Bridge too far
22nd February 2014
As you know, this blog narrates
the story of an attempt to help save the lives of mothers and babies in rural
Tanzania. The problem is that the more story there is to tell, the less chance
I seem to get to tell it. In the midst of responding to an expanding network of
inspiring, encouraging, and well-grounded support, sometimes getting round to narrating
the next blog at the end of a day’s g-mailing can turn out to be a bridge too
far.
(‘G-mailing’, by the way, for
future generations who read this blog after finding a copy of it saved on an electronic
papyrus clutched to my chest within my sarcophagus, along with money to pay the
boatman, and some cheese-and-pickle sandwiches to avoid the lunch queues on the
other side, was not, as you might have thought, the process of sending mail at
exactly the speed of sound. It was in fact a device used in the early twenty-first
century for enabling you to get through more correspondence on the slow train
to Euston via Milton Keynes, than either Milton or Keynes managed in their
lifetime.)
Anyway, today the g-mailing is
taking a back seat whilst I attempt a blogging bonanza, to help bridge the
communication gap between our wildly varying existences on this increasingly
small planet.
Talking of bridges, one of the (barely
credible) stories awaiting narrating is the collapse of the Berega Bridge, (Google Earth 6°11'20.21"S 37° 8'28.26"E), in a flash-flood on the
Mgugu River on January 21st. The rainfall in Berega itself was only
average for the time of year. Far upstream, however, a circle of mountains
gathered up the angry waters like Rawhide heading up a herd of feisty steers,
and unleashed them on the unsuspecting foothills below. The torrent swept away
eleven railway stations, two major bridges, and countless homes and crops. It
would have swept away more transport infrastructure, but Tanzania hasn’t got
any. The river bed is of course impassable for all but the bravest, and so more
than 100,000 sq km of territory is now cut off. To lose your food supply at the
same time as losing the potential to replace it is especially worrying for many
villagers.
Maybe, however, some unexpected
good will come from the turmoil. The President of Tanzania has already visited Berega’s
ex-bridge, and apparently a contract has now been signed with an international
engineering company to build a new one. Furthermore, the whole episode has
raised national awareness of the abysmal transport systems. As a result, President
Kikwete recently met England’s very own Nick Clegg, and asked for the UK to
donate some old locomotives to populate Tanzania’s railway. The Thin Controller
responded with a commitment of sorts, which of course is as good as money in
the bank. Or in this case, rolling stock on the tracks. And it is painfully
needed: Last year, due to dilapidation, Tanzanian rail only managed to
transport 2% of the anticipated shipments. Even had it managed the entire lot,
its meagre 4000 km of railway, (in a country with 5,185 km of borders and
coastline), would have left many of the loads woefully distant from their
destination. (“So you want some goods shipped from Paris to Prague? No problem.
Just drop them off at Marseilles, and we will take them all the way to Venice, whence
you can pick them up. Except if they happen to be part of the 98% of shipments for
which Venice was a bridge too far, in which case you can pick them up from
Marseilles. Alternatively, and this is only a suggestion, leave them in Paris,
and then at least you will know where they are.”)
It is not surprising, then, that
the majority of haulage in Tanzania is performed on the roads. There are about
a dozen inter-city roads in Tanzania – one main cross-roads every few hundred
kilometres. There are almost no dual carriageways. Duel carriageways,
on the other hand, are far too common: this happens when your eye was
momentarily diverted from the road by a Masai warrior on his mobile phone,
perhaps buying a lion-trap on eBay, and you suddenly realise that two trucks
are hurtling towards you, playing chicken. A chicken, ironically, (well a thin
one, anyway), would have survived the encounter, as plenty of Tanzanian
highways are sensibly of two-truck-and-a-fat-chicken width. But not
two-truck-and-your-chosen-means-of-conveyance. It is rare to do the Dar to
Morogoro run without seeing at least three cars in a ditch.
The other death-seeking road-occupant
is the ubiquitous minibus. More than half of Tanzania’s vehicles are some sort
of bus or coach. There are no timetables – the first one to come takes the
passengers, and the first one to get to the destination gets the prime pick-up
for the homeward run. It will not amaze you to learn, then, that despite having
fifty times fewer motor vehicles on the road per capita compared to the UK,
Tanzania has seven times the fatality rate. The moral is: only travel with a
seasoned Buddhist monk driver, in a strong car, with a whale song tape creating
a sense of bien-etre to keep you calm in a crisis – and look both ways before
crossing a bridge.
Of course the majority of river
crossings are too far from the main road to need to worry about trucks and
minibuses. The main form of transport on the dirt roads is the motorbike, and
in every village someone will be selling pints of fuel in old coke bottles
stacked up on a makeshift counter by the roadside, getting worryingly hot in
the sun. When motorbikes are the only transport bar ox cart, then if you came
out without your oxen, you have little option.
The motorbike is indeed the
principle way that a woman in need would access the hospital, but ironically
those most in need are those furthest from the hospital, who are usually the
poorest. An average fare from a village forty or fifty kilometres and three
rivers away might be 10,000 Tanzanian Shillings – £4. Not much to you or I, but
the price might double in a night-time emergency, and a little extra is added
for the sister or mother sitting second pillion. Her role is to oversee safe
arrival, to give blood and make food, and, for the unfortunate, to take home
the body. The final price of a single ride might be as much as £10 – a week’s
wages for most – and even then, in the rainy season, they have to hope that the
roads and rivers will be passable. For these reasons many women in the remoter
areas simply leave it too late, hoping that the bleeding will stop, or that the
baby will eventually come. When finally they realise that they will die without
help, they collect the fare from friends and relatives, say a poignant goodbye
to the children, and set off to cross the most important bridges of their life,
hoping that none of them will be too far.
The project EMBRACE will aim to
saves these lives, and is about to take its first steps – the mapping of the
roads to Tunguli and Mnafu and beyond. We need to know that we are going to the
right places, and we need to be able to measure what we are doing: are we indeed making things better? Are women-in-need really coming in to hospital and going home with healthy babies? When we know the names of the villages, we can begin to check routinely the hospital records, as to whether and how the women
from each community arrive. And so we begin with a driver, a camera and a GPS
machine. Every mile or two he stops: Who lives here? What are the names of the
villages? How many mothers of under-5s? Where do they deliver their babies? The
results are entered both on Google Earth and on living maps. It is surreal that 160 years after David Livingstone, we are treading laboriously in his footsteps to produce the first ever accurate map. When we
have finished the mapping, we might hope that EMBRACE will be ready to begin.
The project is now taking more
detailed shape, under the influence of many good minds, and if you want to see
what can be achieved by this type of approach in remote and isolated parts of
Africa, check out this heart-warming video:
If EMBRACE can achieve the same seismic shifts in attitude and culture, it will be the start of a new era of hope for many women. A pre-requisite, however, is the maintenance of high standards at Berega Hospital, where key new players are beginning to
make their presence tell in many important ways. You will remember I hope that
Ahmed Ali is the obstetrician currently at Berega, and that his wife Elizabeth
is a midwife tutor whom we hope will go out with Ahmed on the next stay. I will
say more next time of their contribution, and especially of Ahmed’s determined
and enlightened enhancement of standards in obstetrics. In this he is
now to be helped by Sion’s acceptance of the role of Deputy Chief Medical
Officer, with a remit for clinical standards.
Many others are helping shape the
vision – Ammalife, Mission Morogoro, BREAD, Hands4Africa, Diocese of Worcester,
KOFIA, and also new players just emerging. Many individuals, both those from
these organisations, as well as others not yet connected, are planning visits
to Berega in the year ahead. Exciting times. I hope that they will find the
river crossable by then, and the waters tamed. It is thought-provoking that the substance of
which Tanzanian health, economy, and agriculture is in most need, is the very one
whose excess destroys all three.
An interesting speculation arises
with regard to our own extra-ordinarily persistent and widespread water problems in the
South and West of England, and especially in the Somerset Levels, or ‘The
Bristol Channel’ as it is now known. (The West Country’s answer to Holland, but
without the dykes.) Is it any consolation to an erstwhile affluent Somerset
Leveller, I wonder, that someone else has got it worse? As she wades waist-deep
from her longue to her kitchen, clad in her pink Versace fisherman’s wellies to
make an ironic water-based infusion, is she sparing a thought for the
flood-swept river beds of rural Tanzania? As she unhitches her occasional-table
raft from the door lintel, to make the white-water dash to her dentist in Bath
to get her bridge replaced, well aware of the pirate menace that infests the
quieter sections of the A367, is she counting her blessings?
I guess that people do not really
appreciate what they have. What they truly do appreciate is the lack of sudden
change to what they have. (Or rather they would do, if it were not the case
that such appreciation is often retrospective.) Interestingly, this even seems
to apply when the sudden change is apparently for the good – winning the
lottery is necessarily more tumultuous than not doing so, and by no means guarantees a happier existence. (I have even thought
about setting up an alternative ‘Zen Lotto’, in which the top prize is free
entry to the following week’s Lotto.)
I guess that my most tumultuous
sudden change in recent years was my two months in the sausage-and-malbec-deprivation
chamber of Africa. A little before that, I had been happily scribbling away my retirement, vaguely aware of a niggling and nudging in my conscience that maybe I still had a caesar or two left in me. Then suddenly I am doing them. One moment I am living a heady life, pork-and-leeking at will, and washing down the day with Argentina's plummiest. A flash of Kismet's prestidigitation, and I am saving lives in a forgotten corner of a different century. It happened too quickly for me to object. Had I been rational, perhaps I might have been put off by the absurdity of the ambition: to build a bridge to women living in a mediaeval African culture in mud-hut villages 5000 miles away. I might have thought, and so might you, that this was too far-flung to reach, too far-reaching to meddle with, too far-fetched to countenance, and too far-ranging to bridge. Too far?
No.
No.
