Chapter 2 of Mzungu Days talks about the adventure I had last year upon arrival in Moshi trying to find a place to stay. I was lucky to meet an incredibly friendly and helpful Tanzanian named Rosmin last year, who aided me in the wild goose chase through dusty Moshi suburbs that resulted in me moving into a nice house for a good price only days after arriving in town. The route we took through residential and commercial areas would have been as bland to an average Tanzanian as a walk through Upper Beechwood to me, a neighbourhood in my home town of Waterloo with streets and streets of fairly identical looking houses. But as this was my first time really seeing what the heck Moshi, Tanzania and Africa looked like, it was a fascinating stroll for me. In this update I'll show some of the sights that helped form my first impressions of Africa, though not from that fateful adventure with Rosmin.

My first picture is that of a Dar es Salaam suburb from above, taken from the airplane that brought me here in the first place. What I'd like to emphasize is the urban planning, or lack thereof. In many areas of Tanzania land has been handed down from generation to generation many times, each time perhaps being haphazardly subdivided between multiple (mainly male) heirs. These subdivisions, and the structures that eventually followed, were not, in general, made with a collective eye on the functioning and flow of community activities, but rather in an ad hoc fashion considering only one's immediate surroundings. This is not a criticism by any means, simply an explanation for the labyrinthine nature of Tanzanian (and surely many places') communities. 

Such seeming randomness may make urban planners a little uncomfortable. However, there are some nice benefits of the way these communities have their systems organically created from within, rather than having been planned by an outsider. I remember years ago hearing about a designer of a campus intentionally leaving all the footpaths off his technical drawings. This was not an oversight, as some suggested, but rather an intentional attempt to create the most efficient network of walkways. Whatever dirt pathways were worn down in the grass over the first couple years of the campus operations became potential candidates for future paving. By not initially creating footpaths, the designer allowed users--pedestrians--to define the optimally useful system. And such is the case in neighbourhoods around here, including the one I wandered around in The Word on the Street: wherever a pathway can be most useful, you can probably find a pathway. Another pleasant benefit of this organic community development is the authentic personalities that neighbourhoods acquire.
 

So let's show you a picture or two of Moshi, my town. The first thing that will probably grab your attention in this first picture is, of course, Mt Kilimanjaro. Ironically, the first thing that grabs the attention of many visitors to Moshi is the lack of Mt Kilimanjaro: at most times it's completely covered and hidden by clouds. There it is though, all 5985m, watching over Moshi, and in this case a daladala motoring down a main drag with conductor hanging out the door.

Moshi is a relatively prosperous place when compared to many other places in Tanzania, mainly due to its proximity to the tallest mountain in Africa. The mountain nourishes the Moshi economy in two major ways as far as I can tell. With thousands of amateur mountaineers flocking to it every year, "Kili" helps support mountain climbing companies, their employees such as guides and porters, as well as a large number of spin-off businesses such as restaurants, internet cafes and bad hat shops. As I alluded to in my previous column though, it is unfortunate that much of this tourist money (it seems) ends up in the hands of a few wealthier businesses and people, and not the people who need it most.

Fortunately, Mt Kilimanjaro's other main benefit to the Moshi area does reach village-folk. Since something like 80% of Tanzania's economy is dependent on farming, the water which flows down the mountainside in a vast network of varying-sized waterways gives a huge agricultural boost the people living in these areas. Banana trees and coffee plants thrive in the upper communities, while maize, sugar cane and other crops grow more reliably in some (but not all) of the lowlands. So Mt Kilimanjaro helps the Moshi economy both from the top down and from the bottom up.

As people are increasingly aware, the glaciers atop the mountain are receding rapidly, and are expected to disappear by around 2015-2020. It's a little scary to think about the effect on the local communities will be once its source of water is turned off.
 

Here's a picture of the Moshi Clocktower Roundabout, taken from the roof of a 6-story building right on the roundabout. You may first notice how well-tended it is, this is courtesy of Coca-Cola, sponsors of pretty much everything. At 10 o'clock on the roundabout is the post office, more commonly referred to as simply "Posta", the best default meeting place in town in my experience. The building directly above the roundabout is an office building in front of which are parked taxi drivers that continue to offer me their chauffeuring services, despite the number of times over the past year and a half that I have refused (which I reckon to be in around the mid-hundreds by now). And to the right, a building that is mostly cut out, was a relatively lavish internet and coffee cafe that opened briefly last year to what seemed like a steady stream of well-off customers. For some reason--some a contract dispute--"Kibo House" (or as I called it "Mzungu House") closed after about a month and has been locked up ever since.

In the picture the clocktower roundabout is fairly quiet; other times it's a lot busier. This is also the roundabout around which I once saw a guy standing one-legged on his motorbike in swan position do 3 full laps, causing me one of my many Tanzanian double-takes.

As my role in Tanzania was expected to be involved with construction, the sight of this building under construction that I viewed from a taxi in Dar es Salaam on one of my first days here was a bit of an eye-opener. In case the picture is not clear, it is a 4+ story building that is currently having the concrete slab floor of storeys 2 and 3 supported by a large number of tree branches each of roughly equal length and of relative straightness, until the concrete dries. Common practice, I would learn, though not exactly confidence inspiring.

This final picture is of a battered and shattered Askari ("Soldier") Monument located in the centre of another of Moshi's roundabouts. The picture was taken sometime within a few months after a careless driver, perhaps intoxicated or sleep-deprived, decided he didn't like the concept of roundabouts and decided to drive straight through. I say that the picture was taken within a few months after the incident, for this is approximately how long it took to repair the monument. Can you imagine the city of Waterloo leaving a monument to its war heroes in such a state for a period longer than about half an hour? Once again, this is not a criticism of Tanzania or Tanzanians, more a sign of cash-strapped Africa. Discretionary budgets and emergency funds don't exactly abound around here.

Tanzanian Moment of the Week

This past week my house was invaded by a small army of large black crickets. I had never seen crickets of this size or nature in Tanzania before, and suddenly they were hiding all over my house. Don't know how they got in, don't know why they came (some say to escape the cold), but I do know the shrill calls that they occasionally emit could be used as a cruel form of sound torture. I'm hoping that just as "rainy season", "mango season" and "flying ant season"; have come and gone, so too will "ear-piercing large black cricket season".
     Major points were scored by the crickets the other day in a humorous incident. While I was sitting in the travel agent's office having left home a half hour earlier, I felt something move in my shoe. Actually, after I ripped off my shoe, I realized there was something moving in my sock, which I proceeded then to rip off as well (all eyes on the mzungu by this time of course). Of course, in addition to my foot, my sock was the home of one large black cricket which had miraculously survived the journey. I squashed some of his brethren later that day with additional glee.