and we were quickly on our way.
The fun of dala-dalas, however doesn’t end there; we were embroiled a few days ago in what one could only call a “dala-dala war”. Similar to gang-land wars of the US, dala-dala wars are considerably less bloody but just as exciting and action-packed! Within the metro area of Dar es Salaam there are roughly 7,400 dala-dalas, which are all privately owned by approximately 2,500 different owners; which means on average that each owner has three. Many of the dala-dalas have similar routes, so it’s a competition to secure as many riders as possible. The other day we hopped onto a Kawe-Kariakoo dala-dala to go purchase fruits and vegetables at the market, not knowing what fun was in store for us. As we begun to roll away from the shoulder of the road, a second Kawe-Kariakoo dala-dala came flashing by to make it to the next stop before ours could get there. As both buses rolled to a stop at the second stand, the other bus ran our bus off the road in an attempt to delay us in getting to the next stand. Unfazed by the “minor” set-back, our driver began to off-road drive as we gunned it in an attempt to inch ahead of the other dala-dala. We were successful in getting ahead only to see that the other dala-dala decided to drag-race us. Both buses, the other riding down the opposite lane of traffic, nearly topping out in speed, ran a plethora of other vehicles off the road as we re-enacted the car-chase scene from the movie “Bullitt”. Although, with a few minor elements missing, such as patented bucket seats and a 1968 Ford Mustang Fastback, we felt as if we were in the back seat with Steve McQueen at the helm! We exited the dala-dala safely, thankful the only thing to have happened to us was elevated blood-pressure, at the Kariakoo market.
-Ryan

D-Day

Well, the research in Singida is done! And we’ve moved on to Dar, the land of milk and honey. Only a 'short' 12-hour bus trip away....on what would be a school bus in the US...with one pee-break....which I stupidly, oh so stupidly, decided not to take advantage of. But we're here now, and living in the relative lap of luxury, with a bunch of Italian and Tanzanian priests. Sadly, when we arrived, we found not one, but TWO of our three favorite restaurants closed! Luckily, we went to the embassy, and found a Christmas box waiting there for us from Ryan’s parents, with Christmas cookies inside, and they weren’t moldy! So at least we have some only slightly stale cookies to help us ease the pain.

In the past few days, we’ve been exploring Dar, and taking random dala dalas (public busses) to their termination point. We’ve learned that the Dar Airport Inn is no where near the airport, that Mtoncani is a great deal (all dala dalas are 20 cents no matter how far you’re going), but there’s nothing to see when you get there, and that Tanzanians can sleep anywhere, including standing up on a dala dala, using Ryan’s back as a pillow.

One of our favorite destinations is Kariakoo, a crazy fruit, spices, used clothing, bootleg dvd, and oddly enough, farm supply, market. The best part about it is the people watching. Today, we saw sanitation workers using used shoes tied to their faces as protective masks. While I understand not wanting to breathe the dust and smell from Dar es Salaam trash, I’m not sure that used shoes is the route that I would take.

-Betsy

Shoe-less Joe

Yesterday, after amassing large amounts of surveys, so many we are unable to keep them in our hotel room, we went to the post office to send them home. Our first trip to the post office was interesting… We lugged two boxes full of surveys (me carrying both since I am after all, the work horse, so much for the union I was trying to form), each weighing approximately 18 kg, down to the office about one half mile away. Upon reaching the post office, we were told that we needed to take our boxes to the Tanzania Office of Revenue, similar to a customs office, which is ironically adjacent to our hotel. Upon hearing this news I insisted upon taking a taxi, after all I haven’t lifted in over 6 months, because I was already getting sore from this (I’m really out of shape)! The customs office is conveniently located on the third floor of a building without an elevator. Anyway, we met with the customs guy, went back to the post office, paid our couple hundred dollars of postage and sent them off to the USA.
As my muscles ached from walking up and down the streets of Singida with 80lb worth of surveys, we decided to head to the Singida Youth Center. It was our intention to buy some of the “street kids” shoes, since they don’t currently own a pair. We met up with Sister Hilda, the operational manager of the center, who gathered four of the kids to go with us. We were able to find shoes for each of them, although I’m not so sure they chose the shoes based on fit… At the very least, they have some leather and rubber surrounding their feet, since walking around here barefoot is NOT recommended!
We had yet another chance run-in with a couple of local professionals here in Singida, the competitive whistlers! We have come to a consensus that these two men, both older men with colorful whistles, one green the other pink, are few bricks short of a full stack. They tend, every time we see them, to walk down the center of the roads blowing their whistles with hand-made traffic signs. We wonder if they want to become traffic cops although Singida doesn’t have traffic signs, none-the-less traffic officers. We’re always entertained by these men, since it seems neither bores of the continuous whistling and directing, it’s pretty amazing. On the off chance they happen upon each other, we witnessed this a few days ago, they tend to escalate the whistling as an attempt to become the loudest on the block. If only I could find where they bought these whistles I would have something to fill my time when I’m not working on surveys.
-Ryan

Hannibal research col-Lecter

Our time here in Singida has been just flying by, in a relative fashion. We haven’t been severely ill since arriving, which is probably the main reason we’ve enjoyed our time here so much. Also, Betsy’s research is moving right along and it looks like phase two will be concluded this coming Wednesday already, kicking butt and taking names! During the course of collecting data, Betsy and I have come across different parts of Singida, which have just slightly amazed us; part bizarre and part completely awesome!
One of our first finds within “unique” Singida was the Curio-Cabinet Jesus. Down the road from our hotel, which has large concrete animals outside scattered about, there is a Catholic Nunnery. This particular compound is one of the nicer looking areas of Singida so we decided to investigate and to our delight they have a live-size concrete Jesus, contained within a glass enclosure (see pictures below)! One of the nuns saw us looking through the gate and offered to let us in to see the amazing concrete Jesus, they’re so proud of it. We’re also white so getting into enclosed and gated areas is somewhat easy around here.
Speaking of gates, here in Singida they employ a slightly more sinister way to protect their buildings than in Haydom, they implant broken bottles at the top of the walls as a kind of razor wire technique. I think it’s amazing the ingenuity of using the one resource they have which will cut people, glass. Since they don’t have access to many materials here, it’s definitely a good way to keep people out (see picture below).
We’ve also found the first city waste disposal system since we’ve been in Tanzania here. Singida, for a Tanzanian town, is relatively clean and litter free. Having been to many different towns prior to coming to Singida and finding them to be just covered in trash we have been wondering why there isn’t taka-taka (Swahili for trash) everywhere! Well, we finally found the reason, they actually have places you can deposit your trash and again, another reason we really like Singida. Apparently, they had widespread outbreak of cholera a few years ago, since then they place large trash receptacles around town (see picture below). It looks really ugly, at least in the places where they placed these things but it’s quite amazing that they do this and keeps the rest of the town relatively clean. I’m glad our hotel isn’t near one of these, they smell like death and people are always climbing around in them, yuck!
As some of you know, we have done some of the data collection at a local youth community center, which is funded by Outreach Africa and run by the local Catholic diocese. Every day they feed a large number (around 150) of the students who attend the Majengo Ward schools; these are the same schools we are doing data collection from. Our mission here was to interview the “street” kids who frequent the center for food. Of the seven street children, two of them their parents had passed away and the others were abandoned in near-by villages and have been scraping-by for the past few years. All of them were in pretty rough condition; all have severe vitamin A deficiency, pellagra, worms, one has jaundice and another has HIV. None of them have shoes so they’re constantly cutting their feet on the ground and one had a large gash on his head. After a little investigation he admitted that other kids tried fighting him because he lived on the street and one hit him in the head with a large rock! Anyway, sorry for being such a downer, they’re situation is just so sad though. After the interviews we went out and bought all of them sodas, which was literally the best thing in the world to them!
Speaking of vitamin A deficiency, an issue Betsy definitely won’t have, our hotel, the Stanley, serves liver and fava beans for breakfast. Betsy has, much to my, and probably many of your, amazement, is that she has a large plate of this every morning. I recently brought up the idea of forming a research assistant union (thank you Ryan Davis for the idea) which she quickly squashed. I’ve become increasingly scared of her lately; she seems to have picked up the taste of liver and can’t shake the addiction. Many mornings I find her standing over me saying, “It’s time for breakfast”. If only she had a nice bottle of Chianti in the morning to accompany her meal, I could call her Hannibal…
-Ryan