First week in Arusha - 11 to 17 December

We met our NOCET contacts, Peter and Samwel, in the lobby of Mount Meru Hotel on 11 December. It was great to see Peter once again, as well as to finally meet Samwel. We asked the conceirge, Michael, if he had any success with finding our luggage - apparently the search continues, and we have left Peter's mobile number for contact. So, we continue to wear the same clothes we've had since Casablanca - the weather is sunny and warm, so it won't be long before we will need a change of clothes!
   We loaded our small pile of belongings in the boot of a car, and Peter drove us to where we'll be staying, the Otakef Hotel, which was a surprise, as we were led to believe we'd be staying in a small rented house. We're there for the full month, at "mates rates", USD250 – it was sobering to realise one night at Mount Meru Hotel cost us more than an entire month at Otakef Hotel! We have a small room, maybe 3 x 3 metres, which includes a queen size bed, a small table and 2 chairs, a one-seater sofa chair, and our own bathroom with a shower - with hot and cold pipes! - sink, and a squat toilet that has a cistern as well as a cold water spray hose. We will also have a fridge, which will be delivered later on … even better! We will also have access to the kitchen if we want to cook our own "Australian meals", and access to the washing machine to do our own washing, our own small home away from home!
   One of the "normalities" of life here is that you can't always rely on there being electricity - on our first night at Otakef, when we were exhausted and overwhelmed by everything, the electricity went our around 8pm. A generator started up after a while, but didn't stay on for long. We borrowed a "Loop", a rechargable flourescent light - it wasn't fully charged, and went out after c15 minutes, so we were feeling quite despondent for a while! In the first week here the electricity has been out a few times, but manage to get everything charged up during the day while we are away.
   Once we settled our belongings in, we were then driven to the building where NOCET is housed, maybe a kilometre along the Moshi road, which is tarred, with the occasional speed hump, then onto an unmade, rutted dirt road, fringed with tiny little shops selling all kinds of things like fruit and vegetables, clothes, drinks, stock feed, etc. It was a bumpy ride of a few hundred metres. It was great to finally see the sign in front of a short row of 5 rooms housed under one roof. Here NOCET is housed in 2 rented rooms, each smaller than the size of our hotel room. One room is where the 6 children and matron sleep, office and storeroom! The other room is the classroom, which is also where the children eat, and bits and pieces are stored as well.
   On one end are 2 rooms which families rent, at the other end, a room used for a stockfeed business. A rather humbling experience to see this place: a patch of grass in front of the rooms, sheltered by wood and plastic "fence" which in places is not really a fence, and between it and the building is a patch of sloping hardened dirt, where the children can play. The simple building is sitting on a concrete base with a porch area. Each room has a metal door and a window, no glass.
   The classroom has 2 x 3 rows of school desks and benches, each row can seat 3 children 'comfortably', no drawer or tubs underneath … we're talking desks we may have used in the 1950s! The teacher, Miss Loveness, has a small desk in the corner, with hardly any space for herself, as the desk is covered in piles of scrappy looking old grubby exercise books. She has a little shelf under her desk with a section of an English-Swahili dictionary of c30 pages, a few pencils and more old exercise books. The walls are painted while, and are also grubby where children have drawn with pencils, as well as brown horizontal grubby stripes where heads have rubbed the walls.
   There is no power socket, and the light globe fitting in the ceiling doesn't have a globe in it. No technology of any kind in this room! A few sticks in an old plastic bag in the corner next to the teacher's desk act as pointers as well as for punishment. On the walls are a few hand-drawn posters, with an illustrated ABC, basic world map [with New Zealand up around the area of the Barrier Reef!], etc. That's it, that's the classroom, no better than the most basic classrooms we saw in Bhutan or Morocco.
   We're in school holiday time, so most of the orphans are with family, we learnt that half a dozen orphans actually live and sleep here full-time; some of the children have now progressed onto secondary school. We had lunch with the children, and there were more than 6, and it looks like other children from neighbouring houses are fed and looked after as well. Samwel's wife is the "matron" of the children and lives there pretty much fulltime, even though she and Samwel have 4 children themselves. A couple of young ladies also pop by to assist with the cooking, one of them, Elizabeth is sassy, lots of fun.
   So, these kids have nothing, their clothes are dirty and grubby, they need a wash, as do the kids themselves, on first meeting were quite shy, and when we asked their names you could barely hear them. They looked at us as if to suss us out, and rightly so I think. Here are a couple of mzungu, what are they here for, what do they want with us? There were about a dozen children there the first day, and so we just introduced ourselves and smiled a lot and just be as friendly as possible. A few of them warmed to us a little bit more as the afternoon progressed … it'll take time for both the children and ourselves to get to know eachother and form bonds. Their teacher, Loveness, speaks reasonable English, sometimes difficult to make ourselves understood, and vice versa, but she seems friendly and happy to have us there. She's 29 and hoping to get married next August.
   A young man arrived, called James, and he's a volunteer volunteer coordinator for NOCET. His English, like Peter's, is very good. Like Samwel and Peter, James is very keen to work out what we can do to assist NOCET get stronger, to attract volunteers and funding. Over the first few days, we had many long discussions with these men: how NOCET came to be, what each "director's" responsibilities are, what needs to be done, their future plans, etc, etc … the list goes on and on, and I'm afraid I'm suffering from information - and perhaps cultural - overload!
   What can I say about these men, Samwel and Peter in particular. These are good men, passionate about the children's welfare. They are proud of what they have achieved these past few years, and want to take it to the next level, and seem to be struggling to work out how that can be achieved. But we don't want to "take over" in any way, to be like the foreign powers of old who came in to Africa and stripped it bare, treated the Africans like "stupid darkies". We want to understand where NOCET's at, and give them concrete, achievable ideas, a plan, and maybe we have some contacts that can assist, particularly at Ujamaa Hostel and perhaps with the School of St Jude.
   It was Samwel who started up NOCET, and, with James' help as translator, one evening he told us the story of how his own children played with neighbourhood children, and having them come over noticed that some looked quite bedraggled, and on asking them why, found out that some came from incredibly disadvantaged backgrounds, that some were orphans, so fed them, and thought how could he properly help them. Samwel came to the conclusion that he would have to fund an "orphanage" from his own pocket - he is a doctor, and has a small laboratory where his staff undertake blood-testing. Not sure how he came to meet Peter, and James, but they, along with others, are Directors of NOCET, which is a registered NGO. So, NOCET rents those 2 small rooms, but have plans to move to a bigger house early next year, with more room, a bigger yard, with better conditions and facilities, again with room for a school, and hopefully rooms for future volunteers.
   NOCET appears not to have any outside sources of funding. They have made an application for a grant from the government, which is where James has come in, as he was the creator of that 13 page document Sheryl received by email a few weeks before our departure in early November. Sheryl has undertaken some fundraising through friends and Eastwood PS. And that's it! From Samwel business pocket comes money for rent, food, clothing, schooling, fuel, wages, etc. Peter is a 7th Day Adventist Pastor, without a parish at present - he's expecting to be allocated a parish presently - and is called upon to officiate at ceremonies and other church events, and we wonder if the Church as a whole, or any parishioners he preaches to, or ministers to, contribute funds, food, clothing, etc. As mentioned before, James is a volunteer, kind of on "work experience" at present - he's looking to land a fulltime job, but takes on contract work for the time being - Samwel's wife Joyce volunteers, as does Dora, one of their children. There appears to be a deal with neighbouring houses for water to be supplied to NOCET as there is no tap - is that why some of the neighbouring children get minded and fed? So many questions …
   Back to our digs, we have also been supplied a car for the month, at mates rates, USD20/day, which we were totally unaware of prior to our arrival. Luckily it's an automatic, and Sheryl has her drivers licence with her - I left mine at home thinking I wouldn't need it and that my passport was adequate ID for anything. Suffice to say, it was a bit of a surprise, to say the least. And, being passengers in that car and seeing the traffic from that perspective, it did fill Sheryl with no small amount of dread to know these guys were expecting her/us to make full use of that car and drive ourselves around! Peter drove us around the first couple of days, and his driving is not terribly good, and we found out that James' driving was quite bad, so, with a couple of Tanzanian backseat drivers, Sheryl took the wheel after a couple of days, and slowly and steadily started to get a feel of the roads and traffic of Arusha.
   Aside from the main roads in and out of Arusha, and the main roads of the grid of the city centre itself, all other roads appear to be unmade, ungraded, including those in the city itself. For example, if in Melbourne, all the roads in the city grid are tarred with footpaths on either side - well, in Arusha it's like only the Flinders, Spring, Lonsdale, Russell Streets, etc, are tarred, and all the rest are dirt, with stones, ruts, litter, hardly any formal parking arrangements as such, few traffic lights, no parking meters, footpaths on either sides of main tarred roads. But parking is policed by officials in fluoro vests, who place a small docket under a windscreen wiper, and you need to pay TZS200 (about 12c) for an hour. Young men will also guide you into a spot and look after your car, as well as guide you out of your spot for about the same amount of tip.
   Arusha city streets are a hodge-podge of big shops, little shops, stalls, cars, motorbikes, dalla-dalla [mini-bus public transport], small trucks, big trucks, lorries, handcarts, bicycles, pedestrians, touts, street vendors, etc all vying for space and trade. It can appear to be quite chaotic when driving, you need to hold your nerve, the dalla-dallas are fast and weave in and out and around you and eachother and so it's incredibly difficult to make right hand turns, especially at t-junctions because you have a tide of metal and humans coming at you from all directions, and if you are hesitant or slow you will get passed from around and behind you as well as being tooted, so you need to pull out, block traffic coming from your right, then get a space into the traffic coming from your left, sometimes with putting your had up in the stop signal, and usually you will be let in. It's hair-raising! It seems to work, but you know how to play the game. If the same situation was happening in Melbourne, there would be no end of tooting and shaking of fists and frankly, road rage, and it would not work, as we have so many rules to abide by!
   A sobering statistic we heard though is that about 13 people are killed every day in Tanzania thru traffic accidents. And it was brought home to us a few days ago when a saddened Peter told us that 2 people were killed and 10 badly injured the night before, 2 mini-buses collided, one of them returning from a wedding, a pastor's wife was one of those killed, the pastor had to be taken to Nairobi the following day due to his injuries, and Peter knew these people. He was to leave for Dar Es Salaam for a few days to conduct the funeral service for the pastor's wife.
   So far, so good, Sheryl is taking it slow and steady, getting used to how it works - and we haven't seen any accidents, but plenty of close calls. The drivers here are fearless, especially the dalla-dallas and motorcycles. To be blunt, the dalla-dallas are a curse, they are terrible, cause so many problems as they have a total disregard for anything else on the road except their own concern. We have been overtaken plenty of times with oncoming traffic laving little space and you wonder what the overtaker was thinking, but it somehow works …
   So, we've had meetings and discussions and talks, to see where these guys from NOCET are coming from, work out how best we can give them assistance, now and into the future. They have big ideas, but don't quite know how to move forward. They want to help more children, they want to move to bigger and better premises, they want to attract volunteers and attract funding … but how? Yes, they've submitted a proposal to the government - what if nothing comes of that? Samwel is using funds from his business to fund NOCET - what if something happens to him, god forbid? And we aren't talking huge amounts of money either: currently the 2 rooms cost TZS60,000 per month rent, which is about AUD35. They are hoping to find a 4 bedroom house with kitchen, toilet and electricity for TZS450,000/month = cAUD240/month.
   The classroom has virtually nothing except as described earlier. So we sat with Loveness and Peter and wrote down a wishlist, and the following day we visited a wholesale stationery business and a textbook business and bought a pile of stuff: 2 boxes of white chalk, 10 packs of 12 coloured pencils, 20 exercise books, 20 cartons of 12 HB pencils, a box of sharpeners, a box of erasers, 12 rulers, pair of scissors, a box of 50 red pens, a box of 50 blue pens, a ream of A4 manilla white card, 5 large pieces of manilla poster paper, a few simple children's books, an English-Swahili dictionary, an atlas, a globe of the world, a bag of marbles, a soccer ball, a hoola hoop, all for about AUD135!
   The next day we were given a shopping list for food for the kitchen. Joyce, the matron, usually does the shopping via dalla-dalla, so can only get small amounts of food every 3-4 days. We had a car, so there was the opportunity to buy in bulk. Over 2 days we visited all manner of shops and markets to buy:50 kg maize, 50 kg rice, 15 kg beans, 10 litres sunflower cooking oil, 50 kg sugar, 10 packets of salt, 1 carton of soap, 96 packets of matches, 10 litres of kerosene, wheat flour, charcoal, cocoa and vegetables, for cTZS455,000 = cAUD255, which should last them about 2–3 weeks. That stationery and food was bought with some of the funds raised by friends and Eastwood PS - you can see just how far that money, a relatively small amount, can go! Next we need to get a wishlist from Joyce for her kitchen, as she has a pathetically small grater, and not even a cutting board … the cooking is done over a small charcoal stove …
   Shopping at the central market was an amazing experience, full on really. It would have been "scarey" had we attempted to do any shopping ourselves. Once the car was parked we were led into a maze of small stalls selling fruits and vegetables, hardware, anything really. We were concentrating on the food aspect, so didn't venture into anything else. As soon as you look as if you're going to buy anything, young boys with handfuls of black plastic shopping bags come up, ready to load your purchases into the bags - the stalls don't give you your fruit and vegies in a bag, and there is no self-service. So, these boys walk around with you, carrying your purchases till it's time to take them to your car, and you pay them a tip, TZS200, 300, whatever … there's not much room to squeeze past shoppers and stallholders and people carrying huge sacks of whatever it is, as well as negotiating bags and baskets in the way, etc, and mzungus are definitely a novelty, with most people taking a good look, and some saying "jambo" or "mambo" [which is cooler way of saying hello], or having short conversations. Not really like the markets we saw in Morocco … I mean, it was incredible to see the spices and dates and nougats and pastries and clothes and jewellery and ceramics and clothing, etc of the Moroccan markets … I can't imagine the markets of Tanzania have anything like that, what we saw was pretty rudimentary, basic, survival stuff … we'll have to take a better look next time we do some shopping, or have a good look before we shop with the orphanage staff.
   We have had lots of "local interaction", as our Intrepid tour guide used to say to us; no matter what we are doing at the orphanage, people walking by will look, or stop and look, or smile, wave and we wave back, etc. Kids from around the neighbouring houses will have a look and maybe join is if we're kicking the soccerball, or just hang at the end of the building, just checking out what's happening. Same happens when we've walked around the local area to the orphanage, or when we're driving to and fro our hotel. One thing I've noticed while we've sat in a small grassy area opposite reception/lounge is hearing the noise of people and children of the neighbourhood, you can hear them going about their day … you don't really hear that at home, we are all so secluded and separated from eachother. It's almost the sound of a schoolyard, but quieter, it's the sound of people who live around you, and you almost feel a part of that "village".
   Back to the orphanage's tiny school: seeing how little the classroom has, and knowing just how much is contributed to the School of St Jude in terms of textbooks and books, we are wondering there may be an excess that we could be given away to the orphanage. And, having a contact at Ujamaa Hostel, we thought "how do we get them to give assistance or guidance to NOCET", ie, practical advice? We set up a meeting time, on Wednesday the 14th, with Carley at Ujamaa, along with James and Samwel. Carley speaks Swahili quite well, so she was able to direct questions to both James and Samwel. She is a straight shooter, and cut through to get to how things truly are with NOCET.
Some of the conclusions/advice being:
- to define what the actual incomings and outgoings are for NOCET - how much money is actually needed for monthly operation, now, and for when they move to a bigger house
- to do what they are doing well, not try to overreach and grow too fast, too quickly, etc
- if they want to attract volunteers, there needs to be a program of activities for volunteers to be created - so they just don't show up with nothing planned for them to do
   - to have an achievable plan of action for the next few years
We have to work thru this list with Peter, Samwel and James over the next 3 weeks, hoping that by the time we leave, everyone is on the same page on where NOCET is at now, where it can be in 12 month's time, 24 month's time, 36 month's time.
Carley visited the centre on 16 December, which was fantastic: the kids were scrubbed up, the rooms cleaned up. It meant a lot to Samwel, Joyce, Loveness, the children and ourselves - she was able to see the conditions, the children, to see what we were talking about.
   On the 17th we actually went to a 7th Day Adventist Church, not to be converted, but more to see the community at worship, to hear Elizabeth - who has a beautiful voice - just to take in another amazing experience. Samwel came to guide us in the car, it wasn't far away from our hotel. On arrival, we saw two groups of children, older and younger, who were having bible class. We were introduced to the littlies' group, and watched them sing and being taught, the children all dressed up and gorgeous. After about half an hour a bell was rung and the people started filing into the church, and we were led to the front bench, with Samwel bringing over a lady who was going to interpret for us.
   I did take my digital voice recorder with me, to record the singing. After notices we were introduced to the congregation and warmly welcomed - we had to stand up and say "thank you all" in swahili with a resounding chorus of "Amen!" -wow! The singing was beautiful, there was a simple sermon for the children - the story of the lion and the thorn in its paw - followed by a sermon to the adults, which seemed to go on and on, difficult to hear our interpreter over the din of the female pastor [poor kids who had to sit in front of one of the 3 main loudspeakers!].
   Once the service was over, the choir sang once more, and then followed the church officials slowly file out, and then it was the turn of the parishioners, into the bright sunlight outside, another song sung before it was totally over and we could thank everyone who welcomed us and helped us. Afterwards we are invited to Samwel's house for lunch, a simple 2 room dwelling, part of a building of 6 rooms, with a share bathroom/toilet, not much better than the rooms at the orphanage; no electricity or running water. Painted walls, cement floor, the doorway between the rooms draped with a sheet; above our heads basic wooden framework and the tin roof, that's it! The main room had a double bed along with 2 sofas and a couple of stools, the second room was where Joyce cooked and there was a bed in there as well, plus lots of suitcases and boxes.
   [A reminder - even though it's obvious - Tanzania is one of the poorest countries in the world]
   I got to spend a little time with Dora and Elizabeth in the 2nd room, asked some more of them - Dora is the only child of S+J's that lives there, the others live elsewhere; the elder sister has 2 children, I think the older brother lives in Mara, and the younger brother lives with an aunt. Dora is 22, and wants to undertake a 2 year course in Human Resources. She doesn't think she'll be able to do so as Samwel hasn't got the money, the course costs TZS800,000 per year [c.AUD450]. Elizabeth is 21, and I asked about her parents: they are both dead, and she has 2 sisters and a brother and she doesn't know where they are [unless lost in translation], and she lives with S, J + D. James was next door, that's where he lives, and that's how he and Samwel met. Pieces of the puzzle slowly fitting in together …
   A few people came and went during and post-lunch, including a very young looking 27 yo Ibrahim, who's studying IT, who had plenty of questions of us and our life and conditions of Australia, and opinions about rich taking all the money - ie, corruption at high places - that keeps the poor poor and the rich rich. Something needs to change here, the vision of the father of Tanzania, Julius Neyere, is being lost to the detriment of the general population.
   We are invited to a wedding tomorrow, being met by Samwel, who will guide us to the church, so another slice of life in Arusha to be experienced by us …