mostly money

Lots to say. First of all, new pictures are up at flickr.com/gregorgregorgregor, mostly pictures of the In-Service Training (IST) of me with a mohawk. There's also pictures a couple of my recently departed housegirl, and some other miscellaneous things.

The week after IST was the last week before a weeklong midterm break for my kids, which meant (I found out when I got back) that I was to give exams. I think mostly due to my lowered expectations following the last round of exams I gave, the kids did pretty well. Maybe some of it had to do with my phenomenal teaching. Almost all of my Form 6's are reasonably competent with derivatives, which is nice.

I also got cracking on my project work. Talking with the village chairman and the wananchi (literally countrymen--what I think is an unofficial council of old men who have an advisory role in the government). They've identified 4 areas they'd like me to try to help with: the kindergarten which seems to have 1 room, 1 teacher who may or may not get paid, and practically nothing in the way of supplies; the elementary school which is severely overcrowded and understaffed--the understaffing is largely due to not having teachers' houses; an existing group that does provides some assistance to PLWHA (people living with HIV/AIDS), and the village office (buying it).

Quite quickly we decided that the kindergarten was probably the most pressing need, and the village office would be the simplest. I have yet to learn exactly what sort of plans they have for the kindergarten, but they already had a house picked out to be the village office. It does have a very nice location near the village center, and the owner is ready to sell. I had an extremely productive meeting where I talked at great length to try to head off some of the problems that other volunteers have all the time such as underestimated budgets and the village expecting me to do all of the paperwork involved, and also made as sure as I could that they all understood that grantwriting does not get them anything for free, that depending on the project the community contribution is required to be from at least 25% to at least 50%.

One frustration many volunteers have is communities that expect the volunteer to be a kind of Santa Clause, showing up with money and passing it out. I'm doing what I can to dispel that (more later). What I love about my community so far is that they called a special meeting for me which started reasonably on time, lots of people involved in my projects came, we talked about the specific projects and general ideas about how to work together, and they even sang some traditional songs of welcome for me. It was really cool. Then, when my part was finished, they told me and I left while they continued with other matters. The only way I can think to explain just how nice this was is to describe a typical meeting based on what I hear from other volunteers.

A typical Tanzanian government meeting: A village government official tells the volunteer a couple days in advance that there will be a meeting starting at 8:00. The volunteer doublechecks the starting time, maybe twice, and is assured that it will be at 8:00. Knowing that things usually run late, the volunteer shows up around 8:30 or 8:45 on the day of the meeting. The village office is locked and no one is around. After waiting for an hour the volunteer goes to a nearby restaurant to get tea and maybe a mandazi (like a donut without glaze), and while eating sees a couple people headed to the meeting. She finishes eating and then goes back to the office and waits with the others who are they but don't have the key. around 10:00 more people show up, but they wait inside for another half hour waiting for one or two of the most important official to start the meeting. Then the secretary will welcome everyone, inquire about their homes and families, and introduce the village executive officer. He will welcome everyone, inquire about their homes and families, and introduce the village chairman. He will welcome everyone, inquire about their homes and families, and ask the village executive officer to start the meeting. The village executive officer will start the meeting, and then ask the secretary to read the agenda. From this point on, no one will be deprived of the chance to throw in the two cents on any topic. The volunteer will then sit through at least an hour of beraeucratic matters until they arrive on her topic. If the volunteer is unlucky enough that she is at a budget meeting, the various budget items will be read and commented on, and then, because no one has bothered to do it beforehand, the attendees will be asked to calculate the total budget. About 6 people will do so, getting about 6 different answers after a few minutes work, so they will repeat the exercise several times until one answer becomes noticeably prevalent. Finally, the volunteer will get to say her piece, then around 4:00 and very hungry, feign slight sickness and leave, spending the next month feeling bitter. So I'm extremely pleased with how my meeting went.

Unfortunately, after talking to my Peace Corps supervisors, I have been told to nix my participation in the village office project. The reasons are that Peace Corps is supposed to stay apolitical, at least when it comes to domestic host country politics, and helping the village government buy itself an office treads too close to my showing support for the one political party there is. I'm disappointed because it was going to be a relatively cheap project (they had about $200 to contribute and wanted about $200 more--cost of a 4 room house in my village: $400), and I was hoping to get it done quickly as sort of a test case. Oh well.
Edit on this: today the village chairman delivered the budget to my house while I was teaching. He told my housegirl that he would come back at 3:00 to talk about it. I had suggested (before I knew I couldn't do the project) that perhaps they might want to paint it or something, and that perhaps it would be possible to do a little more than just buy the house. Apparently he took it a little far, the proposed budget now includes a lot of very reasonable ideas (glass in the windows, cement coating on the walls, paint, building a pit latrine...), but enough of them to jump the budget up to $3,000. I waited for him for about an hour and he didn't show up, so went back to my office to get some work done. I'll look for him again tomorrow to explain the situation. The good thing is that he did a good detailed job on the budget and included a short letter explaining the need for the office. What concerns me is that he initially told me the price of the house was 400,000 /= (shillings), but on the budget that item was down as 500,000 /=. I wouldn't be surprised if the houseowner heard that I was helping out with the money, so decided that he could raise the price. I wish stuff like that didn't happen, but at the same time, who am I to begrudge some poor guy an extra $80? It's tough.

I've been having issues lately with people asking for money. I feel bad turning them down, sometimes, and other times I get angry and feel like they're trying to use me. After the first meeting with the village government my friend, mzee Protasi, told me that he had a problem and he'd like to talk about it. So, we talked, and his problem is that his house doesn't have cement coating the brick walls and it doesn't have ceiling board. (His roof is corrugated steel, just like all the nicer hosues in the area, but he's missing a masonite layer inside making a flat ceiling. In fact, my house only only has the masonite in the main living room, my bedroom and guest room are without. I kind of like it that way, the masonite in the main part of my house is pretty low. Admittedly, especially in July and August when it's pretty cold here, the ceiling board would probably go a long way in keeping the house warm at night.) I was a bit underwhelmed by his problem. I thought he was going to say his wife or one of his kids was very ill and he needed money to send her to the hospital (about 2,500 /= one way, say $2), which I would have been glad to help with. This, on the other hand, isn't a huge problem. His house is definitely above the median in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, I wasn't thinking very well, I was still riding a high from the good government meeting and was superexcited about helping people, and he has been a really good friend, so I--carefully and tentatively--told him that I thought I could help out a little bit. I think he initially thought that we could write a grant for him to remodel his house like we were talking all morning about writing grants to help an elementary school and people with AIDS. I explained that if I helped him, it would be just me. He got really excited, and I left and immediately started feeling uncomfortably with the situation. He's helped me a lot, and it would be nice to thank him (I have given him a couple small gifts), but I want to be careful about what sort of precedent I'm setting that will effect me as well as any other Peace Corps Volunteer or just white person to be in this area.

I went to town that weekend and decided that really, I can't give him money for his house. I'm sure some of you reading this will understand perfectly, and other will not. If I give him money, I would begin to have doubts about the reasons for our friendship--doubts I was already beginning to have just because he asked. I also would be doing an incredible disservice to future white people in the area. I don't want people trying to be friends with foreigners just because they want a nice house.

Ok, basi. Enough about this.

I've had a housgirl for a month now. It's amazing. All-in-all, I'm getting more work done, I have more free time, my house is cleaner, and I'm eating more. She's also a really nice girl and I've enjoyed joking with her and teaching her how to cook some American things. (Her favorite: banana pancakes.) The bad news (for me) is that she's studying to be a secretary in Mbeya, so the past month was her vacation and today she's heading back to school. I'm very sad to see her go. I've been asking her about future plans and she told me that she has two older sisters who graduated secondary school, but they both got married immediately and have kids and have the typical TZ life of a mama at home with her kids. Anumie, my housegirl, said this isn't the life she wants, and she's got some ambitious dreams of working as a secretary, then retaking here O-level exams and doing well enough to get to A-level, and eventually going to university and becoming a teachers. I think it's fantastic.

The other little good news is that I've already found a replacement, so Sophia will start work on Monday. I hope she's as fun as Anumie was.

To counter that, I've got a sad story that made me laugh about gender development. I was in the staff room the other day and saw an English final exam for one of the O-Level kids, so I read through it. I was impressed, all the reading comprehension passages were about pertinent things like soil erosion and life skills. Then there was an essay about a book they had read. The student summarized the book, it was about a woman named Hawa who became a bus driver. Of course, this is typically men's work, but she wanted to make money for her family too. Her husband took flak, people were telling him he should stop her, but he said it was her life, and she was making good money. One day, someone came on the bus with a pistol and wanted to rob it. Hawa saved the day by signaling to some of the passengers and then braking hard, knocking the robber down and thwarting his plans. The student then wrote that "My favorite character was the people on the bus because they worked together to stop the robber. My least favorite character was Hawa because she became a bus driver, which is a man's work, when she should have been at home with her children. Her family needs her at home." Sigh.

I'm also uploading some photos. Some are of the crazy hair contest we had at our In-Service Training, and then (if my connection keeps its speed) there will be some from my vacation in March and some from school recently, including some of my kids playing the violin.

As always, let me know if you're curious about anything I haven't mentioned.
cheers!
Gregor