Challenges living in Tanzania

Living and working in Tanzania comes with a lot of challenges.

There are the normal ones, such as not having water, electricity or internet at regular intervals (actually not regular, you never know when it is going to happen).

And then there are other small (or big, depending on my mood that day) challenges. One of these is the people shouting “Mzungu” at you. It means as much as “white person”. I always have to tell myself that they usually do not mean it in a negative way, that I am the one who has a problem with it and not them. I am always reminded of a story an American lay missionary told me. She was in a car with a Tanzanian colleague when someone shouted Mzungu at her. She told her colleague how much this annoyed her. He was very surprised and asked her “what do you say when you walk in New York and you see a black man”? She told him “if I know him I greet him and if I do not know him I say nothing”.  He was surprised about this (just a little note, their argument does not really hold, as they do not say something to every black person they see in the street).

And then there is the challenge of working in a different culture with different beliefs. For example, people here believe in witchcraft. Ask Kabula, an albino girl that the SMA is taking care of, her arm has been chopped off because some nitwit thinks that this would bring him good luck, make him rich, ensures that he will win the elections, that he will get the woman of his dreams, etc.

And we have a boy of whom the parents say that he is bewitched by his grandmother who is a witch herself. They believe he is a grown man trapped in the body of a small child. The child himself states that he is a ‘follower of the lady of the lake’ and that he has to collect blood for he (he caused a serious accident). To me he is a boy with a mental handicap and a big trauma. But how to deal with this, you cannot tell people that their beliefs are nonsense, but on the other hand you cannot treat him as a witch either.

Luckily we have a good safety net her, there are several lay missionaries, and we have a nice group of SMA people who get along very well. Also it sometimes seems like half of the Netherlands is living in Mwanza, so you can go to them to sniff up some of the “normal” culture. You need this “expat” contact to be able to live her, to be able to let go and to realize that other people feel the same as you do. And also just for the famous Dutch “gezelligheid” (sorry guys, there is not really a translation fort his). I asked a Tanzanian colleague how they see friendship, and she answered me “if you can get something out of it”. Why put effort in something that does not give you any advantage. So they have friends during their time in college to study with, or alter friends who can help them get a job, etc. But just to go for a cup of coffee and a chat, for that they have the extended family.