A Poor Harvest

   Well it is a few degrees colder than I thought it was going to be when I decided not to bring a sweatshirt. Although we are still in the Northern Hemisphere (3 degrees North of the equator, according to my GPS), July is the coldest time of year here, and in addition, we are at an altitude of about 5900 feet (also according to my GPS). So it is a bit chilly, at least at night and in the morning.

Many houses offer little protection from the cold and rain.

   We began this week in Arusha, which is right next to Mt. Meru and not far from Kilimanjaro. From Arusha, Kilimanjaro blends in extremely well with the somewhat hazy sky, and you can only see it certain parts of the day. From where we were, it looks exactly like a cloud. Only after looking carefully can you distinguish the base beneath its white peak from the sky. Arusha is a bit touristy, as it is near numerous national parks. It is green and lush, and houses a large cultural museum, conference center, the U.N. Rwandan Criminal Tribunal, and the newly created African Union Court. In short, it is a relatively prosperous, beautiful city.
   We stayed in Arusha for three nights before heading two hours north to Karatu. Karatu is a setting off point for safaris - it is within driving distance of Serengetti National Park, as well as Ngongoro Crater and Lake Manyara. I'll be putting up pictures of our trip to Lake Manyara soon.

Here's one.

   The town itself is small, dusty, and remote. It suffers from chronic power outages, which (I am told by many sources), are largely the result of government corruption. In fact, power outages are a major problem in Tanzania, and have caused production to drop and unemployment to rise as factories cannot run at full capacity. Luckily our hotel has a generator, and so we have electricity for a few hours each day. However, there is no heat and no internet - the only internet cafe in town has not been able to operate during business hours due to power outages. The one day when we came back from the field after dark (we try to avoid this for safety reasons, as many people and vehicles do not have reflective clothing or proper lighting), the entire town was pitch black.
   We are not quite as much of a spectacle here as we were in Mwanza, and the enumerators speak more English. The villages are dusty and dry, and as usual the fields look mostly dead. It is the middle of harvesting time right now, and in many homes people are sifting grain, laying out maize to dry, taking beans out of pods, etc. However, many people are remarkably idle. There is not as much work to be done as there is most years at this time. In the village centers we see men idling about and drinking all hours of the day (we usually arrive around 9 in the morning and leave at 5).

                                                                  Typical field of maize

   It is clear to the enumerators that many people in the villages will go hungry in the next few months. The villagers' crops (on which they largely rely for food) are completely at the mercy of the rain. Although the soil is rich, there is no irrigation and so if it does not rain the crops die. It is nearly impossible to save up for hard times in good years for at least two reasons. First, the villagers do not have a good way to store grain for long periods of time, and so if they have excess crops they end up selling them at sharply reduced prices to businessmen from the cities. Second, there is a culture of sharing (called ujamaa, which means "familyhood") in Tanzania that tends to discourage saving for the future. Until recently it was law (and in most villages it still is, de facto) that if you have extra food and someone asks you for something to eat, you have to give it to them. In fact, the enumerators said that even in this hard year, if I, a complete stranger who has plenty to eat, were to ask a villager for food, they would be obliged to give it to me. Thus if someone produces a large amount of food, they will probably end up giving most of it away.
  This arrangement is obviously prone to abuse, and takes away much of the incentive to work hard. However, in a society that lacks governmental safety nets, crop insurance, etc. and where starvation is a real danger, I can see why it has survived. Without the mutual agreement that people will share whatever they have with everyone else, the villagers would probably have no where to turn when crops failed. Such a system may discourage hard work and lower overall productivity, but it may at least help to prevent starvation.
   Thus villagers have little to gain from growing more than they can eat in a year. Instead of saving up for bad years, they mostly depend on the food they were able to produce in the previous harvest. The fact that this is a poor harvest means that people all over Eastern Africa are going to face extreme hardship in the next year, if they aren't already (in fact, food shortages in Somalia have already led to a refugee crisis in Kenya).
   This is a pretty depressing post, and I was thinking of some way to end on a lighter note. However, the truth is that a good part of my trip has been spent seeing depressing things. There was a boy in Malindi I met who I remember thinking was probably7 or 8. The enumerator I was with asked him how old he was, and he said 15. When I remember how small he was, I still can't believe it. We've seen children who have begun to lose skin and hair due to malnutrition, children with crossed eyes and bloated stomachs. Another particularly sad sight was of a little girl, probably 5 or 6 years old, struggling to herd a group of cattle.
   It's hard to see people in such terrible circumstances and not do anything to help. We do actually go to people's houses to conduct the interviews, and it is not rare to be confronted with extreme poverty. It can be heart-wrenching to go into a house, clearly see that a family is enduring hunger, sickness, and hopelessness that I and those near to me will never have to endure, and then just stand up and leave after an hour.
   I can now see more clearly the importance of stuyding developing nations and how their people can become more prosperous. It is difficult to see such extreme poverty, but it is necessary in order to study it. And hopefully that will help shorten the time it takes, in the technologically advanced world in which we live, for the people I've met to stop having to depend on the rain to feed their families.