A while back, Jon Gosier of Appfrica offered the telling statistic that inspired Appfrica Labs to spring from the Makerere University, long respected as one of the prime East African academic institutions, in downtown Kampala:

In Makerere’s Computer Science program they graduate about 900 kids per year. Of those 900 between 5% and 10% find full time jobs by the same time the next year. Those that don’t find jobs by that time, now have the added pressure of competing with the next class – with a the added disadvantage of a slightly outdated and somewhat unequal education (as education should be getting better with each graduating class)

This, of course, showed that there was a vast amount of untapped talent to inspire in Uganda.

From my own experience working in the education sector, Tanzania isn’t in this situation: in contrast, they’re still ramping up the post-secondary education system to meet even the tiny job market. About eight years past, Tanzania massively expanded its primary school enrollment (East Africa comparison graph) (2002, PEDP). About six years ago, leaders started building a huge number of secondary schools (SEDP) and student numbers (& some teaching standards, like A-level) have gone way up with the greater student base and intense competition. In the last year they’ve built several huge, new government universities which are starting to accept students in large numbers from these original student cohorts as they now reach adulthood. The government of TZ is also handing out many “loans” which are much like grants to a large fraction of the eligible post-secondary students who apply for them.

The challenge of today is to help these still-green Tanzanian higher-education students realize the communities of ICT online as efficiently as possible so that they have a chance to compete in the regional marketplace. An effective ICT practitioner can not keep themselves current without engaging online.  Think of all those students finishing CompSci at Makerere and getting lost in the progress. Fresh ideas exchanged through newly liberalizing labor market initiatives like the strengthened East African Community (EAC), university-affiliated silicon tech hubs, and high profile competitions like Apps4Africa are fantastic for this. I am happy to note that Tanzanian academics like Rakesh Rajani (e.g. his comments on the SEDP in 2006 & on Twitter) who led some aspects of the hugely important education expansions in Tanzania are getting behind it. Sure, iHub, Appfrica Labs and Hive Colab are big names in East African ICT today.  Tanzania, (and though I can’t speak to them so directly, even Rwanda/Burundi) have a good chance at their own ICT silicon-style hubs as the higher education terrain swiftly develops in the greater Uswahili.

Just to caution: I am not a development or economics scholar so please do correct me if you think any portrayal of a stat is inaccurate.

It was just out of curiosity so I can’t remember what all I read but I remembered being startled by the class-based histories of artificial skin coloring, having expected it to be all about race. Apparently, tanning grew popular with white folks earlier in the 20th century to mark leisure and money. If you could be tan in winter, it showed that you had the resources to go to a warm climate. If you could be tan in summer, it showed that you weren’t stuck in the factories for work…That we can’t see it simply in light of race, but as a complex interplay between race, class, and geography.

Its true. I never heard any East African rail against skin whitening. It is a tempting target but probably a nonissue in a different cultural context. This clash between Indian branch of Vasoline brand and the US reminds me of another cultural chasm brought into contrast by the social internet: the Makmende meme.

Ethan Zuckerman wrote about how Wikipedians adamantly wanted to erase the article for Makmende as it didn’t seem relevant or significant. As the meme crossed Kenyan blogs it was quite notable in those circles but not reachable by the average westerner wikipedia editors.

These kinds of misunderstandings rarely reach us in the US, especially not as we sit down at our computers. They greet and grate on volunteers and international workers constantly–Pretty much whenever they walk out the door of their comfy homes.

Unsmilingly photogenic. Did you think honest portraits required smiles?

Are there any more examples of Cultural Collisions that you’ve seen recently?

I’ve mentioned before on the blog how it makes little sense to me how a country with such rich prospects as Tanzania can be so poor. Another wonder of mine is why do the AIDS prevention techniques presented to me by the US government feel hollow. For me, these books ring as partial answers.

I hope to have more later about each, for now, bullets:

Invisible Cure by Helen Epstein: Why has Africa been trapped with HIV and AIDS? (Amazon)

VIA New York Review of Books review

1. Africans are no more promiscuous than most other people, as measured by numbers of sexual partners in a lifetime, casual sexual encounters, and visits to prostitutes.
2. Common transactional relationships (significantly: more than one at the same time) arise from the gulf between an rich and impoverished men and women and the vacuum left by the breakdown of traditional familial, land & tribal ties.
3. Multiple partners have somewhat more traditional precedent in Africa than in most any part of the world. Both male & female partners are fairly free in this regard (unlike in strict Muslim cultures)
4. HIV is most contagious in the first few months of the disease. Concurrent partners have contact in that period essentially “networking” the disease, spreading it far beyond the promiscuous members of society.
5. The bulk of high profile eradication campaigns have ignored this, instead favoring pet ideological goals.
   1. Conservative and religious groups prefer to condemn sex before marriage rather than emphasize faithfulness.
   2. Liberal and Population Control groups have encouraged fairly impractical condom use, especialy for “risky” individuals.
   3. Talking about partner reduction is hard for outsiders. When key reports in 1990 showed this was likely to be successful, the reports were set aside by the UN in favor of easier condom programs.
6. Uganda was the only success story with a focus on “Zero Grazing” partner reduction, existing community ties, and making the disease the enemy instead of the people with it.
7. Even today, Uganda is losing its grip on the fundamental solution, preferring to pander to Abstinence-linked funds from Washington and is losing its edge in prevention.

    
    

Bottom Billion by Paul Collier: “Why are nations trapped in poverty?” (Amazon)

VIA My Heart’s in Accra review and EconTalks podcast

1. Internal Conflicts: highly persistent and high risk of going back into them once you come out of them. They are extremely common! Africa in the 1970s large scale violence was low. 1990s so much. Less recently but still an ugly reality
2. Having a lot of natural resources: should be an opportunity but it too often used to corrode and corrupt the politics (Int’l Aid contributes too). Even if it doesn’t make violence it makes political leaders dysfunctional. Instead they have a contest with each other to control the public purse. Tragedy of the commons “Resource which no one regards as their own”. Causes “Dutch Disease” where in the 1960s, newly discovered vast Natural gas resources deemphasized stable manufacturing markets that help average citizens raise their standard of living.
   1. I suspect this one is the most relevant in TZ. In the past two months the sapphire market has exploded in my town. Agricultural land here is particularly lush compared to other East African countries like Kenya.
3. Landlocked without natural resources. Options for development are limited to services. (W/ resources Botswana). Around the world, this is 1/3 of the population. Only in Africa these actually became countries, most other places they became parts of more prosperous countries.
4. Start with poor economic policies, bad governance. Need to fix but pace of reform was much faster if country was big and if population was educated. Reform requires a critical mass of educated people! Educated mass often departs (though it *does* send back money!! How does this count, as aid?)
   1. The great leader Nyerere managed to keep civil war and tribalism at bay here but also conceded defeat in securing anything resembling fiscal prosperity in TZ, as he resigned.

Quick: Someone set up a Print-On-Demand service in TZ, duplication rights, and give me some paper so I can disseminate. Getting tired of dealing with customs.

Swahili is a pretty interesting language. There are no genders really, instead there are classes which act a bit like genders. The construction of person, tense and tone is all very compact. If you can keep words compartmentalized well enough into their classes it can be easy to use (note if).

Fun Mnemonics for sentence structure.

You jumped on me.
uliniruka
U-li-ni-ruk-a
U (you, singular) and ni- (me, singular) are both based on the people/animal class which allows for first, second, and third person referencing in both singular and plural whereas most of the classes only have singular and plural. -li- indicates past tense. “Ruka” means to jump.

The thing that you jumped on.
kitu uliyokiruka
kitu U-li-yo-ki-ruk-a (?)

-ki- and -yo- bits depend on the class, the -a at the end simply indicates a normal statement.

(You, please,) jump the pillow.
Uruke mto
U-ruk-e mto
-e ending indicates a request.

Pronunciation:

Much simpler than english. Pronunciation is vowel-based (you need a vowel sound to pronounce anything) and is always consistent.

Musings

Huffman Coding is an interesting concept in the creation of coded languages which formulates a way to express things it encodes compactly. Coming to Swahili from the somewhat more consonant-vowel-spelling centric language of English I immediately was struck by the brevity of most Swahili words that you use on a daily basis.
Nouns, verbs which are relevant here are short:

• kuja: to come
• kupa: to give
• kuita: to name
• kuruka: to jump
• kulete: to bring
• Kuota: to dream
• Ndo: bucket (these are everywhere)
• Mto: pillow

Some are similiar
Kuona: to see
Moto: fire.
Joto : heat

Sometimes it doesn’t hold of course:
Zaidi : More

Might be fun to run some statistics on languages and their variable lengths of words. I’m sure thinking has been done on this. The language is significantly smaller than romance languages you have to fudge an amazing amount of words and concepts with a combination of english and existing words. I’d like to see some studies capturing language general language specificity too. note to self.

Kenya and Tanzania

Gross differences of Kenyan and Tanzanians that I had noticed given three-four weeks in their respective cultures:

• Tanzanians don’t discourage weight gain, significant weight loss is culturally sickly, Kenyans run a lot.
• Tanzanians collectively have a drinking problem in older people, Kenyans might too.
• Tanzanians think running is funny.
• Kenyans speak more English and less culturally rich Kiswahili (according to TZians). Calling someone’s Swahili “Kenyan Kisw.” is an insult and it means they are thinking in English and translating to Kiswahili reversing the adjectives and things.
• Tanzania is quite a bit poorer. Tanzania has no Trash Collection (not sure about Kenya) and so has MAJOR air pollution issues. (P.S. Air was at least partially a result of dry season)
• Tanzanians are more ethnically diverse with a deep mix of Seventh Adventist (Saturday sabath), Islam (Friday celebration) and Catholicism & Pentecostal (Sunday), among others. When I was in Kenya I only really saw one family and they were devout Catholics. Tzians have a very peaceful history and coexist amazingly well with unperturbed democratically rotating religions of Presidents (Rais). The first president was Christian and encouraged schooling but the Muslim population discounted his efforts until the next term when a Islamic Rais was elected.
• Both countries have Sisal (rope plant).
• Both countries drive on the left.
• Both have beautiful national parks and share wildlife though I haven’t seen much of that yet. Kenya seems to have more trouble managing the wildlife due to significant crossing of private land during migration. Tanzania actually owned all of its land not too long ago, now they give out land on 90 year deeds. Tanzania seems to have a preservationist instead of conservationionist approach to wildlife reserves. Tanzanians seem less concerned about poaching though I only have a few people concerned with this in either culture.
• Tanzania is perhaps more libertarian. I suspect it has to do with the many religions and the success with peaceful coexistence and painless (compared to Kenya) departure from colonialism.
• Dar Es Salaam doesn’t have a shantytown like Nairobi (according to our first volunteers who met us there).

I hadn’t reflected about this in quite a while (note that the above was written a few weeks after I arrived here). I will consider some more national and cultural differences and post them as I come up with them. I can’t wait to go back to Kenya. I also look forward to chatting with Willis at length over Skype, so far that hasn’t been possible (hint).

Up next on the blog is a delicious list of fruits that I have enjoyed so far as the fertile season has progressed throughout the country

The contents of this Web site are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the U.S. Government or the Peace Corps.

Preface: I think this note is necessary to set the tone. Before I came to Tanzania I read a bunch of blogs and conceived many inaccurate views of what life in Peace Corps Tanzania would be like. One of my fellow trainees insisted that it was impossible to render a remotely accurate experience from words or pictures. He might be right but I’d prefer it if he was not. That is depressing–all those books, pictures and movies must have some semblance of veracity. In photos you can see the tattered buildings but you need to also see that there is no destructive winter and plenty of horizontal space to make complicated vertical buildings and insulation unnecessary. People only make low dollar figures each month but buy only fuel for cooking (often charcoal) and a few other small necessities. Anyway, please realize that Africa is not completely backwards or upside down, people are people and many things are just like they are in the states with a few deviations. Easy to say, easy to forget.

So here is my story: My training was two months long, The first three days of training were probably the busiest days of my life (besides the two days before my Western College Thesis was due). These took place in Pittsburg, Philadelphia, New York and Amsterdam. They entailed the flight from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia at 6am, locating of the fine hotel in the historic district of Philly, meeting 40 new teachers-to-be who I would spend the next two month with, checking and signing about eight different documents, some with six layers of carbon paper (really!) and subsequently training on all matters of peace corps policy with careful warnings of nasty crimes. After all that was finished we boarded a bus to New York City JFK airport where we waiting for several hours, we finally boarded a plane, stopped over in Amsterdam and 25 or so hours later we were arriving in country to meet the country director and staff of Peace Corps Tanzania. I had no idea what to expect, none of us did. Even when we were in Philadelphia the Peace Corps staff doing the “Staging” had never been to Tanzania and so could not give us any concrete information on our country that we would collectively be spending our next two years in. They were great but there was a serious information vacuum.

This is probably the most prevalent sensation in Peace Corps Training–”What is Going On, Exactly?”. When I visited Kenya several years ago I was amazed at how little my friend Willis had to explain to us of his discussion in Swahili for us to get by. We referred to the atmosphere as “shadiness”. We all felt a little bewildered but we were fine. I’d previously passed it off as my total ignorance of Swahili but now that I can at least follow a conversation in that language at a cursory level, I’m pretty sure that this atmosphere is pretty common in East Africa. The reason no one is saying exactly what the state of affairs is, is that they’re probably not sure either. In America I think we take for granted that we can understand everything happening around us. Here, not so. Once I accepted that cultural tidbit I relaxed. It even fits in pretty well with the general Peace Corps mantra of not telling volunteers what sort of job to do, where, until site announcements the final week of training, only a handful of days before you actually travel hundreds of kilometers to your “kituo cha kazi” (site). For two months I thought I had a pretty good chance of teaching to Secondary school kids (i.e. High School/Junior High) without electricity and computers. However, here I am at a teachers college teaching teachers and surfing the net. Thirty six of the trainees went to secondary schools while two went to teachers colleges. I suspect that they knew for more or less the total period of training that I was going to a teachers college (I hadn’t asked for a teaching position in my application process but an IT position which is what this sort of turns out to be). Still, I sat through weeks of training on how to be a Secondary school teacher and asked hundreds of questions on the topic which all was somehow instantly mooted in mid-November when I got my assignment.

To Be Continued…later this week

The contents of this Web site are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the U.S. Government or the Peace Corps.