Palace Life

July 14th, 2007


So we moved out of our four start hotel today and into our apartment for the next three months. Originally we were suppose to move into a house donated to AKF-Tanzania in Old Stone Town (Shangani district), immediately after the orientation week ended, but it wasn’t ready. So our fearless coordinator, Mr. Said, hit the streets to hunt for temporary apartments instead and found four that were vacant. One was a rough and rugged space located in a stone building next to the Tanzanian Red Cross office at the entrance of one of Stone Town’s ubiquitous alleyways. Hidden from the main streets, its discreet location would allow us to come and go without being noticed by half the city – a definite advantage for any foreigner deciding to bunk down in a place like Tanzania, where wazungu - those filthy rich white people who come from a land of milk and honey – end up servicing the needs of local thieves. The interior was rather medieval, being dark, damp and cold, but it was a stone building, so what should be expected? But there were only two rooms, and the girls were not interested in having roommates, let alone living in a cave, so we decided to keep looking.

The second place was a youth hostel that at ten Canadian dollars a night would be a rip-off for the long haul, given what we could get for the same money elsewhere. The third place was located twenty minutes outside of town in an area called “Mombassa”, named after the port city in Kenya. Like its name sake, the area was rough, rugged and relatively poor. Mr. Said told us we’d be the only wazungu in the neighbourhood – a novelty again worth avoiding. Also, there was no electricity because the fuse had just blown, there was no running water, and a colony of hungry ants had just taken up residence in the kitchen cupboards. We decided to keep looking.

Finally we were shown a palace like home in an upscale area of Stone Town, where local community business leaders and other notable officials lived. Identified by one of Zanzibar’s infamous stylized doors characterized by iron pike heads lining the frames, the fourth option was in an enclave hidden from the main street and within 20 meters from a police station. Double points! Inside were three rooms, one with an ensuite bathroom, with a kitchen and living room each twice the size of my residence room at the University of Dar es Salaam (I was a visiting student there in 2004), which fit two people. High ceilings, marble floors and dark oak-coloured doors and bedroom cabinets topped off the look. Who wouldn’t like that? The price was a bit high but still within our budgeted stipends for rent. Besides, we’d save heaps later after moving into the AKF-Tanzania house that is not as posh and hidden (there’s a motorbike taxi stand right out front). Triple points! So we took it.

Now we’re living in what I have officially called a palace, especially in comparison to the run-down stone homes on the other side of the enclave, and the tin shacks in the neighbourhood behind our pearly-white compound wall. I somehow think us IDMers in Zanzibar are cheating. We were given tips during the training month in Ottawa to prepare to live for eight months in conditions below our norms – in mud huts and tin shacks located in isolated rural areas. Instead, perched upon a queen-sized bed under my mosquito net canopy in a bedroom chamber with all the amenities, including an in-suite bathroom, I am living something beyond my expectations. The fact that it’s all situated within a few minutes walk from a beautiful white sand beach where you can lounge in the sun while eating fresh mangos and coconuts sliced for you by a fruit boy for a few pennies makes it more bizarre.

I’ve becoming what I’ve always criticized – a development worker living a life of luxury while surrounded by poverty. How does that make me feel? Confused and conflicted (development work has a tendency to do that to morally conscious people) I suppose. The way I see it is this. I was damned lucky to have won the birth lottery by being born into a financially, mentally and socially sound family in Canada. Others weren’t so lucky to have been born into a country brimming with opportunities and strong social welfare systems, yes where shameful cases of poverty exists, especially amongst Canada’s Aboriginal communities, but not in the same severity and magnitude one finds in the most desolate of places in the Global South. Thus I feel like I have an obligation to do something about such great inequalities, and so I have decided to build a career in international development. How does eating fruit on the beach help anyone? Well it’s a revenue earner for the fruit vendors for starters. But I came to the beaches of Zanzibar for other reasons as well. This is where AKFC best thought my skills could be used to support the AKF-Tanzania office. This is where I could learn about the challenges local NGOs face in their daily operations in a developing country. This is where I could deepen my understanding of NGO management and development issues so to become more effective labourer in this field. Living in a palace home will not prevent that from happening. Blowing off my internship by not going to the office every day to ask questions and visit project sites will!

Some people argue: "How can you truly understand development issues if you are not living them - if you’re not spending your nights in a tick-infested hovel, and your days on the street begging for change so you won’t have to go to bed hungry that night?" Granted, there’s a degree of truth behind such statements. The great and late polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski lived with his stories for many months so he could carry his writing beyond the mere reportage of facts and deliver insightful observations that considered the cultural context in which they occurred. And quite arguably the same technique could be extremely useful in drafting documents analysing the grass roots level in the development policy world. The importance of gaining a full, three dimensional understanding of the issues is paramount, especially in a field full of them! In this sense living in a palace home will definitely not bring as much personal understanding understanding towards the necessity of clean water and shelter as living in a tin shack in one of Africa’s slum villages. But on the flip side, just because you have not been personally affected by it does not mean you lack the capacity to realize its hardship. Do you need to experience war to realize it creates hell a hell on earth for everyone involved (except the drug smugglers and arms dealers)?

Ok, perhaps you don’t have to go to the same extremes as Kapuscinski to understand what’s going on at the grass roots level, but segregating yourself from the community you’re meant to serve risks making your even more foreign than is the case already. This means acceptance and respect may be hard to win over, and result in your work having very little impact or benefit to the community being served. However, this ‘disconnect theory’ is probably less true the higher up the bureaucratic chain one climbs, especially in the world of executive management, where expectations of you in some cultures to act and live in a pompous manner (read in a palace home) may be required so to win the confidence and respect of your local colleagues. It's just a muse but a possibility.

Bringing this monologue back to my reality as an intern in Zanzibar, I feel every effort should be made to maximize the time I have here by popping the palace bubble and living with the issues. But to what extent have I already done that? After all, I did live pretty locally in Northern India, Ethiopia and even Australia (which has its own problems), where I felt very much connected to the local beats and experienced many of the local issues first hand relating to sanitation, education, conflict and disease. I think now it is time to focus more on the professional development side of things and not follow the Kapuscinski path. There is a time and a place for that, and now is not that time. So the palace it is.

Post script – just returned from visiting our Tanzanian intern counterparts and they are living in a house of similar dimensions, only slightly bigger, in the outskirts of town. I feel slightly better.