Engarre: A Story of Water, Caffeine, and the Tanzanian Bush
My romantic notions of life out in the wild came true to the very last dot in 2020. I ended up in the Tanzanian bush, in a mud hut with a thatched roof. The bush has a curious talent - it takes away your signal, but gives you your head back. The silence got to me so naturally that after two days I had completely forgotten I had ever dealt with morning traffic jams or whether my phone was charged. But romance in the bush has its limits, and they end exactly where the reality of water begins.
A Tin Mug Full of Reality
The real picture of life in the settlement reveals itself in the morning. Watching women and children set off with donkeys on a journey of several kilometres to the lake brings you back down to earth faster than any coffee ever could. It is the very same water they walk for hours to fetch, only to drink it later or cook with it. I sat there with a tin mug of some oddly coloured drink in my hand, mentally calculating whether I had enough activated charcoal in the first-aid kit and whether my stomach would survive this particular all-inclusive experience. While the locals go on living whole generations quite calmly with this water, I was quietly wondering whether I would ever manage to wash in it at all, clutching a bottle of sanitiser in my pocket just in case. But my host was standing there waiting for me with a smile, so I simply drank. In that moment, caffeine beat self-preservation.
When Life Forces You to Start an NGO
At first, it was small things: medicine for children, a few goats, maize to survive the drought, or school desks so pupils could finally stop sitting in the dust. Bit by bit, I realised that the local goats move about with a kind of calm we, in our city rush, can only envy. But once I could no longer keep putting out everything that was on fire in the settlement from my own pocket, the time came for official paperwork. So in February 2022, the civic association Engarre was founded in Slovakia - in Maasai, “Water” - and a year later we “did it all over again” directly in Tanzania. Slovak bureaucracy is a hard nut to crack, but the Tanzanian kind is a coconut - harder, bigger, and every now and then quite happy to drop on your head. For all the paperwork, the name still reminds me every single day why we went into this fight in the first place.
Look for the Signal on the Football Pitch
Today, Engarre is a bridge between Slovakia and Mbogoi. We try to repay Maasai hospitality in the form of school repairs and better education. Our communication does stall now and then - if you want enough signal for a video call, you have to run out to the village football pitch and wave your phone above your head with proper commitment. I felt like a deranged mzungu (white person), chasing invisible waves while the Maasai watched with smiles and took bets on whether I would catch the signal first, or whether some passing goat would beat me to it. Even so, I would not trade it. Mbogoi taught me that the best things in life are free. It is only rather sad that, in the bush, clean water is not yet one of them.
