Once upon a time, Jara began a story—a story of an ordinary
engineering student who found herself suddenly far away, in a strange land—and
as you all know, she never finished it. =P There are good reasons for this;
hospitals don’t like to have publicly published details of all the ways they
don’t measure up to first world standards, nor to have cultural biases placed
on them that they don’t have the opportunity to refute. The good news is, the
story ended just the way you expected it to, complete with minor mishaps and
emotional crises all the way up until the final, happy return home (yes, I did
survive)—so you didn’t miss all that much. ;-)
In all honesty, though, there were some parts of the trip
that I like to have been able to share. I can’t bring you to the waste field
outside the student’s compound of KCMC, to hear the choral cascade of birds
singing over each other; I can’t show you the muddy, uneven rock-and-mud street
that we sometimes tripped along in the dark without a flashlight. The mangoes
we bought from the street vendors, sprinkled with salt and chili powder; the
crushing heat of the dala-dalas; and the small, crumbling cave underneath a
thin waterfall in the jungle of Mount Kilimanjaro are all black-and-white pixels
to you. So instead, I will share with you a few vignettes that can stand on
their own, and continue posting from there.
(Disclaimer: as these stories are mostly based on my
journals and photographs, I consider them to be reliable, but I make no guarantees
for the details and dialog supplied and simplified by my memory. Errata may be
posted by you in the comments section. =) )
July 28, 2011
In Which a Quest is
Given, and Not Received
It was some time in the late morning or early afternoon. I
don’t really know; all I remember is that it was bright and hot, and that
doesn’t narrow it down much. I and my two companions had left our little
workshop behind, half-dismantled medical equipment scattered recklessly over
its rough wooden table, and were in pursuit of a hardware store and some
masking tape. Labeling was the objective. The supplies officer at Mawenzi
didn’t check in on us much to retrieve the repaired equipment, but even if the
machines stayed in our workshop untouched until the following year, future
EWHers would want to see what we’d done and what we hadn’t. In two days, when
our shift at Mawenzi came back around, we’d
want to see what we’d done and what we hadn’t. And so, disregarding the mess of
screws and rags and splinters and little pieces of blood pressure cuffs strewn
about our simple workshop, we ventured forward in the cause of better
organization.
It was the second shop we stopped at. Just past the corner
on the main street, with stacks of thermoses, dolls, and—hanging in the
window—some sort of adhesive. Not quite masking tape, but similar enough to warrant
a second look. We shrugged and entered and greeted the store owner.*
The shop was full to the gills with stuff. Wooden shelves went from floor to ceiling, overflowing with
everything from fly swatters to light bulb sockets, while larger items were
stacked in piles by his desk and the back exit on the other side of the room. If
it didn’t have the chaos of a mysterious old wizard’s shop—you know the
stories, the sort of place that’s full of strange and eclectic objects,
perfectly suited to attract the curiosity of the young hero in spite of the odd
old man who works there—it was only because too many items in the motley
assortment of merchandise were made of un-mysterious-looking plastic.
“You’re British?” he asked, once he knew what we wanted, moving
to the back toward what could ostensibly have been the Tape Cubbyhole.
“Tourists, or medical students?”
“American,” we corrected pleasantly. “Though we are
students. Wanafunzi wa uhandisi wa vifaa vya hospitali.”
“The engineers!” He stopped, turned, gaped at us. “I
remember you from last year! You work at the hospital? Fixing equipment? What
you do is so good!”
He’d totally forgotten about the masking tape. I nodded and
smiled happily; this wasn’t anything like the reception we’d gotten from the
doctors on our first day at Mawenzi.** The man looked at us eagerly, dark eyes
bright—
“I need to tell you something.”
He moved quickly to the front of the shop (stepping around a
plastic bag, a stack of boxes, the counter, and us), looked out the doorway, and
pulled the large iron grate and door shut. Keys jangled in his hand. We eyed
each other nervously.
“I talked with the American engineers last year,” he began,
moving back behind the counter. “I told them about the real problem of
Tanzania. But they didn’t do anything!” He turned his back to us and bent down
and inserted a key into a cardboard—wait, no, wooden—box that inhabited one of
the hundred or so shelves that covered the wall from top to bottom. He pulled a
sheaf of papers from it and laid them before us across the counter. They were newspaper
clippings, pink slips of paper full of handwritten notes, photocopies of magazine
articles—all arranged in no particular order, but with one word in common: Drugs.
“Drugs,” he said. “The real problem in Tanzania is drugs. You
see these people out with their baskets, selling items on the street? Those
young men waiting on their motorcycles at the street corners?*** They sit there
all day! How can they make enough money? They deal drugs.” He pulled up
pictures from the magazine articles—some were of high-level Tanzanian officials
that had been caught in the business, several covered record drug hauls. One
particularly poignant one was of an Afghan farmer whose illegal opium fields
had been destroyed by police, forcing him to sell his 14-year-old daughter’s
hand in marriage in order to pay off his debt.
“You see here!” he exclaimed, pointing to yet another
article. “There are people who fill these small items with drugs so they can
import them. Then, by day, they sell the items on the street. By night they
deal drugs. Have you noticed, people will always sell you things, even for a
very low price? That’s because that’s not where the money is! The money is with
the drugs!”
It was somewhere around this point that the power went off, plunging
the store into gloom. The sun outside was bright, or we wouldn’t have been able
to see anything; the light filtered in dim and yellow through the dusty and
overcrowded store window. Our strange shop owner didn’t miss a beat; he pulled
out a flashlight from somewhere and continued to talk.
“People everywhere are involved in it! High people, low
people—the whole pyramid; it’s a system.” He started to read off of one of his
pink pieces of paper. “People in tourism, in hair-cutting places—no one needs a
haircut every day!—in government, in church, anywhere you can get large groups
of people together. Sometimes people will start an NGO to help some orphanage or
some hospital and undercover they are doing drugs. But no one wants to say
anything against them because they are ‘doing good work for the children.’
“These people are everywhere. Some of them are in government
and they arrange for the drugs to be imported and exported. Some are at the
bottom, selling in the markets by day and dealing drugs by night. They
undersell us honest merchants. If they sell to you for less than the cost, what
does it matter? That’s not where the money is. The money’s in the drugs. Then
how are the shopkeepers supposed to make a living? They go into drugs too.
Everyone’s involved in it. And even if you’re not involved, you have a son or a
sister or an uncle who is—so, what are you going to do?
“They like to have women, to use women. They have a woman go
to talk someone into allowing the drugs, and she offers herself to the man. ‘If
you don’t like me, I have a sister who is even more beautiful’—and so, we are
only men, what will we do?
“You are a foreigner, so you do not see it,” he grinned at
us, “but if you ask for drugs from anybody, they will show you.
“It is the cause of much crime in Tanzania. It is in the
corrupt politicians, and Tanzania is poor because of this drug system; all the
money goes to the people at the top. People will steal medicine and equipment
from hospitals, even people who work there, because crime is part of the
system. And sometimes the police may be part of it.”
“Why,” I asked finally, after a long time of this, “are you
telling us this?” Fred’s patience was wearing thin and Christine was shifting
uneasily, clearly uncomfortable. But some of the things he was saying were
clicking into place in my brain, and I was intensely (if unwisely) curious.
“You need to tell the world that this is the problem of
Tanzania. We cannot do anything because we’re too involved in it. But when you
go back to the United States, everyone needs to know. Don’t tell them my name,
though,” he said, white teeth flashing in the darkness. “If they knew it was
me, I would be in danger. I tried to oppose them, and they tried to kill me.”
He was still grinning as he pointed to a scar on his arm that I couldn’t see in
the dimness.
“You trust us a lot,” I said, trying to sound respectful
through my building wariness. “Why, of all people, did you choose to tell us?” An unconventional question, but I
feel that an ordinary person who suddenly has a quest thrust upon them ought to
have the right to know.
“You’re not from here, so you’re not involved in this,” he
said. “And you’re the Americans who come here to find what the biggest problem
at the hospital is so they can fix it. This
is the biggest problem. Drugs. Everyone needs to know.”
* * *
* * *
Eventually we extricated ourselves and made it back out to
the open street. It was almost a relief to be in the sunny, smoky air. We’d
been talking with the man for over an hour: it was almost time to leave Mawenzi
for the day, so we trudged back up the hill to the hospital to label our
equipment before we returned to KCMC. (“This isn’t even masking tape!” Fred complained
when he opened the package. “It’s some weird sort of packing tape!” He looked up
at me and Christine, uncharacteristically exasperated. “He kept us there for an
hour and a half and then didn’t even give us what we came for.”)
“Do you think,” I said as we waited on the side of the street
for our dala-dala, “d’you think what he said was true?”
“It’s either true or he’s crazy,” Fred answered. “Neither
one is a good thing.”
“Locked up for an hour with a probably-crazy guy,” Christine
mused. “That was kind of scary.”
“The door wasn’t locked,” I said. “He just closed it. I was
watching him.”
“I thought it was locked,” said Christine.
We waited a little longer in silence.
“He was definitely obsessed with the idea,” I started again,
after a moment. “It would explain a
lot, though. What do you suppose we’re supposed to do?”
“Do?” Christine asked. “What can we do? We’re students!”
“He seemed to think we have a lot more power than we do,”
Fred observed. “Anyway, we have no way of verifying his story. That would be
the job of law enforcement.”
“Yeah.” I glanced at my toes as they made little scuffing
motions over the sidewalk, waiting for the uncomfortable feeling in my gut to
subside. This is why I have partners—so that when my gullibility leads me to feel
responsible for a burden of action that someone has irrationally placed upon me,
I have someone to give me a reality check. No.
Trying to meet that obligation is stupid.
…But if it’s a real problem, somebody should know about it. =\
*in English, the language one can use in stores, because
stores are run by Indians and Indians speak English. Far, far better than we speak Swahili, anyway.
**The first few days at each hospital were by far the most
unproductive. Between paperwork, tours, and the mandate that we meet all the
right people before we start working, we lost half a week at each place before
we were actually able to start working on equipment. We struggled especially at
Mawenzi to get the ball rolling. First we were unqualified because we were
students, then they said we needed someone to supervise us, then they said they
only needed biomedical engineers, then they said that because their operating
ward was in the process of being demolished they had no equipment to be
repaired. By the time we got a small room to work in and a few machines on a
table, we felt distinctly unwanted. That first day, we repaired a wheelchair, a
hinged lamp, and an autoclave. We high-fived each other with maniacal grins and
went home exultant. Two days later, no one had come to retrieve any of it. We
finally asked the supplies officer for permission to find our own things to
repair and return—and then, simply had to earn the trust of every. single.
doctor in the hospital. >_< Mawenzi was where we did our best work—but
Mawenzi was hard.
***Men on pikipikis
(motorcycles—the name refers to the sound they make) and in taxi cabs are stopped
all along the streets. You need to go someplace, you can hand a rider some
money and climb on behind him, and off you go! Jen and Ashgirl got hooked on
pikipiki rides on the steep mountain slopes near Machame hospital. I was sort
of tempted, but my eagerness to get the “whole Tanzanian experience” warred
with my “let’s not die while we’re trying to save people’s lives, shall we?”
side, and in the end, procrastination won out and I missed my chance. =\
