A Strange Day...

22/12/09

Another early morning start was on the agenda because I was helping Audax with his last interviews. Or so I thought. Having smartened myself up for the job at hand I eagerly awaited breakfast to find that it wasn’t forthcoming. This broke the usual trend as normally Charles would bring something down to the rotunda for me. Alas, with a grumbling stomach and a stiff upper lip, I proceeded with the day.

We were meant to be interviewing a hospital administrator/manager, but this did not emerge. Our first stop was at the bank. Audax was in the worlds’ longest queue for the ATM. ATMs in Tanzania are in automatically locking booths. The queues for ATMs tend to be equivalent to the lines of a club...but a really good club that everyone wants to get into. Absurdly popular are these bank machines...it’s crazy. Incidentally the ATMs only take Visa cards; MasterCard and Maestro are unheard of in Tanzania. For a country needing as much foreign currency exchange as possible this seems a bit odd. I had US dollars to change for the local currency (Tanzanian shillings, TSH, or /) so I went into the main bank with Salum. The queue inside the bank was huge, approximately 30-40 people were already there, waiting to be served by 3 cashiers. Luckily Salum knew one of the cashiers and headed over to him and fast-tracked me...much to the displeasure of all the on looking faces. My general interpretation of the scene was one question: ‘why does this mzungu’ get to go first?’ For the US$150 that I exchanged I got somewhere in the region of 192,000/. I could easily be a millionaire here.

Having caused enough disruption in the bank we drove into town opposite the bus station. Here Audax got out and told me that he was going to get a bus home (his home village is roughly 2 hours from Bukoba). In my confused state I had to ask what about the hospital administrator. The response was along the lines of ‘Maybe another time?’

Salum and I proceeded to the market which was a fantastic experience. The place was filled with so much colour and so many smells that it was a complete sensory overload. The place was selling everything from huge fish caught that morning from the lake, to fresh tomatoes and bizarre looking herbs, onions, children’s clothing, and soft drinks. As soon as you approach one vendor, others, selling the same product swarm around you as they jostle to see who will make the sale. As a white man I got paid special attention. It’s like they could sense I had just got a huge handful of cash out from the bank.

Once we arrived back in the house I had some time to sit around wasting my day. Soon after that exciting activity I was told that I would be interviewing one of the managers of a tour company so that I can get an idea of exactly what tourism facilities exist within Bukoba and the larger Kagera region. William, my interviewee, was a really helpful and very genuine guy. Possibly in his mid-thirties, his kids were running around the office, excited to see someone new. One of the kids took out a camera and snapped a couple of photos of the interview that was taking place. I quite liked this idea because the kid couldn’t have been more than 5 years old and he was already a budding young photographer. The scope for tourism in Bukoba and Kagera is restrained by a variety of features. Firstly, central government fail to put enough emphasis on the tourism market in Bukoba. Secondly, constraints in infrastructure exist, and this is predominately relating to roads, but also communication failings can be difficult too. The statistics show that there is small, but steadily increasing trend, number of visitors to the region each year. For the past three years the growth rate has been roughly 100% on the previous year. This is a huge statistic, but realistically such growth cannot be sustained. It’s a shame really.

I am fairly sure that the majority of you will not be too keen to read about the evaluation of the current tourism trend in Bukoba, and I hope that soon I will have something more exciting to tell you about it. Alas for now I am running out of words to keep you entertained. Basically I had a very quiet evening in after the interview and I had a call from home which was always nice. Oh, actually one more issue of note. I met Professor Maliyamkono’s sister in law who happens to be a Roman Catholic nun. She said that she would bring me to mass in the seminary where they would be saying a mass in English on Christmas to make me feel more at home. Although I am a very out of practice Catholic I couldn’t get over the niceness of the gesture. I hope the parish don’t get annoyed that the mass structure has changed because of me! If I keep skipping queues and cause changes in the mass scheduling I feel like I won’t be welcome in Bukoba for much longer. Maybe I should learn Swahili?