The scene of the alleged nighttime chicken theft can be seen in the above picture, which is the house that I stayed in for my first two months in Tanzania. Compared to the average Tanzanian abode, this residence is somewhat of a palace: multiple bedrooms, numerous amenities, steel bars over the all the windows and doors, large shady garden surrounding by a fence. Although the fridge, electric cooker and hot water all made adjusting to Tanzania much easier, I learned very quickly that even living in a house that would by local standards be considered upper class, life in Tanzania is not nearly as smooth or comfortable as life in Canada. Even if you live in an upper class house, you are still assaulted with daily facefuls of dust churned up by passing cars while walking in the street; you still, during the hot season, get soaked with sweat sometimes multiple times per day; you still consider yourself lucky upon returning home with two functioning ankles after a day marching on the pot-holed roads; you still have to tediously wash your clothes by hand, for washing machines are still virtually unheard of; you still have to boil water for drinking, although fortunately electric kettles with this; on the subject of chickens, you don't buy "chicken", you buy "a chicken", which although dead, has not yet been carved up into convenient chicken body parts; you still have to head out weekly to burn garbage in smelly garbage burning pits; and you're still susceptible to the frustrating intermittent water and power supplies. I stress that these are not complaints, for I realize that compared to the average person around here (and to millions, nay billions, around the world) I still have it good. But around here life can be, to put it mildly, a little inconvenient.

But of course I wouldn't be here if I didn't enjoy it, and certainly flexibility and adaptability go a long way. You learn to close and protect as many facial orifices as possible when the dust is swirling; you learn to mix a healthy proportion of newspaper and other dry goods in with your wet garbage in order to ensure rapid combustion, and hence a decreased amount of garbage-stink transferred to you and your clothes; you learn how to cut up a raw chicken into its constituent pieces; and, in lieu of electricity, you learn valuable skills like how to build your own outdoor oven…the steps which I now present it in:

HOW TO BUILD YOUR OWN OUTDOOR OVEN

1. Light a charcoal or wood fire.

2. Place stones or sand at the bottom of a large pot, then cover the stones with a metal tray

3.Place food on tray, cover with lid, place on hot charcoal, then place hot coals on top (we also placed rocks to form a better seal)

4. Chill out and have a beer (not optional)

5. Ta-daaa! (my Christmas dinner, 2005…and the neighbour thought it was Sampson who stole the chicken!)

Back to the subject of chickens, chickens are fairly serious business around here in Moshi. Many families that have the capacity to raise chickens or hens, say a wooden shed in a backyard, choose to do so, and use the eggs and meat as either a supplement to their diet or as a small income generating activity. Pictured below is a chicken. Nothing special about this particular chicken, in fact it is quite an ordinary looking chicken; you can see chickens just like this one wandering freely around any village road, and even on many of Moshi's side streets. I am told that when you purchase a chicken, what you need to do is confine it to its new home for a week or so. Once it has become accustomed to that location, you can allow it to wander the streets freely, and it will always return home.  

Small income-generating or expense-reducing projects, like raising chickens, are very common in Tanzania. These can be on a very small family-by-family scale, but many institutions also have side projects that help to support their core activities: a school that can grow its own vegetables, raise its own chickens and goats, and perhaps sell a product like cow's milk, home-made school sweaters or furniture, is in a much stronger position than a school that is completely reliant on income from school fees and government to support its activities. In fact there are organizations whose purpose it is to provide ideas, inspiration, and examples of such initiatives, and I would like to take this opportunity to show a couple picture and provide a description of one of the more innovative ones I've seen.



             



This little contraption can be seen at a UNDP supported organization called "Hemtrust" in the village of Himo. Contained within the small shelter seen in the first picture is the long sausage-like tube you can see in the second picture. This tube is hollow, made from nylon but somehow reinforced to maintain its shape. It also has openings at both ends, and is tilted slightly downwards. At both sides of shelter are small concrete pits like the one seen in the third picture which are connected to openings in the sausage at its ends. To operate, the user needs to dump a bucket or two of fresh cow manure in the upper concrete pit each day. The manure gradually slides down the interior of the sausage, decomposing at it goes, and emitting methane gas along the way. The methane gas rises through a tube emanating from the top of the sausage (this plastic tube can be seen in the first picture) and is stored in a container. The gas stored in this second container can then be used to cook food whenever it is needed simply by opening a valve connected to the cooker. Supposedly a bucket of manure each day will get you around an hour's worth of cooking. And to top it off, the decomposed manure that exits from the sausage is virtually odourless, and is an ideal garden fertilizer. Now that's pretty cool.

I seem somehow to have meandered away from the theme of chickens and arrived at the topic of cow dung. In posting the above picture I return to my original theme, and in so doing, close not only this particular blog entry, but also the cycle of life for Tanzanian poultry. I've already shown you a picture of a live chicken and a cooked chicken, and the above picture is what remains of a Tanzanian chicken post-consumption: a large pile of bones. The bones themselves are not especially noteworthy, but it is the bones' location that I wish to highlight. Around here food is often served on a communal tray and shared by everyone sitting around a table, with the discarded bones simply placed in a convenient location anywhere on the table-top--no side plates. Sometimes each person has their own little pile of bones, other times piles are amalgamated and shared. The waiter clearing the table after the meal is responsible for gathering up all the chewed and sucked-on chicken bones whether it's one pile or more. I greatly look forward to the day when I return to Canada, go out for a fancy meal, forget where I am, and start piling chicken bones on the table beside my plate. 

Tanzanian Moment of the Week

Towards the end of the World Cup I was watching the match between England and Ecuador, won rather unconvincingly by England. After the match, a rather intoxicated fellow sitting at the bar tipped over off his stool onto a pile of empty beer bottles, breaking a few in the process. He was too drunk to stand up, refused to pay for the damages, and so the bar called the police to have him removed. When the police came, the guy remained stubborn and refused to enter the police car willingly. In the ensuing hullabaloo, the two policemen opened the trunk of their car, picked the guy up, stuffed him in and closed the trunk. A couple minutes later they opened the trunk and invited the drunk to enter the back seat, who peacefully complied. Pretty good tactic I thought.