I don’t think I’ve ever feared for my life as much as I did last night when I was coming back to Morogoro from Dar-es-Salaam! I’d gone to Dar on Friday to spend the weekend with friends and experience a change of scenery from Morogoro. I wanted to milk my weekend in Dar for all it was worth, so I decided not to leave Dar to go back to Morgoro until late Sunday night. After all, all that was waiting for me in Morogoro to rush home to last night was just a good night’s sleep. Usually when I head back to Morogoro I don’t arrive at the Ubungo bus station in Dar any later than 5:30pm, especially since Sunday nights in particular are really hectic at the station with everyone trying to head back to Morogoro at the end of the weekend. Last night, however, I wasn’t able to make it to the bus station until almost 6:30pm. By the time I arrived there with my friend Nora (also from Morogoro), we were disappointed to find that the most reliable bus services that I’ve always used to go back and forth to Dar were completely filled. Since Nora is fairly new to Tanzania and it was her first time at the bus station in Dar, I decided to take charge.
A man approached us and suggested that we take an Islam Express bus back to Morogoro. Although we were pretty desperate for a ride back, I couldn’t help but scoff in the guy’s face…the last and only time I took an Islam bus it sat idly in Morogoro for three hours (during which time all the other bus companies’ buses were zooming towards Dar one after the other) and then it took four an a half hours to travel to Dar. The bus was so worn down that it could barely make it up the hills. We even had giant lorries weighing a couple of tons passing us even on the smallest inclines. Hence, I declined the man’s sales pitch to take the Isalm Express bus last night. Hence, we were left with one option.
To the right of the lines of parked buses that had just arrived from Morogoro sat a small minibus whose khonda was yelling for passengers wishing to go to Morogoro. It looked fairly empty, but the khonda insisted that the bus was leaving “sasa hivi” (soon). If there’s anything I’ve learned since being in Tanzania for nine months now, it’s to not take someone’s promise of “soon” too seriously. Soon could usually mean even 8 hours from now! Although Nora and I felt pretty skeptical about the reliability of the transport, we hopped on the bus anyway and hoped for the best. That was at 6:30. An hour later we still found ourselves sitting on the bus waiting in the parking lot. By that point a few other people had joined us on the bus. By the time it hit 7:30 I joked with Nora that we’d be lucky to even leave by 8:00. Sure enough, somehow we managed to start moving at 7:57. That felt like a real confidence boost…until we got rammed in the rear end literally two minutes later by a bus behind us just as we were pulling out of the parking lot! Luckily no one was hurt, but our nerves went through the roof. The driver and khonda freaked out and stopped the bus mid-intersection in front of a long queue of angry drivers going in the opposite direction who were impatient to make it out of the congested traffic. I don’t think I’ve ever heard so many horns hopelessly beeping at once before! It was almost deafening. By the time the men got out of the vehicle the bus that had hit us had already taken off at warp speed, trying to avoid accountability for the accident.
Nora and I couldn’t help but laugh anxiously as we wondered what would happen next. It was already 8:30 and it would still be a lengthy three-hour’s drive back to Morogoro once we officially got on the road. We were contemplating the wisdom of our decision to take this bus after all and were seriously considering hopping off in the next 15 minutes and finding a place to stay for the night in Dar if we didn’t go anywhere anytime soon. Just as we were talking about that option, the driver and khonda climbed onto the bus again and started up the engine. Just as our nerves were beginning to settle down, we randomly stopped on the side of the road to pick up more passengers apparently hoping to make it to Morogoro that night as well. Our bus acted more like a local daladala for quick transport than a bus going three hours away. As the people came onto the bus they really caused a racket, unapologetically pushing and shoving each other to win a spot to stand in the bus aisle. Fortunately Nora and I were towards the back of the bus so we didn’t feel the immediate effect of the jostling. As soon as we took off again Nora and I let out another sigh of relief, but our attempts to stay calm were interrupted by all of the passengers who starting yelling at this one lady who’d just gotten on. As the argument escalated, Nora and I sat back googley-eyed trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Before we could register the turn of events, the driver stopped and the khonda opened the door and shoved the woman out of the bus and onto the street. Yelps and whoops of satisfaction echoed from end to end of the bus as we drove onward.
At this point Nora and I were seriously considering getting off the next time the bus stopped, if and when that was. But by about 10 minutes later we’d conceded to just stay on the bus, as we were heading out of town at a hefty speed and away from any place to stay in the city center for the night. Yet, it was literally impossible to settle into our seats and get comfortable for the hours ahead. For one, the driver had deliriously decided to play traditional Tanzanian bongo flava music at an incredible volume…it was so high that the bus was literally vibrating to the base beat of the tracks. Everyone around us began to get restless and tried to yell at the driver to turn the music down. Nora and I couldn’t even hear what each other was saying and we were sitting right next to each other! (Rather) fortunately, because Tanzanian roads aren’t the best and the tracks were being played off of a CD, the music would skip every time we went over the bumps. Aware of this, the whole bus teamed up against the driver to play a verbal version of whack-a-mole. Every time the CD would skip everyone would yell out at once, “Punguza sauti!” (Reduce the volume!). Eventually everyone’s complaining took its toll on the driver and he agreed to turn the music down. So things started to look like they were getting better, again…until the man next to me perked up and started trying to talk to me.
Although I never caught his name, he tried to make sure that I would pay attention to him for the whole night. He looked fairly young, like he was just out of college like me. Although he appeared rather normal, clad in jeans and a button up shirt, he was holding a plastic packet filled with two shots of Konyagi – the local spirit (or gin) available in Tanzania. That’s right…you can get shots of alcohol in little tiny plastic packets here when you’re on the go! The guy had an opened one in his hand that he was sipping from and another unopened one on deck resting in his lap for when he ran out of the first (or that might’ve even been his third by the rate way he was talking). Although it’s common to see men drinking at bars and pubs with their buddies here in Tanzania, I’ve never seen a man so openly drinking alcohol during something as anticlimactic as a bus ride back to Morogoro. Haha. I guess everyone has his or her coping mechanisms for long bus rides. They are rather boring, so I can’t really blame the guy. I wouldn’t have minded him drinking so much if his behavior hadn’t been so disruptive. When it reached past 9:00pm, most of the bus was visibly and audibly exhausted. There were barely any people talking and mostly everyone had his or her eyes shut trying to sleep…except for the guy next to me. He had the urge to call literally everyone he knew on his contact list and talk at an obscene volume. I’m sure he didn’t realize how loud he was talking because he was drunk, but there’s no reason why he needed to be yelling when the whole bus was quiet.
That’s a funny trend here…I’ve observed that there’s very little phone etiquette in Tanzania, at least compared to the American standards I’m used to. In America people make sure to silent their phones during important meetings and they’re usually fairly quiet and considerate of others when they need to talk on the phone when other people are trying to sleep on a bus. But in Tanzania most people never silence their phones during meetings or at other times (like at night on a bus) when it should be quiet. Even some of my colleagues pick up their phones mid-teaching instead of silencing their phones or waiting to call back later. What’s more is that people insist on yelling into their phones here, no matter what, as if the people on the other end of the line can’t hear them hardly at all. In America if someone screamed into his or her phone everyone would look at him/her like she was crazy!
Anyway, back to this guy. Not only did he call his entire phone book and scream into his phone, he also insisted on chatting me up for about an hour into the bus ride. His balance was off so I got a horrible whiff of his konyagi-breath too many times to feel comfortable about. Haha. It really was bad though. And at the speed at which he was talking, it took forever for him to get out what he was trying to say. On a positive note, he did speak very good English so at least he was slurring words in my native language so I had a 50% higher chance of trying to translate them than if he’d been slurring words in Swahili. Haha. But if I were to add up the entirety of the words he spoke to me in that hour, another – sober – person speaking at a normal rate could’ve managed to say all of them in less than ten minutes. As annoying as it was, it was also incredibly, fantastically, absurdly and wildly hilarious. Nora and I could barely hold ourselves together from laughing at this guy. At one point I tried to go to sleep, or at least pretend to, by resting my head on the back of the seat in front of me. Really I was just trying to avoid having to talk to the guy next to me. While I was “resting” the guy tried to talk to me, so Nora, awake and semi-alert, insisted to the guy that he needed to be quiet and not disturb me because I was sleeping. I couldn’t help but start laughing. I tried my best to do it as unnoticeably as possible, but Nora could see that I was laughing and started laughing too…which only triggered the guy to ask her why she was laughing at him...and as he proceeded to get angry I only started laughing more. It was a great cycle…and probably the best increment of the trip. Eventually the guy drank himself into a stooper and ended up falling asleep on the other lady next to him who was in a deep slumber herself.
Just as I actually started to doze off, I was jolted awake suddenly to the sounds of horns and the swerving movement of our minibus as we avoided a near-crash with an oncoming car. Throughout the whole trip our driver had actually chosen to drive at an incredible dangerous high speed. We could have easily been going up to 90 mph at some points and I’m definitely not exaggerating. The driver wanted to get us to Morogoro fast, albeit the total trip took us a whopping 5 hours by the time we arrived…2 hours more than it usually takes! Surely he had no worries about putting everyone in the car in severe danger while he was driving. At the moment of the near crash everyone bolted into alertness and cursed out the driver for nearly killing us all. For as far as he was driving, we would’ve all surely have died in an instant. Nora and I could only exhale out of panic and thank God that we’d chosen to move seats before the trip started. When we’d initially gotten seats on the bus we were seated right behind the driver. I can’t even imagine having more fear than I had when we were sitting right in front of the last row of seats where we ended up sitting for the journey, but I bet it was 10X scarier for everyone up front.
After that near-death experience, the driver ignored everyone’s requests to slow down and still insisted on driving like a mad man. He drove at menacing speeds all the way to Morogoro. By the time we reached the bus station in town I swear I almost collapsed from happiness…and exhaustion from being so tense the whole trip…but we still had a ways to go before we got home. A few other women, Nora, and I decided to stay on the bus a little bit longer because it was heading into town. We figured we could save a few bucks on a taxi back to the house by getting a ride out of town rather than all the way from the bus station. Clearly we weren’t thinking properly, because after getting rammed in the back by another bus, then barely missing hitting an oncoming car, we had another near-death experience shortly after we took off from the bus station. As we rode through town and the familiar images of town started to make me feel all warm and gooey inside about being home again, we ended up approaching a train that was just crossing at the intersection we were heading toward. Since the driver had seen the train from at least a half a kilometer away I figured we wouldn’t have to worry. Well, that’s not true. The driver kept pumping his brakes (just for fun or out of boredom?) until we were literally centimeters away from the speeding train passing in front of us. Nora and I actually leapt out of our seats slightly from fear. The front of out bus seriously seemed like it was about to get creamed by the train! Fortunately that didn’t happen, but just because it didn’t materialize doesn’t mean it made us any more satisfied.
As soon as we made it off the bus with all of our limbs attached a few minutes later, be both looked at each other with unexplainable degrees of relief plastering our faces. Even though we didn’t say anything, we knew just what each other was thinking – thank God we’re alive!! Fortunately we didn’t even have to walk four feet to get a taxi back to our house. As we rode up the hill to our house we were both spooked into silence from the crazy ride we’d just had. When we got into the house we couldn’t help but shake our heads in misbelief about how many times we’d barely escaped the clutches of death. I may sound overly dramatic, but we really were in danger. Too many people die in Tanzania every year because of poor driving…and all of those people’s deaths could be avoided if only people were a little more careful on the roads.
Perhaps the funniest kick to my story is that when I went to school today and told my colleagues that I got home from Dar-es-Salaam at 12:00 last night they all asked me how I got home at that time. After I told them I took a taxi they shook their heads and scolded me about how dangerous it is to take a taxi at that time of night. It took all of my energy to keep from laughing, since the moments during the taxi ride back to my house were perhaps the most calming, satisfying, and peaceful moments of my entire trip back to Morogoro! On the safer side I just nodded my head and said that it was a foolish idea and decided to keep the more dangerous aspects of my trip back from Dar to myself!
All in all, I’m happy to be alive and breathing – normally – today!
Monday, March 21, 2011
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Spanish Club!
Yesterday I led the first ever Spanish Club meeting at Morogoro Sec. after school. I founded the club after some students asked me if I knew any Spanish. After taking Spanish from 8th grade through my first year of college, I know quite a lot of Spanish...or at least I did. After a 5 year drought in studying, my brain is almost vacant of any knowledge of Spanish anymore. However, I still thought I would give it a shot. Besides, it's usually easy to relearn a language you knew when you were younger.
Before the meeting I had to look up beginning Spanish, just to reorient my brain into Spanish mode instead of Kiswahili mode. It's quite funny because when I initially arrived in Tanzania in June of last year, I couldn't help but think in Spanish. I think it's common for people who go to a country with a new language to default to trying to speak a second language that they know. Somehow thinking in Spanish when I got to Tanzania made me feel like I fit in more, even though Spanish has no use here. Since June 2010, however, I've slowly been replacing my second language competency with Kiswahili instead of Spanish. I now think I know and can speak more Kiswahili than I can after all those years of taking Spanish, but being immersed in a place for as long as 8 months can have that effect sometimes.
About 20 students came to the meeting, in addition to two student teachers who are currently practicing teaching at school this month in order to get their teaching degrees from the Morogoro Teacher's College in a few months. All I can say is I had an absolute blast. It was such a role reversal - being the Spanish teacher rather than the Spanish pupil in the classroom. All of my exposure to Spanish thus far has been dominated by me being on the student side of the equation. I taught everyone the Spanish alphabet and put emphasis on the vowels and special consonants that sound different in Spanish than in English or Kiswahili.
It's actually really useful to know Kiswahili and English when teaching Spanish because you can make a lot of connections between Spanish and the two other languages to help students understand Spanish better. Spanish is like Kiswahili in that the vowels are pronounced in the same ways (except for "y") and the language is phonetic, meaning (*almost) everything is spelled the way it sounds. Spanish is also similar to English in that English differentiates between male and female subjects and many Spanish words look and sound very similar to English words. Whenever I would try to explain a concept or word in Spanish, I would try to have my already bilingual students draw on their knowledge of Kiswahili and English to understand the material better.
After explaining the alphabet I taught the students about words that have stressed syllables and accents. It was so fun to pronounce these words together. I would pronounce a word overenthusiastically in Spanish and the students would try to repeat it as best as they could. It was a hoot! I nearly laughed as much as I taught. They could tell how excited I was to be teaching Spanish and picked up on my energy as they responded just as eagerly. After that I taught them about the gendered nature of most Spanish nouns and adjectives. I finished the first lesson by teaching them useful greetings in Spanish that they can use to practice on each other for the next week until our next meeting on Tuesday.
Overall I'm really looking forward to my next Spanish Club Meeting. It's incredibly fun to teach something other than English here for once. I mean people can tell just by looking at me that I teach English. If you're White, everyone assumed you can only speak English and not Kiswahili. Also, there's such a weird power dynamic with teaching English here, as a White person esepcially, since English is the language of the colonizers. Although it's now almost a necessity to teach students English so they can function in a world that's technologically growing and undergoing globalization at exponential rates faster than any of us can really trace, I still feel weird about it sometimes. It never feels purely genuine to be a volunteer from American who teaches English here, since English has such a nasty historical background in Tanzania. That's why I looooove teaching Spanish here.
Teaching Spanish has no such unsettling effect. It's just super fun. And the purpose of teaching Spanish here is purely for fun and for the sake of learning and gaining knowledge, not so much for practical uses (like with English), since Spanish is not spoken at all in Tanzania. Nevertheless, I'm going to continue to teach Spanish every week on Tuesday and hopefully have a wildly fun and hilarious time with my students who really love to learn. As a teacher, there's nothing I would ever want more than to reward my students who have a pure passion for learning for the sake of learning by teaching, hence I'm more than happy to teach Spanish!
Before the meeting I had to look up beginning Spanish, just to reorient my brain into Spanish mode instead of Kiswahili mode. It's quite funny because when I initially arrived in Tanzania in June of last year, I couldn't help but think in Spanish. I think it's common for people who go to a country with a new language to default to trying to speak a second language that they know. Somehow thinking in Spanish when I got to Tanzania made me feel like I fit in more, even though Spanish has no use here. Since June 2010, however, I've slowly been replacing my second language competency with Kiswahili instead of Spanish. I now think I know and can speak more Kiswahili than I can after all those years of taking Spanish, but being immersed in a place for as long as 8 months can have that effect sometimes.
About 20 students came to the meeting, in addition to two student teachers who are currently practicing teaching at school this month in order to get their teaching degrees from the Morogoro Teacher's College in a few months. All I can say is I had an absolute blast. It was such a role reversal - being the Spanish teacher rather than the Spanish pupil in the classroom. All of my exposure to Spanish thus far has been dominated by me being on the student side of the equation. I taught everyone the Spanish alphabet and put emphasis on the vowels and special consonants that sound different in Spanish than in English or Kiswahili.
It's actually really useful to know Kiswahili and English when teaching Spanish because you can make a lot of connections between Spanish and the two other languages to help students understand Spanish better. Spanish is like Kiswahili in that the vowels are pronounced in the same ways (except for "y") and the language is phonetic, meaning (*almost) everything is spelled the way it sounds. Spanish is also similar to English in that English differentiates between male and female subjects and many Spanish words look and sound very similar to English words. Whenever I would try to explain a concept or word in Spanish, I would try to have my already bilingual students draw on their knowledge of Kiswahili and English to understand the material better.
After explaining the alphabet I taught the students about words that have stressed syllables and accents. It was so fun to pronounce these words together. I would pronounce a word overenthusiastically in Spanish and the students would try to repeat it as best as they could. It was a hoot! I nearly laughed as much as I taught. They could tell how excited I was to be teaching Spanish and picked up on my energy as they responded just as eagerly. After that I taught them about the gendered nature of most Spanish nouns and adjectives. I finished the first lesson by teaching them useful greetings in Spanish that they can use to practice on each other for the next week until our next meeting on Tuesday.
Overall I'm really looking forward to my next Spanish Club Meeting. It's incredibly fun to teach something other than English here for once. I mean people can tell just by looking at me that I teach English. If you're White, everyone assumed you can only speak English and not Kiswahili. Also, there's such a weird power dynamic with teaching English here, as a White person esepcially, since English is the language of the colonizers. Although it's now almost a necessity to teach students English so they can function in a world that's technologically growing and undergoing globalization at exponential rates faster than any of us can really trace, I still feel weird about it sometimes. It never feels purely genuine to be a volunteer from American who teaches English here, since English has such a nasty historical background in Tanzania. That's why I looooove teaching Spanish here.
Teaching Spanish has no such unsettling effect. It's just super fun. And the purpose of teaching Spanish here is purely for fun and for the sake of learning and gaining knowledge, not so much for practical uses (like with English), since Spanish is not spoken at all in Tanzania. Nevertheless, I'm going to continue to teach Spanish every week on Tuesday and hopefully have a wildly fun and hilarious time with my students who really love to learn. As a teacher, there's nothing I would ever want more than to reward my students who have a pure passion for learning for the sake of learning by teaching, hence I'm more than happy to teach Spanish!
Thursday, March 10, 2011
My Tanzanian Life Lately
WRITTEN WEDNESDAY MARCH 3
On Sunday, February 27, I went to another teacher’s house for lunch with her family. Her name is Madam Maryam. She teaches Swahili at Moro Sec with me. She’s an incredibly sweet lady and I really like spending time with her. She has 9 kids – can you believe that!? She has two sets of twins, a group of triplets, and a couple single children as well. She is originally from Zanzibar. Two of her sons live in Zanzibar with her parents and the rest of her kids live in Morogoro with her and her husband. Her husband is also very nice. When I went over her kids were very shy. They all attend English-medium primary schools, hence they already know English quite well. Maryam was trying to encourage them to talk to me and ask me questions in English about where I’m from etc., but the kids were so shy that we barely got to converse. I can understand where they’re coming from though. It’s very unusual to see a White person where they live so I’m sure they’re not used to talking with an Mzungu. Maryam’s youngest kids are twin boys who are only nine months old. While I was over I spent most of my time playing with them in the living room.
I spent a lot of time cooking as well. Maryam and I prepared traditional Zanzibarian food. I made this stuff called Mandazi, which has a mixture of mashed potatoes, onions, green peppers, carrots, and spices inside. You mash everything together into small balls and then dip the balls in a flour/water mixture with another Zanzibarian spice and then fry them in oil. They were really tasty. Maryam also made Chapati (like flour tortillas but made with more oil); a stew with potatoes, beef, veggies and other great spices; and boiled bananas in coconut milk. Everything we ate was homemade. I even had to ground the spices by hand! It was really fun and rewarding to eat a genuinely home-cooked meal. Everything tasted great and by the end of the meal I was totally stuffed. We ate the meal on the floor in the living room, which is how Maryam’s family usually eats. We sat on straw mats that were placed over the carpet so we didn’t get the floor dirty.
After the meal Maryam invited me to go to the Muslim University of Morogoro (MUM) with her. Maryam is a part-time Swahili teacher at MUM and had to go to correct students’ grades before their final exams begun. Maryam is a strict Muslim, as is her entire family. In fact about 90% of the people from Zanzibar are Islamic, just like Maryam. In order to go to the MUM, all women must cover up by wearing hijabs. Maryam let me borrow a hijab. When we first walked out of the house I felt really uncomfortable because I’ve never worn a hijab before. I felt uncomfortable primarily because I felt like an imposter wearing the hijab. I am not Muslim and I felt like it was insulting the Islamic faith by wearing one and pretending to be Muslim. Yet once Maryam and I went through the University gates, I experienced a total shift in mentality. I had gone from feeling like I was completely sticking out in society like a sore thumb to feeling like I completely blended in and was anonymous. The shift in setting was really comforting. I mean, of course people could still see my face and could tell that I’m White – and I was the only White person I saw while I was at the MUM – but at a distance I looked like every other Muslim girl there. It was a really mind-boggling experience. I sat with Maryam at the University for a few hours as she helped her students. Afterwards she and her husband dropped me off in a taxi at the Oasis Hotel where I was supposed to meet up with a girl named Nora.
When I arrived at the Oasis Hotel I instantly felt uncomfortable again because I was still dressed in my hijab. I felt really self-conscious because I go to Oasis almost every day and I have never once worn a hijab there before. I actually met Nora wearing the hijab! She was sitting right by the entrance because her phone hadn’t been working and she figured she could just sit by the door and spot me when I came in. After we met I went upstairs to her room and changed back into my Western clothes and then met her for dinner on the lobby patio. I found out Nora was coming to Morogoro a few months ago when her friend, whom I met once in Dar es Salaam, told me that she was coming to Morogoro to work for 5 months. As soon as I met Nora we instantly clicked. Although she’s only been in Tanzania for five days, she’s very worldly (she’s spent time in South America and India) and we share a lot of the same thoughts and opinions about traveling, living, and working abroad. Nora and I had a really nice meal together and got to know each other quite well. In fact, I invited Nora over on Monday night for a home-cooked meal since she’d been eating out for five days straight.
On Monday I had three classes at Morogoro Secondary, I held my club meeting with my students after school, picked up my February stipend and did a bit of shopping in town, then I had Nora over for dinner. Overall it was a really good day and I felt really happy when I went to bed.
On Tuesday morning I discovered that my wallet was missing 50,000 shillings from the money I’d had left over form my stipend that I picked up on Monday – which is a sixth of my entire month’s stipend! :(! I recounted everything I bought on Monday and couldn’t figure out for the life of my why I was missing 50,000 shillings. I traced my actions from Monday and realized that the only people who could’ve had access to my wallet without my knowing were two neighbor boys who came over on Monday night to watch movies in the living room while I cooked dinner in the kitchen. I was really disappointed that they might’ve taken the money, especially since once of them comes over all the time and I’ve never had a problem with him taking anything from me – not even 2,000 shillings! When I walked to school Tuesday morning I felt really uneasy and messaged the boy’s mom asking her if I could talk to her in the evening and ask her a question (namely if her son took my money). She ended up inviting me over for dinner that night.
On Tuesday I taught all four of my classes and went to Oasis to use the Internet for a while after work to help Maryam make an excel chart of her students’ grades from the MUM. I got home just in time for dinner at my neighbor’s house. I went over there feeling worried about what she might say when I asked if her son had taken my money. When I asked her, she was very surprised and immediately called her son in to talk to me about it. He assured his mom and I over and over again that he had not taken the money. This kid is only 6 or 7 years old so he’s pretty young. He’s been nothing but sweet ever since I met him and he always comes to the house to color and watch movies. He’s always been well behaved so it seemed really out of character for him to take something. His mom was really serious with him and even made him cry.
Things got even worse, too. Here in Tanzania, being a thief is one of the worst things people be in society. Most Tanzanians pride themselves on being honest people who would never take things from each other without asking. Hence, if you are caught as a thief here, people punish you severely for it. It is not uncommon for people – especially good people – to turn extremely violent and beat the crap out of a thief. In their opinion, no matter how brutal their beating can be, it’s better that they beat the thief themselves than tell the police and send the thief to jail (according to them a thief would be treated even worse in a jail…). Some people here even condone burning thieves alive for their crimes. In fact, when I was on my way to Kibiti one time to visit one of the WorldTeach volunteers there, I saw a huge crowd of people gathered around a man on the side of the road in a small village we passed through. All of the man’s limbs had been tightly tied up in rope and he was left helpless on the ground. I suspected he was a thief and was going to be seriously punished for his actions – even burned alive. So you see, being a thief here is no light matter.
When I asked the boy if he’d taken the money and he insisted that he hadn’t and didn’t know anything about it his mom proceeded to beat the living daylights out of him, smacking him really hard with her arm to get him to confess something. I could tell even five seconds into the beating that he really was innocent. I felt so terrible. I can’t even describe to you what it’s like to see a little kid get beat when he’s screaming for his dear life. I’ve never heard a child scream like that and frankly I’m disgusted and disappointed with myself that I brought that beating upon him. What’s worse is that the boy and his mom went to go see the other little boy who had also been at the house on Monday and his mom. When we were there I sat passively on the couch while the two boys stood at attention, almost like they were in a military camp, while their mothers talked in nearly incomprehensible fast Swahili at them trying to get their sons to tell them where the money was. Both boys cried their eyes out saying they didn’t know anything. Instead of listening to them, their mothers thought they were lying. They took the two boys into the next room and got a stick from outside and proceeded to beat the two boys’ bottoms with the stick with their shorts down. I’ve never witnessed anything more horrible in my entire life and I swear to God I just wanted to throw up and tell them to stop. The mothers had this look of evil in their eyes as they beat their sons. It didn’t look like they had one ounce of remorse when they were finished. The boys were completely humiliated and in total shock. They’ve been beaten before, for sure, but that doesn’t make getting beat any easier – especially since they know what they’re in for. I cannot stand that beating people here is such a commonplace punishment. It’s just human abuse and human cruelty in my eyes. I think you can surely get someone to confess to something without beating the shit out of him or her. I’m still in shock myself at what I heard. I say heard because when they mothers took the boys to the other room to beat them I couldn’t even stand to watch it. I sat utterly terrified in the other room, paralyzed with fear and hating myself for what was going on. In Tanzanian society, 50,000 shillings is a ton of money and it’s even a fairly standard month’s salary for some Tanzanians. When I think about it, I should just forget about the money and make do with the 200,000 shillings I have remaining for this month. I should be grateful that whoever stole the money didn’t take all of it so I would at least be able to get by for the rest of the month. After all that happened and all the punishments that were doled out, I never even found out what happened to the money and now I frankly don’t care anymore. Finding out what happened to the money isn’t worth someone else getting beat up over, even if that person was guilty.
After the terrible fiasco on Tuesday night, I immediately went to bed when I got home because I just wanted to get all of the gut-wrenching sounds and sights out of my head. I woke up Wednesday morning feeling sick with the start of a cold. My throat was all itchy and scratchy and it was hard to talk. I decided instead of forcing myself to go to work that I would tell my supervisor that I wouldn’t be able to come into work on Wednesday. I took the day to relax at home and set my mind straight again. Maryam came over to visit me and I helped her start to apply for a job as a full time Swahili teacher at the MUM. We have arranged an agreement where I will help her improve her English (she’s nearly fluent) and she will help me improve my Swahili. She especially wants to learn how to write a research proposal and report. We came up with a schedule together of when we’ll meet to exchange ideas about our languages. A friend of hers, Swabra, who is also interested in learning English came over to pick her up. We arranged that she’ll also come three days a week to learn English. In addition, I have already been teaching another woman a couple days a week…so now I have three people to tutor in English! All of a sudden my life has gotten crazy busy. I’ll see how I can handle all the extra work. If it gets to be too much, I’ll just cut down my sessions.
WRITTEN WEDNESDAY, MARCH 10
I’m happy to report that by that Friday I felt well enough to return back to school. When I was at school that day another teacher told me that I would have to come into school on Saturday to invigilate three Form 3 exams during the morning session. It’s not like I had plans for the weekend, but still I was sort of bummed to have to come into work on a Saturday. On Saturday I arrived at work at 7:00 sharp (a teacher even made a comment about how weird it was that I was so punctual…what can I say…I’m American! Haha). I invigilated the three exams from 7:30 to 1:30. For each of the exams I had to hand out the tests and answer sheets, watch the students to make sure they were quiet and didn’t cheat, and also staple all of the students’ papers together when they were finished. Since there is a shortage of staplers at the school, it was sort of humorous trying to find a stapler for the end of the periods. Teachers would pop into each others’ classrooms trying to hunt down a stapler they could use. It seemed like a game of whack-a-mole with everyone chasing after staplers that kept disappearing. In addition, at one point during my second exam it started down-pouring like crazy outside. In between my second and third exams I had to return to the office to drop of the completed exams and pick up the new ones for my final session. I got totally soaked even from running in the rain for only 20 ft! Although I was rather cold and wet for the rest of the time at school, I actually found the rain really refreshing and calming. When I finished my last session I dropped off the papers at the office and to my surprised delight I received a payment of 5,000 shillings for helping invigilate. It’s not much, but 5,000 shillings can actually get me a ton of fresh fruits and vegetables from the local market, where mostly everything is between 100 and 200 shillings a piece.
After finishing up at school I went home to relax for a bit until I had a tutoring session at 4:00. My student, Veronica, came with her son, Junior (I seriously thought that was a name people only heard in movies these days! Haha), and I taught her for about two hours. While I was teaching her, her son, who can’t be more than 4 years old, insisted on begging for our attention the entire time. He kept banging on dining room table where we were seated with whatever he could grab in reach. He even started playing with a pair of light up bunny ears that my housemate had gotten for Halloween last year. He was using them to play with the kitten and also tried repeatedly to put them on him mom’s head, which he could barely reach even when she was sitting. It was sort of a crazy session. For as rambunctious as her son is, Veronica is insanely calm and a wonderful student. She did really well with the lessons, despite her son’s attempts to veer her attention towards him, and I’m looking forward to continuing to teach her. I just need to find a safe way to entertain her son while we’re trying to learn!
Saturday night Nora and I attempted to go out to dinner at a local Tanzanian restaurant called The New Classic (which is actually a humble hotel) that serves traditional Tanzanian food. At such local places, you usually have the choice of getting ugali, ndizi (bananas), wali (rice), or chips (french fries with nyama (meat – usually beef, which is ng’ombe), mboga mboga (vegetables), samaki (fish), or kuku (chicken). No matter what you order for your main dish, you’re almost always served a side dish of maharage (beans cooked in a yummy coconut sauce) and a scrumptious red sauce that you can pour over your meal. The funny thing is that even though all of those things are on the menu at these local eateries, that doesn’t guarantee that all of those options will be available all of the time. In fact, by the time Nora and I reached the restaurant at 8:00pm, most of the food was finished. When we arrived at the restaurant it was very crowded with local Tanzanians. As is common custom in Tanzania, our waitress sat us at a table that already had someone eating at it. Maximizing places to sit for customers ensures that restaurants will earn the most money they can. Nora and I sat down with an older man who was eating ndizi samaki (bananas and fish). When we both saw his meal we got the craving for the same meal, but when we ordered the waitress just said, “Meisha” and “Hamna” – meaning that the ndizi and the samaki was “finished,” or that they were out of them. Disappointed, Nora and I settled for rice (the only starch option) with the sides of maharage, sauce, and a little bit of spinach. As we ate our meager meals we sipped on fresh mango juice (delicious!). It was pretty funny because the way Nora and I were seated was such that Nora was facing one of the walls of the restaurant, which had a large mirror covering it, and I was sitting to her left side, also facing a mirror from the adjacent wall farther off. Although we maintained a great conversation throughout the meal, Nora couldn’t help but laughing at how awkward and hilarious it was to watch herself eating across from her as she tried to talk to me. I thought it was funny, too. While the restaurant had cleverly tried to make the small space seem larger with the mirrors, they had quite a weird effect on its customs, or at least on us. We finished out meal and grabbed a taxi home, reveling about funny quirks in Tanzania and how Nora felt she was getting along here so far, after her first week in Morogoro.
On Sunday I took it easy the whole day until I had another tutoring session at 4:00pm. This time I met with Swabra. Like Maryam, Swabra is a very strict Muslim and wears the full hijab whenever she is out in public so that only her eyes appear among a plethora of black robes. Even when she came inside the house, she only lifted her face veil so that I could just see her face. She also came with one of her kids named “Shakir,” whom she calls “Shakira” (which I totally love because it makes me think of the awesome pop star!). Unlike Junior, her boy (who is only 2 going on 3) was incredibly quiet throughout the whole session. He even ended up taking a nap right on the table where I was teaching Swabra at one point, haha. I’m sure the image of Swabra and I, with her kid face down on the table, would’ve looked pretty funny to other people if they’d been there. Swabra did really well her first day and I’m looking forward to tutoring her more in the future. I actually find it extremely empowering teaching her since many Islamic women do not usually get the opportunity to become educated as much as men. I’m more than happy to empower her with a basic knowledge of English!
This past week I’ve been teaching as usual at school. I’ve put a lot of focus on doing really interacting, engaging, and critical thinking exercises with my students. Too often they just sit in the classroom passively and listen to their teachers lecture. I want to show them that learning in school can be through many different means. I’ve had them complete several brain teasing activities this week. For one exercise I gave them a definition of different words that all had their first and last letters missing and they had to use the definitions to help them figure out what the full words were. I also taught them about anagrams and had them try to complete ten of those. For my last lesson of the week, I tried to incorporate a drawing activity into my lesson plan, since creative drawing skills are heinously underutilized in schools here. I drew a picture on the blackboard that only half of the students in each class were allowed to see. They had to copy the picture I drew and then describe it to their partners in English using a wide range of vocabulary. The goal was that the students would be able to describe their pictures so well that their partners would be able to draw similar (or exact) replicas. The activity went fairly well and I think the students really enjoyed the opportunity to use their English vocabulary in a creative way. As I continue to plan my lessons for the rest of my time with WorldTeach, I hope to incorporate more critical thinking exercises that encourage students to use a wide range of thinking, writing, drawing, reading, speaking, and listening skills.
On Sunday, February 27, I went to another teacher’s house for lunch with her family. Her name is Madam Maryam. She teaches Swahili at Moro Sec with me. She’s an incredibly sweet lady and I really like spending time with her. She has 9 kids – can you believe that!? She has two sets of twins, a group of triplets, and a couple single children as well. She is originally from Zanzibar. Two of her sons live in Zanzibar with her parents and the rest of her kids live in Morogoro with her and her husband. Her husband is also very nice. When I went over her kids were very shy. They all attend English-medium primary schools, hence they already know English quite well. Maryam was trying to encourage them to talk to me and ask me questions in English about where I’m from etc., but the kids were so shy that we barely got to converse. I can understand where they’re coming from though. It’s very unusual to see a White person where they live so I’m sure they’re not used to talking with an Mzungu. Maryam’s youngest kids are twin boys who are only nine months old. While I was over I spent most of my time playing with them in the living room.
I spent a lot of time cooking as well. Maryam and I prepared traditional Zanzibarian food. I made this stuff called Mandazi, which has a mixture of mashed potatoes, onions, green peppers, carrots, and spices inside. You mash everything together into small balls and then dip the balls in a flour/water mixture with another Zanzibarian spice and then fry them in oil. They were really tasty. Maryam also made Chapati (like flour tortillas but made with more oil); a stew with potatoes, beef, veggies and other great spices; and boiled bananas in coconut milk. Everything we ate was homemade. I even had to ground the spices by hand! It was really fun and rewarding to eat a genuinely home-cooked meal. Everything tasted great and by the end of the meal I was totally stuffed. We ate the meal on the floor in the living room, which is how Maryam’s family usually eats. We sat on straw mats that were placed over the carpet so we didn’t get the floor dirty.
After the meal Maryam invited me to go to the Muslim University of Morogoro (MUM) with her. Maryam is a part-time Swahili teacher at MUM and had to go to correct students’ grades before their final exams begun. Maryam is a strict Muslim, as is her entire family. In fact about 90% of the people from Zanzibar are Islamic, just like Maryam. In order to go to the MUM, all women must cover up by wearing hijabs. Maryam let me borrow a hijab. When we first walked out of the house I felt really uncomfortable because I’ve never worn a hijab before. I felt uncomfortable primarily because I felt like an imposter wearing the hijab. I am not Muslim and I felt like it was insulting the Islamic faith by wearing one and pretending to be Muslim. Yet once Maryam and I went through the University gates, I experienced a total shift in mentality. I had gone from feeling like I was completely sticking out in society like a sore thumb to feeling like I completely blended in and was anonymous. The shift in setting was really comforting. I mean, of course people could still see my face and could tell that I’m White – and I was the only White person I saw while I was at the MUM – but at a distance I looked like every other Muslim girl there. It was a really mind-boggling experience. I sat with Maryam at the University for a few hours as she helped her students. Afterwards she and her husband dropped me off in a taxi at the Oasis Hotel where I was supposed to meet up with a girl named Nora.
When I arrived at the Oasis Hotel I instantly felt uncomfortable again because I was still dressed in my hijab. I felt really self-conscious because I go to Oasis almost every day and I have never once worn a hijab there before. I actually met Nora wearing the hijab! She was sitting right by the entrance because her phone hadn’t been working and she figured she could just sit by the door and spot me when I came in. After we met I went upstairs to her room and changed back into my Western clothes and then met her for dinner on the lobby patio. I found out Nora was coming to Morogoro a few months ago when her friend, whom I met once in Dar es Salaam, told me that she was coming to Morogoro to work for 5 months. As soon as I met Nora we instantly clicked. Although she’s only been in Tanzania for five days, she’s very worldly (she’s spent time in South America and India) and we share a lot of the same thoughts and opinions about traveling, living, and working abroad. Nora and I had a really nice meal together and got to know each other quite well. In fact, I invited Nora over on Monday night for a home-cooked meal since she’d been eating out for five days straight.
On Monday I had three classes at Morogoro Secondary, I held my club meeting with my students after school, picked up my February stipend and did a bit of shopping in town, then I had Nora over for dinner. Overall it was a really good day and I felt really happy when I went to bed.
On Tuesday morning I discovered that my wallet was missing 50,000 shillings from the money I’d had left over form my stipend that I picked up on Monday – which is a sixth of my entire month’s stipend! :(! I recounted everything I bought on Monday and couldn’t figure out for the life of my why I was missing 50,000 shillings. I traced my actions from Monday and realized that the only people who could’ve had access to my wallet without my knowing were two neighbor boys who came over on Monday night to watch movies in the living room while I cooked dinner in the kitchen. I was really disappointed that they might’ve taken the money, especially since once of them comes over all the time and I’ve never had a problem with him taking anything from me – not even 2,000 shillings! When I walked to school Tuesday morning I felt really uneasy and messaged the boy’s mom asking her if I could talk to her in the evening and ask her a question (namely if her son took my money). She ended up inviting me over for dinner that night.
On Tuesday I taught all four of my classes and went to Oasis to use the Internet for a while after work to help Maryam make an excel chart of her students’ grades from the MUM. I got home just in time for dinner at my neighbor’s house. I went over there feeling worried about what she might say when I asked if her son had taken my money. When I asked her, she was very surprised and immediately called her son in to talk to me about it. He assured his mom and I over and over again that he had not taken the money. This kid is only 6 or 7 years old so he’s pretty young. He’s been nothing but sweet ever since I met him and he always comes to the house to color and watch movies. He’s always been well behaved so it seemed really out of character for him to take something. His mom was really serious with him and even made him cry.
Things got even worse, too. Here in Tanzania, being a thief is one of the worst things people be in society. Most Tanzanians pride themselves on being honest people who would never take things from each other without asking. Hence, if you are caught as a thief here, people punish you severely for it. It is not uncommon for people – especially good people – to turn extremely violent and beat the crap out of a thief. In their opinion, no matter how brutal their beating can be, it’s better that they beat the thief themselves than tell the police and send the thief to jail (according to them a thief would be treated even worse in a jail…). Some people here even condone burning thieves alive for their crimes. In fact, when I was on my way to Kibiti one time to visit one of the WorldTeach volunteers there, I saw a huge crowd of people gathered around a man on the side of the road in a small village we passed through. All of the man’s limbs had been tightly tied up in rope and he was left helpless on the ground. I suspected he was a thief and was going to be seriously punished for his actions – even burned alive. So you see, being a thief here is no light matter.
When I asked the boy if he’d taken the money and he insisted that he hadn’t and didn’t know anything about it his mom proceeded to beat the living daylights out of him, smacking him really hard with her arm to get him to confess something. I could tell even five seconds into the beating that he really was innocent. I felt so terrible. I can’t even describe to you what it’s like to see a little kid get beat when he’s screaming for his dear life. I’ve never heard a child scream like that and frankly I’m disgusted and disappointed with myself that I brought that beating upon him. What’s worse is that the boy and his mom went to go see the other little boy who had also been at the house on Monday and his mom. When we were there I sat passively on the couch while the two boys stood at attention, almost like they were in a military camp, while their mothers talked in nearly incomprehensible fast Swahili at them trying to get their sons to tell them where the money was. Both boys cried their eyes out saying they didn’t know anything. Instead of listening to them, their mothers thought they were lying. They took the two boys into the next room and got a stick from outside and proceeded to beat the two boys’ bottoms with the stick with their shorts down. I’ve never witnessed anything more horrible in my entire life and I swear to God I just wanted to throw up and tell them to stop. The mothers had this look of evil in their eyes as they beat their sons. It didn’t look like they had one ounce of remorse when they were finished. The boys were completely humiliated and in total shock. They’ve been beaten before, for sure, but that doesn’t make getting beat any easier – especially since they know what they’re in for. I cannot stand that beating people here is such a commonplace punishment. It’s just human abuse and human cruelty in my eyes. I think you can surely get someone to confess to something without beating the shit out of him or her. I’m still in shock myself at what I heard. I say heard because when they mothers took the boys to the other room to beat them I couldn’t even stand to watch it. I sat utterly terrified in the other room, paralyzed with fear and hating myself for what was going on. In Tanzanian society, 50,000 shillings is a ton of money and it’s even a fairly standard month’s salary for some Tanzanians. When I think about it, I should just forget about the money and make do with the 200,000 shillings I have remaining for this month. I should be grateful that whoever stole the money didn’t take all of it so I would at least be able to get by for the rest of the month. After all that happened and all the punishments that were doled out, I never even found out what happened to the money and now I frankly don’t care anymore. Finding out what happened to the money isn’t worth someone else getting beat up over, even if that person was guilty.
After the terrible fiasco on Tuesday night, I immediately went to bed when I got home because I just wanted to get all of the gut-wrenching sounds and sights out of my head. I woke up Wednesday morning feeling sick with the start of a cold. My throat was all itchy and scratchy and it was hard to talk. I decided instead of forcing myself to go to work that I would tell my supervisor that I wouldn’t be able to come into work on Wednesday. I took the day to relax at home and set my mind straight again. Maryam came over to visit me and I helped her start to apply for a job as a full time Swahili teacher at the MUM. We have arranged an agreement where I will help her improve her English (she’s nearly fluent) and she will help me improve my Swahili. She especially wants to learn how to write a research proposal and report. We came up with a schedule together of when we’ll meet to exchange ideas about our languages. A friend of hers, Swabra, who is also interested in learning English came over to pick her up. We arranged that she’ll also come three days a week to learn English. In addition, I have already been teaching another woman a couple days a week…so now I have three people to tutor in English! All of a sudden my life has gotten crazy busy. I’ll see how I can handle all the extra work. If it gets to be too much, I’ll just cut down my sessions.
WRITTEN WEDNESDAY, MARCH 10
I’m happy to report that by that Friday I felt well enough to return back to school. When I was at school that day another teacher told me that I would have to come into school on Saturday to invigilate three Form 3 exams during the morning session. It’s not like I had plans for the weekend, but still I was sort of bummed to have to come into work on a Saturday. On Saturday I arrived at work at 7:00 sharp (a teacher even made a comment about how weird it was that I was so punctual…what can I say…I’m American! Haha). I invigilated the three exams from 7:30 to 1:30. For each of the exams I had to hand out the tests and answer sheets, watch the students to make sure they were quiet and didn’t cheat, and also staple all of the students’ papers together when they were finished. Since there is a shortage of staplers at the school, it was sort of humorous trying to find a stapler for the end of the periods. Teachers would pop into each others’ classrooms trying to hunt down a stapler they could use. It seemed like a game of whack-a-mole with everyone chasing after staplers that kept disappearing. In addition, at one point during my second exam it started down-pouring like crazy outside. In between my second and third exams I had to return to the office to drop of the completed exams and pick up the new ones for my final session. I got totally soaked even from running in the rain for only 20 ft! Although I was rather cold and wet for the rest of the time at school, I actually found the rain really refreshing and calming. When I finished my last session I dropped off the papers at the office and to my surprised delight I received a payment of 5,000 shillings for helping invigilate. It’s not much, but 5,000 shillings can actually get me a ton of fresh fruits and vegetables from the local market, where mostly everything is between 100 and 200 shillings a piece.
After finishing up at school I went home to relax for a bit until I had a tutoring session at 4:00. My student, Veronica, came with her son, Junior (I seriously thought that was a name people only heard in movies these days! Haha), and I taught her for about two hours. While I was teaching her, her son, who can’t be more than 4 years old, insisted on begging for our attention the entire time. He kept banging on dining room table where we were seated with whatever he could grab in reach. He even started playing with a pair of light up bunny ears that my housemate had gotten for Halloween last year. He was using them to play with the kitten and also tried repeatedly to put them on him mom’s head, which he could barely reach even when she was sitting. It was sort of a crazy session. For as rambunctious as her son is, Veronica is insanely calm and a wonderful student. She did really well with the lessons, despite her son’s attempts to veer her attention towards him, and I’m looking forward to continuing to teach her. I just need to find a safe way to entertain her son while we’re trying to learn!
Saturday night Nora and I attempted to go out to dinner at a local Tanzanian restaurant called The New Classic (which is actually a humble hotel) that serves traditional Tanzanian food. At such local places, you usually have the choice of getting ugali, ndizi (bananas), wali (rice), or chips (french fries with nyama (meat – usually beef, which is ng’ombe), mboga mboga (vegetables), samaki (fish), or kuku (chicken). No matter what you order for your main dish, you’re almost always served a side dish of maharage (beans cooked in a yummy coconut sauce) and a scrumptious red sauce that you can pour over your meal. The funny thing is that even though all of those things are on the menu at these local eateries, that doesn’t guarantee that all of those options will be available all of the time. In fact, by the time Nora and I reached the restaurant at 8:00pm, most of the food was finished. When we arrived at the restaurant it was very crowded with local Tanzanians. As is common custom in Tanzania, our waitress sat us at a table that already had someone eating at it. Maximizing places to sit for customers ensures that restaurants will earn the most money they can. Nora and I sat down with an older man who was eating ndizi samaki (bananas and fish). When we both saw his meal we got the craving for the same meal, but when we ordered the waitress just said, “Meisha” and “Hamna” – meaning that the ndizi and the samaki was “finished,” or that they were out of them. Disappointed, Nora and I settled for rice (the only starch option) with the sides of maharage, sauce, and a little bit of spinach. As we ate our meager meals we sipped on fresh mango juice (delicious!). It was pretty funny because the way Nora and I were seated was such that Nora was facing one of the walls of the restaurant, which had a large mirror covering it, and I was sitting to her left side, also facing a mirror from the adjacent wall farther off. Although we maintained a great conversation throughout the meal, Nora couldn’t help but laughing at how awkward and hilarious it was to watch herself eating across from her as she tried to talk to me. I thought it was funny, too. While the restaurant had cleverly tried to make the small space seem larger with the mirrors, they had quite a weird effect on its customs, or at least on us. We finished out meal and grabbed a taxi home, reveling about funny quirks in Tanzania and how Nora felt she was getting along here so far, after her first week in Morogoro.
On Sunday I took it easy the whole day until I had another tutoring session at 4:00pm. This time I met with Swabra. Like Maryam, Swabra is a very strict Muslim and wears the full hijab whenever she is out in public so that only her eyes appear among a plethora of black robes. Even when she came inside the house, she only lifted her face veil so that I could just see her face. She also came with one of her kids named “Shakir,” whom she calls “Shakira” (which I totally love because it makes me think of the awesome pop star!). Unlike Junior, her boy (who is only 2 going on 3) was incredibly quiet throughout the whole session. He even ended up taking a nap right on the table where I was teaching Swabra at one point, haha. I’m sure the image of Swabra and I, with her kid face down on the table, would’ve looked pretty funny to other people if they’d been there. Swabra did really well her first day and I’m looking forward to tutoring her more in the future. I actually find it extremely empowering teaching her since many Islamic women do not usually get the opportunity to become educated as much as men. I’m more than happy to empower her with a basic knowledge of English!
This past week I’ve been teaching as usual at school. I’ve put a lot of focus on doing really interacting, engaging, and critical thinking exercises with my students. Too often they just sit in the classroom passively and listen to their teachers lecture. I want to show them that learning in school can be through many different means. I’ve had them complete several brain teasing activities this week. For one exercise I gave them a definition of different words that all had their first and last letters missing and they had to use the definitions to help them figure out what the full words were. I also taught them about anagrams and had them try to complete ten of those. For my last lesson of the week, I tried to incorporate a drawing activity into my lesson plan, since creative drawing skills are heinously underutilized in schools here. I drew a picture on the blackboard that only half of the students in each class were allowed to see. They had to copy the picture I drew and then describe it to their partners in English using a wide range of vocabulary. The goal was that the students would be able to describe their pictures so well that their partners would be able to draw similar (or exact) replicas. The activity went fairly well and I think the students really enjoyed the opportunity to use their English vocabulary in a creative way. As I continue to plan my lessons for the rest of my time with WorldTeach, I hope to incorporate more critical thinking exercises that encourage students to use a wide range of thinking, writing, drawing, reading, speaking, and listening skills.
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
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!
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!
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Vacation!
This is a big post, so I suggest getting comfy or reading it in the sections I’ve written about…
The sections are the following:
1. My Mental Turnaround
2. Vacation Bliss in Dar
3. Zanzibarian Wonder
4. My Christmas Holiday in Zanzibar
5. Returning to Dar and My New Adventure Mode
1. My Mental Turnaround
I’ve undergone quite the mental turnaround since my last blog post, which by this point was written more than a month ago! Before I get into the details about my transformation, I just want to say, first of all, thank you for having the patience to believe in me and wait out that difficult time with me before I could get back on my feet again. I also want to especially thank those of you who personally reached out to me during my time of need. Without your words of wisdom and convincing arguments to persevere, I could very well be stuck at home in the middle of a very cold and snowy New England winter right now rather than being baked at 95 degrees Fahrenheit every day under the hot Tanzanian sun! (Believe me, that’s not a complaint…haha).
2. Vacation Bliss in Dar
Speaking of which, that’s precisely what I’ve been doing throughout the past month. I’ve officially been on vacation since December 1. Before I left school I marked my students’ 200+ English exams over the course of three grueling (but very productive) days as fast as my hands could mark the pages so I could get out of Morogoro as fast as possibly. Although a piece of my heart undoubtedly belongs to Morogoro, I was more than ready for a change of situation and scenery by the time I’d finished marking the exams, as evident from my last blog post.
I’ve had the opportunity to enjoy myself in a plethora of ways since I’ve taken leave from Morogoro, which has done well to revive my spirits. I’ve seen oodles of my old Tanzanian friends and met new ones along the way. I’ve had the opportunity to sit and relax in the comfort of my friend’s mom’s apartment where I’ve settled in for the time being in Dar es Salaam. I’ve been spoiled by home cooked meals, ready access to television and up-to-the-minute news broadcasts, warm showers, and air conditioning. Overall, life has been very, VERY good. It’s nice to be able to take advantage of some of these luxuries after having had to forego their pleasures and deal with all the trials of living in Morogoro (what with the lack of running water in my house, above all) for the last couple of months.
In addition to settling into the apartment, I’ve also been able to spend ample time intensifying my familiarization with Dar. I’ve become more acquainted with some of the popular ex-pat places during the last month, where I’ve found solace in some of the charms of Western living, like indulging myself with amazing gelatos, pizzas, and other Western delights. I’ve also grasped a better mastery of where the best local Tanzanian hangouts are, which boast being home to the best combinations of beans, rice (especially pilau and biriani rice), vegetables, traditional African spices, and tasty meat the world has ever seen. The simplicity in some of the most popular dishes you can find there (like kachumbali salad, which is just a bunch of finely minced cold vegetables with lime juice and salt, or chipsi mayai, which is essentially a French fry omelet) is actually what keeps my taste buds dancing with joy every time I pick up my fork…or scoop some yummy goodness into my hands and into my mouth (you eat with your hands a lot here). It suffices itself to say that I’ve been able to enjoy myself in Dar, at least in terms of the food. The company of my friends and the serenity of the Tanzanian sunsets and beachfront have also done wonders to keep my spirit rising higher and higher to where I’m now not just back to feeling content, but I’m genuinely happy and ecstatic about living here.
3. Zanzibarian Wonder
As a bit of anecdotal evidence of my happiness, let me tell you about my recent trip to the beautiful little island of Zanzibar. Although Zenji (what Zanzibar is referred as in local Tanzanian slang) is just a two hour boat ride away from the mainland of Dar es Salaam, but once you arrive you could easily mistake it for being a country a million miles away. There’s something about Zanzibar, something really special, and I felt it the moment I arrived there. The whole energy of the place is absolutely intoxicating…and what I mean by that is that if you’re not happy when you’re on your way there, you’ll feel yourself engulfed in a huge burst of bliss once you step foot on land in Stone Town (the “city” in Zenji). As soon as I arrived and began walking from the waterfront to the place where myself and the other WorldTeach volunteers were staying for our mid-service conference in Stone Town (I still can’t believe more than half of my time is up here!), I felt like I was traveling back in time to a bejeweled treasure island where all the secrets of happiness lie and where only the lucky few ever get the chance to go. As we walked through a maze of alleyways and unnamed side streets to our destination, I felt like I’d suddenly been transported into the animated set of Aladdin when Princess Jasmine wanders the streets of the town and the market for the first time, disguised as a local. Although I undoubtedly couldn’t pass off looking like a local (my Whiteness never allows me to pass like that here, or anywhere in Africa, really), I received a surprising overabundance of genuinely cheerful greetings from local Zanzibarians that made me feel like I was home. Even though some of these Zanzibarians may have been trying to find a way to my heart order to charm me into buying something from one of their many small tourist shops hidden in the alleyways, I was beautifully duked into feeling extremely welcomed. The sense of welcoming I felt in Zanzibar was greater than any magnitude at which I’ve felt welcomed before in any other place I’ve been to in the world. There’s a superb calmness of energy and relaxed sense of peace that floods the air of Zanzibar that makes you feel anything but welcomed. In fact, if this energy could amass itself as a body of water, then Zanzibar might as well consider itself flooded to the deepest depths of the ocean just like in the myth of the lost Atlantis. This extreme feeling of welcoming came as a wonderful surprise, after I’ve struggled for months to feel at home in Morogoro where I’m constantly faced with hostile greetings of “Mzungu” (White European foreigner). I didn’t even realize I needed to feel this welcome until I felt it. For months I’ve put in so much effort into feeling like I belong in my community in Morogoro, and yet it only took me arriving for this very first time in Zanzibar to feel more like a part of the community there than I ever have in Morogoro over these last months.
Perhaps my bliss in Zanzibar could be attributed to the time of year at which I visited – it having been Christmas time and all – and the fact that many White tourists from all over the world flock here around this time to celebrate the holidays. Surely if so many tourists arrive then the community must adapt by making them feel welcome enough to stay and add to the economy of the island. But you have to ask yourself, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” in this case. For, if Zanzibar weren’t a welcoming destination for tourists to come in the first place, then why would they travel all this way to come? It does seem bizarre that so many Christian tourists come to Zanzibar on vacation to celebrate the Christian Christmas holiday when over ninety percent of the island’s permanent residents at Muslim and seriously practice the Islamic faith. But this very trend just proves how much of a non-snow-globelike phenomenon the welcoming and accepting nature of Zanzibar really is for any type of people, no matter their race, religion, nationality, or reason for visiting etc. If I haven’t convinced you just how hospitable Zanzibar is, then perhaps the words I heard from an actual Zanzibarian will do well to convince you. He said that whenever he travels anywhere in the world, he never says he’s African, he always specifies that he’s Zanzibarian. He rationalizes that the pride he feels for being a Zanzibarian compels him to credit his origin as specifically as he does. He says for sure that Zanzibar is like other countries in Africa in many ways, and even indeed that it is a part of Africa, but he remains convinced that there is something special about Zanzibar and its unique acceptance of difference that exempts it from being lumped into the abstract description of just “Africa.” Even the government, alone, speaks to this fact. For the first time in all of Africa (if I remember correctly, at least…it may just be the first time in Tanzania, which is still a big deal on its own), Zanzibar boasts having a President from one political party and a Vice President (the runner up in the national election, in fact) from the opposition party. Although this is a recent change that just came about in this year’s election, Zanzibar’s willingness to even attempt a sharing of power among two different political parties is something that many other African nations cannot even begin to consider (even including the Tanzanian mainland, which has fervently been run by the CCM party since it became independent, which, as it seems at this time, is in no way willing to share power with other opposition parties). If you’re coming from America, imagine the implications if we had a Democratic President and a Republican Vice President, or vice versa! This change is that monumental, and it only happened in Zanzibar. Hence, who wouldn’t be proud to say, “I’m Zanzibarian” instead of “I’m African” when asked where he or she was from? I mean I just visited Zanzibar for only four days and already I can’t stop gloating about how wonderful it is. I mean of course it has its problems, but just from my one visit to Zanzibar, on the surface it seems like there’s something pretty special about Zanzibar that’s worth going back for, perhaps for longer, another time. Believe me, I’m already thinking about how I can get back there for longer…
4. My Christmas Holiday in Zanzibar
On a slightly less abstract and advocate-y level, let me tell you about my Christmas holiday and what I actually did in Zanzibar while I was there. On Christmas Eve the other WorldTeach volunteers and I, along with our Field Director, went to a very nice resort where we gorged ourselves on several courses of some of the most tantalizing buffet food I’ve ever had in my life. I’m not kidding. It was that good. We feasted on different kinds of seafood curries, soups, and other delicious bites. We ate octopus, lobster, prawns, several kinds of fish, each prepared both separately and together while infused with rushes of Zanzibarian spices. Each unique melodic dish came together on our plates, composing flavorful orchestral symphonies that graced our palates. In addition to eating our body weights in all the seafood (I mean we were surrounded by the ocean...how could you pass up such an opportunity?!), we devoured completely nonsensical (and of course unhealthy) portions of delectable goodies ranging from fresh raspberries and other tropical fruits drenched in chocolate fondue; chocolate cakes exploding with layers of icing, caramels, and cream fillings; and creme brulees, biscotti’s, and other delicious things I don’t even know how to describe. God it was wonderful. I haven’t eaten that much or enjoyed eating that much in a really long time. I topped my meal off with a crisp peppermint tea and then did my best to dance to the Macarena the live band was playing (in its own African style) with the other volunteers without toppling over from all the food I’d ingested. Even if I gain five pounds just from that one meal, I really don’t care (and don’t even think about commenting about the likelihood of that, haha)…it was TOTALLY worth it.
Following dinner we retired home early and got to be at a sensible hour so that we would all be refreshed on Christmas morning. On Christmas morning we all woke up at 8:00am sharp, made a big Christmas breakfast of homemade French toast, vegetable omelets, mixed fruit salad, and Christmas cookies and brownies that some of the volunteers had made at their teaching site and that we’d decorated the night before. After we cleaned up from our Christmas morning celebration, we all suited up in our bathing suits and beach gear and begun our daylong sailboat cruise along the southern coast of Zanzibar. Talk about a great Christmas holiday. Even though it was hotter than all of us could stand and the sun was shining radiantly above bright blue clear skies, staining our bodies to darker shades of white and brown and reflecting its glorious rays off the glistening ocean water below us…and therefore it didn’t feel AT ALL like my traditional Christmases have with my family in the icy cold Vermont winters, it still felt just as much like Christmas as Christmas should, at least when it wasn’t possible for me to experience my brain’s familiar version of Christmas at home. And honestly, what better gift can you get than sailing along an island paradise with your friends in amazing weather with no other obligation than to enjoy yourself on Christmas and taking a dip in the ocean whenever you want...except of course the gift of being with your family?! We did just that – enjoy ourselves and take many dips in the ocean. We even anchored near an island and trekked our way through the water onto it…without stepping on sea urchins, jelly fish, or scary pools of tiny fish which apparently will gladly stab you with stingers on the tops of their heads if you get to close to them. Haha. Our journey was well worth it because when we got on the island we discovered a small hotel resort too nice for words that lays claim to a huge fresh water pool, where we all pretended to be guests (no one noticed we weren’t, luckily) and swam around for a while. It was inexplicably refreshing and amazing. We waded back to the boat thereafter and continued the latter part of our day sailing without the motor on all the way back to the shore of Stone Town. We arrived back at the shore around dinner time, freshened up and went to dinner at a nice place in celebration not just of Christmas, but of our fellow volunteer’s twenty fifth birthday. We went out for a couple drinks after, but because the sun had sucked out most of our energy throughout the day, we retired early to bed. Overally it was an incredibly memorable, absolutely unforgettable, exceptionally wonderful and fantastic Christmas. As if I weren’t happy enough to be in Zenji in the first place, my Christmas holiday added oodles more joy to my overall experience there.
The day following Christmas we spent actually being productive WorldTeach-wise. We reflected on our teaching experiences and what we’d learned since we arrived six months ago. It was really rewarding to be able to talk so thoroughly and productively about everything we’d been through in the last half of a year and to discuss what shape we want the program to take next year for the future volunteers. It’s a nice perk, being the first batch of volunteers of a program like this, to be able to be so responsible for how the program will look in the future. Although being the guinea pigs has no doubt been hard and downright grueling at certain points (reference my previous blog post to read up on that), it ends up being more rewarding in the end. You get to make many well-informed and educated influential suggestions and decisions for the program that the home office wasn’t able to do as successfully before you started the program as one of its first volunteers. It’s a cool feeling to know that my experience here will be as meaningful to others’ future experiences as it’s been meaningful to me while I’ve been here. I like feeling like I’ve made a positive impact not only on people’s lives here, but on people whose lives will eventually end up here.
I spent one leisurely day on my own in Stone Town before I left. I met up with friends and went to my favorite café called “Stone Town Café” (very original, I know) then to a delectable Indian restaurant for lunch. I got my ticket and shipped out and now I’m back in Dar.
5. Returning to Dar and My New Adventure Mode
Frankly, it feels odd to be back in Dar all of a sudden. When I was in Zanzibar I was overwhelmed about the possibility of exploring everything there for the first time. I really did feel like Jasmine from Aladdin as I was opening my eyes up to an unbeforeseen magical place. My eyes were excited to explore the new wonders of a new place after having been between Morogoro and Dar (now both of which are familiar to me) over the past six months. Now that I’m back in Dar, I find myself back in comfortable familiarity. My brain has imprinted the layout of Dar as much as it’s been able to after each time I’ve visited here, which is probably almost a dozen times by this point. Since I’ve been to Dar so much, it almost feels like there aren’t too many new unexamined rocks that I could uncover now that I’m here again, but I know that’s not true. I just have to challenge myself to go to new places in Dar, and there are many of those. Although I’m finding that I feel a bit restless because I still want to be in my naïve Zanzibarian adventure seeking mode, it does feel good to be somewhere like Dar. I think I will choose to go on some new adventures, too.
If there’s one thing I’ve realized it’s that life always has the potential to be an adventure, you just have to be prepared to embark on the area that you’re in in an adventure mode, where you’re game to explore, mull around and discover new things about your environment and yourself. It takes a great amount of willingness to get into this porous adventure mode because being an explorer makes you quite vulnerable to discovering things about yourself, others, and where you are that you might not be ready, willing, or eager to know. But I say to hell with it. You shouldn’t be fearful to discover the new, you should just go for it and see what happens. People who have discovered it before you will hopefully be there to catch you in open arms should you slip up or need assistance. That’s what people are for…to help each other get through life. Now that I know I have a bunch of people behind me rooting for me to do great things and take advantage of life and live up to my potential (even if they haven’t been where I hope to go), I’m no longer fearful to explore. I won’t even need a map. No. I don’t even want a map. I want to be brave enough to be a heroic explorer, if for no other sake than just to explore and know for the sake of knowing new things I once didn’t know. That was a lot about knowing. Anyway, I’m excited, I’m ready, and I’m going to start exploring right now…and I’m going to try to keep on my enthusiastic adventure goggles on that I regained in Zanzibar for as long as I can while I’m still in Tanzania for the next six months. Maybe you might consider doing the same, too. If you can’t think of any other way to explore the world you’ve lived in for a while, just try to think of it in terms of smells, for example, just for one day, and be particularly attune to what you find. Then get back to me if you so choose, because I’m undoubtedly curious to know what you know. Whether or not you choose to share what you know, you can count on me telling you what I come to know as I continue my crazy teaching journey in Tanzania and share it with you through my blog posts. And with that said, I guess I better get cracking on that knowing, so I have something to tell you…haha.
The sections are the following:
1. My Mental Turnaround
2. Vacation Bliss in Dar
3. Zanzibarian Wonder
4. My Christmas Holiday in Zanzibar
5. Returning to Dar and My New Adventure Mode
1. My Mental Turnaround
I’ve undergone quite the mental turnaround since my last blog post, which by this point was written more than a month ago! Before I get into the details about my transformation, I just want to say, first of all, thank you for having the patience to believe in me and wait out that difficult time with me before I could get back on my feet again. I also want to especially thank those of you who personally reached out to me during my time of need. Without your words of wisdom and convincing arguments to persevere, I could very well be stuck at home in the middle of a very cold and snowy New England winter right now rather than being baked at 95 degrees Fahrenheit every day under the hot Tanzanian sun! (Believe me, that’s not a complaint…haha).
2. Vacation Bliss in Dar
Speaking of which, that’s precisely what I’ve been doing throughout the past month. I’ve officially been on vacation since December 1. Before I left school I marked my students’ 200+ English exams over the course of three grueling (but very productive) days as fast as my hands could mark the pages so I could get out of Morogoro as fast as possibly. Although a piece of my heart undoubtedly belongs to Morogoro, I was more than ready for a change of situation and scenery by the time I’d finished marking the exams, as evident from my last blog post.
I’ve had the opportunity to enjoy myself in a plethora of ways since I’ve taken leave from Morogoro, which has done well to revive my spirits. I’ve seen oodles of my old Tanzanian friends and met new ones along the way. I’ve had the opportunity to sit and relax in the comfort of my friend’s mom’s apartment where I’ve settled in for the time being in Dar es Salaam. I’ve been spoiled by home cooked meals, ready access to television and up-to-the-minute news broadcasts, warm showers, and air conditioning. Overall, life has been very, VERY good. It’s nice to be able to take advantage of some of these luxuries after having had to forego their pleasures and deal with all the trials of living in Morogoro (what with the lack of running water in my house, above all) for the last couple of months.
In addition to settling into the apartment, I’ve also been able to spend ample time intensifying my familiarization with Dar. I’ve become more acquainted with some of the popular ex-pat places during the last month, where I’ve found solace in some of the charms of Western living, like indulging myself with amazing gelatos, pizzas, and other Western delights. I’ve also grasped a better mastery of where the best local Tanzanian hangouts are, which boast being home to the best combinations of beans, rice (especially pilau and biriani rice), vegetables, traditional African spices, and tasty meat the world has ever seen. The simplicity in some of the most popular dishes you can find there (like kachumbali salad, which is just a bunch of finely minced cold vegetables with lime juice and salt, or chipsi mayai, which is essentially a French fry omelet) is actually what keeps my taste buds dancing with joy every time I pick up my fork…or scoop some yummy goodness into my hands and into my mouth (you eat with your hands a lot here). It suffices itself to say that I’ve been able to enjoy myself in Dar, at least in terms of the food. The company of my friends and the serenity of the Tanzanian sunsets and beachfront have also done wonders to keep my spirit rising higher and higher to where I’m now not just back to feeling content, but I’m genuinely happy and ecstatic about living here.
3. Zanzibarian Wonder
As a bit of anecdotal evidence of my happiness, let me tell you about my recent trip to the beautiful little island of Zanzibar. Although Zenji (what Zanzibar is referred as in local Tanzanian slang) is just a two hour boat ride away from the mainland of Dar es Salaam, but once you arrive you could easily mistake it for being a country a million miles away. There’s something about Zanzibar, something really special, and I felt it the moment I arrived there. The whole energy of the place is absolutely intoxicating…and what I mean by that is that if you’re not happy when you’re on your way there, you’ll feel yourself engulfed in a huge burst of bliss once you step foot on land in Stone Town (the “city” in Zenji). As soon as I arrived and began walking from the waterfront to the place where myself and the other WorldTeach volunteers were staying for our mid-service conference in Stone Town (I still can’t believe more than half of my time is up here!), I felt like I was traveling back in time to a bejeweled treasure island where all the secrets of happiness lie and where only the lucky few ever get the chance to go. As we walked through a maze of alleyways and unnamed side streets to our destination, I felt like I’d suddenly been transported into the animated set of Aladdin when Princess Jasmine wanders the streets of the town and the market for the first time, disguised as a local. Although I undoubtedly couldn’t pass off looking like a local (my Whiteness never allows me to pass like that here, or anywhere in Africa, really), I received a surprising overabundance of genuinely cheerful greetings from local Zanzibarians that made me feel like I was home. Even though some of these Zanzibarians may have been trying to find a way to my heart order to charm me into buying something from one of their many small tourist shops hidden in the alleyways, I was beautifully duked into feeling extremely welcomed. The sense of welcoming I felt in Zanzibar was greater than any magnitude at which I’ve felt welcomed before in any other place I’ve been to in the world. There’s a superb calmness of energy and relaxed sense of peace that floods the air of Zanzibar that makes you feel anything but welcomed. In fact, if this energy could amass itself as a body of water, then Zanzibar might as well consider itself flooded to the deepest depths of the ocean just like in the myth of the lost Atlantis. This extreme feeling of welcoming came as a wonderful surprise, after I’ve struggled for months to feel at home in Morogoro where I’m constantly faced with hostile greetings of “Mzungu” (White European foreigner). I didn’t even realize I needed to feel this welcome until I felt it. For months I’ve put in so much effort into feeling like I belong in my community in Morogoro, and yet it only took me arriving for this very first time in Zanzibar to feel more like a part of the community there than I ever have in Morogoro over these last months.
Perhaps my bliss in Zanzibar could be attributed to the time of year at which I visited – it having been Christmas time and all – and the fact that many White tourists from all over the world flock here around this time to celebrate the holidays. Surely if so many tourists arrive then the community must adapt by making them feel welcome enough to stay and add to the economy of the island. But you have to ask yourself, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” in this case. For, if Zanzibar weren’t a welcoming destination for tourists to come in the first place, then why would they travel all this way to come? It does seem bizarre that so many Christian tourists come to Zanzibar on vacation to celebrate the Christian Christmas holiday when over ninety percent of the island’s permanent residents at Muslim and seriously practice the Islamic faith. But this very trend just proves how much of a non-snow-globelike phenomenon the welcoming and accepting nature of Zanzibar really is for any type of people, no matter their race, religion, nationality, or reason for visiting etc. If I haven’t convinced you just how hospitable Zanzibar is, then perhaps the words I heard from an actual Zanzibarian will do well to convince you. He said that whenever he travels anywhere in the world, he never says he’s African, he always specifies that he’s Zanzibarian. He rationalizes that the pride he feels for being a Zanzibarian compels him to credit his origin as specifically as he does. He says for sure that Zanzibar is like other countries in Africa in many ways, and even indeed that it is a part of Africa, but he remains convinced that there is something special about Zanzibar and its unique acceptance of difference that exempts it from being lumped into the abstract description of just “Africa.” Even the government, alone, speaks to this fact. For the first time in all of Africa (if I remember correctly, at least…it may just be the first time in Tanzania, which is still a big deal on its own), Zanzibar boasts having a President from one political party and a Vice President (the runner up in the national election, in fact) from the opposition party. Although this is a recent change that just came about in this year’s election, Zanzibar’s willingness to even attempt a sharing of power among two different political parties is something that many other African nations cannot even begin to consider (even including the Tanzanian mainland, which has fervently been run by the CCM party since it became independent, which, as it seems at this time, is in no way willing to share power with other opposition parties). If you’re coming from America, imagine the implications if we had a Democratic President and a Republican Vice President, or vice versa! This change is that monumental, and it only happened in Zanzibar. Hence, who wouldn’t be proud to say, “I’m Zanzibarian” instead of “I’m African” when asked where he or she was from? I mean I just visited Zanzibar for only four days and already I can’t stop gloating about how wonderful it is. I mean of course it has its problems, but just from my one visit to Zanzibar, on the surface it seems like there’s something pretty special about Zanzibar that’s worth going back for, perhaps for longer, another time. Believe me, I’m already thinking about how I can get back there for longer…
4. My Christmas Holiday in Zanzibar
On a slightly less abstract and advocate-y level, let me tell you about my Christmas holiday and what I actually did in Zanzibar while I was there. On Christmas Eve the other WorldTeach volunteers and I, along with our Field Director, went to a very nice resort where we gorged ourselves on several courses of some of the most tantalizing buffet food I’ve ever had in my life. I’m not kidding. It was that good. We feasted on different kinds of seafood curries, soups, and other delicious bites. We ate octopus, lobster, prawns, several kinds of fish, each prepared both separately and together while infused with rushes of Zanzibarian spices. Each unique melodic dish came together on our plates, composing flavorful orchestral symphonies that graced our palates. In addition to eating our body weights in all the seafood (I mean we were surrounded by the ocean...how could you pass up such an opportunity?!), we devoured completely nonsensical (and of course unhealthy) portions of delectable goodies ranging from fresh raspberries and other tropical fruits drenched in chocolate fondue; chocolate cakes exploding with layers of icing, caramels, and cream fillings; and creme brulees, biscotti’s, and other delicious things I don’t even know how to describe. God it was wonderful. I haven’t eaten that much or enjoyed eating that much in a really long time. I topped my meal off with a crisp peppermint tea and then did my best to dance to the Macarena the live band was playing (in its own African style) with the other volunteers without toppling over from all the food I’d ingested. Even if I gain five pounds just from that one meal, I really don’t care (and don’t even think about commenting about the likelihood of that, haha)…it was TOTALLY worth it.
Following dinner we retired home early and got to be at a sensible hour so that we would all be refreshed on Christmas morning. On Christmas morning we all woke up at 8:00am sharp, made a big Christmas breakfast of homemade French toast, vegetable omelets, mixed fruit salad, and Christmas cookies and brownies that some of the volunteers had made at their teaching site and that we’d decorated the night before. After we cleaned up from our Christmas morning celebration, we all suited up in our bathing suits and beach gear and begun our daylong sailboat cruise along the southern coast of Zanzibar. Talk about a great Christmas holiday. Even though it was hotter than all of us could stand and the sun was shining radiantly above bright blue clear skies, staining our bodies to darker shades of white and brown and reflecting its glorious rays off the glistening ocean water below us…and therefore it didn’t feel AT ALL like my traditional Christmases have with my family in the icy cold Vermont winters, it still felt just as much like Christmas as Christmas should, at least when it wasn’t possible for me to experience my brain’s familiar version of Christmas at home. And honestly, what better gift can you get than sailing along an island paradise with your friends in amazing weather with no other obligation than to enjoy yourself on Christmas and taking a dip in the ocean whenever you want...except of course the gift of being with your family?! We did just that – enjoy ourselves and take many dips in the ocean. We even anchored near an island and trekked our way through the water onto it…without stepping on sea urchins, jelly fish, or scary pools of tiny fish which apparently will gladly stab you with stingers on the tops of their heads if you get to close to them. Haha. Our journey was well worth it because when we got on the island we discovered a small hotel resort too nice for words that lays claim to a huge fresh water pool, where we all pretended to be guests (no one noticed we weren’t, luckily) and swam around for a while. It was inexplicably refreshing and amazing. We waded back to the boat thereafter and continued the latter part of our day sailing without the motor on all the way back to the shore of Stone Town. We arrived back at the shore around dinner time, freshened up and went to dinner at a nice place in celebration not just of Christmas, but of our fellow volunteer’s twenty fifth birthday. We went out for a couple drinks after, but because the sun had sucked out most of our energy throughout the day, we retired early to bed. Overally it was an incredibly memorable, absolutely unforgettable, exceptionally wonderful and fantastic Christmas. As if I weren’t happy enough to be in Zenji in the first place, my Christmas holiday added oodles more joy to my overall experience there.
The day following Christmas we spent actually being productive WorldTeach-wise. We reflected on our teaching experiences and what we’d learned since we arrived six months ago. It was really rewarding to be able to talk so thoroughly and productively about everything we’d been through in the last half of a year and to discuss what shape we want the program to take next year for the future volunteers. It’s a nice perk, being the first batch of volunteers of a program like this, to be able to be so responsible for how the program will look in the future. Although being the guinea pigs has no doubt been hard and downright grueling at certain points (reference my previous blog post to read up on that), it ends up being more rewarding in the end. You get to make many well-informed and educated influential suggestions and decisions for the program that the home office wasn’t able to do as successfully before you started the program as one of its first volunteers. It’s a cool feeling to know that my experience here will be as meaningful to others’ future experiences as it’s been meaningful to me while I’ve been here. I like feeling like I’ve made a positive impact not only on people’s lives here, but on people whose lives will eventually end up here.
I spent one leisurely day on my own in Stone Town before I left. I met up with friends and went to my favorite café called “Stone Town Café” (very original, I know) then to a delectable Indian restaurant for lunch. I got my ticket and shipped out and now I’m back in Dar.
5. Returning to Dar and My New Adventure Mode
Frankly, it feels odd to be back in Dar all of a sudden. When I was in Zanzibar I was overwhelmed about the possibility of exploring everything there for the first time. I really did feel like Jasmine from Aladdin as I was opening my eyes up to an unbeforeseen magical place. My eyes were excited to explore the new wonders of a new place after having been between Morogoro and Dar (now both of which are familiar to me) over the past six months. Now that I’m back in Dar, I find myself back in comfortable familiarity. My brain has imprinted the layout of Dar as much as it’s been able to after each time I’ve visited here, which is probably almost a dozen times by this point. Since I’ve been to Dar so much, it almost feels like there aren’t too many new unexamined rocks that I could uncover now that I’m here again, but I know that’s not true. I just have to challenge myself to go to new places in Dar, and there are many of those. Although I’m finding that I feel a bit restless because I still want to be in my naïve Zanzibarian adventure seeking mode, it does feel good to be somewhere like Dar. I think I will choose to go on some new adventures, too.
If there’s one thing I’ve realized it’s that life always has the potential to be an adventure, you just have to be prepared to embark on the area that you’re in in an adventure mode, where you’re game to explore, mull around and discover new things about your environment and yourself. It takes a great amount of willingness to get into this porous adventure mode because being an explorer makes you quite vulnerable to discovering things about yourself, others, and where you are that you might not be ready, willing, or eager to know. But I say to hell with it. You shouldn’t be fearful to discover the new, you should just go for it and see what happens. People who have discovered it before you will hopefully be there to catch you in open arms should you slip up or need assistance. That’s what people are for…to help each other get through life. Now that I know I have a bunch of people behind me rooting for me to do great things and take advantage of life and live up to my potential (even if they haven’t been where I hope to go), I’m no longer fearful to explore. I won’t even need a map. No. I don’t even want a map. I want to be brave enough to be a heroic explorer, if for no other sake than just to explore and know for the sake of knowing new things I once didn’t know. That was a lot about knowing. Anyway, I’m excited, I’m ready, and I’m going to start exploring right now…and I’m going to try to keep on my enthusiastic adventure goggles on that I regained in Zanzibar for as long as I can while I’m still in Tanzania for the next six months. Maybe you might consider doing the same, too. If you can’t think of any other way to explore the world you’ve lived in for a while, just try to think of it in terms of smells, for example, just for one day, and be particularly attune to what you find. Then get back to me if you so choose, because I’m undoubtedly curious to know what you know. Whether or not you choose to share what you know, you can count on me telling you what I come to know as I continue my crazy teaching journey in Tanzania and share it with you through my blog posts. And with that said, I guess I better get cracking on that knowing, so I have something to tell you…haha.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
True Reflections of a Traveler
There comes a time in every journey abroad when even the most enthusiastic travelers, like myself, become homesick. In my past travels I’ve honestly never really felt homesick. Then again, I’d only ever been away from home at most for 4 months during which time I was dating someone, spending all my time with new friends, enjoying my classes at my University and having the time of my life. As I approach the 5-month mark of my time in Tanzania at the end of next week, I’ve come to realize that homesickness has crept up on me almost out of nowhere. While I’ve enjoyed most of my time here since I arrived in June, lately the cultural differences that I once perceived as charming and intriguing at the beginning of my trip have become quite troubling and burdensome. All of a sudden it seems like I’m struggling to shake the smallest annoyances that I previously held an indifferent attitude toward. The small things I’ve had to adjust to like not having running water, sharing my house with many species of insects, being called “Mzungu” wherever I go, and inhaling huge clouds of dust on a daily basis have all become taxing and sometimes even infuriating.
I suppose I started to really feel flustered and homesick for the first time here when I got malaria nearly a month ago. At that time all I wanted was to be in the ultimate comfort zone I experienced when I was sick at ten years old: sitting on my couch at home in Vermont eating soup and watching movies while my mom tended to my every health need. Not having the luxury of being at home nor with my family while I was sick provoked the homesickness bug to implant itself into my brain. It’s funny that I’m homesick because I’ll admit I was easily the most unlikely person to get homesick out of our WorldTeach group when we first arrived. I was the most excited person at the start of our program to be here and I even used to get annoyed when my fellow volunteers when they started to complain about this or that about the culture. Since I’d been to Tanzania twice before and I have so many great friends in Dar es Salaam, I felt like I was home and I didn’t want anyone to rain on my parade. Yet, when I started feeling some of the same irritations that the other volunteers had voiced, I felt embarrassed to suddenly feel bad about being here. I felt guilty, almost like I was turning my back on a good friend. All the experiences I’d ever had in Tanzania had been positive up until this point and I didn’t want to admit to myself or anyone else that my time in Tanzania could be anything but completely fantastic.
Once I got malaria, however, I got a harsh wake up call that keeping these feelings inside might not be as productive as I had once thought. While I thought I was being strong for trying to stay so positive, I realized I’d begun denying my right to express my true feelings, which are sometimes just plain shitty, just like everyone else’s sometimes are. I began to grasp that sometimes, no matter how much you love where you are and the people you’re with in another country, living abroad is really hard sometimes. Whereas I’d stubbornly kept my negative feelings to myself about my internal adjustments to Tanzanian living before I got sick, I immediately let my emotional floodgates free as soon as I got malaria. As a consequence of keeping these feelings to myself for so long before this point, however, I all of a sudden didn’t have enough bad things to say about Tanzania, my program, and my general life here. Rather than venting a healthy amount, I quickly saw myself falling into a deep depression because I was finally acknowledging all my qualms about being here. Life was not looking so hot.
While I sought solace in my housemate during this time by sharing my feelings with her once she returned from her month-long vacation away from Tanzania, we both realized quite quickly that instead of soothing each other’s negative emotions as we talked about them, we were instead feeding off of each other’s negative energy and making each other feel even worse about being here. Although I definitely felt listened to by my housemate and I utterly adore her for hearing me out, we always felt so hopeless at the end of our venting sessions. By some grace of God, a former friend of mine, whom I hadn’t seen in over a year, is currently traveling across Tanzania and she was able to make a pit stop in Morogoro for two days last week to visit my housemate and I. When she observed how my housemate and I talked about being in Tanzania (and hating it at the moment), she dawned new light on what we were doing by telling us just how destructive our empathizing for each other’s bad experiences had become. She could see that the more we talked about what made us upset, the more upset we got about them and the more we wanted to go home as soon as possible. Hearing her say this was a revolutionary wake up call for me. After she told us this, I almost instantly became open to the idea of accepting my life here the way it is, no matter how rough it is sometimes, because no one wants to be around nor talk to a Negative Nancy all the time. I could see my negative self reflecting back at me through my friend’s eyes, whom had always been accustomed to knowing me for my bubbly, friendly, and optimistic personality. I knew from that point on that I didn’t want to be the negative person I was turning out to be, for my sake and everyone else’s, and that I needed to find my old self again if I expect to survive here for another 7 months.
Up until I made this revelation last week, I hadn’t been able get over even the slightest ounce of my homesickness. In fact, it somewhat shames me to admit that I even went through a tough time a couple weeks ago when I was seriously considering ending my time with the WorldTeach program early six months and coming home in January. I just felt like I couldn’t take being here for any longer than six months. Fearful that I would say some things I would later regret, I refrained from uploading a blog post during this time and instead specifically reached out to my closest family and friends to pull me through my difficulties. As much as I wanted to go home, I secretly wanted the people I look up to most in this world to pull me out of my negative mentality and tell me to stick it out for the year. They know me well enough to know that I am not a quitter and that I can accomplish anything I set my mind to, as long as I want it enough. Fortunately, these amazing people ultimately believed in me enough to tell me to complete my time here with flying colors. Although it took a lot of convincing on their behalves, I’m now mentally prepared again to stay on board with my program for the entire year until June 2011. In my humble opinion, even the most flexible and open-minded travelers go through trialing times like this when they feel like enough is enough and all they want to do is go home. That’s the very definition of homesickness, really. Reflecting back on my whirlwind of emotions over the past month and a half, I’m honestly grateful to have gone through this grueling thought process because I think it’s helped me cleanse out my system. As I’m actively shifting my attitude, I’m starting to feel like my optimistic self again who knows that I’m here for very important reasons and I can’t leave until I’ve achieved what I set out to do by June of 2011.
I suppose I started to really feel flustered and homesick for the first time here when I got malaria nearly a month ago. At that time all I wanted was to be in the ultimate comfort zone I experienced when I was sick at ten years old: sitting on my couch at home in Vermont eating soup and watching movies while my mom tended to my every health need. Not having the luxury of being at home nor with my family while I was sick provoked the homesickness bug to implant itself into my brain. It’s funny that I’m homesick because I’ll admit I was easily the most unlikely person to get homesick out of our WorldTeach group when we first arrived. I was the most excited person at the start of our program to be here and I even used to get annoyed when my fellow volunteers when they started to complain about this or that about the culture. Since I’d been to Tanzania twice before and I have so many great friends in Dar es Salaam, I felt like I was home and I didn’t want anyone to rain on my parade. Yet, when I started feeling some of the same irritations that the other volunteers had voiced, I felt embarrassed to suddenly feel bad about being here. I felt guilty, almost like I was turning my back on a good friend. All the experiences I’d ever had in Tanzania had been positive up until this point and I didn’t want to admit to myself or anyone else that my time in Tanzania could be anything but completely fantastic.
Once I got malaria, however, I got a harsh wake up call that keeping these feelings inside might not be as productive as I had once thought. While I thought I was being strong for trying to stay so positive, I realized I’d begun denying my right to express my true feelings, which are sometimes just plain shitty, just like everyone else’s sometimes are. I began to grasp that sometimes, no matter how much you love where you are and the people you’re with in another country, living abroad is really hard sometimes. Whereas I’d stubbornly kept my negative feelings to myself about my internal adjustments to Tanzanian living before I got sick, I immediately let my emotional floodgates free as soon as I got malaria. As a consequence of keeping these feelings to myself for so long before this point, however, I all of a sudden didn’t have enough bad things to say about Tanzania, my program, and my general life here. Rather than venting a healthy amount, I quickly saw myself falling into a deep depression because I was finally acknowledging all my qualms about being here. Life was not looking so hot.
While I sought solace in my housemate during this time by sharing my feelings with her once she returned from her month-long vacation away from Tanzania, we both realized quite quickly that instead of soothing each other’s negative emotions as we talked about them, we were instead feeding off of each other’s negative energy and making each other feel even worse about being here. Although I definitely felt listened to by my housemate and I utterly adore her for hearing me out, we always felt so hopeless at the end of our venting sessions. By some grace of God, a former friend of mine, whom I hadn’t seen in over a year, is currently traveling across Tanzania and she was able to make a pit stop in Morogoro for two days last week to visit my housemate and I. When she observed how my housemate and I talked about being in Tanzania (and hating it at the moment), she dawned new light on what we were doing by telling us just how destructive our empathizing for each other’s bad experiences had become. She could see that the more we talked about what made us upset, the more upset we got about them and the more we wanted to go home as soon as possible. Hearing her say this was a revolutionary wake up call for me. After she told us this, I almost instantly became open to the idea of accepting my life here the way it is, no matter how rough it is sometimes, because no one wants to be around nor talk to a Negative Nancy all the time. I could see my negative self reflecting back at me through my friend’s eyes, whom had always been accustomed to knowing me for my bubbly, friendly, and optimistic personality. I knew from that point on that I didn’t want to be the negative person I was turning out to be, for my sake and everyone else’s, and that I needed to find my old self again if I expect to survive here for another 7 months.
Up until I made this revelation last week, I hadn’t been able get over even the slightest ounce of my homesickness. In fact, it somewhat shames me to admit that I even went through a tough time a couple weeks ago when I was seriously considering ending my time with the WorldTeach program early six months and coming home in January. I just felt like I couldn’t take being here for any longer than six months. Fearful that I would say some things I would later regret, I refrained from uploading a blog post during this time and instead specifically reached out to my closest family and friends to pull me through my difficulties. As much as I wanted to go home, I secretly wanted the people I look up to most in this world to pull me out of my negative mentality and tell me to stick it out for the year. They know me well enough to know that I am not a quitter and that I can accomplish anything I set my mind to, as long as I want it enough. Fortunately, these amazing people ultimately believed in me enough to tell me to complete my time here with flying colors. Although it took a lot of convincing on their behalves, I’m now mentally prepared again to stay on board with my program for the entire year until June 2011. In my humble opinion, even the most flexible and open-minded travelers go through trialing times like this when they feel like enough is enough and all they want to do is go home. That’s the very definition of homesickness, really. Reflecting back on my whirlwind of emotions over the past month and a half, I’m honestly grateful to have gone through this grueling thought process because I think it’s helped me cleanse out my system. As I’m actively shifting my attitude, I’m starting to feel like my optimistic self again who knows that I’m here for very important reasons and I can’t leave until I’ve achieved what I set out to do by June of 2011.
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