Overseas briefing

Author: Lizzie Horvitz

TANZANIA - I lowered my cupped hands into the cavity of the slaughtered goat, filled them with blood and drank. The night before, I had slept on a cowhide "bed" next to my naked Maasai Mama. I danced in the discos, rode the public transportation and kickboxed at the local gym. For four months in Tanzania, I lived like a local. You might think I knew what it was like to be a local, but you'd be wrong.

During a homestay, I was looking at photos with my Tanzanian sisters. When I got to a picture of a hippo, I asked them how to say hippo in Kiswahili. They responded, "tembo!" I knew that tembo means elephant, not hippo, and I soon realized that my Tanzanian family had never seen or heard of a hippo and didn't know the Kiswahili word. Although hippos are prevalent in Tanzania, my homestay family had no idea what one looked like. This baffled me at first, but it made me understand the extreme juxtaposition of locals and the privileged tourists, volunteers and students.

I spent four months studying and traveling throughout Tanzania. At any point, I could have said I'm sick of eating the same thing at every meal, sick of living in dirty conditions without showering for days, tired of the way that men treat me. I had a ticket home to America and I had the power and the privilege to leave. That made all the difference.

With a per capita annual income of $400, Tanzania is considered the third poorest country in the world. An American thinking of Tanzania may think of elephants, Mt. Kilimanjaro, and the Ngorongoro Crater. But unless you've been there a long time, you might not know about the discos where people jam out to Celine Dion until the early morning hours, or the Mamas selling ndizi and mahindi kuchoma on the street who have probably never been to the crater or seen an elephant.

In both homestays, my Tanzanian families thought of me as a rich American. They thought of every American as a rich American. They asked me for money to buy new shoes, to send their cousin to college and to pay for everything in between. I didn't know what to do. I wanted to help, but the primary goal of the Tanzanians I met was to get charity from Westerners.

In the past 60 years, Africa has received more than $1 trillion in Western aid, without much to show for it. Thousands of people travel great distances every year to learn about the country and provide humanitarian help. They come over and spend a few months bringing clothes and medicine, working at schools and orphanages, interning at NGOs and international relief organizations, etc. Then they leave, and the Tanzanians wait for the next wave of Westerners with checkbooks. Does this really help, or are we encouraging a continuing culture of dependency that impedes a longer term solution?

There is a difficult balancing act between preserving the culture and traditions of a country and helping it become self-sufficient. Westerners have preconceived notions of how a prosperous society should be organized, what role money and education should play, whether young people should stay on the farm or move to the city. But these notions may not be right for every culture.