In Tanzania if you want someones attention there are different ways of going about getting it. None of them standing up and walking over to that person. Some people simply shout. For example, one day I was looking for a student so I asked a fellow student if she was in the dorm. That student said she didn't know but would find out for me. Assuming that she would walk over to the dorm to look, I told her that it was not so important and I didn't want to bother her . She said it was no trouble and then shouted in the general direction of the dorm at the top of her voice half a dozen times. It worked.
In a restaurant there are several methods, one is hissing, another is clapping or snapping, or rapping ones knuckles, or when all else fails, shouting. If someone is selling something you should shout the word for whatever they are selling. So you might say 'Hey newspaper' or 'you, chashew' or for a service you might say 'oya wheelbarrow'. Wheelbarrows are everywhere here.
The important thing is not to give up. If you are calling someone and they are not responding the important thing is to continue calling them. This can go on for as long as a minute. After 20 seconds or so a certain rhythm is achieved so that the sound might become a sort of mantra. This also applies to knocking on the front door. No response doesn't mean noone is home, it means they didn't hear you or are busy or are ignoring you or maybe other things that I can't imagine, but certainly don't stop knocking.
Or course people often do ignore each other because very often noone has anything to say that anyone else wants to listen to. At first I thought this was only the case for me because I stand out and am assumed to be very wealthy, but eventually I realized that I was only being very arrogant in my assumption and that this behavior applies more or less equally to everyone. It made me feel much more relaxed to know I was only a small fish in a very large sea. I ought to understand this by now, but I am in the habit of exagerating my own importance.
Tanzanian people are often very surprised to learn that it is possible to get paid for doing nothing in America. We call it welfare. There is no such thing in Tanzania, at least not in the same form as we have. But there are a number of methods for distributing money, mostly based on the trickle-down theory. One of them is that members of parliament give out a lot of cash. If you are a poor person (and relative to mp's almost everyone in Tanzania is poor) and you need money for school fees or tea or an illness or anything else at all that you can dream up then you can go to your mp's house and ask for some money. In Kenya the parliament recently raised their salaries arguing that they needed more cash to meet the needs of the people in their constituencies. More or less the same happens in Tanzania. It must feel something like being God, with people at the door all day asking for this and that.
But the real money isn't in begging (although I read in the paper yesterday that a beggar in Dar es Salaam can make between $90 - $150 a month, which is what a teacher makes. And the beggars are presumably not paying taxes or taking miscellaneous deductions), nor even in taking a salary, which tend to be very low. The way to make money in a hurry it to attend seminars and workshops. For example, a teacher who is paid $100 a month might make $30-$40 in one day attending a workshop. There have been letters to the editor by taxpayers lambasting this scheme, saying it is a waste of their tax dollars and they want roads and honest cops and good schools for their children. But since many different kinds of people benefit (there can be workshops on anything at all) I doubt that anyone is really interested in slowing the gravy train. It's sort of funny in retrospect because when Americans, like myself, first get to a place like Tanzania we assume that people are excited about seminars because they want to improve their skills or are taken with some other 'noble' intention. That is possible, but I have also talked to a variety of Peace Corps volunteers who have attempted to arrange such things only to have people back out when they realized there was very little cash involved.
Finally, several students came to me the other day and wanted to know if it was true that on Valentines day in America there was a kissing contest in which couples attempted to kiss each other for the whole day (24 hours) to get a substantial cash reward. I suspect that what may feel like heaven (getting paid to kiss?!) for the first hour probably turns into purgatory and eventually devolves into hell. In fact I wonder if any of them ever kiss each other again after its all over. Hopefully I will never know. I told them it was probably true.
In a restaurant there are several methods, one is hissing, another is clapping or snapping, or rapping ones knuckles, or when all else fails, shouting. If someone is selling something you should shout the word for whatever they are selling. So you might say 'Hey newspaper' or 'you, chashew' or for a service you might say 'oya wheelbarrow'. Wheelbarrows are everywhere here.
The important thing is not to give up. If you are calling someone and they are not responding the important thing is to continue calling them. This can go on for as long as a minute. After 20 seconds or so a certain rhythm is achieved so that the sound might become a sort of mantra. This also applies to knocking on the front door. No response doesn't mean noone is home, it means they didn't hear you or are busy or are ignoring you or maybe other things that I can't imagine, but certainly don't stop knocking.
Or course people often do ignore each other because very often noone has anything to say that anyone else wants to listen to. At first I thought this was only the case for me because I stand out and am assumed to be very wealthy, but eventually I realized that I was only being very arrogant in my assumption and that this behavior applies more or less equally to everyone. It made me feel much more relaxed to know I was only a small fish in a very large sea. I ought to understand this by now, but I am in the habit of exagerating my own importance.
Tanzanian people are often very surprised to learn that it is possible to get paid for doing nothing in America. We call it welfare. There is no such thing in Tanzania, at least not in the same form as we have. But there are a number of methods for distributing money, mostly based on the trickle-down theory. One of them is that members of parliament give out a lot of cash. If you are a poor person (and relative to mp's almost everyone in Tanzania is poor) and you need money for school fees or tea or an illness or anything else at all that you can dream up then you can go to your mp's house and ask for some money. In Kenya the parliament recently raised their salaries arguing that they needed more cash to meet the needs of the people in their constituencies. More or less the same happens in Tanzania. It must feel something like being God, with people at the door all day asking for this and that.
But the real money isn't in begging (although I read in the paper yesterday that a beggar in Dar es Salaam can make between $90 - $150 a month, which is what a teacher makes. And the beggars are presumably not paying taxes or taking miscellaneous deductions), nor even in taking a salary, which tend to be very low. The way to make money in a hurry it to attend seminars and workshops. For example, a teacher who is paid $100 a month might make $30-$40 in one day attending a workshop. There have been letters to the editor by taxpayers lambasting this scheme, saying it is a waste of their tax dollars and they want roads and honest cops and good schools for their children. But since many different kinds of people benefit (there can be workshops on anything at all) I doubt that anyone is really interested in slowing the gravy train. It's sort of funny in retrospect because when Americans, like myself, first get to a place like Tanzania we assume that people are excited about seminars because they want to improve their skills or are taken with some other 'noble' intention. That is possible, but I have also talked to a variety of Peace Corps volunteers who have attempted to arrange such things only to have people back out when they realized there was very little cash involved.
Finally, several students came to me the other day and wanted to know if it was true that on Valentines day in America there was a kissing contest in which couples attempted to kiss each other for the whole day (24 hours) to get a substantial cash reward. I suspect that what may feel like heaven (getting paid to kiss?!) for the first hour probably turns into purgatory and eventually devolves into hell. In fact I wonder if any of them ever kiss each other again after its all over. Hopefully I will never know. I told them it was probably true.
posted by Ryan Kadow at 10:08 AM
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