Gerry and Bruce Melville pose with friends outside of the Canon Andrea Mwaka School, Tanzania. Photo contributed.
In July 2007 my wife, Gerry, and I boarded a plane and began our journey to the city of Dodoma in Tanzania, east Africa.
We spent the next year and a half teaching at Canon Andrea Mwaka School, which serves children from nursery level through Form 4 (Grade 11) and is operated by the Anglican Diocese of Central Tanganyika.
Our life in Africa is described on our blog. In this article, though, I’d like to focus on our return home.
Our work in Dodoma over, we came back to Canada on Christmas night 2008.
In the winter weeks that followed friends would say, “It must be quite an adjustment getting used to these temperatures after the heat of Africa.” Or they’d ask, “So, have you been able to warm up yet?”
While acclimatizing to winter, having just boarded a plane in Dar es Salaam in 38°C heat, was indeed an adjustment, it was small compared to acclimatizing to life in the “developed” world.
Have you heard the expression, “seeing something again for the first time”? That phrase once held little meaning for me.
But since returning from Tanzania, I have come to see many things again for the first time—for instance, Thrifty Foods, a large grocery retailer here on Vancouver Island.
My first post-Tanzania trip to Thrifty Foods was unsettling. This once fairly ordinary store now seemed so unreal, with row upon row of over packaged products. I was struck by how processed the products were and how distant from their source they were.
By contrast, in the Dodoma market, other than rice sold out of large sacks and spices from Zanzibar that had been dried, ground, and bagged, all produce was straight off the plot or out of the ground—tomatoes, potatoes, beans, ginger, pumpkins, bananas, and so on. The chickens in the market were still alive.
The grocery store presented a staggering range of choices, with dozens of types of any one product, from salad dressing to chocolate chip cookies. Of course, we have been led to believe that choice is somehow indicative of progress and vast choice is necessary to maintain our lifestyle. From the point of view of consumption, life in Tanzania, where there is little or no choice, was charmingly simple and uncomplicated.
Not long after my Thrifty Foods experience, I was pleased to walk into the once-familiar McPherson Library at the University of Victoria. But the sheer magnitude, modernity, and affluence of the facility set me back, and I had to step outside for a moment to collect myself.
In Dodoma, the capital city of a country of 40 million people, there are two small universities, both recently built—the University of Dodoma, a government institution, and St. John’s University of Tanzania, a project of the Anglican Church of Tanzania. The library of either institution easily could fit into half the space occupied by the coffee shop at the McPherson Library.
Quite possibly, having lived in Tanzania for a year and a half, my responses to visiting Thrifty Foods or stepping into the McPherson Library were predictable. But I would never have predicted I would come to see my Aboriginal brothers and sisters in a completely new light.
While Tanzanians live in a post-colonial situation, having established their own republic in the 40+ years since their independence, Aboriginal people in Canada have not had the same opportunities. They are still trying to find their place.
In Tanzania, even in this day and age, I could see how easy it is for well-educated Westerners to slip into the role of superior colonialist among the often less educated, and less confident, local people. And, while Tanzanians justifiably take great pride in their government, I also could see the local people, in response, slipping into a dependent role.
I wonder how often we Canadian non-Aboriginals find it easy to slip into the colonist role and whether Aboriginal people allow themselves to become dependent?
Perhaps it’s true that, to learn about one’s country, the best thing is to leave home, so that you can see it again for the first time when you return.
