The Blaz Blog

Sex Workers (and Liberalism)

2010-07-07T23:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was somewhat hastily invited to sit in on a meeting for which I hadn’t been briefed. Three people came into the office and exchanged business cards with us (I definitely wished I had sprung for York business cards before I left). From their cards and the conversations I could see they were all advocates for Ugandan sex workers’ rights and were currently seeking to follow through on a case against an abusive police officer and secure protection for the litigating victim in the interim. Two of the people present were women (one of whom was the litigant) and were both coordinators of separate but collaborating sex worker advocacy organizations. I assumed the litigant was an advocate who had been harassed due to the nature of her work, I did not think she was a sex worker. The third person present was a male doctor who has taken a role in the case. As we filled out an intake form, I was somewhat annoyed seeing the man tell the woman exactly, word-for-word how to fill out the intake form which asks her to describe her case. After the meeting was complete I did some research on the organizations and found out that both women who came to us were (as of their last public writings) active sex workers who had taken up advocacy and organizing within their working environment to respond to the abuses they had experienced and witnessed in their line of work.

I am someone who is open minded, and I have for a long time supported the rights of sex workers, and been against their criminalization . I don’t flinch talking about or advocating for sex workers rights any more than I would talking about gay rights or anti-racism (ie: not at all). Yet I still displayed an implicit reaction when I assumed that neither woman was a prostitute. Mind you, I don’t think I should start assuming that women I meet ARE prostitutes, but that’s not my point. Rather, there is an implicit classism present in assumptions about who is able to be an advocate (or trustee), and who is able to speak eloquently and directly in the public and judicial domains about social and legal issues. ’Advocate for sex workers’ is consonant, whereas ‘advocates who are sex workers’ is dissonant.

My Googling turned up an article (link) written by one of the women at the meeting wherein she describes her experiences turning to sex work (a term I now greatly prefer to ‘prostitution’) as a way to fund herself through the completion of her secondary school, which turned out to be so profitable she was able to support her sibling’s schooling as well as her mother. Eventually she politicized her experiences after a colleage was attacked and began to seek advocacy opportunities.

The other woman present had shared her own story in a collection of stories called “When I dare to be powerful”. The editor of that collection recounted the launch event for the book:

“As the audience listened to Daughtie Akoth of Kenya and Daisy Nakato of Uganda share parts of their stories, we could see the transformation happening before our eyes. Although one person in the audience assumed that we were ‘preaching to the converted’ it became apparent during the question and answer session that there were in fact a number of people that were engaging with the discussion of sex worker rights for the very first time, and still held negative perceptions about the industry and the people engaged in it. We also later discovered that when Daughtie and Daisy began to speak a lot of people in the room were surprised that there were sex workers in the room, and that they could speak for themselves in a powerful and articulate manner.”

This audience was surely as caring and liberal a bunch as any. Yet liberalism and humanitarianism in general still rests on a similar classism to my own which only allows the members of the upper strata of society (generally based on educational achievement) to be the legitimate (and well-paid) advocate for equality.

This is a paradox which resonates when I visited the large secured UN village in the heart of Kampala (secured by the Ugandan Police), when I make the transition from the untarmacked road leading up to my workplace to the large and stately building housing my modern office, as well as when I look around posh offices apartments then look at poorly paid domestic workers. Or perhaps when my housemate, after hearing my small diatribe against Coca-Cola and bottled water, reminded me of how I turned my nose up at the prospect of using boiled tap water in my morning coffee.

So, retrospectively, I could see that the male doctor was facilitating a process for a politically active sex worker whose moderately hindered literacy might otherwise hinder her from filling out a form which assumes that human rights advocates are fully literate English speakers (who can fill out a form in 10 minutes instead of an hour).

I think this critique dives into a discussion about voice, agency, and the subaltern – a discussion which also dives into totally unintelligible and inaccessible academic language (see Butler, Spivak, Homi Bhabba, etc…). But let me briefly put it (and these are not rules, but patterns)… when injustice occurs to articulate members of liberal society, it is intolerable, prosecutable (as Judith Butler would say, grievable). But when injustice occurs to inarticulate (sub-altern) non-members of liberal society, it is perhaps regrettable (when relayed by articulate elites), but largely invisible, as in the case of refugees warehoused in camps for decades, sex workers raped by police officers and beaten by clients. The result is a tiered system of justice both nationally and globally in which some people lose access to that justice due to their ‘invisibility’.

Sex workers who are advocates belong to the same group of people as Brazil’s landless persons movement (MST) or perhaps the Zapatista’s of Mexico: people who seek representation, rights, recognition, ‘a seat at the table’, but who do so outside the historically bourgeois liberal sector of professional human rights workers and activists.

Follow up::

Read Macklean’s personal story

Contact Akina Mama wa Afrika to get a copy of ‘When I Dare To Be Powerful’, the collection of stories from East African sex workers.

Check out the websites for the African Sex Workers Alliance

Rwanda, Research, Elections, & Human Rights Defense

2010-07-05T00:00:00.001-07:00

I’ve been intending to write a more general explanation of the organization I’m working with and the work I’m doing with them however I’ll take the chance given to me by a rather exciting presentation I attended yesterday to give another glimpse into the human rights world of the East African region.

As everyone knows, Rwanda experienced a horrific genocide in 1994. The genocide was not a singular event but rather one development in a series of struggles which have displaced people into neighboring countries and around the world for decades. The genocide was ended with a military victory by an army comprised mainly of one ethnic group. This army proceeded to establish a new government based on a rhetoric of peace and reconciliation with the goal of erasing the social division between the two ethnic groups which led to the genocide. This goal has led to the criminalization of ‘genocide ideology’ and ‘discrimination and sectarianism’. In addition, local courts have been set up to try genocide perpetrators, called gacaca courts, in a speedy manner.

Despite the return of a military peace to Rwanda, there is still a significant Rwandan refugee diaspora in the region. Thus, in the view of the Rwandan government and the UNHCR (the UN Refugee organization), it is no longer “justifiable or necessary” for Rwandan refugees to remain receiving support outside their country. Yet refugees remain in Uganda and refuse to return home. Why won’t they go?

There is an organization under the Makarere University’s Faculty of Law called the Refugee Law Project which does frequent high-quality research on refugee issues in Uganda. They had completed a report on a settlement for Rwandan refugees in Uganda in which they interviewed over 100 refugees on the reasons they have decided not to return to Rwanda. There is a belief that refugees might act as a sort of barometer reflective of the situation in a home country: when the situation is supportive, most will return, when it is exclusionary, they would rather live elsewhere, even if living elsewhere brings its own uncertainties. Thus the data the report collected was highly critical of the current Rwandan government (more on that later) and the overall situation in that country.

So the Refugee Law Project had sent out an invitation for us to attend the presentation of the findings. Myself and two others arrived at the Hotel Africana which had heightened security due to the presence of a governmental bigwig (possibly the President) at a separate event – our car was briefly searched, we were asked if we had handguns in our bags, and we had to step through metal detectors. At the presentation the researcher ran through the findings – namely that Rwandan refugees fear repatriation due to a repressive political culture intolerant of dissent, the existence of ethnic discrimination, the assignation of collective guilt upon all members of the ethnic group which perpetrated much of the genocide, and the use of gacaca courts as a means to settle political and personal scores instead of reach post-genocide justice.

The report made recommendations aimed at the three principal parties handling Rwandan refugees: the Prime Minister’s Office of Uganda, the UNHCR, and the Government of Rwanda. As is good form, representative from each of these parties were invited to the presentation. The first two parties did not attend, but, as some were surprised to learn, the Rwandan ambassador to Uganda came to the presentation and had apparently already read the report. His presence was acknowledged by the first speaker, who invited him to say “three or four words” following the presentation of findings.

Let me first ask my colleagues of this blog to imagine returning home to Canada, arranging a presentation for your research, and having the top diplomat from the country of your research arriving to watch and comment upon your research. Add the facts that your research is highly critical of that country’s administration, the government in question is domestically very repressive, and that political refugees of that country were present at the event. Yes, the ambassador was invited, and there were recommendations in the report directed at the government of Rwanda, but I suspect his presence and response was a surprise.

The ambassador prefaced himself by defending his own diplomatic credentials, however excused himself from being diplomatic for the present event. He then proceeded to ask why his office was not involved in the research from a much earlier stage, as then it could have been directed to be useful rather than arriving at the ludicrous conclusions which it did. It was not so much a report as a non-report full of outrageous accusations. What is more, the researchers did not even enter Rwanda to confirm these accusations, they merely asked refugees, many of whom are genocidaires, what their opinions were. If the researchers were genuine in their intent they would have asked experts in the World Bank and United Nations what was happening in Rwanda, they would have asked human rights organizations in Rwanda [note: Human Rights Watch has recently had an employee banned from operating in Rwanda]. He hoped that the research findings were presented out of good faith and total ignorance, but he has to suspect that they were made in bad faith and with malicious intent. As he had nothing more to say on the subject he would not remain to answer questions but could be reached in his office at the embassy for further discussion. He then walked out unceremoniously.

(See I told you it was exciting!). The truth is Rwanda is becoming a real point of concern. Paul Kagame has been in power for 16 years, since his military victory in 1994. His administration, much like Museveni’s in Uganda, has had great accomplishments in reconstructing Rwanda’s economy and returning a sense of normalcy to the country, however peace and reconciliation is backgrounded by Kagame’s grip on power and a pervasive anti-hutu sentiment which is made invisible by the philosophy of a post-ethnic Rwanda.

In only the time which I have been here in Uganda, a Rwandan general living in South Africa who posed a risk of political opposition to Kagame was shot in an unsuccessful assassination attempt. The editor of a Rwandan newspaper was successfully assassinated in Kigali, and other journalists have left the country. Kagame was named one of the top predators against press freedom by Reporters Without Borders in 2010. Why is all of this worsening now? Rwanda is going into its presidential elections on the 9th of August, 2010, one of a string of elections occurring across the region in 2010/2011. Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Djibouti have all either already had or are schedules to hold elections in this period, in addition to a constitutional referendum in Kenya and a referendum on independence for Southern Sudan.

Elections are periods of increased insecurity for people whose professional calling is speaking truth to power and public education through media. The mandate of the organization I am working for is to provide protection, both through advocacy and training in the hope of preventing insecurity, and through reactive protection measures, of these people, who we call human rights defenders. The issue of the elections, advocacy, and the role of the different organs such as foreign embassies in protecting human rights and defending the defenders of human rights are all things I should be writing about and sharing, however I think I’ve gone over the limit of what a reasonably-lengthed blog post should be, so I’ll try to write about those things another day, though in truth it’s hard to put the time into blogging because I find the work of the organization much more engaging! Adieu for now…

A Little Snapshot of My Life in Kampala

2010-06-04T02:05:00.000-07:00

My cellphone starts playing Fur Elise at 7am, which is far too melodious to actually raise me from bed, so I hit snooze repeatedly and drowse through the time I had, last week, planned to use for a jog. At 7:30 I get up, shower, shave, dress, eat yogurt, fruit, and granola, grab my motorcycle helmet and head out the door. No, concerned family and friends, I did not buy a motorcycle. To get to work I take Kampala’s boda bodas, motorcycle taxis which zoom around traffic and between gridlock to get you to work on time. They’re a lot of fun, only a couple steps down from the fun it must be to actually drive a motorcycle, but the constant excitement of weaving through moving traffic also bumps up the excitement factor a notch. Traffic gets bad in Kampala, like anywhere, and my ride from work which would take an hour in a car takes only 30 minutes by motorcycle. Yes, I bought my own helmet from the downtown Nakumatt. Inspecting their two varieties – one for $20 and the other for $40 – I instinctively opted for the cheaper, but still ostensibly sufficient one. Beginning to walk away, I think to myself: ‘that’s really really stupid’. I return, and get a snazzy silver $40 full-headed helmet with visor. The trip from home to work evens out to about a full-fare trip on the TTC ($3), which is expensive compared to the alternative matatu bus option, but hey, it’s fun, fast, and convenient. Kampala itself isn’t laid out in any particular system of order which I’ve figured out yet. It’s not a grid pattern, there aren’t main road arteries which I could use to orient myself (or there are but they’re a little tricky to discern/name) – it’s more of a spiderweb, without the symmetry or concentricity. The result is that I’m dependent on drivers and the periodic stranger on the street to point in the right direction. Of course, I’ve only been here a week and I’m living on the edge of town, so I haven’t had much time to figure out the urban area.

Arriving at work, we ride along an unassuming and bumpy red dirt road. One turn up the road, and we get to the gates of the Human Rights House, one of about a dozen Human Rights Houses around the world hosting and forming a network of established human rights organizations. The House itself is massive, even imposing, and certainly contrasts against the un-tarmacked road taken to get to it . There are ~5 organizations in the House, and they are all well established. I will save my actual work, organization, and experience to another post though.

I’m living with a young Ugandan woman named Lulu in a beautiful 2 bedroom apartment on the outskirts of town. I didn’t actually know the details of my accommodation when I arrived, so I was pretty surprised to walk into a posh and well-equipped apartment on arrival. The kitchen has everything I need to maintain my love of cooking, the living room is beautifully furnished by Lulu, and opens up onto the balcony with rattan chairs in the open air – perfect for morning coffee or evening aperitifs. There’s also a sweet and clever little dog who hangs around inside and outside the apartment and whom I’m quickly training using the tricks I learnt from Jenga (my relationship:‘its complicated’ dog)’s training classes.

Lulu had some food for me when I arrived – when I went to wash my plate afterwards, she says ‘I hope you’re not washing your dish – there’s someone here who does that’. So yes, there’s a woman here who does the dishes and cleaning and even laundry. I leave my dress shirts in a hamper in the bathroom, and the next day they’re magically clean, ironed, and hanging in the closet. Gendered divisions of labour, Marxist class analysis, radically participative economies - whatever… I’m not complaining.

Today is Martyrs day, in which thousands of people in the region make the trek to a location not far from where I’m living to visit the tombs of a number of young people killed by the King of Buganda (the Kabaka – who still plays an important role in Ugandan politics) in the late 19th century. Well the upshot for me is that I get the day off work, Lulu is off to meet her father, and I get to stay in the apartment, write this blog, sit on the balcony and drink coffee, and oh ya, make pasta sauce!

I’ve made pasta sauce from scratch a couple times before but I’ve never made a big batch properly. This morning we drove out to a market stand where we made a ‘drive-thru’ market transaction with the mama selling fruits and vegetables from a thatched lean-to. 25 fresh tomatoes, chili peppers, onions, garlic, plus the red wine left over from last night… that’s a good pasta! I marinated a couple chicken breasts in some of the red wine overnight, the sauce is done and very tasty right now, and when Lulu gets back I’ll sear then bake the breasts and serve them sliced over the pasta, maybe with a bit of cheese and fresh bread. Ain’t life grand?

The inevitable transformation into a food blog

2010-02-14T13:20:00.000-08:00

Since I'm not currently travelling or feeling like writing about political/social/personal stuff, it's inevitable I'm going to use this space to share one of the things I'm happiest about right now... food!

This week I decided to try out a delicious looking Boeuf Bourguignon with a recipe shared on my new favourite food blog, FXCuisine.com. I know about the administrator of that site, François-Xavier, as administrator of another site I frequent, How-To-Learn-Any-Language.com. If you read his about page, you will be impressed. The guy's not even a chef, and check out the lighting setup he has above his stove!

Anyway, I threw this dish together somewhat impulsively. It's supposed to marinade in red wine overnight but I just left it to soak from around 11am-3pm. The recipe calls for a glass of grappa but I used instead the Havana Club rum I picked up the night before for the express purpose of getting drunk at a class party but having enough left over to make this bourguignon!

The beef gets patted dry then browned to seal the meat. I fried up the onions and garlic that was in the marinade then dumped it in the pot along with the reserved wine/rum marinade. I made a little butter/flour roux and threw it in to thicken the sauce. I think cooked that on simmer for like 4 hours (it probably would have gone quicker if I had marinated overnight, or if I wasn't impatient/curious and kept opening the lid to look). About a half hour before it was ready I quickly sautéed some mushrooms, carrots, and whole peeled onions (shallots, actually), and

tossed them in.

Lastly I boiled potatoes and made mashed potatoes (which I've never done before... boy is it easy and good!) with some cream and butter, then formed a little volcano out of it and served the boeurguignon inside the volcano. It was really good! I'm going to cook it again for my family on Tuesday, probably with a better cut of meat (I had a bottom round which I had frozen for a few weeks. It was good but I imagine I'll be able to tell the difference with a fresh and better cut). If you want to give this a shot, I'd definitely recommend the recipe on FXCuisine, it's very easy to follow and offers some flexibility. And his photos are way more awesome than mine (but he's probably spent over $10,000 on photo stuff, so I don't feel bad).

À bientôt!

Last day in Cuernavaca

2009-07-10T21:43:00.001-07:00

Bueno. Today was my last day at CETLALIC and in Cuernavaca, and I feel like it was a good day for closure for my short (3 week) life here - the life at the school, the social life, and the life with the family I´ve been living with. It´s sad to go, and I´m grateful for my time here, but I´m ready to go home and start approaching Spanish from different angles.

Yesterday our maestro, Roberto, instructed us to go home and ask our host families for some Mexican jokes, then bring them back to class and make him laugh. So last night at the dinner table I pulled out my notebook and asked everyone to tell me jokes. I´ve been living with a part-time nurse close to retirement whose 3 grandchildren live across the street with their mom and who come over often, so the kids start pulling out jokes which I guess circulate in their milieu. So the 8 year old boy starts telling this joke about African children not getting presents from Santa Claus. I said ´¡no me gusta ese chiste!´ and looked to the 15 year old boy for another one. He goes on to tell a joke which I´m pretty sure was about gay men not having balls, though to tell you the truth I wasn´t following enough of it to say for sure. I didn´t like that one either, and asked for another, so they gave me one pretty lame one about baloons, the another one which used a play on words about a little chicken named Resistol which I didn´t at all get but recited to Roberto this morning and he did in fact laugh then explained it to us. We then had a pretty interesting discussion about culture and humour, cultural stereotypes used in humour, and the grammatical function of the subjunctive used in spanish humour. Then he gave us a couple good jokes in Spanish, suitably dirty and political to be fun!

Classes have been great. I´ve actually mostly been with the same teacher, Roberto, which isn´t the norm (classes rotate and get reshuffled every week), but there are very few students right now so it is a little more difficult to make sure students are suitably arranged to their skill levels, plus I was sick for 2 days when I had a different teacher in the middle week. Roberto takes a very structured approach to language learning - he sets out a road map of the grammar from the beginning then gets us to learn to use the different branches in the mood\tense tree, plus learn different exceptions and helpful rules to decode idiomatic uses within the gramatical system. He likes to joke around and have fun in class through the examples or in discussions

Normally every Friday there is a special celebration for those students who are leaving CETLALIC, where the staff brings in a cake onto the patio then professors say a few words about each departing student before giving them their diploma, then the students say a bit in spanish with varying degrees of proficiency, then all the departing students surround the cake, bend over with their hands behind their back, and take a bite out of it at the same time. (It´s then cut up so you get the piece you bit into). Today there were 5 of us moving on, which made for crowded cake biting. But this week has been exceptional in that there were people leaving on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, so there was cake 4 days this week! It felt good to get the diploma and say my gracias a todos. I grabbed some promotional material I´m going to try to put up at Kings and Huron Universities - I´d definitely like to promote CETLALIC to anyone who is interested in learning Spanish effectively, and who simultaneously would like to learn about the many solidarity and rights movements which flow through and beyond Mexico.

Today was also the 15th birthday of Angel, the oldest grandson in my host-household. In Mexican culture the 15th birthday for a girl is a very important event meriting a big party, but for a boy, I guess it´s no big deal. So we all headed out to the mall (Cuernavaca Plaza) and dined at Pizza Hut, which was oookay, but nothing compared to Marco Polo, an Iplace downtown with a wood stove and the best pizza I´ve had in a long time. Anyway, it was nice to dine with the family (we also had a 6 month old baby with us, my host-mom´s new grandson - his mom is a professional ballerina and has a show, so we are babysitting). Afterwards we went around the Plaza and I hung out with the kids. Geraldo, the youngest (Dennis the Menace-like), was having a ball imitating Michael Jackson dance moves, so he was running around the mall spinning around, grabbing his crotch and thrusting his pelvis out. I was a little worried the security guards with automatic rifles might have been thinking about taking him out, but we all made it out OK.

When I got home I called one of the other students from the school who had said she might be heading out tonight. Her and another woman were at a bar downtown so I hopped on a bus to join them. I had a nice night chilling with them on a patio over beers and marguaritas with a mariachi singer behind us laughing about school and cultures and life. We were joined by a young Cuernavacan woman who is doing research with one of the CETLALIC students and doing her PhD at Colombia in NY, but who also visits Toronto often and said she would visit me next time she´s up. It´s interesting, every time I travel I end up meeting a very metropolitan crowd of people, and it is in fact a global metropolitan class of people who are more members of a global culture than just their own national ones. CETLALIC attracts students who have interesting perspectives and experiences on issues which go far beyond the borders of their communities and their countries, and its been very interesting to share and hear those experiences both in a social setting and in the midst of our language studies.

So I´m back at the house now, about to hop in bed, then tomorrow I´m off to Mexico City for 4 days on my own, which I hope will both be fun and frugal, because I´m damn near broke!

¡Hasta Luego, Cuídate!

I took Dennis the Menace to a museum

2009-07-02T14:39:00.000-07:00

(Cuernavaca, Mexico)

I´ve been sick for the past week so I took the day off from class. In the morning I was downstairs at my hosts house, in my underwear, eating breakfast, and I hear a buzz at the door. I run upstairs and put some clothes on, came back down and opened the door, and found Geraldo, the 8 year old grandson of my host mom (who lives across the street with this mom, who normally drives him to school). He hadn´t gone to school for some reason (turns out he had left his backpack in the house I was in, so he just stayed home). So I let him in and he hops on the computer and starts playing online flash games. After a while I was about to go out to join my class for an afternoon trip to a museum, as I was feeling better. I didn´t know if I should leave him at the house, and what my host mom would think about the doors being open (because you need a key to open or close the doors, and I wasn´t going to lock him in. So I told him he had to go when I went. So we both go, and when we pass his house, he just keeps on walking. I asked him, ´are you going to your house?´, and he said that he couldn´t, it was locked. So I asked him ´well then where are you going?´ And he just shrugged and said ¨no sé¨. I was going to take him back to his grandmothers house, but then I asked him if he wanted to go to the museum with me and he shrugged and said ¨por qué no?¨. So off we went to catch a bus downtown, me suddenly with an 8 year old charge falling asleep against my arm during the ride.

So we got downtown and I most definitely took us on a terrible route to get to the museum, so we stopped at a tienda and I bought us both ice cream bars. We got to the museum a little late but caught up with the group, who had an English speaking tour guide who was obviously very enthusiastic about the museum. The museum is actually a house, the house of an American artist named Robert Brady. The building was originally a part of a Franciscan convent (the cathedral is still attached next door) built in the 16th century which he purchased when he moved to Cuernavaca (I think in the 60s). Equipped with access to his fathers fortune, he proceeded to decorate the casa exquisitely with art from around the world. Every room is positively stuffed with art, carvings, statues, beadworks, from every continent and many epochs. Everything is placed acording to his artists aesthetics. For instance there is a Hindu Buddha placed in an enclave that was added to a shower because it was directly visible through the doorway in the next room. The interior is painted with particular colors which they called ´Brady Colours´ and he left them instructions for how to mix them before he died. Brady died in 1986 and his house was turned into a museum afterwards. The website of the museum is here. Pictures from a Google search.

Anyway, before we got to the museum Geraldo reached into his back pocket and pulled out a slingshot and started fiddling with it - and I realized, I´m bringing Dennis the Menace to a museum! He skipped school, and when I told him he couldn´t stay at his grandmothers house he was going to just wander around on the streets for 3 hours until she got home! Then he hops on the bus with me with nothing in his pockets but a slingshot! Definitely Dennis the Menace material. In reality though he´s a really good kid, and he enjoyed the museum. He looked at all the room and kidded around with me about using the shower and the toilet and eating from the fridge. Everyone else in the group loved him and thought it was cute that I suddenly had an ¨hijo¨.

Anyway, we got back home and his grandma thought it was cool that I took him, so all is well! By the way, I´m in Cuernavaca for 3 weeks to learn Spanish. I was going to write an introductory blog post about it (had a really good first week, then got sick, and I haven´t felt like doing much of anything). I went to the hospital last night and got a new perscription and I´m feeling better now, though still weak. I´ll try to get a post up about my first week at some point, and I hope that my last week is worth writing about!

Neil

Maji, Chakula na Kazi

2008-12-16T10:38:00.000-08:00

(Water, Food and Work)

My taps have been dry for about a week and a half now (I honestly come home, turn on the taps, and stand there being depressed by the thought of the long stretch of pipes with no water in them). I don't know Dar es Salaam's water system, if most of it comes from the rain, or a river, or is desalinized from ocean water (water water everywhere...). Apparently the whole city is having shortage problems. I think it's just following me. Other people didn't seem to have problems, while I did for a week, then I went to the Slipway and that day there was no water, then I go to the mall to use their washroom and they're out of water too. I'm moving at the end of the week, and mark my words, their taps will go dry conveniently as I show up.

Well, I've gotten used to washing my hands, doing dishes, and bathing my self using a cup and a bucket of water (though the tank I scoop the bucket up from is nearly empty, hmmm....). Kai's family has their own tank which apparently has more. It turns out you can do these chores with much less water than you'd normally use. I can fully wash my hands with less than 1 cup of water. The real water waster is flushing the toilet - it takes up the whole bucket of water. But you can't skimp on toilet flushing, for sanitary reasons involving fruit flies (though you can go to the bathroom less).

Partly because I'm lazy and partly because I wasn't sure how to wash dishes without tap water, i let the dishes sit for a long while and have just been eating out or skipping unimportant meals like breakfast. Though I did the dishes, tonight I didn't have much in the way of food so I decided to check out a little bar on the road near here that I pass by every day that looked like it had food. Now my host has advised me not to go out at night, but others have advised she's just being paranoid. My judgement call is to not make a habit of it but to not let it stop me from doing something. So I headed out, it's a very short walk, no problems either way. I went in and asked what food they had. They said 'chipsi na mayai' (fries and eggs). There was a carton of eggs which I assumed were hardboiled, so I asked for chips and an egg. So he throws the chips into a frying pan over a charcoal stove then cracks the uncooked egg over it, making a nice little french fry frittata! I was willing to accept this, and threw some pilipili (hot) sauce and ketchup over it. I asked the server if there was a fork I could use, she walked into a back room and honestly for at least 40 seconds straight all i could hear was clanging and crashing and things falling and clunking against eachother then she walked and said there was no fork, so I grabbed a spoon. It was not bad, and I washed it down with a small Serrengeti beer. There were some guys playing pool who I was tempted to challenge to a game (as I was reccomended to do) but I wasn't feeling it.

Today I had my first interview with a civil society organization, which maybe I'll only talk about briefly. The funny thing was that I called at 10am this morning and asked for an appointment for sometime before Christmas. He director of the organization asked me if I could come in immediately, as he was leaving for Dodoma (out of town) at noon. So I threw on my clothes, gathered the questionnaire and recorder, and speed walked to the mall to catch a taxi. Something you should know about Dar es Salaam is that most locations only loosely have an address. The listing for this oganizations said the block #, which I'm not sure how to find, but it said it was opposite a certain market. So I told the cab driver which market, he said fine, 10,000 shillings, and we took off. About 2/3rds of the way there he stops and asks someone else where this market is. So we got there and I was able to call and get pulled into the organization's office.

The interview went well, I got lots of information and was able to speak with the director and with other employees of the organization. I have a questionnaire with about 40 questions on it, and it's very hard to give the questionnaire in the form of a survey. They aren't yes or no questions, so if you ask something the interviewee might launch into a big answer which ends up answering other questions. Because it's more of a dialogue, you don't want to tire the interviewee by recovering ground. Anyway it went very well for a first try, and I will hopefully learn each time.

Well I'm off to bed, lala salama tout le monde!

Learning Kiswahili (plus a lesson for the grammatically curious)

2008-12-14T10:15:00.000-08:00

Warning: this will probably only be interesting to language nerds

Having recently had a couple one-hour Kiswahili sessions with a private teacher, I have to say, at the end of a language lesson I’m left mentally exhausted, with a small headache from the sheer exertion of active listening and from the inability to form complete thoughts or sentences. A language teacher truly sees people at their most incapable: blustering with simple phrases and awkward social interactions in the target language. Communication is the fundamental way we exist in the world, and learning a new language is the purposive act of obliterating one’s ability to communicate in the world, moving back to the infant stage of communication (without the benefit of their incredible linguistic acquisition abilities) and learn not through natural repetition and observation but by memorizing lists of words on paper and codified grammatical rules.

There are many stages of language learning, depending on how you go about it. For me, the first period isn’t so painful. You can spend weeks, months, or years reading through a textbook, making word lists and flash cards, doing grammar exercises, listening to audio dialogues, doing simple back and forth conversations like ‘hello, how are you, what did you do today, I’d like some coffee please’. But eventually, you’ve learned a sufficient number of verbs, nouns, adjectives, and those crazy prepositions, conjunctions, and grammatical rules that hold them all together that you’re really on the verge of being able to communicate a practically infinite number of things by combining your knowledge of the language in different ways. This is what’s necessary to have real conversation, not just formulaic exchange. And yet, you’ve never ever had to do that! And when you try, you realize you’re missing all sorts of vocab, and grammar, and other things that you need, and you simply can’t think fast enough or remember enough of your flash cards to get out a whole sentence.

I think there’s a threshold which is a somewhat difficult one to cross, where you need to, through practice and effort, force your mind to combine all these things into something which is an integrated language and gives you the basis of fluent communication. I think of it as a basic matrix from which you can add more complexity. You can learn all sorts of words and phrases without having this dynamic matrix capable of rapidly generating communication in appropriate ways. Right now I’m somewhere in the midst of this threshold (and thus the headaches from the language sessions). I’m able to communicate in novel ways only with much effort, but as I make that effort I make progress and am able to integrate more of what I’ve learned.

I think it’s interesting that when I was learning French, by the time that I was beginning to form this sort of basic matrix of fluency I probably had a vocabulary of about 1000 words and had been working on the language for nearly 2 years. With Swahili, I’m reaching that point with only maybe only 2-300 words. This is not because Swahili is more simple or has a small vocabulary, just that I now have the capacity (and possibly confidence) to try to communicate at an earlier stage of vocab acquisition. Also, once you know some verb grammar, a single word verb can be conjugated to say a lot of different things.

So for the grammatically curious, I’ll write out a little Swahili grammar lesson, using one verb, a noun and an adjective or two, two tenses, one case, and two subjects.

Ok, let’s take a verb, let’s say, ‘to want’. Verbs don’t stand on their own like they do in English, they get conjugated with a whole slew of pieces of information (in fairly straightforward ways, unlike French). So every verb in itself is a verb root. For ‘to want’, this is: -taka

In the most basic conjugation of a verb, you have a subject, then the tense, then the verb root.

Let’s take two subjects, I and you. I is ni-(pronounced 'knee') and you is (conveniently) u-

Now lets take two tenses: present –na- and future –ta-
So already we can put these together to say a few things:

Ni – na – taka: ninataka I want
Ni – ta – taka: nitataka I will want
U – na – taka: unataka You want
U – ta – taka: utataka You will want

Now if we add a noun, let’s say… shoes. Ok, so in Swahili, nouns work in a class system. All human and most living nouns exist in one class. Everything else is split into several other classes. Shoes is in a class called the ‘ki/vi’ class, for a reason now to become apparent. Shoe is kiatu and shoes is viatu.

So put them together… Ninataka viatu – I want shoes.

Adjectives go after the noun, as they do in French (shoes red, not red shoes). Some adjectives just stand on their own, but just for fun lets choose one that doesn’t. Let’s talk about our new red shoes! New is -pya and red is –ekundu

To talk about new shoes, you have to make the adjective agree with the ki/vi class noun. A new shoe is kiatu kipya and new shoes are viatu vipya. Red, because it starts with a vowel, changes the prefix a little bit. Red shoe: Kiatu chekundu, red shoes are viatu vyekundu.

You gonna want some new red shoes???
Utataka viatu vyekundu vipya?!

I want a red shoe:
Ninataka kiatu chekundu

I should stop there, but as a bonus, how to say, I want ‘it’/I want ‘them’ (referring to the shoes). Real simple. You take the prefix (it’s actually the subject prefix not the noun prefix, but in the case of ki/vi, they’re the same), and you insert it between the tense and the verb root.

So to say I want it (the shoe), you say: Nina – ki – taka: Ninakitaka
and you will want them: Uta – vi – taka: Utavitaka

Hooked, want some homework? (Pete you’re the only one I expect to do this). The verb root for ‘to like’ is –penda, the infinitive form of ‘to eat’ is kula, and the adjective for ‘blue’ is –a buluu (it changes the ki/vi prefixes in the same way –ekundu does). The past verb tense is –li-. Now, how you do you say in Swahili: ‘I liked to eat blue shoes’ (NB. Infinitive verbs follow conjugated verbs in the same way they do in French).

It’s a neat language! And as you can see, it’s really extremely logical and straightforward once you learn the necessary elements.

Wako, Wacko

Neil

The Slipway

2008-12-14T00:15:00.000-08:00

This, is The Slipway.

It is, as my professor put it, a 'white person paradise'. It's a clean, comfortable bastion of consumerism where everyone knows enough English to serve you. It has a pub, an Italian and a Japanese restaurant, a small deli and a small supermarket. It has a book store with mainly western books (I went in to another branch of it and asked if they had any book on Tanzania, they were unable to show me any). And of course, it has tons and tons of curios.

There's a new addition to Slipway, a curio market set up outside the main buildings, stuffed with vendors. You can find curios all over Dar es Salaam, I assume they are mainly for the benefit of tourists, though I'm unsure the extent that the local population might buy items to wear or decorate with. There's generally a wide variety of limited types of items: bracelets, necklaces, footwear, cloths, cushion covers, shirts, dresses, skirts, paintings, wooden sculptures. They're attractive because they represent what most people think of 'African culture', though I'm sure most people recogize its a highly commercialized version of it, but are willing to accept that, understanding the economic position of vendors of African culture.

What strikes me when I walk into this new Slipway market is the sheer volume of vendors and curios available. They're just stacked up, piled on top of eachother, table after table. It's a completely unabashed display of mass-manufactured representations of traditional African art and culture. When you find a little booth with a limited number of items elsewhere in town, the vendor might be able to persuade you that the paintings were done by a fellow tribeswoman and the carvings are done in his homeland. People love the idea of authenticity. They want souvenirs of the ancient continent, of primordial, animistic cultures, land-based cultures. And this is exactly what most items try to convey.

But I should stop myself before I get too cynical. I'd be very curious to learn more about the curio sector, and who makes different items. When Courtney and I were in Kenya we became somewhat cynical about it. One vendor sold us paintings on cloth, telling us his Luo step-sister made them. Of course, we found the exact same paintings in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and Zanzibar. There are a lot of items where you find the exact same thing sold in every shop and naturally distrust any story told about them. Many of the 'African' shirts sold have tags that belie their origins (Thailand, China, etc...).

Yet someone makes all this stuff, and much of it does come from Tanzania, or the region. I spoke with the man selling the above masks and I asked them where they came from. He told me he buys them from different tribes in Tanzania, and told me which tribes made which masks. Could certainly be true right? The below man was sitting outside a shop selling paintings, in the process of making a painting of some Masai. There was a lot of similar art inside the store. That's a transparent production chain!

I have the sense that a lot of the stuff sold is still made by hand, and while there's a lot of it, they aren't really cheap knockoffs (with some definite exceptions... most clothing is made with cheap and uncomfortable fabric, for example. But of course you just need to pay more for better stuff). The art is indeed hand painted. There's also a lot of curiosities. I like the crafts which are made of found material like Fanta bottle caps, which say more about modern African culture than a kistchy (sp?) bracelet.

By the way, I should mention I donned a tourist mantle to get these pictures. I've taken very few pictures since I got here because it's difficult to find shots that don't have people in them, and as much as I'd love to share some of the sights with people in them, I don't believe that people are just on display for the tourists' camera. I'd want to get permission before taking pictures, and its generally hard to do hat. However, tourists do just that, especially at touristy spots. So I swallowed all the Swahili I knew and pretended to be a sightseer with camera in hand asking if I could take pictures. Which I should actually do more often!

The Blog Has Landed

2008-12-06T06:06:00.000-08:00

This post is kind of late, I had internet issues but we're good now so I'm just going to post what I wrote earlier. Welcome to my blog! My intention is for it to be part travelogue, part reflection on the academic and research questions I’m pursuing here. As I just landed today in Dar es Salaam, this post will definitely be on the travelogue side.

My flight was three hours late (there was a problem with the plane we were supposed to have), and I stupidly lost my notebook in Heathrow, but we touched down 10am this morning no problem. Moving from the new Heathrow Terminal 5 to Dar es Salaam is a stark transition from privilege to poverty. Kai picked me up from the airport and drove me in to her family’s compound, where they have built guest houses. There was a lot of construction on the road, and most of it was nicely tarmaced. My room has a bed, couch, table, desk and chairs, as well as a microwave, mini-oven and electric stove. No running water though, only a bucket which I can fill with water from a water tank nearby. I realize that this is how most people utilize water in rural Africa, but I have no idea how! I went to the store and bought a package of cups so I could pour water over my hands with them and wash things separately. There’s a small trickle of running water now though and apparently it should be fixed shortly. But I’ll learn how to get by with the bucket in the mean time!

My current place is next to a new shopping centre which is extremely convenient, just a 10 min walk. It’s got a grocery store and two other stores which might be equivalent to Hart and Giant Tiger, with a lot of clothes and other essentials. There’s also some cafes, specialty shops, a book store, and an internet café though I haven’t found it yet (though obviously I will have by the time this is posted). I picked up a cheap cellphone, I’ll give my number to anyone who wants it, just message me. I’m being tempted to buy a cellular modem for my laptop, which has quite good speed internet mobile access (note to mom: that means I could connect with my laptop from anywhere I could use a cellphone). They’re way ahead of Canada here with that stuff!

I was pleasantly surprised that nobody yelled ‘mzungu’ at me while I walked through the neighborhood today, or even conspicuously ogled me! This was very common in Kakamega, Kenya, last year, though it wasn’t something that bothered me so much. Maybe I’m going to miss the attention!

I’m munching on a bowl of beef/plantain stew right now, it’s pretty good. Bananas are cooked before they’re yellowed, and they have a consistency and taste much like potatoes. Kai brought me over a bowl of it. Once the stove (and water) is working I’ll be able to cook more for myself. I don’t think I’ll have any trouble doing this. I already picked up some garlic and onions, beef stock, oil and vinegar, and soup mix. Once I have a fridge I’ll get more veggies and meat and be able to do all kinds of culinary magic.

It’s a little intimidating being here. I’m a little nobody in a big city. I’ll admit to a couple ‘oh jeez, what have I gotten myself into?’ moments, but I’m pretty confident overall. It will be very interesting once Arja is here and she introduces me to some different sectors of the society. Until then I’ve got some reading and exploring to do, and some Swahili to practice.

I may as well keep my blog posts short or else no one will read them! More later. Goodnight world.

Neil