The afternoon of my arrival day was spent unpacking and setting up my room/office to my liking. The Forest Way is a comfortable place consisting of 5 guest rooms, a restaurant and a bar. I take all my meals here. Breakfast is included and its the usual eggs a samoza (small, triangular deep fried meat pie) toast and coffee. Dinners are decent but variety is limited. Several kinds of tough local steak, spaghetti Bolognese (best thing on the menu) and chicken (often the one that woke me up that morning) are offered. The fish is inedible. Not much fiber and of course it is not a good idea to eat raw produce. They do cook up a mash of spinach, cucumbers and beans that is actually quite good. All cooking is done over open charcoal braziers.
Unfortunately there is no longer internet service here as the owner is away for medical treatment so all communication is being done in town. More about that later. Since last year a new cell phone tower has been built nearby so that service is excellent. The town center and hospital are about a 30 minute walk over a dusty dirt road followed by a paved street lined with shops. Though I have a driver at my disposal I have resolved to walk at least one way each day lest I come home looking like a bowling pin with legs.. Only two streets in town are paved but I'm told that is about to change. Right! Remember, this is a town of about 25,000 people with a surrounding population of 250,000 more in scattered villages over an area about the size of Los Angeles county. It is located in a region (corresponding to our states) called Rukwa which is huge. Unfortunately, Rukwa is treated as an afterthought by the government and is badly underserved in every way. It is far from the center of power in Dar es Salaam and produces none of the tourist income of the northern regions nor does Rukwa produce much of anything for export. The economy here is mostly subsistence farming and produce for local trade and from what I can see the locals to a good job of it. The lack of economic output means that there is no paved highway in or out and social services, though the infrastructure is here, gets woefully inadequate funding. Add that to the usual level of corruption and the people do not get much. The road problem turns into a chicken and egg situation: There is no progress because there is no road and there is no road because there is no progress. Watching TV I see endless meetings of government organizations endlessly discussing this problem or that but little gets done. To their credit the Tanzanians have an open democracy. Every meeting of Parliament is televised and they even kicked out their prime minister earlier this year after a corruption scandal. It seems he was in cahoots with a corporation that was supposed to be buying electricity for resale. They borrowed the money, didn't buy the power in the way promised, managed to corner the market and drive up prices and everyone got screwed. Sound familiar? The methods of Enron were not lost on them. The consequences were.
Speaking of electricity, I'm experiencing many more outages than last time. The power goes down for short periods several times a day. It is very disruptive. While at the intenet cafe yesterday posting to the blog I had to start over twice. What should have taken 10 minutes took an hour an a half. Power to Rukwa is obtained from neighboring Zambia and is supposedly pretty good but the distribution of it here is not adequate. All this is the result of lack of government attention and incompetent private enterprise.
The internet cafe is a very iffy proposition. There are 5 ancient Compaq desktops working off a very cranky pirated Windows 2000 operating system. The network varies from very slow to passable depending on traffic. It is subject to the same power outages. They have surge supressors but no backup power so when it goes down you just sit and wait. I had originally planned to offer links in this blog to pertinent sites but limited time for posting does not permit. I'd rather use the time to put in pictures.
I needed to do a little shopping at the town market where I found out that (a) mens underwear is hard to find and (b) they never heard of a sweatshirt both of which items I was seeking. After wandering through hundreds of stalls periodically lowering my belt to reveal the top of my Jockeys I managed to score 2 pair of semi-bikinis with no fly. I will not be bringing these home but they will do for now. No sweatshirt appeared so I bought a bizarre looking long sleeve tee shirt and a vest. Hey, it's cold here at night - down into the 40's. Walking by the food stalls a guy tempted me with a beautiful potato omelet that I washed down with a coke. Street food.....yeah
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