A Simple Phone Call

The inner workings of the bursar’s daily toil at SMMUCo are not only visible, they are cumbersome and have monstrous proportions. One wooden table in a corner holds about fifteen ledger books. When the bursar, Tumaini, opens a ledger book, it spreads across the desk like a fold-out cot. Next to the table with the ledger books, a bookshelf looms large from floor to ceiling. It’s sole purpose is to support three-ring binders that have bank receipts and other necessary things snapped and bound into them.

The monstrous proportions mean monstrous tedium. For the last quarterly report, Tumaini and her assistant worked day and night in high gear for a full week, poring over books with tiny squares and tiny numbers. So when a computer software program arrived last week, Tumaini was overjoyed and immediately called the Information Technology man, Baraka, to the office to install it.

Then began a series of hurdles, small and large. First Baraka wasn’t answering his phone. This was small. When Tumaini wants something, Baraka drops whatever he’s doing because he and Tumaini belong to the Muhehe tribe in the Iringa Region, far away from the Chagga tribe here in Masoka. Soon Tumaini was leading Baraka away from his desk to her office.

As Baraka navigated through screen after screen to install the program, Tumaini was bubbling over with possibilities, some in English. A major report due in November that otherwise takes three months to prepare would now be a manageable task. Tumaini would no longer have to deal with accountants who complain her reports are so late. In the middle of Tumaini’s litany of possibilities, Baraka reached the step to register the program. It instructed the software owner to call a toll-free number in the U.S. For those of us outside the U.S., we could call a not-free number. Baraka, Tumaini, and I madly searched the screen for an email option but found none.

The problem with a not-free telephone number was not the financial part. Land lines in Tanzania have not been effectively established, and most of the country operates by cell phone. I explained to Tumaini and Baraka the problem with cell phones and international calls—you can lose the call at any instant with a rude beep, and often one or both voices break up. I also did not know how long this call would take, and once an international call has ended abruptly, one never knows if a second call is possible.

Tumaini’s euphoria wasn’t even slightly diluted. She was convinced that once she had the software, life would work out. Tumaini’s cell phone ring is a recorded voice of an inspirational singer calling out to the cheers of an audience, “God is good, all the time!” Jeanne, dreading hurdles all along, might as well have Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh as her cell phone ring.

We came up with the idea to email someone in the States to make this call. I volunteered my mother. But on campus that day, internet was not working. Still riding a wave of euphoria, Tumaini decided we would drive twenty minutes into town and use an internet café to email Mom. At the internet café, email was slower than usual. After fifteen minutes of not getting email, I asked Tumaini about using a phone with a landline in town. It would cost money but it would be simpler and hopefully faster. Tumaini was ready for the faster part.

Off we went to the post office where a man in a booth just outside the office operates the phone and sells stamps. An adjacent booth sat empty except for a telephone secured to a wooden box on a ledge. Tumaini paid for ten minutes and made sure we could add more when our time ran to seven minutes. Between the two booths, Tumaini stood ready to signal to pick up the phone. At this moment, she chose to teach me the Swahili words for “pick up” (“nyanyua”) and “put down” (“weka”). I dutifully repeated both, but I knew I’d never hang on to these words, mostly because I was thinking of all the things that could go wrong with this call: 1) I would spend the entire ten minutes on hold, 2) I wouldn’t be able to hear over the people passing by and greeting each other, 3) the line would be cut off in the middle of getting the secret authorization code and I’d never get the connection again.

At Tumaini’s signal of “nyanyua,” I picked up the phone and recognized an automated voice system. The first automated request was to press one for such-and-such, two for such-and-such, three to register your software. “Press three!” I yelled to Tumaini. “Tatu!” Tumaini yelled, and then a beep sounded in my ear. Next the automated system requested that I press my telephone number on the key pad now. Since my telephone had no keypad and I knew we didn’t have time to tell Phone Booth Man to press all of the numbers, I waited. Luckily the system gave us the option to speak to a customer service representative. “Press zero!” I yelled. “Sifuri!” yelled Tumaini.

Within a minute, a human began speaking, and just as I feared, I had trouble hearing. Both the customer service rep. and I repeated everything five times: What is your name? What is the business? Who is the contact person? How do you spell her name? (My mother would not have been able to answer any of these questions.) We’d managed to get through six questions five times each when the line was disconnected. I hollered to Tumaini who hollered to Phone Booth Man, and in half a minute, the connection returned and I was amazed to find the same customer service rep. still on the line. We got through two more questions when the line was disconnected again.

With the next call, I spoke to a different representative who saw on his computer screen that we’d gotten through the first six questions of the registration. About three more questions down the line, the service rep. asked where Tanzania was, followed by, what was Africa like? Was it all jungle? Did they have wild animals? In my mind, I was certain that the only thing connecting me and that service rep. were ten tiny threads of electric fibers, worn to shreds from millions of international calls. I was dangling by my little finger, desperate for the secret code that potentially could wipe away monstrous tedium for the bursar, and he wanted to know if Africa had only jungles. Not soon enough, the representative told me it would take two minutes to get the secret authorization code, please hold. The line was disconnected.

I wasn’t screaming, but I was pulling my hair out. With calm that passes all understanding, Tumaini said, “Jeanne, please come out here and sit on the bench for a while. Please.” Phone Booth Man needed to leave his station to get more change, and Tumaini clearly saw I needed to stop the anxiety attack that had rushed to a feverish pitch during the first and second calls. Now, sitting beside me, Tumaini read the newspaper, and I looked at words I didn’t know. Outside Western tourists looked at paintings that a walking vendor was rolling out on the sidewalk for them. Tumaini turned the page, and asked me if I liked football. I said I didn’t.

I wondered how it was possible for Tumaini, who two hours ago was so overjoyed she couldn’t think straight, could now read about a football match; how on the verge of a pivotal phone call, she could think to teach me two more Swahili words. It occurred to me that for Tumaini, a process like this happened all the time: a walk along a short path that only opened the way for another corner to turn, a downhill climb, an uphill climb, a tree to climb, and a boulder to roll up a hill.

In the booth again, I pleaded with the third customer service rep. to hurry, and she did. I read back the secret code, but I couldn’t hear the code numbers accurately. The rep. and I repeated the code several times until she believed I’d said the right code. As we rode home, Tumaini returned to the wave that carried her high above the clouds, stopping to buy chocolate for both of us.

A half hour later we were back at the office. Baraka had returned, typed in the code, and the code was not valid. Nor were the twenty other variations he tried. Now we waited for the weekend and Monday to arrive without knowing whether the road was up, down, or even existent.

In Kiswahili, “tumaini” means “hope.”