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Living in Transition

Tanzania is poor, it’s one of the poorest nations on earth.  Usually in the top twenty for that honor that no one is hoping to have bestowed upon them.  Along with poverty comes a lack of resources, infrastructure, opportunity, and internet too slow for snapchat--they will tragically never learn any of DJ Khaled’s major keys to success.  Where I live in Tanzania is what I would like to call semi-rural; it’s a large village, about an hour from a small city.  Roads are dirt, there’s no electricity, health outcomes are poor, and access to resources is bad.  

That was the narrative for about the first year that I lived here. 

TODAY WAS A BIG DAY

To say that it all happened at once is silly and reductionist, but today a massive plow like machine tore our hardened dirt road into pieces to prepare for the beginning of a paved road. Then a few pickups full of transformers and other electrical materials ascended the hills to begin the process of connecting the power lines to something that would actually bring power.  Last week one of the more successful businessmen remodeled his gas station, which now looks almost exactly like what a city gas station looks like.  Finally, two weeks ago the local government put in a bid to the district to build a hospital in our village.  The municipality in which we live, just became a new district, and new districts need new district hospitals.  

Like I said.  TODAY WAS A BIG DAY

Progress here is not necessarily uniform.  At the same time as the area where I live is seeing rapid modernization there are still areas of the country that will have severe food shortages.  Some people there will all but certainly starve to death--in a nation that is a net food exporter. Tanzania is still awesomely mismanaged, but it’s amazing to see progress.  The nation visibly appears to be turning a corner.  

I routinely ride in a toyota mini-van called a Noah to get to the village where I live from the city near-ish by.  It looks exactly like any other mini-van.  It has a drivers seat, a passenger’s seat, and two rows of benches.  You have ridden in this sort of van.  The vans that I ride in generally have 12 or more passengers, despite having seating for eight.  I thought that this was life and that it was not going to change. Two weeks ago we were stopped at a police checkpoint and told the driver that there were too many people in the car, everyone needed seatbelts. I was floored, this was on our crappy little dirt road, a dirt road that I had traveled on countless times, rolling past the same police checkpoint with passengers squeezed in like sardines. Then it happened again, and again, and again. 

What will this modernization mean?

It’s hard for me to say.  I am not an expert.  It will mean more Tanzanians walking along paved roads, probably soon they will be looking down at their smartphones.  It’s easy to think wistfully about a simple rural life in Africa. But this will also mean lights that children can use to read and do their homework.  It will mean refrigeration (for a lucky few at first).  It will mean access to the internet which is full of new knowledge and ideas.  It will mean access to new markets via online applications that help farmers to sell goods and find potential buyers.  Some people who live here will probably prioritize getting a TV over buying nutritive food, or the cost of their children’s education.  People are irrational, and poverty doesn’t change that--it intensifies irrationality. 

People who work in a village like this are wont to think about what things will be like if they return in ten years.  Today, I found myself asking what would things look like when I leave next year.  

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Malaria and Moral Imperatives

Malaria kills a lot of people.  We don’t really know how many because of the fact that most of these people, some 90% die in Sub-Saharan Africa, but the figure is somewhere between 236,000 and a million depending on WHO you ask (good old WHO pun for all you out there). Malaria is almost frustratingly preventable--if you sleep under a bed net you aren’t 100% safe, but between the fact that you’re much less likely to be bit, and the fact that you’re much less likely to become a disease vector.  It works pretty damn well in theory, and it’s really cheap.  It’s working okay in practice too.  Malaria rates and deaths are dropping, but slower than they could for a number of reasons.  These reasons draw off mostly off of my experience in Tanzania, so they aren’t necessarily relevant to other countries, or even other parts of Tanzania, though I do believe some of these to be relevant to many places. 

First, the delivery systems in places like Tanzania are bad.  Sometimes districts with high malaria won’t get enough nets, malaria test kits, and medicine.  This can happen for a lot of reasons, corruption in government has seen people stealing shipments to sell for profit elsewhere, poor quality roads can lead to accidents, late shipments, and other problems--resources do not always end up where they need to be when they need to be there.  

Second, behavior change is hard.  People in some places just aren’t used to sleeping under nets.  They’re heard stories about how the insecticide can hurt their babies, or their fertility.  They’ve seen their neighbors use these nets to keep birds out of gardens, or to go fishing.  They’re not convinced the nets work--can’t they just be bitten during the day?  They’re not willing to replace or mend holes in their nets in some cases.  Nets cost about $5 to buy, but often aren’t available in the village, and that sum of money can be an issue for many people.  I’ve been asked dozens of times when the next round of free nets are coming and our distribution was August last year.  Even if people used nets spending time outside during the early evening is just a part of life here.  There’s no electricity to have lights inside and the twilight will keep things bright for a bit longer so people stay outside cooking, socializing, and working. 

Third, there should be enough nets for everyone, but there aren’t.  The reality is that we just don’t spend enough money on Malaria.  According to the GlobalFund, “Experts estimate that to eliminate malaria as a serious public health threat will require US$5.1 billion each year. In 2014, less than half that amount was available.” This is in comparison to the $7.4 billion spent on HIV abroad by the United States alone in 2015.  This is in comparison to the $4.3 billion in military aid that Egypt and Israel received from the US last year.  This is in comparison to the $6 billion that Americans spend on Christmas decorations annually--and that’s before our electricity usage (guys, Jesus would soooo not be cool with this.)  I’ve talked to a commodity chain specialist from the US’ CDC who told me that part of the issue is that we simply don’t have enough of many things when it comes to malaria.  

That’s because we’re not spending enough, and I know that foreign aid is a zero sum game, but malaria should get a bigger piece of the pie.  Listen, just for the sake of comparison, there are 37 million people living with HIV, that means that we spent just about a nice even $200 per person on each patient last year--Americans alone.  There were 214 million cases of malaria last year, which means that we spent about $10 per case of malaria as a world.  Malaria interventions are good bang for the buck too, the Copenhagen consensus, a group of researchers who investigate the efficiency of aid programs rate malaria interventions as highly efficient.  HIV is still deadlier, and I’m not advocating for defunding HIV, but for elaborative purposes, it should be clear that we are not doing enough to end malaria, which brings me to my next point.

The developed world doesn’t have malaria in more then negligible quantities.  We got rid of malaria in the US in the late forties because it was killing a lot of people and we understood that it is preventable, but we didn’t get rid of it by using bed nets.  Ask your grandparent if they ever slept under a bed net, unless they served in the south pacific in WWII, or maybe in some parts of the swampy American Southeast, they did not.  We got rid of Malaria with insecticide--DDT to be exact, and it almost destroyed half of our ecosystems.  DDT was what pushed the Bald Eagle, our national icon, to being a highly endangered species.  We cheated.  America, decided that the safety and health of our people was more important than the health of our eco-systems.  Perhaps we did not fully understand the extent to which DDT could be dangerous, but there were scientists expressing grave concern while we dropped it from airplanes across our country.  Today it’s essentially illegal worldwide because of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants.  

I am not advocating that we should have used DDT to end malaria in Africa, South America, and Asia.  The damage that the chemical would have done to the Amazon, Congo Basin, and other tropical biodiversity hotspots would have been tragic.  I think these areas should be protected ecologically, but without straying too far from the point, I believe that we have a moral imperative to do more to help end malaria because well--we cheated.  These areas serve as the lungs to the world, many of the same areas where Malaria is most endemic are also fighting to preserve the world’s biodiversity, and often on our behalf since we have so thoroughly destroyed our eco-systems.  We would never allow them to get rid of malaria through the same environmental manipulation games that we played, and they shouldn’t, but I believe that creates an obligation on our behalf to help them do it through better ways.  (This is only intensified by our complicity in destroying these places for rare earth minerals [please recycle your cell phones], oil, and tofu for fuck’s sake, but that is a whole larger argument, as is the idea that we should subsidize the cost of maintaining ecological commodities). 

We have the technological power to end malaria worldwide in a year through harsh chemicals that we have used in the past.  We should not do this, but we did to save ourselves.  Perhaps you don’t feel a moral obligation to save people that you are so disconnected to, people who generally have so much less in the way of power and resources.  The merits and morals of an ideology that supports rugged individualism is up for debate, but I believe that the actions that we took, actions that severely impacted the globe to defeat malaria, tips the scale.  We’re asking people to subsidize our futures ecologically, let’s bevy up our support and subsidization of their health today.

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ON EX-PATS AND VOLUNTOURISTS

I have seen and heard just about every version of smug derision carelessly lofted in the direction of voluntourists, and I get it, their money could be better spent.  I made a conscious decision when I got to Tanzania that I would do my best not to bad mouth people who are trying to help.

“But if they donated that same amount of money they could do so much more good.”

Well yeah of course they could. But that’s not really how things work is it? Even for an NPR drive, where people are actually already getting a service, they have to give out little mugs, totes, and other pits of cache to flaunt at your co-op.  People like experiences, and if they want to have one where they can learn about a foreign culture and simultaneously feel useful I cannot blame them. There is a net benefit to the world if more people are more understanding of different cultures.

“But what they’re doing in inefficient, they don’t have any development skills.”

Well for those of you keeping score at home...so is the development industry as a whole.  We waste so much money.  There are tons of prominent development economists who have made a name by showing the staggering inefficiency, and in the very worse cases the harm caused by foreign aid.  Angus Deacon just won a Nobel Prize in part for this work.

“It’s condescending and patronizing for people to come and tell other people how to live.  We shouldn’t be doing anything.”

First, there are responsible ways to go about doing this work that rely on empowerment, capacity building, and the cardinal rule of “Do no harm.”  You start by not assuming that your white skin gives you all the right answers, like we did for the better part of five centuries.  Second, it’s where we are at, so instead of pretending like we could go up and take 95% of Tanzania’s entire medical budget with us, let’s be realistic.  Then let’s also realize that there is some quantifiable good being done.  We’ve helped drop HIV rates, Polio is nearly in global pre-elimination status (Pesky Pakistan needs to get it together), Malaria deaths are shrinking, et al. Lives are very literally saved.  It’s not perfect, but it is where we are now, we could and maybe should scale down, but it’s easier to take pot shots than to propose solutions so unless one of the latter is going to leave your mouth--close it.

“I hate to see people lose their cultures as they become more Westernized with TV’s and Coke!”

For starters--modernization and westernization are not the same thing.  Japan and South Korea are thoroughly modernized nations, but I think they would be insulted to be called “Western,” even with their Korean made Televisions and Japanese made PlayStations. The world is not a cultural time capsule or musem.  Some parts of Europe have thrived off of creating a facsimile for tourists, but I think that few would demand Romans wear leather thong sandals and take their chariots to work where they recline on a chaise and are fed grapes by a Libyan slave--just a guess.  Electricity is an amazing thing with the capacity to change lives.  Refrigeration is amazing, not just for food, but medicines and vaccines.  Lights allow children to read and do homework after dark.  Televisions, radios, and the internet carry news and educational programming from around the world.  It’s simply inappropriate to imply that other people should not enjoy the same luxuries as we do so that a sophomore taking a cultural anthropology class at Brown can sleep at night.

Of course there are actual problems that can happen with voluntourism.  Notably the issue of mistaken expectations.  You will not save the world, or probably anyone.  Best case scenario for the community in the way things are currently formatted, you come and build something that they will actually end up using (remember schools need teachers, hospitals need doctors and nurses, and those people need salaries.), and you as a tourist come and support their local economies.  The power of the way that tourists spend money is huge, so be diligent about who and what you support.  Being a respectful and responsible tourist is a good thing, you don’t have to try and save all the orphans to have helped a community.  The greatest fault in how voluntourism is that we need better programming, but shaming well meaning people will not accomplish that.

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I used to think that living somewhere like Dar es Salaam would be so cool--working for an embassy, immersing myself in the culture, and weaving between the alleys to find the best spot for mutton curry.  There are tons of people here who are ex-pats, working for a million different NGOs, governments, or even owning businesses, but I’ve sadly found that few people really bother to learn swahili or really venture away from foreigner hotspots.  That’s all well and good, and I understand that many of these jobs require tons of moving, which might not allow for that sort of immersion in the language and culture.  I think that in and of itself is problematic, but what actually bothers me is how many ex-pat’s here across the country insist on telling me how poor the people they (drive their pristine Land Rover to) work with are immediately after I explain how I am a volunteer who lives in a village.  (It’s even worse coming from the voluntourists.) I get it all the time from people who live in towns and cities behind guarded gates more often than not.

The moral of both stories is that I guess we’re just too impressed with ourselves when we go somewhere desperately poor.  I can see why it happens too--everyone asks for advice, money, jobs, et cetera. It’s hard not to feel so important sometimes--I am the white guy here, how do you not recognize me? Life here can almost make a person more condescending when what we need more than anything else is to be humble.  No one will achieve anything by thinking they have all the answers, especially not here where the reasons why things fail are so varied and obscured from the lens of a foreigner.  So as I enter my second year in Tanzania, I’m just trying to keep my head down and learn.  Inevitably if I keep my mind open I will learn more than I could teach, and I might actually do some good.  

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A non-exhaustive list of music popular in Tanzania (but not necessarily from Tanzania) that I like

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2016 here we come

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(via https://soundcloud.com/tyler-brenton-894986738/syria-and-development-91615?utm_source=soundcloud&utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=tumblr)

Another post this month, hopefully I can put up more of these since it’s easier.  This time talking about the Syrian refugee crisis, and the way that we go about development--and how that effects my job here. 

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Hey all! Been a while, turns out that I like talking more than typing, probably not a huge surprise to any of you who know me well... So here you go, ~25 minutes of whats on my mind here in Mbinga.

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Being White in Tanzania

Being white (and a male) has been an advantage for my entire life--it has meant being comfortable. People have never made assumptions of me, particularly not negative ones. I've never been seen as white, I've been a swimmer, or a good student, or whatever I was aspiring to be.  Being white means that I was able to exert a lot of influence over how people view me--a privilege that is almost entirely unique to whites in America. Unless you're a first generation immigrant to the U.S. with a heavy accent generally you aren't labeled by your ethnicity, nationality, or race. Even when in a situation where I was a minority I was still a part of the majority American culture, and as such my race was rarely called to attention. It is a genuinely amazing phenomenon, for the most part I was completely un-reminded of my race on a daily basis.  Being able to exist anonymously, without perturbations is a privilege.

Now I live in Tanzania. It's important to lead with this fact: I absolutely do not want to equate being a white person living in rural Tanzania with being a person of color in the United States. They are almost entirely dissimilar. The one notable similarity is the extra attention that comes along with looking different than every other person in the community where I live. I live in a small rural communities of about five thousand people, nearly all of whom are farmers. When I walk around town, I am greeted by everyone, and expected to have a conversation with each person.  I am routinely invited into homes to have a chat or a small meal. My presence is novel and confusing, but people are exceedingly kind and generous.

Sometimes I bristle, at least internally, at all of attention. I grew up mostly in cities, at the university of Washington I was one of about forty thousand students, and for the most part I haven't stuck out anywhere. I'm about six feet tall. I have brown hair.  I look so stereotypically American, that once when visiting a girlfriend at her school she posted a sign "if you see a non-descript brown haired male, don't worry, it's my boyfriend." At first I was a little offended, and then just resigned. I am accustomed to the anonymity and I like it.  

Dealing with the attention has been one of the harder things about peace corps for me thus far. Sometimes people ask me for money, which feels different than it does at home in two ways. First, it's a much more personal process outside of big cities. There people are my neighbors, people that I see on a daily basis, and usually it's a part of a long, protracted conversation. Second, there is an assumption that as a white person I am fabulously wealthy. Frankly, their assumption isn't wrong. I have more money saved than most of them could hope to make in a year. Globally I am easily the one percent. There are elements where they are wrong as well. While volunteering here, I am paid, and more than the average villager--but less than the teachers and nurses in the community. My income level would make me wealthy in comparison, but not fabulously so. The larger issue is the fact that in two years I will be moving back to the U.S., where my savings will once again become meager. I don't speak enough Swahili to explain cost of living adjustments, and I don't think many people would want to listen either.  

There is a disconnect here between the perception of me as a white person and the reality; just like there is a disconnect between the perception and reality of minorities in America. The difference is extremely important though. People here assume that I'm wealthy, they assume that I'm older than I am and that I have a family, they assume that I'm a doctor (and when they say that the doctor can't ride in the back of the truck I don't correct them), they assume that I am smarter than everyone. I have done nothing to earn that status. That was given to me the second I stepped out of the van that took me home. 

On the contrary the assumptions made about minorities in the United States range from ignorant to extremely insulting. Michael Scott drafts Stanley first in the episode of the office where they play basketball cause he's black--that's ignorant. A professor at northwestern university is denied a soda on a plane cause she's Muslim and will obviously MacGyver it into a weapon--that's insulting.  Donald Trump, the current leader in the polls of the vaudeville comedy that the Republican Party has become calls immigrants, the backbone of the American labor force and some of the most courageous Americans, rapists and thieves--that's disgusting.

Despite the fact that all of the assumptions made about me are positive I would say that absolutely prefer to not have any made about me. Having the terms through which people think about you taken out of your hands is never a good thing. There's a lot ways that this happens at home that might seem innocuous until you realize how irritating it can be.  It's not mean spirited to think that black men are athletic, but having people make assumptions about you is irritating, even when they're not negative ones. It can have negative consequences as well, people should think of themselves however they please. So if there is a young person who loves poetry but it being subtly nudged towards a scientific or mathematical field because of a stereotype that's a loss.

I continue to be afforded unearned advantages because of my skin color, sex, and sexual orientation here in Tanzania. The (racial) reasons why are not entirely clear to me, but I believe they have to do with the lingering effects of the European colonial legacies, and America's popularity in most of East Africa. Now I try to use my influence to effect positive change. Like a true Pennsylvanian I'll start with finding something to mine. ;)

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6/28/15

For starters, today my sister Molly turns 19. Happy birthday Molly! I live in a medium sized village in the southern highlands of Tanzania, not far from the city of Mbinga. It is beautiful in a way that it is hard to describe and escapes accurate comparison. Picture an idillyc Italian hill town, now sprinkle in the harsh, jagged rockiness of the Scottish highlands, and then add some of the tropical verdant goodness of the Andean jungle--replete with coffee and banana trees lining the paths where you walk. It's not too bad. I have begun to work on my first project, which in essence is to learn about the village so that I may effectively contribute. In practice this looks like hours spend reading data and asking questions at the clinic, school, and government office, as well as conducting interviews with people who live in the village. It's been fun, and it keeps me busy. So far the areas of main concern include: -malaria, which is a rather common disease in Tanzania. It is very common in the region in which I live, but it is also likely extremely over diagnosed. Literally every single person to whom I have spoken believes that they have had malaria in the last year, and while this is not impossible, it is unlikely. Malaria has many of the same symptoms as bacterial and viral infections, and as such the prevailing wisdom that it's always malaria is likely wrong on many occasions. Combine this with the fact that malaria is often diagnosed clinically instead of by microscopy or with the rapid tests, and it becomes clear the potentially the biggest problem with malaria is that people are mistreating other illnesses. The mistreatment of these illnesses could spell disaster in two ways, for starters, people can die if they get an anti-malarial instead of an anti-bacterial, and second this could lead in the long term to anti-biotic resistant malaria in tanzania, which would make the disease even deadlier and much more expensive/difficult to treat. Luckily malria is preventable! We used to have tons of it in the us, but through environmental measures the disease was eradicated. Here, capital intensive environmental projects are less likely, but the use of bed nets, and treating people when they are sick can eliminate contagion vectors and drastically reduce the spread of the disease. Woo. -HIV, the region in which I live reports having an 8% rate of infection. It's likely higher, sadly ruvuma region has an extremely high stigma against the disease which likely leads to lower rates of testing, and thus, a higher than reported rate of HIV. The village in which I live currently has no support group for people living with the disease. This is a problem because one of the ways that has been shown most effective to slow the spread of the disease is to have people adhere their medical regimen. Anti-retroviral therapy can lower a person's viral load to the point where they no longer transmit. In an ideal world, people with HIV would be extremely careful to avoid engaging in activities that could transmit the disease, but we don't live in an ideal world, and people are not perfectly rational beings. Keeping down a person's viral load also keeps them healthier and they're more able to stave off the opportunistic infections that plague immuno-compromised individuals. It's a win win. Additionally, creating support groups or other programs that encourage medical adherence is a cheap way to fight the disease. When Bush started PEPFAR, the us aids program, that essentially is tantamount to the world funding to eliminate the disease (don't say the U.S. never does anything good!) the goal was to spend the disease to death, to encourage every person in high rate countries to know their status and to get positive people the appropriate treatment. Well the U.S. has spent a crazy amount of money, and has made admirable progress, but it has become clear that no one has enough resources to spend the money to death, so the approach has become more targeted. Please forgive the violent metaphor, but if we were trying to carpet bomb the disease before, we've switched to laser guided missiles now. The U.S. government's approach today, has switched to targeting most at risk populations and ebcouraging people to adhere to medical schedules. I will be able to help with both, and thus far have found through the data I have collected that many HIV positive people where I live are not getting their medicine each month. This is where a support group can help. People living with the disease also have heightened nutritional needs, as the medicine is hard on their body, so also I hope to create a vegetable garden open to the group. -Unsurprisingly infrastructure can be a problem too, after a few months of operating without an adequate scale, the clinic got one last week! Which was cause for celebration, and a good opportunity to make sure that I haven't lost too much weight, I haven't. But they struggle with other small things as well. The eyepiece on the only microscope has broken, rendering the machine difficult to use at best, and currently the clinic doesn't have a blood pressure cuff--a huge issue for health workers trying to care for a large population of pregnant women. It's not impossible to get these things of course, there are ways of doing so, but funding is an issue as is efficiency. The company from whom the clinic would regularly get the cuff has been out for months. Improving effiency is something that may be difficult but I'm hopeful to find a way that I can find a way to help. -Coffee, which is both a concern and a way of life here. The concern has to do with making sure that the farmers are using good practices, both for their crop but also for the earth, in order to get good prices and by entirely destroy the ecosystem. Coffee is big business in Mbinga. We have the elevation (everything seems to be over 5,000 ft above sea-level) and the volcanic soil necessary to produce some of the world's finest coffee. The country as a whole isn't quite there yet, and a lot of that has to do with farming practices and processing practices. The village where I live is large enough to support three central processing units, where coffee can be washed and pulped. This is the ideal. The trick now is to teach farmers how to process their coffee properly, and to convince farmers who process at home not to do so. Coffee processing is a pretty intense process that requires certain facilities most notably big pools of clean water, and raised beds where the beans can dry and ferment. Usually individual farmers have neither. One reason that farmers are reticent to use the CPUs is that they are owned by coffee buying companies, if you use the unit, you have to sell to that company, some farmers like to shop around with their crop, which is fair, but processing at home adds risk as they are more likely to ruin the cherries before they can go to market. Other musings: -I might miss the NBA more than all of you, not being able to watch The playoffs and draft was sad, but I have been able to keep up by reading articles incessantly. -I bought some hienz ketchup, and it's good, but it's made in Egypt and is clearly a little sweeter, like the more European style... It's just not the same, especially for a Pennsylvania boy. -I miss decent wine. Working at a fancy restaurant may have turned me into a little bit of a snob. I don't think that I am, I think I just know what I like, and what I like is not here. Instead I get South African wine, which gives off secondary notes of garbage fire. After a co-worker Elton told me that I haven't been able to un-taste it. -also cheese, not even fancy cheese, just any damn cheese. There is almost none made or eaten in the whole country. -finally I learned that macadamia nut shells are crazy hard. I dented a metal thermos trying to open them, and have put some pock marks in my cement floor smashing them with a rock, because the shells are so hard that they just wedge themselves into the concrete before they break. It's remarkable. We should build things out of them. They're so damn strong. But they're alsk delicious and absolutely worth it.

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It's a blog

I have lived in Tanzania for over four months. I have been at site for over two. I have decided that I would like to share some of my experiences and insights with friends, family, and whomever else cares to read. The idea of writing about my self discovery and personal journey is, let's say, unpalatable to me. Instead, I would like to write about things here that I find fascinating, beautiful, and tragic. I will also write on occasion about development, my opinions on it and how I fit in to the system while working here, and on occasion I will probably hit down some thoughts on current events. You're all welcome to read and share a bit in my life. Karibu sana Oh, and I also have to say this: The views expressed in this blog are my own and do not reflect the views of the peace corps or the United States government.