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I took these photos earlier this week in Mtakuja, a village about 10 miles outside of Moshi, a place seemingly not only cursed but taunted by God. Nearly every day, rain clouds form across the southern horizon, hanging onto the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro. The mountain’s enormous size blocks water vapor moving across the sky, creating the its own weather system and showering the green foothills with rain.
Invariably, the dark clouds move off the mountain and toward Mtakuja. But they almost never make it, dissipating and evaporating en route. The fields between its settlements and sub-villages are pockmarked with failed attempts at farming. Now, small plots beside many residences consist of piles of newly baked bricks; beside them are the large holes in the earth that have been dug out to make them. The economic futility of the enterprise is readily apparent. They have a stack of bricks, but no more earth. It is the ultimate non-renewable resource.
Parts of the village receive about 500 mm of rain per year, which makes any kind of agriculture almost impossible. Virtually no one here has reliable electrical or water supply. And yet, around 4,200 people live here, many of them moved during Julius Nyerere’s disastrous collectivization movement (“ujamaa”) during the 1970s (“Mtakuja” is a common named for ujamaa towns, meaning “You will come.”). It doesn’t look like a promising site for a town, though during the 1970s, the records show, there was actually more rain. Now, for whatever reason, there is less rain and more people.
Compounding the taunt, Mtakuja is surrounded by miles and miles of lush, green, richly-irrigated farmland, owned by TPC, the giant sugar company that supplies the domestic Tanzanian market. From an airplane or Google Earth (and even our hike on Mt. Kilimanjaro last weekend), TPC dominates the overhead view, a giant oasis of green amidst the otherwise dry scrubland. At its center are the company headquarters, processing plant and a kind of company town where employees and others lived in houses on green manicured lawns and even a healthy-looking golf course that also benefit from the irrigation. It feels like an Air Force base in Texas. But a few miles north, in the village, there is little to no water available.
Many residents of Mtakuja and the surrounding villages work at TPC, so it is important to the economy. Still, wages are generally around a few dollars a day at most. And this time of year there is no work in the fields or at the processing plant for several months. The surrounding economy essentially grinds to a halt.
I was visiting Mtakuja with Joris de Vries, a native Dutchman (visible in the third photo), who is the point person for a Dutch NGO working to the alleviate the extreme poverty here. The group originally became involved in a program to provide school lunches, but quickly realized the poverty here was so complex and all-encompassing that the only possibility of making a real difference was an effort on many fronts at once — education, health care, agriculture, financial services, etc. In many ways, it’s a smaller-scale version of the strategy that Jeffrey Sachs and the Millennium Village project are pursuing in a wider range of villages (see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/world/africa/09kenya.html). The downside of the comprehensive approach, of course, as critics note, is that it is not easily scalable. But it is interesting and useful to learn if progress can be made showering extensive resources on a relatively small place. The trick — one Joris constantly harks back to — is to make everything they do sustainable, so that once the NGO departs the villagers themselves will be able to continue the projects themselves.
Two years ago, Joris’ group did a baseline census of the 909 households in the village, trying to get some picture of the people there. The results offer a richly detailed portrait of life in a poor Tanzanian community. The average resident at 1.8 meals per day, had reached approximately grade 6 in his or her education. About half owned a cow and one in five a chicken, and about two in five said at least once in the last month they had been able to get necessary medicine or medical treatment.
Now, the group is conducting some follow-up survey work, trying to get a more detailed economic picture as well as see if they have made any progress in two years. Joris kindly allowed me to tag along for the day.
After driving out from Moshi through TPC’s sugar fields, we pulled off the road in one of Mtakuja’s sub-villages and continued on foot, following dirt trails back to some settlements perhaps a quarter-mile away. In each of the selected houses we approached, the head of household sad down readily to speak, offering decrepit stools to each visitor and placing them in a circle in whatever shade could be found outside. By midday, this was a challenge in the equatorial sun and typically meant cramming up against the sides of the mud and thatch houses. There was no slamming of doors or “I don’t do surveys” responses. Still, there was a certain wariness. The surveyors took pains to explain the survey, that they were not from the government, and that these families had been selected randomly and were not in trouble (“They are afraid,” the translator told me. “They think they have done something wrong.”)
The first woman looked drawn and tired. She wore a brown dress and said she was born in 1959. Giulia, a friend and volunteer working for Joris, asked if she was married. No, she replied, her husband is dead. Do you work? Housework only, she replied. She has a son 11, and a daughter, 18. A brother provides occasional support of about 5,000 shillings (about $3.75). The surveyors tried to pin down how often that was and it first it sounded like once a month, but then she claimed he had not provided anything since October. She pays rent to her sister for the house.
“Do you sell anything?” they asked her. “We don’t because there is no rain to grow anything,” she replied. A pair of chickens wandered in and out of the circle where we sat next to a pile of firewood. Yesterday, she said, she had just one meal — porridge — and none so far today.
The surveys are an exercise in frustration because, while they reveal something of the depth of the poverty here, the numbers often don’t add up. Precision is elusive. It’s hard to know what is misremembered, what is misrepresented, what is simply lost as estimates in an economy that often uses family obligation, barter, subsistence production and probably theft in place of the normal exchanges of a money-based economy. That is what happens when there is simply no money. Compounding the imprecision, surveyors also believe that respondents do sometimes exaggerate their responses because they think they will be offered more help (and indeed, the woman did ask for help when the survey was done; Giulia explained to her the project was trying to help the village but not by awarding direct aid).
Still, they paint a picture. The woman (we did not ask them names) estimate she spends a little over a dollar a month on kerosene, about the same on clothes and soap, and almost nothing else. She has a mobile phone but it doesn’t work. A big expenditure is the school fees that are universally charged on top of the supposedly free tuition. She reported both her children were enrolled and that charges totalled 60,000 shillings, which weren’t paid but the children were not dismissed. Her daughter, she says, got by with one uniform instead of two and without paying for food (so she didn’t eat school meals). Again, it wasn’t entirely clear where what she did pay for came from.
The surveyors asked her how she satisfied she was with various aspects of her life, from 1 (“very satisfied”) to 7 (“very dissatisfied”). As is common, she didn’t seem to understand the question. The translators tried several different ways. Initially she said she was fairly happy because she had few responsibilities, but she certainly didn’t look it. After a brief exchange, she changed her answer to 6, though she gave decent marks for her children’s education.
Each interview took about 20-30 minutes and we conducted a half-dozen or so over the morning. Next was a man, apparently another tenant in the same small house, sharing the space also with his wife and two children. He was 36, his wife 23. His main source of income was traveling into the bush and gathering firewood for resale. The surveyors tried to pin him down on his profits and settle on about 4,000 TS ($3 per day), but that appears not to include the fees to the owner of the land where he collects it. Nor is it exactly clear how many days a week he is able to sell — perhaps most but not all. Like all of the others, he had started his business, such as it was, with his own money, and had no discernible access to borrowed capital, let alone other services like banking or insurance.
He was dressed in a green shirt, a pair of badly worn sandals and a white caps. He said he ate twice a day, a diet that sometimes includes a bit of fish, though always the same meal for lunch and dinner. He spends about 3,000 TS a month on cellphone credits and reported he is very dissatisfied with his finances and work. Giluia noted he is doing better than many around there, but the work in the hot sun, he says, is miserable.
We continue on through the morning — a brick maker, caked in mud, claiming he is 31 (he appears about 20; the surveyors find many people wildly misreport their ages), shirtless and shoeless. Again, there is no CPA keeping track of his business records. But the best guess is, after factoring in the firewood needed to make his bricks, he clears under $300 per year. Next is a talkative 89-year-old man, then a woman who says she is 60 but looks older. She sat on a stool with her chin in her hand, with yellow, broken-down teeth and a yellow scarf wrapped around her head. She estimates an income of around 1,000 shillings a day and says she does small farming, but the two mud-mortared brick structures that comprise her home are surrounded by empty, dusty weed-ridden fields. Her diet is porridge and some ugalli (rice). A reed-thin cat pokes its head from her door. Her only recent purchases, she says, were soap, kerosene, and cell phone credits. The interviewers moved down the list, asking her about more and more improbable resources — does she have a radio, battery lamp, bank account? Happana (“no”), happana, happana, she answered to each. By the time they get to television and car she looked at them in genuine amazement and started to laugh. It was as if she had been asked if she owned a personal space shuttle. (Sometimes, if the answers are obvious enough, the surveyors skip over these questions).
Surprisingly, the woman gave fairly high marks of life satisfaction. Older people in the village tend to give more positive answers to these questions, Giulia tells me. That’s surprising, though consistent with a range of cross-cultural research. In western countries I always assumed the explanation was that older people have made peace with the choices they have made, whereas for younger people the choices themselves are anxiety-provoking enough to cancel out any benefits of happiness stemming from youth. But it’s hard to see that as an explanation here, where young people hardly have enough choices to become anxious about.
The last stop is a kind of family compound, four buildings around a small, dusty courtyard, with a fire smouldering in the middle. One woman washes rice in the middle, another nurses a baby. Two tiny puppies, ribs protruding from their chests, nap in the shade. There are 10 people here and their full connections to each other escape me: their ages are 7,8. 10, 15, 15, 16, 19, 30, 60 and 75. Part of their home is concrete and one of the girls has a decent-looking cell phone. They seem to pay some school fees for some of the children, but again the numbers don‘t exactly add up (and the children are home at mid-morning on a Monday). Joris writes it all down, concerned more with what the residents report rather than trying to pin them down on more realistic numbers. If they had more money, the family says, they would add on to their home and invest in more livestock. As we talk, goats wander through the courtyard, snacking on dry leaves and occasional bits of garbage. The mother gives a “1” (very satisfied”) for her health and a 6 for all other categories.
Each respondent will be data in the survey, but each has a personal story, and it was rewarding to hear many of them, sad though they are. It is not a place without hope. In the afternoon, I sat in as Joris met with farmers who have been selected to help lead an experimental farming project on communal land, where an irrigation pipe is being installed. It is an interesting return to elements of “ujamaa” but with hopes for better incentives, resources and a more successful outcome. Some of the residents are skeptical but after two years of laying on the groundwork it is about to become a reality. The various projects underway there are all interesting, and I plan to make at least a few return trips to see them.
