"It is Just the Way It is"

It was field meeting day at a small Tanzanian village 45 minutes down a one-lane dirt path from the nearest paved main road. The staff of the NGO, myself included, was waiting in the village’s main “square” for the farmers’ arrival. The field team has been working hard all day to go door to door, getting people’s commitment to showing up for a 2pm meeting that explains in detail what programs the NGO has to offer to help farmers increase their agricultural yields for the next planting season.

So the staff sat there and waited…and waited. Slow trickles of farmers showed up, one here…a couple there.  Some said hi, some brought their kids. Some decided to have their late lunch, and some brought maize to de-cob by hand, an activity that all the other women in presence began to help out. 2:30pm passed, 3pm passed, 3:30pm passed. People were still just doing whatever they were doing on another regular day. The staff waited. And then all of a sudden, all of the one dozen farmers in attendance stood up in unison for prayer, and suddenly, the meeting just started.

The meeting itself was notable for the constant little games played and slogan shouted by the NGO staff to keep the attention of the attendees. A few asked questions during the hour-long session, but mostly the crowd kept quiet except to respond to the slogans, and passively listened to the lecture. Many people are not new to the programs on offer, but when the staff talked about changes, there was neither excitement nor complaint, neither joy nor sorrow. Passivity was the emotion of the day.

The meeting ended abruptly, the same way it began. The crowd dispersed fast, silently, and still emotionless.  I had the opportunity to speak one of the older female attendees who seems to live nearby. With the assistance of a local staff member with translations, I asked about any difficulties with farming today and any specific hopes for improvements that perhaps the NGO can consider. The responses were as timid as they were uneventful. She spoke of hand tools that make harvesting a laborious and time-consuming exercise but little else negative.

In exchange, she, dismayingly calm, answered “appropriate” to questions on the service and farm inputs the NGO is providing. There was what seems to be hesitation in giving further elaborations, so I did not dig deeper with pesky inquiries. On the way back to the office, I consulted the staff on the phenomenon of passiveness, to which the staff noted the culture of “beating around the bush” when talking in rural Tanzania. The staff expressed appreciation that the farmers showed up in enough number and their attentiveness to the meeting, with not much more to add.

If anything, that attitude of appreciation, both among the staff and the farmers, for what is already present is a theme that can be seen throughout interactions with villagers. For those new to the experience, there obviously are plenty of questionable factors: why is everyone more than an hour-and-a-half late to the meeting? Why is no one more actively inquiring about the details of the programs? And probably most significant of all, why isn’t anyone in this remote village actively asking for other ways this NGO can help them?

It can be speculated that the lack of such boils down to the idea of being satisfied with the status quo. People are already getting many good, new things from the NGO that helped to improve production and income over the past few years, so why push for more? Interestingly, the attitude is also exhibited among the same NGO’s foreign staff. They enjoy their camaraderie, created over sports and dinners, in their home base, a dusty but friendly, relaxing, and surprisingly convenient town. Aside from a few grumbles about the discomfort of public transport, all the descriptions of the life there are positive.

When reflecting on such attitudes, one can wonder about exactly if it has any correlation with economic development in general. People who are from some of the most developed places in the world are also often the most complaint-oriented. Whether it is Americans cussing out their outsourced customer service agents over the phone, or Singaporeans not forgetting to display their best “kiasu” nature to take advantage of every deal on offer, many people in these highly developed places exaggerate the most insignificant-looking inconveniences and let the whole world know of their resulting unhappiness.

It begs the question of whether improvements happen because people complain. When people are not going to be satisfied with anything that is below what they perceive to be the very best they can get, they push to get the very best. Their complaints might be the real force behind development. And it is a force sorely lacking in rural Tanzania. All the resident foreigners in rural Tanzania saying that they are there to help people improve their lives; but if locals are unwilling to be vocal about how they think their lives can improve in specific, realistic ways, then helping people is just an inefficient guessing game.