Adam Hooper's Blog

Kahama in Pictures

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 19:50:58 +0000

Kahama, in Western Tanzania, has about 100,000 residents and enough dust to cover the entire country.

It's the last town of note on the road west to Rwanda and the second-last on the way to Burundi. A new gold rush has attracted more businessmen (and businesswomen, and women of a certain business) than usual. Kahama has scores of guest houses, though it still awaits a tarmac road. This being election season, the government has started paving the highway; but while contractors did dump a kilometre's worth of gravel here three weeks ago, work seems to have stalled faster than an overstuffed dala-dala with a student driver.

School attendance is dismal, though the students I've seen are enthusiastic. This class, across from my guest house, is learning English outdoors.

Like all of Tanzania, Kahama is missing garbage collection. In the meantime, residents let garbage accumulate in public spaces like this one, the site of an abandoned construction project.

This attracts scavengers, before a fire is set to burn away the remains.

There is beauty beside the trash, though, as proud residents will tell you.

The richest people in town are the truckers and miners. The rest make their livings using motorcycles, bicycles, carts and feet.

Most men are thrilled to have their pictures taken, but most women flee the camera. This seamstress wouldn't show off her shy laugh, even after consenting to have her picture taken.

After a few more minutes of explaining what I was doing, her friends were slightly more willing.

Almost all men, such as this peanut vendor, were thrilled to be captured on camera. This man even offered me 200 shillings ($0.14 USD) for the honour.

Retraction: "I Hate Men"

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:52:32 +0000

Two years ago on this blog, I made a victim out of a friend.

Quoting myself:

One week later, the employers hired a replacement. They would never see their old house girl again.

...

She is beyond rescue. No well-meaning person can do anything about her situation. In the darkest parts of our hearts, for all our pride of our notions of feminism and gender equality and statistics, we know this. And in the darkest part of your heart, you already know all the stories and statistics and words I can muster.

Pendo, this is your eulogy: more respect than most women ever receive in Africa.

Actually, they saw her just last week. And so did I. A few weeks after I wrote my story about her being "abducted" by family, Pendo returned to Dar es Salaam and started sewing dresses for a living. Currently she's unemployed and job-hunting, but her smile is wider than ever.

How did I write a story so far from the truth? I've since learned enough about journalism to explain.

First, I didn't use any primary sources. I didn't talk with either Pendo or her brother: I just used hearsay and prejudice.

Second, I tried to predict the future. I'm no expert at divination, women's issues or even Tanzania: my predictions are worthless.

Third, I used derogatory terms. I wrote words like "beyond rescue" and "eulogy" and I injected venom in "Africa".

I wrote as if Pendo would never read my website. I behaved like a superior, somebody wiser than she about her own life story. In taking away Pendo's individuality, I was grossly unfair.

I apologize to those who read my "I Hate Men" story and felt they learned something from it.

But I didn't have enough time or Swahili skills to tell Pendo about the original story or this correction, either. So Pendo, I apologize ... twice.

Miss Higher Learning

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 17:26:05 +0000

Thursday night, twelve university students competed to become Tanzania's Miss Higher Learning.

Number 12 was absent: I suspect she lost her nerve. This was an important event, after all: these competitors, averaging 21 years of age, already placed in their respective universities' beauty pageants. The three winners of the Miss Higher Learning contest would move on to compete with winners from other pageants for the title of Miss Tanzania.

There were plenty of cameras.

There was a lot of smiling.

Each student wanted to best fulfil the judges' expectations.

The audience had expectations, too.

I admit, I didn't attend as a journalist. I was here in support of Rahma.

Rahma is 21 years old. She's studying business and when she finishes school she hopes to join the fashion industry.

Halfway through the pageant, six contestants were eliminated. The judges chose Rahma as one of the top five to move on and participate in the quiz and dance. These top five all received prizes, though only the top three would compete for Miss Tanzania. Rahma looked gorgeous in her dresses and bikini, her smile was spot-on, and she answered her surprise question about Tanzania's anti-malaria campaign confidently and completely.

Her competitors performed very well, and the most vocal audience members were cheering for Contestant Number Six.

In the end, Rahma placed fifth.

I was humbled by all the contestants' bravery. Not many people have the courage to be quantized, and these young women faced stresses most of us never will. I congratulate them wholeheartedly.

Clichés are bad

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 21:50:53 +0000

The Internet is a gold mine of information. But if you write that cliché on your web page, you dilute my "gold mine" search results.

A "gold mine" is a place where miners extract gold from the ground.

Most of Google's top search results for "literally" point to suggestions that you avoid the word, even if you mean it.

Everybody has the habit of writing clichés, just as everybody naturally spends more time choosing adjectives and adverbs than the nouns and verbs they adorn.

Need incentive to improve your style? Tell Google to email you daily search results of a cliché. I'm researching gold mines, and it's painful. I suppose I should be thankful I'm not researching gun smoke or red hands.

Distributing magazines in Tanzania

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 09:59:56 +0000

I'm (occasionally) helping a Tanzanian organization called Femina. Femina creates and distributes magazines about gender, sexuality and HIV.

My job is to help make sure those magazines get to their intended readers.

Femina's flagship publication, Fema, is Tanzania's most popular magazine, probably because it's donor-funded and free. Femina distributes hundreds of thousands of copies of Fema to schools across the country, and an independent study recently confirmed Femina's calculation that on average, 15 people read each copy.

But distribution isn't as simple as a phone call to Canada Post.

For one thing, the timeline is different. Femina's distribution contractor promises that most magazines will get from the warehouse to the schools within 60 days.

Even the address list is a challenge: it's hard to figure out what schools are actually out there and where they are. There are no postal codes in Tanzania, and there are few official street names and even fewer numbers. For many schools, Femina only knows a misspelled school name and perhaps its district. Femina sends out a box with the school's name on it and hopes for the best.

In that district, receiving the box from its weeks-long trip over whichever roads have survived the rainy season, somebody from the distribution company has to exchange it for a confirmation stamp.

If the school exists, he may know where it is or he can ask around for it. But maybe his path is blocked by a flooded road. Maybe nobody has heard of the school. Maybe the headmaster is hundreds of kilometres away at a wedding or funeral and will only be back next week. Maybe the school has permanently closed. Then maybe the headmaster from some other school Femina never heard of intercepts our intrepid delivery person, confirmation stamp in hand, says his school isn't receiving copies, and asks if everything wouldn't be easier if he put that box down right over here instead of getting all wet and dirty and oh, hey, is that your delivery slip? Let me stamp that for you. And you can keep a nice, glossy copy for yourself.

Donors are skeptical when their recipients don't know what their money is doing, so Femina needs to know where its copies are going.

With my computer skills, I find ways to tell the computer what happened (not many existing programs include a "school closed all month because of bat monster" checkbox). Femina then uses the program I wrote to tell donors how well it's doing and tell the delivery company how to improve.

Femina sends far fewer magazines to nonexistent schools now than it did when I first arrived, three years ago.

The community team even gathered actual addresses for many schools, using a questionnaire. This could be the most complete and accurate database of schools and non-profit organizations in the country. Few organizations apart from Femina know, for instance, that the address of Buchambi Secondary School, in the Maswa district of Shinyanga, is "Maswa".

After all, there are still no postal codes in Tanzania, and there are few official street names and numbers.

Writing Wretchedness

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 11:19:40 +0000

As I was interviewing a refugee in a camp about his inspiring story, an outsider came to make sure I was telling it properly.

"You're getting how wretched people are here, right?" he asked.

Refugees play volleyball instead of being wretched.

The outsider, who is not a refugee, would benefit politically if I wrote a story about wretchedness. He'd hold my story up high, proclaiming, "look! even a Westerner wrote that these people are wretched!" and if that helped him achieve his ends ... he'd get richer.

As a journalist, there's nothing I hate more than an interview with an agenda. I can trace it back to my first "real" interview for my first story assignment at school in Ottawa: my very first character told me, "you have to write X."

To keep the conversation going, I bit my tongue over my retort: "actually, I don't. I'm not writing this for you."

In East Africa, most journalists are writing for their subjects. Reporters here expect free food, transport, gifts and even cash from people with vested interests. The outsider at the refugee camp assumed I had been paid to write the story his way. (I had turned down the money.)

My refugee was different. He wasn't worried about looking rich or poor, confident or concerned, lucky or stoic. He told me the easy and tricky aspects of his life because, well, I asked.

As a journalist, there's nothing I love more than agenda-free honesty. I stayed up all night writing his story.

Inflation in Tanzania

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 17:15:11 +0000

I thought I'd need to haggle to get 67,000 Tanzanian shillings with my $50 USD bill when I arrived in Dar es Salaam, but the clerk gave me 74,000.

The Tanzanian shilling is suffering. When I flew in to Dar es Salaam this April a dollar was worth about 1,350 shillings; now, it's 1,490. In other words, the shilling has dropped 10 per cent in three months.

Why? Politics, according to analysts.

Every July, Tanzania's government begins a new budget. This year's budget costs 11.6 trillion shillings, up from last year's 9.5.

What's different about this year to justify 22 per cent more spending? Well, there were bumper crops and the mining sector is booming. But analysts say politicians are exaggerating these gains in advance of this October's election. They argue donor countries aren't giving more and tax collectors are collecting less than planned. According to Twaweza (a new non-governmental organization from the founder of government-watchdog HakiElimu), Tanzania's inflation, already the highest in East Africa, is higher than authorities are reporting.

The flagging shilling makes it clear: the international market thinks Tanzania will print lots of money.

Local prices haven't changed much, but they will soon. First, fuel prices will rise. And as one friend explained to me, "once the price of fuel rises, every other price rises too."

As a traveller I'm visiting at the perfect time: until local prices rise, my dollars are worth more than they should be. Oranges now cost 7 cents. And this is my first time in East Africa when I've been able to buy a pint of milk and a big box of Kellogg's Crunchy Nut for under $10.

I can now afford cereal here. So if you'll excuse me, I'm going to enjoy the sweet and creamy taste of not being a Tanzanian during an election year.

Company

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 18:52:55 +0000

Kahama is a lost trade town: dustier and smaller than its lake-endowed northern neighbour Mwanza, its only assets are buried gold, a few hundred thousand residents and a dirt road that guides trucks from the rest of Tanzania to Rwanda. Google Maps shows it as a low-resolution swerve in the road. On the ground, it seems like every second building is a guest house.

Maybe I should have seen where this conversation was going, as I filled in my midrange hotel's registry:

"Company?" asked the landlady.

"No, I'm a student, I don't have a company," I replied.

"Company?" she asked again, watching my pen.

"Where do I write my company?" I queried, intending to jot down my school name.

Her patience was leaving. "You want company?"

"Ohhhhhhhhhhh. No, thank you."

Photography Prohibited

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 19:14:45 +0000

I was arrested for being white while strolling around Goma during Congo's 50th anniversary of independence on June 30th.

I was told I made a mistake in leaving my passport at my guest house. I did that because I figured taking my passport to the pickpocket-stuffed streets would be an even bigger mistake. (It was the right decision: I even caught one pickpocket in the act.)

Of course, the reason was euphemism. The whole crowd, laughing at me, knew I was arrested purely because of my skin colour. Or maybe I was arrested because the policeman on that block was angry at me after his superior chastized him for trying to extract a bribe from me the day before.

They had intended to arrest me for taking pictures. But I was cautious enough to distrust the encouragement of four policemen and army captains; when the authorities realized they couldn't arrest me for taking pictures, they went down their checklist of excuses.

"Wait," you say, "why would authorities be so intent on arresting a white guy who's allegedly done nothing wrong?" I'll get to that.

First, I'll back up and say this is the second time I've been arrested in Congo. The guy interrogating me this time had no stripes or medals on his uniform: I was not intimidated.

"Wait," you say, "If you think this guy is so harmless, why don't you name and shame him on your blog?" I'll get to that, too.

After helping hammer out a statement, I was allowed to fetch my passport as corroboration. My interrogator was disappointed to find absolutely nothing wrong with my documentation; I even had a receipt for my visa.

But he did pay particular attention to my $200 permit to climb Nyiragongo, an active volcano.

I had previously only seen Mount Nyiragongo at a distance, from the Rwandan city of Gisenyi.

He had me pegged. Or so he thought.

"I think you'll need to pay $200 to rectify this situation," he said.

I laughed. "I don't have $200. I have $10," I said.

"Then you'll have to pay half of the price on that permit," he said, pointing at the "$200" on the piece of paper. "One hundred."

"I don't have $100. I have $10."

"Oh, this is going to be a serious problem," he foreshadowed.

He confiscated my camera and sent me to the waiting room as he worked on a statement of another white person who had been arrested in the meanwhile. The other white person, at least, had used his camera.

I watched the celebrations on a tiny television.

In this sort of situation, one must tap one's social network. I hadn't even been in Goma for 24 hours, but my social network was surprisingly well-connected. I sent out a couple of texts, and within minutes I heard one side of a phone conversation with my interrogator's superior, who was getting chastized by his boss.

"He didn't ask for $100!"

He listened to the voice on the other end of the phone.

"Tell him he's a liar!" he yelled, then he hung up. His phone rang again but he didn't answer it.

"If this is the sort of thing they can say about me, maybe I should pack up my briefcase and walk out the door forever!" he said to one of his friends in the room.

I bit my tongue and buried my face in the book I was reading. I thought I had scored a major victory.

But as the hours drew on, I realized this kind of drama is like a bad soap opera: it happens every week and it's always the same way.

Finally, the other white tourist and I were brought, together, into the interrogation room. This time, the entire office came along as witnesses: clearly, there would be no talk of bribery here.

"My boss has decided to let you go without consequences," he said with a magnanymous smile. "But you should know that taking photographs is a serious offence. What if you were to take a picture of a government building?"

To verify that that wasn't the case, we both had to show our inventory of photographs to the group. The other tourist was first: he was asked to delete every picture he had taken that morning.

These are the pictures I showed them, which they admitted are legal:

The engineer who finished this statue of a Congolese bycicle had asked me to take these pictures the day before, as I had to explain.

I took one shot which I would later crop to highlight motorcycle taxis in the roundabout rather than the Congolese bicycle; but this photograph escaped attention.

I had also gotten permission from the appropriate authority to photograph a shoe market.

"Yes," I had to explain, "all these subjects gave me permission to take and share their pictures."

The man then explained that while he would do what his boss ordered and let us go without charges, he had to confiscate our cameras so we couldn't accidentally break the law in the future.

"I thought I was arrested for not carrying my passport," I reminded him. "I haven't taken any pictures without permission."

"Yes, but it's a good thing we stopped you when we did, otherwise you could have broken more laws in the future," he sympathized.

"You aren't even the police; you don't enforce the law!" I felt like saying; but instead I checked my chuckles and explained with all the humility I could muster that no, that $200 paid exactly for my right to take pictures of the volcano and that I would not leave without my camera. (What was he going to do: put me in prison against his boss's will?)

There were too many people around for him to press the issue, so he returned our cameras. We walked out, free at last.

But that's not the end, because the real story doesn't revolve around us. The real story is in those social networks: the mafia-esque government employees were using us to shake down our Congolese friends, who implicitly promised to make amends in the future.

I quietly made sure those friends got some extra money from me for their support. That's not really a bribe, see? I was thanking people for helping me out. Those people, in turn, thanked the government employees for their assistance in letting us go.

It's the white man's paradox: we're practically invincible. We can go home any time we want; the locals, on the other hand, have to live with the consequences of our actions. I didn't name names because while I don't hold respect for everybody in this story, I respect the fact that they can make my friends' lives less pleasant if I shame them.

Anyway. I kept to myself the rest of the day then climbed the volcano on Thursday with six other white people I met the same morning:

The climb up Nyiragongo is rather steep.

The path is made of volcanic rock, left behind from an eruption in 2002. The pebble-sized stones would roll out from under our shoes like marbles; I was amazed at our porters.

After five or so hours of hiking, the view at the summit took our breath away: a kilometres-wide crater with boiling lava in the middle.

The lava constantly shifts and bubbles.

The glow of the volcano can be seen from Goma, several kilometres away. We could feel some heat, but we were too far from the lava to warm ourselves by it.

Really, at that altitude nothing could warm us enough. Only after descending several hundred tricky metres did we finally escape the fog, shed some layers and breathe properly.

Minstrel on a Uganan bus

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 15:04:11 +0000

Julius, Carleton University's Rwandan superhero, invited me to visit his family in Uganda.

Crossing from Rwanda into Uganda, the road becomes unpaved and the border officials and bus ticket vendors happily try and scam you.

The pineapples become tastier, too.

Bananas spring up everywhere. Even Rwandans agree the matoke (mashed banana, Uganda's staple food) carries more flavour on this side of the border.

On Julius's property, right near the Rwandan border, there are beautiful cows.

Villagers set up nets to trap fishes in the rainy season. Now that the season is over, the water level has dropped and the nets aren't even submerged.

Cows still provide ample nutritious beverage and a small income.

Julius, the city slicker, hadn't visited his family in a year; they couldn't get enough of him.

The day came to an end...

...and a new one began.

After a 45-minute walk and 15-minute motorcycle ride, we arrived at the nearest trading hub. We waited for a bus instead of mounting this popular banana transport.

We spent a night in the Ugandan city of Mbarara.

On our bus back to Kigali (which, in Ugandan fashion, cost more than the going rate and took about twice the time and effort we were promised), a wandering minstrel sang us tunes.

I'd forgotten how different Uganda is from Rwanda. Food is cheaper and more plentiful; rules are more lax; and timing is more liberal. I wish I had the time to spend a few months there before my return to Canada in August.