Thoughts on my time in Tanzania
A typical family home in a village - Lindi, Tanzania
I’m waking up this morning to the beautiful sounds of chanting in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopa. It’s hard to believe I was sweating it up in Tanzania just yesterday - such is this crazy world of airflights and modern transport.
So, Tanzania. The land of Mt Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest peak, and the Serengeti. Renowned for its animals and the island paradise of Zanzibar, not that I saw any of these things, of course.
I’ve spent the past week meeting families from Mtwara and Lindi, down the very bottom of Tanzania near Mozambique, who are ‘food insecure,’ as the jargon goes. Which means they don’t have enough to eat.
Because this is my first trip to Africa ‘proper’ (I’m counting Egypt as more Middle Eastern), I wasn’t sure what to expect. Heat and mosquitoes, red dirt….African people…poverty…Beyond that I really didn’t know.
It turns out I got all of these. Family homes in villages are mud huts, the ground is sandy red, the red of Australian soil even, and I’ve got at least six mosquito bites despite trying my very very best to cover up.
But I’m very glad to have added some nuances to my expectations. Tanzania’s cashew nuts are delicious and available roasted, salted or raw just about anywhere. The green jungle-like vegetation down south grows whereever there is space. The Indian Ocean coastline provides a welcome breeze in the heat of the day.
My Tanzania smells like frying meat, sweat, and the seaside. The people I met were friendly, despite my appalling attempts at Swahili, and I particularly loved trying to nail the Tanzanian handshake - a three-move combination that feels seriously tough.
Aid and development wise, I don’t feel like a week in one area of one country qualifies me to make sweeping generalisations, but what I did see where great challenges in earning an income, increasing crop yields of both food and cash crops, malaria and access to more expensive medications, and the costs of sending children to secondary school. These themes came up again and again, with most families I met eating two basic meals a day of porridge.
Through work I am following an agricultural project in Mtwara and Lindi which is only just beginning, but will extend for five years. I’m very interested to see how the people I met are impacted by the project. I hope I can tell a more positive story of the people I met in this trip in five years time.
