My only trip to the African continent was for a specific purpose. No, not a safari. I had an academic interest that I was pursuing: Does volunteer tourism benefit the local community, or is it merely a feel good trip for the volunteers?
I spent a good chunk of time looking at various organizations that run such programs. After weeks of poring over the information, I selected one, paid up, got all my medical shots, and ... I was off to Tanzania.
Turned out that my hunch was not off-base.
It was disappointing that I could not reject my hypothesis that the volunteer tourism doesn't really contribute much to the local community.
I filed a couple of op-eds, but not about the volunteer tourism itself. I wrote about everything else, it seems like. And, of course, my excommunication at the university meant that I didn't have any forum to talk about it with "peers." Nobody cares!
As a member of the faculty in global health studies at Northwestern University, I’ve studied medical volunteering in Tanzania since 2011, including over 1,600 hours observing volunteer-patient interactions across six health facilities. I have spoken with more than 200 foreign volunteers in Tanzania, plus conducted formal interviews with 48 foreign volunteers and 90 hosting health professionals. This research shows that some help does indeed cause harm. In fact, the international volunteer placement industry opens the door to potentially disastrous outcomes.
Is it the cynical me, or is it the case that there are crazy things in many walks of life that people intentionally do not talk about, which is why I am drawn to the studies like that one in the Scientific American? Do most people really go about with "do not rock the boat" attitude and are merely happy to collect their paychecks? There is something seriously wrong here.
Empirical data about the medical voluntourism industry is sparse. The most-cited figure estimates up to 10 million volunteers travel abroad annually, spending approximately $4 billion.
Where do these people go?
Popular destinations tend to be both lower-income countries and tourist destinations: Tanzania, Ghana, Cambodia, India, Nepal, the Philippines, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and others. Many organizations’ websites prioritize prospective volunteers’ interests rather than the interests of those they purportedly serve.
You saw Tanzania in that list?
Research has found that volunteering in health settings can be detrimental, even if the volunteers don’t realize it. Volunteers often over-estimate their positive impact.
It was one of those rarest of rare days. I guest-lectured, on campus. Really. There is at least one faculty colleague/friend who thinks I am worth her class time. The talk/discussions were about the caste system in India, in the context of Carnatic music, about which one can go on and all I had was fifty minutes!
India is a strange (sub)continent with all kinds of discriminatory practices. The poor engage in it and so do the rich. The educated and the illiterate alike are avid practitioners. And, of course, they extend this "courtesy" to visitors too, especially if they are darker skinned--yes, from sub-Saharan Africa. The latest happened in Bangalore, which is the hometown of the long-time commenter/debater:
An African woman was reportedly brutally assaulted by an angry mob in India’s Silicon Valley, Bengaluru
A 21-YEAR-OLD Tanzanian student has lodged a police complaint
accusing a mob of stripping her and forcing her to walk “without her
top” on the street in Bengaluru on the night of January 31.
The alleged incident took place following a road accident earlier in
the day, when a car driven by a Sudanese medical student hit a local
resident, 35-year-old Sabeen Taj, who died in the accident, while her
husband Sanuallah sustained injuries.
According to the woman’s complaint, a mob gathered that night and set
on fire the Sudanese student’s car, as well as a car in which the
Tanzanian student was travelling.
The two were targeted for their race: by the mob’s logic, an African had
killed someone so Africans should pay the price. Officers of the
Bangalore police stood by as the mob thrashed the Africans, and
passengers ejected the victims from a passing bus they’d attempted to
board to save themselves. Later, police refused to register the
Tanzanian’s complaint until she produced the hit-and-run driver. (A cop
told her, “You all look alike.”)
Racism (and racist violence) is only one of many forms of intolerance in
which India specialises. But it’s the most modern of India’s evils.
Particularly sickening is the casual racism shown by Indians toward
Africans in their midst.
On the morning of Feb. 06, a few hundred African students gathered on the steps of Bengaluru’s Town Hall ... It was a heartfelt outcry over violence against Africans that is
becoming all too commonplace in India. But there was also a strange air
of amusement and bewilderment at the protest site. The policemen
sniggered, speaking among themselves. Some passersby openly laughed,
entertained by the sight of a group of agitating African students.
But, it is not merely the accident and the mob. According to one student, Janeth:
Her experience with fellow students was
problematic, and she did face racism, especially from the general
public. “They think Africans are into fraud and prostitution,” she said.
Even landlords, who sometimes speak with
potential tenants on phone, often deny apartments on realising that they
were speaking to an African. “I don’t want Africans,” the typical
landlord would say, Janeth recalled.
As I noted a fortnight ago, the profit motive is so darn wonderful and a curse at the same time. Since the end of WWII, and especially since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, it has been a worldwide experiment on how to handle this profit motive. We do have variations on this, from the US model to the Scandinavian approach to the Chinese one to ... In all these, there is no hands-off approach to the profit motive and, instead, these different approaches reflect the different ways in which societies attempt to rein in that profit motive.
A few years ago, as Bill Gates started thinking, talking, and doing philanthropy, he talked about ideas on "creative capitalism." That was five years ago, and it is awful that as I go back to posts that long ago, hyperlinks rarely work anymore. I wonder how archivists and librarians deal with this nightmare; not my problem, at least for now! For now, I did a Google search, which led me to this site, in which Gates notes:
Why do people benefit in inverse proportion to their need? Well, market incentives make that happen.
In
a system of capitalism, as people's wealth rises, the financial
incentive to serve them rises. As their wealth falls, the financial
incentive to serve them falls, until it becomes zero. We have to find a
way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve
poorer people as well.
The genius
of capitalism lies in its ability to make self-interest serve the wider
interest. The potential of a big financial return for innovation
unleashes a broad set of talented people in pursuit of many different
discoveries. This system, driven by self-interest, is responsible for
the incredible innovations that have improved so many lives.
But to harness this power so it benefits everyone, we need to refine the system.
See, the gazillionaire Bill Gates, as he started to think of the world beyond Microsoft, also was seduced by that tricky question of how to refine the system that is driven by the profit motive. In such a refined system, the poor and the underserved can also be quickly brought up to levels where the market forces might then take care of them too.
It is one heck of a challenging question. And Gates' vision?
The challenge here is to design a system
where market incentives, including profits and recognition, drive those
principles to do more for the poor.
I
like to call this idea creative capitalism, an approach where
governments, businesses, and nonprofits work together to stretch the
reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain
recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities.
Hey, we cannot complain that Bill Gates simply talked about this and forgot all about it after exiting Davos--the guy has been walking that talk ever since. But, of course, this is not a challenge that he can take up on his own and solve it.
Now, another entrepreneur is talking a different variation. This time, it is the founder of Whole Foods, which is also popularly joked about as "whole paycheck," but that is a different story.
"I think the critics of capitalism have got it in this very
small box - that it's all about money," explains John Mackey,
co-founder and co-CEO of
Whole Foods. "And yet, I haven't found it be that way. I've
known hundreds of entrepreneurs and with very few exceptions most
of them did not start their businesses primarily to make
money."
The popular, or populist, image of a capitalist is of bloated fellow smoking his cigar in utmost comfort while plotting how to screw the hoi polloi. But, that ain't so. There is no doubt that there are several rogues out there, but, seriously, isn't Whole Foods that liberals love so much a capitalist enterprise by itself? My neighbors own a small business and they aren't out to rob people. Anyway, let me stay focused here on creating a refined system, call it "creative capitalism" or "conscious capitalism" or whatever.
In Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of
Business, Mackey and his co-author, Raj Sisodia, make a
case that businesses are at their best when reaching for a higher
purpose that ranges far beyond any simplistic notions of the profit
motive or self-interest.
WaterHealth International, a
social business that has set up drinking water centers in western and
southern India, now purifies about 1.4 million liters of water a day,
and serves around five million people.
As I recently commented to a student, if I am not an "Argumentative Indian" then I am a "Doubting Thomas." So, of course, I checked out the company's website; it is not clear whether the communities in which this system has been installed fully paid for it, or whether corporations and/or foundations subsidized it. Even if the latter, then it is nothing but the model that Bill Gates outlined where businesses, NGOs, and governments team up in order to provide for goods and services to the poor whom, otherwise, the profit-motivated businesses completely bypass.
It isn't a perfect world; but, to read about such developments is encouraging enough.
Women carrying water from the common hand-pump, in Pommern (Tanzania)
I am already way too tired of all the empty rhetoric and posturing on the looming fiscal cliff.
Perhaps the news has taken over my subconsciousness, which is the only reason I can come up with for a strange dream that I hazily recall, in which the discussions about the fiscal cliff were happening at this location in Tanzania that I visited three years ago:
It is the Sea Cliff Hotel, and the photo easily conveys the explanation for the name of the facility.
The Indian expat couple, who picked me up from the airport and hosted me for two days, took me to this restaurant. It was a wonderfully scenic location, yes. But, it felt so stiflingly colonial in that almost all the patrons were non-natives, and the staff, including the waiters, were all locals. I felt so much out of place.
Perhaps the Sea Cliff hotel does have a parallel with the fiscal cliff, in that if the Democrats and Republicans cannot constructively agree on the restructuring of revenue and spending, then life for those politicians or the affluent won't be affected one bit--it is the average John and Jane Doe whose lives will be immediately messed up. The politicians are like the expats at Sea Cliff, sometimes even talking pejoratively about the lower and middle classes even as they are being served by the very people.
Anyway, back in Tanzania, the day after this visit, I walked around, as I always do when I travel to a new place.
It is a good thing to back away from the cliff and get back to the firm and level ground of reality.
If only we can get the politicians, who we elected to serve us, to come down from that cliff!
The agenda for tomorrow's class includes, for want of a better phrase, a show-and-tell by a student, T, who recently spent three weeks in Kenya.
While I haven't been to Kenya--I went to Tanzania three years ago--I did get to know about Kenya in two different ways, even when I was way young. The first was through the travelogue series that Manian authored in Ananda Vikatan (ஆனந்த விகடன்.) The other was through my classmate, Belliappa.
Belli and his brother had a wonderful opportunity during Belli's middle school years, thanks to his father's assignment in Kenya for two years. The few evenings and nights that our town cooled down enough for us to wear sweaters, Belli and his brother often showed up wearing their (green?) corduroy jackets, which they brought back from Africa!
The brothers wrote about their experiences in the school magazine--back in 1977. Yes, that long ago. They concluded with the following lines:
We have traveled--physically and mentally--a long way from those school days. I met Belli last year, during my sabbatical hundred days in India. Unlike me, he is so easily recognizable from the images we carry from thirty years ago.
In one of those travels over the years since high school graduation, I spent three weeks in Tanzania, in December 2009. The following is a column I wrote in that context:
Register Guard, Dec 27, 2009
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — When students asked me about my winter break
plans, my favorite reply was a simple one-liner: “I am going home.”
Their typical response was something along the lines of, “Oh, how long
will you be in India?” That is all the opening I needed to engage them
in a discussion of how Africa is the “home” for all humans. The “roots”
of Alex Haley’s Kunta Kinte are connected to our own collective
narrative as well.
Tanzania offers a compelling argument for why it is home to humans —
going back to hominids, who were human-like precursors to our kind. The
evidence, in this case, includes the well-preserved footprints of
hominids in northern Tanzania, estimated to be 3.75 million years old.
Further, with coffee having originated in Ethiopia, the stretch of
Africa that includes Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia is an important
ancestral home to this avid coffee drinking human.
Tanzania is merely one country in the African continent, and at almost a
million square kilometers, Tanzania has about four times the area of
Oregon. Yes, four times — that is how large the country is. Dar es
Salaam, the capital city, and its neighboring region has a population
roughly equal to that of the entire state of Oregon. One can, therefore,
easily imagine the challenge at the very early stages of planning the
trip — how to choose the parts of Tanzania to visit over the three weeks I
will spend here. Of course, I am here to focus on a research question,
but more on this later.
As I continued to work on my going-home travel plans, I brought in
Africa and Tanzania as examples at the appropriate moments in my
classroom during the recently concluded fall term. For instance, during a
discussion on global climate change, I used maps to point out that the
electricity consumption in New York City alone was equal to the
consumption in all of sub- Saharan Africa, with the exception of South
Africa. Yes, it caught the students’ attention.
Students’ response has been the same over the years: They are excited to
learn about the continent of Africa when provided with the chance, and
utterly disappointed if there is nothing presented despite their genuine
interest in learning more. I remember one African-American student in
particular who was visibly disappointed that there was nothing about
Africa in the schedule of social science classes.
Even if the rest of us are not like that student, who was innately
driven to understand Africa, the post-Sept. 11 world in which we live
requires us to give Africa the attention it deserves. I hope that we
have not forgotten the significant pre-Sept. 11 incidents in Africa.
First, in 1998, came the near- simultaneous bombings at the U.S.
embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, Kenya, the work of al-Qaeda.
Responding to these incidents, President Bill Clinton ordered missile
strikes on precise locations in Sudan in an attempt to neutralize Osama
bin Laden. Ten years later, al-Qaeda sympathizers have yet another safe
haven in Somalia. Its capital, Mogadishu, has earned notoriety as the
world’s most dangerous place.
From an economic perspective, Tanzania and most of Africa seem to be
falling behind the rest of the world. Globalization, which columnist
Thomas Friedman popularly refers to as the world getting flatter, has
delivered a double whammy to Africa. On the one hand, the trend of
globalization has further pushed the heavily populated nations of China
and India closer to the United States and Europe. On the other hand,
most African countries rarely register a blip in our academic and
journalistic radars. The economic playing field does not seem to have
been leveled for Tanzania and most of the rest of Africa.
Yet we continue to marginalize Africa, even though doing so serves
neither our academic interests nor the geopolitical interests that
govern our realpolitik. I suppose the election of Barack Obama as
president has given us a wonderful opportunity: Instead of arguing over
where he was born, why not channel all that energy into understanding
Africa?
Nearly three years ago, I authored this column
in the paper here, in which I described how the visit to Tanzania was a
homecoming for me:.
Tanzania offers a compelling argument for why it is home to humans —
going back to hominids, who were human-like precursors to our kind. The
evidence, in this case, includes the well-preserved footprints of
hominids in northern Tanzania, estimated to be 3.75 million years old.
There was still something missing even after that trip, which I understood much later--to go beyond the theoretical argument, and get evidence of how I
came to be from that African origins.
A few weeks ago,
when I was reading an essay, I came across a reference to the
Genographic Project, and I decided to participate in that as a kind of
a belated birthday gift to myself (yes, I paid for my own gift, thank you very much.) Because
there was that payment to be made, I asked only for the "male" side of the
history--after all, only males can get the male side of the story,
given the Y chromosome. Some time later, I would gift myself
with the female side of the past as well.
Today, I got the results of the DNA analysis, which tell a story of my origins from Africa. The genetic map shows how I got to India, all the way from Africa:
Compared to the tens of thousands of years that it took for the geographic movement out of Africa to India to happen, I came over to Los Angeles in 1987 after a mere day of air travel. Perhaps those early ancestors would not have even dreamed about such a possibility?
Anyway, the report notes:
The
man who gave rise to the first genetic marker in your lineage probably
lived in northeast Africa in the region of the Rift Valley, perhaps in
present-day Ethiopia, Kenya, or Tanzania, some 31,000 to 79,000 years
ago. Scientists put the most likely date for when he lived at around
50,000 years ago. His descendants became the only lineage to survive
outside of Africa, making him the common ancestor of every non-African
man living today.
The place I visited in Tanzania was really, really, close
enough to be the real, old, ancestral home--the home before Pattamadai, Sengottai, and Neyveli that I have often blogged about.
Anyway, from Tanzania (as I imagine the home!):
Your ancestors, having migrated north out of Africa into the Middle
East, then traveled both east and west along this Central Asian
superhighway. A smaller group continued moving north from the Middle
East to Anatolia and the Balkans, trading familiar grasslands for
forests and high country.
And then from there,
Your next ancestor, a
man born around 40,000 years ago in Iran or southern Central Asia, gave
rise to a genetic marker known as M9, which marked a new lineage
diverging from the M89 Middle Eastern Clan. His descendants, of which
you are one, spent the next 30,000 years populating much of the planet.
Getting close to India ...
The man who gave rise to
marker M20 was born in India or the Middle East. Your ancestors arrived
in India around 30,000 years ago and represent the earliest significant
settlement of India. For this reason, haplogroup L (M61) is known as the
Indian Clan.
Although more than 50 percent of southern Indians carry marker M20 and
are members of haplogroup L (M61), your ancestors were not the first
people to reach India; descendants of an early wave of migration out of
Africa that took place some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago had already
settled in small groups along the southern coastline of the
sub-continent.
So, there! Everything else was easy, it seems like.
About that Y chromosome itself? It is alive--through my nephews, now it is in Australia!
I was excited when I saw these elephants at Mikumi National Park, Tanzania.
Growing up in Neyveli, whenever cousins came from small towns deep in the south of Tamil Nadu, or even from Madras, I was made to feel that Neyveli was one advanced town. They marveled at the roads, the buildings, the abundant clean water that was piped, electricity that was always available, and a school that was fabulous.
I am confident that all these were not merely my perceptions, but were factual.
After such a life, and after a few years in the US, when I visited Tanzania a couple of years ago, I was shocked at the conditions there. Even in their big city, Dar es Salaam.
A couple of days later, our group headed to the village, Pommern, where we were to spend the two-plus weeks. That village was way poorer in every which way than any of the villages I had visited throughout my childhood.
The high school at Pommern, which was a residential one, was supposedly one of the better rural high schools and students came there from towns and villages quite far away.
But, conditions were awful.
Even the blackboard was not a blackboard--it was merely a rectangular portion of the wall that had been painted black. Very few students had textbooks, and the furniture in the classrooms was not anything to write home about.
But, that was Tanzania, I thought.
Now, after visiting Neyveli, my old high school seems to be only a couple of notches above that high school in Pommern.
Thirty years have gone by but the school does not appear to have undergone appropriate upgrades over the same time period.
The classrooms looked the same as they did when I was a student.
How can that be?
More so when the industrial activity in town is immensely more profitable now compared to three and four decades ago.
There is something seriously wrong with this picture.
As I walked around with "W" and "J" I kept muttering to myself, and to them, that this was all too depressing. Maybe I was screwing up their homecoming experience!
Were/are my expectations unreal?
I think not. If four decades ago the facilities at the school were that much above norm for my cousins to go ooh and aah, then am I not justified in expecting conditions to be correspondingly better now?
When traveling, I have come to use a convenient shortcut for getting a feel for how things are: peeping into bathrooms at public buildings. So, of course, I walked into the toilet facilities for students, and took a couple of photographs as well.
There is something seriously wrong here.
In a way, this ties in with my earlier observation that "long-term investments that could propel continuous productivity enhancements seem to be severely lacking. From the physical manifestations in roads and power supply to education and health."
Makes me think all the more about the Chinese versus Indian approach to development--my hypothesis is that schools in cities and towns in China would not have fallen behind in their facilities, compared to how things were four decades ago. Some day, I hope to visit China and check it out.
But, as Shakespeare wrote in Sonnet 130, there are flaws and we still love them:
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red ;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
Was searching for a photo in my collections when I came across this clip of lions and cubs just having a great day at Mukumi National Park in Tanzania--from my trip there in December 2009.
Which then, naturally, led me to think about The Tokens singing their classic:
In one of the columns I wrote in the Register Guard (editor: have you stopped writing for the paper? Did they find out your work is nothing but "mashed potatoes"? Hahaha!!!) I noted the connection between the high incidence of Acute Respiratory Illness and the usage of wood and charcoal in the tiny kitchens.
I was, therefore, appreciative of the efforts to design and provide cleaner stoves--particularly the local angle:
It was thus with a gladdened heart and local pride that I read, after returning home, the essay in The New Yorker magazine, which also was referred to in a recent editorial in this newspaper. The article featured the Aprovecho Research Center, right here in Oregon, which has won international recognition for its efforts to design better stoves that also would be inexpensive.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced today the formation of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a more than $60 million dollar public-private partnership to save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women and combat climate change by creating a thriving global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions.
A neat correlation that does not turn into any causation linking my column and this news :) Anyway, my first thought was this: if 60 million dollars are all that was needed to get this going, we waited this long? Well, better late than never, I suppose.
So, what is this Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves? It is:
a new public-private initiative to save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women, and combat climate change by creating a thriving global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions. The Alliance’s ‘100 by 20’ goal calls for 100 million homes to adopt clean and efficient stoves and fuels by 2020, toward a long-term vision of universal adoption of clean and efficient cooking solutions.
How will this be done?
To achieve its ‘100 by 20’ goal, the Alliance will establish industry standards; spur innovative financing mechanisms; champion the cause across the donor and development communities; develop indoor air quality guidelines; address global tax and tariff barriers; field test clean stoves and fuels; and develop research roadmaps across key sectors such as health, climate, technology and fuels.
Sounds great. But, I wonder if this is slightly more than a much narrower focus I would prefer. I hope that in this process, we will not repeat the same errors that are typified by the classic experience that John Kenneth Galbraith's wife talked about when she lived in India during Galbraith's service there as the US ambassador. Mrs. Galbraith noticed how much the maids had to bend to sweep and mop the floor. So, to make their lives better, and to improve productivity, she gave them the long-handled brooms and mops that we are so familiar with here in America.
Good idea, right? Yes, the maids did use them--but, after cutting the handles off first.
It is for those kinds of reasons that I am hoping that the Alliance will also focus on massive education and marketing of both the need and the technology. It is a similar theme expressed at Aidwatch on what will be needed to make this a true success:
If this new effort is going to avoid the mistakes of its predecessors, it needs to do a few vital things:
It needs to get as much input as possible from the people who will actually use the stoves. The stoves will need to be as much like existing stoves as possible, to minimize the change in cooking style required to use them. In particular, women need to be able to cook traditional foods that are appealing to their families. Listening to the women who’ll cook on them is the best way to do that.
It needs to produce affordable stoves and consistently distribute them. Price is a big barrier to use of better cookstoves, since the benefits aren’t immediately obvious. The stoves need to be cheap enough that families can buy them with a minimum of savings or debt. Since they won’t last forever, there needs to be a steady supply of available improved stoves. That means building a structure for production and distribution, not some kind of one-off stove airlift.
Finally, it will need to market the stoves intensely. Since the benefits to getting a new stove are obvious, and the problems aren’t, they’ll need to really sell these stoves. Women, and their families, will need to be convinced of the benefits. That will require a lot more than a dry brochure or an earnest slogan. It will need actual ads, with an advertising strategy behind them.
I hope this works out. I can still clearly recall how much my grandmother's life became easier after gas stoves finally reached her small town. The kitchen, which was all the way in the back of the house to keep the smoke away--among other reasons--could now be moved into an inner room. And, no more coughing as the smoke built up.
So, do your part to cheer this Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves on. And, if you have a few dollars to spare, perhaps donate to this venture?
When I was in Tanzania, which now seems like eons ago, one of the hot news items in the papers there was from neighboring Uganda, whose government, with valuable assistance from American evangelicals, had passed one of the most virulently anti-gay legislation in the world. There I was comfortably seated inside the newly constructed Doubletree and having coffee in the morning admiring the scenery when I almost spilled that bloody strong coffee when I read about the death penalty for gays! If it was that shocking to a straight guy, I could only imagine how absolutely threatened gays felt in Uganda ...
Well, that was then ... and the following is now (from, ahem, America's Finest News Source) about a Colorado-based Christian charity that raises money to feed non-gay famine victims in Sub-Saharan Africa
Was thinking about Tanzania earlier. Thoughts took me to the place where we had lunch--Hasty Tasty. Halfway through the lunch, my lunch-mate spotted a photograph on the wall of a person who seemed to look not quite European nor Indian nor Middle Eastern, and we became curious.
So, I walked up to the counter and asked the person there.
"You don't recognize him?" was her reply.
I had no idea, though the face in the photo looked familiar.
"That is the Aga Khan" she said, and various pieces fit together right away.
See, before we sat down for lunch, when we were walking around, I saw a hospital named after the Aga Khan.
Now, the curious conversationalist in me took over. It turned out that she (I think the "mum" in that place that travel books refer to) was born in Zanzibar--yes, that island/archipelago which merged with Tanganyika to form the country Tanzania. Marriage brought her over to the mainland. Most of her relatives, near and far, have immigrated to the UK or Canada, or the US.
We were on a schedule, and had to get going. I had hoped to chat with again another time, but when I returned there about ten days later, she was not to be found--perhaps that was her day off. I was looking forward to resuming the conversation because I wanted to ask her about Freddie Mercury, the lead guy for Queen.
Mercury was born in Zanzibar to Parsi parents. His schooling was in India, but the entire family had to flee from Zanzibar when the Sultan was thrown out in the aftermath of the British exiting .... So, Mercury ended up in the UK.
Aha, you see how I ended up thinking that somebody ought to make a movie out of Freddie Mercury's life. It has all the drama that you would ever need--from his childhood in Zanzibar and India, the political uncertainties in the background along with their minority status, then the UK, his HIV/AIDS (which he did not publicly acknowledge for the longest time).... the music scene/Queen, an astrophysicist lead-guitarist! I tell you, this will be an Oscar-winning movie.
ANYTHING FOR WATER: A group of tribal women fetching water from an agricultural well at Govind Tanda Karepalli Mandal in Khammam Distrcit. Photo: G.N.Rao
Yet again, I am blown away by the physically demanding labor that most poorer women have to do day in and day out, and almost always they seem to do that with a smile on their faces.
In Tanzania, too, it was women carrying water from the community hand-pump to their homes. There were lots of young and older men alike cycling around, playing football, .... No, I did not take photos--neither of the women carrying water, nor of the men biking or chatting.
In this photo, it appears that one small slip could easily mean a fall into the well and, perhaps, crashing one's head against the rocks. I am getting a tad dizzy just looking at this photo ...
A neat follow-up to my eggplant post, with respect to how important the agricultural battles are going to be:
The enemy is Ug99, a fungus that causes stem rust, a calamitous disease of wheat. Its spores alight on a wheat leaf, then work their way into the flesh of the plant and hijack its metabolism, siphoning off nutrients that would otherwise fatten the grains. The pathogen makes its presence known to humans through crimson pustules on the plant’s stems and leaves. When those pustules burst, millions of spores flare out in search of fresh hosts. The ravaged plant then withers and dies, its grains shriveled into useless pebbles.
On the one hand, the rising population and their affluence will trigger higher demand for food of various types. On the other hand, the possibility of pests causing large-scale problems. The report at Wired.com continues:
While languishing in the Ugandan highlands, a small population of P. graminis evolved the means to overcome mankind’s most ingenious genetic defenses. This distinct new race of P. graminis, dubbed Ug99 after its country of origin (Uganda) and year of christening (1999), is storming east, working its way through Africa and the Middle East and threatening India and China. More than a billion lives are at stake. “It’s an absolute game-changer,” says Brian Steffenson, a cereal-disease expert at the University of Minnesota who travels to Njoro regularly to observe the enemy in the wild. “The pathogen takes out pretty much everything we have.”
These are the kind of reports that make me dismiss the extraordinary events that Hollywood movies, for instance, portray as our huge dangers. In contrast, it is such "small" and "old" problems that I worry will cause large-scale havoc on this planet. It turns out that Yemen is at the nerve center of this problem too:
The fungus is also an efficient traveler: A single hectare of infected wheat releases upwards of 10 billion spores, any one of which can cause the epidemic to spread. The circumstances have to be just right, though — the prevailing winds must blow toward an area of wheat cultivation, and the P. graminis spores must survive the airborne journey.
That is precisely what happened in the case of Ug99. Two years after its initial discovery at Kalengyere, the pathogen drifted into the fields of central Kenya, where it caused major losses and wreaked havoc on thousands of subsistence farms. The pathogen’s next stop was Ethiopia, sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest wheat producer, followed by eastern Sudan. (So far, those two countries have escaped major damage thanks largely to dry weather, which tends to hinder.) By 2006, the pathogen had hopped over the Red Sea into Yemen, a disturbing migratory milestone. “I look at Yemen as the gateway into the Middle East, into Asia,” says David Hodson, former chief of Cimmyt’s Geographic Information Systems unit and now with the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, where he tracks global wheat rusts.
In response to some of my photographs from my Tanzania trip last December, a cousin (in India) noted:
By the way, I thought the rural Tanzania classrooms potentially had much more infrastructure than those in India. Chairs and tables are a good start - compared to sitting on the floor. Also, have heard that faculty vacancy/ absenteeism is a big issue here - wonder how it is there.
Yes, it is true ... government school teachers not even showing up to work is not unusual at all in India, and more so in the villages there. And, yes, it is not that much a different story in Tanzania's schools either, apparently.
So, it is no surprise to me that even desperately poor people in India might save a few rupees in order to send their kids to private school where they have to pay fees. To them it is worth that trouble. Why? Aha, glad you asked. Let us turn to this review of Peter Tooley's book, The Beautiful Tree, for some insights:
what Tooley found, in four years of site visits and a five-country study described in his book The Beautiful Tree, throws a wrench in this familiar-sounding reasoning. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of students in the impoverished areas he studied were in fact attending these allegedly nonexistent schools, even when public options were available. ...
Most reasons that the parents gave for their choice had to do with what the World Bank calls the “short route” to accountability (as opposed to the “long route” which works through the political process). Because school owners’ profits and reputations in the community depend directly on whether parents are happy with their children’s schooling, they paid attention to parents’ complaints. Because teachers in private schools can be fired, they were less likely to be late, idle or absent. ...
Interesting, eh. And then this paragraph with a lot of punch:
The most surprising thing to those of us who harbor prejudices (hidden even to ourselves?) that illiterate, unschooled parents can’t possibly know more than education experts, is that these parents were making smart, informed decisions. Not that the private schools were perfect—far from it: many of the schools Tooley visited were tucked away in poorly lit, dilapidated, smelly buildings without toilets, and teachers there did lack government training certificates, and were paid less than in the public system. But Tooley found that in low-cost private schools, across the board, classroom sizes were smaller, and teachers were much more likely to be found teaching during an unannounced visit. They are also achieving better results: the students in private schools outperformed their public school peers in nearly every subject they were tested in.
FOR THE REGISTER-GUARD Appeared in print: Tuesday Feb 2, 2010
“Maize is an important cultural food in our country,” said the student in the front row in the English class that I visited at a rural high school when I was in Tanzania. I nodded my head, while picturing in my mind Tanzania’s national dish, “ugali,” which is made from corn and looks like mashed potatoes.
But I did not expect the question that followed.
After a pause, she asked me, “is it true that in America people don’t eat maize, but use it only to feed cattle?”
The entire class of about 35 students stayed silent and looked at me, waiting for my response. I told the students that we eat a lot of corn in many forms, and added that we also use it to feed cattle. The student who asked me the question seemed to be pleased with that reply. Or maybe she was simply being courteous and respectful to the visiting college professor.
Later, I felt relieved and thankful that she did not ask me about the use of corn to manufacture ethanol. I would have had a tough time explaining how and why we use food as fuel for cars!
That student’s question about their staple food is a reflection of the main concerns of an average Tanzanian — food and poverty. Corn is a relatively inexpensive source of ample carbohydrates, and provides more than half the dietary calories of the Tanzanian population.
An interesting juxtaposition, indeed: a New World crop, with its origins perhaps in Costa Rica, being grown in plenty as the primary food crop in the ancestral Old World of Tanzania.
The basic need for food that might preoccupy the average Tanzanian is in sharp contrast to the fantastically plentiful lives that we lead here in the United States.
An overwhelming majority of us here in America have access to so much of food that under-nourishment is not our typical concern.
Our worries, on the other hand, are about problems at the other end of this spectrum — overeating and obesity. Increasingly, we in America are also concerned about the links between the extensive use of high fructose corn syrup and obesity, an ironic and unfortunate contrast to the life-sustaining role that corn plays in Tanzania.
More than 95 percent of Tanzania’s population subsists on less than $2 a day.
The United Nations Human Development Index, a composite measure of economic and social development, ranks Tanzania at 151 out of the 182 countries analyzed in the latest report.
The Tanzanian government defines abject poverty as an income of 641 Tanzanian shillings a day, per person, in Dar es Salaam, or about 469 shillings in the villages.
At an exchange rate of about 1,350 shillings to a U.S. dollar, a person living in rural Tanzania needs 35 cents per day to be above the official poverty line. Yet more than a third of the country’s population is very poor — perhaps beyond our wildest imaginations.
It is no surprise, therefore, that there is no McDonald’s franchise in Tanzania. I do not recall spotting any of the other leading global fast food outlets either, even in Dar es Salaam.
It was a coincidence that the main academic activity in that English class in the high school was a discussion of a poem that was about food.
Titled “Eat More,” the rather cynical and revolutionary poem was authored by Joe Corrie, a Scotsman with a lot of firsthand experience with the struggles of the working class in Britain’s coal mines in the early decades of the 20th century.
With profound thanks to the teacher, Mr. Phillip, who offered a wonderful analysis of the poem, and his students — especially to the female student who asked me about corn and cattle — here is Corrie’s poem, “Eat More”:
Register-Guard opinion writer and geography professor Sriram Khé’s articles on India and now Tanzania have added to my understanding of Third World issues. I’ve just returned from a 17-day trip to the heart of India, including stops in Delhi, Juipur, Ranthambhore National Park and Tiger Reserve, Agra, Khajuraho and Varanasi. The heart of India suffers from the same environmental degradation as the Tanzanian village of Pommern mentioned in professor Khe’s Jan. 18 column.
Arriving in Delhi in late December, I expected such a large city to be polluted, but I had no idea that I would see so many homeless people along the main streets and alleys building small bonfires for heat and for cooking. Traveling south to Juipur and Ranthambhore National Park I expected the smoke pollution to abate. However, a haze of smoke hung over the natural beauty of the national park. I was lucky enough to spot a wild Bengal tiger through haze.
I also visited Abhaneri, a typical small village, set among brilliant-yellow mustard fields. Over 60 percent of India’s 1.2 billion people live in small villages like Abhaneri. This village has electricity, but in every home I visited the women were cooking over small open-air wood stoves. I’m sure that poverty plays a role in villagers not using electrical power.
Possibly the Aprovecho stove manufactured here in Oregon should be introduced in India as well as the many small villages in Third World countries such as Tanzania.
The travel doctor gave me a tincture of iodine kit that I could use to disinfect water, if needed, when I was in Tanzania. I never had to use it, though, because bottled drinking water was available everywhere.
But that is also the source of one of Tanzania’s environmental problems — empty plastic bottles all over the place: by the highways, on beaches and in open drains.
One might hypothesize that collecting such recyclables would be a source of income to the hard-working poor, as is the case in India. But I suspect that Tanzania lacks a robust industrial base to offer the necessary economic incentives for the poor to turn all that plastic into cash.
The litter problem was, however, nothing compared to the more pressing problem of smoke pollution.
I spent most of my time in Tanzania in a village, Pommern, in the southern highlands. It was a two-hour drive from Pommern to the nearest town, Iringa, which itself is a little more than 300 miles from Dar es Salaam. Pommern is up in the hills, at an elevation of close to 6,500 feet.
With red soil on the rolling hills and fascinating flora that included “sausage trees,” Pommern was absolutely picturesque. But it was hard to get away from smoke.
The smoke came from two primary sources. One was the rubbish that was burned practically everywhere in the village. The smoking piles included plants that were cleared away, and even plastic bottles and batteries.
But the smoke and the smell from trash incineration was secondary to the noxious clouds from wood and charcoal burning, which is how the village’s energy needs are met.
In a country of 37 million people, barely 10 percent of the population has access to electricity — and that is mostly in urban Dar es Salaam. More than 80 percent of Tanzania’s people live in rural areas such as Pommern, where electricity is rare. And gas for cooking is rarer still, even in Dar es Salaam.
Thus, most of the population relies on charcoal and firewood for cooking. The World Bank recently estimated that about 1 million tons of charcoal are consumed every year in Tanzania. That amount is projected to increase, because electricity and gas are not available for the growing population.
Charcoal-making itself is an important economic activity. Charcoal, of course, comes from trees, and it is preferred over firewood because it is easy to store and transport, and it offers more energy than a comparable weight of firewood. It was quite common to see young men selling bags of charcoal in the rural and forest areas that dominate Tanzania’s landscape outside Dar es Salaam.
Both charcoal and firewood often are used in remarkably inefficient settings that generate a lot more smoke than usable heat. Often, the “stove” is nothing but a traditional fireplace with three stones.
Women and children often are gathered around these smoking stoves. As one can imagine, such a constant inhalation of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and other gaseous chemicals — along with tiny particles of soot — can be devastating for health. Which is why acute respiratory infection, or ARI, is a leading public health problem in this beautiful mountainous setting, along with HIV and malaria.
This trend has not gone unrecognized. The Improved Charcoal Stove was introduced in Tanzania in 1988, and research continues in developed and developing countries alike on designing more efficient firewood and charcoal burning stoves.
It was thus with a gladdened heart and local pride that I read, after returning home, the essay in The New Yorker magazine, which also was referred to in a recent editorial in this newspaper. The article featured the Aprovecho Research Center, right here in Oregon, which has won international recognition for its efforts to design better stoves that also would be inexpensive.
My academic discussions with students about the more than 2.5 billion people who depend on wood and charcoal as the source of energy pale next to experiencing it every day amidst an otherwise gorgeous setting on this blue planet of ours.
I bet the people of Pommern, along with other billions, can’t wait for the kitchen upgrade.
The travel doctor gave me a tincture of iodine kit to disinfect water, if needed, when I was in Tanzania. I never had to use it though because bottled drinking water was available everywhere.
But, that is also the source of one of Tanzania’s environmental problems—empty plastic bottles all over the place. By the highways, beaches, and in open drains.
One might hypothesize that collecting such recyclables will be a source of income to the hard-working poor, which is the case in India. But, I suspect that Tanzania lacks a robust industrial base to offer the necessary economic incentives for the poor to turn all that plastic into cash.
The litter problem was, however, nothing compared to the more pressing smoke pollution.
I spent most of my time in Tanzania in a village, Pommern, in the southern highlands. It was a two-hour drive from Pommern to the nearest town, Iringa, which itself is a little more than 300 miles from Dar es Salaam. Pommern is up in the hills—I was at close to 6,500 feet elevation for most of my time in Tanzania.
With red soil on the rolling hills, and fascinating flora that included “sausage trees,” Pommern was absolutely picturesque indeed. But, at the same time it was hard to get away from smoke.
There were two primary sources of smoke. One came from the rubbish that was burnt, well, practically everywhere in the village. The smoking piles included plants that were cleared away, and even plastic bottles and batteries.
But, the smoke and smell from such trash incineration was secondary to the noxious clouds from wood and charcoal burning, which is how the village’s energy needs are met.
In a country of 37 million people, barely ten percent of the population has access to electricity, and that is mostly in urban Dar es Salaam, while more than 80 percent of the population lives in rural areas like Pommern where electricity is rare. And gas for cooking is rarer even within Dar es Salaam
Thus, most of the population relies on charcoal and firewood for cooking--the World Bank recently estimated that about one million tons of charcoal are consumed every year in Tanzania. This amount is projected to increase even more due to the fact that electricity and gas are not available for the growing population.
Charcoal making itself, therefore, is an important economic activity. Charcoal, of course, comes from trees and is preferred over firewood because it is easy to store and transport, and offers more energy than a comparable weight of firewood. It was quite common to see young men selling bags of charcoal all along the drive in the rural and forest areas that dominate Tanzania’s landscape outside Dar es Salaam.
But, both charcoal and firewood are often used in remarkably inefficient settings that generate a lot more smoke than usable heat. Often, the “stove” is nothing but a traditional fireplace with three stones.
Women, and children too, are often present around these smoking stoves. As one can imagine, such a constant inhalation of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and other gaseous chemicals, along with the tiny particulate matter can be devastating for health. Which is why “Acute Respiratory Infection” (ARI) is a leading public health problem in this beautiful mountainous setting, along with HIV and malaria.
This has not gone unrecognized. The Improved Charcoal Stove (ICS) was introduced in Tanzania in 1988, and research continues in developed and developing countries alike on designing more efficient firewood and charcoal burning stoves.
It was, thus, with a gladdened heart along with local pride that I read, after returning home, the essay in the New Yorker magazine, which was also referred to in a recent editorial in this newspaper. The New Yorker featured the Aprovecho Research Center—right here in Oregon—which has won international recognition for its efforts to design better stoves that would also be inexpensive.
My academic discussions with students about the more than 2.5 billion people who depend on wood and charcoal as the source of energy pale next to experiencing it everyday amidst an otherwise, and ironically enough, gorgeous setting on this blue planet of ours.
I bet the people of Pommern, along with other billions can’t wait for the kitchen upgrade. Go Aprovecho!
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanznia — In 1498 a new connection was made between India and Africa when the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama rounded Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, paused for a while in Mozambique and finally reached the land of pepper, which was the original “black gold.” When he landed in Kozhikode in India’s state of Kerala, da Gama one-upped Christopher Columbus, who had mistakenly claimed to have reached India.
The spices that drew the European explorers quickly transformed into political and military conquests. Thus, when da Gama undertook a second expedition in 1502, it was with cannons aboard a large fleet. What followed, as they say, was history. Five centuries later, “globalization,” which has its origins in those European maritime explorations, has become a household world.
The economic and cultural interconnections between peoples and countries present themselves every day. In my trip to Tanzania, these connections were evident right from the start at Dar es Salaam airport, where I was picked up by a couple from India, who came to Tanzania four years ago because of professional banking opportunities. I suppose people of Indian origin are everywhere on this planet!
They joked that the celebrations outside the airport were in my honor, and quickly followed up with the explanation that I had landed on Tanzania’s independence day. It is certainly an extraordinary achievement for Tanzania to have experienced 48 years of self-rule, without the ethnic strife that unfortunately characterizes many of its neighboring countries — Rwanda and the Congo, in particular.
Tanzania’s connections to the global economy are all around, especially with Japanese cars on the roads, and people driving and walking around with Swedish- and Korean-made cell phones. It was quite mind-boggling to read the news item that “Kuwait-based Zain Group has awarded Nokia Siemens Networks a five-year outsourcing contract to manage and upgrade its mobile networks in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.” What fascinating complexities: A Kuwait-based corporation responsible for the mobile phone operations in Tanzania, awarding the contract for day-to-day management to a company whose global headquarters are in Finland!
As if such a web of global economic interconnections were not enough, it turns out that the CEO of Nokia Siemens is, you guessed it, from India!
But this is also where Tanzania’s disconnect is obvious — the absence of Tanzania-made products. As students in my introductory course find out through their assignments, we consumers in the United States rarely come across products manufactured in Tanzania or any of the other African countries.
The Tanzanian government, not unlike other countries whose policies were heavily influenced by socialist ideals, is maneuvering in many ways to reverse the old policies and integrate the country into the global economy, and has done so with moderate success. Until the Great Recession hit, Tanzania had one of the best economic growth rates in all of sub-Saharan Africa.
However, Tanzania is also plugged into the economic world in a very different way — through foreign aid. According to the Development Partners Group, which comprises 16 bilateral aid groups and five international bodies including the United Nations, “Tanzania is one of the largest recipient countries of foreign aid in sub-Sahara Africa. Approximately 35 percent of government spending is dependent on foreign aid.” Last year, official development assistance from the U.S. government alone was more than $360 million — roughly $1 million in U.S. aid per day.
A lot of the aid is theoretically aimed at reducing poverty and economic development, which is also what I hope to understand during this trip. I will be spending an overwhelming majority of my time in the southern highlands. As the commercial capital of Tanzania, Dar es Salaam projects an image that is not quite reflective of the country where more than a third of the country subsists at below poverty levels as defined by the Tanzanian government. Neither are the shiny new multistoried buildings in the city’s center representative of the about 80 percent of the population that lives in rural areas.
But it is a long, long way to the highlands from the Mozambique shores where Vasco da Gama landed more than 500 years ago. If I will be able to get chicken tikka masala out in the villages in those highlands, I will need no further evidence of globalization!
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — When students asked me about my winter break plans, my favorite reply was a simple one-liner: “I am going home.”
Their typical response was something along the lines of, “Oh, how long will you be in India?” That is all the opening I needed to engage them in a discussion of how Africa is the “home” for all humans. The “roots” of Alex Haley’s Kunta Kinte are connected to our own collective narrative as well.
Tanzania offers a compelling argument for why it is home to humans — going back to hominids, who were human-like precursors to our kind. The evidence, in this case, includes the well-preserved footprints of hominids in northern Tanzania, estimated to be 3.75 million years old.
Further, with coffee having originated in Ethiopia, the stretch of Africa that includes Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia is an important ancestral home to this avid coffee drinking human.
Tanzania is merely one country in the African continent, and at almost a million square kilometers, Tanzania has about four times the area of Oregon. Yes, four times — that is how large the country is. Dar es Salaam, the capital city, and its neighboring region has a population roughly equal to that of the entire state of Oregon. One can, therefore, easily imagine the challenge at the very early stages of planning the trip — how choose the parts of Tanzania to visit over the three weeks I will spend here. Of course, I am here to focus on a research question, but more on this later.
As I continued to work on my going-home travel plans, I brought in Africa and Tanzania as examples at the appropriate moments in my classroom during the recently concluded fall term. For instance, during a discussion on global climate change, I used maps to point out that the electricity consumption in New York City alone was equal to the consumption in all of sub- Saharan Africa, with the exception of South Africa. Yes, it caught the students’ attention.
Students’ response has been the same over the years: They are excited to learn about the continent of Africa when provided with the chance, and utterly disappointed if there is nothing presented despite their genuine interest in learning more. I remember one African-American student in particular who was visibly disappointed that there was nothing about Africa in the schedule of social science classes.
Even if the rest of us are not like that student, who was innately driven to understand Africa, the post-Sept. 11 world in which we live requires us to give Africa the attention it deserves. I hope that we have not forgotten the significant pre-Sept. 11 incidents in Africa. First, in 1998, came the near- simultaneous bombings at the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, Kenya, the work of al-Qaeda. Responding to these incidents, President Bill Clinton ordered missile strikes on precise locations in Sudan in an attempt to neutralize Osama bin Laden. Ten years later, al-Qaeda sympathizers have yet another safe haven in Somalia. Its capital, Mogadishu, has earned notoriety as the world’s most dangerous place.
From an economic perspective, Tanzania and most of Africa seem to be falling behind the rest of the world. Globalization, which columnist Thomas Friedman popularly refers to as the world getting flatter, has delivered a double whammy to Africa. On the one hand, the trend of globalization has further pushed the heavily populated nations of China and India closer to the United States and Europe. On the other hand, most African countries rarely register a blip in our academic and journalistic radars. The economic playing field does not seem to have been leveled for Tanzania and most of the rest of Africa.
Yet we continue to marginalize Africa, even though doing so serves neither our academic interests nor the geopolitical interests that govern our realpolitik. I suppose the election of Barack Obama as president has given us a wonderful opportunity: Instead of arguing over where he was born, why not channel all that energy into understanding Africa?
