So much potential
The general education level in Tanzania is low. The last time I scrutinized education statistics here, only about 60 percent of the children completed primary education and less than half of those continued on to the secondary school. That means 70 percent of young people here are formally educated only up through primary school.
Many of these primary school dropouts, as we call them in TZ, attend vocational schools to acquire skills in carpentry or masonry, tailoring, plumbing, car maintenance, and other trades, to become employable. However, the quality of teaching in these schools is low. A running joke has it that masons so trained can’t produce a straight wall. Even so, it is amazing how some of these poorly educated and poorly trained young people show sparks of skill and innovative thinking far beyond expectations. This is a story of one such worker in carpentry.
When Anence had a house built in Moshitown at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro, she engaged a village carpenter which raised many eyebrows. Now she is tickled that the very same individuals, when they visit her home, are full of “Wow” at what they see of the woodwork by Sadiki, a humble village carpenter.
They rave over her kitchen. The upper cabinets have glass doors, the lower have pullout shelves for easy access. Vertical dividers allow cookie sheets and cutting boards to be stowed upright. A narrow cupboard next to the pantry has a pullout shelf with rods where table cloths can be hung to minimize creasing. Above it are pullout shelves for placemats and napkins.
“You brought those kitchen cabinets with you from America?” they ask her. “No. Not at all. They were all built right here by a village carpenter,” she tells them. Incredible! Her guests caress the smooth, silky finish of her cabinets as they admire the symmetry and simplicity of the design.
My friend, who lived in the U.S. all her life until she retired to her home village, likes to tell whoever would listen that her whole house was built entirely by people from her village. She is proud of that. She finds the work the local craftsmen can do is simply amazing if they are given proper guidance. “They become surprised too to discover what they are capable of producing,” she remarks.
Her closets are something out of a Good Housekeeping magazine. Shallow shelves, honeycombed with dividers, make organization easy. Drawers catch smaller items. Double rods for shirts and jackets double the space. But her closet doors top everything.
They are made of colorful African print fabric panels attached to wooden door frames which allow air to flow through while keeping dust at bay. They prevent mold and mildew from setting on clothes, shoes and bags during the three-month long rainy season, just as it was used in Korea during the long monsoon rains before air conditioning became the norm. These fabric panels are removable. They can be taken down from time to time to brush off the dust that builds up. Her house has plenty of dust because the road that passes by is not paved.
Mosquitoes annoyingly linger in and around closets. Here, where malaria is still prevalent, that’s a bother one wishes one didn’t have to live with. In Anence’s house, one doesn’t have to. Sadiki used cedar, a natural moth repellant. It turns out cedar also repels mosquitoes!
Despite his exceptional skill and hard work, Sadiki’s lot in life is only a fraction better than run of the mill carpenters who have minimal skills and who also only put in minimal effort. The saving grace for Sadiki is that his satisfied customers go back for more and his reputation spreads by word of mouth.
Poor carpentry work here is to be blamed not only on the poor training carpenters receive here and the poor equipment they must struggle with, but also on market failure.
Carpenters don’t know how to package their products and market them effectively. In developed countries too if it were not for department stores and furniture stores to stock and sell the products of the carpenters there, they too would face similar marketing problems.
Unfortunately, the department stores and furniture shops are in urban areas and they prefer to import their goods from China or other Asian countries rather than bother with helping the local carpenters. The few stores that carry locally produced furniture mostly cater to the expatriates. These specialize in “exotic” products such as furniture made of seasoned dhow (traditional sail boat) wood or wood ornately carved in the Zanzibari style, all sold at exorbitant prices.
Exceptional village carpenters like Sadiki are known only to consumers in their immediate environ. Since rural consumers are not particular about the quality of finish but are more concerned about costs, given their meager income, even Sadiki curbs his penchant for quality and churns out mediocre products in the shortest possible time. So should it be any surprise that the furniture we see around is very much of substandard quality?
It’s so tempting for outsiders to draw quick and fast conclusion that carpenters here are incompetent. But chance encounters with the likes of Sadiki is positively humbling. No doubt there are workers like him in all walks of life. That raises questions that are worth pondering.
What if we were in his disadvantaged position from birth, how far could we ourselves have reached? What if Sadiki had the benefits of the developed world behind him from birth, how far could he have soared? Humbling food for thought....