Friday, February 11, 2011

Every Day Is a Roller Coaster When You Live in Tanzania

Written Thursday, February 10, 2011

I had a really up and down kind of day today. My day started off well. I drank coffee for the first time in ages and got a pretty good buzz off of it this morning. I taught my first class. Class went fairly well. Students participated a lot and really understood the lesson. I used colored chalk for the first time and it dyed my hands green and blue. I looked like a frog when I left class, haha. I washed off my hands and went to the staff room.

In the staff room I spent time with a fellow teacher of mine named Maryam. She is very nice. She taught me Swahili for about half an hour and schooled me on some really important stuff. Since I arrived in Tanzania, every time somebody told me a really high price for something, I would say “Chizi sana,” which I thought just meant, “That’s a ridiculous price.” I came to find out today that when you say “Chizi sana” to someone it’s actually a huge insult to that person and is taken to mean that you’re calling him or her mentally disabled. Oops…me saying that in the past might’ve caused some epic misunderstandings. I learned a more polite way to say that a price is absurd instead. I also get random men on the streets here calling me “Mchumba” a lot, which means “wife.” As a matter of principle, I always want to call back to them, “I’m not your wife.” Maryam taught me how to say that today too, which will surely come in handy. After my mini Swahili lesson I was in a good mood because I was making good connections with my colleagues and really felt like part of the staff. It’s nice to feel included in the staff here finally, especially since in the past I’ve often felt shut out from staff bonding by default because every speaks fluent Swahili faster than I can process. In the staff room I even shared basil tortilla chips I had made the previous night and brought for lunch with the other staff members, who seemed to enjoy them. After hanging around the staff room for a while I had some time to kill before my last class (the last periods of the day), so I walked to town with Maryam.

While in town I went to the Oasis Hotel where I use wireless Internet. I’ve been there every single day for the last week since I figured out how to connect to the free wireless server rather than having to pay for the one I’ve been using since I moved to Morogoro in September. While at Oasis I experienced a weird shift in mood. I got to talk to my sister online, which was comforting, but it also tugged on my heart strings a lot. I never realize how much I miss my family until I get to talk to them. I also felt a little anxious at Oasis after checking my email. Since I applied to a job on Monday, I’ve been anxiously awaiting an email reply from the employers about possibly getting an interview for the position. I know it’s only been about four days since I submitted my application, but I’m really excited to hear back. Adding to my anxiety was the fact that I finally got an email reply from a Career Counselor at my old college which I was expecting to receive on Monday instead, which gave me feedback on my resume and cover letter that I ended up submitting to the job on Monday. Even though I edited my resume and cover letter and had multiple people look over them, in retrospect I wish I had waited a few more days to get that feedback first. After seeing that feedback, I’m now more anxious about not hearing back from the employers. As I was stressing about that job opportunity, I also started wondering what it is I really want to do after WorldTeach ends. Do I really want to move back to America and work in Boston and live with my friends? Do I want to stay in Tanzania and explore opportunities to live in Dar es Salaam, where I’ve wanted to live for a while now? Do I want to get a job that will allow me to be moving around and traveling all the time? I really don’t know what I want. I feel like the different parts of who I am are telling me to go in different directions all at the same time and I can’t make up my mind about which direction I want to choose yet. I wish someone could almost make the choice for me, even though I know I ultimately have to make that decision on my own. For the hour and a half that I was at Oasis I browsed jobs in Dar es Salaam and tried to find information about different NGOs that operate in the area that I might be able to work for. I left Oasis feeling a bit overwhelmed and torn.

As I walked back to campus for my last class, I had a really unsettling confrontation with a Tanzanian man. As I was walking, he approached me from behind, walking faster and faster until he caught up with me. He was shoved up against me, almost close enough to brush shoulders with me, which made me really uncomfortable. Although I’m used to having men cat call me and try to get my attention here, especially wanting to talk to me, I felt a certain degree of uneasiness about this man in particular. He kept saying really quickly, “Salama?” as in “Are you peaceful?” I said yes and tried to ignore him so he would take the hint that I wasn’t interested in talking to him. Unfortunately he began getting more aggressive with me and almost pushing into me said over and over again, “I love you. I love you…” I felt like he was going to attack me based on his uneasy tone of voice. Since I had my computer with me, I wanted to avoid an attack as much as possible. It’s very rare that I ever feel threatened by men here. Most of the time I just feel annoyed, but this time, on high alert, I immediately turned around while this guy was mid-sentence and found comfort in the fact that there was another young Tanzanian guy walking behind us about 15 feet away. I stopped dead in my tracks, turned around, walked toward the guy and said, “Naomba msaada,” to him, which means, “I would like help.” I asked him if he would walk with me for the rest of my route to school. He could see how nervous I was and agreed. He walked alongside me for the last five minutes to school, while the man who’d tried to talk to me before followed right behind our heels continuing to get my attention until I reached school. As soon as I reached the campus I let out a huge sigh of relief that nothing had happened and thanked the guy who had escorted me.

When I returned to school I found some of my male students sitting outside the classroom. They noticed that I looked frazzled and asked if I was okay. I told them that some random man had been harassing and following me on my walk back to school from town. One of my students sweetly asked me if I wanted him to go find him and beat him up. Haha. Little kids are charming sometimes, even though that student is pint-sized compared to the man he would’ve been up against. I politely declined his offer with a slight laugh. Noticing that there weren’t any girls around, I asked the boys where they were. They told me that all of the girls in their class had gone to the main campus (I’ve been teaching at the other school campus this week where the older students usually study because they’re taking their national exams this week at the main campus where I usually teach my students). The boys told me that all of the girls were required to go to the main campus to get an annual pregnancy test that is required by the school. I was a bit taken aback because surely if the school makes the effort to invest in enough pregnancy tests for about 500 girls then there must be a rather high probably that at least some of them are pregnant. All of my students are definitely no older than 15 years old, so it was a bit devastating to hear this. I think it’s a positive thing that the school is trying to make sure the girls are tracking their pregnancy status, but the fact that the school offers no support or counseling for them after they receive their test results really frustrates me. I can’t imagine being that young and finding out that I’m pregnant at school, only to find out that the school won’t provide other resources for me to take care of myself. Not to say it’s the school’s responsibility per say to take more responsibility for girls’ pregnancies, but I would think that if the school was going to put in the initial effort to test the girls that it would also think about treatment options for the girls after they find out their results… It further irks me that there seems to be all this accountability forced on girls partaking in sexual behavior here by making them take pregnancy tests when half the reason any of them would end up pregnant in the first place would be because a guy got them pregnant. It seems unfair that the girls are rushed off for pregnancy tests, forced to face the results alone, while all of the guys on campus treat that amount of time as just another free period. It seems to me that if Tanzania wanted to decrease rates of teen pregnancy then it would address both parties involved in teen pregnancy – that is, girls and boys. Why not use the time in which it takes girls to get tested during school to have someone educate and talk to the boys about responsible sexual behavior and the risks of pregnancy and getting sexually transmitted infections/diseases? Even if the boys were mostly disenchanted about having a session like this, at least Tanzania could’ve said that it tried to educate its children to become more sexually responsible…

Anyway, while I was processing all of these thoughts in my head, my female students started turning back up onto campus, most of whom seemed to be acting normally so I was somewhat relieved. As they returned I entered my classroom and prepared to teach my lesson. My last class went well and picked up my mood quite a bit. As part of the lesson I chose students from the class to write sentences on the chalkboard that practiced the grammar I had just taught them. When they do that I usually have them read their sentences to the class and then I repeat them, louder, and make any necessary corrections. Knowing this, the students purposefully wrote Swahili names that are particularly hard for a non-native Swahili speaker, like myself, to pronounce. I swear one of the names had almost 10 syllables! It was fun trying to pronounce the names for the class though. I said them slowly and delicately, trying to pronounce them as accurately as possible. I was more than willing to try because it gave my students an opportunity to see me struggle with the language in which they’re most comfortable with, whereas it’s usually the opposite circumstances. I think it built up their confidence knowing that, even as their teacher, I also struggle to learn a new language, just as they sometimes struggle to learn and pronounce new English words. It taught me a degree of humility about teaching a second language, which I greatly appreciate. I believe it’s always good when your students can see you as just as much of a student as they are sometimes. It reminds them that the learning process never ends and that even adults whom that they look up to face similar challenges they experience when learning another language. The rest of the class went smoothly and I headed home after class ended.

On my way home I noticed that I couldn’t see clearly out of my left eye. When I got home I realized, unfortunately, that I just got my third case of pink eye since arriving in Tanzania eight months ago. For someone who’s never had pink eye in her life until coming to Tanzania this year, getting it three times in eight months is quite alarming, at least to me. I immediately took out my contacts and threw on my nerd gear (what I call my glasses), a bit discouraged. Although I absolutely enjoy running on my road almost every day after school, the incredibly dry and dusty road continuously gives me problems with my eyes. In a way, although it will be gloomy most of the time, I can’t wait for the rainy season to start so that the dust gets packed down and stays out of my eyes, especially when people driving dangerously fast who whoosh by me while I’m running. That’s the worst – when a torrential cloud of dust flies into my face at high speeds after a car’s just got zooming past me. May I just say, let it rain, let it rain, let it rain…

When I got home today I made heart-shaped sugar cookies in preparation for the up-and-coming Valentines Day party my housemate and I are hosting at our house this weekend for our fellow WorldTeach volunteers and some of our other friends. The last time we hosted a party for our WorldTeach pals was for Halloween. We made a bunch of crazy decorations, such as spiders made out of black trash bags and paper chain ghosts and pumpkins, and hung they up all over our living room walls. It’s been three months since that party and we still have those decorations up on the walls. In spirit of our Valentines Day festivities, my housemate and I are going to make V-Day-themed decorations to replace our old spooky ones. Hopefully we’re all feeling the love by the time the party rolls around this Saturday. Since there aren’t many things to do in Morogoro, it’s fun to have everyone come together once in a while to celebrate while we’re still all together in Tanzania. This could very well be our last holiday-themed party before we all live in either May or June.

For dinner tonight we made homemade pizza. I made the dough and we topped it off with a ton of veggies and lots of cheese. The pizza was absolutely delicious! After dinner we watched the movie from the 1990s called, “What About Bob?” starring Bill Murray. It was really funny and helped to keep my mood elevated for the rest of the night. While we were watching the movie the electricity went out, but it fortunately came back on when we were brushing out teeth before bed.

I’ve been having the worst time trying to fall asleep tonight, hence why I chose to write this now. My mind is racing with too many thoughts and I can’t process them all. I’m busy thinking about my future career and what I’m going to do after when I finish volunteering for WorldTeach. I can hear our neighbors outside rustling around filling buckets with the water from their outdoor tap. Since there’s a water shortage on our school campus, our school controls when water is available from our taps. For some ridiculous reason, someone decided to only make water available between midnight and 2am every few nights. Why they couldn’t make water available to us during normal daylight hours so we wouldn’t have to lose sleep over getting water is beyond me…perhaps they think we’re less likely to use up as much water as we please if water only flows in the wee hours of the night. It’s a clever way to try to conserve the water supply, but it doesn’t make it any easier for us to get by. Our house’s outdoor tap is usually quite fickle and even when water is literally rushing out of our neighbors’ taps ours only offers a weak trickle. I went outside a few minutes ago to turn our tap on and put a bucket under it to wait and listen for flowing water. It just came on now, but when I went outside to check the level of flow, there was only a weak stream of water coming out of the spout, which is disappointing to say the least. Since I’ve been writing this I’ve gone to check the water three more times and the bucket is still only about 3 inches full of water after all this time. Now that I’m tired, I decided to postpone my effort to get water. I just turned off the faucet and took the bucket inside. I suppose I’ll try again to collect water tomorrow night. For now, I’ll try again to sleep. Hopefully my thoughts will dissipate and my mind will be at peace enough to fall asleep.

4 comments:

  1. Megan,

    Kwanza kabisa ningependa kukushukuru kwa moyo wako wenye mapenzi na Africa. Nasema hivyo kwakuwa naamini kuwa Mmagharibi yeyote anayekwenda Africa, mara nyingi huwa na hamu ya kujifunza juu ya bara letu.Kwa hilo nakushukuru. Ila tatizo moja nililoliona katika maelezo yako ni kuwa umeelezea madhaifu mengi zaidi ya Tanzania kuliko mazuri yaliyopo. Kwa mtaji huo naona huu ni mwendelezo tu wa tabia ya wamagharibi kuipondea Africa. Hata mkiwa na mazuri ya kueleza juu ya Afica mtafanya juu chini kueleza uozo.Ademas, hay cosas que has contado que no son correctas.

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  2. Haha, That is Tanzania for you. You survive there, you survive most places in this world. Good luck to your future career.

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