First Impressions

Greg Vogl, VSO Tanzania

April 6, 2001

Greetings from Bukoba! After four days I finally found the time to compose this letter at home and get to the Bukoba Cyber Centre to send it and check my e-mail. (The university does not have a phone line, so to send e-mail I have to either come here or use my neighbour's phone line. I could theoretically receive incoming calls, but the person who answers might not speak English.) First impressions are often inaccurate, but hopefully some of the details that would strike other first-time visitors. I hope to take some photos of the town once I feel secure about carrying a camera around. In the meantime, I have uploaded a few of my touristy Morogoro photos to http://gvogl.tripod.com/morogoro/.

The town of Bukoba is scenically located at the edge of Lake Victoria, which from the air looked like rippled blue glass with low green carpeted islands and puffy cotton clouds. As I flew in on a small 18-seater plane, I saw that the centre of town is on a plain not much above the level of the lake, but the surrounding hills are dotted with buildings and go up to a plateau which has cliffs with large rocks sticking out like teeth in a lower jaw. The buildings are amazingly colourful and varied, including some ornate mosques, a Sikh temple, and numerous hand-painted signs. The people exhibit a colourful mix of Muslim, African and western dress. Some young Muslim women and girls wear black from head to toe. Many primary and secondary students wear school uniforms. The town is bustling and lively from dawn to dusk, yet not hurried or overcrowded. Pedestrians, bicycles, motorcycles, cars and lorries make their way at differing speeds, with lots of starting and stopping, along the left side of the roads, which are usually unpaved, very uneven and not clearly defined, cratered with muddy potholes, and bordered by rectangular open sewers to carry away the rain. A fine-grained dust colours puddles, clothes, fingers and soles of feet or shoes bright orange. The hardest thing to grasp is the extreme poverty of many of the people and the vast gap between the rich and poor.

Shopping has been a bit of a challenge. There aren't many western style shops, and most goods can be obtained cheaply in the market, which is pretty large and includes areas with fruits and vegetables, butchered meats, fish, and grains as well as clothing and many other items. To get good prices it is necessary to bargain, especially for westerners who are given a higher price. I have managed to cook for myself a few times, making some basic dishes with rice, pasta, potatoes, eggs, fruit and vegetables, but it would have been cheaper and more nutritious to eat out, and I need to go shopping often. People from the university took me to breakfast and lunch at a local diner/caf?. I had eggs, cake and tea (with lots of milk and sugar, Tanzanian style) for breakfast, and matoke (green bananas that taste like potatoes) and beef and rice and beans with fish (head included) for lunch.

My house is conveniently located on Arusha Street, about one block from the main market, one block from the main street (Jamhuri Street), four blocks from the university, and four blocks from Bukoba Cyber Centre, so for now I can walk to almost anywhere I want to go. I have half of a very large house to myself. Occupying the other half, which is roughly the same, is Professor Katoke. I have all to myself a kitchen, toilet, shower, guest bedroom with two beds, a sitting room with two tables and several wood chairs, and a bedroom with a table, bed and two chairs. The ceilings are about 12 feet high and show signs of water damage. The walls are yellow below eye level and white above. The roof is made of corrugated metal and makes a loud noise in the pouring rain. The house is surrounded by a white and olive iron fence, and I must open and shut two massive padlocks (one on the back door, one on the front gate) whenever coming and going. A worker came today and started hacking away at the many weeds in the front yard; tomorrow he will do the back yard. The floor is tiled and the doors and window frames are made of a dark red wood. The house is under constant siege from mosquitoes, moths, tiny cockroaches, leafy green grasshoppers, fruit flies, other insects, spiders, lizards and geckos, though the screens on the windows keep most of them out. Rumour has it that swarms of tiny lake flies are bad at certain times of the year, but I haven't seen them yet. Any time I drop a crumb of food, or leave unwrapped food sitting on a table, an army of nearly microscopic ants heads for it within a few minutes and starts crawling over it and trying to haul it away. I don't have a chest of drawers or wardrobe, and most of my clothes and toiletries are temporarily scattered on suitcases and chairs, but I put a metal bar over the backs of two chairs and hung my clothes from my coat hangers. The shower floor isn't flat so I have to use a squeegee to push the water into a hole in the corner. The toilet seat and lid are missing, and I have been warned that the toilet might overflow, and I might have to use the toilet out back. The kitchen light does not work, so I use a candle when cooking after dark. I don't have a fridge, so I can't buy perishables that I don't immediately consume. My mattress is just a thick foam pad, but I haven't done much computing yet and my back and neck haven't bothered me much. The university will probably not bother to renovate the current campus or staff houses, since both are likely to move in a few months, so I will have to live with some minor inconveniences.

A variety of sounds can be heard from my house at various times throughout the day and night: vehicles and pedestrians passing, gates and doors opening and closing, people talking or singing, the Muslim call to prayer, crowds cheering a football match, African/Muslim keyboard music, a squeaky toy, dogs howling and barking (including two which stay in my back yard at night), roosters crowing, crickets and birds chirping, pelicans flapping on the roof and crying like babies, etc. There are two FM radio stations: a (presumably local) Kiswahili station and an English station from Kampala, Uganda that both play lots of African American hip-hop/soul/R&B music.

It had rained just before I had arrived but was warm and dry for two days before raining heavily this morning. The temperature gets a little hot around noon but is reasonably comfortable compared to Morogoro and Dar. It gets cooler at night, though I don't need more than shorts and a t-shirt indoors. I haven't done any exercise yet, but there is a basketball court at the youth centre, and a dirt tennis court at the Bukoba Club, and I may try jogging near the lake once I am more familiar with the area.

The University of Bukoba apparently only has about 25 students. It once had as many as 85. This week I had only two classes of 8 and 5 students that each meet for 90 minutes between 4 and 7 Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons. I taught a little about PowerPoint and the Internet for my IT2 class, and photocopied handouts of recursion in Pascal for my programming class. I surveyed my larger class of 8 students and found that most are Lutherans or Catholics, most are of the local Haya ethnic group and come from the surrounding Kagera region, and most had been to the Bukoba Cyber Centre to create an e-mail account for themselves under the supervision of Angel, the previous computer lecturer. The university is in a building owned by a youth centre and the space is being loaned temporarily until the university moves two kilometres out of town and up a hill at the end of June. It includes a lecture hall, a few small conference rooms, a reception, the Vice-Chancellor's office, a tea room, boarding student rooms, a library, and the computer lab, all surrounding a central courtyard. Most staff members have computers on their desks. The staff room is somewhat cramped, and I have a small desk with a computer, disks and a few folders of papers. The library has about 1000 books, including one shelf of not particularly useful computer books. Supposedly the Bukoba public library is better. On one of the reading tables is a copy of the University of Bukoba newsletter, which Ann from the UK created and her students wrote. It indicates that student tuition is about US$1800 per year, though many students are sponsored by present or future employers.

I attended a three-hour staff meeting in which five lecturers and a member of administrative staff discussed the creation of a prospectus, the attempt to get the university officially accredited, and related plans and progress. The university has a lot of problems, especially funding, and might not continue if they cannot get things in order by the end of June or sooner. The two ex-pat teachers did not get along well with Professor Israel Katoke, my supervisor and the acting Vice-Chancellor of the university, a friendly and assertive man in his 60s with a lively sense of humour whose voice reminds me of my previous African supervisor, Mr. Andima, and whose face is like a mix between Laurent Kabila and Robert Mugabe. They told me they felt frustrated and badly treated, and complained that the university administration is bureaucratic, corrupt and incompetent, but I will try to withhold judgment and not take sides. Part of the bureaucracy stems from the fact that the university needs to jump through a lot of formalities and hoops in order to be accredited.

The student computer lab has about 13 computers, but most of them are old and have serious problems, and only five are functioning at all. I will try to revive a few of them over the next two weeks (the Easter holiday starts today) if I can find the installation floppy for the Zip drive and a screwdriver to open the cases. Orange dust coats the keyboards, mice and backs of the computers, especially those near the partly open windows, so it is not surprising that the computers are having problems. Some computers do not have virus protection software and are infected with the "Dodgy" and/or "Ravage b" virus. The computer equipment I brought is far advanced compared to what is here, and the students know relatively little, though there is a wider range of abilities and some are good in English and their own fields of study.

I have lots of feelings of d?j?-vu; so many of the teachers and students remind me of people I knew at Ponhofi, as do the school's conditions, the groceries and market, etc. But I feel like I have gone backward in time, because the conditions in Bukoba are somewhat less developed than Ohangwena, Namibia was when I arrived in 1995 despite the larger size of the town. I hope I will be able to help, though I will not be using many of the skills I obtained from my recent education and had originally hoped to use as a university lecturer; I don't expect to do much beyond very basic teaching and computer maintenance. Since I am the whole computer studies department, I cannot exchange content knowledge with a colleague. If I had known the conditions and potential level/nature of my contribution beforehand, I probably would not have come here and would have held out for a larger and more distinguished university in a larger city in southern Africa. Now that I'm here, I will do my best to stay at least until the end of June and complete this term with my students and see what happens. There appears to be plenty to do here, so if I can keep healthy, it should at least be enjoyable and a novel experience. If the university survives, gets more money and better facilities and equipment, and expands its staff and student body, and if I feel I am making a valuable contribution, I will probably stay the full two years.