Postcards

I bought three postcards and airmail stamps to get them to the U.S. The total came to about half the price of liter Gordon’s gin. But that wasn’t the worst of it. There is no home mail delivery in Dar es Salaam. Perhaps that’s because there are few addresses and many streets have no names. Just last week Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete decreed that all streets in Dar and surrounding areas had to have names and all buildings had to have numbers. Indeed, Kikwete himself said the street where his private residence is located does not have a name. Providing street names is the first step in the country’s postal code project to facilitate package and mail delivery. Currently the 4 million Dar residents who want to get mail have to have a postal box at one of just a few post offices in the city and suburbs. And the country as a whole, which has a population of 45 million, has just 173,000 postal boxes. Consequently, few people get mail or have packages delivered. In the email, cellular phone and texting age, home mail delivery may be a bit anachronistic. And in the GPS age maybe even addresses are a quaint relic when coordinates will get you even closer. But lack of street names also impedes commerce by hampering package delivery, whether by post or private courier, and can confuse and frustrate tourists. So Kikwete told the city and suburban mayors to get cracking and name all streets within the next two weeks. Let me just point out that Dar is not laid out on a grid. There can’t really be a First Avenue, a Second Avenue and so on. Naming of streets will take a lot of imagination, and reconciling duplicates will take much wrangling.

Today, when an organization such as the Johns Hopkins office in Dar wants to get a letter or package delivered to, say, Iringa, which is about 300 miles and 10 hours away, the manager has to have one of the office drivers take the parcel to a bus depot in Dar and give it to the company. The driver of the bus to Iringa then takes the parcel with him. On arrival in Iringa he will be met by another Hopkins office driver who has been alerted to await the arrival of the bus from Dar carrying a Hopkins delivery. This is what passes for UPS here.

Getting back to my postcards … Just to mail them I had to go to the post office. No letter boxes on the corners here. Perhaps if I had been staying at a tourist hotel there might have been a service. So I took the dala-dala to the downtown post office. The dala-dala is a bus. It cost me 300 shillings (about 20 cents) to get downtown. The bus stop is directly in front of the post office. But I had to ask three people where the letter drop was because the clerk at the window was there to sell stamps, not take mail. And the little-used letter drop was out of view around a corner. After strolling around downtown for a couple of hours (unaware of a U.S. Embassy warning in the wake of the killings in Libya), I went back to the bus depot to wait for a dala-dala back to my neighborhood. I waited. And waited. And I waited. Under the hot sun. So I bought a cool – not cold – Coke for 1,000 shillings (about 60 cents). Buses came and buses went, but there was no bus to my neighborhood. After an hour and half I gave up and caught a bajaj, a three-wheeled, small-engine vehicle that can seat two in the back with the driver up front. These are much cheaper than taxis and in crowded streets (which is practically all the time here) much faster because they weave in and out of lanes with hair-raising speed and closeness to oncoming traffic. Did I mention they are open-sided – no doors or seat belts? The bajaj got me back at a cost of 7,000 shillings (about $4.60). It turns out that because of my unfamiIiarity with Swahili I had the name of the bus I needed to take wrong. The name I had been looking for for so long would never have come.

And the bottom line on buying and mailing three postcards: about $12 or $14 and six hours of my time.