One year on

Hello again!

It’s been a while, but basically if I updated my blog regularly you’d find out an awful lot about what I eat for breakfast and when I put the bins out. Life in Tanzania, just like anywhere else, becomes routine!

Which is not to say the past few months have been entirely uneventful, so if you’ll allow me a bit of a higgledy-piddledy order of things, here’s what’s been going on!

Solar Aid Tanzania - an update
Get micro-Solar Lights to Tanzanians at affordable prices (£5 per light). This price is possible thanks to donor money. The reason we don't simply give the lights away for free are (a) people value what they buy (e.g. NGOs have found giving away Mosquito Nets simply results in thousands of discarded nets around the country), and (b) we can reinvest that money into bringing affordable lights to a far wider audience, than if we just gave everything away.

The current project is to get these to school-children, but the impact of each is felt by the whole family. Here are some findings of a recent Solar Aid M&E Study in Tanzania:

 - The majority of users live in households with income < £40/month, and over a third are < £20/month. Most rely on farming income, which can be very unreliable. Unsurprisingly, the majority of users do not have any access to electricity.

- The alternative to Solar Lights is Kerosene, which is relatively expensive (average spend £1.45/month). Solar Lights almost entirely remove the need for Kerosene in the household (75% reduction). The Solar Light will last for 7-10 years. It doesn’t take John Maynard Keynes to do the economics.

So not only do households save money, they also wind up with more “light hours” in the evening as there’s no pressure to turn-off the lights (as you would with kerosene in order to save). And to boot, the solar light is far brighter than kerosene and allows more than one person use the light at a time.

Year 2012/13
When I arrived on a hot muggy morning in April 2012, I found myself in the deep-end, forming part of an entirely new local management team, together with a newly appointed Ops Manager.

With both of us joining at the start of the financial year, we were thrown an audacious target of selling 186,000 lights that year (it had been 27,000 lights the previous year - I have no idea how they arrived at 186,000).

Something like this, but 200,000 times over

Pulling up our sleeves, we knew we had our work cut out, in particular managing growth under tight cash restraints. My first thoughts were “well, we can just give it our best“.

A lot of people put in a lot of hard work, and roll forward to today & we’ve issued 200,000 lights!

With around 5 people per Tanzanian household, that's a million lives impacted. I’ll be honest, I’m pretty proud to be part of this team.


Looking to 2013/14
I was offered a position to stay on another year, and excited about the projects ahead, Liisa and I thought “screw it, why not!”. So we’re here until April 2014, and postponing our settling-down just a little bit longer!

The ups & downs
Of course not every day is a bed-of-roses, not everything is always utterly amazing, and life is not always hakuna matata.

Living here, there are inevitably peaks and troughs. As long as the peaks are wider than the troughs, things are OK. But there certainly are times when everything gets to me, nothing makes sense, and I wonder why on earth I’m staying another year!

There is a huge cultural difference to bridge, and (in my opinion at least) these cultural differences become more and more noticeable the longer you’re out here. I get wound up by corruption in particular, which brings me to…

Corruption
Tanzania incidentally is only mid-table in corruption standings  (102nd least corrupt country, South Africa is 69th, Zambia 88th, Kenya 139th & UK 18th), however it’s certainly no Finland or New Zealand (joint 1st).

I do despair when I wonder what countries who rank particularly badly (Afghanistan & Somalia) must be like. Anyhow here's a couple of examples of how it comes up in day-to-day life:

I continue to misunderstand what
'Chai' (tea) really means

Permits - Since we’re staying on another year, I need to get a new work permit sorted. Rather unfortunately our Immigration Agent went AWOL (which is a whole other story!) I thought I’d give it a go doing my own application. Big mistake! You wouldn’t believe the amount of  'technical errors' I made that need to be ‘fixed‘, and the amount of times I was sent back and forth wore me down. I clearly wasn’t getting something.

Since then, we’ve managed to get an agent involved who has interpreted what they were “too shy” to ask me. Seems the people processing these applications need 'chai' (tea). And they must really, really, really like their tea, because they’re looking for an awful lot of $ $ $ to buy it with.


“Fire Safety” Another case is in point is when we had Fire Safety ‘experts’ come visit Solar Aid Tz (honestly, these guys wouldn‘t know how to put out a cigarette).

Anyway, we didn’t have the right safety standard certificates. The certificates cost Tsh 500,000 (£200). Although it quickly became apparent that Tsh 50,000 (£20) would help the problem ‘disappear‘.

But we weren’t having any of that! We politely declined their offer and proceeded with getting a legitimate certificate. The funny thing was the men couldn’t get their head around why we wanted to pay so much more just to get a receipt!

Corruption particularly irritates me, as it really does stop an economy from developing properly, and discourages efficiency, productivity etc. But it's an extremely difficult one to tackle, other than to (a) not buy into it, and (b) educate people to understand the damage it does.

When it rains, it really does pour

Wet Season arrives with a flourish
Praise be to the Lord! It’s been so hot the last few months, and the rains have arrived nicely reducing the humidity to some level of bearable!

And the rains aren’t bad, it’s mostly lovely weather, but when it does rain, it really pours! And if it can hold off next weekend, I’m going back to the beach!


KFC!

KFC Mikocheni, Dar es Salaam. Almost ready and will
probably prove too tempting...

Just as we got over our junk food addiction (living above Brixton McDonalds is not good for you), and having really got into our healthy eating (it’s avocado season now, mmm), Tanzania - a country without McDonalds or Burger King - is opening its very first KFC.

And it’s right across the bloody road from us!

Must avoid.
Should avoid.
Probably won’t avoid.


Taxi drivers
What is it with me a taxi-drivers?

Walking down the street a few weeks ago, one just “went for me”. He was laughing manically and tried to run me over! I had to jump completely out of the way and he missed me by inches. And he drove off continuing to laugh manically.

How odd!

The saving grace was I was in a particularly good mood that day and was able to more-or-less laugh it off! TIA etc


Get there by Foot
Liisa and I have fully embraced walking / running into our routines, it‘s healthy and we don‘t have to worry about taxis (much!) And a 12km daily round-trip to work has the obvious benefit of being good exercise, but boy you do meet some weird people along the way!

And friendly ones too.

But my favourite are the people who ignore you. Ah to be anonymous again!

Till next time :D