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.
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.
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