20th September 2006
Paul and Brian traveled to Tanzania with Oxfam during August 2006. Here they visited some programmwho would be benifiting from funds made for the sale fo the CD.
Brians diary:
Tuesday 1st August
"Dubai offers the visitor a fascinating kaleidoscope of contrasts, a distinctive blend of modern city and timeless desert.... An exotic destination with a cosmopolitan lifestyle". Or so it says in the colourful brochure we read in the airplane on our way to Tanzania, via a 6 hour wait for our connection at Dubai. We take advantage of our time there, and venture into central Dubai for a closer look.
It's 10 o'clock in the morning and it's an unbearable 43 degrees. There is no life outside, as we see everyone scramble from one air conditioned haven to the next. We make it to the sea side to cool down in the hot sea water. We see the famous super extravagant 7 star Hotel Dubai complete with its own private helipad on its rooftop. It even has its own falcon to scare off incoming birds that might shit on the windows. I then learn that there's a man employed permanently to wash the windows. A full time job apparently... One room in Hotel Dubai costs US$6000 / night - quite an extreme to be subjected to on our way to Africa's third world. Yeah, sure, it's got a nice clear view, but, .. so what. IT'S SIX GRAND A NIGHT!!!
We drive around the city centre. There's really nothing to write home about. The city is one massive construction site, being built for air conditioned indoor shopping and living. With no outside life at all and absolutely no sign of any heritage or history, it's not my kind of place. We get back to the airport completely disappointed with Dubai, and realise we've been conned by the artists' impressions that we've seen in the brochures. Why are so many people are choosing to buy property here!? Haven't they heard? This place is uninhabitable!
Wednesday 2nd August
There is confusion at the immigration and passport control at Dar Es Salaam airport. Some people are queuing with their yellow forms at the visa queue. Some with white ones at passport control. Some delegates can just walk straight through it all. Some other people seem to just wink at the men in uniforms and walk without queuing. Kind of reminds me of how Dublin airport used to be in the good ole days, when you'd wink at the security guard, and say in your thickest Irish accent "How'ya", and let you through, no passport no nothin.... Yeah the same,.. only different.
It turns out that we don't need a visa to enter the country so we fill out our white forms. Confused as to which box we should tick for reason for entry, Paul and I go for 'the missions'. .. The Oxfam staff suggest to us that the 'on business' box is probably more appropriate, but luckily they have a sense of humour and so christen us 'Father Paul and Brian' from here on in, just for their own amusement.
We meet Peter Boffin outside, who hails from Monkstown, but has been working in the Tanzanian Oxfam office for the past year and will be showing us around for the next week. He drives us to our accommodation. I'm on reserve energy now after 30 hours on planes, so after a couple of spacey drinks, I say goodnight to Sisters Rebecca, Siobhan, Kim, and Father Paul and go my bed under my mosquito net.
Thursday 3 rd August
Dar Es Salaam is a bustling place, in a chaotic unorganized kind of way. The cars and buses are stuffed with people. Some are so full that the doors cannot close. Shops all look the same - old garages selling a random selection of good, like a car boot sale. And, armed private security guarding places of business are a common site.
After meeting the Oxfam staff at the Dar HQ, we drive around the city centre to collect a few bits and pieces before staring our journey north for Tanga. We get out of the city after a couple of hours in traffic, and get our first glimpse of country life in Tanzania.
Friday 4th August.
An estimated two million men, women and children live with HIV/AIDS in Tanzania. Today we're visiting the Tanga AIDS Working Group, set up by a group medical practitioners for treating people with HIV and reducing the spread of AIDS.
As we arrive at the clinic, I see a woman completely covered in a black gown so as to disguise herself as she makes her way to the clinic. It's explained to us that this is a common scene and that AIDS still carries with it a huge social stigma, which alienates victims from their communities. We arrive inside and are introduced to the doctors who run the clinic. We're shown around the complex, and are introduced to some of the patients who are being treated here. Reality now hits home for the first time on this trip. The colourful clothes worn by the patients acts as a not very convincing cover for the sadness in everyone's eyes. Feeling totally inadequate, and embarrassed for our invasion, all I can do is nod and smile apologetically to everyone, and try and make our presence there as short as possible.
The doctors here have developed herbal remedies for the treatment HIV related infections and symptoms. Herbs are grown, and grinded into four powders. White powder for increasing appetite, green powder for reducing fever, black powder for skin infections and brown powder for fungal infection. Patients whose white blood count goes below 200, are being treated with generic antiretrovirals (ARVs) which are imported from India.
We visit a community centre in central Tanga, whose members are all HIV positive, and meet daily to talk and cook together, and offer practical advice to each other on how to live life with AIDS. There is a wonderful community spirit here. Everyone is sitting around in a semicircle. Some women in front of us are huddled up with their feet tangled together. Newer members are hanging nearer the back. Everyone stands up in turn and introduces themselves telling us their name and the number of years they've been infected. One older woman sitting to my side is particularly sparky. Her story provides hope and strength for the group - she is 58 years old with 8 children, and has been HIV positive for 10 years.
All the members are using the herbal treatments, and about one third are using ARVs. Nobody here is aware of the pending trade agreement being negotiated between Africa and Europe which in its current incarnation will not allow generic drugs such as ARVs to be imported from places like India. It's sad to learn that these new trade rules are being put in place to protect the financial interest of first world multinational pharmaceutical companies at the cost of denying these drugs to millions of people in the developing world which their lives depend on.
As well as treating people living with HIV, it's also important to educate people on HIV awareness and try to prevent this disease spreading through communities. Our next visit brings us to a drama group in Pongwe, a town 10 miles outside Tanga where this message is being delivered.
I'm super impressed with how these guys have put together an effective awareness programme given the limited resources they have. The group of about 20 performers, all dressed in green t-shirts, are dancing and singing to an audience gathered around for the show. There are four men banging out the beats on bongos and other bits and pieces. There is a gramophone hanging in the tree which is amplifying the music around the field. Apart from some young kids running around, the group have a captivated audience of about 300 locals. With all the kids playing around, and my language barrier, I'm almost fooled into thinking that this is a fun day out for the family, until I get the translation for the chant being sung: "We are killing each other every day. We need to change the way we behave".
Beside the group are four small blue tents which offer free AIDS tests, and advice on prevention of HIV. We go over and visit one tent. I try and imagine what it must be like to take this walk to this side of the field to get tested. It must be terrifying. It's spooky over here. I see a woman in one of the tents. She'll know her fate in 30 minutes. There is no-one outside to comfort here if the news she gets is bad. We walk into another tent and meet the nurse who has been testing here all week. She tells us that they have tested 80 people in three hours last week. 11 people tested positive.
Sunday 6th August
We are in a town called Morogoro, and are being shown around by an outfit called "MVIWATA", a farmers advisory service set up in 1993 to help small scale farmers get their foothold on the market place. The jeeps drive us up into the mountains. Colours are so lush and vibrant up here. There's rich tropical vegetation everywhere. Once again, my mind is playing tricks on me, as I'm more than slightly distracted by the breathtaking scenery all around. I'm becoming numb to the recurring scenes of families living in mud huts, with no electricity or running water. It's almost becoming normal.
We arrive at our destination, and are met by a group of local farmers who have set up a Savings and Credit group for the local area. We sit around in a circle and introduce ourselves. I have learnt a little Swahili now, and am able to say my name, and that I'm a musician from Ireland. After my introduction, their faces are a little bemused. I'm not sure if they didn't understand my phonetically transcribed Swahili, or just confused as to what help exactly a musician from Ireland can do for these folks up here in the mountains. Feels like I've come to the table with an insufficient offering.
After speaking with the Credit Union, I'm really impressed with the level of detail they have considered, and the compassion they show to their members, knowing that the service they provide to them is crucial to their livelihoods. Small loans give farmers the chance to invest a little into their businesses and allow them become self sufficient and make better profit margins from their farms. We meet Omary 'Ubaya' Lukanza, who is a local hero for playing centre half on the Kinole soccor team ('Ubaya' meaning badness). He tells us how his life has changed for the better since he has become a member of the saving scheme. He needed a trade, and so decided to get into pineapple growing after he researched what kind of farming would give him the best return. With the money he borrowed, he bought a truck and started his pineapple farm. He now can feed his family and send his kids to school.
Monday 7th August
Today has been promised to us as being the highlight of the trip. We leave our accommodation early and drive up into the mountains until we reach Nyandira, a meeting place for traders far up in the clouds. We're 1,650 metres above sea level, and the temperature is now 12 degrees Celsius. On our drive we pass many farmers on their way to the market, carrying heavy loads on their heads. Some of them are barefoot. It's cloudy and misty and cold up here. Yeah, it's like Croagh Patrick in Ireland - the same, only very very different!!
I knew a little about fair trade before I came to Africa, and was aware of farmers not getting a fair price for their produce in most of the Third World. This is where the deals were going down. This place has a sinister feel about it. We could see buyers negotiating their price, and sellers obviously not happy with the price they're being offered. But they don't hold the reins. If they don't sell they,.. well they have to sell. Most of their produce up here is perishable, so if they don't sell today, then they don't sell at all. This is the way the scales are balanced.
One of the main problems with selling local produce is that the supply far outweighs the demand. This is largely due to Tanzania not being able to compete with world markets, which is largely due to first world countries giving subsidies to their home grown produce, resulting in countries like America being able to produce cotton for a cheaper price than Tanzania. Marco Mtunga who works for the Tanzanian Cotton Board, explains to us the not too bright future for the country's cotton industry should these new trade agreements go ahead. Not only will Tanzania not be able to compete with world markets with their own cotton exports, they will also be threatened from imported cotton from countries like the US which will undercut locally produced cotton, and hence completely destroy the domestic industry.
...and Paul's Diary :
I'd like a sausage, please
Eddie Izzard does a plummy, obnoxious Englishman on holiday 'out foreign'. "I'd like a sausage please!" he bellows, "What do you mean you don't speak English, you just don't try!!" I'm in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, with Brian from the band, and Oxfam, to see some of the work that they fund here. We got in late last Wednesday night, and at breakfast the following morning I hear the words leave my lips - "I'd like a sausage please!". Well, the waitress had offered an omelette with sausage, and everyone else had declined the sausage. I however was digging on swine, so I had one. It turned out to be some class of hot dog.
We had a six hour stopover in Dubai on the way, and took a taxi tour of the city. It's an awful place. Like some kind of settlement on an uninhabitable planet (it was 43 degrees and very humid), consisting of air conditioned new shopping malls, hotels and holiday apartments between which you zip in air conditioned cars on multi-lane highways. There's an indoor ski slope, which from the outside is a big metal tube at about 30 degrees to the ground. The Iron Giant's Cock. It's like LA in that everything is built on these freeways, and no one walks anywhere. Ain't got no soul
I've never been to Africa before and it's been a crazy, wonderful, melty few days. The hotel rooms in Tanzania have all had a mosquito net over the bed, making them look like the set of David Brent's video for "If You Don't Know Me By Now". The food's been really good, lots of rice and fish, and wonderful mango and passion fruit juices. I've seen banana, coconut and mango trees for the first time. They seem to grow everywhere, lining the roads as we rush by. The parts of the country we've seen seem really fertile, with lush growth all around. This, the buzzing, seemingly anarchic markets in every town and the kaleidoscope of colours of produce and clothing give the impression of a vibrant, vital and luminous place.
Tanga
For the first of our visits we went north, to Tanga, on the Indian ocean. There we met with the Tanga AIDS Working Group, who work at raising awareness of HIV/AIDS, and provide testing, treatment and counselling. They combine traditional herbal medicines with modern drugs, and we saw some of the ground root powders that sufferers take for abdominal pains and ulcers. We met with a group of about 30 people with HIV who meet regularly in a kind of community centre, and by way of introduction they stood in turn to give their name, and a number - the number of years that they have been living with the disease. In declaring themselves HIV positive, they run the risk of being shunned by their peers or disowned by their families, so they draw support and comfort from each other. There was a 19 year old girl - two years. A 58 year old woman with eight children - four years. I spoke to Peter, a 34 year Kenyan who has been positive for four years. He lost his wife to AIDS four years ago, and isn't really working at the moment, picking up casual labour on the docks when it's there. He's on the herbal medicines, as his white blood cell count is above 600. They taste rank, he makes a puss to underline this. He says he won't take the Anti Retroviral Drugs unless his count falls below 200, if he gets them. It's doubtful that he would qualify, he says. The group make crafts to sell to visitors like us - colourful fabrics and handbags. They have hand held wicker style fans bearing a line in Swahili that means "Sadness will End".
That afternoon we visited a village where a group of dancers, drummers and singers were bigging up the importance of safe sex and 'get yourself tested' to the kids. This was mental. It's proven to be a really effective way of getting these messages across, and there was a real sense of something cool going down, under a big mango tree that held the tannoy speaker. The crowd cheering, answering the call, and response-style singing. The performers are definitely the cool kids, they're the boys in Grease, they're Fonzy baby. I ask someone what it is they're singing. "Be smart, get tested, or AIDS will kill us all!" is bellowed out, as the drummers get wicked. The great irony is that the dancing is incredibly sexual. Barefoot and elegant, the girls move those hips as if the bones in the pelvic area have been liquidised. Says Whitey. A youth peer educator gets on the mike and talks about drink and drugs. "If you come home drunk, you won't be able to get it up and your woman will get her lovin elsewhere!" he warns, as the children gaze up at him, or dart about, chasing and laughing. People sign up to be tested for HIV at a desk near the performing, and the testing is carried out in a series of little army surplus tents. In one of the tents we were given a demonstration of how to put on a condom by a grandmother of eight. "And now, the man is ready", she says before slipping it on the wooden replica cock.
Savings and Loans
On Saturday we travelled south to Morigoro, where we were to meet with an umbrella group for Tanzanian farmers' collectives called MVIWATA. Before we got into this, we went on a bit of a safari in Wakiri National Park. Helen, a guide from the park came with us and we were lucky enough to come upon a pride (there were four lionesses, and a cub. Does that make a pride...?) of lions. They were asleep, and half woke up as we drove up very near to them, giving us a slightly disgusted look of condescension. Yep, they were cats alright. It was like the primary school geography book coming alive. The African Plains - elephants (apparently more dangerous to humans than any of the others, other than hippos), along with giraffes, all manner of monkeys, zebras, wildebeest, warthogs, antelopes.
That evening we met with members of MVIWATA. They are funded by Oxfam, and provide education and access to resources to farmers nationwide. Henry spoke to us for some time that night. One of the things that really stuck with me was his passion for encouraging a sense of dignity about farming as a valid career choice. In a country where 80% of the farmers are poor subsistence farmers, growing on a small bit of land for their own use, living hand to mouth, this was very important in raising their horizons and quality of life. He stressed the importance of education in teaching these farmers how best to use their land and how best to group together to sell their produce. MVIWATA provides training and facilities for the development of farmers credit unions called SACCOS (I don't remember what this stands for. So many acronyms, so little brain...). We visited one of these, and saw how they can lift farmers out of subsistence farming by providing loans for seeds, hire of machinery for preparation of the land, fertilizers and pesticides. We met "Badness" (So called because of his effectiveness as centre half for the local soccer team,) a pineapple farmer who had grown his operation through loans from the local SACCOS and who now had his own machinery and was a director of the credit union. All of the meetings we've had here start very formally, with a definite protocol observed. Everyone stands and introduces him/herself, and then a few words from whomever we're visiting on what they do, followed by words from a member of our party on why we're there. It even got to "And now a few words from the musicians", which I'm sure were needed by many who were wondering what two musicians from Dublin had to do with any of this. Then we would move "from the formal to the informal", or ask some questions. And man, do some of them love to talk. This could get very protracted if everything had to be translated between English and Swahili, as it often did. Apparently there is a strong culture of public speaking and social protocol in Tanzania. When a couple decide to marry, there is a Wedding Committee that decides who's invited, who sits where, and what everyone eats and wears. This was all really surprising to me in a society that in many ways seemed so disordered - electricity off every second day, few paved roads, crammed Hiaces for timetable-less public transport, the anarchy of the market. But it's not disorder, it's poverty. There simply isn't the money to change these things.
As an attempt at light relief, at one of the meetings with farmers I asked if it would be possible for me to become Ireland's first mango farmer. A discussion ensued as to what particular strain of mango might be suited to such colder climes, and it was concluded that the mango growing should be left to them. Every meeting ends with a Vote of Thanks, us thanking them for their knowledge and time. I think. That evening there was football on in the hotel bar, Ajax vs Inter in the Amsterdam Cup. It was very surreal. They're mad for European soccer here, particularly the English Premiership. Lots of fake shirts, mostly Arsenal as far as I saw. They get the games on television - there's many a blackboard outside the most modest of mud-hut bars with fixture lists and forthcoming matches on them, a satellite dish on the roof. Lots of Beckham stuff - shirts, chewing gum, underwear. I wonder of he's getting his cut.
Market in the Mist
The following morning we drove high into the mountains to visit Nyandira market. Before this was built by the French government, the local farmers had limited access to markets through which to sell their produce. Here, high in the clouds, figures slip in and out of the morning mist carrying huge loads on their heads, or line the road having set out their stalls. The bigger farmers or groups of smaller farmers meet with traders under cover of the main market buildings, hammering out deals for cauliflower and radish. Through MVIWATA, the farmers are kept abreast of market prices all over the country, and the markets growing popularity with traders means that they now get better prices for their produce. Outside, the smaller farmers sell beans, potatoes, sugar cane (Brian and I bought a cane each, you can just peel and chew it raw) and a little number called cassava. I met one woman who had walked for four hours to sell her sack of red beans. She wasn't getting the price she would have liked for them, but it was still worth her while coming here. There's also some pound shop style stuff being sold here - plastic basins, Ja Rule t shirts, and dirty playing cards that come all the way from China.
That afternoon we visited an agricultural show, where MVIWATA had an area in which they displayed farming produce and animals. I held a baby goat (kid?) for a while, so when asked if I've been in contact with livestock upon my return to Dublin airport I'll have to say yes... it's the hose for me. Mobile phone use is spreading like wildfire in Tanzania, and everything seems to have been branded with one service provider or another. The guys controlling the car park here have VodaCom all over them, and there's a stage inside brought to you by Cellnet, with guys rapping and doing comedy routines. I think I am singled out for ridicule at some point, as I hear the word "Mazungo" (meaning "foreigner", though slightly derogatory) and there's laughing in my direction. That's one of the mad things about being here. Whitey can't blend in. Driving or walking through the villages, you're fixed in the stern gaze of a hundred pairs of eyes. This can seem intimidating, but if returned with a wave or a thumbs-up it is always met with same. We talked for a good while to Marco from the Tanzanian Cotton Board about the problems facing cotton producers, and how subsidies paid to US cotton farmers by their government keep prices down on the international market, making it very difficult for Tanzanian farmers to export at a profit. One thing that has really struck home from this visit is how unfair the paying of subsidies to first world farmers can be. After facing obstacles like drought, intermittent electricity supply, poor or non-existent road or transport networks, farmers from the developing world are often faced with getting artificially low prices for their produce as exports or worse still, being undercut in their own countries by cheap, subsidised imports. This is simply unfair, and though most of these kinds of subsidies are being phased out, it will be prolonged and often conditional. Our economies, and we as taxpayers, must be prepared to take the hit in getting rid of them sooner and unconditionally.
The night before we left, Brian and I played a few songs with a band in a bar. They did some kind of long-winded introduction, and then handed their instruments over to us, a guitar and a keyboard with drum machine. We used to play in pubs ourselves in this configuration... we decided it would be best to keep things up, and not descend into moanyhole introspection as is our want, so Brian got the beats going and we played a few songs in the key of craic. Made a balls of "And She Was" by Talking Heads, tho...
