Religious Diversity and Property Values

22 April 2007

On Friday when I went to the village to pick up some honey (the good stuff is back, it's about $1.15 per liter. It's like crack. I'm completely hooked) my main man Mzee Protasi told me that they had just come from a town meeting type thing where they had where they had selected a new village chairman. The new guy is named David, and he used to be the village chairman of the 500 people who live to the southwest of the tiny village (in this country representative democracy, and corruption with it, has gone pretty far). Now he's the VC for the whole village--I'm not really sure how big this exact village is. He told me that next week there is a meeting of the four VC's in the (small) area, and the meeting is in the medium-sized village that's a 25 minute walk from my house, so it doesn't involve the big village 45 minutes away, or presumably, the little villages that are closer to the big village.

What I find exceptional about his election is that he is one of the only Moslems in the area. Religion in Tanzania tends to be Moslem close to the coast and Christian inland. At my school we have one Moslem teacher (who's from a different region), and one Moslem staff member, the school carpenter, who is the dad of David the Village Chairman. Coming from a country that's been democratic for over 200 years and has had 1 president who wasn't a protestant and 0 non-Christians, I think it's pretty cool that this largely Christian population has chosen a Moslem to represent them.

This smoothly transitions into property values because David came to talk to me about his problem: there's no Village Office. After the elementary school visit, it's probably good that we had this discussion, it gave me a chance to explain that when I said I was here to help and wanted to help the community, I didn't mean I was here to throw money at it. I was thinking of teaching English in the elementary school, but I'm so busy now that seems a long way off. I told him about my upcoming training in June which will teach me a bit about grant-writing, and told him that maybe when I learn how to do it, we can write a grant together. Especially if he's willing to do some HIV/AIDS work. And that grants typically pay for 1/4 - 1/2 of something. (I'm not so sure about that, but I don't want him thinking that this is going to be an easy answer to problems.) He seemed to understand quite well, and said he'd wait and actually seemed enthusiastic about helping with AIDS issues.

He has a house picked out to be the village office, and it's for sale. The price is 400,000 Sh, about $325. So that's what a house costs in Tanzania. However, I doubt anyone reading this blog would really like to live in this house. I haven't seen it, but my guess is my house at the school is quite a lot nicer. This is probably mud/straw/bamboo construction. But it's got a good location, relatively, and is probably decent sized. At least big enough for a small family.

As for nice houses, Mr. Fox told me that he's building a very nice house for a Canadian doctor who's going to start living here for half the year. This house is, I believe, 3 bedroom, the master has a nice balcony and there are fireplaces in the dining room and upstairs in the kitchen. The construction costs will total about $9,000, supplies and labor.

My schedule is being very hectic. Sometimes it's nice, and sometimes it's just stressful. I'll have more organized thoughts perhaps next week after my househelp starts. The only thing that's enabling me to do this is the immense quantities of notes Mithril, the old volunteer, left me. The only lessons I have to prepare from scratch are my F6 physics. But it's still a lot of work. Going over old notes, adapting them a bit, and then often having to learn the F6 physics myself and really synthesize it so I can explain it effectively. There's a lot in this physics syllabus that I've never really studied: optics, fluid mechanics, heat transfer. It is kind of fun getting to learn it now.


1 May 2007
So I'm half done with my 3rd week of crazy schedule, but I still haven't had a full week of it. For week one, the Form VI classes didn't start until Tuesday. Last week, week 2, when I showed up in the class room on Thursday there were about 5 students there. "Where are the other students?" I asked. In the dormitory. "Why are they in the dormitory?" Because it's a holiday. "Oh. What holiday?" Union Day, celebrating the unification of Tanganyika and Zanzibar. "Okay. Happy Union Day, see you tomorrow." This week we had yet another holiday, today, May 1. It's the first of May. Of course. I think it's supposed to be something like Labor Day, and some of the teachers were supposed to go to the district capital to do some teacher's union stuff, but apparently when they got to the bus stop the bus had already left so they were stuck here.

The Union Day holiday was actually really good. I was falling behind in my lesson planning and I managed to be more diligent about advance planning than usual so I finished lesson plans for at least another week. I just wish someone had told me about the holiday beforehand.

Today's holiday I did know about in advance, so I slept in just a little bit, took my time making breakfast since I knew there wouldn't be chai at school, and got a lot of work done in my office and taught a little bit. It is very strange to have a consecutive Thursday and Tuesday as holidays, but work as normal on the Friday and Monday in between.

Breakfast was uji, which is porridge made from cornflour and finger millet flour. I actually bought a nice uji mix in town that has ground nuts in it too, and I had powdered milk and some honey, it's pretty tasty. The students get uji for breakfast at 10:10, after being hungry in class for a couple hours. Their uji is not tasty like mine. I'm pretty sure it's just corn flour and water, which is just like the ugali they get for lunch and dinner too, except that it's runnier and doesn't come with beans in the mornings.