Tabora, Tanzania

I suppose I never properly introduced my location or project.  We'll start with Tabora.  Tabora is in western Tanzania; I've heard it described as "the end of the earth" because it's impossible to travel to or from Tabora in any direction in any reasonable temporal quantum.  Tourism is non-existent so the only "mzungu" here are working for the tobacco industry or the Millennium Village Project in Mbola.  The Orion Tabora Hotel is the decent hotel in town and we're there around three times a week for food (which takes no less than two hours due to an inoperable oven and the omnipresent "swahili time") and drink.  John Legend stayed here a couple years ago to check out the MVP in Mbola so it's kind of a big deal.  

Tabora seems to be a pretty standard (and sparse) low-income town.  Plenty of goods being traded and sold including some food imports from Britain (the usual crackers and such).  Fruit is always delicious, particularly bananas (I eat at least one a day, if not 2 or 3) and pineapples.  Mango season is in summer (November/December) so I'm missing out on that.  The typical meal for me consists of beans, rice, and some sort of cooked spinach/collared green) - usually costs around $1.  Breakfast and snacks are usually some sort of fried dough - chipati (the cross-cultural round flat disc of dough fried, like tortillas, pancakes, crepes, etc.), mandaazi (donut without a hole), and kitumbua (made from rice and also fried).  There's also the Indian influence that you can find throughout East Africa.  I can get paneer and other Indian staples at a few hotel restaurants here.  For transport, I can get a ride on the back of a pikipiki (motorbike) across town for 2,000 TZSs which is about $1.30 USD.  


"Showers" here consist of dousing yourself with cold water from a large pail that gets refilled from a well every day.  Faucets and showers are installed in a lot of places but I'm unclear on why running water is lacking.  Electricity in Tanzania is controlled by the government organization Tanesco.  Of the 


Next time your in a book store, take a look at the Lonely Planet guide for Tanzania and turn to the western Tanzania section (or lack thereof).  Feast your eyes on the breadth and depth of cultural, scenic, and tourist opportunities with which Tabora is laden.

Goat.

Today started as any other weekend morning, with the exception that Marc and Amos, my roommates, were making arrangements for a goat slaughter at our place in celebration of their completion at Mbola.  They've been taking surveys of people with blindness, finding those who have cataracts and lining them up for surgeries in a couple weeks.  The procedure can be done for a couple hundred dollars, and even as low as twenty dollars each eye in India.  Marc is asking questions for socio-economic indicators for later follow-up to measure the economic impact of restored sight.  

Anyways, goat slaughter.  Marc, Amos, and I hopped in the Nissan Land Cruiser with one of their enumerators (they administer the surveys).  First stop was to check out an outdoor patio/bar at which we were considering holding the event.  Decided against that, so we were off to meet another enumerator at his house.  Borrowed his large grill (strapped it to the roof), knives, and grabbed banana leaves on which we could prepare the feast.  He jumped in the car with us.  We stopped at the market to get the knives sharpened; this is accomplished with a bicycle setup where pedaling turns a bike wheel that uses a belt drive to turn a small grinding wheel.  Thomas Edison, eat your heart out.  After that we stopped at a soccer shop that one of the guy's brother owns to check out some jerseys.  Everything here is too small for a Midwest-grown mzungu.

Next we picked up two more guys, so now we were two mzungu, four Tanzanians, and a Kenyan in a Land Cruiser with three large, sharp knives, banana leaves, and a grill strapped to the roof.  We set out on the quest for the goat.

After slowing down and shouting out the window at a guy who happened to be walking a few small goats (and didn't want to sell) we headed north out of town, past a prison, past a military base, and well into the sticks on a rough dirt road (standard) where we inquired a random villager about buying a goat.  We parked the car and went on a ten minute walk away from the road to arrive at a home.  We were told to wait, and wait we did - probably 45 minutes to an hour.  A couple of us passed the time by climbing some mango trees with a few kids.  Finally, a farmer approached with a herd of fifteen or so goats.  One was selected (on what basis, I know not) and paid for (equivalent of $20 USD or so) and we haul it off to the Land Cruiser.  The pitch and timber of a goat's cry are truly unfortunate for someone who already sympathizes with animals; it's eerily similar to a small child crying.  Its legs were bound and it was placed in the back of the vehicle.   On sporadic occasion during the rough drive back to our house the goat would let out a cry and the whole lot of us would respond with gasps and laughter.  I know, not the PC response for a vegetarian.

We dropped the grill and goat off at the house and we headed back to town to the market.  We collected loads of fruit, veggies, and beer, and Marc was determined to find duck in addition to the goat.  Upon arrival at a small market to retrieve charcoal for the grill we talked to a man who said he could get us a goat.  So he hops in the car with us and we drive up to the top of a hill (with a great view) to his house.  He tells us to wait and he runs off.  After waiting 15 minutes or so, the guys realize he just scammed us out of a ride to his house at the top of the hill so he could take a nap.  We walked back to the car laughing hysterically and sans duck.

Having retrieved all our necessary accoutrement, we returned to the house where we prepared pineapple, guacamole, and watermelon while the other guys dealt with the goat.  If I had realized when they started I would have been present from the start, but I got to the scene a few minutes after the initial kill.  This was really only the first or second goat slaughter most of the Tanzanian guys had been to (needless to say, my first), though they had no trouble knowing what to do.  The night continued with plenty of beer and probably not enough food for the number of people that showed.  We never ended up cooking the rice so I was fairly unsatisfied and inebriated as a result.  I will admit that I tried the goat.  It was a once in a lifetime (hopefully) occasion and I felt that, socially and culturally, I'd be missing something by not participating (what I wasn't sure).

On the whole, it seems to me that the general disregard of animals' capacity for pain and suffering is universal.  I don't think the attitudes here towards animals are much different than those in the States.  I think some American carnivores would have had no problem witnessing or participating in the goat slaughter.  But it also seems to me that a lot of people who eat meat and would indeed eat goat would be uncomfortable with witnessing or participating in the slaughter; this speaks to the disconnect between us and our food sources - physical and cognitive.  If you wouldn't personally kill an animal for your own consumption, how is it justifiable to eat meat?  Definitely interested to hear any takes on this; vegetarians are usually the ones asked to defend their position.  I have a whole host of thoughts on vegetarianism (and had started to draft a lot of them for this post) but I figured this question was the most relevant to the aforementioned experience and this isn't really the blog for expounding on said thoughts.

Pictures from Tabora

Here are just a handful of pictures from Tabora to show you what life has been like. 

Robert, Alfred, and me at Orion Tabora Hotel (the usual). Robert is my partner-in-crime for SharedSolar at the MVP Mbola office.

About to put in some work on rice and beans at the hut across from the office.

Robert and Kat.  Kat's a physio from the UK.

Grace, Daniel, and me at Club Royal.

Laura and Hannah helping paint a school.

It can't possibly get more cliche: helping paint a primary school in Africa.  I went home and put on my Toms.

First Trip to Mpenge

Woke up in the middle of the night to some stomach problems that would persist the rest of the day.  This is pertinent for two reasons: first, it made for interesting transit over the rough dirt roads to Mbola, the Millennium Village.  Second, it prompted me to ingest one of the Ciprofloxacin pills the nurse at Columbia had prescribed for such occasions.  This lead to freezing cold uncontrollable shaking (think cartoon alarm clock) and substantial nausea in the middle night.  I fully expected the typical traveler’s stomach bug but didn’t expect to be rid it so quickly (by morning) thanks to that pill.  Unfortunate side effects though.


Like I mentioned, we made our first trip to Mbola to visit the Mpenge cluster.  Our predecessors had narrowed the potential first sites for SharedSolar installations to three and I wanted to get a picture of what they were like.  We met Pilijumanne, one of the village council members, and were shown around to all of the homes that would potentially be connected to our system.  I took a handheld GPS unit to collect points at the potential shed sites and all the homes.  SharedSolar has been stalled in Mbola up until now, and we’ve heard that the people have asked quite a lot about us and when we’ll be coming to connect them.  Our next objective for site preparation will be survey work to determine who is able and willing to pay our connection fee ($60 USD) and for their consumption.  The connection fee covers a very small part of the installation costs and serves to instill a sense of ownership of SharedSolar in the community.

Getting to Tabora

I arrived at Shinyanga “airport” this morning.  It consisted of a one room building and a dirt landing strip.  No security delays there.

It’s about a three hour drive from Shinyanga airport to Tabora, and only the first hour is on a well-paved road.  Whether paved or dirt, the driver is cruising at a comfortable 45 to 60 miles per hour with hoards of bicyclists just inches from the truck.  The dirt road that is the last two hours of the trek is mostly straight but the dirt is dry, loose, and lets the truck shift its weight around like a killer whale on a slip-and-slide.  Saw some monkeys crossing the road at one point.  

Within my first 24 hours on this continent and half way through the trek from Shinyanga to Tabora we had a flat tire.  "Standard," my British friends would say.  The driver deemed it acceptable to support the weight of the vehicle on the jack precisely on the edge of a hex nut.  Seeing this and deeming it perhaps a tad precarious, he decided instead to reposition on the bent flange of a chassis member immediately adjacent to the bolt.  I tried to warn him that perhaps this was equally as dangerous but I suppose my advice was lost in translation.  As we jacked the car up the jack began to lean, waiting for the next rush of a passing car for the jack to kick out and the car to land on one of us.  I braced the truck as best I could while he replaced the wheel.  The job got done but we were practically begging for bodily harm.


You can read all you want about Africa and poverty, but it is still profoundly striking seeing it first hand and my mind was racing the entire drive to Tabora.  I immediately realized the irrelevance of my formal education and that if I wish to continue in economic development, this was just the beginning of my education.  Both the depth and breadth of development issues are overwhelming and have been so for decades (since aid programs spawned out of the Marshall Plan) but your mind desperately tries to sort them all out within the first footsteps into field work.  

Diesel Generator in Dar es Salaam

Within just the first 10 minutes or so of my brief walkabout in Dar I bumped into the Ministry of Energy and Minerals. In front of the building was the first diesel generator installed in Tanzania. It had been built in Britain, was in use from 1932 to 1967, and was rated for about 80 kilowatts.  By comparison, modern Tanzania's largest diesel generator is on the order of 6 megawatts (6,000 kilowatts).

On The Space Shuttle Program

This is one of my favorite rants from The West Wing and it is exactly the right way to start this blog.  "There are a lot of hungry people in the world and none of them are hungry because we went to the moon."

I’m sure it’s a coincidence that the last space shuttle flight launched on the eve of my trip to Tanzania, but I can’t help but try and attach some meaning to it. The space shuttle program is what inspired me to become a mechanical engineer; it is the pinnacle of both technical excellence and human aspirations. We looked up and said “let’s go there,” and so two generations of American engineers spent their careers first putting us on the moon and then guaranteeing human presence in space for another thirty years with a reusable spacecraft.


Given current dilemmas both domestic and international, the question is often asked what service human space flight provides. Stephen Hawking argues we must colonize space to ensure the proliferation of the human species and while he makes a convincing argument, it’s not the only one. I needn’t list the ubiquitous technologies derived from the space program (I’m sure you’ll agree Velcro alone has justified the space program). I think the best argument for continued human presence in space is that it is simply what we do. In the 15th century we set out for a new world, in the 19th century we turned westward across our new continent (with sad consequences of which none of us are proud). The pursuit of new knowledge and new worlds is a wholly human endeavor; questions lead to both answers and new questions, and to stop asking the questions is to abdicate an important part of our nature.


Of course, human space flight is not coming to an end. Russian cosmonauts continue their program and a multitude of private ventures will soon dart from the earth. But governments must reflect the will and character of the people; when the United States loses its ability to launch humans into space it reflects a lack of interest in this pursuit amongst its citizens. President Obama has tasked the National Aeronautics and Space Administration with a keener focus on atmospheric and earth sciences and given the staggering potential disaster looming resulting from anthropogenic climate change this could not be more welcome. But we can and must continue sending our brethren from our “pale blue dot” because it is what we do. We ask questions and without blinking, without hesitation, and with all the will and fury of a speeding freight train we race towards the answers. Why do we need the answers? Because we asked the question. Why did we ask the question? Because we’re human.


Speaking of being human, I’m headed to Tanzania to hopefully help some fellow humans out. Why? Because it’s simply what we do.