Lending Hands

There are a couple paved roads in Tanzania. Literally, just a couple. We don’t live on one. We live off of it. You take a dirt road (of which there are a WHOLE lot) down to a field, then take a left and go up a bit of a hill to get to our house. The hill is pretty steep and being at nearly 4000 ft elevation, it’s a hike to get to the top. And that’s when all that you’re doing is walking up it. There’s a whole lot of mom’s carrying kids, bikes with stuff, buckets, bags, and handcarts being carried, lugged, and pulled up that hill.

When I was coming down the hill the other day, three young men were struggling to pull a handcart up the hill. Handcarts here are either metal contraptions with old bicycle wheels or heavy wooden things with old flat car tires. They’re normally packed full of produce, carrying furniture, or piles of wood. This one was piled high with wood. I gave my backpack to one of the other volunteers and “put my shoulder to the wheel.” It was hard sweaty work, but well worth the shocked faces and laughs of our Tanzanian neighbors as they saw a Muzungu (Swahili for “gringo”) helping push a handcart up a hill.

When I arrived at the top I shook hands with the cartman, and feeling a little “job well done” pride wiped my hands and headed back down the hill. To my surprise both of the other youths joined me on my way down. I thought that I had been doing such a favor, lending a hand to help these three when in fact, I had actually joined a service project already in action. Just like me, they had seen a man in need and had taken time out of their day (and the effort to hike back up the hill) to help him out.

Since then I’ve seen Tanzanians who have never met help a handcart in need more than a couple times, and have taken the chance to join in again. It seems that there is a culture of shared labor which you don’t often see in the states. But even more important, that experience was a lesson to me about the service that I render here as well as elsewhere during my life. We tend to think that when we do something, it is our hand that is making the difference, getting a stalling cart moving up the hill. But in reality, it is the many hands involved that get the cart moving and keep it going. There are so many hands at work all over the world, it is about finding the right place to join them and help move that cart along. I didn’t get that cart to the top, we did.