It all began in Arusha, on a street corner where a woman flipped chapati on a blackened pan, the dough slapping and hissing while three other women stood around her. They were not waiting exactly, just there, passing a baby between them, laughing at something I couldn’t catch. Nobody was in a hurry. Nobody ate alone. I bought one, and she handed me the change with the same hand she used to fold the next round of dough, no gap between the work and the woman doing it. I thought: this is what a fair trade actually looks like. Not a certification sticker. Just cash, palm to palm, no one skimming a cut in between.
To her, this was simply how things are done. Ontology built on interdependence long before the UN gave it seventeen numbered goals. I was there to study Swahili, but that corner taught me something no classroom could: that sustainability, in its original form, was never an individual virtue. It was a way of being with each other
That corner became the shape of the whole trip. In Arusha, I’d gone looking for local women to interview about their lives, however one of them fell sick before we could sit down, and I never quite recovered that thread. But I found something else instead: a Facebook group where women across the world host each other for free, a bed and a kitchen traded for a few hours of help — cleaning, teaching, listening. Strangers, trusting strangers, for no better reason than how broken systems lead us to create our own.
Then came the question I couldn’t stop turning over: how do you get from the mainland to an island as a woman traveling alone? I chose to fly rather than spend a full day overland and by ferry, arriving after dark in places I didn’t know. A shorter flight versus a longer road, albeit less fuel-efficient, but also fewer hours exposed, and fewer unknowns to manage by myself. Sustainability, I decided, has to leave room for safety; a trip that gets me hurt doesn’t serve anyone, least of all the people I came here to learn from. I made my peace with the tradeoff and looked for ways to balance it elsewhere. In Zanzibar, that meant and still means folding myself into the dala-dalas, shoulder to shoulder with people going to work, not people going on vacation.
So far on the island I’ve vowed to stop booking anything through an agency. A boat owner. A spice farmer. A woman renting out a room in her own house. I wanted my money to land directly in the hand that earned it, the same way that chapati landed in mine, such that there are no layers between the work and the worker.
Sustainable travel isn’t a checklist necessarily. I think it’s closer to that street corner. It’s about slowing down and noticing who’s doing the work, and make sure they’re the ones who get paid for it.
