Some Little Differences

Figure I’ll make a post about various of the small differences between here and the US. Mostly all of us noticed these during our initial training, but have since gotten utterly used to them, but I’ll see what I can recall.

Soda

Soda here primarily comes in 350 ml glass bottles that require bottle openers to open. You have to return the bottle to the shop where you bought it (some won’t even let you leave with the bottle; you have to drink it there), and the shop returns the bottle to the company that sold the soda (mostly Coca-Cola and Pepsi).

The soda tastes different here, presumably due to using real sugar instead of the corn syrup they apparently use in the US. Most people prefer the flavor of soda with sugar (though I suspect that’s partly just them fooling themselves because they prefer the _idea_ of real sugar), though I think I slightly prefer the corn-syruped soda, when it comes to cola anyway.

Basic varieties of soda available:
- Coke
- Pepsi
- Sprite
- Fanta
- Mirinda (basically the same as Fanta)
- Kriest (I think? I haven’t tried it and don’t know much about it)

Sugar

Here, you buy sugar by the kilo. The seller has a big container of sugar, scoops out about as much as you want, makes a cone out of newspaper, puts the sugar in the cone, and then closes it off and tapes it shut. The sugar is light brown.

Cooking Oil

Cooking oil is somewhat similar, in that they have a big container, you say how much you want, and they give you that amount. Measuring is a bit goofy – in my village, at least, they sell cooking oil by the soda-bottle-ful. A lot of places will also sell either 500 ml or 1500 ml water bottles full of cooking oil.

Rice

Rice is bought by the kilo, given either in newspaper cones or in plastic shopping bags. You can buy rice of various different “grades”, based on how thoroughly the rice has been cleaned/sorted. So, if you don’t want to spend much money and are okay with having lots of rocks in your rice, you get the low-grade stuff. If you prefer fewer rocks, you get the high-grade stuff.

People here use things called “ungo”s, which are basically rice sorters. They’re more or less large plates woven together out of basketmaking material. Part of the sorting process involves using the ungo to toss the rice in the same way as tossing a pancake. The purpose of sorting is to get rid of any rocks that are in the rice. Personally, I’m too lazy to do this, so I just get high-grade rice and am careful when eating to avoid crunching down too hard.

Laundry

The vast majority of people here (even rich people) do not have washing machines. Laundry is done either in buckets or basins, depending on personal preference I guess. I’ve been using buckets at home. The Tanzanian way involves filling one bucket with water and some detergent and a second bucket with just water, then putting your clothes in the soap bucket, scrubbing them a lot by hand, wringing the soapy water out, putting them in the water bucket to rinse them, wringing them out again, and putting them on a clothesline to dry.

Most of the Americans seem to be too lazy to do much scrubbing, myself included. It turns out that if you just soak your clothes for a few hours in the soapy water, without scrubbing them, it takes care of a lot of the dirt, and then you don’t have to scrub that much. So, that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing – soak them for a few hours, then scrub them a bit, then rinse them and dry them as described above.