Adam Hooper (the blog)

Kahama, in Western Tanzania, has about 100,000 residents and enough dust to cover the entire country.

It's the last town of note on the road west to Rwanda and the second-last on the way to Burundi. A new gold rush has attracted more businessmen (and businesswomen, and women of a certain business) than usual. Kahama has scores of guest houses, though it still awaits a tarmac road. This being election season, the government has started paving the highway; but while contractors did dump a kilometre's worth of gravel here three weeks ago, work seems to have stalled faster than an overstuffed dala-dala with a student driver.

School attendance is dismal, though the students I've seen are enthusiastic. This class, across from my guest house, is learning English outdoors.

Like all of Tanzania, Kahama is missing garbage collection. In the meantime, residents let garbage accumulate in public spaces like this one, the site of an abandoned construction project.

This attracts scavengers, before a fire is set to burn away the remains.

There is beauty beside the trash, though, as proud residents will tell you.

The richest people in town are the truckers and miners. The rest make their livings using motorcycles, bicycles, carts and feet.

Most men are thrilled to have their pictures taken, but most women flee the camera. This seamstress wouldn't show off her shy laugh, even after consenting to have her picture taken.

After a few more minutes of explaining what I was doing, her friends were slightly more willing.

Almost all men, such as this peanut vendor, were thrilled to be captured on camera. This man even offered me 200 shillings ($0.14 USD) for the honour.

Two years ago on this blog, I made a victim out of a friend.

Quoting myself:

One week later, the employers hired a replacement. They would never see their old house girl again.

...

She is beyond rescue. No well-meaning person can do anything about her situation. In the darkest parts of our hearts, for all our pride of our notions of feminism and gender equality and statistics, we know this. And in the darkest part of your heart, you already know all the stories and statistics and words I can muster.

Pendo, this is your eulogy: more respect than most women ever receive in Africa.

Actually, they saw her just last week. And so did I. A few weeks after I wrote my story about her being "abducted" by family, Pendo returned to Dar es Salaam and started sewing dresses for a living. Currently she's unemployed and job-hunting, but her smile is wider than ever.

How did I write a story so far from the truth? I've since learned enough about journalism to explain.

First, I didn't use any primary sources. I didn't talk with either Pendo or her brother: I just used hearsay and prejudice.

Second, I tried to predict the future. I'm no expert at divination, women's issues or even Tanzania: my predictions are worthless.

Third, I used derogatory terms. I wrote words like "beyond rescue" and "eulogy" and I injected venom in "Africa".

I wrote as if Pendo would never read my website. I behaved like a superior, somebody wiser than she about her own life story. In taking away Pendo's individuality, I was grossly unfair.

I apologize to those who read my "I Hate Men" story and felt they learned something from it.

But I didn't have enough time or Swahili skills to tell Pendo about the original story or this correction, either. So Pendo, I apologize ... twice.

Thursday night, twelve university students competed to become Tanzania's Miss Higher Learning.

Number 12 was absent: I suspect she lost her nerve. This was an important event, after all: these competitors, averaging 21 years of age, already placed in their respective universities' beauty pageants. The three winners of the Miss Higher Learning contest would move on to compete with winners from other pageants for the title of Miss Tanzania.

There were plenty of cameras.

There was a lot of smiling.

Each student wanted to best fulfil the judges' expectations.

The audience had expectations, too.

I admit, I didn't attend as a journalist. I was here in support of Rahma.

Rahma is 21 years old. She's studying business and when she finishes school she hopes to join the fashion industry.

Halfway through the pageant, six contestants were eliminated. The judges chose Rahma as one of the top five to move on and participate in the quiz and dance. These top five all received prizes, though only the top three would compete for Miss Tanzania. Rahma looked gorgeous in her dresses and bikini, her smile was spot-on, and she answered her surprise question about Tanzania's anti-malaria campaign confidently and completely.

Her competitors performed very well, and the most vocal audience members were cheering for Contestant Number Six.

In the end, Rahma placed fifth.

I was humbled by all the contestants' bravery. Not many people have the courage to be quantized, and these young women faced stresses most of us never will. I congratulate them wholeheartedly.

I'm (occasionally) helping a Tanzanian organization called Femina. Femina creates and distributes magazines about gender, sexuality and HIV.

My job is to help make sure those magazines get to their intended readers.

Femina's flagship publication, Fema, is Tanzania's most popular magazine, probably because it's donor-funded and free. Femina distributes hundreds of thousands of copies of Fema to schools across the country, and an independent study recently confirmed Femina's calculation that on average, 15 people read each copy.

But distribution isn't as simple as a phone call to Canada Post.

For one thing, the timeline is different. Femina's distribution contractor promises that most magazines will get from the warehouse to the schools within 60 days.

Even the address list is a challenge: it's hard to figure out what schools are actually out there and where they are. There are no postal codes in Tanzania, and there are few official street names and even fewer numbers. For many schools, Femina only knows a misspelled school name and perhaps its district. Femina sends out a box with the school's name on it and hopes for the best.

In that district, receiving the box from its weeks-long trip over whichever roads have survived the rainy season, somebody from the distribution company has to exchange it for a confirmation stamp.

If the school exists, he may know where it is or he can ask around for it. But maybe his path is blocked by a flooded road. Maybe nobody has heard of the school. Maybe the headmaster is hundreds of kilometres away at a wedding or funeral and will only be back next week. Maybe the school has permanently closed. Then maybe the headmaster from some other school Femina never heard of intercepts our intrepid delivery person, confirmation stamp in hand, says his school isn't receiving copies, and asks if everything wouldn't be easier if he put that box down right over here instead of getting all wet and dirty and oh, hey, is that your delivery slip? Let me stamp that for you. And you can keep a nice, glossy copy for yourself.

Donors are skeptical when their recipients don't know what their money is doing, so Femina needs to know where its copies are going.

With my computer skills, I find ways to tell the computer what happened (not many existing programs include a "school closed all month because of bat monster" checkbox). Femina then uses the program I wrote to tell donors how well it's doing and tell the delivery company how to improve.

Femina sends far fewer magazines to nonexistent schools now than it did when I first arrived, three years ago.

The community team even gathered actual addresses for many schools, using a questionnaire. This could be the most complete and accurate database of schools and non-profit organizations in the country. Few organizations apart from Femina know, for instance, that the address of Buchambi Secondary School, in the Maswa district of Shinyanga, is "Maswa".

After all, there are still no postal codes in Tanzania, and there are few official street names and numbers.

I thought I'd need to haggle to get 67,000 Tanzanian shillings with my $50 USD bill when I arrived in Dar es Salaam, but the clerk gave me 74,000.

The Tanzanian shilling is suffering. When I flew in to Dar es Salaam this April a dollar was worth about 1,350 shillings; now, it's 1,490. In other words, the shilling has dropped 10 per cent in three months.

Why? Politics, according to analysts.

Every July, Tanzania's government begins a new budget. This year's budget costs 11.6 trillion shillings, up from last year's 9.5.

What's different about this year to justify 22 per cent more spending? Well, there were bumper crops and the mining sector is booming. But analysts say politicians are exaggerating these gains in advance of this October's election. They argue donor countries aren't giving more and tax collectors are collecting less than planned. According to Twaweza (a new non-governmental organization from the founder of government-watchdog HakiElimu), Tanzania's inflation, already the highest in East Africa, is higher than authorities are reporting.

The flagging shilling makes it clear: the international market thinks Tanzania will print lots of money.

Local prices haven't changed much, but they will soon. First, fuel prices will rise. And as one friend explained to me, "once the price of fuel rises, every other price rises too."

As a traveller I'm visiting at the perfect time: until local prices rise, my dollars are worth more than they should be. Oranges now cost 7 cents. And this is my first time in East Africa when I've been able to buy a pint of milk and a big box of Kellogg's Crunchy Nut for under $10.

I can now afford cereal here. So if you'll excuse me, I'm going to enjoy the sweet and creamy taste of not being a Tanzanian during an election year.

Kahama is a lost trade town: dustier and smaller than its lake-endowed northern neighbour Mwanza, its only assets are buried gold, a few hundred thousand residents and a dirt road that guides trucks from the rest of Tanzania to Rwanda. Google Maps shows it as a low-resolution swerve in the road. On the ground, it seems like every second building is a guest house.

Maybe I should have seen where this conversation was going, as I filled in my midrange hotel's registry:

"Company?" asked the landlady.

"No, I'm a student, I don't have a company," I replied.

"Company?" she asked again, watching my pen.

"Where do I write my company?" I queried, intending to jot down my school name.

Her patience was leaving. "You want company?"

"Ohhhhhhhhhhh. No, thank you."

Those aren't boats: they're buses. This is a picture of Dar es Salaam's main public transit canal, Posta.

It's the rainy season.

If you've lived in Canada all your life, you might never have seen rain like this.

Canada's rain meanders from above without much concern for the people around it, like a mildly inconsiderate house guest. It may overstay its welcome by a few days, but we rarely flinch when it returns to our doorstep. It's family.

In Dar es Salaam, rain falls with purpose. It's impatient: to save time, entire clouds drop whole from the skies like ripped water balloons. Then, after its grand entrance, the rain will rearrange the furniture and stay a while. This week, for instance, started with a bang of thunder Tuesday morning that sent the sun away for three days and counting.

Its first activity is to rip the roads. Potholes quickly embrace all lanes, forming knee-deep lakes that cannot be circumnavigated. Drivers cautiously descend into these countless, unreadable pits, with a wince each time and a prayer the engine will escape saturation. Some roads turn impassable, swept away by semiannual rivers that have never known culverts.

People scatter. Nobody abandons cover during a downpour (except for one muscular man near my office, stomping down the street with enormous rubber boots and a deity-defying grin). The rain prolongs or postpones lunch breaks, delays meetings, and herds umbrella vendors to the nearest parapets.

This is merely the city. In other parts of the country, water absorbs whole houses and strands entire villages.

On the bright side, it's good for the crops. Most Tanzanians depend on agriculture for survival, so the only thing worse than daily torrential downpours at this time of year would be a lack thereof.

When people talk about a developing country, they usually lump every part of that country together. But that's misleading.

I found a neat way to display indicators on a map of Tanzania. I tested it out with Tanzania census data and the result was so neat I figured I should publish it.

If you are not using Internet Explorer (8 or lower), check out a map showing some of Tanzania's development indicators.

As you can see, the level of development varies enormously depending on where in the country you are.

In Dar es Salaam, "mbongo" is the way to be.

An "mbongo" is a cool person, and using the slang term is the first step to becoming one.

The next step is to speak the lingo, often stealing from English. For instance, instead of saying you're "mzuri", you might say you're "fit". This kind of high-school level English sets you apart from your rural countrymen and marks you as a legitimate resident of Dar es Salaam.

I suppose English is one sign that you're worldly.

So I wonder: is the exclusively white-person sign in the above picture aiming for mbongo appeal?

At any given moment near that advertisement for thousand-dollar equipment, dozens of Tanzanians wait for sweaty, 25-cent seats in the public transit system. They may be mbongo, but I wouldn't think they're the type to spend on fancy electronics.

But when I finally took that picture, I noticed something in it that could change my perspective.

Few facets of life in Dar es Salaam are as reliable as the queue.

It begins near sunrise. The dala-dala pulls over, the conductors yells, "I'm going to Posta, climb in, hurry!" and each collected passenger obliges, squeezing into the territory inside until the few gaps between standing people carry drops of sweat to their feet. Hearing a hurried rat-a-tat on the door frame, the driver yanks the gearshaft into place, swings his steering wheel (sustained by electrical tape) clockwise, lurches back into the fray and promptly stops.

Everybody waits.

Overcoming my entrancement at the rivulets of perspiration breaking ground from my hand at the ceiling bar, down my forearm, through hairs and eons and off the precipice of an elbow below, I dropped out two kilometres early one morning and walked. Indeed, the sidewalk is the fast lane.

At the head of the queue is the traffic: a nonplussed policeman waving directions. His raised right hand tells one lane to stop while the metronomic waving of his left initiates and sustains the flow of one of the four crowds of cars that face him. For ten minutes he'll maintain this motion, perhaps pacing, never acknowledging a driver; then he'll switch hands and rotate to signal the next incoming lane to pass.

Like a toilet flush, that queue's movement past the traffic begins slow and ends with satisfying speed. Wheels roll and all is forgiven. Soon, as with a failed flush, the glee turns to despair at another intersection, where the process begins anew. The only difference is that more passengers have hurried into the dala-dala.

The downtown core is forsaken by traffics. Only lights endure the embarrassment. At a red light, everybody stops, edging into any crevice in the queue. At a green light, the story is the same. To make myself visible to a friend, I weaved into the middle of one such intersection and waved my arms. It's perfectly safe: the clutter of vehicles has no moving parts.

According to every resident I've asked, compared to two years ago "it is even worse," and I hasten to agree. It's simple: there are more cars now than ever before.

The queue can last until 10 p.m. and there are no shortcuts. When faced with a ten-minute distance, passengers can merely guess: will this take one hour, or three?