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….