Summer in the southern hemisphere. It’s the rainy season, but it hasn’t rained in weeks. Exhausted bean plants whither and die. An old man naps under a tree, conserving his energy. The sun glares down relentlessly, angrily.
Sitting atop a pile of hot mud bricks are four small Tanzanian children and one sweat-soaked American woman. The assembly is staring at the road in front of them, enjoying the free theater of development. They watch excitedly as big yellow trucks drive by, leaving smelly but welcome tarmac in their wake.
In addition to tarmac, the truck carries an assortment of young Tanzanian men transplanted unceremoniously from cities and towns all around the country. They listen to music on their phones, talk about their many girlfriends, and yell obscenities at the random white girl hanging out with snot-nosed kids in ripped, muddy clothes. The city-boy road workers look around this dinky little village and think; I am so much cooler than this place. Or maybe they’re thinking about dinner. Actually, being young men, they’re probably thinking about sex. Anyway, they’re looking around and thinking about something.
I pull the bright fabric of my khanga closer around my head, blocking the twin glares of sun and men.
“Where do you want to go once the road is finished?” I ask my little companions.
“I want to go to Singida,” 5-year-old Salima announces.
“No rain in Singida,” her older brother counters. “We’ll go to Arusha!”
The children begin to talk excitedly about all the great things in Arusha, especially the rain and fruit. Always appreciative of my little neighbors’ explanations for the great mysteries of the world, I ask the kids why there’s lots of rain in Arusha but so little here in the village. The children look up at wispy clouds floating pathetically against a background of shocking blue.
“The Chinese wizards,” Hussein replies sagely. Hussein is eight years old. He’s been in primary school for almost a year, so he knows things like this. He explains matter-of-factly how the Chinese road engineers set off thunder-bombs at night in order to confuse God and make the rain stop.
I patiently explain that the thunder-bombs are just dynamite, and that no-one—not even a Chinese engineer—is capable of stopping the rain on cue. The kids look at me like I’m an idiot.
I wrote the beginning of this blog update about two weeks ago, before I left for Dar Es Salaam to help with a staff diversity training. When I left, the tarmac was just reaching my village, but it was still drying so cars couldn’t yet ride on it.
Before coming back to the village, I stopped in Moshi to run my second half marathon. Pretty much nothing I’m doing in the village has a fully measurable impact… ye olde pre-test/post-test might tell me that 90% of my students now know how HIV is transmitted, but it doesn’t tell me how many are going to protect themselves accordingly. So it was really nice to see that at least my personal project of getting in shape is objectively succeeding. This year I ran 15 minutes faster than last year, reaching the finish line completely exhausting and with strangely tingly limbs at just over 2 hours.
I brought the medal back and tried to convince Mama Saidi that I had come in third place (I didn’t want to push it by claiming to have come in first), but she wasn’t fooled. Her exact response was, “You aren’t a Kenyan, Lauren. You mean you came in third out of the Peace Corps volunteers.” (Actually, I tied for 4th.)
The marathon is completely unrelated to a blog entry about the road, but I felt the need to brag. We’ll now continue with your regularly scheduling programming…
I almost missed my stop on the way home because I didn’t notice my village bus stand rushing by while the bus chugged right along on paved road. The road is now paved all the way from the biggest city in Tanzania right to my doorstep. In a few years, we might even be on Google maps. Watching the road arrive and the rains depart, I realize what a unique opportunity I have here. It’s been over a year and a half, but I’m still wrapping my head around it. I’m watching a road arrive, watching a village go through a very serious developmental growth spurt.
And I’m seriously enjoying the new perks.
I can now get to the nearest western-style coffee shop in half the time it took when I first got here, and every time the road inches a little closer to completion, the distance between me and pizza grows gloriously shorter. I’ve seen busses coming from Arusha pass by the village just 4 hours after leaving town. That same trip used to take 12 hours, and was impassible during some parts of the rainy season.
Considering the vaguely Luddite tendencies I started acquiring during my last year of college, I’m surprised by how unconcerned I am about the environmental externalities of the road. I’m just too excited about the economic and social possibilities (and, let’s be honest, my judgment is clouded by my serious food cravings). But even with this uncharacteristically optimistic perspective, I can’t help but worry. I worry about deadly collisions with daydreaming children unaccustomed to looking both ways before they cross the street. I worry about rapid population growth straining already tight resources. Most of all, in the short term, I worry about the road workers. With a girlfriend in every big town in Tanzania, they enjoy giving their STDs to local girls for the price of a soda and French fries. In a region that has managed to keep its HIV rate to a relatively low 2%, our road workers seem determined to bring this area closer to the Tanzanian average of 7%. I think about this statistic as I look at my students. There are about 300 of them. I look at their mischievous smiles, their too-cool-for-this-silly-white-girl grins, and I do the math. 7% of 300 is twenty. I can’t let myself fully digest the implications, but I’ve made a commitment to ramp up my Life Skills programming.
Speaking of Life Skills programming, I have to wrap this up. Tomorrow morning is the beginning of the Hanang District Young Women’s Empowerment Conference—an even that’s been in the making/on my mind since well over a year ago. Maybe I can’t bring back the rains and I can’t stop the road from being a vector of disease, but if all goes well over the next weekend, a few young women will come out of the conference feeling a little bit more confident, capable of protecting themselves from the struggles the road will bring and benefiting from the opportunities. Here’s to cautious optimism and small victories.
