Mwenge

Well Tanzania is shaping up to be a pretty excellent adventure. This week we went to Mwenge which is a town/ district/ neighborhood not too far from campus. It’s about a five minute daladala ride (the ramshackle overcrowded minivans) smushed up against countless other town-bound locals. There is actually a daladala hub in Mwenge, so when you get there the first thing you see is like 100 vans and minibuses and tons of people.

The town is kind of what you think of when you think of an African market: uneven dirt roads lined with tons of shops selling everything from cell phones to handicrafts to hot plates. There is this one section with tons of small fruit & veggie vendors. We wandered toward the back (to the $0.50 papayas) and there were cages and cages of chickens! In the midst of all these chicken cages at the back of a fruit market was a random pool table. My goal for the semester is to play pool with the chicken vendors.

While we were there, we all bought buckets. It took some tricky maneuvering getting those back on the daladala, but it was well worth it. What a handy piece of plastic. The water in our dorm was off for a few days, and between the humidity and dust I needed a shower pretty badly. Sarah and I took our buckets down to this block of spigots nearby to get some water. After washing all the grease out buckets (they were originally full of vegetable oil), we had to haul them up 6 flights of stairs, which was amazingly difficult. I tried the whole African strategy of carrying it on your head, but it turns out I am too much of a pansy for that—it’s way harder than it looks. When I finally got my water, I had the most refreshing bucket shower ever. Naturally, the water came back on right after that.

One night this week I went to Mwenge to tutor. There are a handful of students, especially exchange students that volunteer to teach English to woodcarvers working there. The night I went, they were having discussions about life in Tanzania. The general consensus was that life is bad (for obvious reasons: expensive education, lack of funds, poor and/or corrupt government, etc). Most of the men were worried about getting food on a day-to-day basis, and none of them owned their own home or had insurance. The one guy who argued that life was actually good and didn’t need to worry about food said that he spent Tsh3000 a day, which is about $2.50 - $3.00. The whole thing was very enlightening, and I can’t wait to go back next week.