Almost home...

I come home in FOUR days…predictably, I am having very mixed emotions. Some parts of me are ready to go home, to see my family (especially Vince who is significantly bigger now), to have a Western toilet and an actual shower, to be able to run without being harassed, to eat something other than rice, ugali, beans, and/or cabbage for dinner each night. But a bigger part of me is already missing Tanzania. I have actually had some successful pseudo-conversations in Kiswahili recently, and my mama complimented my progress – too bad I most likely will not keep practicing upon my return. The weather has gotten a bit better and there has recently been sunshine. Many Tanzanians in the street can now identify me as a mwalimu (teacher) and are respectful and do not harass me once they confirm their suspicions. (I am not really sure how they guess that I am a teacher, but I am thinking it must be my horrible fashion sense which has devolved into modesty with practicality – skirts with tennis shoes, amazing) I have gotten close with several Tanzanians, and my family here I will especially miss. All in all, I love Tanzania…and I definitely see myself back here, hopefully sooner rather than later.

My last week of community training with GSC was good, pretty routine by now. Actually, it almost seemed that the better we got at teaching for community groups, the more disheartening it became. All of the trainings I did except for one were coordinated through women’s groups, so there were only female participants. A lot of the information we shared with them was great and seemingly helpful (i.e. myths about AIDS, how to care with someone who is infected, how HIV can be transmitted from one person to another including MTCT). But when it came to protection from infection via sex, it got very sticky. The vast majority of the women were married, and many times none of the prevention methods given in the ‘ABC’ method (Abstain, Be faithful, or use Condoms) were realistic options (being faithful only works if your partner is also faithful to you, clearly). We did not get many questions about how to effectively talk with stubborn/controlling husbands in our first couple of trainings, but then it came up every time. And we never came up with a good answer. GSC never addressed this in our orientation, and really, what can we say? Especially as foreigners who want to reserve judgment on other cultures. And even if it was okay to say that their culture is bad for imparting their husbands with so much control over their lives, that does not change the reality of their current situations. Our only semi-decent answer was that they need to teach both their daughters and sons about HIV, relationships, and communication, so even if they cannot attain gender equality in their marriage, they can educate the next generation to empower women.

I had a creepster experience early last week, when a man started walking with me on my way home from town. This happens with some regularity, so I was not at all surprised, especially when he started talking about the safari company he works for and telling me I should use them for safari. After explaining that I had already been on safari and was leaving in a week, he moved on to talking about me: what I am doing here, what I study in the states, etc. Still okay. Then he suggests that we stop and get a soda before I go home – no, my sisters are waiting for me. He will not let it go, says it will not take long…I keep refusing, say that I am already late and need to go home. So he asks if we can do it the next day. Sorry, probably not because I only have a week left and I am very busy. From this point on it is just very weird…he gets up in my ear and whispers that he wants to “give me something special” (eek), tells me that I am different because I am white (I hate that one), and claims that I promised that I would get a soda and chipsi with him. Nope, I did not promise you anything; oh well, you told me you would; no, you told me that I would. He also explains that he knows, unlike most people, that not all white people have a lot of money – yes, for example, me. He says that since I am a student and “on a budget”, I should come to his house and he will “cook me a vegetable”. No thank you. He gets upset and asks “well do you have money or not?” No, but my mama cooks for me and I like her food so I do not need you to cook for me. At this point we are at the corner where I turn off the main road and start down back roads to my house, and there is no way I want to let this guy see where I live. I round on him and ask him where he is going – back to town apparently, he came all of this way for no reason other than to talk with me. Okay, fine, I am going home now, kwaheri. I turn and continue, and he keeps following me. So I stop in front of a group of Tanzanian guys who stand in front of this little shop and who know me by now, and refuse to continue on until he leaves. I tell him that we are done talking, I am going home, and he needs to go. He finally does, but not before saying that we will meet tomorrow. Luckily I have not seen him since. I think if I do I will pretend not to remember him and just ignore him. Really, he might be fine. People here seem to not have a grasp of what foreigners think of as creepy, so they typically seem more sketch than they actually are. But I am not looking to make friends with random older men anyway, so even if he is harmless, I do not want to hang out.

On Friday, one of the other volunteers with GSC, Taylor, created a surprise night for the other 11 of us girls who did day camp together and are still here in TZ. Since I worked with Taylor in community training all that week, I was able to get some information out of her and piece together a lot of the rest, so it was not that huge of a surprise for me; but I actually prefer figuring things out and turning out to be right more than being surprised anyway. We went to a great local joint for dinner (amazing veggie burgers for only 1000 TZsh = less than a dollar), she bought a chocolate cake for us to share, and she got everyone a kitenge. We went through and everyone wrote in permanent marker on everyone else’s kitenge…I am excited to read it once I get home, it will be a great memory not only of Tanzania, but of the amazing people I worked with. I came here not expecting to make friends with any of the other volunteers; I was expecting Africa to be an intensely personal experience that would not involve much reflection with others while I was here. But it turned out that the group I worked with was made up of stellar people – which makes a lot of sense if you think about it…it takes a certain type of person to want to come to Africa to volunteer for a summer. At any rate, I am very grateful for all of the girls in our group. They definitely made my experience here even more meaningful than it would have been otherwise.

Kucheza!!

Wow, last night was probably the craziest and most fun night I have had so far in Tanzania! I went out to dinner and then to Maasai Camp – a pseudo-dance club – with some other volunteers…we also went with one of our Tanzanian friends who is a translator with GSC, and ran into another one there. Actually, the one we ran into at the club is Isaya, the Maasai who ran in the London Marathon. I am going to his village next weekend, and I am stoked. Anyway, once I danced with one person, I literally could not get away with dancing by myself for more than 2 minutes before the next guy would turn up and dance with me. It was fun for sure, albeit a bit overwhelming. Luckily I have not danced in a long time so I mainly just appreciated it. I think the fact that my hair was done in African style in the little braids probably did not help my cause, I got a lot of comments on it…I realize it probably looks a little ridiculous, but Rachel my dada did it yesterday afternoon (completely of her own volition and uninvited), so I could not really take it out right after she spent half an hour on it. I actually kind of like it a lot, it feels nice. The Tanzanian guys claimed to like it too… “Unapenda? “Ndiyo, ninapenda sana” was a recurring exchange. The music was an eclectic mix of stellar American hip-hop (by my standards), old 90’s music, and Bongo Flava, which kind of all sounds the same to me. I got many proclamations of love and a lot of Kiswahili practice in, haha. One of Isaya’s friends was particularly into me, so I spent a lot of the night dancing with a Maasai guy. Seriously, if I had been told my sophomore year when I was learning about Maasai culture both in cultural/social anthro and my theology course that I would be dancing with a Maasai in a dance club…there is no way I would have believed it. Both he and Isaya are actually not very good at dancing, but the sweet cultural aspect completely makes up for it…although I kind of felt like I was corrupting their culture or something…hmm. But overall, a great night, I had a lot of fun.

On a different note, I just realized yesterday that my flight out of Kilimanjaro is actually on July 31; I had been thinking it was July 29 pretty much my entire time here. Oops. It is probably good that I have an extra two days to finish up interviews and things though, so overall a positive discovery. Interviews so far are going quite well. Everyone that I have talked with so far is enjoying the chance to talk about these things, and many of them have meaningful insights that I had not considered before. I am starting to understand more and more how important it is to get input from the people who actually live the culture, as opposed to coming in with Western ideas and blindly implementing them – I always believed this in theory, but I have never witnessed it until now. Hopefully my thesis will eventually do a good job of capturing everyone’s ideas and representing their feelings, because people have been very welcoming and helpful with interviews. The only slight glitch is that I, being the genius I am, failed to realize that I needed to put the software for my digital voice recorder onto my laptop before I could transfer interviews from the recorder to the computer. Apparently the recorder came with a cd that had the program, although I cannot remember ever seeing this. Hopefully it is sitting in my room at home…we will see. For now, I hope I have enough space to keep everyone’s interview recorded. I could always downgrade the quality of the recording and hence have more space, but I have been really happy with the setting it is on so far so I would rather not. Perhaps I will just transcribe some of the “less important” (i.e. other volunteers) interviews while I am here and then delete them? I started transcribing the other day and did not get very far; I kind of forgot how tedious it can be. At least I had practice with it last fall so I have a framework for attacking it.

I had a great last couple of days with my family…on Friday and Saturday I spent a good amount of time playing Frisbee, hopscotch, and jump rope with my dadas. I stole back one of the Frisbees that I originally brought for GSC’s day camp and took it home to them, and they love it. We have started playing a game where the three of us count how many consecutive successful throws/catches we can get…so far our record is 98, and they are shooting for 100. Yesterday, I made s’mores with my family, which they really liked. Mama was really cute: “Wait, Mary, I want to write down the recipe!”…“It is really easy Mama, I really do not think you need to write it down…” haha. The food situation also drastically improved on Friday. The chai had ginger in it, which was amazing. Then Mama asked if I liked spices or not in my food – YES – so then we had the spaghetti with carrots and peas that we often have but with some seasoning, and it was ten times tastier. Then for lunch on Saturday we had rice with beans and carrots, one of my favorite Tanzanian dishes. All of this inevitably means that dinner tonight will be ugali though. If you do not know what ugali is, look it up on wikipedia. I liked it for about 3 weeks, and then my family started eating it 5 nights a week…a bit too much for my liking.

This week will be another community training, and I also need to seriously start buying things that I want to take home. I have been holding out because it is not a particularly pleasant experience. People here have a hard time with the concept of looking but not buying. Especially if you shika (touch) anything, they KNOW that you want it, and are determined to get you to buy it. When you try to walk away, they will not let you out of their little stall, and ask you how much you will pay for it. A bit overwhelming, you definitely need to go in with the right mindset to make it. Last week I went fabric shopping though, and it was actually very fun. I am in love with the fabrics here, although I limited myself to just two. There are so many gorgeous ones though. Especially on African women, they look amazing. If the fabric I bought looks half as good on me, I will be happy.

Safari!

Sorry it has been awhile since I last posted! My 21^st bday here was very fun…we went to the snake park with some of our students from day camp and saw some amazing snakes, birds, and crocs in different stages of development. I even held a snake! I was semi-froking out, but I figured it was a good way to commemorate becoming a fully fledged (American) adult. I did not drink at all, but spending my birthday in Tanzania is a 21^st that I will never forget.

Last week I did another community training for GSC for a women’s group in Arusha. It was actually called Notre Dame Women’s Center, which was special to me. They were a great group and had a lot of intelligent questions and suggestions, too. I bought a kitenge that has their name and emblem of sorts on it, and I think I am going to get a bag made from the fabric at the tailor near my house. Actually, I need to put in my orders at the tailor soon so that she has time to make everything before I leave.

I started interviews for my anthro research last week, and they are going very well so far. At this point, I am focusing on the changes in gender roles and female sexuality that are occurring right now. In all of the trainings that I have done, the idea of shifts in gender roles has come up, so I want to explore if and how these perceived changes will have an impact on HIV rates for women in Tanzania. In the next two weeks, I am going to be doing many interviews. Add in shopping for some gifts, community trainings, and MAYBE some preliminary MCAT studying…and I have a very busy two weeks before I return to the states.

On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, I went on safari to the Serengeti and Ngorogoro Crater. It was amazing, definitely some of the most gorgeous things I have ever seen in my life! Highlights included the best sunset of my life in the Serengeti, a man-eating sized python in a tree, one month old baby lions, a cheetah super close to the jeep, black rhinoceros, and watching 2 mama and 5 baby lions eat a warthog that they had just killed. Definitely a once in a lifetime experience that I will never forget…while it was quite expensive, it was worth it.

Finally, I think posting photos on this blog is a lost cause for now. Once I get home in two weeks, I will go back and put up pictures that are relevant to each post within each entry. For now, I am paying for internet access and uploading photos takes a ridiculous amount of time with the extremely slow internet, if it is not completely impossible. So keep reading, but no pictures for now…samahani (sorry). My new fbook profile photo is actually from here, at the first day camp I taught. So at least you can see one I suppose.

back in the city for my 21st

Well, the week in the village, called Moshono, was very interesting. I LOVED doing community training. We did our trainings in a Pentecostal church, and we had a variety of people and ages…from 17 to circa 100…the oldest woman did not know for sure how old she was. It was really cool though because she and her great granddaughter were both there, sweet. It was also crazy to be doing condom demos in a church, with the pastor and his wife sitting right there. They seemed to think it was hilarious and were totally down with it. I cannot see that ever happening in America. People here are serious about stopping HIV though, at least in theory. I worked with Summer and Edita was our translator, so the three of us lived in a room in a bibi’s house. Everyone was super welcoming and warm, and seemed to be completely concerned with making us comfortable. Different from Arusha, were you always feel like people want something from you – and you are usually right.

The bad part about the village was that it was dirtyyy. I did not shower for an entire week, lol, I was super gross. Which really was fine, I am not necessarily one of those hyper-clean people. But I actually turned out to be still sick. On Monday, when I was still in Arusha, I felt fine. When I woke up Tuesday morning and left for the village, I was feeling a bit queasy again…and then by the afternoon, I felt awful. I proceeded to throw up every single morning there, which was just really gross considering the bathroom conditions. GSC send “provisions” for food, which turned out to be white bread and peanut butter for breakfast and lunch. That got old after about two minutes, lol. But since I could not really eat anyway, it did not matter too much. Meanwhile, the bibi bought me medicine and prayed over it, and then the Pentecostal dancing group that was visiting from Kenya prayed over me…and I got better on Friday. I was kind of nervous to take the medicine, but at that point I felt awful and did not think there was much chance of getting worse, so decided to go for it. Luckily, it worked out.

On Friday after we were done in the village, we headed to Moshi/Marangu to meet up with the entire original group of GSC volunteers…everyone who is still here anyway. Some of the girls are doing an international health program and are now scattered at hospitals all over northern Tanzania. It was very nice to all get together again. And we all stayed at this AMAZING house. Two of the girls are working in Marangu, near Moshi, and there are two German nurses who work at their hospital. These nurses have a mansion that they rent out to visitors…it was sooo great. We honestly did not feel like we were in Africa anymore, it was like being in Europe – which after a week in the village and being sick, was much appreciated. On Saturday, we went hiking in the foothills of Mt. Kilimanjaro and saw some stellar waterfalls. It was kind of difficult, but it felt great to actually be pushing myself physically for once. Then Saturday night, we got to make dinner together…actually I did not do much, but a couple of the girls took the lead and made great spaghetti, omelets, and a bean salad. Plus we made legit jungle juice with these cheapo packets of vodka, juice concentrate, boiled water, and sprite…yumm. We saw Kilimanjaro both on our way there and on the way back to Arusha, which was breathtaking. Even better than the pictures on the bottles of Kilimanjaro beer, haha.

Today is a bank holiday in Tanzania, saba saba [seven seven] – also my 21st birthday. In a bit we are going to attempt again to go to the snake park, which hopefully will be a success. Last night my cousin here, Erick, warned that he is making/doing something special for my birthday…I told him not to trouble himself, but he seemed pretty set on whatever it was, so we will see. I would also like to make no-bake cookies with my dadas, but I am not sure if we will have time.

I hope everyone had a great July 4 and ate some good American food for me. And watched some American television and partook in all of my favorite American things. I will be home in just over three weeks, crazy stuff. This countdown is getting annoying, I will stop for awhile now. Let me know how you are doing please.