Reflections on Return From Tanzania
Seeing It All Again For The First Time

by Bruce Melville
March 2009

Gerry and the teaching assistants at the Early Years Centre, CAMS	Bruce on a visit to the village of Lamaite, Tanzania	Lunch time on the central rail line in western Tanzania	Children begging beside the train at a whistle stop in western Tanzania	Children from one of the many villages watch as the train rolls by	Children sitting patiently during a village church service

 

In July 2007 my wife, Gerry, and I boarded a plane and began our journey to the city of Dodoma in central Tanzania, east Africa. We spent the next year and a half teaching at Canon Andrea Mwaka School (CAMS), one of a number of schools that are operated by the Anglican Diocese of Central Tanganyika. CAMS serves children from Nursery (age 3/4) through Form 4 (Grade 11). As our time in Africa unfolded we provided a chronicle through our blog (http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Bruce-and-Gerry-in-Tanzania/ ) in which we attempted to tell the stories of some of the people we met and of situations in which we found ourselves.

Village kids near Dodoma mugging for the camera

 

Our work in Dodoma completed, we arrived back in Canada on Christmas night in the midst of snow and cold weather. In the days and weeks following our return friends would observe, ‘It will be quite an adjustment getting use to these cold temperatures after the heat of Africa.’ Or they would ask, ‘So, have you been able to warm up yet?’ While it was a bit of an adjustment getting use to winter weather after boarding the plane in Dar es Salaam in 38-degree heat, the climate and the weather presented only a small adjustment compared to reacclimatizing ourselves to life in our part of the ‘developed’ world.

Have you ever heard the expression, ‘Seeing something again, for the first time.’? I have often heard that phase but until recently I don’t think I properly understood its meaning. The contradiction inherent in it made it a little confusing. But for me, since returning from Tanzania, seeing things again for the first time has become a common experience. This phrase, for me at least, has acquired meaning.

With that in mind, I thought I would share just three of several occasions in recent months when I saw again for the first time something that in my pre-Tanzanian experience had been quite familiar and unremarkable.

For a couple of decades now Thrifty’s Foods has been the principal supplier of groceries to our family so I have walked in and out of Thrifty’s countless times. But my first post-Tanzania encounter with Thrifty’s felt distinctly different from what I had experienced before leaving for Africa. Rather than being a pretty ordinary grocery store, I saw Thrifty’s again for the first time as row upon row of highly processed and often over-packaged products. While the sheer quantity seemed remarkable what really struck me was how processed and distant from their source all the products on display were. By contrast, in our market in Dodoma, other than the rice sold out of large sacks and the mounds of sardine-like fish that had been dried in the sun, the only items that had been processed at all were the spices brought in from Zanzibar. Many had been dried and some had been ground – that was it. Everything else was straight off the plot or out of the ground – tomatoes, potatoes, beans, ginger, pumpkins, bananas, mango, papaya and so on. The chickens in the market were still alive.

Of course the other aspect of the grocery store experience was the staggering range of choice. Perhaps you know how many choices of salad dressing you have, or how many types of ‘Chips Ahoy’ cookies are made and marketed. I notice these things now. In the past they did not seem to register in the same way. I think we have come to believe that choice is somehow both indicative of progress and necessary to the maintenance of our lifestyle. It has been so interesting to live with the simplicity of little or in some cases no choice. From the point of view of consumption, life in Tanzania was charmingly simple and uncomplicated.

Gerry and Bruce with some local children outside CAMS

 

Not long after my Thrifty’s experience I had the pleasure of walking into the McPherson Library at the University of Victoria, another place that in my pre-Tanzanian life, I was very familiar with. The sheer magnitude, modernity and affluence of the facility really set me back. I had to step outside for a moment to collect myself before going in again. In Dodoma, the capital city of a country of 40 million people, there are two small universities, both about two years old. The University of Dodoma is a government institution and St John’s University of Tanzania is a project of the Anglican Church of Tanzania. In both cases, the libraries of these institutions could easily fit into half the space occupied by the coffee shop in the McPherson Library. I am certainly not suggesting that there is anything wrong with a large and magnificent library in a well-established and very successful university such as UVic. It is the contrast that is so remarkable for me – seeing the McPherson Library again, for the first time, brought home in such a graphic way what it means to live on the developed and privileged side of this planet rather than the alternative.

An entirely unexpected experience of life in Tanzania was seeing, even in this day and age, how easily well-educated ‘westerners’ could slip into a superior role among the less educated and therefore less confident local people. As westerners slipped into their role one could see the local people, in response, slipping into a dependent role. I was quite upset by observing this dynamic and had the opportunity to address it in meetings from time to time.

Seeing people assume these roles with apparent ease allowed me to see another aspect of our life here in Canada for the first time, and that is the relationship that non-aboriginal people have with our aboriginal brothers and sisters. The difference of course between the Tanzanian experience and that of the aboriginal people of Canada is that the Tanzanians live in a post-colonial situation, having been given independence and having established for forty years now their own republic, in which they take great pride. The aboriginal people here, on the other hand, in some ways are not post-colonial and, within the context of modern-day Canada, are still trying to find their place and establish themselves as post-colonial people. I wonder how often here the ‘westerners’ slip into the role of superior and how dangerous it can be for the aboriginal people to see themselves as dependant.

My response to visiting Thrifty’s Foods, or stepping into the McPherson Library was probably entirely predictable. But I would never have predicted that after living in Tanzania for a year and a half I would come home to see the aboriginal people of our country in a completely new light. It is true that to learn about one’s homeland the best thing to do is to leave it, for a while at least, so that in time one can return and see it all again for the first time.