January Recap

WHERE DID JANUARY GO?

I can’t believe January is over and we’re already into the second month of the New Year. In all honesty, January seems like a total blur to me. I don’t know where January went!...As in, I’m not really sure what it is that I did in January that took up all of my time. I was in Dar for the first week of January living out the last whim of my holiday break. I attended a stellar New Years Party and spent a lot of time with Tanzanian friends of mine before coming back to Morogoro.

THE CHANGED ENVIRONMENT

I’ll admit that before I came back to Morogoro after my holiday you could say that I was a little more than anxious about coming back “home.” Before I’d left we’d been going on our fourth straight month without running water and everything was dead and dusty as all get out. Yet, once I made it back to Morogoro by the second week of January I was unexpectedly gloriously happy to return. I was absolutely floored by how beautiful it became almost overnight that it made it so easy to readjust. While I’d been away on holiday for five weeks in Dar and Zanzibar it seemed like a big wooly green monster had completely attacked Morogoro and left traces of greenery everywhere in its path. Absolutely everything that was brown and dead before I left had tripled in size and turned to shades of rich emerald and forest green when I returned. My entire front yard looked like an overgrown jungle, which as awesome at first, until my over-heightened sense of fear of accidentally stepping on hiding/possibly highly poisonous snakes got the best of me and I asked some students on the school campus to slash the grass down. Even without an overgrown lawn, Morogoro still looks rich with life. The bushes and trees have grown to their full potential and tons of fuchsia and bright yellow flowers have overpopulated the previously bare bushes surrounding our house. My 25-minute walks to school these days are now chocked full with images that now hold a level of life and vitality that I’ve never before seen in Morogoro. Even the people around Morogoro seem more vivacious and energized since I got back.

THE WATER FIASCO

Perhaps the biggest change I noticed when I got back to Morogoro, which might have single-handedly been responsible for most people’s mood boosts and the change in environment was that water had returned! In the weeks that I’d been gone there had FINALLY been rain showers in the mornings and evenings that restocked the water supply for our community and brought all of the foliage in our area to life. On my walks to school I was pleased to see water flowing in big lustrous gulps out of faucets I’d never before seen water coming out of in all my months living in Morogoro. I swear every the children were jumpier because of the renewed source of life. The things that had previously begun to irk me before I left for my holiday, such as little kids screaming “Mzungu” at me, didn’t seem to phase me at all this time around. Apparently the cure I needed for my adjustment to the community was just a little water running through Morogoro’s veins.

The joy of the replenishment of water was unfortunately short lived, however. Not all good things can last, of course. After having running water for a mere week-and-a-half at home, the evil water company disconnected our water pipes. In truth, my housemate and I had purposefully neglected to pay our water bills from September-December of last year because we didn’t have any water at all during those four months. We figured why should we have to pay for water service that we weren’t receiving…especially when the biggest threat the company could pose to us for not paying was to shut off our water supply that wasn’t even providing us with water in the first place. They wouldn’t be able to take away water that wasn’t already there. Well, our methods caught up with us in the end, unfortunately. Once we finally had running water again, we got what was coming to us.

As soon as they shut off our water I went directly down to the office (called Moruwasa) and complained that they turn our water service back on. They told me in order for them to turn our water back on I would have to pay our outstanding bills over the last four months. I said I was unwilling to pay for months of water that our house didn’t have and claimed that I should be excused from paying said amounts as such. Moruwasa’s response was that I should write a letter of complaint to the General Manager to see what the company could do for me. I wrote the letter on a Tuesday and was told to come back to the office on Thursday to see what the manager had said to my request.

When I went back on Thursday I was disappointed to find that the manager hadn’t even looked at my letter yet…apparently he spends about as much time out of the Moruwasa office as President George W. Bush Jr. did when he was in office, haha. I exchanged phone numbers with the man who had tried to console me that day and continued to bother him just about every day until the following Wednesday when I went into the office again.

This time I came armed with backup. I had asked Mr. Milango, the Deputy Headmaster of our school’s campus, to escort me to the office and help settle this dispute. Even if he couldn’t do anything about the amount of the bills, I at least figured that he could hasten the process of getting us water again since he’s fluent in Swahili and I’m not (even though almost everyone at the office spoke good English with me when I went by myself, I still felt like my argument would hold more weight with them if I had a native Tanzanian backing up my claims). When Mr. Milango and I went to the office we were disappointed to find that the General Manager had denied my request to be excused from paying the past due bills since, according to him, the amounts that we had been charged were the minimum amounts the company charges for services (e.g. using their meters) each month.

I was hugely disappointed and frustrated by his response, yet a ray of sunshine hit me when Mr. Milango discovered after looking at our water bills for November and December that the company had actually been mistakenly charging us double the amount that we owed each month for their water service ever since we moved into our house in July 2010. The General Manager hadn’t noticed this, of course. As it turns out, when the school campus decided to install personalized water meters to each of the teacher houses in the months before we arrived, the Moruwasa company had tagged our house at the institutional rate (which our host school pays) when it should have been tagged at the domestic rate (half the price of the institutional rate). When we pointed this out to Moruwasa during our visit, I asked if I could pay the adjusted balance. However, the lady we were talking to said I would have to write another letter to the General Manager requesting permission to do so before I could pay and they would turn my water back on. After not having water for eight days already, my housemate and I had exhausted our stored water supply and we were desperate to get our water service back as fast as possible. Since it took over a week for the General Manager to look at my last letter, I pleaded with the lady we were talking to to just let me pay the adjusted amount so the company would turn our water back on. She absolutely refused until, by some ironic grace of God, the man who had initially installed the water meter at our house (who had been silently listening to our conversation until now) vouched for me that the meter was for domestic use. Trumped, the woman let down her guard and conceded to adjust my bill. I was ecstatic…until I tried to finally pay and get out of there…the office where I needed to pay my bill had already closed by the time we finished arguing. Of course!

I rode home in the car with Mr. Milango with our campus driver completely exhausted and defeated. I had to return to Moruwasa the following day to pay the bill. I arrived at the crack of dawn on Thursday morning to swiftly pay my bill. For once the company stayed true to its word and sent someone to reconnect our water a few hours later. Yet, perhaps the most unfortunate thing from this whole fiasco was that by the time they reconnected our water…our water source had run dry…AGAIN! So, I’d gone through all that trouble to regain service that had once again disappeared. I guess you really don’t get what you pay for over here, ugh!

From last Thursday to Sunday my housemate and I struggled to survive without a drop of water. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to take a shower more badly in my entire life as I did during those last few days. I even made a desperate visit to our neighbors on Saturday to get one bucket of water so I could bathe. Fortunately I was given a bucket to console my frets. Now, since our pipes have been reconnected my housemate and I decided to leave our tap outside turned on so that incase water was available we would be able to hear it and collect water. In the past, when water had been scarce on campus, the only time when water was available was during the late hours of the night around 12:30am or 1:00am.

After heading to bed early on Sunday night to get a good night’s rest for teaching on Monday, my housemate woke me up at 1:00am to tell me that water was finally flowing out of our faucet outside! We were so exhilarated to finally have water that we proceeded to fill up 25 20-Litre jugs, 3 buckets, and one giant bucket with water until almost 2:00am. Hopefully even if the running water we once had doesn’t come back, we’ll be comfortable for a while living off of our buckets! Even though I was exhausted for school on Monday morning, it was so worth losing 45 minutes of sleep to collect all the water.

TEACHING

I should probably update you about what it is that I’m actually supposed to be doing here…which is teaching. In truth, the last three weeks of January that I was back in Morogoro I hardly taught!

The first week I was back we only had one staff meeting at school the entire week to determine a bunch of important stuff for the upcoming new academic year. Unfortunately, what turned into a 5-hour meeting was conducted completely in Swahili. Needlesstosay I was completely lost the whole time about what everyone was talking about. The Headmaster of the school ran the meeting and seemed to be asking his staff for feedback on different issues the school had had the previous year. I wish I would’ve known what they were talking about so I could’ve participated a bit. I left that meeting feeling a little more than overwhelmed and sort of excluded from the whole school agenda, but now it’s up to me to seek the Headmaster our on my own time to hear the English version on the lowdown I missed out on.

The second week of school I was sick for the first three days. Since my teaching schedule is front-loaded every week, I only had 6 periods to teach between Thursday and Friday when I was back at school (and healthy) again. Since I didn’t want to have two of my classes ahead of the other two, I decided to just do some fun activities in class to fill up my class time.

I chose to save the really important stuff I needed to cover for the following week. That is…until I found out the following Monday morning that there would be no classes the whole week. I found this out abruptly after I’d walked onto campus that morning. All I could see were swarms of students in little groups socializing and standing around not doing much. I ran into two of my colleagues, confused, and asked them why all the students were outside the classrooms. They informed me that all classes had been cancelled for the week because the students had to perform “cleanliness” instead to prepare the campus for the Form 6 (senior) graduation that was taking place on Thursday. I just had to laugh at not being able to have class…again…and started wondering when I would actually be able to kick off teaching this year’s syllabus to my students! Maybe better luck next year, haha. No, just kidding, but still.

And you know what’s funny and ironic about the Tanzanian school system – especially having to do with the fact that students barely have class because cleaning and aesthetics rank higher in priority than going to class and learning – is that every Tanzanian school I’ve ever been to here has confused the phrase “doing cleanliness” with the simple English word “cleaning.” You’d think that Tanzanians’ misunderstanding of this English concept might actually inspire them to have their students spend more time in school learning proper English as opposed to wasting time stirring leaves around outside, but things just don’t work out the way you’d logically think they should here sometimes. This is Tanzania, after all. Sometimes there’s no other reason for why things are the way they are here other than that’s the way things have always been.

Unfortunately since I was fritzing around with the Moruwasa company on Thursday last week, I was unable to attend the graduation. I’m actually bummed I didn’t get to go, but I heard from my students this week that it was a really nice procession. If there’s one thing Tanzanians know how to do really well, it’s to throw massive and over-the-top parties with so many frilly decorations your head doesn’t stop spinning until after you leave. They are an incredibly good time though! There are always lots of people dancing, cheering, and giving speeches to honor the good times. I’m surely going to miss Tanzanian-style celebrations once I leave here in June. And while you might’ve assumed that classes would’ve resumed by last Friday after the graduation, wrong again. The day was instead devoted to a huge party, or disco as parties are called here, which all of the students at school attended. Although I was curious what such a disco at my school would look like, I purposefully neglected to go. Earlier that week when I had run into some of my students “performing cleanliness” (AKA just standing around) on campus, a few of my students had made special efforts to ask me if I was planning on going to the disco on Friday. Although I wouldn’t usually think much of my students asking me to attend, it seemed that all my male students in particular were asking me if I was going. Weary of perhaps having things turn awkward on Friday if I’d gone and danced in front of my students, or vice versa, I decided against going. Later on this week when I asked my students how the disco had gone they said that a lot of fights broken out between students, probably because of typical boy/girl issues that consume most high school aged students. In retrospect, then, it’s probably better that I didn’t go. I’m not sure how much authority I would’ve had trying to chaperone in the first place.

When I went to school this Monday I was relieved and excited to finally start off a fresh full week of classes! Now that I’ve been teaching for a couple days, I’ve realized that I missed teaching a lot more than I’d expected I did. Although it’s still quite challenging trying to get all 50 of my students in each of my four classes to listen to me for an entire 80-minute period, my classes have been going well. All of my students are familiarized with me at this point and really enjoy the lessons I prepare for them. I try to make my classes as interactive and engaging as possible to stimulate my students’ minds, especially since I know most of the time my students just get to passively sit and listen to their other teachers lecture for full periods. The Tanzanian educational system glorifies lecturing as the ideal way of teaching students what they need to know. Coming out of American education, I prefer to take a more hands-on and messy approach. For as long as I’ve been at Morogoro Secondary my students have been positively responding to my style of teaching, so I’m going to continue to try to keep things lively and engaging for the rest of the time that I teach in Tanzania.

Perhaps the coolest makeover my teaching career in Tanzania has undergone this new academic year is that my students have asked me to be the Chair of a new English Club that they’ve started. Every Monday after school ends at 2:30pm I meet with a mixture of students from all four of my classes for the club. The students chose to call the club, “The Union of Students in Worlds.” I think it’s a pretty nifty and inspiring name. When I met with the students for our initial meeting two weeks ago they told me a range of topics they’d like to cover during our meetings for the rest of the year. Their interests ranged from learning more information about diseases and health issues pertinent to Tanzania to how they can connect with other students from nearby schools about issues that are important to them. They also want to plan how they can help orphans and help change the Tanzanian environment for the betterment of all kinds of people. I know they’re rather naïve and idealistic, but in truth I feel absolutely blessed to have such courageous and outstanding students who really want to make a difference. Really, I’m almost blushing our of pride now because of how ambitious they are. These are the students who are going to change the face of Tanzania for the future. I’m so privileged and happy to be a part of their early creative-thinking process for how they’ll bring about change.

For our first official meeting this past Monday, I brought in copies of a book I’d been given upon my time of arrival in Tanzania. The book was complied by a Tanzanian organization that interviewed young adult Tanzanians in 2008 about how their lives had been affected by HIV and AIDS. The book is a compilation of six different stories based on people’s stories, which are translated into both Kiswahili and English. I had the students take turns reading aloud the English version of the first story during the meeting and then went over what the students had learned from the story. Overall the meeting went really well and all the students enjoyed reading the story. I had nearly a dozen students after the meeting ask if they could borrow copies of the book so that they could finish reading the book at home. In fear of losing all my copies if I let my students take them home, I told them I would bring them to our meeting again next week instead so we could continue where we left off. When I leave Tanzania I plan to leave the books with the school so that other students will have opportunities to read them and learn truthful and up-to-date information about HIV/AIDS in Tanzania.

Those are all the updates I have to share with you now. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more information about what I’ve been up to. Thanks SO MUCH for reading!