Fabric Shopping in Arusha, Tanzania

You may have noticed since I returned from my travels that I have a lot of fabric now for sale.. well in case you were wondering, this is where it all came from. 


In Arusha, Tanzania, in a particular street in the centre of town just near the bus station, are lots of tiny fabric shops.. in alleyways, a small arcade type row of shops with a partially hidden entrance, and also along the busy street. They are visible by the fabric hanging from the rafters out the front and are typically just a very small room with a glass counter at the front (usually filled with batiks or tie dyed pieces). Inside there is barely enough space inside for two people. If you are invited in (which is at most of the shops, the shopkeepers are generally very nice) it is a challenge not to trip over the piles of stock on the floor, the shopkeepers wooden stool, or perhaps even a sleeping baby. If you are not invited in, or if it is just too small, it's a fun game of crazy sign language and pointing to the fabrics you would like to look at while the shopkeeper picks them out. Usually the shopkeeper is very helpful and chooses some for you, that she thinks you will like (and are often way off the mark), so you are constantly having to say hapana asante (no thank you)! After the selections have been made it's a game of bargaing which can take as much time as the choosing. It helps to know how much each type of fabric should be, I was lucky I had a friend come with me who called her friend in the know about such things.


A typical fabric shop, although this one is larger than most. It really was that dark inside, the shopkeeper had to use her mobile phone flashlight to see the fabrics:

Just to emphasise the darkness inside the shop, This photo was taken with f4.8 and a 1 second exposure, and has not been edited:

This is another fabric shop. This is not a wall inside the shop, or just part of the shop. It is the whole shop, it is actually just a shelved wall inside a covered alleyway. On the wall opposite (about 1.5m away) are shelves of shoes, a separate shop.

This part of town is very busy and crazy. I normally would catch one of the local mini buses to town then walk up from there, but I had my baby with me and i was planning to buy a lot of fabric so I took the plunge and drove. This video is just after my first shopping expedition. I thought I'd video the drive on the fabric street by sitting my camera on the dashboard. As you will see it's not for the impatient, or the faint hearted! You can see some fabric shops on the left hand side of the road at the very start of the video, they have fabric hanging in front of them. The times the camera drops is when I was going down and up the big ditches in the road, not running over anything!

A visit to Cradle of Love Baby Home, Arusha, Tanzania

While I was in Arusha, Tanzania last month I had the privilege of visiting the Cradle of Love Baby Home. This is the only orphanage in Arusha which takes in babies, they currently care for around fifty babies and toddlers from newborn up to three years old. The babies are there for a number of reasons, sometimes the mother may have died, or the babies may have been found abandoned, or the families just can not care for them. Some orphans are up for adoption, some will be returned to their families, and others will be transferred to a nearby orphanage which cares for children up to 18 years, the SOS Childrens Village.


Twins Princess and Priketts arrived at the Home as newborns, after their mother died soon after their birth. They were less than two weeks old when I met them, and so tiny. I’m not sure if this is Princess or Priketts, but she is the smaller of the two.  I was told the twins are to be returned to their family when they are a bit older.

Nappies, nappies, nappies! The home needs donations of even more cloth nappies, if I had known I would have taken some with me. Instead I took another much needed essential, baby formula.

Inside the baby nursery, the room which houses newborns to six month olds:

And this is little two month old Francis, who was tragically abandoned by his mother at birth and is for adoption. He fell asleep in my arms while I was feeding him, and I fell a bit in love.

Explaining baby sleep training to an African mama of 8.

I had an interesting conversation today. Somehow I ended up explaining the concept of baby ‘sleep training’ with an African mama of eight, who is also my sons grandmother (Bibi in Swahili). It went something like this:

Bibi and I were sitting in my living room, watching my son (almost 13 months) play with his older cousin, when the conversation turned to sleep.

Me: He doesn’t sleep a lot, he wakes a few times at night, and only has one short nap during the day. Did your babies all sleep well?

Bibi: Oh, all babies, they differ. Some sleep a lot, some do not. Every baby, they are different. They will all sleep in their own time.

Me: In Australia, some people train their babies to sleep at night.

Bibi: (looks confused)

My boy with his Bibi

Me: They put their babies to bed in a cot in a separate room,

Bibi: They don’t sleep with them?

Me: No, they usually put them in their own room, sometimes from only six months old. I don’t do that, my baby sleeps with me because it is easy for me to feed him back to sleep when he is just lying there next to me.

Bibi: Yes, sometimes they wake and just want to suck. And having them in your bed, that is where they feel the love.

Me: Yes, I think he feels comforted when he is snuggling next to me. So anyway, what some people do to train their babies to sleep is to put them in a cot in their own room, and when the baby wakes they don’t pick them up or feed them.

Bibi: (looks confused and a little shocked)

Me: They figure this way the baby will learn not to wake up because they won’t have their needs met. Some mothers might go in to the babies room for a few minutes, patting the baby to settle them, then leave again. If the baby cries they just wait outside the room and go in some minutes later, but still don’t pick them up. They continue this until the baby goes back to sleep.

Bibi: They do not pick up their babies?

Me: No.

Bibi (looks a bit disgusted by this thought)

Me: I have even heard about a doctor who tells mothers to put their baby to bed at a certain time, close the door and don’t go in if the baby cries and to not go in until the morning, unless the baby is asleep so they don’t know their mama came in.

Bibi: (Looking absolutely horrified by now) Why do they not attend to their baby?

Me: I don’t know, maybe they prefer to sleep. Don’t worry, I would never do that to my baby!

I hope I haven’t given Bibi nightmares now by sharing this information with her. We discussed more on the topic, and also the stark difference in the way babies are treated in our countries, which I noticed when I returned to Australia the first time after being in Tanzania for about a year. To come from a country where babies are content, normally being held or carried on someones back, having their needs met promptly, to then arriving in Australia to see babies crying in prams, not able to even see their mothers and their cries being ignored was quite a shock. I think it’s safe to say that ‘baby training’ is a relatively modern western concept that will never catch on in Africa.