Too much socializing recently. Too many blogs about konyagi and clubbing. I know it’s not what I came to Africa for, and not remotely why I love being here. I think it’s just that blogging is storytelling, and while every moment with the children is sacred and wonderful, it’s the going out experiences that make the best stories. I don’t want that to be the case, though. I have a tendency to gravitate towards telling every story in a humorous way, which I think is a symptom of the fact that blogging makes me feel very exposed. It’s hard to communicate my innermost thoughts when 35 people are reading them (or, at least, signed onto my site; who knows who’s really out there reading? J ). I’m often sitting on the ground with the kids or working with Mr Mwendapole in the office or buying my tomatoes from the Mama across the street or sifting our evening rice for stones and twigs, when I have sudden longings to be able to really capture what it feels like to be here. But, as my dad and I just discussed in our first-ever text-message conversation, this is what the Buddhists mean when they say that life is an illusion. I have to accept the fact that no one at home will ever know what it was like to be me or see me living and working in Tanzania. More importantly, I have to accept that after a while, I will forget how to remember how it felt. So although it’s two in the morning and I really should go to sleep so I am fresh for the last day with the kids before our Christmas break, I’m going to listen to the voices in my head that tell me tonight is a writing night. The two new girls (18 and 19) wasted no time in hooking up with two of the pilots, so they are busy with a sleepover at the Man Pad in Ipuli, and Mandi is dead asleep after going out with Daniel last night and being the only white person at Bubbles Nightclub (haven’t had the guts to try that one yet). It’s a good time to write about something that matters. Luckily, I have the languid (and heavily distorted) sounds of Bongo Flava wafting in through the windows from the night guard’s (apparently very cheap) radio to keep me motivated.
Sheki. How to describe Sheki. I’m sure I’ve mentioned him before; he’s a nephew of the Sekasuas and works as a volunteer at HAPO. He’s 23 years old and has been waiting for a place at university; he wants to study business administration. Sheki watches over us girls like a featherweight boxer. He’s half a foot shorter than me and is the sweetest young man I have ever met; he goes almost everywhere with us, comes to visit us, escorts us home at night, yells at men who get too close to us, and when he puts us in taxis at the Tabora, he talks at length with the driver and then writes down the numberplate before the cab leaves. He’ll never leave the restaurant before we do and walks us home every time we go out. The kids call him “ka Shek” (short for “brother Sheki”) and adore him. He is the guardian angel of the HAPO girls, and he has been acting awfully secretive recently. Since we both adore him, Mandi and I have been asking him repeatedly to tell us what’s wrong for the last few weeks, but all we got was more secretive behaviour.
When I say Sheki was “waiting” for a place at university, what I really mean was Sheki was waiting for Dr Sekasua to tell him that he was willing to send him to university. This is what I found out tonight (finally). In Tanzania no one has any money. Period. This is unfortunate, since there is no such thing as a loan, student or otherwise, and no jobs (again, period). There is a push to get students to finish school, but there is no net to catch those who actually do defy the odds and do so, since there is no employment for them with or without a university education. At to add to this problem, university costs around one million shillings ($1000) a year. This is a ridiculous, astronomical, unreachable sum of money, and a 23-year-old fatherless Tanzanian with no home and no possessions is about as likely to secure it as he is to land a space shuttle on the surface of Jupiter. The university year started in September and Sheki has been waiting for the Dr to decide whether he can afford the money. So far Sheki has heard nothing and as a result, he will now have to wait until next September, even if Dr gave him the money tomorrow. Meanwhile he works full time at HAPO for nothing.
There was never anyone as desperate to go to university as Sheki. I never saw anyone crave a university education so badly that he starts to cry when he talks about it. Sheki talks about university as though it’s this warm, golden thing just above his head; something he can grasp that will lift him out of the life he lives now. He wants to study business because it will be a good thing for Tanzania, he says; something that will develop the economy and help to improve the country. Sheki doesn’t want money for cell phones or stereos or even food. He doesn’t want to be given pocket money by wazungu. He just wants to go to university. “I don’t need a Masters or a PhD like you,” he told me tonight as we walked home together. “I just want, just one degree. Just one. I tell you this because you are educated, you have a PhD. I just want to have one degree. But then I think maybe God does not want this for me; maybe he wants me to stay in this life.”
And why didn’t he tell us this before? Because it’s not right for him to discuss family financial business with wazungu, particularly those who are working for his uncle, who is currently feeding and housing him.
So do I send Sheki to university?
Mandi and I discussed this a few weeks ago, after she had a long talk with him. We talked about how terrible it was that someone like Sheki, who works so hard and gives so much, could just be incapable of getting a break, even just a small one. I know there are thousands, millions, of people like Sheki here; people who dream of a better life but are truly victims of an inefficient bureaucracy and a gross surplus of potential workforce in a country with almost no private enterprise. Vodacom and Celtel, the two cell phone companies, appear to be the only real “businesses” here. Everyone else struggles along by working in dukas (shops), selling food at the market or off the tops of their heads, or dinkying people on the backs of bicycles (but mungu wangu, is that heaps of fun – it’s my new preferred form of public transport).
Split down the middle, a thousand dollars a year isn’t a lot of money to part with if it’s going to transform someone’s life. I have eight years of university education under my belt; I don’t think there exists a degree higher than the one I last acquired. I have lived an enormously privileged life as a result of being white as well as having very hard-working immigrant parents who both placed huge value on education. I’d like to think I now have the opportunity to “pay it forward”, as my mom would say.
I wish the university year started in January; I wish I didn’t have to wait until September to give Sheki the money. I’m afraid I’ll go home and fall victim to that malaise suffered by 99 per cent of people who do what I’m doing now – best of intentions while here but life has a funny way of taking over once we return to the normalcy of the West. It has already happened to me a number of times on past trips, so I have been very careful here not to make anyone any promises that I’m not willing to put my life against as collateral. Right now I want to give Sheki the money but how will I feel next September? But does what I feel even remotely matter? I would be doing it for Sheki, not to satisfy my own privileged guilty conscience.
I get very frustrated here with the perception that wazungu should just pour their money into everyone and everything in Tanzania. Maybe that’s not actually how everyone feels, but it certainly seems that way a lot of the time; some people are just better at hiding that opinion than others. I feel like people think that if I give them money, that will solve all the problems in the country. “Hey mzungu, give me money” is a phrase I hear a lot (it’s not actually meant rudely likely it sounds in English, it’s just a translation of what would be considered polite in Swahili). And it’s very heard to deal with because part of me wants to give money to everyone who looks at me sideways – because after all, I am rich as Midas here – but a) it won’t solve the problems, and b) it will make me very poor when I finally do return to my own cultural (and financial) context.
But I do feel like sending Sheki to university is a constructive way of giving money here. I don’t like the idea of giving him money for clothes or even for housing, but if I could help him get a degree that would help him get a job that would help him improve the country? I could get my head around that.
I told him I could give him half the money every year and that I would have to discuss the rest with Mandi. I said the money would go into a bank account to keep it safe for his education. He put his head on my shoulder and wept.
Sheki. How to describe Sheki. I’m sure I’ve mentioned him before; he’s a nephew of the Sekasuas and works as a volunteer at HAPO. He’s 23 years old and has been waiting for a place at university; he wants to study business administration. Sheki watches over us girls like a featherweight boxer. He’s half a foot shorter than me and is the sweetest young man I have ever met; he goes almost everywhere with us, comes to visit us, escorts us home at night, yells at men who get too close to us, and when he puts us in taxis at the Tabora, he talks at length with the driver and then writes down the numberplate before the cab leaves. He’ll never leave the restaurant before we do and walks us home every time we go out. The kids call him “ka Shek” (short for “brother Sheki”) and adore him. He is the guardian angel of the HAPO girls, and he has been acting awfully secretive recently. Since we both adore him, Mandi and I have been asking him repeatedly to tell us what’s wrong for the last few weeks, but all we got was more secretive behaviour.
When I say Sheki was “waiting” for a place at university, what I really mean was Sheki was waiting for Dr Sekasua to tell him that he was willing to send him to university. This is what I found out tonight (finally). In Tanzania no one has any money. Period. This is unfortunate, since there is no such thing as a loan, student or otherwise, and no jobs (again, period). There is a push to get students to finish school, but there is no net to catch those who actually do defy the odds and do so, since there is no employment for them with or without a university education. At to add to this problem, university costs around one million shillings ($1000) a year. This is a ridiculous, astronomical, unreachable sum of money, and a 23-year-old fatherless Tanzanian with no home and no possessions is about as likely to secure it as he is to land a space shuttle on the surface of Jupiter. The university year started in September and Sheki has been waiting for the Dr to decide whether he can afford the money. So far Sheki has heard nothing and as a result, he will now have to wait until next September, even if Dr gave him the money tomorrow. Meanwhile he works full time at HAPO for nothing.
There was never anyone as desperate to go to university as Sheki. I never saw anyone crave a university education so badly that he starts to cry when he talks about it. Sheki talks about university as though it’s this warm, golden thing just above his head; something he can grasp that will lift him out of the life he lives now. He wants to study business because it will be a good thing for Tanzania, he says; something that will develop the economy and help to improve the country. Sheki doesn’t want money for cell phones or stereos or even food. He doesn’t want to be given pocket money by wazungu. He just wants to go to university. “I don’t need a Masters or a PhD like you,” he told me tonight as we walked home together. “I just want, just one degree. Just one. I tell you this because you are educated, you have a PhD. I just want to have one degree. But then I think maybe God does not want this for me; maybe he wants me to stay in this life.”
And why didn’t he tell us this before? Because it’s not right for him to discuss family financial business with wazungu, particularly those who are working for his uncle, who is currently feeding and housing him.
So do I send Sheki to university?
Mandi and I discussed this a few weeks ago, after she had a long talk with him. We talked about how terrible it was that someone like Sheki, who works so hard and gives so much, could just be incapable of getting a break, even just a small one. I know there are thousands, millions, of people like Sheki here; people who dream of a better life but are truly victims of an inefficient bureaucracy and a gross surplus of potential workforce in a country with almost no private enterprise. Vodacom and Celtel, the two cell phone companies, appear to be the only real “businesses” here. Everyone else struggles along by working in dukas (shops), selling food at the market or off the tops of their heads, or dinkying people on the backs of bicycles (but mungu wangu, is that heaps of fun – it’s my new preferred form of public transport).
Split down the middle, a thousand dollars a year isn’t a lot of money to part with if it’s going to transform someone’s life. I have eight years of university education under my belt; I don’t think there exists a degree higher than the one I last acquired. I have lived an enormously privileged life as a result of being white as well as having very hard-working immigrant parents who both placed huge value on education. I’d like to think I now have the opportunity to “pay it forward”, as my mom would say.
I wish the university year started in January; I wish I didn’t have to wait until September to give Sheki the money. I’m afraid I’ll go home and fall victim to that malaise suffered by 99 per cent of people who do what I’m doing now – best of intentions while here but life has a funny way of taking over once we return to the normalcy of the West. It has already happened to me a number of times on past trips, so I have been very careful here not to make anyone any promises that I’m not willing to put my life against as collateral. Right now I want to give Sheki the money but how will I feel next September? But does what I feel even remotely matter? I would be doing it for Sheki, not to satisfy my own privileged guilty conscience.
I get very frustrated here with the perception that wazungu should just pour their money into everyone and everything in Tanzania. Maybe that’s not actually how everyone feels, but it certainly seems that way a lot of the time; some people are just better at hiding that opinion than others. I feel like people think that if I give them money, that will solve all the problems in the country. “Hey mzungu, give me money” is a phrase I hear a lot (it’s not actually meant rudely likely it sounds in English, it’s just a translation of what would be considered polite in Swahili). And it’s very heard to deal with because part of me wants to give money to everyone who looks at me sideways – because after all, I am rich as Midas here – but a) it won’t solve the problems, and b) it will make me very poor when I finally do return to my own cultural (and financial) context.
But I do feel like sending Sheki to university is a constructive way of giving money here. I don’t like the idea of giving him money for clothes or even for housing, but if I could help him get a degree that would help him get a job that would help him improve the country? I could get my head around that.
I told him I could give him half the money every year and that I would have to discuss the rest with Mandi. I said the money would go into a bank account to keep it safe for his education. He put his head on my shoulder and wept.
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