Friday I managed to stirr my head well with all vital, practical things related to my own (small) role in Danish development aid, electricity, Internet, water, traffic, corruption - to the music pouring out loud from the container bar next door run by the self-acclaimed peaceful rasta (who once told me that he sold drugs for the Nigerians in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, which means I don’t complain when a bar customer cranks up his car stereo outside my gate);
* to the ufisadi I read about in the paper;
* the big potatoes in the fat land cruiser not giving me space on Ali Hassan Mwinyi Road;
* my Internet provider who has been hassling me to prepay my Internet subscription (though there hasn’t been any connection for the past two months and they have no intention of telling me that his company really has been bought up by another…);
* that my water bill suddenly tripled, and DAWASCO (Dar Es Salaam’s Water Company) interpretates ‘Customer Care’ very differently than I.
* the young female students who pay with sex to get through university or to get jobs;
* the fact that you have to know someone to get somewhere (but that you owe that person the rest of your life);
* the young guy with limps in stead of legs;
* to the hungry street child on Morogoro Road whom I passed when I returned from Zanaki Street, and who wanted to wash my (clean) front screen so that he could fill his stomach later.
And that’s where I had had it:
He mimicked ‘chakula’. Food.
I got a lump in my throat, and I then went for notes in stead of coins, though it is against all principles (which ones exactly, I’ve luckily forgotten). I thought; World Food Day, my ass. I just blogged about it, and here I face my own limitations one hour later a kilometer away from the office. It made me feel like I was paying a monthly subscription for a lighter conscience in return for representing a nation which have prioritized Tanzania in their development support budget, but not the boy in the street ‘because he is outside the strategy which is focusing on another district, cluster, group or theme.’
Some days it just doesn’t stop.
When I finally got home to my neighborhood, all traffic had come to a halt. Two cars had crashed, one driver still stuck in the front seat behind the wheel, people gathering like flies on sugar, hovering like hyenas. Just up front Kikwete’s house in the crossing between Ursino and Migombani Street, which got tarmac last year so that people now can drive as if no one else exists.
There is only so much you can deal with in one day.
Your friends at home think you’ve finally lost it, and that Africa has beaten you. They tell you, they told you. That Africa wears you out. That it is time to return home.
So, you stop telling them what’s really going on.
Or you insist that this is normal. That Danish psychological interpretations appear absurd in Tanzania. That this is what most people in Africa go through, and you are not excempted just because you are white.
If so, that is because you close your eyes and have lost touch with your feelings and conscience.
By Pernille Bærendtsen • October 19, 2009
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