Discussing Poverty - 5

A group of South African engineers hangs out. They sit in the lounge, smoking and drinking. They have asked the waiter to look out for white girls. The most extraverted of the guys comes to ask the girls to sit in the lounge with them. “White girls!” they smile, now at ease. Black girls are tiring, black girls are only after money. There’s too many black girls everywhere. With their Afrikaans accent they discuss the state of South Africa. How the blacks have taken over politics, and whites have stopped caring. “Few more years and we will lose our advantage. It’ll be a second Zimbabwe.” “When I’m in Africa, I miss home. It’s so different. At home we have normal shops, good roads, it’s nothing like Africa.”
The South Africans could have been the white girl’s fathers. Indeed they have wives, daughters and sons at home. That doesn’t stop them from hitting on every piece of white meat they see. “ai, and then this Spanish girl, she was so hot..!”

The dance floor is full of the so-called ‘black girls’. Tall, hardly dressed, glamorous girls dance with stiff, old Chinese men. Their bodies swing and curl around the men who look bored. They reach only till he girls’ breasts, so that they hold them there. Disgusting.

Discussing Poverty - 4

A deeply religious young man, born again, devoted to his work and to singing gospel. He is tall, dark and skinny, with a fine pointing nose and a proud posture. Glasses give him an intelligent look. One night he comes home upset. Someone he knew from home had called him to meet up. He had a job for him. He would triple his current salary. Curious, the young man went to see the friend. “What do you enjoy?” he was asked. “Beer? Cigarettes? Dancing?” None appealed to him, and he told his friend so. “Let me take you to Zanzibar, by plane. Or we can go and sleep in the Mövenpick tonight, do you like that?” The friend had girly hair, and female clothes. While he paid the waiter, his wallet showed an enormous pile of dollar bills. His job at the Rwanda Tribunal paid him $ 8000 every month.
The job conditions were quite different from any other job. The young man refuses to repeat them. Hadn’t he been so dark he would have deeply blushed. He didn’t want the job, but the man insisted. He gave him some cash, and asked him to come to the hotel again. “You know, here in Tanzania people are so behind. When I lived in Europe, it was very normal. I have been with many boys before. I like the tall and slender ones.”
The next day, messages kept coming in, and he received some more money. “Imagine I would be really in need of that money, how hard it would be.”

Discussing Poverty - 3

It’s late, and dark. We’re in one of the many suburbs of Dar, more than an hours drive from the center. The roads are more potholes with some little road on the side then anything else. Houses have space here, there are trees and bushes and it doesn’t feel like town. Our passengers have fallen silent, or are asleep and only the driver and me are awake. Every junction we guess: right or left, in an attempt to escape the web of dirt roads and get back to the main road. Families sit at their verandas, eating and talking in the fresh breeze. We talk with long pauses, about work, home, religion, the future and how hungry we are. Then the topic changes to politics. Dominick misses Nyerere, the socialist who brought Tanzania to independence. That man understood the power of education. Everyone was enrolled in school in his days. Now the whole country is behind. Politicians are just selfish.

Dominick lost his father while in primary school and dropped out after standard seven. He helped his mum to look after his 7 brothers and sisters. Only now that he is 27 he will go back to school with the help of his employer. He believes he can learn anything. He knew nothing about cars before being a driver, but he knows now. He promises that next year we will speak English together. He will know then.

Discussing Poverty - 2

One of the fancy places in town. A fast food chain, a bakery, internet café and little tables host lots of youngsters and elderly sipping their juices, chatting. I’m talking to Athman, a student of banking, working in his sister’s duka, shop, and always looking for new challenges. We discuss the differences between Tanzania and the Netherlands. He has been in Holland twice on an exchange project and is well acquainted with a Dutch family who treat him like a son.
“We have tried to imitate the European culture,” he says, “without knowing what it is all about. We see the outside of it, the leisure time that you have and spend so well, and then we want that too. What we don’t see is that you work hard, and efficiently to be able to afford that free time. And we try to have that leisure time without money. It doesn’t work. There’s no cohesion left in our society. In Holland my family would sit together every night and talk about what keeps them busy. They pay taxes to their government and they care about the environment. They believe that they can make a change themselves and don’t sit and wait for the government to act. All we do is care about ourselves. We no longer live as a community. This way we can never reach anything because nobody believes in the same goals. We gave up our way of living and replaced it with something that is neither yours nor ours. It doesn’t help us at all.”

Discussing Poverty - 1

Dropping from the bus my sandal breaks. The repair shop is right in front of me. Dave seizes the opportunity and makes place on his bench under a tree. While stitching my sandal, the discussion moves back and forth between the six or seven guys around him. Street vendors that keep their tangerines in Dave’s eyesight, a guy selling cigarettes per piece from Dave’s pack, others seemingly just sitting there advising Dave on the stitching methods.
“Who taught you to fix shoes?” is one of my curious questions to the young Rastafarian. “Njaa, hunger is the best teacher” is his simple answer “I just knew”. The alternative was pick pocketing. But the idea of being caught by enraged citizens who would wrap him in car tires and pour petrol over his head before setting him on fire didn’t attract him much. This is the cruel answer of society to small crimes and the absence of trustworthy police.
Dave can afford his own room now, and food. Before I know he is stitching my other sandal too, preventing it from breaking tomorrow. The discussion moves back and forth still, and the vendors run off and on between the cars, everybody surviving.