Club Med, My Ass!

If you are one of my Facebook friends, you have already see some pictures from the trip to the hot springs on Saturday.  In fact, one of my Facebook friends suggested it looked more like Club Med Tanzania than a charitable endeavor.  But you be the judge.  Does this look like something you would do on a tropical vacation?

Okay, okay.  Maybe that's not the best example of how hard life is for me here.  But how about this?

Oops.  Also probably not the most convincing argument. 

Okay.  I've got it.  You won't be able to argue with this.  The refreshment stand at the hot springs only sold warm beer!  Hardship!  Beyond imagining!  And did I mention that when not in the shade, the sun was really hot?

Although you cannot tell from these pictures, there were also Africans at the hot springs.  There were young men in swim trunks enjoying the water and the rope swing--not surprising to me.  But there were also a group of women in native dress (the colorful cloths wrapped around them) sitting at the side of the water and then one of the young women went to the rope swing, swung out over the water and back to the land (while wearing her traditional dress).  Then she repeated it--swinging out and back to land.  Then she swung out--and jumped into the water!  I expected the older women in the group to have a conniption fit (as my grandmother would say), but they were totally indifferent.

The strange part came a little later.  All of the women got up, left the shade and the water, went out to a sandy area nearby, picked up big bundles of firewood that they had cut, put the bundles on their heads, and walked off across the hot, dusty sand.

Which leads me to the serious part.  I have looked up the statistics.  Tanzania is a poor country with a struggling economy.  The CIA Factbook will tell you that the average age in Tanzania is 17.3 years, with 65% of the population being under 25.  But that doesn't truly convey the idea that children have little opportunity to have a childhood because there is not a large enough adult population to support the population of children.  Nor does it tell you how difficult it must be to develop an economy when your work force should be playing with toys and worrying about pimples.

The CIA Factbook will tell you that Tanzania ranks 199th in per capital GDP, but to have an inkling of how bad that is, you need to look up two places on the list and see that North Korea ranks ahead of Tanzania.  I think we can all agree that the only category you would want your country to trail North Korea in would be "Number of Megalomaniac Dictators." 

One of the things you notice pretty quickly is how many different foreign organizations and individuals are here with the intention of making things better.  Of course, there is no coordination between these different people and groups, and in some cases--especially between the religiously-affiliated efforts--there is competition.  The two really popular activities by foreign do-gooders (which I must accept, includes me) in addition to spreading a group's particular brand of Christianity are schools and providing charity care. 

I think you can see that, in a country poorer than North Korea, these activities are only touching the periphery of the problems.  At the Juvenile Jail this morning (Monday), we cut short the lessons because the kids were listless.  Because the new month's allocation of corn flour from the government had not arrived and the kids had not eaten since Sunday lunch.  One of the other volunteers went to a market and bought bananas for all the kids (one each).  They did get lunch--a plate of navy beans.  And one of the students, Juma, insisted that I share his lunch and I did, because I wanted to allow him the dignity of repaying me for teaching him. 

And last week, when lunch was a heaping plate of brown rice, that was a treat!  And we have to ask ourselves, how does teaching math or anything else in our foreign-supported schools, and how does providing charity to the poorest of the poor, bring an end to endemic hunger, poverty, unemployment (I am told that the unemployment rate for college graduates here is higher than any other group), alcoholism, disease, and lack of fertile land? 

I don't have any answers.  What I do is, for (at present) 17 kids, teach them math and call them by name and let them feel that they are not invisible or, even worse, an annoyance for one adult.  Which only amounts to making this day perhaps a little less burdensome and, occasionally, a little fun.  And that is all that I do. 

Thanks for listening.

Now I need to get back to work.  And here at Club Med Tanzania, you know what that means.