Mama's life story

6/27/2013

This morning over breakfast, Mama told us her life story.  We knew bits and pieces, but this time she gave us the complete version.

She was born in the Kilimanjaro region, the ninth of ten children.  Her parents owned a farm there, which is where she spent her childhood.  But because the land in the Kilimanjaro region is becoming more and more cramped, after being divided into smaller and smaller plots with each generation, her parents eventually moved the farm to the Arusha region where they could find more land.  Rather than cutting up the land into ten plots for the ten children to inherit, the family decided to keep the land whole as one farm. Ruth’s father, the youngest son, now lives and works on the family farm.  Although he technically owns the land now, the profits from the farm are intended to benefit all ten children proportionally.

During her school years, Mama moved to Dar Es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania.  She lived with her older brother and attended better schools there.  Dar Es Salaam is a hot, crowded city and seems very utilitarian to me.  It consists of office buildings, schools, and universities, so its population is largely made up of businessmen and students.  It doesn’t seem like many families live in Dar.

Mama went to university and studied to be a secretary.  So she has a surprising amount of technical skills, i.e. she knows how to type, send emails, browse the Internet, etc.  Unfortunately, she was not able to sustain herself as a secretary.  She used to run a little business out of her house, but that is long gone, now replaced with her food shop and beans business.

At one point, Mama moved to Denmark and lived there for three years.  For this reason, she actually speaks four languages: Kiswahili, English, Danish, and Kichaga, a tribal language from the Kilimanjaro region.  She worked for a Danish family as a cook and housekeeper but had a miserable time there.  She would be left in the house all day, and this was especially terrible in the winters with so little sunlight, when she would spend her days cold, dark, and alone.  “Denmark in winter is no place for human beings,” she said.  She was very happy to return to Tanzania.

Perhaps even more surprising, Mama has also worked as a safari cook!  It was quite an adventure and she enjoyed cooking for the safari groups.  (I suspect this is why she knows so much about westerners, in particular, our eating habits.)  But it was a rough life.  The bush is very hard on women, and she was constantly on the move.  She would leave for two weeks, come back for a weekend, and then leave again.  She left her daughter Anna, very young at the time, to be taken care of by her parents.  Mama said the reason behind taking a job like that was that she had just been divorced.  She was very upset about the divorce and wanted to shirk all her responsibilities.  The safari job allowed her to escape—to run away.  However, Mama’s constant absences made Anna upset, so she eventually left the job and returned home.

Mama has lived in her house in Makumira for some time now.  More recently, she worked as a housekeeper for a family at the TCDC compound, where I’m taking Swahili classes.  She knows how to drive, which is a rare skill that enabled her to run errands and drive around the children of the family.  I’m not sure why she stopped working at TCDC, but she is still on good terms with the TCDC staff.  Her connection with TCDC is the reason why I’m living with her for my homestay!