So much unrealized potential...

By Young Hoy Kim Kimaro

A friend of mine had a house built in Moshi town at the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Visitors delight her with their wows. They rave over her kitchen. Did she bring the kitchen cabinets from America when she moved to Tanzania? Are you kidding? They are all built here by village fundis (craftsmen), she tells them proudly. “Incredible!” her visitors exclaim, as they caress the smooth, silky finish of her cabinets.

My friend likes to tell, to whosoever is willing to listen, that her whole house was in fact built by village fundis. You know, it is amazing what they can do, she says. If you know what you want and guide them, you will be surprised at what they can produce.

Sadik Sam, a village carpenter, did all the woodwork in her house, including the much admired kitchen cabinets. Inside one tall kitchen cupboard he made a pullout shelf of rods for hanging tablecloths. Above it, are pullout shelves for placemats and napkins.

His closets are no longer the run of the mill ones, i.e., shelves 80-90 cm deep that are as far apart, running the full closet length. Folded clothes piled up high topple over, and the ones placed at the back have to be dug up. My friend had him make them shallow, place the shelves 40 cm apart and partition them into cubbies. Now the same amount of space accommodates twice as many clothes and there is no toppling over, no digging from the back. Every single item is easily accessible, so the piles always remain neat. Few drawers take care of small items that are hard to organize.

He stretches the hanging space by using double rods for shorter garments like shirts, jackets, and blouses. And his rods are ever so smoothly sanded. No splinters. A village fundi, indeed!

His closet looks like one straight out of American home improvement magazines, though he has never seen one. He followed my friend’s instructions to the letter and there it is, an amazing outcome.

My friend took him a step further. Instead of all wood closet doors, she had him put large panels of African print cloths that allow the closets to breathe, enough to fend off the ever present mold and mildew in rainy seasons. Double lining of cloths provides the much needed protection against clouds of dust that blow over her house with each passing of a car on unpaved roads in her neighborhood. These panels can be removed to have the dust brushed off.

Designs of the cloths had to be lined up from one door to another. Tough going at first for Sadik but after he got the hang of it, much to my friend’s surprise, he became even more exacting than her.

Sadik confesses that this friend of mine was difficult to work with at first. She fussed over every detail, and she had an eagle’s eye that could detect a difference of as little as 2 millimeters. But he is glad he stuck it out because he learnt so much and made products that he had no idea he was capable of.

Many fundis here, like Sadik, have no more than primary education. Many of them want to get away with minimum effort which gives bad name for their kind. But my friend has spotted enough of the likes of Sadik who are eager to learn, to improve themselves, and get professional satisfaction from making a product that’s appreciated.

In her unabashedly opinionated view, the substandard products these fundis churn out are less a testimony to their innate inability than the failure of the education system here to give them quality training they need. She agonizes and wonders what other talents in other fields also go wasted.

An American librarian visiting Mwika was so enamored by the furniture Sadik made for the village community library. Oh, if only she could have such furniture at her school library in Washington, DC…! “Now, what does that say about our fundis?” My friend proudly throws a rhetorically question. May be the sky’s the limit for some of them, if only….

The writer resides on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro

in Tanzania. She worked for the World

Bank for nearly 30 years and her email is

youngkimaro@gmail.com.