Her dream was to become a soldier or a motor mechanic. In the end Feliciana Urio (29) did neither. Instead she recently made headlines in Tanzania by becoming the country’s first woman crane operator.
When Urio arrived at the capital’s port in Dar es Salaam for her interview last November she was the only woman applicant and, though she felt pretty confident that her qualifications were good enough to clinch the job, she wondered long and hard about her interview outfit.
“I came here in a skirt on the first day that decided my destiny,” she says. “But I’ve never worn one since. Now I wear the trousers.”
I met Urio a few months into her job in her boss’s office. Though she was wary at first — not knowing why she’d been asked to leave her sky-high post and report to the office — she soon relaxed and I found her charming.
Urio was the only woman among a throng of candidates who had the required qualifications for 25 new posts. She says she was treated as an equal by her prospective employers and received a lot of “encouragement from well-wishers”.
“But it was scary on the first day at work,” she says. “Going up to that level of the crane-height [roughly five storeys] was by itself enough of a scare and it wasn’t an easy feeling to stay up there in the cabin. But now I know it is a dream come true.”
Urio’s bosses love her. The terminal manager of Tanzania International Container Terminal Services, Cassian Ng’amilo, boasts about having her on staff. “She mixes very well with her colleagues and does her work equally well,” he says. “She represents what is fought for by feminists: nothing is impossible for a woman and this crane operator sets an exemplary precedent for any woman with a drive to join this profession.”
Urio was born in Kombo, a village in the foothills of the famous Mount Kilimanjaro in northern Tanzania. She was the fourth of six perfectly gender-balanced children — three boys, three girls.
She managed to stay in school for seven years before the family’s lean finances forced her to leave before she could start high school. After two years out of the system rescue came when one of her brothers invited the teenager to join him in the capital and offered to pay for her to attend high school there. Urio did not need a second invitation. She completed O levels at Nuruyakini Secondary in 2000.
“I became an addict in pursuit of education,” says Urio. “After school I took a two-month computer course, but it made me realise that I was academically low and that it wouldn’t help me find a career.”
Then what Urio calls “a miracle that showed the way to [her] destiny” happened. Her brother offered to send her on a motor vehicle mechanics course at Chang’ombe Vocational Training College. During her three years at the college Urio discovered she had a knack for things mechanical. “I don’t mind getting under a car bonnet — the grease and dirt are just part of the job,” she says.
So when one morning she saw an advert in a newspaper calling for crane operators with her qualifications at the port, she “jumped for it”.
Sitting with her inside the cabin atop the $1,8-million Rubber Tyre Gantry (RTG) Crane for a brief chat is another experience. From her sky-high perch Urio seems at ease, not only with the noisy, nerve-taunting environment but also with her all-male colleagues, with whom she trades banter and technical terms that would take a trained mind to decipher.
Always in contact with ground-floor colleagues, the crane operator does what brought her up here in the first place and moves massive containers from A to B along the dock — which is not as easy as it sounds.
Is there any incident she won’t forget?
“Yes, in fact there are two,” she says over the roar of the cranes. The dates are etched into her mind.
“At 8.25am on March 25 the spreader suddenly rolled at full speed towards the cabin and broke the glass shelter. I rolled in my chair, which saved my life. Two days later I was lifting crates when I realised two containers had somehow got locked together. Sensing terrible danger to myself, the containers, the merchandise inside and to the cranes, I summoned up all my mental and professional faculties and started slowly lowering them. But before they reached the ground one container snapped, as it had only locked at one point-end instead of at all four points.” But, says Urio, she is now “used to this environment” and no longer panics.
Benjamin Thompson is a founding member of the Forum for African Investigative Reporters and an associate editor at ET Magazine, covering democracy and good governance in media through Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. He lives in Dar es Salaam.