Updates

Written Thursday, October 14, 2010

Last weekend I went to Dar to deliver something to my roommate before she left for South Africa for the rest of her vacation. While I was in Dar I met up with some of my friends and went to the Visa2Dance performance. It showcases dancers from all over Africa for three nights and serves as a reminder of how difficult it can be to get a visa just to perform in another country. I just went to the performance on Friday night, but it was fabulous. It was a really nice treat to see dancers from Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, and even France. Afterwards the four people I went with and I decided to walk for an hour across town rather than waste money on a taxi (four of us are White so the drivers were asking for really unreasonable prices). We saw one of our friends off at the end of our journey and continued on in a bus to a small eatery/bar where we just hung out and talked the night away. It was a nice and relaxing evening. Although I usually stay with my friend’s mother right in the city center, I decided to stay the night at my friend’s house since we were really far from town. I woke up Saturday feeling refreshed and spent the whole day hanging out at my friend’s house reading amazing books, drinking tea, and chatting. It was utterly amazing to be so relaxed. I haven’t felt that at peace in quite a while. Saturday evening we had a small dinner party in which we ate baked chicken and pilau (which is like dirty spicy rice and it’s exquisitely delicious). Dinner was great. We hung out for a while and decided to join up with our friend across town who was at a party to celebrate the Ugandan Independence Day (he’s Ugandan but studying here in TZ). The party was really fun because I got to listen to a lot of Ugandan music that I hadn’t heard before. I returned late Saturday night to my friend’s mother’s house where I usually stay and got up Sunday ready to go to the beach. Unfortunately, my ride was running very late so I decided to scrap plans and hang out with another friend instead. We went to a nice lunch together and even got to hang by the beach after all…although I didn’t get to swim it was still nice. I got dropped at the bus station thereafter and ended up having to wait an hour for my bus. When you get a ticket from the station they write the license plate number of the bus you’re supposed to ride on on the bottom of your ticket. I waited and waited and my bus never came! Another woman next to me shared the same problem so after an hour of waiting we decided to throw our luggage under another bus run by the same company and snagged two seats onboard. Luckily it wasn’t a problem. I arrived in Morogoro by the time it was dark and caught a taxi home. Since I was all out of water at the house I walked across campus and filled up two large jugs of water and then came home, made dinner, finalized my lesson plan for Monday’s classes, and got to bed early.

On Monday I woke up at 5:30am (my usual wake up time on class days now) and made it to school by 7am. I went to the secondary campus that I’d been teaching at the week before, come to find out by 7:30 at the beginning of my first period with my Form 1C class that they had been moved to the main campus down the road. By the time I made it there and found my classroom almost half of our class time had blown by, but fortunately I was able to teach for the remainder of class. I was totally awed by how much smaller, for one, and quieter, the class was on Monday. I came to discover that the week before what I had thought was just my previous Form 1C class was actually Form 1C and 1D combined. I now only had 40 some odd students compared to the nearly 80 or so I’d once had. My Form 1C students blamed the Form 1D students for being so loud, rude, and disruptive the week before. I couldn’t help but agree with them because they were angelically quiet and attentive during our lesson on Monday, even though I’d embarrassingly showed up a whole period late. That’s the thing when you start teaching at a new school – it’s really hard to learn about changes to where classes are held etc since you barely know what it normal protocol yet anyway. Luckily I asked some students at the secondary campus who turned out to be in Form 2 and they alerted me to the location change for the Form 1 students. Following class I went to visit the Head of my Department, Madam Safina, and spent some time in the Commerce office with her and four other female teachers at Moro Sec. Although I couldn’t understand much of what they were saying because they were all speaking in Swahili together, it felt nice just to sit there in their presence and at least feel somewhat immersed in my new staff room. We all drank tea and ate various traditional Tanzanian breakfast foods like chapatti (which is like very oily tortillas) and chipsi mayai (an omlette with French fries in it). After a while I introduced myself and chatted in English with Madam Safina and she even taught me some Swahili after all the other teachers had gone. I taught my second and last period of the day around noon. The class was as well behaved as I had remembered them being from the week before and we made great progress in class. When I finished teaching an hour and a half later Madam Safina escorted me through another shortcut from Moro Sec to Kilakala. Since it was sweltering outside by the time we went home we stopped at a little shop and got some fresh mango juice for only 200 shillings a glass (that’s a major deal!). Since mango juice is my favorite, I have a feeling I’ll be stopping there a lot on my way home. It turns out that the shop owner is also a neighbor of mine at Kilakala. The more time I spend here the more I realize that this really is such a small world. After spending about an hour relaxing and watching “Sex and the City” (which has become a nice relaxing ritual since my roommate left for break), Madam Safina invited me over to her house just across the way to hang out for a while. When I arrived she and some of her friends were watching a Tanzanian soap opera that was so bad it had me totally enthralled after only twenty minutes, haha. We watched the show until the T.V. decided to stop working, randomly. I played with Safina’s nephew and his friend. They’re just learning English and they can count to ten in English so far. Her nephew, whose nickname is Babu (“grandfather” in Swahili), brought out his exercise book in which he practices writing the letters of the alphabet. For some reason, he can never draw a successful “a” for the life of him, haha. I spent some time trying to teach him, to no avail, although I’m happy to say that he got how to write “b” right away. It’s funny how little accomplishments like that by others will make me, as a new teacher, so happy and proud, haha. I spent a few hours there and then retired to my house, made dinner, watched some “Sex and the City” again, and finished my lesson plan for Tuesday. So pretty much, I followed my new usual routine.

On Tuesday I taught both of my classes right in a row and then headed home right after. I was exhausted for some reason even though I’d gotten 8 hours of sleep the night before. I napped as soon as I got home for three hours and then made a lazy dinner of Annie’s macaroni and cheese (a special item my family had sent me weeks before). Since my last day of teaching this week on Thursday was Nyrere Day (a Tanzanian holiday) I didn’t have class. In fact, mostly everyone in Tanzania gets the day off. Hence, by Tuesday night I was free to let loose for the rest of the week and do whatever I needed to until next week’s classes. On Wednesday morning I woke up with an excruciating headache and a stuffy nose. And so it began – my first official cold in Tanzania. It hasn’t been that bad now that my headache has disappeared, but I’ve mostly been confined to my couch doing little else other than watching movies and drinking lots of tea since I got sick. On Wednesday I never even unlocked my front door from the night before because I couldn’t even make it out of the house. Luckily I didn’t have a reason to leave my house on Wednesday. I had enough food from shopping at the market on Monday and I had enough water – a rare occasion for me.

Luckily on Tuesday night when I was still feeling mostly fine my neighbor, who is a Form 4 student that my roommate and I have been tutoring in English, invited me to take water from the tap behind his family’s house. Ever since the water ran dry at Kilakala the tap outside our house hasn’t worked, whereas mostly everyone else’s tap works for an hour or so around midnight every night. It felt as if I’d struck gold Tuesday night because I filled up five huge jugs of water as well as a small bucket that I’d borrowed from Safina the day before. Usually I’m only able to fill up two previous jugs at a time and lug them all the way across campus by myself because 1) I can only carry two myself and 2) the water runs out of the only working tap on campus so slowly that it takes almost 8 minutes just to fill up one jug. Every time I got there with my water jugs there are usually at least 10 students crowded around the tap sitting on their buckets waiting to fetch water. I always get star treatment when I go to the tap because I have a higher status as a teacher compared to a student (so the students have decided). The students always take my buckets and jugs from me and put them under the tap as soon as I get there, no matter how many of them are in line for water. Since I already get special treatment and realize how fortunate I am to not have to wait, I’ve made it a rule that I only fill up two jugs at a time because I don’t want to be selfish and fill up 8 jugs and made the girls wait an hour just to get a bucket of water for themselves. It’s a highly political issue for sure, so whenever I can get water by another means and leave for time for the students to get water from that tap, I take advantage of it. I was so grateful to my neighbor for letting me take water…in fact I still am. It’s nice that everyone here is so neighborly and friendly. It makes me feel so much better being here when I know that I have really nice people who can be my allies in this new place to me.

On Wednesday night I couldn’t stay awake past 10pm. By Thursday morning I woke up at 7am, made some breakfast, watched some Sex and the City, and then mustered up enough energy to wash some of my clothes. Believe me, it’s no easy feat here washing clothes. I know I’ve spoken about how much time it takes before, but when there’s a water shortage and you need water for things like flushing a toilet, washing dishes, cooking, and taking baths, washing clothes drops way down on the list of priorities for water use. I’m embarrassed to say that since I arrived at Kilakala over a month ago now, I’ve only done laundry once at my friend’s mother’s house. I know it’s really not that difficult to go to the water tap three times to get enough water to wash my clothes, but it takes a lot of energy that I usually don’t have to psych myself up about washing my clothes here. It really is laborious. On Thursday I managed to wash just about everything that I’d brought with me to Tanzania, an impressive accomplishment considering my health. In fact, by Thursday I’d gotten even sicker and couldn’t walk around the house without a tissue in hand. Nevertheless, my headache was gone so I decided to stick out my illness and do my washing anyway. Now that it’s done, I have to say I’m glad I forced myself to do it. There’s nothing like having freshly washed clothes in your drawers after they’ve been lying in an ever-accumulating dirty heap on your floor for weeks and weeks. In spirit of washing my clothes I also cleaned the whole kitchen and bathroom. It feels good to be in a clean house. A dirty house is one less thing I have to worry about while being sick, so I can focus on getting better.