Around the world in... 26 hours?

I arrived in Paris one week ago, via Doha and London. I don’t think that I feel any culture shock in the classic sense of the word, mostly because there is so much mixing between my experiences in the two cities that some aspects of Paris are more African than Dar. For example, on Friday I had dinner with Lucien and another of his friends from Cote d’Ivoire and discussed how President Sarkozy’s immigration policies affect West Africans, while some of my nights in Dar es Salaam were spent talking about the quality of the music at the last party with other young Brits and Americans.

There are, however, some truly striking differences between the two cities, and my direct voyage from one to the other has made me understand both much better. Most importantly, the quality of government here in Paris is absolutely breathtaking when compared with the government of Tanzania and Dar es Salaam. For example, two months ago the mayor of Paris launched a new program to cut down pollution and traffic by providing public bicycles. There are little stands all over the city where people can use their credit card to rent a bicycle and then drop it off at another stand somewhere else in the city. If you use the bike for less than 30 minutes, you don’t pay anything at all. People use the bikes all the time, but the city keeps each stand stocked so you can count on using the bikes. It’s a brilliant solution to the problems of transportation costs, air pollution, and traffic that Parisians face.

My direct voyage from Dar es Salaam to Paris has highlighted important similarities and contrasts.

In Dar es Salaam, on the other hand, the government cannot even repair the roads. When I arrived in Dar, there was a huge pothole in the middle of the major road in front of my house. Midway through my time living there, the city filled it with dirt, but they left a mountain of dirt next to the old pothole. By the time I left, the dirt had started to grow a little forest of weeds, and cars still had to circumvent this huge barrier in the middle of the road.

In Paris, the metros are absolutely spotless and there is a metro stop every 200 meters. In fact, some of the metro stops are actually quite beautiful, with mosaics on the walls or ornate entries. There are big maps posted all over the city and handed out for free at the entrances. On top of the metro, there are buses to use in Paris, trains that will take you across the country or continent, and airlines that will transport you throughout Europe for little more than the cost of the taxes.

Maps do not exist in Dar. The only public transportation is the daladala bus, and navigation is a lengthy process of trial and error for a new-comer. The bus itself is a Japanese minivan that looks like it has been pieced together in a junkyard and stuffed with thirty passengers. During rush hour, you have run for the daladala when you see it coming and push your way in before the wheels stop rolling, or put your head down and burrow your way into a chink in a wall of bodies. The reason the buses are so packed is that the government has put a ceiling on ticket prices, but then continues to increase the taxes on petrol, which puts increasingly more daladalas out of business every month. They are operated by private enterprises, so when they break down and their profit margin is so thin, it just doesn’t make financial sense for their owners to repair them.

If you venture outside of Dar, you are taking your life into your own hands. Most Americans worry about malaria, war, and rape when they think about living in Tanzania, but in truth, the real threat to the safety of foreigners and Tanzanians alike is traffic accidents. Cars, especially the private buses that take people over long distances and trucks to transport goods, drive at maniacal speeds on unkempt roads, and the nearest hospital (which provides care far below Western standards anyways) is hundreds of miles away. A friend of mine regularly takes a bus upcountry to work with peanut farmers. Last week, the bus that left an hour after his collided head-on with another car and 28 people died. I am not trying to scare anyone, but this is only the most recent example of how dangerous long-distance transportation is in Tanzania.

Another major difference between the French and Tanzanians is the style of communication. Tanzanians will tell you that they are very chatty, especially the coastal people which are considered real Mswahili (the “m” refers to a group of people, while “ki,” like “Kiswahili” refers to a language). When you greet a Tanzanian, you spend a number of minutes asking about how he slept, how his family is, how his morning is, how his work is, etc. When I walked from my office to the printer at work, I would often pass groups of people standing outside just chatting (however, as rude as I’m sure it was to pass them by, as an American with a different kind of working style I could rarely make myself stop and pass the appropriate amount of time talking to them). More often than not, strangers will greet you in the streets of Dar es Salaam.

I won’t describe styles of communication in Paris because they are typically Western, and familiar to most of the people reading this blog. However, one difference between communication in Paris and the US is that most people are happy to talk about politics at the drop of a hat. While I often feel that I am being rude for getting into a more combative debate at the dinner table, for example, my host mom surprised me by bringing up US policy in Africa when I had only known her for a day or two. Politics, especially radical politics, are something to be discussed casually. A friend of mine here came down to breakfast with her host family to find a copy of the monthly journal for the “Association of Anarko-existentialists of Paris.”

However, I maintain that Parisians are friendly, despite the snobbish stereotypes, though not as friendly as Tanzanians. For example, last week a woman struck up a conversation with me in the metro about my knitting, and several people have commented on the sound that Lucien’s scooter makes (which is not surprising considering it sounds like death coughing up a hairball). Today, a flower salesman stopped me in the street by my house to give me a rose when I was walking home for lunch. I waved to him when I was walking home for dinner and he ran across the street with another rose. In fact, I don’t think I could imagine a more stereotypical Parisian story than that.