Experiencing life in a Dar es Salaam slum

If you live in one of Dar es Salaam’s posh areas, you should find time and visit the slums, or just any unplanned areas and experience life on the other side of the city. Saying that life there can be miserable is an understatement.

I stopped complaining about how hard life is the moment I set foot in Uswahilini recently and prayed to God to forgive me for having ever complained about difficult life.

I had never experienced this kind of life until I visited Elizabeth John, 67, who lives in Mkunguni A street, in Kinondoni District’s Hananasifu ward in Dar es Salaam.

It would not have been easy tracing Elizabeth’s house had it not been for a local who volunteered to take me there given the fact that the houses are too close to each other and that there are so many corners.

Although the rainy season is not here yet, I had to negotiate my way through narrow muddy paths between makeshift houses to reach where Elizabeth lives.

Clad in kangas, Elizabeth was sitting beside the wall outside a neighbour’s house when we got there. In a calm voice, she invited us and signaled me to sit next to her. After we exchanged greetings, Elizabeth invited me to her house and led me to the sitting room, which looked unkept.

As if reading my thoughts, she asked me if I would be comfortable siting there and I assured her the place was okay for me. I soon noticed that she had difficulty breathing. She told me she hadn’t been feeling okay for the past two weeks. Her blood pressure was low and she did not have money to go to hospital or buy anything to raise her blood pressure. I gave her some money to buy a bottle of coke.

To be frank, I wasn’t comfortable in those surroundings but to make my host comfortable, I had to pretend I was. The mother of six does not live in a decent house. They live in filthy conditions, dirty stagnant water outside, bags full of rotten garbage outside her sitting room window... I just wondered how they survive in such conditions.

Five more tenants occupy the house where Elizabeth lives, each living in a single room with their families. The six-room house with unpainted dilapidate bricks has neither ceiling board nor electricity.

The single mother lives in two rooms with her three daughters and four grandchildren. One room serves as the sitting room, which is where her daughters sleep and the other is the bedroom which Elizabeth shares with her grandchildren.

Her sitting room contains a single 3 seater sofa with old uncovered cushions. There was a mat on top of the sofa, which serves as a bed at night. There was a charcoal stove near her bedroom, eight plastic buckets and three oil lamps on the floor and an unfinished mat that Eliza is currently weaving.

The other tenants occupy one room each. One family consists of a couple and their 15-year-old daughter who is in Form Two, the second family is a couple with teenagers, a boy and a girl, all living in a single room and the third is a family of four, a mother, father and their two small boys.

In the sixth room live a couple with two young daughters, one in Standard Two and another who is not in school yet. This makes a total of 23 people living in Elizabeth’s house.

All these people share a single pit latrine and a small door-less bathroom. Although the conditions seem normal to the tenants in this house, the stench emanating from the dirty stagnant water outside and from the pit latrine not far from the house and the three bags of rotten garbage outside made me struggle as I pretended everything was alright.

People in this neighbourhood share more or less misery with the dwellers in slums and other unplanned settlements in other parts of Dar es Salaam. It is common in such areas to find one house’s pit latrine built almost at the entrance of the other house. Lack of drainage systems makes the environment worse, with wastewater flowing down narrow paths between houses.

The filthy environment coupled with poor ventilation inside the houses makes the area indecent for human beings. In these areas, the environment is conducive for diseases like diarrhea, cholera, malaria, TB and the likes. Elizabeth feels that their lives are so threatened by their living environment.

For adults, says Elizabeth, at least they can take good care of themselves. It’s risky for children as their environs expose them to health hazards and bad manners that they learn from the conducts of adults they live with and those around them.

According to Eliza, the area is home to pick pockets, robbers, prostitution, bhang smokers, drunkards, local brew joints and all that. Sodomy and rape are the order of the day here and children are exposed to all these.

“Raising children in such environments is a headache. I have only two rooms for my big family. My husband abandoned us since 2001. He left me with our six children, three boys and three little girls,” she narrates.

Unfortunately, her first born died some years later, leaving her with two boys and three girls. “They are all grown up now. The boys left to start their own lives, one is a farmer in my village, Chalinze and the other is a handcart pusher. The girls live here with me. One of the girls has three children, two from the same father and the other one with a different father. I feel blessed to have these grandchildren,” Elizabeth says before adding that she is worried about their future given that they are raised by single parents.

Since Elizabeth and her daughters have to strive to put food on the table, time to look after the little ones is very minimal. Her daughters engage themselves in petty businesses, selling samosas and fried cassavas in the streets, while their mother collects empty plastic bottles which she sells at Mkwajuni kanisani area. All the little ones go to school except for the young one who is three years old.

“In this kind of life, it is difficult for the children to go to school (referring to her own children). My children finished primary education but I could not afford paying for their school fees in private secondary schools so they failed to proceed with secondary education,” said Elizabeth.

Elizabeth is worried that the same might happen to her grandchildren. “Being a single mother is the biggest challenge. One of my daughters didn’t even finish her primary education. She dropped out when she was in Standard Six after she became pregnant.”

Elizabeth says all her children had not interest in school for they used to dodge classes from time to time. She blames the environment in which they grew in which is why she is afraid the same might happen to her grandchildren. She wants them to get a decent education.

“Teen pregnancy is a big problem facing girls here. Lack of reproductive health education among teenage girls is to blame for the problem,” says Elizabeth, adding: “what most teenage girls from poor families have in mind is that men can give them money in exchange for sex, but they do not think of the consequences of their actions.”

Steven Mbaya,24, who also resides at Hananasifu, says bad parenting is the problem. He thinks the whole community has abandoned the responsibility of raising children so that they become good citizens in future.

“Living in slums is difficult and for the children, young boys and girls, they are vulnerable to all sorts of bad manners. Girls turn to prostitution to earn a living. This way they influence their peers too,” says the security guard.

“You would be lucky if your children, who spent their entire childhood in such areas would not engage in crime and alcoholism,” he adds.

Sometimes, Steven says, some irresponsible mothers hunt for men for their daughters in order to get some money to meet family needs.

According to Maria Mhaya, a mother of two, children are also exposed to bad manners as the houses in which they live also serve as local joints for selling illicit brew. She says the daughters in these families are the ones that serve the customers.

“This is the reality in this area. I think this is because most people here don’t have jobs to do especially the youth, which is why they end up being thieves and prostitutes.

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