Living in the village

Moving to the village

When I first came to TICC I was very happy when I saw the mud huts in the nearby villages because I assumed this would be how we would live. When I saw the luxury of TICC I was quite disappointed. I wanted to experience the REAL Africa, not the tourist version. Most of the other students here had the completely opposit experience. The sight of the villages made them worry, and they were relieved when they arrived here. My supervisor and I talked about this in one of our weekly one hour coaching sessions, and we quickly agreed that I should live a while in the village to experience life there and improve my swahili. My supervisor then arranged with one of the women who work in the kitchen that I could come and stay in her house because she had a spare room. She just needed to fix the roof first, and she also decided to make a toilet (=a little house with a hole in the ground).



 

Building the toilet



The village

I lived in a very poor village. There is one water tap in the village where everybody goes to fetch water in buckets. We usually do this once a day and fill up 4 or 5 buckets. The water is for the most part safe and clean. In the village there are a few small shops that sell flour, sugar, oil, soap, soda, mandazi, bread etc. People also set up their own little shops around and sell vegetables they have grown, fish they have caught or food they have cooked. Very easy, effective, local and few middle men. People can set up a shop any day outside their house, or go to more established places and sell their things. People also rent equipment and different kinds of service. If someone has a bike they might rent it out when they don't need it. There are places you can go and pay to charge your phone, and a man who has a pump can fill up your bike tyres for a small amount. There is one place in the village where you can pay to watch movies on an old television. I was astonished that this very poor village had a cinema! People in the village are very good at finding creative ways of making money. Which they have to be. You have to be able to provide for yourself one way or another. The businesses make very little money, and what you make one day will decide how much food you ge to eat that day. My village mum said to me one day: "Kama mungu akipenda, labda kesho tutashiba" = If God wants, maybe we will be full tomorrow. She sometimes gets work at TICC to cover if someone is sick. She also sometimes sell mandazi and chapati. I was very surprised to see how much the ingredients costs, how much work it is to make, and how little profit she makes. Maybe about 50 - 100 shilling profit for per madazi or chapati =0.20-0.40 NOK=0.03-0.06 USD.



My breakfast and my bike



Making chapati


The house
The house is a standard swahili mud hut. My village mama lives there with her mother, daughter and grand daughter. Four women of four generations. The house has 5 main rooms. 2 bedrooms, a storage room, a hallway/eating area and a kitchen. The floor is just hard earth, the walls are made by a wood construction which is filled with rocks and mud. The roof is also wood construction tied together with string and covered with palm leaves. The toilet is a small mud hut about 3 square metres. In the middle is a hole in the ground covered with a piece of wood. The hole is just 10 by 20 cm on the surface, but underneath it's maybe 2 square metres and 2 metres deep.

The bathroom is a little room with a rocky floor (so the water can run away without making the gorund too muddy). The walls are made of living trees and palm leaves. There is no door, so you just hang your kanga in the entrance. The shower is easy to use, you just bring a bucket of water and poor it over yourself using a cup. Easy, effective and water saving.


L: Backyard with bathroom and toilet and mango tree. R: my bed


The fire place is very common here; three rocks, pot on top of rocks, wood between rocks and you push them in as they burn. The heat is very easy to adjust and the fire is easy to construct and easy to clean out afterwards.

Eco friendly - No electricity

There were four kittens in the house:)

Almost none of the houses in the village has electricity. It gets very dark in the night and everybody sits outside their houses and talks to the people walking past. It was quite nice in the night because nobody could see that I was white, so I had a break from the "mzungu, mzungu!!"-attention. No electricity also means no fan which means it gets very hot in the night. My supervisor's husband gave me a very good tip to help with the heat. I made one of my kangas wet and had it over me to cool me down. It was very effective, and took away my dependency on having a fan on at night. Another quick and easy way to save electricity! I quickly got used to living without electricity and just using water from a bucket. When I later moved back to TICC I didn't notice that there was a power cut in the evening and I was quite surprised when the power suddenly came back and I saw how much light there was everywhere.


Cats and chicken

 Feminine waste troubleOne problem I had in the village was getting rid of rubbish. I had my period while I lived there, and I quickly realised that sanitary towels are a bit hard to get rid of when there's nowhere to throw away rubbish. Everything is reused, burned or just thrown in nature. I hadn't really thought that much about it before how non-biodegradable sanitary towels are, and I certainly didn't want to burn them either. I ended up just having a plastic bag for my own rubbish that I brought back to TICC every day adn threw it away there. But what do they do with their rubbish? I guess it goes to a land fill somewhere, or maybe rubbish is burned in Tanzania? Sanitary towels are of course also imported goods and too expensive for normal people. My village mum said that they use cotton. Not sure if she means the natural cotton that you can pick from some trees in the village, or cotton fabric that they wash afterwards. Any way, it was an interesting conversation and a bit difficult in swahili. One thing is certain, when people are struggling to get food, they are not going to spend money on buying sanitary towels, and if they did it would just create a silly amount of waste.

Normality 

Living in extreme poverty means you're going to be hungry very often. It also means that you're forced to use your creativity to find cheap ways of getting through the day. It also means you're going to live very eco-friendly. In Norway we have a saying "deprivation teaches the naked to make clothes". It is very true. I am copletely astonished by how well people manage with so little. When I say well, I mean that they survive. It is not a life that gives you any hope for the future. Every day is a new struggle for survival. The money you get today will decide if you get food or not. But it is also what people are used to and they have worked out ways of managing. I think people in the village were generally quite happy. They all want better houses, better mobile phones etc, but when it comes to happiness, I don't think it is decided by the things people have at all. Even though their problems are much greater than what I am used to, life was surprisingly normal. And I think anything can feel normal once you get used to it. Humans are very good at at adapting to new situation. There poverty is normal, so you find a way to deal with it and survive as best you can.



Pictures from the house and through the window: Kanga drying, banana plants, palm tree roof, water buckets and neighbour carrying a kitten in each hand.