Jambo does not mean hello – my first week in Dar es Salaam

My childhood was filled with educational television programming.  Not only was my access to the TV limited, I had to learn something.  Fortunately, shows like Reading Rainbow made the combination of learning and TV fun.  For the last twenty years I have carried around the following sentence from Levar Barton’s trip to Kenya: “Jambo means hello”.  Finally making my way to East Africa, I eagerly awaited my first opportunity to utter these words.  But then a curious thing happened: no one said ‘jambo’ to me.  Confused, I referred to my pocket Swahili handbook that essentially said the following: ‘jambo means “hello, I am a (stupid) Muzungu (white/foreigner), please speak English to me”’.  Good thing I was too timid to bust out the jambo without hearing it first! To be fair to Levar, maybe I can use jambo in Kenya (I’ll let you know) and here people say ‘mambo’, which isn’t actually that far off….

Anyway, It’s my 7^th day here and I’ve taken myself to brunch at a popular ex-pat café, Epidor.  It’s a welcome reprieve from the stifling heat of my guestroom and the ant invasion I discovered just as I was leaving!  I figure its best to use this entry to update you on what I’ve seen/been doing this past week.

I arrived in Dar at 11:30pm and upon leaving the airport the first thing that struck me was how quiet and calm it was.  There were people and cars around, but no chaos.  This is in stark contrast to the mania that is Mohammed Murtola International Airport in Nigeria, the only other country I’ve been to on this continent.  On the streets, the driving was orderly, gone the infernal racket of car horns that constantly assaulted my senses in India. 

Immediately, some things were familiar.  Signs advertised Tigo, Tata, Airtel and Vodacom.  The occasional car dealership or petrol station flanked the roadside.  And the air smelt like Africa to me, a mix of earth and rain and sweat that I clearly cannot properly articulate but catch myself smelling at odd times all around the world.  Other things were less familiar.  When we landed on the tarmac, the in flight monitors said that it was 32 C – at around midnight! They weren’t lying!  It is hot hot hot and very humid.  Apparently the breeze that provides marginal reprieve these days is set to disappear next month, when we’ll all be enveloped in a heat-induced stupor (or so I imagine it). Unfortunately, the consequence of this is that you could probably fry an egg on my face, given the combination of oil and heat.  I’m not so vain that I wont eventually post pictures (first I need to make a friend who will take them), but know that I am trying to look composed but am constantly losing the battle!

The Sunday I arrived, I got a-mini orientation from my boss.  We drove around the Peninsula, an area of Dar populated mainly by ex-pats and wealthy Tanzanians.  It’s much larger than I imagined, littered with establishments and services catered to ex pats and very quiet.  Almost every house or apartment building is surrounded by concrete walls and looked after by round-the-clock security guards.  It soon became clear that although this arrangement fills me with a certain level of unease, the Peninsula will also be my home.  That’s because the reality is that it is safe, it is where if I manage to make friends, the majority will live and it is (relatively) close to work.  Apparently the traffic in the main part of the city is atrocious.  The intern that I share my office with takes 2 hours to cover 40km each morning!!!

I spent the week on the hunt for the place to call home for at least the next 5 months.  Most apartments have 2 or 3 bedrooms and most landlords want you to sign a year lease.  And pay all the rent in advance.  And the rents are exorbitant. I ended up finding a 1 bedroom furnished apartment off one of the main roads for the princely sum of $2000 USD per month.  That’s right, $2000!!! Plus, I’ll still have to pay for electricity and fuel for the back up generator because the power is constantly going out. Actually, everything is expensive!  The grocery stores charge about $3.50 USD for a pack of Dentyne.  I have consequently resolved to give up gum.  The internet is intermittent at best and also expensive (surprise!).  I had a 30-minute video g-chat yesterday for the princely sum of $10 USD.  At this rate, I might have to take a paying job on the side!!!

As for work, I started first thing on Monday.  There is nothing like work to shake you out of jet lag and the languorous dream world created by 4 months of unemployment.  I am assisting the director of an access to justice project involving legal and civil service organizations in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya.  Essentially, I am helping to provide them support by organizing research done by Canadian lawyers, doing research of my own, reviewing draft policy and legislation proposals and coordinating workshops and meetings.  The project is scheduled to end in June and there is no shortage of work for us in the meantime.  In fact, I might even find myself in Uganda this week, which I’m sure will make it into a future post.

This weekend, I managed to get myself invited to go sailing (I’m still a bit mystified about how it happened).  Entering the yacht club, I had the surreal feeling of stepping into a different world, one where lets just say I was the only black person who wasn’t on a service boat.  The political side of me felt a little uncomfortable.  (As I anticipate this will be a recurrent theme, I will save my comments for later) When I was told that the same group of people race their yachts around the bay every weekend, another side of me thought: sailing better be an entry in the book ‘Stuff White People Like’, which I haven’t read (and might not even be a book, come to think of it), but hear is pretty funny.  To be fair, I soon gained a sense of appreciation for the skill and effort required to sail a boat – its hard work! Plus, nothing beats an afternoon in the sunshine on the Indian Ocean, especially when you are sufficiently clueless that you aren’t put to work! It was a pretty lucky way to spend my first Saturday here.

And now I’m going to go and read some work papers by the pool.  I have to try and balance out the unsightly tan lines that I added to yesterday.  Hmmm… and probably devise a way to get rid of the ants.  It’s a hard life, but someone’s got to live it.