Friday, August 24, 2007

Land of Milk and Honey


So I’m having lunch one day at my favourite dive, the Passing Show (think greasy-spoon Montreal deli without the deli and waiters sporting black bow-ties) and this man comes over and sits at my table. It’s common to share tables during the busy lunch time hours, when seating is scarce. He is reasonably dressed and, with his many bags, looks like he’s travelling. So I ask if he’s going somewhere and discover he is planning to catch the afternoon ferry to Dar in a few hours time. Silence then falls over our conversation despite the noise of the bustling diner around us.

It is a mixed crowd, filled with foreigners who have disrespectfully dressed as if they by the pool at a Club Med, and local laymen and business people whose appearance is more conservative: collar shirts and loose fitting pants for men, and long skirts and shawls for women, with some also wearing the traditional bui bui, or black cloth that covers everything from the head to the ankle but has an opening for the face. They have all come to enjoy what Passing Show is known best for: excellent local food at cheap prices that are pre-determined by a menu instead of being calculated according to your skin colour – a common practice of one local restaurant that has a chicken and rice dish to literally die for but overcharges foreigners for the priveledge. To avoid this scam, myself and the other interns will either give money to our Tanzanian colleague who we'll accompany to the restaurant and then wait behind the wall of the restaurant compound so the owner can't see us, or ask the office assistant to go on our behalf.

Not wanting to eat in silence, I attempt to start a conversation by telling him I’ve come from Toronto to do an internship with the Aga Khan Foundation.

He scrunches his face as if I pinched a nerve.

I brace for a potentially critical response to the Foundation similar to ones I've heard in the past.

One time I was talking to a night wathman while waiting for a friend and upon hearing of my association with His Highness, made sure I knew that the Foundation only serves the interests of the Ismaili community and no one else, despite the global evidence of AKF programming in Africa and Asia benefiting people of all faiths. He occasionally worked at the Ismaili mosque in town and not being an Ismaili himself, let alone a Muslim, probably felt excluded from the communal love. Therefore anything related to the Aga Khan was not right.

Another time was in conversation with a religious zealot over tea, chipati and fish one morning at a sea-side eatery. I stopped there on my way to work to get a quick bite, but ended up staying longer than anticipated after he launched into conversation about the immorality of the Bush regime, to which I gladly contributed. The topic eventually shifted focus to the Foundation, which he believed was too “modern” and therefore was losing touch with the fundamental morals and tenants of Islam. He asked for my number and I gave him my e-mail instead, not wanting to get too chummy after having second thoughts.

* * *

It turns out my lunch time companion at the Passing Show has no beef with the Aga Khan. Instead it is with Toronto.

“I use to live there once” he says, “in Scarborough, where all the aliens live.”

Ah, a Toronto basher who lived in Scarborough. Can he really be blamed? I disagree with the alien comment though. Although Scarborians are rather rough around the edges, they look more like humans than Martians.

The man talks of his wife and children, who currently live in Toronto. I ask him if he plans to return “home” and see them. He tells me bluntly that “home” is here in Zanzibar, where he was born and raised. Besides, he has no money to do that anyway, and it is this thought that triggers a statement I have never heard anyway say during all of my travels throughout the Global South:

"I left Canada to find work in Tanzania."

Tanzania, a country where the life expectancy at birth is 50 some-odd years, where those 64 per cent of the population who are not living below the poverty line of USD 1 per day make a average income equivalent to USD 800 per year (or like the teacher I just met in Pemba, USD 400), where 80 percent of the labour force works in the rural sector to eek out a living selling commodities for pennies (go rich world trade tariffs and climate change!), where national unemployment is not publicly recorded because of a largely informal and untaxed economy that makes defining such term rather difficult, or because the government is too embarrassed in admitting it is high. Although Tanzania’s a very beautiful country with a rich culture and (colonialist) history (of exploitation), it’s not generally known as a go-to country for jobs and opportunity. Those places are either elsewhere on the continent, like in South Africa or Nigeria, or overseas, like in Europe or North America.

But North America always ranked the number one for the place to be for a 'better life' in my numerous conversations with residents and students during my year at UDSM and month and a half as an intern here in Stone Town.

It is seen as a land of milk and honey.

After all, how could the streets not be lined with gold when the North Americans my conversants saw had laptops, iPods, fancy shoes, digital cameras, silver watches and spent the equivalent to an average monthly income on fancy meals not once, but many times a week? Surely anyone who can afford all that plus a plane ticket to travel halfway around the world must come from a magical place where money grows on trees and silk is used as bathroom tissue (apparently the women here are easy too and make excellent housewives)?

But for my lunch time companion headed to Dar, the reality of Canada was far from sugar coated. Instead his experience in this perfect land crushed his high expectations and led him down a path of depression, not happiness. It was something he regretted doing:

“Moving to Canada was the biggest mistake of my life.”

Fourteen years of mopping floors and scrubbing toilets is apparently a dream smasher. It also throws your sense of self worth out the window, especially if you have qualifications to do something more stimulating that interests you. For him, it is supplying shops and government departments with IT equipment. But to Canadian employers in this field, he was nothing more than an unskilled labourer from the Third World who lacked Canadian credentials. So toilet and taxi duty it was.

As he tells me over a colourful plate of chicken biriyani, his dreams of a happy life filled with riches therefore never materialized. Constantly rejected by employers outside of the custodial industry had its toll on his physical and emotional health, and soon reached the point where he decided to return home and start over once again, only this time feeling defeated. And adding to his misery, he would have to go back single because he couldn't afford to bring along his Canadian wife. But hey, looking on the brighter side of things, she never appreciated his “Swahili style of communication” anyways (if it resembles anything like the words he used to order his meal, it is solely based on imperatives).

So now he’s back home in Tanzania, where, as he tells me while washing down his meal with a soda, he belongs; working the daily grind in a culture and environment most compatible with his personality and skill set; making a living that allows him to support his family, who still live with the “aliens” in a dream country that refused him, and probably many other newcomers like him, the luxury of emotional stability and peace.

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Salama Island

So here I am sitting at my desk with the evening calls to prayer ringing all around me - a sign that I’ve stayed at the office far too long. But that’s the price you pay when managing a blog, to go that extra mile and document your experiences and have something to look back to when my time here is long over.

I haven’t been active this month with my entries because I’ve had lots work to do. His Highness (the Aga Khan) is visiting Tanzania this week and major communications materials for all of AKF’s projects have to be finalized. That means I’ve been completing project profiles and making power point presentations highlighting the projects around the island, finicky work that at times is fun but for the most part is mind numbingly dull and painful. At least it’s something that is needed by AKF Tanzania and won’t, I hope, all be for nothing like past experience has shown. My plan is to finish much of these mini projects asap so I can make myself available for project monitoring and evaluation work or other tasks outside of the communications theme.

Generally speaking, life is pretty good after living here for one and a half months. I’ve fallen into synch with the Zanzibar lifestyle, or to be more precise my expat version of it, pretty well. I work the 9-5 in a beautiful heritage building that would look out onto the sea if the University of Dar es Salaam’s Marine Science Institute wasn’t blocking the view; I eat and drink at fine restaurants named after posh colonialists who “discovered” and tamed the wilds of this “dark continent” (these watering holes also provide stellar views of the Indian Ocean, especially of Zanzibar’s famous sun sets, my god!); I get chauffeured around town in a white SUV during the day to visit AKF project sites to collect information and interview beneficiaries; I sleep in a palace; I get someone to hand wash my clothes every other week, and her colleague serves me tea and biscuits every morning and afternoon at my desk, and her colleague brings me five daily newspaper around tea time so I know what’s going on around town. Life’s tough as an IDM-er, I know.

But it hasn’t all been selfishly pimping it up mzungu style. I’m also spending time helping my local friend Hemed launch his tour company, Salama Island Tours. "Salama" means "peace" in Swahili (and many other languages for that matter), and is also the name of his wife, who giggled ferociously when I suggested the idea at his home one evening. Personally I think it’s a great name, and so does Salama! Right now we’re creating a brochure and will begin work on a website shortly. Once those two items are complete, the communications side of things will be in place and Hemed will be ready to roll as an executive director and master co-ordinator. With an excursion list and packages already organized, the expressed interest of a few friends wanting to partner with the company, and Hemed's reputation for delivery quality tours, things look promising. Exciting times indeed. So if you have any advice for running a small tour company, please pass it along because Hemed and co. would be most appreciative. Also, if you ever want to come to Zanzibar, let us know and Hemed will make your stay unforgettable, but in the good way.

Anyways I must be off. It’s pitch black outside, my eyes are going cross-eyed from staring at this bloody screen for all day, and malaria-ridden mosquitoes are biting my feet. Ciao.