I am in Tanzania. I realised, as I arrived yesterday in an overpriced taxi from the airport, and saw normal street scenes and no UN vehicles and no scared people in their heavily fortified Corollas, that this is the first normal, stable African country I've been to. That's because the others have been Liberia (just after a big war), Cote d'Ivoire (just before a little war), Burundi (in the middle of a long war) and South Africa (just weird).
I don't know much about Tanzania. I didn't know who the president was and having asked Kisheri who works for Wateraid to tell me, and having heard his answer, I still don't know. But as I diligently read through many documents last night, before my eyes glazed over on page 12 of the Joint Monitoring Project/WHO investigation into whether the Millennium Development Goals are going to be met, I read that it is one of the most studied countries in Africa. Probably because it doesn't have wars and it's not weird. And though it doesn't much look it, it's very very poor. NGO and academic honeypot.
Today I spent tracking the progress of a sanitation marketing initiative in an unplanned area in the Tameke municipality of Dar es Salaam. In practice, that means trying to set up a small-scale pit latrine emptying business, by sourcing a plastic tank in Simba Plastics (who make water tanks and Coke bottles, thus making a big business), checking out the Piki Piki (three-wheel motorcycle with trailer) and having a demonstration - though not on the real thing - of a hand-operated latrine pump. It also means having lunch in a restaurant that in Kisheri's word is “conducive” to talking. I liked his use of the word “conducive” because the rest of his English isn't brilliant. I thought English would be more widely spoken but I was wrong. Kiswahili and nowt else. In the conducive restaurant, I ate rice and beans while Steve, the man behind the sanitation marketing, covered a whole page with calculations of how much shit there is in Tameke to be got rid of. A lot. 280 tankers-full, every day. Whether that means the business will work is another matter.
At the waste stabilisation ponds which take away Tameke's shit (principle: pour shit into a series of ponds, let bacteria and algae deal with it, discharge into river), a tanker was unloading some phosphorescent green chemical which smelled as bad as it looks. The waste stabilisation ponds are undergoing rehabilitation, which means that they are being dug up. Yet in five minutes three tankers full of shit and other waste turned up and discharged. Who knows where it goes.
It's on days like this that I realise how much I love sugar and soap. Sugar for energy. Soap because it's soap. I love soap. God, I love soap.
I'm still considering the rats.