It appears living in a different culture is going to be more difficult than I was allowing myself to realize. Here’s the situation:

We have quite a few of our things (mainly baby items gifted to us while in the States) on a couple of pallets that were shipped air freight to Dar es Salaam. The shipment arrived in Dar on May 3. It finally cleared customs this past Monday afternoon.

Enter Faith Logistics (FL) into the picture.

It is a Tanzanian company which SIL uses for most, if not all, large shipments to/from Tanzania. They handle the whole clearing process for us and deliver the items to SIL’s desired location. The desired location for our stuff is of course Mbeya so I hired them to haul it 14 hours inland for us. I also had them pick up the remaining items of ours at the SIL - Dar office, leftovers from our first trip over last year. They were supposed to pick it up there late Monday afternoon. My contact in the office text messaged me saying they picked it up and left with it, but not until Tuesday at 10am. I was told by Anania, manager at FL, the truck would leave immediately for Mbeya following the pickup at the office. After numerous exchanges with him throughout the evening, the communication ended that day with this: Gari imeondoka jioni leo na inategemewa kufika Mbeya kesho kuanzia asubuhi. Meaning… The car has left this evening and is expected to arrive in Mbeya tomorrow to begin [unloading] in the morning.

Okay. I can handle that. Sounds definite, right? eh-eh.

I take the day off to welcome the arrival of the truck only to go well into the afternoon without hearing a word. “Where are your guys, Anania?” is a message I sent to him. He called me back an hour or so later to apologize but he found out his driver decided not to leave yesterday evening due to ’security’ reasons. He instead left this morning and should be arriving in Mbeya at any moment now. “Okay. What is the driver’s name and phone number?” The call conveniently disconnected at that moment. I’m a hard person to upset but this was working me over I tell ya.

My good friend Tunku (co-owner of the Swahili school we attended) got in touch with me at perfect timing. Come to find out, he knows Anania and knows him well. Doesn’t trust him and deems hims a liar, but knows him and calls him for me. An hour later, Anania sends me the driver’s name and phone number. Tunku calls him to find out… get this… that the driver is in Mikumi. Where’s Mikumi you wonder? It is 7-8 hours away from Mbeya. I am livid at that point and send Anania some pretty demanding e-mails requiring him to tell me where the driver is, where he will stop and when, and when he is going to leave that point in the morning.

Finally, this morning our branch operations director called me to help out. He gave me some great insight on Tanzania and how things operate here. The best thing for me to do is hang loose and wait for the truck to get here when it gets here. 11am Thursday morning now and the best thing for me to do is to hang loose because this is the norm here.  That’s a big ol’ test, I tell ya.

A consistently updated status between driver and Dar isn’t normal or expected, unlike my western expectations. All along, what I’ve been told is what Anania believes I want to hear. So, if the truck has yet to leave Dar but he knows I really want it to have left already, he will tell me it has because in a relationship-based culture, he could not be the one to bring disappointment upon me that it indeed hasn’t. If the truck breaks down in Iringa (4 hours away) and a repair part can’t be obtained for 5 days, I’ll still hear that it is almost here or should be here at any moment. Basically the driver has one expectation on him… get the stuff to its destination. Every detail in between is irrelevant including time, status, etc. He ultimately just has to get it here at some point in the future. This means the only expectation I can have is that it gets here when it gets here. Anything else would be unfair to Anania.

You can see how frustrating this can be to someone who is used to things like UPS where you can go online and at any given point find out when and where your package was last handled. This has now become my biggest challenge in Tanzania since I first arrived last year. Learning Swahili was even easier.