recycled fishes

in homage to all the trash that ends up in the ocean...fishes made out of trash: http://www.gugazine.com/2009/09/plastiquarium/

wrong busses

Spent the day riding buses to wrong places today. I’ve gotten maybe overly calm about this. I got on the bus and realized it wasn’t going to go where I thought it was and decided I’d just see Ubungo once and for all and know where this place is where so many busses go. Forty five minutes later, we had passed out of any area of town I was familiar with, and I realized what a thin line of Dar I navigate never moving far from the coastline and mostly tracing the edge of the city. The bus though went through Kinondoni and Sinza, past miles of the same variety of shops, shuffled into a new order every few miles…used clothing, pharmarcies, plumbers, furniture makers, fruit sellers, cloth sellers and small restaurants…and every once in a while the road elevated enough that I could see down past the front row of shops and into a sea of corrugated roofs fit so close to each other that from above maybe they would all look like crooked roof tiles on the same house. To just ride along on the road and realize I haven’t a clue what’s in there...makes the idea of research seem silly.
I corrected my bus problem by getting a taxi to take me back to where I was originally headed…the UN information centre. I wanted see what sort of stuff they may have in their library. Maybe it was the bus ride, but the UN information centre just seemed so sad. I walked in and wandered the stacks of pamphlets published by the UN in the last twenty or so years. Coffee farming, Sisal farming, “groundwater and society”, “vulnerability and property rights of widows and orphans, women and informal entrepreneurship, … all these 80 page pamphlets floating around here perhaps the only proof of projects proposed or finished. Packed as tightly as those houses. Calling the UN ineffectual is certainly not an original critique …just seemed particularly apt as I tried to thumb though all the skinny little multicolored bindings.
On the way home, on another bus going to the wrong place, it was getting near rush hour and more people were selling things in the street…pillows, apples…my favorite though was a guy weaving between cars trying to sell two copies of a book I just barely saw the title of…Research Methodologies.

Anything wrong with this picture of my bathroom?

Same as it ever was...article on the waste trade actually increasing...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/science/earth/27waste.html?_r=1&hp

Mama Jengo and Sister Epiphania

There is certainly a much wider range of almost mundanely random things that happen here. They are the things I’ll recall for a long time in vague snapshot images. Like taking a Daladala (the public bus…called daladala because it is cheap to ride (sounds like dollar)) with a Korean nun and talking with her in Kiswahili. I found out that she has seven siblings and that her parents died. I wish I knew more. She is off tomorrow morning back to the small village where she is a nurse and there is maybe three cars a day that pass through town. On the daladala we ran into an Indian nun that she knew and we were all standing there hanging on to the railing squished in with a dozen people standing between seats. I went to the university yesterday and Wolfgang, this German professor who has been generously helping me hopefully get contacts and an informal affiliation at the university introduced me to a professor there who does work on slums and urban development. He was very friendly and presented himself as endlessly willing to help but that may reflect a cultural nicety more than it will result in actual assistance. I don’t say that cynically so much as I’m trying to make sure I rely too heavily on the idea that total strangers who are busy with their own lives and responsibilities are going to hold my hand here and help me.
Also, at dinner here at the hostel there is always a string of mostly westerners who come through on their way upcountry (as in, anywhere that isn’t Dar es Salaam) or out of the country and its interesting to hear briefly what they are doing here or how long they’ve been here. I started talking to this French anthropologist (who looks vaguely like David Carradine) the other night, who had been traveling with his daughter to the area where he has been conducting fieldwork on an off for the past twenty years. He told us about his work with communities that live around the national park (I forget which one) and how with the new rules for hunting and fishing in the national park it is impossible for fishermen who live in the village to afford to send their kids to school if they fish legally. This means they are often forced to fish illegally by sneaking into the park at night, and trying to avoid both park rangers and crocodiles. Certainly a problem that conservation has to face, when efforts to preserve nature privileges access to land almost exclusively to foreigners while locals can’t even send their children to school. Anyways, when he heard what I was interested in doing (generally looking at people moving into the city and accessing resources) he told me that many people from the region where he works moved into the city in the sixties and seventies. He called up Hassim, someone who he has worked with in the field for years and arranged for him to come to Dar to introduce me to people I could talk to and interview. Just like that. I called Hassim and talked to him briefly…he knows more English than I know Kiswahili but still it is limited…and we will see where it goes. I guess I have been rewarded by choosing a good place to stay.
Also last night Roxanne invited me (Roxanne is from Berkeley…she is working at a micro-finance bank here) to join her friend Charlene and her at the “Irish Pub” for “Salsa Night” the idea of both of those things (fake irish pub and partner dancing) are things I would studiously avoid back home but the size of the social world here doesn’t really allow for, uh, individually tailored subcultures…so one does things like go salsa dancing.
Roxanne and I planted ourselves firmly on the couch and watched for most of the night but the reason to go these things is to meet people like Raoul. The dangerously tanned Puerto Rican-American here apparently training the Tanzanian army…wearing n a shirt unbuttoned to his navel revealing a snarl of chest hair and two giant gold chains. He had just moved here from Nigeria and before that Iraq, where he taught Turkish and Czech soldiers how to Salsa in the barracks. Or Sean, the lonely bald British guy who works for an electricity company and talked about how his hobby back home is roaming the English countryside with a metal detector, and how, within a weekend they found six thousand metal objects around the outside of a house in some village that had been around for a thousand years. Nice but strange misfits... who I usually try to avoid talking to about what they think of Africa or living here. Its usually pretty predictably cynical in a way that strikes me as very unsympathetic. Cynical in a way that demonstrates that if they ever did commiserate with locals for what is obviously a tough life almost everywhere you look, they long ago stopped really noticing it as much more than a nuisance to their own security and comfort. Is this something that happens when you are here long enough or a characteristic of westerners spending a life in contract jobs in the developing world? All the bleeding heart NGO types though are a different story I suppose. Just trying to parse it all out….

Man collecting recycling

Started up Kiswahili classes yesterday out at Slipway, an overpriced but pleasant place where foreigners go to eat expensive spaghetti and pizza and shop for bejeweled souvenirs. The intermediate class is just me and a Korean nun, Epiphania. I immediately liked Epiphania. She conveys kindness immediately and smiles at every awkwardly executed sentence I say in way that never seems to convey condescension. I am trying to imagine her life. She lives in a small village ten hours away from Dar as a nurse. She has been here for a year and is staying all together for four. Her English is not so good…in fact, I think we can maybe converse best in Kiswahili. Her Kiswahili is pretty limited too, even though it is far better than mine. In October I think she said, she will be working alone at the hospital. Not quite sure what that really means, but I am picturing trying to care for patients when you have a limited ability to even listen to them explain what is wrong let alone tell them what to do. I guess she will probably be fluent before long. Really though for her, it is like learning two languages at once, since her dictionaries and anyone who does teach her or help her is not going to know Korean. Our teacher has been late both days…like two hours. She is old…I was sort of taken aback by how frail and, well, old she looked when she arrived. The other teachers were young and energetic at the other tables and with a job like this, they were probably doing relatively well. Mama Jengo though arrived in these old dusty patent leather heels that looked thirty years old…with what looked like a piece of paper fashioned for an insole. Her dress just sort of hung on her three sizes too big and her neck and face looked like mosquitoes held her hostage every night. Out of her bag comes an endless stream of well-used goods, like scraps of old paper that she writes our lessons on, some clothes and a pair of foldable reading glasses as if space in that large bag was at such a premium that reading glasses needed to be half their normal size.
The teaching is a bit infuriating. It is hard to deny that things here happen slower…and with teaching too there seems to be no premium on efficiency…we wait as she refolds the paper and writes down more words and then we copy them and pass the book for exercises between the three of us. She is a good teacher though and will hopefully save me from terrible kiswahili. Mama J better be on time tomorrow though. Epiphania I can tell is getting a bit perturbed by all this waiting and is liable to lash out real soon. Its going to get ugly.

This blog is about my research and about being in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. I study recent urban history and I study trash. The Orwell quote captures most of my fascination with trash, if I am reading it correctly. Orwell wrote it in The Road to Wigan Pier after visiting industrial northern England and reflecting on the poor living conditions of the workers there. I guess I assume that Orwell is presenting a somewhat cynical view of “liberty” that’s nearest synonym may be “capitalism” and therefore reflecting on quite a wide range of “dirt” that necessarily accompanies its various forms. I guess then its easiest to say I am interested in waste and wasting in modern economies and cultures and I think in Africa there are many interesting forms of both to consider…from why there is trash on the street, to governmental waste and corruption, to transnational relationships where Africa is often treated as a wasted continent.

Arriving here for research though tears away much of the security blanket of research questions. My topic is recent, ongoing and ubiquitous...it lacks right now much of a fixed historical point, it is too big to manage and not obvious where to start, especially in a place where i have so little cultural traction. This blog will probably just be pictures for family and friends but maybe it'll also be some sort of research repository as i try to figure things out.