Musings of a social worker - Rose

Our food and beverage habits have adjusted to the climate. Keeping enough water filtered for us all is a daily chore. We have two water filter units that we fill and empty all day long, collecting the water in water bottles and storing them in the fridge. We keep pop and beer cold and replenishing both requires a lot of trips to the market as you have to provide an empty that matches what you buy or pay an exorbitant deposit fee. Bottles have clearly been reused way more than they would be in Canada. In addition to the standards: cola, orange and sprite; there are a few interesting alternatives. My personal favourite is Sparletta, a citrus lemon-lime type soda. My favourite name is a ginger beer called Tangawizi. The bottling plant is not too far away on the road to Tanga.
Snacks are crisps (very hard and often stale potato chips), roasted peanuts or cashews sold by street vendors, oranges pealed and sold by street vendors, and sugar cane which Simon tried this week for the first time and says it was good. Chocolate bars are available and a luxury but getting them home without having them melt is the challenge.
We have ready access to a standard variety of vegetables and have had a number of delicious meals but food preparation and planning takes up a lot of time as, for the most part, everything has to be bought and prepared on the day of the meal. Refrigeration is limited and untrustworthy so there is no room for a large quantity of leftovers and what we do keep needs to be eaten soon. The fridge is only bar sized and in general, we keep it fairly full of liquids, yogurt, cheese and a few condiments.
The biggest industries appear to be the bottling plant, the Tanga cement factory, Tanga fresh dairy – where our milk and yogurt comes from, and the sisal industries – the lake we visited near Magoroto was in a Royal Palm plantation and the nearest village was built around a sisal manufacturing facility. There are several sisal factories around. Tanga used to be a major producer of sisal rope and although the demand has dropped, it appears to be on the rise again.
Costs vary and there are clearly two price scales: one for Tanzanians and one for Wazungu (white people). Food is cheap even at Wazungu prices – 10 cents for 3-4 tomatoes, 5 cents for a lemon. Fabric is also quite inexpensive but prices for electronics and many other non-food items are often comparable to Canadian prices and in some cases more than we would have to pay. Ink cartridges for Sister Gwynneth’s printer cost about twice what I would have paid in Canada. But the most glaring difference is in wages. Julietie and Hatibu earn the Canadian equivalent of 80 dollars a month. A program administrator at the hospital earns about 350 dollars a month. It’s difficult to know how much this amount of wage difference makes in people’s lives as there is so much about the lives of the people that we are not privy to. Almost all of our information is filtered through other Wazungu.
As we walk to school in the morning we pass many homes and many gardens and see people starting their day. The lifestyle appears based on self-sufficiency, a lot of hard work, and does not require or rely on electricity at all. People cook over charcoal or wood braziers in their homes. They grow food for their own consumption and if they have extra, they sell it. There is no vegetable processing and preserving that I have seen so crop failure or a drought would have serious consequences to a family’s ability to feed itself.
It is hard to say why some families have more than others but I suspect it is similar to Canada. The number of children to feed and the number of wage earners in the family would determine a family’s economic stability and illness, injury, or death of an income earner would have serious consequences. There are a number of half built homes around and when I asked Sister Gwynneth why they were empty, she said people receive a land grant and it is cheap to build the walls out of brick or concrete but they don’t have enough money for the roof and so the project is abandoned. I would like to know more and whether it is for want of the cost of a roof that some people stay poor.