Jason Flew into Dar on Saturday afternoon, and from that point on we basically had a non-stop schedule for the whole ten days he was here. On Saturday night, Jason and I went to dinner and then out dancing to live music with Anna (the American Anna who I know through our family friend) and her friends from University of Dodoma. Her friends were off from school for the week and came to visit Anna for a few days, which was great timing because it meant that I actually got to meet them and make some new friends who live in Dodoma (since I’ll be there doing research for another three weeks and have none there!)
On Sunday I gave Jason a bit of a tour of campus, took him through the enjoyment of being hassled majorly buying bus tickets at Ubungo station, and then spent the rest of the day working on organizing our survey questions. The way we want to do the research is through a series of surveys in which we talk to all different people in varying villages about where they get their water from, how clean it is, do they have to pay for it, is there health education in their town, does their borehole/well have a water committee that runs it, etc. We spent the day writing up a new version of our survey and then I translated the whole ten pages of it into Swahili… which was unbelievably long and hard and not really worth it in the end since we had a translator who did it anyways, but oh well. That night was also Eunice’s birthday (Mary’s Tanzanian roommate) so there was a whole party going on upstairs that I missed out on. Although it is obvously sad to miss outon any birthday party haha, the reason that was especially sad was that Mary left this past week, while I was in Dodoma, to go to Uganda for the summer. That meant that Sunday was our last night together and I barely even got to hang out with her. We had a very sad/unreal goodbye in the middle of the party, which wasn't the way I had wanted to leave at all :(
We left Dar on a 7am bus Monday morning, which got us into Dodoma at around 2:30 pm. When we got in, I called one of the main contacts that I had been given (from one of the million people I had to meet with at the Open University of Tanzania while trying to get my approval letter). The contact, Mr. Mihale, was one of the head guys at the government’s Ministry of Water branch in Dodoma. I thought we would just be able to meet with him and get some info, but he ended up coming to pick us up at our hotel, bringing us to his office, and then basically offering to help us do everything for the week. It was honestly too good to be true.
On Tuesday morning, Mr. Mihale and another one of his colleagues from the Ministry of Water , Mr. Hoza, came to pick us up and took us all around town to the different government offices in the area. We went first to the District Officer for Dodoma district to get his approval, and then went on to the District Water Engineer for Dodoma Urban District. Visiting the district directors is really just a formality because you need to inform them of the research, but talking to the water engineer was actually extremely helpful. He gave us the first real insight into what the government does when they built the wells, how they work, how many projects they do, how they get their funding, etc. Next we went to visit the District Director for Chamwino district, which is a much more rural area of Dodoma Region. The water engineer for that district is located a lot further away from town, so I will have to go there at a later time one my own. Having Mr. Mihale and Mr. Hoza there to go around with us was a HUGE help though and made it much easier to get approval from all of the government sectors. Judging by how miserably I failed at doing exactly that on my last trip, I think that would have taken the whole week to get done without their help.
That night, we met up with and went out to dinner with Patrick and is brother Edson. Patrick is one of the friends of G and Dennis (Anna’s friends from University of Dodoma who I met the weekend before going to Dodoma). Patrick lives too far away from Dodoma to go home for the week break, and his brother actually lives and works in Dodoma, so Dennis gave me Patrick’s number before going to Dodoma. It was really nice to actually have some friends there and have someone to show us around the town a bit… especially because Dodoma isn’t really like any other town I’ve been to in Tanzania. Even though it is the capital, EVERYTHING closes at literally 7pm. I honestly don’t know how people in Dodoma eat, there aren’t even restaurants open; it’s really somewhat ridiculous. Jason and I had tried to go out and get some cookies/sodas or something sugary the night before to keep us awake so we could get some work done, but absolutely nothing was open at 7:30pm. They have stores that sell snacks and other random stuff on every single corner in Dar and nothing closes til at least 10pm... so needless to say I was very confused that first night. Anyways, it was nice to meet some people who live there and could tell us where to actually get food and what not haha.
On Wednesday, we went first to meet with the Regional Director of the Open University of Tanzania to discuss with her the plans for our research and inform her what we would be doing (since it was technically under her supervision). She didn’t have too much to tell us, but offered to help in any way possible next time I’m back, so that’s always good. Next, we met up with Patrick in town and went to an internet café so that he could help me fix my translated Kiswahili version of the survey. That was definitely necessary since Mr. Mihale had laughed when he saw it and said people in the villages would probably be confused by what I was saying if I read that… whoops, I tried. Next, we went to meet Mr. Mihale and Mr. Hoza at the Ministry of Water office and then headed out for the first of our village visits. We went to two villages (Mtumba and Ihumwa), which were both fairly close to the main road and not overly rural, but were a good start nonetheless.
On Thursday we started early and made it to three villages (Mahoma Makulu, Mahomanyika, and Nzuguni). We might have been able to make it to more than three, but unfortunately something in the Tanzanian diet didn’t settle well in Jason’s stomach and he wasn’t feeling good at all… which was just about the worst timing ever possible for such a situation to occur. Being sick while driving through rural Tanzania on the sketchiest “roads” of all time and going to multiple interviews in tiny villages with no real toilets = misery. He got better soon after getting back to town/the hotel and flat land though, so no worries. What a trooper.
On Friday, first thing in the morning we went to visit WaterAid, the main NGO in town which has been working in the district for over twenty years. All along we had thought that WaterAid had been doing all of this work separately and only in distant partnership with the local government, so whatever the government said they were doing community development-wise we assumed would at least be better on WaterAid’s projects. Oh boy, were we wrong. So it turns out that WaterAid literally does NOTHING. Al they do is directly fund the government on whatever projects they choose to do in the area. WaterAid has recently started to critique the gov's proposals of where to work and make the local government’s budget a little more equitable between villages in each district (some villages who already have wells get funding while ones with no systems at all continue to get no attention). Nonetheless, they said they almost never go to the villages unless someone specific needs to be convinced of something or talked to, they only have 6 people working in the office and most of them just do paperwork/office work, they say it isn’t their job to check up on the villages who they work with and that is the job of the government and the district water engineer (but the gov doesn’t actually do it), etc. Basically they fund projects and collect some data in the region... THAT’S IT! It’s ridiculous, the regional government has complete control over the entire budget and the entire water system implementation in the region. It’s never good to have the government be the sole provider of a good… there is just too much politics that gets in the way of truly doing what is best for the people. Long story short, our half hour meeting with WaterAid completely reaffirmed my idea that the region needs some serious help in improving its efforts at sustainability and its community development techniques. Good thing we made it to talk to them, because it completely changed all of my perceptions...
After that, we met up with Mr. Mihale and Mr. Hoza and set off to visit 4 more villages. We made it through two of them (Ng’ong’ona and Mapinduzi) when our tire went flat on the way to the third (Chololo). Not only did we get a flat in the middle of nowhere in the semi-desert that is central Tanzania, we also discovered at this time that men from the Ministry of Water are inherently motor vehicle knowledge handicapped. First off, the jack we had wasn’t big enough, so it lifted the car a little but not far enough to take the tire off. Then, they tried to dig out the tire but the ground was too hard so they proceeded to push it into the ditch on the side of the road where the sand was softer. This, however, made it so all of the weight of the whole car was resting right on the flat tire. When I tried to explain that we should put it in neutral and push it into the ditch on the other side so it was put up in the air (like the opposite back tire was at the moment) and we could take it off easily, they completely dismissed us. I could just see the “what does the little white girl know about cars” thought going through their heads haha. At one point, they all disappeared to go collect rocks to put under the jack to make it taller, at which time Jason and I concluded that that was most likely the time they would ditch us in the middle of the desert and we die of thirst or heat stroke. Anyways, after about and hour and a half, the tire being now fully off the rim and having the car resting on the rim alone for a while (which I again tried to explain would break the axel and was a bad call, but was obviously ignored), finally a huge truck passed us and stopped. About 6 Tanzanian guys hopped out of the back of the truck (while the other 30 still in the back stared at us thinking “look at the dumb wazungu!”) and brought a real jack. They fixed the whole thing in five minutes and hopped back in their truck and disappeared without being paid or anything. Gotta love Tanzania. So after all that, we basically were forced to call it a day (Mr. Mihale and Mr. Hoza were sick of us by then, I think). We stopped for one interview in Kikombo on the way back to Dodoma but it was just with a regular woman we found on the street, not with the village leader or anything.
What we found out in the villages: Mainly just talked to the village leaders in each of the towns, which wasn’t exactly the original plan but it ended up being very productive. We had wanted to talk to random people on the streets and just ask them about where they got their water and what not, but turns out the village leaders are really the only ones who know anything about when their wells were built and by who, how they get fixed, how much everything costs, and other such important info. So not what we had intended to do, but it worked out well. Anyways, turns out that almost every village we went to (8 in total) had their wells built in the 1970s during the period of Ujamaa (the socialist policy of Tanzania’s first president, Mwalimu Nyrere). Some of them were broken now and some were still working, all had very different payment schemes and local government set ups, all of the towns had water committees to run the wells systems but those had only existed for about 10 years since the time the gov stopped paying for all of the repairs, almost all had full piping systems to go with the wells (to 6-8 different rural distribution points), and the government only came to check up on them if the village contacted the district water engineer first and said that they had a problem.
On Friday evening, 6 other girls that I’m friends with from the university came to Dodoma for the weekend because they had wanted to see these 30,000 year old rock paintings that are outside of Dodoma. We hung out that night and tried to figure out how to get to them, but it turned out they were 120km away in the middle of nowhere and we would have to stay over the next just to get a bus back to Dodoma at 4am the next morning… so we decided against that plan. Instead, on Saturday morning Patrick took us all to University of Dodoma and gave us a nice tour of the campus. Then he took us to climb the mountain behind the campus to see the beautiful view out of the Dodoma region. We spent the rest of the afternoon shopping and just hanging out in town, and then that night we went out dancing to the one club in town with Patrick and his friends.
On Sunday, we took the bus home from Dodoma and then I ditched Jason at the hotel for the night because I had a whole bunch of work to get done after missing a week of classes. On Monday morning I took Jason and Jessie, this girl who actually goes to University of Florida and is only here for a month doing research, to the Mwenge woodcarvers market to do some shopping. I had a test in Literature in the afternoon so I again ditched Jason for a while… I’m a terrible host. We then spent the rest of the afternoon updating our surveys and working on an outline for our paper. And On Tuesday morning Jason left! The time flew by (as I knew it would), and although we got a lot accomplished it still felt ridiculously short. Now it’s back to work for my last two weeks of classes and trying to fit everything I want to do in Dar into the neaxt week and a half or so!! Ahhh, I can’t believe I leave so soon…
Love you all,
Lisa
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