Living in Dar Es Salaam

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Dar is a strange kind of bubble, you somehow fall into thinking, you are living in a big modern city, but then there are some things that bring it back to you, that this is the developing world and not quite everything has developed yet: Even some of the main roads aren’t tarmaced and have got pot holes big enough to fit a small car in, which transform into little lakes after a rainfall, which again causes even bigger traffic jams.
Then there are the occasional power cuts, with whole districts of the city being pitch black for hours or the other option is phasing. A concept I hadn’t heard about before. If there is some power, but not quite enough, then only some circuits are working, so you find your plug sockets working in one room and the fan in another, but not everything everywhere.
We had our trouble with the water mains, too. That to say, only half of Tanzanians have got access to water supply. So I shouldn’t really complain. Sometimes the water that comes out of the tabs is varying shades of brown and sometimes there isn’t any water coming out at all. Half the time we’ve been out of water, it has been down to the water works (In one case the pumps failed at the source and then people hacked into the pipes on the way, so there was no water for 2 weeks), the other times to the system in the building. There are some water tanks, which should cover us for a few days of supply problems, but then one time the pump fails, the other time there is air in the pipes, then the valve isn’t working. In these cases we can get at least water from a tap in the backyard, so I had my fair share of bucket showers… For the case where there is no water at all, we have learnt our lesson and keep now a few 12l bottles of water as emergency. One time there was some magic water supply at the end of the road with three queues, one short one, the other two significantly longer. The short one was 200 Shillings per bucket, the others 50… Another time there wasn’t any water anywhere nearby, so we drove to a friends house and filled up our big bottles there.

You can’t rely on anything fully in Tanzania, everything seems to break down constantly,
1) either because it is poor quality (so many counterfit products and I’m not talking about Gucci handbags, but everything from car tyres to tooth paste and electrical goods or just crappy Chinese products, that don’t even try to pretend anything else),
2) because it is been pushed beyond the limit (25 people on the back of a small pick-up on poor roads can lead to axle break or simply the African climate is too much for many things) or
3) because it has been fixed by a ‘fundi’ (Swahili for repair man). One qualifies as fundi, if one has got a hammer or a screwdriver or some other tool. Many of these fundi, don’t really know, what they are doing, but they somehow try to fix things by trial and error or have developed some inventive technique to make something out of nothing, giving recycling a completely new meaning.
Amazingly enough, they do manage do get things working somehow, often not for long and not quite in the way originally intended and not to forget not very quickly. So simple repairs take about 10 times as long as they would in Europe (if you are lucky). Tanzanians don’t like to disappoint you by telling you, they can’t do something or don’t know something. So they rather say ‘yes’, even if they mean ‘no’ or do something, even if they have no clue, if it is the right thing. So applying this to our ‘fundi’, this means he might not know, what to do to fix it, so just starts taking it apart and tries to put it back together again a few times, this may take several days of course, delayed by not having the tools they need or the tools breaking. Always with the reassurance ‘kesho’ (=tomorrow) everything will be ready.

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