Day 3, Dar es Salaam
One of the delightful aspects of staying at the hotel is meeting people at breakfast. Everyone staying at the hotel is a foreigner engaged in some way with health care. Another ‘longer term’ hotel resident, Maria, is from Denmark and is doing work with type 2 diabetes and nutrition. Others are from the U.K. and Switzerland.
Last night Sher-Ping, Maria and I went out to dinner together to a ‘real’ Tanzanian restaurant. There was no menu, so we were very glad that Maria was along to engage the waiter in her fluent Kiswahili. We ordered grilled chicken, beef and fish (which sounded like pretty much the offering). Each comes with a sauce for dipping. Prior to eating they come around with hot water to wash your hands. There are no utensils, and in the middle of the plate is a large mound of ugali, the basic starch in East Africa. It is a white cornmeal mush like dense, sticky mashed potato. You pick out some ugali, squish it in your fingers to make a flatter ‘scoop’ and use that (and your thumb) to scoop up the ubiquitous beans, the vegetable (usually some mixture including spinach), while you pick apart the meat and dip it in the sauce (and also in a little mound of salt if you like). A challenging part of this process is that it is all right handed. Your left hand doesn’t exist at the table and using it is considered pretty disgusting. At the end of the meal, they come by with the pitcher and bowl of hot water to pour over your hands to clean them. Of course without a menu, you also need to clarify the prices as you order.
After the meal is the process of engaging a taxi driver to negotiate, as always, the rate to get home. Being mzungu, or white, you pretty much can count on the starting point to be at least 50% higher than the final rate. It helps to know the going rate within the city is about Tsh 5000, or about US$3.75. Gradually we are getting the sense of going rates for other items we must negotiate, like a bottle of water, or a Coke, or pretty much anything else. There are rates, and there are mzungu rates. At some point, however, you realize you really are negotiating about very small amounts of money, although there is also an expected part of the negotiation process and it is a bit like sport. It helps to have some command of Kiswahili, giving more impetus to get a better grasp of the language. English is the lingua franca at the university, but everyday life is conducted in Kiswahili, and few people outside of those in higher education speak English (and that is a tiny fraction of the population).
My grasp of Kiswahili will get better quickly...
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