Adventures in Tanzania

Finished

2008-11-21T09:38:00.009+03:00

I'm sitting in the Peace Corps Lounge now, waiting to get the last of my forms signed so that I can stick the R (for Returned) on the front of my PCV title. In a few hours I'll be on a plane to Greece.

Everything got wrapped up nicely at my site. It was hectic, but everything that needed to get done got done. Here in Dar I was able to attend the site announcements for the new training class, so I got to talk to my replacement for an hour or so, which was a nice opportunity.

I really can't believe the time is up, I've gotten very accustomed to life here, and I think being back in America will be strange. Most RPCVs say that readjusting to America is more difficult than adjusting to life in the country of service.

I especially want to thank those of you who helped with my project at Itundu Primary School. They were rushed to finish everything before I left, but they came through and got it all completed. I'm trying to upload some photos to accompany this blog entry of the construction process and completed houses, but even here the Internet is slow. Before renovations, the houses were awful, you can find "before" pictures here, during and after scattered through this post. Now the houses are in about the same condition as the house I've been living in for the past 2 years, which is to say pretty nice, and excellent for the area we're in. One of the teachers said that he used to be keeping his eyes open for other work that might come along, but with such a nice house he's now content to continue teaching.

The teachers (and whole community) are absolutely thrilled with the houses. Walking around the village I was being thanked constantly. They threw me a lovely going-away party and repeatedly entreated me to pass along many many greetings and thanks to everyone who supported the project. Tunashukuru sana (we are very thankful).

Election Part 2

2008-11-15T11:46:00.002+03:00

And he won. McCain resigned just after 7:00 am here. During the night we made a victory cake--I'll post some pictures on Tuesday or Wednesday. At 7:30 I got on a bus and came to Njombe. There's a Kenyan Obama song that was playing on all the radio stations, and everyone was talking about it. I've never been so proud to be American.

Lots of people here were aware of Obama. A pretty common opinion was that it was almost like a joke, that he could never win. I've had conversations now with several people where they said something along the lines of "America has shown us that true democracy is possible." I think that this election has done more for spreading Freedom and Democracy around the world than all the foreign policy of the last 50 years. Leading by example.

I've left my village now. The project at Itundu Elementary School was completed in my last week. I'll write a longer post about that (and put up some pictures) when I get to Dar, Tuesday or Wednesday. Thanks again to everyone who helped with that. I can't tell you how grateful the entire village is.

It's strange to think that I'm not going to turn around and go back to school on Monday. My last week was incredibly busy, wrapping things up, 2 goodbye parties, getting things set for the next volunteer, and trying to pack and say goodbye to everyone. And now I'm done.

A massive election

2008-11-05T03:54:00.000+03:00

...or as the r/l mixing Tanzanians are calling it, a massive erection. As in, "It seems there at your home you are have a massive erection today, Mr. Gregor." Yes. Almost. Something like that.

But I'm hopeful. I'm updating my blog at 4:00 am, having gone to another volunteer's site to follow the election coverage in his school's computer lab. We're also making a victory cake for dear Mr. Obama, though hopefully we're not too premature.

I can only imagine it's very different following the election from outside of America, especially this year. In America, things are so split, so even. Outside America, every African (of course) but it seems every Peace Corps volunteer, staff member, every volunteer of any sort from other organizations, every UN employee, every ex-pat I've talked to, are unanimous in their support for Obama.

And all I can think of is how nice it would be to come home to a president-elect I could be proud of. One that doesn't make fun of bombing other countries. One that didn't pick a running mate based on gender instead of qualifications. One that might actually make healthcare affordable for average Americans, bring an expensive and pointless war to a close, one that can lead America and lead in the world...

Happy election day, everyone.

Work Has Begun!

2008-10-19T15:28:00.003+03:00

It's been an exciting and busy time since my last post. I'm not quite sure when I last posted, and the computer I'm on doesn't want to let me check, but here's a bit of what's happened:
In September I was visited by Jesse, my old roommate from Budapest. Among other tings, we went to Uganda and rafted the Nile with another PCV, Peter. It was really cool, we did lots of big rapids (4 class V's!), saw monkeys and lots of birds, even a fish eagle making a catch.
Prior to that there was some excitement--trouble, rather--at my school. The O-Level (forms 1-4) kids got in a fight with the A-Level (forms 5 and 6, my kids) over a soccer game. Things got hugely out of hand. The A-level kids, who are all boarders, went to the village where most of the O-Level kids live, and threw rocks at their houses, breaking some windows and scaring everyone. They even burned some clothes and a mattress of some of the O-level kids. This all happened about 2 weeks before the end of the A-level term, and we ended up closing the A-Level early and sending the kids home. We expelled ringleaders and the more flagrant participants, and just last week the kids came back from their September Vacation. So this week they are finally getting the final exams they should have taken at the end of August...
I'm a bit disappointed that I didn't actaully see any of the riot. It took place on a Sunday evening while I was working in my office, and I didn't know anything had happened until it was almost over. I did hear a bit of shouting, but that's pretty normal when there's a soccer game. These days, most everyone seems very comfortable pretending nothing happened.

There is some undoubtedly good news. Thanks to help from you, the funding has been completed on my grant to renovate teacher's houses at a local elementary school! I got the money a couple weeks ago, and on Friday 17 October, the construction was started. We are cutting it a bit close timewise, but the villagers understand the constraints and assure me that everything will be completed even a week early.

What time constraints? Well, it's been more than 2 years I've been here, and my time is nearly up. I was in town this weekend for a goodbye party as the members of my group are beginning to leave. My official Close of Service date is 20 Nov, and the next day I'm flying to Greece to meet Annie, and then on 6 Dec I'll land in Houston. It seems unbelievable. In between now and then I need to give and grade these final exams, monitor and finish the construction work and Itundu Primary School, and finish the last edits on the math book I wrote for the course I'm teaching. Buybusybusy.

Thanks to everyone who helped with the project!

Projects!

2008-08-11T17:01:00.002+03:00

I just finished up my COS (Close of Service) Conference, a preparation for returning to America, and probably the last time I'll see all the members of my Peace Corps group together. It was a good time, and a sad time. It does not feel like two years are almost up, but come December I'll be back in America.

All that makes me feel like I have almost no time left to finish up lots of things that I want to finish. I mentioned in my last blog that I wrote a grant to renovate a local elementary school. My parents have kindly posted some pictures of the school to my flickr site: flickr.com/gregorgregor. If you think you'd like to help with this, you can donate to my project here. Unfortunately the site seems to be quite slow about updating how much money has been donated (it's the government, after all), so even I can't be sure how much more is needed.

The other big project I'm working on is writing a math book for the course I'm teaching. There aren't any books published in Tanzania for A-Level subjects, A-Level being the last two years of secondary school that serve as college prep. For most subjects there are British textbooks that fit the course rather well, but I've found that for Basic Applied Mathematics, those books don't match the Tanzanian syllabus very well. So I decided to write one. My book is going very well; at 132 pages it's nearly finished. I'm hoping to have a good draft and some student feedback by the end of the month, and maybe I can print it in September.

While here, my parents were really surprised that I speak a bit of Pangwa, the tribal language in my area. I actually can greet in quite a few tribal languages: Pangwa, Benna, Nyekyusa, Kinga, and Hehe. (A lot of them are very similar, so it's not too hard.) When I travel in Tanzania I always try to learn the local language in that area (Tanzania has around 200 of them!), and it's a nice way to make people smile (or guffaw) because an Mzungu (white person) is speaking their tribal language. It also helps show that I know what I'm doing and that--at least a little bit--I belong. In my area, I think it shows the people that I'm respectful and trying to fit in to their community. And they love it.

Until next time,
Gregor

A Grant!

2008-07-06T15:33:00.003+03:00

My project is going through! I wrote a grant what seems like ages ago, but I've heard that it's finally reached some of your in-boxes and mailboxes.

For those that haven't seen, the project is to renovate 3 teacher's houses at my local elementary school. They are in very poor shape. My grant ought to include pictures, and my parents have visited the school and can tell your firsthand about the need there. There are holes in the roofs, the floors are mud, the walls are falling apart... it doesn't make for a home environment conducive to good teaching.

You ought to be able to make donations through the Peace Corps Website here, as well as view part of my project proposal. The website was down yesterday afternoon when I first wrote this post, but this morning it looks to be working just fine. The next time I come to town I'll put up some pictures and a more detailed grant for anyone interested. That probably won't be for a few weeks, though.

Aside from that, I had a lovely visit with my parents. We went many places around the country, including a safari in the extremely remote Katavi National Park where we saw herds of water buffalo and lots of giraffe, elephants, hippos, and crocs. We also spent a full week at my site. Maybe when they put some pictures up, my parents will link to it in the comments.

Other than that, things are busy, but going well. This semester is being much more manageable than last year. I'm grading exams now, in general my Form 5 Math students (that I'm grading right now) seem to be doing very well. That said, I'm still very busy, but I'll try to put up a good long blog entry near the end of the month. Topics to look forward to: tribal languages and the math book I'm writing.

Gregor

Back to School

2008-04-13T10:52:00.002+03:00

It's been an exciting few weeks. Students are beginning to arrive at school to begin the new school year. Our official opening day was Friday, April 4. They're coming quickly enough that I think enough will be here on Monday, April 14 for me to start teaching. The big news is that we finished building a second dorm, so the A-Level is co-ed now. It used to be that just the O-Level was co-ed, the A-Level was boys only. Already it's strange. In just a few interactions with the A-Level girls it's apparent how different they are from the average village girl. I'm no longer used to interacting with young girls who have self-confidence, but these girls have plenty.

There are two dorms, one for each gender, this is where all the A-Level students live. Each dorm has a teacher in charge of it, for the students to go to if there is a problem, but I they mostly manage themselves. The dorms are very community, each has 4 big rooms full of bunk beds, though the showers and toilets are each in their own separate room. (And, in both cases, pretty nice. A lot better than the concrete-framed hole I have for a toilet and the bucket-baths I take in my house.) Some O-Level students live in some not-quite-completed teachers' houses. The school tries to pick needy kids who are well-behaved. Administration would much rather have trustworthy students living in the houses rather than letting them be vulnerable to theft and vandalism. Most teachers also have some O-Level students living with them to help out to different extents with chores, farming, etc. Typically a teacher with a small family (perhaps with only very young children) will have one student live with them, and teacher with a bigger family and older children has no need for this, and an unmarried teacher may have 2 or 3 students living with them. These kids the teachers choose themselves.

The school life is pretty different for the kids from an American school. One of the biggest differences is that the school has no janitors, groundskeepers, etc. This morning (Wed April 9 as I write this), most of the new Form 5 arrivals were "slashing," using a long machete that's bent at about 150 degrees for the last few inches to slash the grass. There are no lawn mowers. Slashing is a whole lot of work, usually it's used as punishment, but these kids were doing it of their own accord because they thought (correctly) that when enough of them got there to start being taught, if the environment wasn't "clean," we (teachers) wouldn't start teaching. Last year, we had a small teachers meeting and agreed to start teaching the following Monday. I showed up ready for my first class to find the other teachers telling the students that they wanted to start teaching, but that the grass was too long. So the students slashed and cleaned, and we started teaching the next day.

The students range in age from about 17 to 22, at A-Level. Most of them, I think, are 18 to 20. I haven't seen or heard of any sorts of hazing.

The area is very safe and peaceful. I don't regularly leave school grounds at night, but when I have I feel perfectly safe. Theft is common, but all the incidents I have heard of nearby are when nobody was home. I've been robbed of my leatherman and my watch, both probably by former Form 6 students. The leatherman was lying out in the room between my office and the physics laboratory, and many students were passing in coming to see me. My watch, I let a student use as a stopwatch for a physics experiment. When the experiment was done he returned the watch and I locked the room and went to have tea. When I got back another teacher had opened the room to make some announcements to all 80 Form 6 students, and of course someone had taken it. Over the Easter holiday, also, it looks like someone tried to break into the outdoor room where I keep my bike, but they didn't get in.

Most people living around here are more cautious than I am. They think I shouldn't go walking at night because I'll be targeted because I'm white. When I go walking at night the only thing of any value I have is a cell phone, and I don't think anything will happen. Women, especially, will try to walk in groups. The attitude I've encountered in several people is that here in Tanzania, there is no rape. If a women is walking at night, alone, in an isolated area, and something happens, that's her fault for not being strong enough and putting herself in a dangerous situation. They acknowledge that in other places that are more violent, where guns are common, maybe then it could be considered rape, but here, no. In the words of another PCV's headmaster, "If you put meat out, you cannot blame the cat for eating it." This attitude isn't held as strongly by younger, urban, educated people, but even their attitudes are probably different from yours and mine.

I also want to tell you about one of the coolest things I've seen in country. I heard about some villager who had built a dam by his house a little way up one of the hills, so last weekend my (awesome) new counterpart went to go check it out. And it's really cool. This is a retired guy. He's village-wealthy, which is to say he used to be a tailor and now has a decently big farm, and that supports him well enough he could retire. He's above average for the village, but that's not saying much. He has about a 5th grade education, and last year he heard about a guy in a neighboring village who was trying to get electricity from water. His house is by a creek, so he thought "I could do that!" and went to see what the other guy was doing. He didn't like the other guy's method but he understood the idea and came back and did it himself. He got a metalworker to make a waterwheel (he said it took about 3 attempts), build a little reservoir right above a decent elevation drop, and ran a pipe down to power the waterwheel. He's using a bicycle wheel as a gear and belts made from discarded truck tires to take the power to a tiny little generator, and then he runs wire for the 400 m to his house. He didn't have enough money for nice wire for half the way, so about half of it is this horrible aluminum wire that I think is used for construction.

But now he's got power in his house, he bought a TV from a teacher who got transferred away from my school, he got a satellite dish, and he's making lots of money (comparatively) by charging people's cell phones and batteries. (Seeing his line for charging, a lot more people than I would have guessed in my area have car batteries that they take to their houses for a little bit of power.) And his only power costs now are maintenance. He's also got very realistic plans for improving it, he wants to get a bigger generator, finish buying good wire, and maybe even expand his reservoir. All-in-all it was a really inspiring trip. I very rarely see people here being innovative, experimental, or taking development into their own hands, and seeing this guy was extremely refreshing.

Graduations!

2008-02-16T09:40:00.003+03:00

Christmas vacation was fantastic. I succeeded in getting a duck, which took way too much effort before I realized that 2 other teachers keep ducks. I took it with me to Njombe, and do feel like I've passed some sort of milestone by bringing live cargo on public transportation. I had a couple days in Njombe before it was time to go to Dr. Josh's (Lupembe) for Christmas, so I ended up tying up Butter the Bata on the roof of the Chani, our hotel in Njombe.

After a those busy days of shopping to make sure we had everything necessary to feed 20-some people for a few days, we went to Dr. Josh's village. There were 10 of us the first night, the 23rd,
we had a tasty tasty big batch of macaroni and cheese. The next morning was pancakes, and lunch was avocado salad and hummus. Then, everyone got there, we were up to 20-some, and for dinner we had a Thai-style stir fry and a delicious beef stew. Then, for the Big Day we woke up to a fantastic breakfast. Maandazi are a typical breakfast food here, they're like donuts without the hole and without any sort of frosting. So, for our breakfast, we made chocolate frosting and had frosted maandazi. They were amazing. Lunch was leftover beef stew and another avocado salad. Dinner was the highlight. We spent all afternoon killing and cleaning 6 chickens and Butter te Bata. The chickens we fried, Southern-style, for the duck I made an apple stuffing and we baked it, and on the "side" we had garlic cheesy mashed potatoes, green beans (a specialty, brought from Dar), stuffed green peppers, and pineapple upside-down and chocolate cakes for dessert. It was amazing.

The rainy season is in full swing for me. It really started around the second week of December. It's so nice to have all the water I can use! I can wash my rice--even twice--and not even think twice about it. Drying clothes is a bit more difficult, but at least there's plenty of water to wash them with.

And, I've finally got another house mama. She started in the last week of January. Mama Charles is her name (her firstborn is named Charles). So far, she's not quite as personable as Anumie, my first house-girl, but far better than my second. My clothes are superclean, and I've already taught her how to make fried rice and banana pancakes. Next is guacamole and maybe we'll get to burritos. Or as close as i can get.

My garden is going quite nicely, that's also mostly thanks to one kid, Asifiwe, who I'm employing there. I've got pumpkin, carrots, cilantro, a few types of beans, lettuce, and some other greens growing. The cilantro is just getting big enough that I don't feel bad harvesting leaves from it almost daily, which is good because the avocadoes are just begining to roll in. For more than 6 months there haven't been many fruits availale at my site other than bananas, but now I should be set for a while on avocadoes, apple-pears, and maybe some mangoes brought in from nearby.

The bad news for me when I got back from a conference in early January was that my chickens all died. Which was only 2 of them, at that point. While I was gone they were sleeping at a neighbor teacher's, and they all broke out with Newcastle's Disease, which is apparently a chicken equivalent of cholera, so they all died. The good news is that students are now living in the house closest to me, and the next closest house is this teacher's, who also lost his chickens, so my house is nice and quiet in the mornings.

Within the course of 3 days a couple of weeks ago I found out about 3 unrelated cases of kids with parents claiming to be orphans to try to get sympathy. One was an A-level kid who had been causing some problems. We chewed him out before Christmas break and told him not to come back without a parent. He took the whole lecture and then came out with "I'm an orphan." When pressed for who was paying for his school, he insisted that both parents were dead, he didn't really have any living relatives, and he depended on himself. Now, the school fees for A-Level come to about $100 a year, which isn't easy to scrape together for entire families. And also, everyone here has massive extended families. So the principal told him that we've tried talking to him, and it hasn't worked, so if he can't bring some sort of guardian for us to talk to, he shouldn't bother coming back. He showed up about a week after school opened without anybody. The principal gave him a week and then called him in and asked him where his guardian was. He said she was coming in two days. He got yelled at for disobeying his instructions and kicked out of the dorm until his guardian actually got here. Kumbe! (expression of surprise) it was his mom. He hadn't really filled her in on why she was being asked to come, so it came as a pretty big shock to her, especially when she found out that he had said that she, her sister, and his four little brothers didn't exist.

The other two orphan cases are less interesting. One is a kid who I had given some money for some help in the garden which he did a real half-assed job of. When he came back from break and I asked him why he didn't finish the job he told me that his dad had died on Dec 22. I asked around and found out his dad was fine. The last was the most indirect: our headmaster got a call from some minor government official who had gone to Dar and recognized a kid panhandling, saying he was an orphan. He's actually one of our students and his parents have been wondering where he went.

It's really too bad that in a country that does have over 1 million orphans--mostly due to AIDS--that these people are playing the orphan card, and they're bluffing. It makes me even less inclined than I already was to give out money to random people begging for it.

On the plus side, the headmaster of the elementary school seems to be getting it together and I'm going to try to write a grant to improve the teacher housing situation, which will help them to actually attract some teachers. When that gets put together, I'll start asking for funds, any help you'd care to offer is very very welcome.

The last few weeks have been a flurry of activity at school. We're still severely understaffed, but the A-Level school year ends at the end of February. The national exams began on 11 Feb, but for reasons I'm still not exactly clear on, graduations here are done before final exams and such. And, prior to the official school graduation, various student organizations, which at my school are all religious, all have their own graduation ceremony. In some ways, they're like the graduation parties that followed high school graduation. But they're much more organized. They must have a typed up time-table of events to be ignored later. I attended the Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, and Miscellaneous Other ceremonies, missing only the 7th Day Adventist event because they chose to do it about 10 km away at a church instead of at school, and it was raining pretty hard that morning. Of the small groups, the Catholic one was very well done, but I'm partial to the Pentecostal one because they asked me if I would sing. I said no, but I'd play the violin, so I played a little bit of Pomp and Circumstance and also a fiddle tune.

The best by far was the school graduation. It did drag on a bit long, but the graduating class put on a good show. Graduation is like a talent show. The whole class sang some songs together, and a couple kids put on a little magic show, another group had an elaborate skit... And that's just the graduating class. Every other grade, 1-5 had their own opportunity to sing and dance to a goodbye song. And the Form 5's did a few things. And then there were the speeches... It took about 6 hours but it was well worth it. And when I'm done here I try to post lots of graduation pictures (and other pictures) up on my flickr page and www.flickr.com/gregorgregor .

My star violin student (who has barely touched the violin for monthss because everyone's been frantically studying) is a 7th Day Adventist, and he gave me a present the other day of a little 7th Day Adventist propaganda book. Adventists worship on Saturdays rather than Sundays, and the book makes a big deal of how the Sabbath is properly the last day of the week, but that the Catholic Church subverted this and moved the day of worship to Sunday, the first day. What I find ironic is that this propaganda is apparently distributed here in Tanzania, which has inherited an Arabic week. Moslems also worship on the last day of the week, but they say the last day is Friday, and in Kiswahili, rather than reaching back to pagan gods like in English, the names of the days are Day 1 (Saturday), Day 2 (Sunday), Day 3 (Monday)... except for Thursday and Friday which have special names. So thinking in Kiswahili, one of the larger points in the 7th Day Book is that the Bible says that God created the world in 6 days and on the 7th day rested; this 7th day is the Sabbath, so that's why we tell you to worship on Saturday, Jumamosi (Juma - Day, Mosi - first). It just seems to emphasize that it all depends on where you start counting, which doesn't have just one answer.

So, that's the news from Lake Nyasa (Malawi). Keep sending me questions, and go out and be politically active in America, because I can't do anything from here.
peace,
Gregor

Validation!

2007-12-02T13:46:00.000+03:00

A couple of weeks ago we got the results for the Form VI Mock Exam. My kids did quite well, better than most expected especially as this is the first year for my school to graduate an A-Level class. Within the Iringa region, we placed 4 out of 9 schools in Physics and 5 out of 12 schools in math, my 2 subjects. I'm pretty proud.

On a related note, exactly half of my math students passed. As its not one of their focus subjects, the test is pass/fail. I've heard that at some schools no one passes, so that's good (for my kids), but at the same time, I think a 30% was the pass cut off, so that half my kids didn't even get a 30% is a bit of a downer. Different standards! I have to remind myself that they did better than more than half the schools in the region.

My buddy Dr. Josh came down for Thanksgiving, we had a duck and a good time. We cooked a lot of village-extravagant food. (He brought some packaged salmon and crab meat, so I made a sort of pie crust and we sauteed the meat with some veggies and made little indivdual pie things. Sometimes I feel like all my time spent watching Iron Chef was as good preparation for Peace Corps as anyting else.)

My kids have also started taking some good initiative. I've been too busy preparing notes for all my classes to do many "practicals," labs, with them, and I don't even have more than a couple examples of what they're expected to do on their national exam. One kid has taken charge and started coming to me with an experiment to do, so I help him assemble the appartus and then they do it in the afternoons after class (or while their other classes aren't being taught).

The A-Level has officially been open for 5 weeks now, I started teaching when about 2/3 of the kids got back from vacation, 2 weeks after opening. Two weeks ago the geography teacher taught a couple classes, and this week the biology teacher taught a couple classes, but other than that I'm the only one teaching. It's absurd. The chemistry teacher got called away to grade the Form 4 national exams, so she's been gone for a month. Our headmaster is being transferred, so the geography teacher is sort of filling in, which means he'll be busy until the new one shows up, which I believe was supposed to be late October.

Other than that, I'm teaching lots again, I'm looking forward to Christmas, and I've now completed a full year at my site. Feels good.

Cheers,
Gregor

Peeling Back the Callous and Feeling Again

2007-10-26T13:10:00.000+03:00

I took a long bike ride the other day, about as far as I've been from my village yet without a bus. I was asked for money somewhere around 10 times, which is a lot especially when you consider that I was on a bike and listening to my iPod, not walking and engaging everyone in conversation.

At one point I was having a bit of bike trouble (several points actually, one of my brake cables kept poppping out) and while I was working on getting it back in a mama came up to me, and she really wanted money. I was hot, tired, and frustrated with my bike at that time. She told me that she had called me as I rode by. Not that I'm uncaring, but even if I had heard her I wouldn't have stopped. 3/4 of the children I pass feel absolutely compelled to shout "Mzungu" -- white person -- when they see me. It doesn't really bother me most of the time, but I definitely don't stop for every person who sees me and recognizes that I'm white.

She began explaining how of course I know that the people here have become very accustomed to drinking ulanzi (the local bamboo-wine) and that the price is so small, but some people still just can't afford it... I interrupted her at this point to say that I don't hand out money, especially not for booze. Then she said that she was just talking in general, and that she herself doesn't drink. No, she wants assistance for her family. Even 10,000 shillings would help (a lot of money, about $8.50-- more on how much money is worth later). I explained that I just was out for a day ride so I really only brought 500/=, (about $0.40) enough for chai and a snack in the village I went to.

But this mama was persistent. I told her where I was coming from, and she got very excited, because her son is a student at my school! Now it doesn't matter that I don't have money on me, I can give it to her son! I tried to explain that her son was at my school, the school where I'm freely giving 2 years of my life to teach--that this is the assistance that I see as really helping, not some money because you got lucky and saw a white person, but teaching! providing education to her and many other children. I tried to explain that she was the 10th person that day to beg money of me, and it's not even 1:00 in the afternoon yet! That there is no way I could give money to even 1% of the people who ask me for it. She didn't get it. She kept asking for money. But what she kept saying, and which did get to me later, is that I have to keep seeing the people.

She really annoyed me. I was in a bad mood for hours afterwards, feeling like there was no point in leaving my village at all when wherever I go people just want money from me. But what the mama was saying was right, sort of. I'd completely lost sight of the people; I was feeling that the poor people were there for the purpose of bothering me. So my goal has been, for the few weeks since then, has been to not blame people for their problems, even if, as Annie put it "everyone has a problem that a little of your money will solve." The only reason me and the poor villagers are in our respective places is the accident of where we were born.

All that said, the cultural attitudes towards begging here are frustrating. There's no shame at all connected with asking for money, accepting money, borrowing money and not paying it back, etc. I can't help but think that if there was a little more "pride" in that area, if people were a little ashamed of needing assistance, or even if there was just a bit more pride shown in doing something by yourself, without help, that would motivate people and speed up development considerably.

Also, check out the next post back for an article by a Peace Corps Volunteer who served in Tanzania in the 60's and came back in the 90's.

Salama,
Gregor

Socialism in Tanzania

2007-10-26T13:09:00.000+03:00

This is probably illegal without getting permission first, so please notify me if there are any objections and I'll take it down. I want to share with you an essay by an ex-Peace Corps Volunteer, Leonard Levitt. This is an excerpt from Mbeya Dreaming, which was published in Going Up Country: Travel Essays by Peace Corps Writers, edited by John Coyne and published by Charles Scribners Sons, 1994. I am taking this excerpt from the September 2007 issue of Worldview, the magazine of the National Peace Corps Association. The author was a teacher in Tanzania, near my region, in fact, from 1963 to 1965.

The Party Secretary

"Do you know, Levitt, that one of your students is also here in this village?"
"Who is that?"
"Peter Mwakyusa."
"Peter Mwakyusa!" Peter Mwakyusa, who durin gthe Saturday night debates had fired up the school with his wild burst of African nationalism.
"Yes, he is the party secretary for Icolo. His office is just down there." Mwandunga points down the dirt road we have come on. "I will send word to him that you are here. He will want to see you."
Like Mwandunga, on the surface Peter Mwakyusa has not changed. He is sill short and stocky, and has the same short haircut he had as a schoolboy.
"So, Levitt, you have returned to us," he says paternally, almost patronizingly. He says this matter-of-factly, with no emotion, and though my returning here to his village at this remote corner of the country is the most natural of events.
We shake hands. He takes two or three steps back and literally looks Susan and me up and down, as though appraising two animals. "Are you still teaching, Levitt? I remember your teaching. You were a fine teacher. A fine teacher."
"No, I am a journalist. A writer."
"A writer? Why not a teacher? Why did you stop? Hakuna maua. No more buds, no more flowers."
Taking me by the hand, he begins leading Susan and me about the village. "I am the party secretary here", he explains in English as we walk off the road, past his office, and through fields as villagers appear and stare at us. He explains he is the secretary of one of three local areas, responsible, he says, "for knowing everything of the 25,000 people in my district."
"I am interested in knowing the will of the people," he adds, "so I can determine their needs."
"And what of //your// life, Peter?" I ask. "Are you married? Do you have children? How long have you been here in Icolo?"
He shakes his head. "No, I am the party secretary. Personal matters are not important."
There is a mkutano, a meeting, in progress that Peter says he must attend, and invites Susan and me to accompany him. There, in a clearing some yards away, under tall, leafy trees protecting the people from the afternoon sun, is a long table with wooden benches at which a dozen or so officials are seated. Beyond them are perhaps a hundred villagers seated on the ground, old men in varying states of dress, from Western trousers to cloths slung over their shoulders to turbans wrapped around their heads.
Leaving Susan ehind with our driver, Peter leads me to an open space on one of the benches and we sit down together. Peter points out the official at the center of the table--a tall young man in a white Mao shirt that hangs outside his trousers.
"That is our Area Commissioner," says Peter approvingly. "He is very radical."
"You mean he is against the government?" I say facetiously.
"Oh no, no." Rising from our bench, Peter walks up to the Area Commissioner and whispers in his ear. The Area Commissioner nods his head. Meanwhile, one of the officials at the table has finished speaking. Seated on the ground, the old men have raised their hands and are asking questions. They are speaking both in Swahili and Nyakusa, the local dialect. I cannot understand what they are saying, but they appear to be growing angry, with more of them reaising their hands.
I am struck by this scene, this picture-postcard version of the Mwalim's Ujamaa, the African equivalent, perhaps, of a Vermont town meeting, and I wonder if Susan might take a picture of it. But first, I realize, I mus obtain permission from the Area Commissioner. Taking out my notepand, I scribble in Swahili, describing myself to the Area Commissioner as Peter's former teacher, and ask Peter to and the note to him.
Too late, i realize I have made a mistake, fr in writing the note in Swahili I have implied the Area Commissioner does not know English. By then, Peter has passed on the note. I watch the Area Commissioner pick it up, glance at it, and jot something of his own on it. He places a pin through the note and passes it back to Peter.
Peter hands it to me, unopened. I pull out the pin. Scrawled on the back of my note are three words, in English, all capitalized. They are: "Is Not Allowed."
The meeting continues. The old men continue to raise their hands The questions appear interminable. but finally, it is over. The Area Commissioner stands up and walks straight to his car. Without a glance at anyone he drives off.
Peter does not mention the Area Commissioner's refusal, but begins leading me through the village, past the mud huts and the kraals where the cattle are lying amidst the banana trees.
Like the area commissioner, he does not speak to anyone.
When I ask him whether Susan can take his picture with some of the villagers, he says, "But I am the party secretary! Why should I be taken with them? IT is not dignified. You should know this, Levitt. You know Africans better than anyone."
I have no idea what he is talking about. "Peter," I laugh, "You are the first politicianI have ever met who does not want to have his picture taken with his constituents."
But Peter does not respond to this. Instead, he begins berating me for not understanding him, for not understanding Africans. "What we believe, Levitt, is that if a man is rich and has much land, he exploits the others who have less land than he. Why should one man have so much land and others have none? The land belongs to everybody. Shouldn't they all be equal?"
I wonder where he has picked up such nonsense.
"You see, Levitt," he continues, "We are not like the Chinese. The Chinese have to be taught about socialism. They had it imposed on them. With Africans socialism is natural. We have a word for it. It is called Ujamaa. The word is new, but to us Africans it is natural."
"But what if a man works very had and sells his crops and makes money from them?" I say for the sake of argument."And another man does not work and produces no crops. Why shouldn't the first man take his money and buy the land of the second man and produce more crops and make more money?"
"But that is not the African way, Levitt. You know Africans. You taught us. You know this about us."
Again, I have no idea what he is talking about. He is mad, I find myself thinking. They are all mad. What is it that he thinks I know of them? That equality does not mean equal opportunity but equal ends? That being equal means being the same? That there are no differences between people, in their character, in their intelligence, in their motivations?
Is this what is meant by African Socialism? IS this the logical conclusion of the //Mwalimmu's Ujamaa//? Here in this remote village, is this the final mutation of Fabian Socialism, as interpreted by none other than my former student, Peter Mwakyusa?
And it is so sad. They have worked so hard. They had believed so much, the Mwalimu as much as any of them. For the first time I fiind myself feeling sorry for him. Yes, he had truly wanted to help his countrymen. He had truly wanted to eradicate poverty, ignorance, and disease. Yet it is now all a pretense, a sham. I think of the organizational chart on the wall of the Mbeya Hotel, the walls of our room covered with ants eating away at them, the single can of Raid. I recall the line of decrepit cars and buses creeping up the hillinto town; the ridiculous signs on the walls of the stadium across the road. //Nchi-Maskini Haiwezi Kuendelea Kwa Msingi Wa Fedha//. A poor country will not progress if it depends on aid. //Nchi Maskini Haiwezi Kujitawala Kama Inategemea Misada Toka Nje//. A poor country is unable to rule itself if it relies on foreign aid.
I recall the boarded up Indian-owned stores, the bottles of Neva Shampoo, Junior Aspro, Sloan's Linament, and Galloway Cough Syrup that now pass for medicines. The schools on the roadside with no pupils inside them. The overturned truck that has lain for years. I imagine the corpus of Tanzania, lying inert beside it, with all the transfusions of foreign aid unable to resuscitate it. I suddenly have the premonition that in not too long a time the grass and weeds will grow up and cover everything.
It is growing late in the day now and time for us to depart. Peter escorts Susan and me to our car. But the car has a flat tire. While we and Peter watch, our driver replaces it with a spare tire. Now the driver says we must hurry. If another tire goes, there is no spare. He says he is afraid of the darkness. We must, he warns, return to Mbeya before nightfall.
We say our goodbyes to Peter, who stands expressionless behind us in the road as we pull off.
But at the bridge over the brown river Songwe, two soldiers stop us. They are young, in their teens perhaps, boys really, in green fatigues and high black boots, with rifles slung over their shoulders. They want to see Susan's and my identification. They want to examine Susan's camera.
They search our belongings--the camera case, Susan's pocketbook. They pat under the dashboard. They say they want to see if we are sending messages across the Malawi border. To whom? Why?
They want to know about the package of rice Mrs. Mwanduga has prepared for us. They say they are checking smuggling from over the border. There are shortages of rice around the country, they say. Speculators--Indian businessmen--have driven out to the rice-producing areas. They then return to the cities where they sell the rice on the black market.
Our driver is nervous. he speaks to them so quickly I cannot understand him. The soldiers say they want to send us to Kyela so that we can report to the Area Commissioner. The Area Commissioner is the last person I want to see. Our driver continues talking, gesturing, pleading. In the end they let us go.

Craziness!

2007-09-28T11:12:00.000+03:00

It's been a while since I posted. Sorry. I've been on vacation for almost a month now. I think I blogged about it before, the vacation was supposed to be September, the dates were set way back in March. Then, in mid-August, my headmaster comes back from one of his endless trips and announces that the Form 6 Mock Exam dates have been announced by the region: a week of exams to start Sept 17. He announces that, because of the mock exams, the A-Level school break will be postponed until after the mock exams. The Form 5 students, showing a remarkable amount of backbone, disagree. They tell him that they've been away from their families for half a year and that their end-of-term exams are already scheduled for the next week, and that they will abide by the original schedule. Also, the cooks tell the headmaster that they don't have enough food to keep the school open for an extra 3 weeks on that short of notice. So the headmaster decides that we will keep the original schedule, and the Form 6 kids can just hang out for the extra 17 days studying by themselves and not being taught. Now, I would have stuck around and taught them myself, except that Annie (my girlfriend) had long before bought plane tickets to come visit me, so I was leaving to pick her up in early September.

The completely ludicrous part is that when I took Annie back to my site the headmaster showed up for one afternoon, and announced (not to me, one of the other teachers told me later) that he was changing the plan again, and that the school would indeed officially close only after the Form 6 mock exam. Basically, he announced halfway through a vacation period, that it wasn't actually vacation, the vacation would be next month. Then he promptly left that evening.

I have no idea how they plan on contacting the 60-some Form 5 students. Perhaps they'll send letters, but the school has also been running out of money, meaning we haven't been buying diesel to power the generator in the evenings, so without electricity and computers, I don't envy the typist the task of typing out all those letters. She types pretty slowly...

In a way my vacation from school was extended, but I've already taken my Peace Corps vacation with Annie and it just means there's none of my normal work for me to do at school. There's plenty of other work to do, but my chances of finishing the syllabus with the Form 6's are shattered. (The real exam is at the end of February. That's a national thing and thankfully the dates are already set.) Also, the university students who were teaching at my school during their holiday all went back to school, leaving me as the only physics teacher. Basi. So they'll probably expect me to pick up some O-Level physics classes, which is fine until the A-Level kids get back, but it's much harder to stop doing something once people are used to you doing it.

On lighter notes, I got some good travel stories. On my way to town from site this poor teenager was getting carsick in front of me. He threw up a little bit, and then the mama sitting next to me started telling him that of course he threw up, he hadn't drunk any kerosene that morning. I wasn't the only one giving her a weird look, but she kept on explaining how if you drink a little kerosene, it makes it impossible to throw up. At the next little village we stopped at this mama got out and found someone to give her a little kerosene, which she brought back cupped in her hands. She gave it to the poor sick kid and insisted that he drink it. He kind of lapped it up out of his hand. Personally, I think I would have heaved again on the spot, but he managed to finish the kerosene and--the worst part of the story--he kept it down for about half an hour, at which point the mama had gotten off. So she didn't see him when he threw up again, much more violently this time, and she probably still thinks kerosene is a miracle at settling stomachs.

A bit further along in the journey I had to wait for a couple hours at the bus stand in Iringa (this was on my way to Dar es Salaam to pick up Annie). I ended up having a fairly interesting conversation with a rasta guy. (There's a few of them here, I see them mostly around bus stands in bigger cities. He was wearing some Bob Marley stuff, had dreadlocks, and offered me weed.) I bought him a cup of chai and we talked mostly about AIDS. He was asking me about things he had heard and at least half-believed: that AIDS was created by white men to reduce the population of Africa, that AIDS was created by condom companies to improve business, and so forth. We talked a bit about why those don't really make any sense at all. I didn't convince him completely, but he did acknowledge that dead people don't buy things. Then we got on to politics a little bit, and he told me that he liked Bush but didn't like Reagan. When I asked him why, he said that Bush didn't bring AIDS. I guess he blames Reagan for that.

Then, I got on the bus (warning, this is another story about carsickness) and this time it was the poor mama next to me getting carsick. I was reading a book though, and she was amazingly quiet about it. I hadn't even realized except we were pulling in to the Al-Jazeera rest stop--the nicest stop on entire road from Njombe to Dar--so I looked up to see her throwing up absolutely silently into a nice little bowl she had made out of her khanga. (Piece of fabric women wear a carry around. They're more useful than even a towel is to a hitchhiker.) Nothing is remarkable there, what makes it a story is that seconds later the bus stopped and we had a 15 minute break, and instead of getting off the bus to wash out her khanga or just find a place to ditch the vomit, she folded it up in her khanga and stuffed it into her suitcase. Then she got off the bus.

That's the craziness, the rest was mostly sane, though Annie might disagree. I picked her up at the airport, we went pretty directly to my site where she got to meet all sorts of neighbors. Then we did a safari in the beautiful Ruaha National Park, where we saw 14 lions, baby elephants, and fighting giraffes, and we spent her last weekend on Zanzibar, which was lovely and relaxed due to Ramadhan, although it was a little difficult finding food during the day. Another day I'll put up safari pictures and better account of our trip.

basi.

Gregor

Stockholm Syndrome

2007-08-27T14:46:00.000+03:00

I got a text message the other day from my friend Peter. He asked if I could remember the name of the syndrome where a hostage of kidnap victim begins to sympathize with his or her captors and sort of help them out (Stockholm Syndrome). Peter and I worked on crosswords a lot in training, so I asked if he was tackling another (he's got a book of NY Times Sunday crosswords... they're tough). "No," he said, "I'm just writing a letter to a friend and trying to describe my place in the educational system here."

I know exactly what he means. I showed up today and was about to call the form 5's in for math when I realized that only about 5 of them were there (out of 60). It turns out there was some problem with water, so they were working on that. They showed up for the last bit, I taught for about half an hour, which turned out to be okay. We reviewed the last lesson and did some practice problems. Then I taught my F6 physics and went to the daily staff meeting/announcements. They went on longer than usual, and the teachers decided that after the meeting they'd call all the students to the parade ground and punish those that hadn't shown up to the morning parade on Friday (nearly 200 of them!). We had talked about it Friday and decided that each student would get 3 hits (with a stick about 2 1/2' long). So each of about 15 teachers had a stick so that they could punish all the students in a somewhat timely manner. But they started about 15 minutes after my period was supposed to start and it still took them a while, so my class didn't return in time for me to teach much of anything.

Some thoughts on corporal punishment: it's reasonably fast and easy. As a teacher, you can mete out fairly standardized punishments quickly and forget about it. It definitely has its advantages. I'm only beginning to think of other punishments that we could have used on nearly 1/4 of the student body that wouldn't have taken lots of teacher-hours. (This method did take almost all of the staff about 30 minutes, between hitting and lecturing.) The problem I have with it is that I don't think it's effective. One of the teachers today confirmed my suspicions and said that this morning attendance was no higher than normal at the morning parade, and that many students who did show up still were skipping their classes later. So while I can understand the desire to just hit a kid sometimes, I don't find corporal punishment good for much more than venting that desire. It gives both the teacher and student a feeling that punishment has been given, but does little to correct the behavior.

Personally, I'm extremely lucky that I don't have big behavior problems in my classes. It comes not from any magical classroom charisma that I have, but from the fact that my kids are older and more mature--mostly in their early 20's. In O-Level schools I've heard plenty of stories of Peace Corps Volunteers using more creative forms of punishment and having the students ask to be beaten--they'd just as soon get it over with as well.

So the long story short is that the half of my classes didn't get near as much time as I thought they would. And the only thing I can think is "Kama kawa:" as usual.

There's a ton of things about the educational system that I don't like, but all I can do is try to teach the kids as best I can. The Stockholm Syndrome analogy works well. I'm trapped in the system, but working as hard as I can for it.

mostly money

2007-07-14T11:39:00.000+03:00

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

Death

2007-06-09T10:51:00.001+03:00

Death is different in Tanzania. There's more of it.

I've been wanting to write a blog entry to try to sort out my thoughts on this, but it's never the thing I want to do when I get on the Internet. However, today I got terrible news from home about the death of a family friend just done with his freshman year of high school, and these thoughts are suddenly more pressing.

In America, including this latest tragedy, I can count on two hands the number of people I know who have passed away, and that's with several fingers to spare. I think I've been to 2 funerals in America. On the other hand, I've been in Tanzania for about 9 months, and I've been to 2 funerals here.

Part of the difference is the way communities deal with death. In America bereavement is mostly an affair for family and close friends, and often a church community. Here, it is a community-wide event. As soon as the news comes, an msiba is held, which is like an all-night vigil with the bereaved. Everyone from the community comes to spend time with the family. At the last msiba I went to at school there were probably over 300 people in and around the family's house, with bonfires in front and in back. The girl students were mostly packed inside the house singing hymns, while the boys were gathered around the fire in front occasionally joining in the singing. The faculty and other community members were in the backyard. The deceased was the sister of a teacher who had lived at the school for a few months. She died in Dodoma (far far away), but I guess our teacher was the closest family member, because the body was sent directly to our school, arriving a little after midnight. (Bear in mind that the only electricity in the area is at our school, so staying up past 10:00 when the power is turned off is extremely rare.) I left shortly thereafter as I was getting company the next day and needed to sleep, but I think most people stayed several more hours and even the whole night. I think that most of the people there had never met the deceased and many of them barely new her sister, our teacher. Even the next day the house probably never had fewer than 50 people there. I had to do some shopping and my mzee thankfully told me to walk the long way home because walking by the house with my tomatoes and cooking oil, everyone would assume I had brought them to help the family out.

One of the last books I read before coming here was The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, which is a nonfiction work about an author whose husband unexpectedly died while their only daughter is dangerously ill. The book is about dealing with the grief, and while I can't understand what it's like to lose someone that close to me and I don't think I'd find the Tanzanian style of grieving comforting, the book has me convinced that there can be American cultural deficiencies in dealing with grief. Or maybe there's just no good way to do something so difficult.

The biggest difference about death I notice about death in America and death in Tanzania is in its conspicuousness. Here, where the whole community comes out, deaths are hard to miss. But with poor nutrition, limited access to healthcare, and AIDS, deaths seem more frequent here, especially of younger people. One of my teacherfriends is a bit of an amateur photographer. When I looked through some of his photo albums there was hardly a single picture of more than a handful of people for which he didn't tell me that one or two of them had passed away. Mostly these were pictures from his college and early teaching days, at most 10 years ago.

One volunteer told me an anecdote about a village meeting she attended where the villagers started complaining to each other "Don't you hate msibas?" "Oh yeah, such a pain, somebody you don't know dies and you have to drop everything to spend all night at the msiba," and so forth. Finally they concluded "Well, it's our culture, can't do anything about it."

On a completely unrelated topic, this past week has been my In-Service Training, so I've been reunited with all the remaining people from my training class. It's been great seeing everybody, but I've come to realize how big of a shock I'll be in for when I go back to America. Having people talking to me all the time (especially about real things that often require thought to reply) is kind of stressful. It's going to be a big change to go home.

As a celebration of IST, some of us had an informal crazy-hair contest. I've got a mohawk,(I'll try to get some pictures to you guys sometime soonish), and some other notables were the checkerboard, bullseye, Tanzanian shilling sign ( /= ), braids, and triple mohawk. Although most of the cuts were truly hideous, mine didn't turn out to bad in the end and a lot of people are urging me to keep it. The jury is still out on that one.

Here in Iringa there is an NGO that produces lots of really neat crafts and also sells fresh ice cream and chocolate cake--all the labor being done by handicapped Tanzanians. One of the deaf people there was fascinated by my hair, and I explained to a couple of the non-deaf people that it was a tribal haircut in America, worn both by Wamohawk and Wapunk. They translated that into sign language for the deaf people, and while they still wanted to touch it, that was a perfectly acceptable explanation to them. Mostly, wandering around town with our crazy hair, we've been struck by the lack of reaction. As Dr. Josh with his horrible tri-hawk said, I'd be getting a much bigger reaction even in a trendy hip area of Tampa.

Volunteer Styles

2007-05-26T10:29:00.001+03:00

First, I have to correct a mistake. The Village Chairman in my all-Christian area who I thought was a Muslim is actually not. His dad is from a mostly Muslim area of Tanzania, and they both wear the traditional Muslim hats most of the time, but it turns out their Christian and there really are hardly any Muslims this far from the coast.

Volunteer Styles
Everyone has his or her own style of volunteering and of adapting to life in another country.

There are some volunteers that seem to depend on things from America, especially some environmentals (not meaning to stereotype too much) have a fair amount of free time that, by their reports, they devote much of to cooking elaborate meals. I'm sure I get an exaggerated account of their grandest successes and hear more about exceptions than the rule, but I have also heard from other volunteers of the more plain style that they have been shocked to see how luxuriously some of the other volunteers are living. Other reports tell me that some spend most of their time decking out their houses with exotic gardens and landscaping. Some of this is encouraged, to lead by example of good/sustainable/intensive gardening practices, but I've heard that some take the example bit rather far and do little else. There are also volunteers that I lump into this category (especially the 'mentals in this case) that don't have such elaborate lifestyles in their villages, but go into the towns almost every week and live it up there. As one example of this category, my distant neighbor Connor has a house that reminds me of college life when I visit. His housemama cooks for us while we sit on the couch watching movies on his laptop. He also spends a ton of money on American food in town and gets sent a bunch of stuff too. It's great when I visit, and I want to say that I'm trying not to be judgmental or hypocritical, but it's a little tough. Mostly, this is just how I see it. All that said, many of these volunteers still do lots of good work and help their communities a great deal.

The opposite extreme is the isolationists. I joined Peace Corps expecting a certain degree of lonesomeness, and some people deliberately isolate themselves, often requesting and getting the most rural sites. Two of my "neighbors" are like this in different ways. They both spend more time in the village than average without going in to town (but they are also dating, so they visit each other more than most volunteers). However they differ in that Jacob doesn't try to isolate himself as much, but leads a lifestyle very similar to that of his other teachers, eating rice and beans almost every day, and spending lots of time in his garden. Jeska, on the other hand, I believe it's more creative food (I've gotten a couple stories of her scaring her neighbors with some more creative dishes like sauteed apples with honey), but she goes months without getting to town, and although she recently got cell phone service at her site, she just turns it on to check her messages once every 3 days or so (that bit is by Jacob's account, so it might be a little exaggerated).

I sort of think of myself if a happy medium. I think I'm leaning more towards the village life side, I rarely cook elaborate meals for myself, though when I have company who will appreciate it, it's no holds barred. Recently, I've gotten some lovely packages with food in them, and the ramens have been nice for making a quick meal, but the fancier things (stove top stuffing, muffin mix...) are just kind of piling up, and I'll probably save them for when I have guests.
I definitely don't take steps to isolate myself. As I said, I came expecting a degree of loneliness, but quickly found friends in my village and also found that about 3 weeks of time in the village is enough for me to get frustrated with the slow pace at which things happen and make me want some time in town with friends--mostly Americans to complain to. And to stock up on peanut butter. Whereas most of the meals I prepare are of the rice and beans variety with some vegetables, for breakfast and sometimes lunch a peanut butter and banana sandwich is the thing I can make quickly without waiting for charcoal to be ready, though recently we got a couple new teachers and the school has started providing meals for a few teachers, and often I'll eat with them. Being on the busy schedule makes that very convenient, I think my average day in the office, including lunch, is around 9 hours. That just wouldn't be possible if I took an hour plus to cook a decent lunch. I've now found a mama in the village who makes good bread, and her daughter is a student so it gets delivered to my house, which is awesome. She has yet to do it, but says when the wheat harvest comes in she'll make whole wheat bread.

I definitely have come a long way from the days in training when I looked down on the volunteer I visited a little for all his empty peanut butter tubs, and I explained to my host sister when she commented on how many socks I have that I don't like putting on dirty socks. A long long way.

I also can't can't really imagine what the Peace Corps experience here would have been like even recently without cell phones and Internet access in the cities. The speed at which these amenities have arrived gives me a very positive outlook on development and progress here--an outlook that's often hard to maintain back in the village where it's needed most. Maybe more on that next time--which ought to be quite soon as I've got a little training in about a week. Until then, take care.

And.... no. And movies

2007-05-05T10:38:00.000+03:00

5 May 2007

Nope. No househelp. She never showed up. Apparently, as I learned from the headmaster this past Monday, a week after she was supposed to start work, he found out about some "bad behavior," apparently she hadn't told him that she has a husband she ran away from in Njombe, and a son too. I'm not sure whether the son is with her or him. He saw this as good reason not to hire her (she was to work part time for me and part time for the school) and told her not to show up.

Now, I do agree that she probably should have told him about these things when he interviewed her--I know he asked her quite a bit about her time in Njombe and all she said was that she took some secretarial classes--but my instinctive prejudices tell me that she probably had a very good reason to run away from her husband, and that now she probably needs help, such as employment. Unfortunately, now that the headmaster has nixed her, it would be bad form for me to go look for her to just work for me without first consulting with him. I'll try to do that, but he's only been in town for a handful of days in the last month. Sooner or later I will get househelp.

I brought a VHS copy of Pirates of the Caribbean to my school because I found out we do have a VCR. I watched it last Friday with the teachers, and then this past Monday (the day before the May 1st holiday) I watched it with the students--about 600 of them staring at a normal size TV in the auditorium/dining hall.

The reactions to the movie were a lot of fun. I will continue to bring movies, but my next choice will be a shorter movie. Even a movie as fun as Pirates got boring for those who couldn't understand it well (everyone but me). After the viewing with the teachers the head of the physics department (whom I have previously referred to as Evil Physics Teacher, but I think I'll downgrade now to Annoying Physics Teacher) asked me "Is it true? Is it true that skeletons can talk?" I assured him that it was not true and asked him how he liked the movie. "It was absolutely terrifying."

Most of the other teachers seemed to enjoy it more than be terrified, and the kids enjoyed it. Explaining the plot also gave my Kiswahili some interesting vocabulary such as gold, curse, and skeleton.

Speaking of movies, the wishlist is updated and (as I cringe to think about what the ex-PCVs reading this are thinking) I've added some movies that would be fun to have in Njombe, either VHS or DVD is good, but don't anyone spend much on these. They're just whims.

Religious Diversity and Property Values

2007-05-05T10:29:00.000+03:00

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.

Start of the New Term

2007-05-05T10:25:00.000+03:00

13 April 2007

So it's the end of the week. Last week I thought I would get to start teaching this week. I was wrong. Monday for sure, though. This week has been really disorganized; it's really made me appreciate how much the headmaster does. Last week A-level was supposed to start, which meant that by Friday around 30 or 40 of the 150 students had arrived. For O-level it was Easter break, so more than half the teachers were gone on Monday and by the end of the week it was down to 2 others. I went into town on Friday, along with the 2nd master who goes to Njombe for vacations to visit his family. He hadn't been unable to leave earlier because the headmaster had been traveling.

I stayed in Njombe for Easter, coming back Monday night. Tuesday, still students were arriving, but my headmaster had to travel for family reasons and the 2nd master, as well as quite a few O-level teachers, still hadn't returned. The school sort of seemed directionless. Neither returned until Thursday (both had said they'd be back by Tuesday). Anway, without really knowing how many students were present or what sort of time table we were working with, I didn't know whether or not to start teaching. I decided to use the other teacher's as an indication. Thursday morning the geography teacher asked me if I was starting to teach today. I said no, but that if he was I'd start tomorrow. He said he was and that we'd just use last year's timetable for the form 5's, which were here in enough numbers to start teaching. A look at the timetable indicated that he had no periods. (I think he taught anyway, which is great. We need to get these classes underway.) That afternoon I hashed out a new timetable with the chemistry teacher, which confirms my fears, I'm up to 28 periods of math and physics, 30 if you count the music I'll be continuing with, and, and they're still gonna want computer classes. That might just get a "too bad." The good news is that my schedule doesn't have periods on Fridays, which will mean I won't have to feel bad about missing classes on those weekends I want to use the post office, and for the majority of weeks when I'm here will give me some freedom to do some preparations or work on extra projects. The fourth A-level teacher, my counterpart whose advice I trusted when he said we'd probably be able to start teaching as early as Wednesday a week ago, I haven't seen in 2 weeks.

16 April 2007

Started teaching FV today. It's nice to be teaching again after so long a break, but tomorrow I'm starting the FVI's also, and that brings me up to 28 periods a week. A normal load is around 12. By some scheduling oddities, my classes are all on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, except for 2 on Wednesday. Thursdays, as often as I can manage will be labs, and on the days the schedule will be roughly halved. Still, it's a lot of work. A whole lot. My counterpart (who it turns out was at a workshop on teaching biology for the past 2 weeks) was complaining about his 20 periods. I don't know what I'll think about this set-up in a week, much less a month, but right now my mind is alternating between thinking "Why am I doing this, I didn't come to Africa to overwork myself," and indignantly retorting "This is exactly why I came to Africa!"

I went to the monthly big market this afternoon. It was the first time I've both known about it and been in town for it. Gotta say I was underwhelmed. I suppose to the villagers here it's a big deal, but I'm jaded by going into town all the time and it was like big bus stand, but with no buses, just the merchants. I bought some "high quality" rice for a decent price and got a earthenware pot I think I'll use as a breadbox. The pot, which I got with a little pot that fits over it as a lid, was amazingly cheap. I paid 1000/=, which is also what a paid for a kilo of the nice rice, which is the same price as 2 sodas and a packet of biscuits, or about 25 pears when they're in season, or 1 beer, or, in America, whatever you can buy for 80 cents.

17 April 2007

Just some quick reflections about teaching so far--I love it when I'm teaching, it's just the frantic preparation periods in between that are rough. I gave the new form 5 students tests in physics and math to see what they actually learned in their O-level. I also asked them what they want to be when they grow up, and almost everyone said doctor. A few wanted to be teachers, some pharmacists, a banker, a lawyer, and I got a few interesting responses: a responsible citizen, an adult, an environmental manager, and my favorite, "a facilitator like Mr. Gregor."

Also, progress has been made on the househelp front. There's a prospective who's going to ask her mom and get back to me. After teaching and working straight until 4:00 today (starting at 7:30), then going to pick up a little food in the village and washing clothes while my beans cooked, while wishing that I had time to sweep my courtyard while the wind was a bit low, I can't wait to get some househelp. Phew.

Also, some little things are letting me know that I'm adjusting to life here. For the first month or two something little like being hungry could really get me in a bad/sullen mood, so I worked hard at keeping myself fed regularly. Recently I've slipped a bit on that with no worse consequences than hunger, so apparently I'm becoming stable. But I still miss home. I've been thinking a bit (or a bit too much) about what I want to eat my first few days in America. I'm not going to commit to anything here as I've still got a lot of time I may change my mind in, but I'm pretty sure a fat juicy steak and some salad with a balsamic vinaigrette are high on the list. And Ranch dressing. And bacon.

From final exams to Easter week

2007-04-08T09:48:00.000+03:00

28.2.07
My kids had their final exams last week. I was worried at first, but now that I've graded them I'm OK with how my exams went (my first time writing tests!). Which is to say I think they were reasonably fair, you may not guess that if you were to look at the scores.

Grading was this week and was a pain. I think next time I may include more multiple choice and also make them a bit shorter just for the grading work. I curved them a bit, I think they both ended up with around 120 possible points, though I treated the final scores as if they were percents. A few (very few) kids did quite well, but the averages, especially on math which these kids treat as a necessary evil (they all focus on Chemistry/Biology/Physics or Chemistry/Biology/Geography, so math is required but not seen as very important) were pretty bad. A few kids didn't even take the math test, and a couple didn't even get 8 points, which is especially sad because I told them that I would test them on the Unit Circle, all they had to do was memorize it, I gave them the question almost verbatim 3 days before the test, and that alone was worth 8 points. Most everybody got most of those points.

I also got some diagrams of pendulums for my mass-on-a-spring physics problem, and several other mistakes that suggest that language difficulties are still very much there. Since the national exams are in English, I'll have to see what I can do to work on understanding question skills.

One little gem from a math test though
x = cos(y)
x/cos = cos(y) / cos
x cos^(-1) = y
cos^(-1)(x) = y

Several misunderstandings result in a true statement, but it's still nothing like implicit differentiation so no credit.

1.3.07
Grading has made me more frustrated with the computer situation here. After all the grading was done, the three other A-level teachers and I sat down together to compute averages and rank the students. It took about a day and a half to copy our scores onto report cards, 1 copy for the kids and 1 copy for the school records (thank god for carbon paper), and then to calculate the average score for each kid, and then rank them. Worst was writing by hand the 5 announcements on each report card regarding the school fees for next term.

I would have thought that, having experience doing stuff like this sans computer, the other teachers would be pretty good and doing it. I would have been wrong. I tried to keep things sorted for most of the procedure, which I was told didn't matter at all. When I realized that we would have to rank the kids ("What's this "nafasi" thing still left blank?") I put myself at the end of the average grade line and sorted the papers as we went into rank order, which saved a ton of time, except that I had to explain 3 times to the chemistry teacher what I had done to stop her, after they were sorted, from trying to organize them. Also, whether from perseverance and not putting down papers to talk every 5 minutes in the case of the chemistry teacher, speed of finding names on an unorganized class list in the case of the geography teacher, or I don't know what in the case of the biology teacher, I was definitely the fastest worker. Noticeably.

And this is at a school where we have a working computer lab. But I'm very aware that, although it would be much faster for me to do the work on a computer, it would probably slow down the other teachers even more initially, and it just seems impractical when there's only 3 hours of electricity everyday, and it's in the evening when we mostly want to relax some.

2.3.07
The last of the kids left today. Even yesterday, I think about half of them had gone home, if not more. I cleaned up my office a bit and started taping together the textbooks that are falling apart.

4.4.07
Yesterday was a day of presents! In the course of the day I was given 10 eggs, a sack of potatoes, chicken soup (pretty expensive for just a snack during tea time), a soda, a bag of green tomatoes, and another rooster! And that was just Tuesday, I can't wait for my birthday.

I feel pretty bad accepting the stuff, but there really is no other choice. I tried to turn down the rooster--by far the biggest gift--but with no luck. So why all the presents? Over a month ago I was working on my Peace Corps community entry writing assignment, so I was talking to one of my friends in the village and we started talking to the village chairman about some of the problems in the community. I explained that part of the assignment was to identify problems in the community that I could possibly help out with. In retrospect I think they might have taken that the wrong way and now assume that I've got a fair bit of money to throw at projects. Anyway, they invited me to come visit the elementary school to see its problems, but I was grading exams and then on vacation and just got around to doing it yesterday.

The school does have problems. They have 1 classroom for each class, which means that most classrooms have 70 to 80 kids in them, but a couple of the bigger classes have over 100. Only 2 of the classrooms are completed all the way, with, say, glass in the windows and enough desks. The principal (who used to teach at my school) kept pointing out the absence of ceiling board, which doesn't seem like such a big issue (only the dining area of my house has celing board, and they have some really nice plastic roof pieces mixed in with the corrugated metal that works as a skylight). But the numbers of kids in the classes was astounding. Now I'll try to explain to the village government that the help I can start soon is to maybe help teach the kids some English, but as far as finishing their buildings maybe I can write a grant to get some money, but it's gonna take a lot of work on their part too and also take a fair bit of time.

Anyway, apparently the school keeps chickens and they gave me 10 eggs and a bag of potatoes as a thank you present for the visit. Eggs aren't supercheap, so I was really surprised to get 10. Later that day, I went to the village chairman's house/office, and he gave me the chicken, which I tried in vain to turn down.

The most interesting part of the day was walking and talking with the two guys from the village. Mzee Protasi is probably my best friend, and we've talked a lot, but I haven't talked much with David, the village chairman. It turns out he really likes to keep animals; he's got a cow, a few pigs, chickens, and a few milking goats, which are rare in this region. He was asking a lot of questions about America, and it was hard for him to get that very few people in America are farmers. Here, everyone farms on the side: it's the main job for most of the villagers, but even those with shops have farms, same with the teachers at the school. Even my homestay mama in Morogoro--which is the 4th biggest city in the country--had a good-sized patch of land and a couple cows. Walking with David, we'd pass a patch of potatoes and he'd ask if we grow those in America. I'd tell just say yes, but then he'd ask if we keep pigs in America, and I'd explain that very few people keep pigs, but that those people keep lots of pigs. Then he'd ask if we keep chickens, same answer. Cows? Same thing. Corn? Sunflowers? Beans? Yes, all these things are in America, but most people aren't raising/tending/farming them for money. I thought he had the idea, but at the end of the day, but then he asked about one more thing: bananas. So I finally got to use a different answer. No, we don't have banana trees in America.

Packing List

2007-04-08T09:40:00.003+03:00

Packing List (editted 31 August 2007)

When I was still just a little volunteer-to-be, I was looking desperately for packing advice, and I still wish I had found so more than I did. So here is mine:

Packing for Peace Corps Tanzania
Things I Brought that I Didn't Need:
Sheets. They provide them. Though some people bring a set of nice big high-threadcount sheets and really like them. Fitted sheets are also nice to have and need to be brought. My bed at site is 5' x 6', though there's no guarantee you'll have one of those. But you can always buy one. Some (taller) people will get a custom bed made that's bigger.
White shirts (or white anything else) - they just get dirty
Many shirts - it's fun and easy to get some cool shirts made. I would recommend bringing 3 or 4 shirts to teach in (for teachers). T-Shirts are also pretty available, and you can find some funny ones. I'd bring 3. Any collared shirt is fine. Polo shirt, great. Has funky designs on it? Fine.
I brought a nice frying pan. The one I brought was too big for just me, so I hardly use it, and decent ones are available here. The little non-stick one I got here I use all the time. The one I brought I think I'll only ever use when I have company.
American Stamps. Some book said to bring these, I brought a bunch and haven't used any yet. People don't go to America that frequently.

I had written "Traveler's Checks are a waste. To change them you must go to certain banks and present ID, the receipt, and the check." I take it back. I had my traveler's checks stolen, and assuming the refund comes through, I'm going to be very happy that they were Traveler's Checks, not cash. You get the best exchange rates with $100 denominations. Easier, perhaps, is just bringing a Visa debit card. The two major Tanzanian banks accept Visa. Mastercard can be found only in the really big cities.

Unofficial Peace Corps Uniform: For us Education guys I would say the uniform is zip-off shorts/pants and a lightweight collared shirt. Girls, although they exaggerate how formal TZ culture requires you to be, you will want long skirts in the village. Below the knee always. And almost everybody brings Chacos.

Great things To Have
IPod with solar charger (Solio). If you have electricity, you don't need it. If you don't, it's amazing. Especially if you bring a cord so it can charge your phone. Speaking of which:
Cell Phone: if your phone has a SIM card, bring it! Try to unlock it (if necessary) before leaving America so you can switch SIM cards. It's very nice if you don't need to buy a phone when you get here.
Solar Flashlight - we got them as Thanksgiving gifts from the ambassador. It is amazing. Some people prefer headlamps, but I like the big guy. I have hooks all over my house so I can hang it up like a normal light. A company called Bogo sells a nice model and gives one to a needy family for each one you buy.
Musical Instruments are tons of fun for you, other volunteers, and your friends in the village.

Shoes: running shoes, boots, nice-ish shoes (maybe 2 pair), comfy sandals (like Chacos). Cheap flip-flops are very available. You can also get Chaco's for wholesale prices, just e-mail them and they'll send you a form. You give them a copy of your placement letter and they give you a good price. Thanks Chacos!

Laptop: I've never heard a volunteer say they regret bringing a laptop. It's handy. I keep grades on it, write tests on it, write e-mails on it that I bring to town on my iPod, I've written a grant on it, and now I'm working on writing a math book on it. And sometimes a game of free cell is nice too. That said, you don't need a new, nice laptop. Pretty much any old thing will do, and if it's one you really don't care about, you can give it to someone when you leave, and they will love you forever.

Other things I'm glad I have:
Spices
Nice kitchen knife
Sweater - it actually gets cold here
Waterbottle
Frisbee
Leatherman
A few zip - lock bags. great for traveling with toilet paper in the rainy season.
Spatula
Measuring Cups
Pepper Mill. Pepper seems like a luxury now
Books
Messenger bag

Of course different people will want different things. I do a lot of cooking so I have a lot of cooking stuff on this list. Many people don't.

The best packing advice I found was to divide your stuff into 3 piles, 1 you think you need, 1 you think you want, and 1 of things that would be nice. Take half the stuff you think you need, and 2 or 3 things from the luxury items you think would be nice.

Superstition

2007-03-18T10:56:00.000+03:00

I just got back from my vacation to the Tanga region, in the northeast part of Tanzania. On the coast, the Tanga region couldn't be more different from my area down in the Southern Highlands. It's stiflingly hot and humid, the Muslim population is huge, and, well, that's most of it really. Tanga was a lovely town, and it was great being in a place where cold showers felt good anytime of day or night. The whole area seemed relatively laid-back, which was perfect for a vacation, and swimming in the Indian Ocean was a lot of fun. I also managed to get up to Lushoto, a town up in the nearby mountains, where the weather was cool like at my site, but still more humid creating a jungle environment with lots of monkeys.

The Tanga area is supposed to be more superstitious than most. Out in the villages it's common for kids to hear stories about white demons or people who drink the blood of children, so one volunteer, Neal, has fun with the slightly older children by saying "Ehee, watoto watamu," (Ah, delicious children). He's pretty good at making them laugh with it, but a couple times he says he's tried it on kids just a little too young to find it funny, which causes them to run away screaming.

More superstitious evidence is that another volunteer, Krista, had 2 kids possessed by demons at here school in the week prior to our visit. The kids start thrashing around, and maybe babbling (perhaps it's just a seizure? perhaps they're just bored?). When possessed, a kid is brought into the staff room and put on the floor while the teachers argue over who should pray over her (both of Krista's cases were girls). They say that they need someone of great faith and pure of heart to pray over them to cast out the demon, so if a teacher prays and the demon remains, then clearly the teacher's faith is not strong enough. The second possession was spasming violently and hitting her head against the concrete floor, so the teachers brought in a couple students to hold her down.

Krista says that the first possession was successfully exercised by a Church official who was luckily visiting the school, and the second sort of went away by itself during the half hour while the teachers were arguing.

Anecdotes

2007-03-16T10:47:00.000+03:00

These are some little stories from Peace Corps Tanzania volunteers that may or may not be entirely true, but I've found interesting of funny and would like to save.

Masai
There are tribes all over Tanzania. Lots and lots of different tribes. They all (I think) have their own tribal languages, customs, etc. For example, in the area between Njombe and Ludewa, the tribe is Upangwa (then, in Kiswahili, one person is an Mpangwa, the people are the Wapangwa, and the language is Kipangwa). In Njombe, you find some Wapangwa, but mostly Wabenna. Travelling towards Iringa you get Wahehe and then Wakinga. Now Kibenna and Kihehe are quite similar, many words are shared but pronounced a bit differently, and most of the tribal languages are Bantu languages so the grammar is quite similar to Kiswahili. There are a few exceptions, Kimasai and Kirek, for example, are not Bantu languages.

Lots of tribes. Some are bigger than others, some are more powerful or generally more wealthy than others. In African countries, problems are often caused when there are only 2 or 3 tribes, like the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi, or (not exactly tribes, but) the current situation in Iraq. In Tanzania for many many years, the different tribes have lived pretty well in harmony, and many attribute the success to the great diversity that is present. I don't think any single tribe makes up even 10% of the population.

It is also not very easy to know someone's tribe by their appearance, with the exception of the Masai. The Masai are definitely one of the larger tribes and have historically, been primarily warriors and cattle ranchers, whereas most every other tribe were historically subsistence farmers. Even today, many Masai have a diet that consists almost solely of beef, milk, and cow's blood, whereas most of the rest of the country eats spinach, rice, beans, and ugali (cornflour and water). Cattle are very valuable, and the Masai are generally quite wealthy, but it is only recently (and still more an exception than a rule) that they send their children to secondary school and university.

The Masai also perform many body modifications, such as ear-stretching, decorative burning and scarring, and removal of the two front teeth. They also have traditional robes that they wear and often are carrying a spear or a sort of truncheon. So they stand out a bit.

I recently did a bit of traveling with a volunteer, Peter, from the Arusha region, near the Serengetti, where there are lots of Masai, and got a couple good Masai stories. On his way to Tanga, where we met, Peter was sitting next to a Masai on the bus. The Masai was dressed in traditional robes, didn't have his front teeth, had circular scars on his cheeks and forehead, and had his spear. Pretty clearly Masai. I think he was rather young, and Peter struck up a conversation with him. After a little small talk, Peter told him that he was trying to pick up a bit of Kimasai, to which the Masai guy responded with great enthusiasm "Oh really? I'm a Masai!" (in Kiswahili, of course). Peter didn't quite know how to respond, and just paused and said, "Well, yeah." He's decided if it ever happens again to come back with, "Yes, and I'm white!"

The Masai also had some tough bargaining techniques that I doubt I'll ever try. Buses are a very common place to buy things, and in every little town you stop in, people are trying to sell you things through the windows. Peter tells me that in one town the Masai guy took some interest in a pack of 4 bars of soap. He took the pack from the seller and asked how much it was. The seller said 1,000 sh (about $0.80), which the Masai said was too much. He opened the pack and took two bars of soap, gave back the rest, and asked how much for two. Predictably, the seller said 500 sh. Again, the Masai guy said it was too much, and he gave the seller 300 sh. Then they had an argument, where the seller kept asking for his 200 additional shillings, and the Masai guy insisting that it was too much. Eventually, the bus drove off leaving the seller behind, still yelling.

At another stop, the Masai guy bought something for 700 sh, took it, but didn't want to give the seller his 2000 sh bill until the seller could produce the change. He said something like "the bus is leaving soon, and if I just give you the money, you won't get the change in time." Similarly to the last story, it ended with the bus driving off and the seller not getting paid.

When the bus got close to the Masai guy's stop, he gathered his things and went up to the bus driver and told him his stop was coming up. The driver didn't know quite where the guy met, as they were in the middle of nowhere. They had a brief exchange where the driver was asking "By that tree?" "No, a little further," "How about at the top of that hill?" "No, there, by that rock!" and the Masai guy got off the bus at a very specific spot in the middle of nowhere, and stood there as the bus drove off, apparently waiting for someone to come help carry his bags.

2007-02-18T12:30:00.000+03:00

1.2.2007

Oof, what a week. I've had some really good days, and then this morning I nearly threw up I was so stressed out.

I think what's been putting me in a good mood is the gardening I've been doing. Last week I planted green peppers, cilantro, and carrots, and this week I added a lot of tomatoes. It's also really nice finally having the whole school in session. The little tiny village really close to the school is much more bustling, I can do almost all my food shopping there now.

On the downside I had to yell at my kids. After doing the lab 3 weeks ago, I had 5 or 6 lab reports turned in to me, 4 of them completed. So, I devoted a period to how to do a lab report, how graphs should look, etc. I also gave a writing assignment when the lab was first assigned that was basically 1 paragraph of reflections on the lab. I told them that we would redo the lab this week, but that I wanted to collect the writing assignment (which only 1 person had included at the end of his lab report) on Wednesday, and that only those students who turned it in would be allowed to participate in the lab on Thursday. I was really thought that would get me those assignments. I re-wrote the assignment on the board and left it up for a couple days. But by the end of the day on Wednesday I had 7 papers, pretty bad for 28 students. What was stressing me out so much today was what to do. So I took them outside and yelled at them. I think there were more problems they weren't telling me about. Turning in work is very unusual here, and I think one of the obstacles/excuses was that many kids didn't have a separate notebook for labs or any extra paper. Now, of course no one came out and told me this, but this time I let them all do the lab, with a strict warning that for real, anyone who does not do a lab report will be not be allowed to do the next lab. And I gave them all a couple sheets of paper (which I'm fantastically lucky that the school provides--I know of volunteers who buy a ream of paper every other week give their kids quizzes). So we'll see how it goes.

I also got really mad today at a teacher, who happens to be the physics department head (though I don't think that means a whole lot as I'm the only A-Level physics teacher) and occupies the office that I go through to get to my office. He pulled me out of class today, midsentence, and took me into my office where he proceeded to explain that the kids are dishonest and will take any opportunity to rob me. He's become very agitated because I've put the 2 chess boards in my office and I let kids come in and play. Several times he's told me that they're "very clever" and will distract me and trick me so that they can steal my things and the textbooks that I have to check out to students. He tells me I shouldn't allow more than 2 kids in my office at a time. I asked him how, then, am I supposed to check books out to kids when his rule requires that 3 students must sign to check out 1 book? He ignores the question and repeats himself (these are past conversations). Today, since he pulled me out of class while teaching I thought he'd have something worthwhile to stay, but unfortunately it was just the same. After listening for a minute I interrupted to ask what his point was. This prompted him to start over--this is all in Kiswahili, and often with this teacher, when I try to ask leading questions he assumes I'm just not understanding what he's saying. I assure him that I understand, and, unfortunately I think the sarcasm was totally lost on him when I said "Maybe you didn't see, but I'm teaching now. So, right now, what do you want?" I don't think the rudeness translated, which is maybe for the best, but he realized I wanted to go back to my class so he finished off with his normal conclusion, about the only thing he's ever said to me in English: "We Africans, you cannot trust us."

I'm angry again just thinking about it. I think I've had 3 conversations on other topics with this guy, and probably 5 conversations about how "Africans" (meaning the students) are doing nothing but looking for ways to take advantage of me. They'll steal lab equipment (Why? I ask) oh, the standard weights and measures are very valuable, you can sell them for lots of money--I'm a bit skeptical. They'll steal the textbooks--I say karibu (welcome, go ahead)--the good books have been checked out and what's left are old books falling apart that I have 10 to 20 copies of each. And if the students want to steal them and read them instead of letting them fall apart on my shelf, I don't see a problem.

Since I'm angry, one more story about this teacher. I had a visit yesterday from Jacob, my sitemate, a volunteer at another school about 10 km away. He just dropped by for a little while, but he told me that once when he was visiting Mithril, the old volunteer at my school, they were in her office (nextdoor to the Evil Physics Teacher) when a kid came in and asked EPT a question. They heard the question, and Jacob said it was a good one, really tough. Mithril commented later that she didn't know if she could even answer it. EPT tells the student that he's embarrassed to be asked this question, it is so easy, and that the student should be ashamed. He tells the student that he should go ask any of the other students, beacuse the question is so simple anyone will be able to explain the answer. The kid leaves, and Mithril asks him why he said those things, and he says something like, "Well, I didn't know the answer..." Sigh.

I suppose I should say here that, though I haven't observed any full classes, walking by and sticking my head in, many of the teachers seem to be effective, and even EPT seems to be mostly effective in the classroom.

So, I've got kids playing chess almost everyday, which I think is great. Yesterday I announced that if anyone beats me in chess (I've only played 2 or 3 games against the kids) I'll take him into "town" (the village) to eat pork, which would be a huge treat. And we'll see Monday how many lab reports I get.

6.2.2007
Today's excitement was a staff meeting. I got to school a little early so I could make an announcement at the morning parade that I'm starting music classes this Thursday. I'm a bit worried about how many people will come, I invited between 500 and 600 students and teachers, and a whole lot of them seem interested... More news on that after Thursday.

After the announcement, I taught my math classes. Then I got a surprise visit from my sitemate, a volunteer about 10 km away, who was hoping to borrow some teaching materials from our Physics and Biology departments. The biology department head apparently left to go into town today, but we got some of the physics stuff. Around 10:10, we have a short staff meeting (matangazo) everyday, usually about 10 minute long. Today, when I got there the secondmaster announced that the "Kigao" would be at 11, and that was all. I asked what that was, and was told it was a meeting. The different name should have warned me, but this was a major to-do. My after-chai class normally starts around 10:45 (on good days, sometimes not until 11:00), so I decided to just start class after the Kigao. Little did I know that the Kigao would surprisingly start almost ontime, and then drag on until 5:50 pm. That was one long meeting. I was very hungry by the end. Luckily I had my bag along and I did some lesson planning and got a couple letters written. As many of the teachers were variously writing text messages, sleeping, and passing notes, I didn't feel so bad ignoring most everything which I could only understand half of anyway.

9.2.2007
Ah! Secondary Project: Music Education is off to a great start. I would estimate I had well over 100 kids clapping rhythms last night. (Over 100 is just an estimate, but there were a bunch more than in math class, where I regularly have around 80.) No teachers came, but several asked me about it the next day, and two of them said they really wanted to come and gave me very legitimate reasons why they couldn't, and one actually did come, but I think he was a bit late and many students were early (which almost never happens), and I think he didn't want to be the only teacher.

Early next week I may try to do an additional period for the teachers so they can catch up, and then have them join in with the students. My first class was just rhythm, and it was a lot of fun. I was pretty nervous before starting--I'm not sure exactly why--but everything went well. After abou 90 minutes of teaching I told them that was all for class, but welcomed them to stay to listen to me play my violin a little. Almost everyone stayed for a few short pieces and they were full of questions. No one had seen a violin before, and almost no one had even heard of the Kiswahili word for it (fidla).

And then today I got my bike. Finally. A Peace Corps vehicle is going around delivering bikes, apparently being delayed a lot due to road conditions. Today was my lucky day though and I got a brand new nice Trek bike, which took me a bit longer to put together than I'd like to admit. Tomorrow I was going to walk the 10km to visit my sitemate, but now I can ride!

I've also added some math periods so that I can hopefully finish covering differentiation before the end of the term. This brings me up to 22 unique 40-minute periods each week (including music), which is quite a bit of work. (They are all paired, and it is rare for a set of two to start less than 10 minutes late, and the one's after the mid-morning tea break, which is really breakfast for my kids, usually starts more like 20 minutes late, or more if the daily staff meeting runs long.)

Right now we're covering thermometry in Physics. This is a good example of one of my reasons for disliking the national syllabi. I'm starting the heat unit, and I've spent 6 periods on the basics because, although my kids have been taught some of it before several times, it's always been partial (and likely poorly taught and poorly understood). So after going over how the temperature scales are defined--which is good to know--I spent yesterday and today talking about the pros/cons and misc. characteristics of various kinds of thermometers and diagramming the thermometers and how they work. I found it a little interesting to read about, but teaching it is boring, and I can tell the kids think so and can probably tell I think so. Guess I need to work on my game face. Part of the problem is that next year is when they will learn about electricity and magnetism (who knows what little tidbits they've had now and again for 4 years), but they need to know now for the national exams how a thermocouple or a platinum resistor in a wheatstone bridge can be used as thermometers. Oh well.

14.2.2007
It's been a busy week. My extra math periods are catching my class up a bit, but they're keeping me plenty busy too. Tomorrow We're gonna do a nice little physics lab with springs in series and parallel. I got all the apparatus together yesterday and today, tomorrow morning is to be spent writing the assignment. Second music class is tomorrow evening, and then I'll be in to Njombe for the weekend.

One of the A-level teachers got sick and has been in the hostpital since Monday. She was the one in charge of the exam schedule, apparently, so the other 2 decided to take the initiative and schedule exams next week, so they will start Feb 21. The kids have 5 exams to take, so of course exams need to start a full week and a half before the school closes. Actually, they just want to make sure they can all be graded by the time the kids leave, but I was counting on them starting the week school closed, not next week. So, I don't get to finish the topics I started, but there's still next year.

And the teacher shortage, oh my gosh. This afternoon we had a going-away party for another teacher (the second this month). Not good for a school that was short-staffed to start with. Also, last Friday one of the young teachers got fired, along with my friend the cook, because apparently they got drunk and showed up at the dorm. The cook's wife, who is the 3rd Master has been sick for weeks at the hospital, and now I won't be surprised if she doesn't come back. I haven't seen Donald, the cook, since he got fired. His kids say he's traveling, so I assume he's gone to see his wife. I kind of feel like people are jumping ship. In my weaker moments, when I'm thinking a lot about home, it helps to realize that there is really nothing this community seems to need more than teachers. It looks that way from in the school at least, and it's good to know I'm making as much of a difference as I possibly can.

Fashion!
People wear the strangest things here. The strangest Western clothes, that is. Today I saw a Form 3 kid wearing a t-shirt that read "MVP, Most Valuable Parent." One of my favorite teachers, Mwl Mwindosa, who teaches geography and general studies to the A-level kids, is incredibly good-natured and seems to always be smiling. Sometimes he wears a black cowboy hat, which looks great on him. He's a little big, and I can imagine him on a ranch somewhere riding the fences. On other days, sometimes he wears an immaculately laundered and ironed labcoat like a sportcoat. That just makes me laugh.

Having my bike is wonderful. I visited my sitemate, Jacob, last weekend, and it was really nice to be able to do. I told him that the last time I came back from Njombe when my bus passed his school, this guy came running down the hill wearing a (very nice, compact) life jacked. He's pretty sure that this is the guy he calls "Bwana Fashion" (mr. fashion) because he wears all sorts of strange getups, and once Jacob saw him wearing some bright orange jumpsuit, and Jacob asked him why he was wearing it, and he said "It's fashion". Very unusual for Tanzania, but I like it.

18.2.2007
Despite (or maybe because of?) all the work I had a really satisfying week. Maybe it's that a lot of the work actually got done. My second music class went great. Attendance isn't what it was the first week, but I knew it wouldn't be. A couple new people came, but I'm down to around 25 kids, which is a much less exciting but more manageable number than the hundredsome that showed up week 1. It was another rhythm class, with more syncopation practice and dotted rhythms added in. Next week I promised we'd start singing, so it's gonna be the old do re mi's. I'm so glad I started teaching those classes, they're much more exciting than my other classes because it's constantly involving the whole class, and the progress is immediately apparent.

Also, my lab went off well on Thursday. I found enough springs and weights to have the kids do an experiment about springs in series. It's nice to watch them work on the labs, they're very eager there. I just hope that I keep getting increasing numbers of lab reports. I ended up with 21 from the second try of the first lab, and I kicked all the kids who didn't turn one in out of the room for lab 3. A couple didn't leave, and promised me that they'd do the lab report this time, and I'm pretty sure a few more snuck in to do the lab. If they turn in the work, that's just fine with me... we'll see tomorrow.

The results came back for the Form IV National Exams, which determine whether kids get to go on to A-Level or not. I believe (trying to remember from training) that for boys, you need a Division 1 to get a scholarship to go to a government A-level school, and for girls Division 1, 2 and 3 get scholarships. I'm sure they still have to pay a fair amount, but my guess is if you get, for example, Division 2 and you're a boy, you can go to A-Level pretty much only if you're parents are rich. My school's results (where I doubt anybody's parents really qualify as rich... maybe a couple) were 1 student with division 1, 2 with division 2, around 20 with division 3, around 40 with division 4, and 3 or 4 failures. The Division 4's are probably pretty happy, my guess is most of them knew they weren't A-level bound and they get to graduate, which puts them among the elite for the area out in the middle of nowhere, but honestly the results are pretty abysmal. Only 1 division 1 is a blow to the school. All my A-level kids come from different schools and different areas--I think pretty much all A-level schools are boarding schools.

basi, enough of that. I learned a new phrase this weekend that I think I'm gonna overuse, but it will be so useful. Acha aibu, stop the shame. Apparently it works extremely well to make students speak up and maybe look at you while they talk, which can be a big problem, especially for the younger girls.

Now it's about time to get on a bus back to my site to go write some final exams1

take care everyone,
Gregor

Remarkable Community

2007-01-28T11:58:00.000+03:00

Just a quick little post here, since looking at my blog I'm intimidated to try to read my last monster of an entry. I came in to Njombe (apparently I actually am allowed to publish the name of my banking town, because PC admin agrees that I ought to be allowed to post my mailing address) to catch some friends on the way back from their PEPFAR training, the week after mine. For some interesting and very pertinent views on PEPFAR, I recommend checking out Joshua Levens' blog (see my sidebar for a link).

When I told my headmaster I was going in to town this weekend, he advised that I leave Friday morning in case there was a problem at the bank. The fact that I have classes doesn't seem to have any bearing on the Tanzanian school cultural ideas of whether I should be at school or not. I stuck around because I wanted to teach, and because there was a little party for teachers on Friday afternoon. As it turned out, the party was a going-away party for one of the teachers who is going to the Tanga region for either school or a better job. There were a lot of tears because she has a lot of friends in the staff here, but also because our school already has a substantial shortage of teachers. Despite this, the headmaster helped her get this opportunity because he knows it will be very good for her. There were a lot of long-winded speeches reminiscing about her time at my school, but the headmaster's added on bits about how we will be okay without her, everyone just needs to do their part.

I've been a bit frustrated in my classes. The A-Level students study lots, but the mostly take a self-directed path in their out-of-class studies and homework is a bit of an oddity. I've been assigning a fair amount of homework or practice problems, but with no way to collect it, and no time to grade it even if I could collect it, I'm beginning to think that most of the assignments don't get done. I came down a bit hard on my physics kids, and I'm making them do some assignments as a prerequisite to participating in the labs, but I've had lots of kids come in asking math and physics questions about topics very different from what I'm teadhing. While I'm happy that they're taking some responsibility for their own studies, I wish they'd at least try the problems I'm assigning to them. I'm also finding that many of them have big gaps in the knowledge that should be well-established. So those are the challenges I'm working with right now. I've got one month left in the school term, and then I get a big vacation where I hope I can get better organized for when I start teaching again. That's all for now. Siku njema, take care everyone.

2007-01-20T16:05:00.000+03:00

So, apparently the post didn't go through last time, I'll try again.

I never know what to say when I've got the time pressure on in an Internet cafe, so I've decided to try to write some blog entries on the computer at school and take them in on diskette. I remember bringing a disk or two to college. I never used them. I never thought I'd use them again, but hey, they work great for text files.

4.1.2007
I was supposed to start teaching yesterday, but I should have known from training that no one would show up to class. There's a strong cultural precedent of not hurrying back to school after holidays. I've only seen 1 of the other 3 A-level teachers (the O-Levels have break until Jan. 15). So, I opened the door to my classroom yesterday, but the students who were here were mostly studying in one of the other classrooms. A couple came to ask me some questions, which was nice and led to me giving a mini-lecture/sermon-on-the-benefits-of-factoring-polynomials to the 20 or so students studying. Today, however, they surprised me by actually showing up to class (I asked the 3rd-mistress, the highest ranking person who isn't traveling when she thought they'd start coming to classes, and her guess was next Monday). So, I gave the lecture I had prepared for yesterday and I've started working on the one for tomorrow. Apparently a quorum of physics students are here and they're OK with starting classes.
At end-of-term breaks, one of the reasons students are late to return to school is that their parents need to collect the school fees, which takes time. I've heard that many schools cope with this by giving the students who do show up on time chores to do (cleaning, gardening, etc.) so that the majority of students don't fall behind in the first week. This seems horrible to me. I agree that maybe it would be best not to teach new material since 80% of the students may not be there, but it really seems like they are punishing the students who come on time. I think, at my own end of term, I will try to have the students come to my class and we will have review problem sessions, which the kids (I'm told) are generally quite enthusiastic about.

I also hung some things on the walls of my office (a world map and a cut-up old calendar of American art that I found in my house). I'm amazed how much nicer it feels to do work there now. Next step is to get some things up around my house... Also in my office I set up a chess set that I found in my house, and already a student and a teacher have shown some interest in it, so I'm hoping I can teach some people some games. Many people here play what they call draughts, which is the British name for checkers (I think), but the rules are a little different, basically the kings have super-powers. I've only played once so far. I'm going to try to follow the example of the volunteer I shadowed during training and collect bottle caps for chips and teach a group of kids poker. I think it would be a good cultural exchange, and maybe help develop some critical thinking skills, which in general need all the help they can get.

I was just about to write about the lack of rain: it rained everyday I've been here until this past Monday, and aside from a tiny drizzle this afternoon, I haven't seen it rain since New Year's, except it just started now and it sounds heavy enough that I'll miss my umbrella--which I've been so good about keeping with me--on the way home.

I did get an answer to one of my questions about technology here: they do use oxen form plowing extensively, I just have been in the wrong places at the wrong times to see the heavy planting times, and now the little that's being done, I'm told, is done exclusively in the early morning starting before sunrise. Still no clue on things like washboards, clothes wringers...

More neighborhood observations starting with corrections about Ulanzi, the local liquor. Ulanzi comes from bamboo, and is extremely easy to get. You simply cut down a large bamboo stalk and attach a shorter, but slightly larger diameter, collecting piece of bamboo to catch the Ulanzi that will bubble out over the next 12 hours. Then you drink it. Not to talk to much about Evils of Society or anything, but there is one teacher who I have noticed by far more often than any other teacher in one or another of the local Ulanzi Dens (what I call them in my head, "bar" doesn't really seem to fit). The other day I found out he lives in the one house on campus that confused me. All the teachers have housing provided, but this one house is dingier than all the others. It doesn't have glass in the windows, only wood shutters, and the kitchen is a mud hut outside. I've been in now, and I think there's supposed to be a kitchen room inside that seems to be given over to a little pig and some chickens. His wife is very nice and gave me a cat to help me out with my rat--which ate my peanut butter!!!--and then gave me a bagful of tomatoes from her garden. They also have one of the cutest kids I've seen here, which is saying a lot. The kid insists is probably about 5 and insists on greeting me every time I walk by, which is generally adorable.

The cat is another story. It scratched me plenty when I tried to catch it, I ended up carrying it to my house in a piece of cloth.

5.1.07
So, the cat scared the rat plenty but was scared to death of me. As soon as I let it go in the kitchen it ran into a corner and then climbed up into the rafters. It wouldn't come done when I was there, even when I put milk out for it and waited very patiently. It then mewled pitifully whenever I left for the last couple days. It ran away this morning and went back to its mother. The rat was already back as of this evening, but I'm beginning to think the cat may be more trouble than it's worth (also I would have to cook for it, I did feel a little bad trying to feed it my left-over and rather spicy curry fried rice).

I had a pleasant surprise after class today, a couple kids came in to check out a textbook, and they took a good interest in the chess set, so I told them how to play and then coached them through a game against each other. I think they liked it pretty well, I hope they come back for another.

This morning was one of the most beautiful days I've seen in a long time. I was looking forward all morning to taking a nice walk in the afternoon, but by the time I was done teaching it was boring. It seems to be a rule that the sunnier the morning is, the more it will rain in the afternoon. Similarly, though rarer, it seems if it rains in the morning the afternoon will be nice. Anyway, it cleared up for a little in the early evening and I tried to do some actual exercise (really my first since hurting my foot in training). I'll blame my pitiful jogging performance on the altitude, I just hope I keep it up and improve. Anyway, I got back home just in time. I started cooking dinner and I heard the wind carrying me this sound which I realized the sound of the downpour on the aluminum roofs across the valley. About 10 minutes later it got to my house, and was quite impressive. Watching it come was gorgeous, as the sun was out too and the rain was very visible. I got a picture or two...

6.1.07
Today was another of those gorgeous mornings, and I was determined to take advantage of it (being Saturday). I did some household chores after getting up, packed my self a lunch (PB, honey, and banana sandwich. The honey I have is amazing.), and set out around 9:00. I've walked East for about 2.5 hours before, there's pretty steep mountains to the north, and the way south looks pretty boring (and roadless) for a while after the bus stop, so I decided to head West, trying to check out the path towards Lake Nyasa. I'd only been as far as Mlangali (about 45 minutes), so it was mostly new. It's very pretty, the rolling hills get bigger and bigger going towards the Livingstone Mountains, and the landscape is mostly cornfields or grass with frequent groves of eucalyptus and the occasional pine grove. It actually reminds me a whole lot of Northern California, though a little warmer in general.

I walked for almost 3 hours, and was about to turn around when I arrived at a village having some sort of celebration. I went up to check it out and was promptly invited to a seat with the village government, elders, and church officials (it was some sort of church-related event, I'm still not sure what exactly). Having a Mzungu (white person) at a celebration seems to add something, I suppose. Actually, they already had one Mzungu, Father Volker, who had driven in to preside and watch, and is planning on returning tomorrow to deliver a special mass for them.

There was lots of dancing, which I got some pictures of and later took part in, which everyone in the village LOVED. After I danced one song (not hard dances, step step step wait, step step step wait...) they gave me a drum and lots of smiles for that song, and then they gave me a flail/brush-like thing made maybe from the tail of some animal, which I waved around a lot but I'm still not sure waht I was supposed to do with it. Most of the music was either cassette tape (I think they were running a generator for the special occasion) or vocals with drums, but for a couple of the songs they brough out some of the most obnoxious instruments I've ever heard: bush kazoos. A couple of the women had short pieces of bamboo with a notch cut in the side and a piece of plastic rubber-banded on to one end which sounded just like a kazoo, and then some of the men had some small gourds with a notch in the neck that they blew through, the bottom half-chopped off to let the sound out, and the same pieces of plastic rubberbanded to the top, making bass kazoos. It was the first time I've heard kazoos in coordinated harmony, and was pretty cool, but it did sound like you would imagine a kazoo choir would sound like.

After the music and many long-winded speeches, there was a little feast in a community barn, and then luckily (because it was getting sort of close to dark) Father Volker gave me a ride home in his land rover. I got to learn a little more about him: he's a priest and Benedictine monk from Germany, and he's been here since the early 1970's. He said that Benedictine monks started Christianity in this valley about 70 years ago. He works with churches in 11 villages around Mlangali, as well as his big church in town. I know that he was instrumental in building my school in the late 1980's and in adding the A-Level buildings 2 years ago. He's also helping us build more classrooms now. I don't know quite how far-reaching his influence is. I've heard from a friend, Conor, who's site is about 25 km away (though a 2-2.5 hour bus ride... I haven't been there yet but I have pretty low expectations for the roads. That's an average speed of like 6 mph) that his mkuu (headmaster) got in a fight with some German Missionaries and chased them away. There are other German missionaries in the region, so I don't know if it's Fr Volker he's talking about. I'm looking forward to talking to Volker again, there's lots I want to know from him. When he started working here there was no AIDS epidemic, and though I haven't seen obvious evidence yet, it statistically must be pretty prevalent and I'm sure he has some experience.

Thursday, 11.1.07
I felt like a Peace Corps Volunteer Extraordinaire today. I organized a lab for my physics class, and after class about 6 students came to my office where a few of them played chess and the rest were looking at a couple world maps I had up (one was a great one National Geographic put out a few years ago of night satellite pictures, so you can see the lights of cities and fires and things) and talking about the world and asking questions about America and Tanzania and development. I think they may have been skipping another class to be there, but I won't worry about that just yet.
Also, I hung out it the staff room for a while and talked with a teacher who has been visiting his family for most of the time I've been here, and he seems pretty cool, I think I may get another good friend in him. I also got advice on the music stand I'm going to have made. I drew up some nice specs (taking Tools is coming in handy) and was going to go the the carpenter-fundi I've seen in town, but apparently there's a handy old mzee (old man) who lives near the school who will give me a good price.
I do have to say admit that my feeling of coolness came down a little with dinner. I steamed some pumpkin leaves and stalks with some onion and tomatoes--which has been on the menu for the last several nights running as I have a massive pumpkin vine--and instead of the rice supplement I've normally been accompanying it with, I decided to make some fried stuff. The onion rings turned out very well, the french fries were OK, I don't think I got the oil quite hot enough to really finish them well, and I also fried some cassava. I've tried several times to cook the cassava I was given, and I just can't do anything to it to make it taste good. Anyway, I ended up throwing out half of my dinner and eating a couple of bananas. The onion rings were great, but the grease on the french fries just started making me sick and I'm tired of the pumpkin greens. I think tomorrow I'll switch stuff up and do another little Italian food night.
Anyway, this whole week has been extremely busy. I've been trying to get some stuff done around the house (laundry, some more 'moving in') and I've been preparing about 1 hours worth of new physics material everyday (on fluid mechanics, which I've never studied--it's pretty cool), as well as trying to sort out what math homework problems to give, and trying to get some work together for my kids to do next week while I go to Iringa for AIDS training. And I was sick a bit in the beginning of the week, marking the fourth time I've had giardia in the past 20 days, though on the plus side I seem to be developing an immunity to it. Which is actually very nice, because it's really unpleasant. I have no idea how I managed to get giardia 4 times. The only two possibilities I can think of are that the drugs they had me take didn't really kill it off the first three time, or that somehow my drinking water got contaminated, so this time I re-sterilized my drinking water buckets and started reboiling and filter water.

Friday 12.1.2007
Today was a holiday, Zanzibar Revolution Day. Luckily, one of the other teachers mentioned it to me yesterday, so I slept in a little and didn't show up in the classroom at 730 expecting to teach. Instead, I did some cleaning in the morning and then climbed a nice little mountain by my house that I've been wanting to climb because there's a cell phone tower at the top which is what keeps me in contact with other volunteers and the little bits of contact with America I get. It's also a big mountain to the Southwest, so I was hoping I could maybe see Lake Nyasa from the top, but all I could see was the bigger mountains in between me and the lake.

Tomorrow, bright and early, I'm heading in to town to start making my way to the AIDS training I have for a week. To summarize life now, things are busy, which is nice for the most part, but two years still sounds like a much longer time than it did before. However, it's hard to believe that I've been at site for almost one-and-a-half months, making me 1/16 done.

Saturday, 20.1.2007
I've just completed my PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) training seminar. It took place in Iringa, which is, I think, my favorite Tanzanian city so far. It's up on top of a hill, very pretty, not too hot, not too big, but big enough to have a nice market and some very nice shops (very safi dukas as we PCVs semi-correctly call them) and some really cool things going on.

For example, we were lucky enough to meet a guy named Bill Lloyd (I'll post a link to his website when I get it) and his son, both from DC, who were in town for a couple weeks delivering 70 computers to schools in the area. He's started an NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) in his free time where he accepts donations of computers from a lot of sources, fixes them up, and gives them to churches, schools, and community centers in America, and now also in Tanzania (this is his second computer-bringing trip to Tanzania). He also is hosting a Tanzanian student in his house and takes him to the community college where he teaches IT stuff. We were thrilled to meet him, especially since he was so happy to identify people in country here who can help him find good homes for these computers. He was very happy to give me a good MS Office tutorial and some ethernet cables so, if I get a router, I could set up a nice little LAN.

Now, I think this entry may have gone on long enough. The week has been really motivating, now I'll have to see how well my time can be managed as I try to start a Health Club and start organizing computer activities in addition to all the teaching. Step 1: get a housegirl to cook and do laundry!

until next time,
Gregor

New Year is Here!

2007-01-01T10:29:00.000+03:00

So, on Wednesday I start teaching full time, it's the official re-opening of Form V. The first topic I'm gonna do in Physics, I think, is fluid dynamics, which sounds really cool--I've been reading a lot about it because I've never learned it before... Though I might start with some review of circular and harmonic motion, make sure the kids remember.

So, I should be teaching my butt off for about two weeks, when I have to interrupt to go to a PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) training, which will be nice to see people but a shame to have to take a week off teaching. After that again I'll be teaching like mad until mid-March, when I think the A-Level kids have a month-long vacation. Then, I don't know what I'll do as most of my friends are O-Level teachers who will be in the middle of the school year. It may involve a lot of bicycling.

I'm getting settled in pretty well at my site. I've begun working my garden, a little bit, which is being a nice food source of spinach-like greens and pumpkin leaves, as well as basil, parsley, and rosemary. I'm still under some pretty heavy mood swings, but sooner or later they'll subside. I hope. I think starting to teach lots will actually be about the best thing for me, being very busy means no time to be lonely.

I've been doing all my cooking so far, but a goal for this week is to find a nice mama who can cook lunches for me, because I just won't have the time to do that. I may even have her do a couple dinners a week--we'll see. That and my laundry. I have to say, doing laundry and dishes by hand in buckets is one of my least favorite chores ever.

So, that's how things are looking now, I thank you all for all the support you've been sending, it helps a lot.

-Gregor

And I'm there: site

2006-12-22T09:58:00.000+03:00

Hey everybody! Happy Holidays and all, I'm in my banking town for a couple days to do my banking and pick up all those things my house is missing, which is mostly spices. The two things I really want and haven't been able to find are some sort of cutting board (one of my friend's family had one in Morogoro) but no one here seems to have any clue why I would want something special to cut things on, and a little mortar and pestle for grindign spices. I may just have to have a carpenter make me a little cutting board and improvise the mortar and pestle. They must exist somewhere...

So it turns out the PCV I'm replacing left me with a ton of stuff. I started teaching very quickly, so it took me all of the last 3 weeks to really have a chance to go through all of it and find the goodies (e.g. a massive star chart! a hammock--if I can only find a good spot to hang it up) and separate them from some of the trash (IRS instruction from 2003, expired medical supplies). Anyway, it's been exciting.

Kind of exciting. Very interesting? Hmm. It's hard to describe. My first week at site was pretty miserable, I was really lonely and nothing was easy. I think I took some extra punishment for letting my homestay family take care of me in Morogoro, so I had to get used to cooking on a charcoal stove and other such things by myself. I've learned that to feel vaguely comfortable somewhere I really need to know how to get food, make food, and leave (getting on the bus and coming into town yesterday was like getting over yet another hurdle to feeling at home). Even just walking around in every direction, climbing the big hill to the South, walking to the road and a little beyond the the North, walking to the big church and big littlevillage to the West and to my closest PC neighbor about 5 miles to the East all have nurtured a slowly growing feeling of comfort.

Now, I can't publish openly the exactl location of my site, which probably includes my address, but I'm in the Souther Highlands region, and if you'd like my address just e-mail me and I'll be more than happy to get it to you. Or you can give me a phone call (text messages tend to work well): +255 752 122 810 is my number at my site, but here another line seems to work better so my alternate number is +255 786 229 772.

So, some news of my teaching: I'm lucky enough (I think...) to be teaching A-Level math and physics, which is the last two optional years of secondary school here. The kids begin to specialize in A-Level, so the courses of study offered by my school are PCB (Physics, Chemistry, Biology) and CBG (Chemistry, Biology, Geography). In addition to the three subjects of specialization, they take a General Studies course as well as BAM (Basic Applied Mathematics). So I am the only A-Level math or physics teacher here, which means I get to teach the 30 or so kids in PCB for physics and I get all 80-some kids at once for BAM.

For my first week I fit myself into the schedule that I think has been modified by some of the other teachers since the last volunteer left in October which gave me 12 40-minute physics periods and 4 math periods in one week. Now, however, the school is closed until Jan 3, and I've talked to the headmaster about balancing these periods a bit more, because the kids really need a lot more math than that.

The great benefits of teaching A-Level is that the kids are pretty highly motivated and are all quite bright--and generally speak English quite well. I also get to teach more fun stuff, we're working on derivatives right now in math and I covered simple harmonic motion in physics. A-Level is 2 years, Form V and Form VI, but my school recently opened A-Level so we only have Form V right now. Form VI will begin in March or April (I still don't have the calendar down very well), and I think before then I'm going to have to do a lot of work to re-learn lots of the Electricity and Magnetism is sort of botched my way through at Mudd.

My school also has a nice little computer lab (no internet of course) which they use to create school documents and such. No one is very competent there, but, unlike stories I've heard from many other volunteers, the people at the school are being very proactive in trying to learn and attempting to use the computer lab by themselves. So, in addition to my teaching, I'll also be conducting computer classes for students and teachers. The lab has power for about 2.5 hours each evening (the school has a generator), but apparently the school has a system in place where interested people can pay a little extra for the computer classes, the money being used to buy diesel for the generator.

I've also had one kid and one teacher show considerable interest in learning how to read and write music, so I may also start up some music classes. We'll see how much time I have... The old volunteer left me with a lot of coursework prepared for math, but the Physics is going to take a fair amount of preparation.

Anyway, that's gonna be all for this blog post. Miss you all.

-Gregor

p.s.
I'm updating my wishlist: there's very little need for flyswatters here. I think the nicest things to get are going to be sweets and edibles. Thanks to everyone who has written me, e-mails and letters are all greatly appreciated.

There!

2006-12-02T12:57:00.000+03:00

So, I've got a ton of news. Last Wednesday was the swearing-in ceremony and now I am a full Peace Corps Volunteer. Very early Thursday morning we left Morogoro and six other volunteers and I came down here to the Southern Highlands where our schools are. If you want more details on where I am, for paranoid security reasons you'll have to e-mail me.

I'm hanging out in my banking town for the weekend. I haven't been to my actual site yet, I'm told it's 2-3 hours away by bus. For now I'm buying things I think I might need, which is difficult since I'm replacing a volunteer and I'm not exactly sure what all she's left me. So far today I've bought a big bucket (70 L), some food in bulk, cleaning supplies, bug spray, and when this rain lets up I'm gonna get a little charcoal stove and make a run back the the (absolutely amazing) hotel to drop stuff off.

The weather here is great! It doesn't feel at all like Africa. A few people have commented that the town feels like a ski-town, maybe Lake Tahoe or something, though it's definitely bigger than that. There aren't big mountains around, just big rolling hills everywhere, but we are well elevated and there's even pine and eucalyptus trees, adding to a Northern California feel. It's also pretty cold at night, I'm sleeping under a nice blanket and it's the summer now! I even wore the sweater that I brought and thought I would never use a little bit last evening.

I'm feeling really lucky because I get to teach A-Level Math and Physics (there were only 2 A-Level teaching spots for the 39 in my training group). However, A-Level is on a different schedule, so I may start teaching about as soon as I move in. I'll tell you all about my site as soon as I can.

A bunch of PCVs in the area have been traveling in to greet us, which has been pretty fun (one even brought chocolate chip cookies), and I can't wait to see my site which is supposed to be gorgeous. I think there may be some mountains around there, and it's reasonably close to a big lake. As I've got some time to kill here I'm going to be very persistent about getting some pictures uploaded later today or tomorrow.

Also, due to the distance to my site, I'll warn that my Internet access is probably going to drop to once every 2 or 3 weeks or so. I'll still be really happy to get e-mails from anyone, I'll just be a bit slower in the replies.

Minorly Injured, staying close to home

2006-11-11T16:29:00.000+03:00

I am officially done with language classes! Three weeks ago my Kiswahili was at an "Intermediate Advanced" level, I'm hoping to move up to full Advanced at our final language test which is in 2 weeks. Until then, I'll be practicing. This week I go to "shadow" a real PCV for a few days. Unfortunately, possibly due to my injured ankle (I twisted it pretty badly last Sunday playing Ultimate Frisbee and now I'm supposed to not walk too much)I got placed with a volunteer who lives about an hour away from our training site. So, while most people get to go see some more of this beautiful country, I get to see a slightly different side of the same hills. I'm still looking forward to it a lot because training has gotten a little tiresome lately and this is gonna be a good time, I think.

Anyway, it's been a pretty slow week. I said goodbye to the classes I've been teaching (they seemed very sad to see me go, which was nice), and Friday we had a farewell party with the teachers where we introduced them to Nutella and Peanut Butter spread on some mildly sweet cupcakes that they're familiar with. It was a huge success. This week we're having training in a big group before heading off to our shadow sites and then to Dar for a couple days. And sooner or later I'll get to find out where I'll actually be going... Pretty exciting. I think just about the whole group feels very ready to get out there and start actually doing stuff. Now we're just in a tense state of anticipation...

Anyway, I've updated my Wish List (see the link in the sidebar) because I'm beginning to get some ideas of things I wish I had. There's also my new phone number,
which will take effect in a couple of days.

Big Game!

2006-10-29T11:14:00.000+03:00

About half an hour ago I got back from a trip to Mikumi National Park. The Peace Corps was kind enough to give us Saturday off, creating our first completely free weekend, so we organized a trip to the nearby park. It was AWESOME!!! We saw lots of impala and monkeys, some baboons, warthogs, zebra, water buffalo, wildebeast, plenty of elephants (with babies), giraffes, a couple crocodiles, and hippos. The hippo's didn't seem terribly hungry, though.

We also saw lots of cool birds. I think my favorites were the zebra or the giraffes. We took one drive around the park last night near sunset, and then one more this morning just after sunrise. Unfortunately, we didn't see any lions or cheetahs, but what we did see was really cool. It was also really nice to get out and have a break from things.

Recently, I've been playing my violin a bit. It's really nice whenever I do. My family enjoyed seeing me play, but they are not sure how to react. For them it seems to be a novelty. Awareness of music beyond hymns and what is on the radio is nonexistent. In the past week I've played for some teachers who live near me, and they liked it quite a bit, and I took it over to Jacob's house (another trainee... Hi Jacob's mom!)and played for his family. His baba liked it a whole lot and sang some hymns with me. I also brought the violin along on the trip which was a lot of fun for all of us.

I haven't reread my last post, but I think I made it a week ago when Idii was still undecided. The holiday turned out to be on Tuesday and Wednesday, so I got to teach my two double periods on Monday. The students now are taking a school-wide test, so I don't get to teach for my scheduled final week of teaching training, so I reviewed what we had gone over the previous week and gave them some practice problems. Class went very well, with many of the students successfully solving the problems, and I think understanding what they were doing. I had an observer in one of my classes, and he seemed impressed by how many students were making real attempts at the problems and were working together and such. It was a very nice final note to this small teaching segment.

I'm gonna cut this post off here. Feel free to leave comments if there's more stuff you want to hear about or if you have questions you'd like me to answer. Oh, and a note about pictures: I haven't yet been able to successfully upload any, sometimes the Internet is slow, sometimes the computer I get to use has an old OS that can't recognize my camera, and once the USB port was just broken. So, I will eventually get some pictures up, but as for now it's too much of a hassle and I don't have any fantastic pictures yet. I'll get there eventually...

Salama,
Gregor

After one month, a typical day

2006-10-22T12:38:00.000+03:00

I've had a request to describe in detail what a normal day is for me, so I'll try to do that in this blog entry.

Everyday, I get woken up at 4:45 by the mosque a couple houses down. At first, I would get up around then, but now I'm very good at sleeping through it, though it still wakes me up when it starts. It broadcasts the call to morning prayer through a megaphone speaker on the roof. There is talking and singing, mostly in Arabic, though sometimes there is some Kiswahili too, saying things like "Wake up your family and come pray." Ramadan is going to end either tomorrow or the next day, depending on the moon (like Groundhog Day, kind of), so I'm hoping that the mosque will be a little less enthusiastic when this month is over.

I get up to start my day around 6:15, and I brush my teeth and get my water for my morning bucketbath. Usually my dada (sister) has been up and put some water on the charcoal stove to warm up for me, which is very nice, so I pour that in my bucket and go to the hose in the courtyard (my family's only source of running water)to dilute it down to a nice temperature. I then go into the shower room and use the plastic cup with handle and pouring spout provided for me by Peace Corps to pour water all over myself (armpits are the only tricky part, but I've found a good technique), then I soap up and rinse off. This has only been awkward a couple of times when I've forgotten to bring the towel in the shower with me... but I haven't exposed myself to the family yet so everything's good. Either before or after the shower I also make a stop off at the pit latrine, which is 2 doors down from the shower, next to the cowpen. Then I go back to my room, get dressed in my clothes for the day (usually khakis and a short-sleeved button-up shirt), and go have breakfast, which is tea, a couple hard-boiled eggs, and bread with margarine and jam, or sometimes chapati, which is kind of like an omelette crossed with a crepe, but very greasy.

Then I ride my bike to school (it's a nice one, on loan from Peace Corps) to school, which takes 10 to 15 minutes, mostly uphill. The school has 5 classrooms for the students (3 for Form 1 (freshmen), and 2 for Form 2 (sophomores)), a teacher's room, and 4 unfinished classrooms. The most finished of the unfinished classrooms has been given to our training, and so the other 3 volunteers assigned to this school and I have our Kiswahili classes there whenever we're not teaching. We started teaching this week, and it's been pretty fun. The students seem to like us a lot, but it's very hard to gauge their understanding. All of their instruction is in English, but that only starts in Form 1, and before secondary school their English instruction is minimal. Also, they don't have textbooks, so they write down everything you write on the board verbatim, which can be very time-consuming. Teaching Form 1, I assume that the students do not understand English well, so they will only really be able to understand things that I write on the board, so class goes slowly. I am teaching Physics, because the school only has one Physics teacher, and there is another math volunteer at my school. The topic I'm teaching is pressure, which I did some good demos for. The first day I attached an extra violin string to my bag and to contrast how the same weight can feel different when held by a wire and by a nice wide strap, which I thought was a good introduction to pressure on solids. The second class I brought in a water bottle with holes poked in the side near the top and near the bottom, and the difference in pressure was easily apparent from the amount of water coming out of the two holes.

The first class I taught seemed to understand well and get very far, in the first 80 minutes I taught all my solid pressure material and I started on liquid pressure. The second class didn't get quite as far, and then the third class wasn't familiar with "area", so since pressure is force divided by area, that slowed us down a lot and I got to teach some math. I was looking forward to trying to re-gauge how well the first group actually understood this week, but there are holidays for the end of Ramadan, and next week the school is giving them examinations, so even though I'm supposed to practice teaching for the next two weeks, I may only teach 1 or 2 more 40-minute periods. Each class gets 3 physics periods a week, first a double period and then a single period, but the way my schedule worked out I teach 4 periods on Monday, and then one each on Tuesday and Wednesday. Last week I picked up and extra double period because the other teacher needed to go into town. It's hard to get more than a couple students to participate in class, and the speed class has to go can be frustrating. I used my single period to get the students to do an example problem, so I told them this, wrote up a problem, gave them about 5 minutes to copy it, read it, and started walking around to help them. The whole class appeared to be busy when I gave them time to write, but it was when I started walking around that some students began to write the problem, which will take them about 10 minutes to do before they will begin work on it. Then, other students will just stare at the board waiting for me to present the solution... sometimes I feel very ineffective, but the students really seem to like me as a teacher. I got ovations after 2 of my classes, and some of the Form 2 students tried to trick us into teaching them math instead of their normal math teacher. They told us as we were walking by their classroom that they were waiting for their math teacher (true, and as per usual here she was starting class about 5 minutes late), and that she hadn't been to class in 3 weeks (completely false). The other math teacher and I went to the teacher's room to offer to teach more if the school needed it, and the headmaster said that they had all their classes covered, and would tell us if they needed more help. Apparently, they just wanted us to teach them too, so our reputation mus be pretty good.

After school, sometimes we go into town, or sometimes we have a bigger meeting with about 16 volunteers to discuss teaching strategies or other issues. I'm always home before dark (about 6:30) because it's not very safe for me to walk around by myself after dark. I have dinner around 7:30, and spend the evening preparing lesson plans, studying Kiswahili, and talking with my family and occasional visitors. I take another bucket bath before bed, and usually read a bit and listen to some music on the iPod, which is a very nice way to end the day.

I've been at the internet cafe for 90 minutes now, so I'm going to call this post long enough and go back home for lunch. Also, I got my phone working (thanks for everyone who sent advice), so anyone who wants to can drop me a line or a text message at +255 71770 8150. Also, Saturday I got my first pieces of mail, thanks to those who sent letters, I'm working on replies.

salama,
Gregor

2006-10-03T17:14:00.000+03:00

So, I have been in Tanzania for about 10 days, and at our training site in Morogoro for just over a week. I'm staying with a small Tanzanian family, just a Mama and a 16 year-old dada (sister--who is actually my Mama's niece), as my Baba (father) works in Dar es Salaam. My days are extremely busy, and my Kiswahili is improving very rapidly.

The other day in class were writing sentences about our days, mine went something like: Kila siku msikiti inaamsha mimi saa kumi na moja kamili. Every morning the mosque (1 house down) wakes me up at 5 am. Getting up early hasn't been much of an issue because I'm normally exhausted at the end of the day and I go to bed around 9:00 or 9:30. We Peace Corps Trainees (PCTs) are spread around secondary schools in the area, 4 of us at each school. My school is out in the boonies and has 5 completed classrooms, and 2 that are under construction (though I haven't seen any indication of work being done). The week after next I will begin teaching Physics at this school, as they only have 1 physics teacher. I will teach here for 3 or 4 weeks during training to get some practice in before I go off to wherever I will go.

The food has been very good. My mama, I think, is very happy to have a son again--her youngest child and only son is at University in Iringa, 6 hours to the south. I normally have chapati, which is sort of like a crepe crossed with an omelette, for breakfast. Lunch and dinner can be lots of things from a cinnamon rice pilaf to various stew-like concoctions sometimes with boiled bananas or plantains. I haven't found anything I don't like yet, and the tomatoes (nyanya) are especially good.

Ummm, what else? I feel like I've been here for months already. I'm making good friends, and my language teacher is amazing. I haven't been too homesick yet, as everything is still new and exciting. I'm vaccinated against more things than I ever thought I would be. The staff is wonderful and friendly, and the medical staff is especially funny. My time on the internet is running low, so I'm going to wrap up this entry. I'll try to post a picture or two next week.

Who's in Tanzania?

2006-09-22T15:47:00.000+03:00

I'm in Tanzania. After about 26 hours of traveling, I arrived in Dar Es Salaam around 10:30 last night. Today's excitement has included a Yellow Fever immunization, as well as many many neat introductions. There are a couple of volunteers here at the end of their 2-year stay, and they have been happy to answer all of our eager questions.

My group is pretty neat: there are 41 of us, 3 are computer teachers and the rest of us are secondary school math and science teachers--so it's a group dynamic (nerds) I'm familiar with. One of our volunteers is on his third Peace Corps assignment, he first went to Iran in '67, and more recently to Samoa in '01. He says that he's going to "keep doing it until I get it right."

Tomorrow we go to Morogoro, which besides having a really cool sounding name, is supposed to be a lovely place. Dar, though I haven't seen much of it, is not the nicest of cities (though the weather seems better than Houston's, if only by a little). Morogoro on the other hand, is supposed to be quite lovely. It's about 200 km inland from Dar and is pleasantly hilly.

Tomorrow night will be spent in a hostel in Morogoro, but after that I will be living with a Tanzanian family until Nov. 29, when training ends. I can't wait to dig in to learning Kiswahili and see everything I possibly can.

Off!

2006-09-18T08:13:00.000+03:00

Here I am, with everything that I'm taking for the next two years. Two years, two duffel bags (one just contains a big backpack), a messenger bag, and a violin.

Wish List and Mailing Address

2006-09-15T21:58:00.003+03:00

Main Mailing Address:

Gregor Passolt
PO Box 666
Njombe, Tanzania

I'll probably get a letter from America around 3 weeks after it's sent. Packages are also welcome, but never with a high declared value (Under $10 should be good), and when possible padded envelopes are highly preferred.

Phone Number: +255 752 122 810

I'll appreciate mail more than you will ever know. All letters will be responded to.

WISHLIST
I still have months left, but it feels like nothing. I don't need anything but a good welcome when I come home.

The First Post

2006-09-09T02:04:00.000+03:00

In 10 days I'll be flying to Philadelphia, where I'll go through some brief orientation activities and get to know all the Peace Corps volunteers going to Tanzania with me. Then, on Sept 21, I'll go to a clinic to get jabbed by a lot of needles before getting on a plane for Amsterdam, where I have a very brief layover before an even longer flight to Dar Es Salaam.