TANZANIA LARGER BY FOUR TIMES
By Bob Van Leer

  (ARUSHA, TANZANIA, EAST AFRICA - Oct. 31, 1993) - Today we left Uganda for a short (1 hour, 15 minutes) flight from Entebbe to Arusha, Tanzania, crossing the equator again. Our flight had been scheduled to make a stop in Burundi, a small country to the west of Tanzania, but the country is in a state of anarchy and the stopover was canceled. Burundi is being torn apart by clashes between the Tutsi and Hutu tribes. The Tutsi are a minority but have traditionally lorded it over the Hutus. In the country's first free election this year a Hutu was elected president. In a coup attempt last week, the president and a number of senior government officials were killed. But the coup fell apart. The remainder of the government is still holed up in the French embassy and out in the countryside the tribes are slaughtering one another to settle old scores.

  Our flight on Air Tanzania was on a Boeing 737, the same kind of plane we left Medford on. The world flies on Boeing airplanes. We left Entebbe just after noon. With the end of daylight saving time in the U. S. we are now 11 hours ahead of time at home. When it is 9 p.m. in Gold Beach it is 8 a.m. the next day here. Entebbe is not a real busy airport. The departure board listed five flights today. Arusha is a few miles from Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa at 19,340 feet. Arusha is south of Mt. Meru which, at 14,979 feet high, would be the dominating peak if it weren't so close to Kilimanjaro. The airport is named after Kilimanjaro and is in a dry, scrubby plain. But as we drove west closer to Arusha the countryside became greener.

  Our hotel, the Novotel Mt. Meru, has a swimming pool and a number of our party headed for it. The water was at about 65 degrees and this was the first time we have been really cool since we arrived in Africa. We chatted with a young mother who was raised in the Pacific Northwest but has lived in Tanzania since 1984. She came here a teacher and met and married a man from Kenya whose family was from England. According to her, the country has improved a great deal in the last decade. It was in the traditional socialist mode but much, although not all, of this has been abandoned because it didn't work. Some of the legacy lives on such as problems with infrastructure. Effort was given to end products and infrastructure, such as roads and power lines, was neglected.

  The international agencies that would have helped before now are pulling back because of financial problems at home. She said the country has rolling brownouts because there simply is not enough electricity. Our hotel has a backup generator that energizes part of the hotel circuits during brownouts. Here, as in Uganda, there are candles on the bedside tables. When she first came to Tanzania she said at your hotel you were given a bar of soap, a light bulb and a roll of toilet paper and these were supposed to last you your stay. The rooms in our hotel are reasonably equipped except for lack of a TV set. Towels (two only) are not brought to the room until it is occupied. The young lady said there is no TV in Tanzania. Tanzania has a one-party stable government. But if the people could see how the rest of Africa lives, much less the rest of the world, there could be some opposition to the government.

  Tanzania is about four times the size of Uganda at 363,950 square miles which would be roughly four times the size of Oregon. The population (1992) was about 26 million. The annual growth rate is 3.5%. Life expectancy is 49 years for males and 54 years for females. It is primarily an agricultural country with 90% of the work force involved in agriculture. The former British trusteeship of Tanganyika gained independence in 1961. The offshore island nation of Zanzibar, with 1658 square miles, became independent in 1963. The two merged and blended the names to Tanzania in 1964. In religions, about a third of the population is Muslim, and it is well-organized and more influential than the numbers would suggest. Multiple marriages are permitted as in other Muslim countries. Our friend said she was married here and the form for the marriage certificate had a section with three check boxes asking if this marriage is monogamous, possibly polygamous, or polygamous. The reason for the "possibly" box is because even with Muslims, the first marriage is not polygamous but could become so if the groom takes a second wife. Tomorrow we will head west to Lake Manyara National Park to look for tree-climbing lions.