Immersing Oneself in the Busy, People-filled Market Town of Musoma, Tanzania

This is Part 3 of a 7 part series on my experiences in Tanzania while volunteering with a U.S. based NGO to build a library and community resource center in the village of Nyegina, near the shores of Lake Victoria. To read other parts of this series, please use the term “Tanzania” in this site’s search function.

A taxi brought us from Epheta to the lake shore in downtown Musoma where we watched the hustle and bustle of the day’s commerce and trade. The sights, sounds, and smells overwhelmed the senses. A man walking on the side of the road held a chicken by its legs, blood still dripping from the hole in its neck where the head used to be. A toddler laughed and smiled at him while tugging on a string, attached to a home-made toy truck consisting of a bent and torn cardboard box, two sticks serving as axles, and four plastic water bottle caps of varying sizes serving as wheels. Nearby, a lady, using her hands and knuckles, scooted across the dirt and the filth to get out of the way of on-coming traffic while her withered and contorted legs dangled underneath her dirty and torn paisley skirt.

Boats arrived at the dock overloaded with passengers. They disembarked in droves, carrying with them their belongings and trade supplies. Once off, they were immediately followed up by workmen pushing carts alongside the gunwales to load their cargo and gear for a return trip to God knows where. Hundreds of people on the shore were coming and going with no apparent order or organization. It was third world messiness at its best, with a rhyme and reason known only to the participants.

Fishermen were repairing their nets or fine tuning their boat motors in preparation of another night's fishing later that evening. They were doing what that could to make a living from a resource that according to published reports was quickly depleting.  Meanwhile, some of the townspeople, trying to eke out a living in a land with little to offer, bought from the fishermen their overnight catch of fish. Small, bait-sized sardines or smelt of some type was the main catch.

They placed their buckets, now teeming with fish, on their heads and carried them to a location further up from the shore line. Giant storks, standing over four feet tall, walked behind them trying to scavenge the few fish that would occasionally fall off from the bucket’s overflowing loads. The catch was spread out directly on the dirty, debris filled sand. After the fish dried out from the day’s natural heat and sunlight, they would be ready to be turned into fish meal and resold later that evening for what could only be a few meager schillings.

  

Back in my room at Epheta, I reflected on how we were being given plenty of free time to explore on our own these examples of the daily lives and work-a-day world of the Musoma and Nyegina people. In fact, taking advantage of this free time was encouraged by Dr. Kurt. This was further enforced by Father Leo, the head of the area's parish and who would be our local contact throughout our stay in Tanzania. They were not direct about it, but it became evident that they wanted us to see first-hand, and not through the filter of their points of view, the abject poverty that afflicts most of those who live in this part of Tanzania.

Perhaps one could say we were being voyeuristic tourists. But by now, our observations of the poverty and living conditions have grown into something more than what might have originally been a voyeuristic curiosity. To understand the need for education, we must first understand the depths of poverty that the lack of an education helps create. We were left to conclude this on our own while we took advantage of our free time. There was no direct or overt announcement from Dr. Kurt or Father Leo that this was part of the lesson plan. My appreciation for the importance of what we were doing here in Tanzania was growing and becoming firmly established.

By mid-day, we were back in town to experience more of Musoma. While walking along the now familiar route of dirt, dust, and poverty, I was confronted by an albino woman with blood red eyes. She grabbed my arm, pleading for money or for me to at least buy from her some peanuts from her tray that was lying in the dirt at her side. Construction workers at an adjacent build site wore hard hats, yet walked around in flimsy and paint-stained flip-flops. In a nearby stall, tall, slender men, dressed in the red, flowing robes indicative of the Massai tribe, were cutting strips out of old, used car tires and fashioning them into serviceable sandals for sale.  Nearby, a man repairing bikes and motorcycles, doing what he can to make a meager living, sat and worked in the speckled sun and shade created by a tattered and torn umbrella overhead, the type a suburbanite might have on their backyard deck. Above me, little kids yelled out "Mzungu" (white man) while pointing at me from their second floor perch in a three story unfinished building.

One of the volunteers commented that if you take away the mechanized equipment, the scenes and environments we have been immersed in daily could easily be one from 300 years ago. It reminded me of the quote used by Richard Grant in his book Crazy River where he described the conditions of the villages he visited in Tanzania as “medieval squalor.”

A video of the the daily lives of people in Musoma is at the following link: