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As with water-borne illnesses, the extraordinary incidence of traffic death in Tanzania finds its cause in the uneven pattern of Tanzania’s development. This boy’s death adds to the 1,500 traffic-related deaths that will officially take place this year in Tanzania (pop. 30 million, 0.2% car ownership), though scholars believe the actual rate to be much higher. In 1998, Tanzania reported 161 traffic-related deaths per 10,000 vehicles. In contrast, the United States (pop. 300 million, 79.8% car ownership) suffers 2 traffic related deaths per 10,000 vehicles. After Malaria and Diarrheal disease, accidents contribute the most health complaints and deaths. Development renders Tanzanian life and business dependent on cars, but Tanzania lacks the funds, the police, and the education to properly regulate the country’s transit. Automobile traffic has grown at a faster pace than Tanzania’s capacity to manage it. People—and even worse, healthy people—die as a result.
Better roads in Tanzania have produced higher death tolls. Likewise “better” water infrastructure has created its own dangerous side-effects. For example, since 87% of Uchirans falsely believe their water to contain “medicine”—based on the assumption that all water coming out of pipes must be modern and safe—many have stopped taking basic health precautions like filtering water through cloth or boiling. More alarmingly, the very success of the piped water has set off a population explosion in Uchira that will increase crowding and pollution, triggering another water shortage by 2010.
Development always involves trade-offs. For example, if all Uchirans boiled all drinking water until the chlorination project was completed, they would cause massive local deforestation as they cut trees to produce enough charcoal to stoke the fires used to heat water.
Deforestation, in turn, would exacerbate soil erosion and damage the harvest, thereby creating more hunger and poverty in the village and causing long-term damage to the local environment.
The road deaths also challenge the notion that educated people will act in ways to protect their health. The young boy’s highway bloodstain and the many before ought to have given Tanzanians a thorough education about the dangers of the road. Yet drivers continue to veer in and out of lanes, children continue to walk along the road instead of through the itchy grass, and people still continue to pack into the rickety dallah-dallah buses that could double as clown-car training vehicles.
The phenomenon is not contained to Tanzania; American teenagers continue to smoke, college students continue to have sex without condoms, and tourists continue to climb and die on Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Health-related behavior depends on much more than just knowing what’s good for you. Likewise, developing infrastructure depends on much more than just installing more advanced technology. Any effort to create and maintain a viable sanitary water system in Uchira or anywhere else in the developing world will need to account for the complexities involved in development and its unintended consequences.
“No water, no health,” Zaina Msafi says, over tea and overlooking the dry and mountain- studded landscape. She’s right. But water alone is not enough.
Laura Schewel is a Senior double majoring in literature and environmental engineering.