What’s a Western Girl to Think?

I had pretty bad culture shock as we drove back from Ngorogoro Crater (just next to the Serengetti) to Arusha at the end of our safari. I know a lot of it was just normal transition from national park/wilderness setting to the city. This happens to me in the States, too. Dirt road becomes paved (there’s a whole discourse that could go here about why the World Bank chose to pave the road to the Serengetti national park rather than between large cities in Tanzania … but I don’t know enough about politics to go there). There are more people and more noise.

And then I have so many thoughts about how little I really know about the people I’m driving past. That happens at home, too, sometimes as close to my house as Broadway … and that’s just 2 blocks! But at home, most of those people and I take a lot of the same things for granted: clean running water, electricity, walls that mostly keep out the cold. And many Tanzanians who live in cities have walls that would keep out most of the cold, probably spotty electricity, and maybe running water … but don’t drink it. Even in Arusha – which is a big city – I saw residents doing laundry and bathing in the river (a naked black man bathing in the middle of a city stream is quite the unexpected site!). Most people in the country, though, live in houses with thin walls, with no running water and no electricity.

I don’t mean to say these things because I pity the people. Tanzanians are obviously proud people. They dress gorgeously, in amazing beautiful, bright colors (the clothes are always clean), are fun to talk to, and work REALLY hard. And the ones we met were really pleased to show us what little bit of their country they could (even if it was the server talking about where they came from and their job). But their lives are so different from mine.

All this musing made me realize that I don’t even have a framework to process most of what I’d seen there. I had this thought in Thailand, too … the way I think about things, what I expect is so rooted in my experiences in America and the mostly western countries I’ve visited and in my education (also western). I’m not sure what it would take to really understand Tanzania, other parts of Africa, or even Thailand … other than lots of time and patience and probably living in the country, too.