a ham-radio set on which a frantic husband in the Serengeti was explaining that the tour guide’s jeep had gone into a hyena den, and he thought his wife’s spine was fractured. Garbled plans were being made to fly the wife hundreds of miles to Nairobi, Kenya, for medical treatment. At last count, there was one doctor for every 28,271 people in Tanzania, and, I suppose, 28,270 patients were in line ahead of the poor woman with the fractured spine. Only 260,171 Tanzanian households or businesses have electricity, and that electricity arrives with the frequency and predictability of Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes wins. Speaking of such, the average Tanzanian receives 2.14 pieces of mail per annum. In 1990, the most recent year in which the Tanzanian government has managed to count these things, 3,314 cars, 2,385 four-wheel- drive vehicles, and 6,445 trucks were imported. Number produced domestically: zero. Five percent of Tanzania’s teenagers are enrolled in high school (though this is better than the percentage of American high-school students actually paying attention). The average Tanzanian family devotes 70 percent of its expenditures to food. In Cuba, where they claimed the American embargo was starving them, that figure was 50 percent. And a U.S. family allots about 14.5 percent of its spending to food—$6,592, which is 1,739 Big Mac meals and a large order of fries, and may explain why Americans are so fat. Tanzanians are not. According to the World Bank, 29 percent of Tanzanian children age five or less are underweight. Why is Tanzania so poor? The nation is by no means overpopulated. The countryside is mostly dry plains and mild badlands, a sort of tropical South Dakota with seacoast, but it’s not infertile. Tanzania is a net exporter of edibles. Agricultural products make up 75 percent of foreign-trade earnings. Forty percent of the country is meadow or pastureland, enough to supply all the burgers missing from local lunch breaks. And Tanzania has resources: tin, phosphates, iron ore, coal, diamonds, gemstones, gold, natural gas, and nickel, says the CIA World Factbook, and salt, gypsum, and cobalt, adds the U.S. State Department’s 1997 Country Commercial Guide. Plus, there’s said to be hydroelectric potential. (I did notice a lot of water running downhill—as it tends to do.) Tanzania has not suffered the wars, civil and otherwise, that have riven sub-
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