Some of us volunteers have talked about the interesting racial dynamic here, from being a part of a vast minority, to being called out to or referred to as “mzungu” (white person), to calling our experiences “African” versus “Tanzanian.” During that conversation we came to the conclusion that the people here do identify as African almost as much as they do Tanzanian, even though the continent is huge and encompasses many different cultures and even colors.
But when in Tanzania, do as the Tanzanians do.
So we don’t have running water or electricity in the village. So that means no toilets. But rural doesn’t mean uncivilized. They have their own kind of facility, called a “choo” (rhymes with “snow”). What it is, is basically a hole in the ground (quite deep… I don’t imagine they’ll have to dig a new one for many many years to come) surrounded by some sort of barrier that includes a latching door that latches from both the inside and the outside. (I’ve heard stories from my coordinator of volunteers being locked into the choo from the outside by accident.) Mine looks like a shack on a concrete slab. When you walk in, there is a nice concrete floor with one large block-like foot stand on either side of the hole to—you guessed it—put your feet on. The hole itself is rectangular, allowing a forward-backward margin for error. When compared to the choo stories my fellow teaching team members have, I’m a natural at using it. And apparently, my homestay has the best choo of all three host homestays in my village. I think mine is the only homestay whose choo is not cockroach-infested, especially at night. I’ve been shocked that it’s not, according to all the stories I’ve heard. But I don’t know why the buggers don’t like our choo. Is it not smelly enough? Hard to imagine…
Now… I have provided myself with my own toilet paper. But we haven’t figured out what the locals do. Someone told me that the left hand is… the “dirty hand,” but I don’t know if I actually believe they use it to wipe themselves or if that’s volunteer rumor. I’ll let you know if I find out for sure. We have a somewhat evidence-based theory that they use water from a bottle to wash themselves afterwards, but that doesn’t make sense to me. They’re pretty clean, non-stinky people. In fact, I’m under the impression they wash here more often than I do.
Speaking of washing, bucket showers are actually quite nice! They boil some water and add that to another bucket of water to make a very nice temperature bath. You take the bucket into the wash room (the next door over from the choo, on the same concrete slab). Instead of a towel, I’ve brought with me a small-towel-sized shammy for showering, etc. Good choice, I must say. I used the shammy to soak up water and wring it out over my shoulders, creating a very nice shower effect! I won’t lie… bathing this way has been LUXURIOUS compared with the bathing we did in standing showers at some of the places we’ve stayed. Often times the water won’t be running at all or, when you’re lucky and it is, it’s cold!
Off the hygiene topic, time is kept quite differently here. There’s “English time,” “Swahili time,” and “Tanzanian time,” each of which are different from the others. For the sake of explaining this, I’ll call English time normal time. Because that’s what it is. To me. And you. You’ll see how.
Swahili time is how you say the hour when speaking Swahili. I can’t account for Kimeru or other local languages, but it’s this way for Swahili. In this time frame, 7AM is the first hour of the day (“Saa moja”). So 8AM is referred to as “Saa mbili” (hour two). Likewise, 7PM is the first hour of the night (“Saa moja”). So likewise, 8PM is “Saa mbili”. Now you can see the confusion this would cause in many ways. One of those is cleared up by referencing the time of day you’re referring to, such as “Saa mbili asubuhi (morning)” versus “Saa mbili jioni (evening).”
The peculiar thing is that the clocks here look the same as the clocks at home and in western society. They also have the same numbers, with 12 at the top and 6 at the bottom. 10:00AM on the clock looks exactly like you’d want it to, although you’d read it in Swahili as, “Saa nne,” meaning “Hour four.”
Tanzanian time is something else. If you’d ever heard the phrase “No hurry in Africa,” it wasn’t a westerner who’d said it. It is not uncommon for people to show up hours late for a meeting or appointment. I don’t know how they function this way. But I guess it’s because they don’t try to do so many things in the day as we do. I don’t know what else to say about this except that it’s been a source of frustration for we wazungu, and that although the Tanzanians make a habit of being hours late, we need to be on time everywhere, even if that means on time to wait patiently for their presence. And we can’t allow their tardiness to make us late for our later engagements (i.e. scheduled teachings in schools).
My theory is that they don’t have enough clocks—or enough people don’t have them—to keep a consistent sense of time, even once they put the watch on. I’ve joked that my gift to Tanzania would be a large clock. But that, of course, was coming from a place of impatience.
