Impressions of Dar Es Salaam

Traditional and Modern Dress

Dar is a city of nearly 4,000,000 people. There are only a few roads through town and sometimes there was only 1 road you could take to get to your destination. When trying to drive to the rice market, we sat in absolute grid lock on the road for nearly 2 hours. In the course of 2 hours we traveled about 3 or 4 miles. There is such a lack of infrastructure in most of the city.

An advantage to sitting dead still in traffic is that you are approached by the “walking Walmart” of street vendors. We saw people selling toothpaste, gum, cell phone charges, water, shoes, shirts, peanuts, fruit, maps, newspapers, etc. It was quite entertaining to see what would be brought to your window next.

We went for walks from the hotel on two nights before dinner. The sidewalks are covered with street vendors selling all varieties of things. Used clothing is a big item. Most of this seems to come from the US based on style and tee shirt messages. Also, there were several “book stores” spread out on blankets on the sidewalks. The books tended to be in the English language. There was a nice selection of Spanish Bibles at one location. I’m not sure how much demand there is in TZ for Spanish Bibles. One of my favorites was a 1960 vintage book explaining to pastors’ wives how they could be a pastor’s wife and still have a fulfilling life.  I’m not sure of the demand for that title in TZ, but someone was trying to sell it.

I’ve been told that much of the used clothing sold in TZ comes from US groups like the Salvation Army and Goodwill. What doesn’t sell in their US stores is sold in bulk to a wholesaler in India. This guy has a network of agents in the countries that rim the Indian Ocean. These agents distribute to the street vendors who try to sell whatever merchandise they get. I wonder if the books sold on the street are the leftovers from what Books for Africa can’t use in school programs.

Dar Es Salaam, and maybe all of TZ, seems to function on human power. This is good in that it provides more employment for more people, even if wages are low. We are so accustomed to seeing big machines moving dirt to get a sewer in place that watching humans with shovels doing the work seems strange and not productive. One of my favorite memories of Dar was watching a furniture delivery man. He had a full size sofa balanced on a bicycle and was pushing it down a busy street to make his delivery. The bicycle and the 2-wheel hand cart provide the vast majority of local deliveries in Dar.