T.I.A.M.F.

This Is Africa.

It’s a phrase you hear a lot around here, always uttered by wazungu, always with an accompanying chuckle and shake of the head. But this week I decided to modify it a bit, in keeping with the mood I generated as a result of being incredibly, uncontrollably, stereotypically, culturally-inappropriately pissed off at everything and anything.

This Is Africa, Mother Fucker.

When you first get to Africa you get completely drunk on the exoticism of it all. The smells, the sunsets, the smiles, the feeling of “here I really am in Africa, doing what I always wanted to do”. Being pulverised under the weight of 45 people on a daladala is fun, for example. After a few weeks you begin to get mildly irritated when you spend an hour at the post office trying to get someone to hand over a package with your name on it sitting half a foot in front of you. Now that I have been here seven weeks I can see why the expat wazungu who live here say what they say about Life In Africa. And I understand so, so much more why it is so hard for Africans who come to live in Australia.

This was the first week of the children’s school holidays so the “schedule”, such as it was during school term, was abandoned in favour of having a week of fun and games until Sandra and Ann-Marie leave (tomorrow morning at dawn). For Thursday’s activity, I had the brilliant idea of sponsoring a trip to Igombe, a dam outside Tabora where, apparently, there were lots of trees and nature-like things and the kids could all have a picnic, run around, fall in the water and half-drown, that sort of thing.

“It’s a good idea, Mama!” declares Mama on Monday.

Great. So, the plan is, we will ask Martha to cook the children’s food early on Thursday morning so it will be ready to take with us to Igombe at 11.30am. We will take the children’s water in buckets and the UN tarpaulin. Easy. How far away is the dam?

“It’s not far, Mama!” says Mama. “Maybe twelve kilometres.”

Great. Is it easy to get to?

“Yes, Mama, it’s easy!” says Mama.

On Wednesday night at 8pm I casually inquire whether Martha has been told to cook the children’s food so that it will be ready to take with us at 11.30am.

“It will be too difficult, Mama,” says Mama. “Why do you not go and buy the children’s food from Mayor’s (local fast food place) in the morning?”

Through gritted teeth I agree to this, not resenting having been asked to do (and pay for) it, just pissed off it was only discussed at the last minute, and then only because I raised the subject. Ultimately Sandra had the excellent idea of giving the children just a snack at the dam (eggs, bread and bananas), and returning them to HAPO for their mail meal around 3pm. Simple.

On Thursday morning I was a force to be reckoned with at HAPO, bossing everyone around with an air usually reserved for drill sergeants, determined that our scheduled departure time of 11.30 would be stretched by no more than an hour (I’m dealing with 37 children and I’m in Tanzania – cut my schedule some relative slack, please). This involved negotiating with Lazaro, the driver, on how much money to pay him for fuel for the truck. According to Lazaro, he needed TzSh25,000 to drive 24 kilometres. It occurred to me that if HAPO was running a truck that needed $1.50 to drive one kilometre, it was time to think about buying another truck (with what – but that was a problem for another day).

At 12.30 37 children squash onto the back of the truck with Sheki and Deus, Anne-Marie, Sandra and I pile into Mama’s car, and we start off. Twelve kms should take no more than half an hour. The kids love riding on the truck despite winding up with each other’s feet in their faces, and from the look in the rear vision mirror, they were loving their safari.

One hour later we find ourselves on a dirt track, both cars having driven 20 minutes in the wrong direction on the “main” road, after stopping passers-by to inquire about the state of their morning, their health, their work, and ultimately where the hell this dam is. The dirt tracks around here have a touch of the Wolf Creeks about them; they give a feeling of real remoteness and isolation even though there are always one or two random people about and I know we are only about 15kms from Tabora. The HAPO truck leans horizontally in places, random arms and legs hanging out at all angles and flushed faces beaming, never the slightest bit concerned when Lazaro swerves clean across the road to avoid a herd of goats. Mama’s car, something resembling a Corolla decked out with plastic flowers and images of the Virgin Mary, is probably not built for manoeuvrings that would rival Evil Kaneevil’s. But she approaches the situation with the usual attitude of Africans – calm, detached, completely without concern. The car struggles over the lumps and up from the walls of huge holes; Mama speeds where she can and then brings the car to a screeching halt at the foot of ditches and men carrying entire farms on bicycles, banging our heads on the ceiling.

“Pole,” says Mama.

All would be just an adventure if we knew where we were. I start to experience a mild form of my usual panic when encountering such situations, this one compounded by the fact that even if I wanted to cut and run, I’d probably get into a little trouble if I abandoned 37 African orphans packed onto the back of a truck. I’d probably be breaking the Child Protection Policy I agreed to before coming to Tanzania. Swallowing tears, I ask Mama if it is far from here.

“Not far, Mama!” says Mama.

Do you know where it is, Mama?

“Yes, I think so, Mama!” says Mama.

It takes an hour and a half to drive 17 kilometres but ultimately we reach the dam and, to make a long story somewhat shorter, the kids did have a good time playing for the 45 minutes or so we could now afford to spend there. Since we now knew where the dam was, the trip home should have been fairly stress-free (except for the aggressive-looking clouds that were gathering – and when it rains here, it means business, and this was a very sobering thought while out in the African bush on sand tracks in a senior Corolla and a dying truck with an open back section carrying, did I mention, 37 African orphans). After piling all the children back on the truck, the girls and Mama and I get back into Mama’s car.

“Oh!” says Mama, pointing to the fuel gage. “The light has come on.

"Pole."

One would think that when planning for a trip for 45 people into the bush, one would check one’s fuel gage before starting off. But this is just the cherry on the cake of examples of what it’s like here. There’s no planning, no thought for consequences, no organisation, no contingency plans. Everyone just goes ahead and does what they can and relies on Mungu to provide the rest. If we run out of fuel in the middle of nowhere in the rainy season…. but I’m writing like an Mzungu. No one would even start that thought here, let alone finish it. When we get frustrated enough to kill someone, people just laugh at us and say “pole”. It’s the phrase for everything and reminds me a little of the way “shame” is used in South Africa. Pronounced “POL-eh”, the direct translation is “sorry”, but it doesn’t only mean “I apologise”. It means “that sucks”, “I feel your pain”, “gee, that’s a pity”, “I wish I could help”, “ouch, that looked like it hurt”, “damn, I messed that up”, “here, let me comfort you”, “oh, that baby is so cute”, and “I’m feeling sorry for myself” (the latter of which we use a lot at home). In fact the term has completely invaded my vernacular and I can’t imagine being able to function a single day without it or its variation, “pole sana” (very sorry). I’ve noticed that it’s frequently used in a way that almost exonerates people from having to take responsibility for anything.

What I find desperately annoying is that people are completely accepting about “the African way”, which means nothing is ever on time, there are no schedules, things change constantly and without notice, there’s no consistency to anything, there’s no planning, no foresight, no protection for the future (ie no insurance). People just laugh and say that’s Africa, you must accept it. But then in the next breath, people ask for money to help Africa. As an mzungu, you could walk down the street with every single cent to your name strapped to your waist and be completely fleeced of it by the time you walk home from the market, just by making friends and listening to people’s stories. I’m not saying people beg here (there are few beggars and the ones who do are old and take care of kids like ours, so we always give); I’m saying that given an opportunity, many people will ask an mzungu for money – ongoing money to “sponsor my life”. There is a very strong sense that the responsibility of wazungu, being as rich as we are, is to fix Africa’s problems. People seem unaware that billions of dollars are already sent to Africa every year, but that people in the West are disillusioned because nothing seems to make much of a difference. Last Wednesday night Mandi and I had a long talk with our (very drunk) program manager who was asking us for money for HAPO. I told him that no amount of money would fix the problems here; that people need to change their attitude towards life, work, money, structure and society. Yes, Africa has many problems that the West does not have but the West has its own problems which it works hard to address. Here, the only people who seem to work hard (and they work until they drop) are those doing unskilled work. Women selling vegetables on their heads strap babies to their backs and walk across Tabora for 15 hours and make about a dollar a day. But the bank shuts at 3pm and everyone takes at least a two-hour lunch break and pauses for chai (tea) at every opportunity. I remembered my dad telling me that the West is rich because people work their guts out. Here, some people work their guts out but it’s the kind of work people do to survive, not the kind of work that grows the economy and the country’s prosperity. It can be depressing, but I do feel I have some answers to my questions now.

(Oh, and by the way, we made it back to Tabora in one piece. Perhaps Mungu really does provide.)