One Down, Eight To Go….

As some of you may have already heard, my cat, Nulty, had a really close call last weekend when she was attacked by three dogs right just outside of my house.

It all started last Saturday evening. I had stayed at site for the weekend, working on lesson plans, doing laundry and taking care of some other projects around the house. Nulty had been going out in the courtyard all day to get some sun and (as usual) she kept jumping over the wall to do some exploring in the area around my house. So (also as usual) I kept going out, tracking her down and bringing her back in. At around 6:30PM, I was hanging a poster in the kitchen. I didn’t realize that she had jumped over the wall again until I heard the sound of dogs fighting. I’m still not sure if I actually heard her make a noise or if I just heard the dogs and automatically assumed they had her, but I ran out the door, grabbing the key to the back gate on my way, and saw a little grey fluff ball and a tangle of dogs right outside my courtyard. They were just on the other side of the gate, so I imagine that she was trying to outrun them and jump back over the wall and they caught her at the last second. I remembered that the lock on the back gate always takes a long to open (it’s rusty – I’ve already replaced it once but it keeps rusting because of all of the rain here) so I tossed the key on the ground and ran back in the house and out through the front door. All of this probably took less than a few seconds, but I felt like it was in slow motion. I had started screaming, “No! No! No! Stop!” as soon as I heard the dogs, and my shrieks just got louder after I saw them. There were three of them and, obviously I didn’t stop to take a picture, but trust me when I say they looked like this. One of them had her head, one her midsection and the other had her hindquarters. They were all pulling at her, as is they were fighting for a piece of meat (which, of course, they were – she might as well have been a furry pork chop to them). By the time I made it out the front door, they had dragged her little body towards the front of the house (I think they were trying to take her away so they could devour her without any interruption from me). As soon as I ran towards them, still screaming like a banshee, they dropped her and scattered in several directions. When I saw her little body on the ground, I was sure she was dead. Her eyes were wide open and she was on her back, looking petrified (literally and figuratively). I grabbed her and ran back into the house with her, where I was incredibly relieved to see that she was still alive. I didn’t see any blood or bites on her but I put her down on the ground to check her over, and she immediately hid under my bed and started growling. I went outside to get some water to try to clean her up with (she was covered in dirt) so I could check her wounds and I saw the dogs outside the courtyard, still milling around and growling. I was still pumping with adrenaline (Crazy Cat Lady powers activate!) so before I even realized what I was doing, I grabbed a big stick and ran back through the house and outside, slamming the front door behind me. One of the dogs immediately ran off down the hill and towards the neighboring village but the other two dogs were still rooting around the spot where they’d first caught Nulty, looking for any scraps that remained. I screamed at them, swung the big stick (banging it on the ground occasionally for emphasis) and chased them down the path towards the school.

This is probably a good time to mention that I was wearing shorts, a tank top (I had been planning to do yoga before this whole thing happened) and had put a short bathrobe over them while I was working in the kitchen. Generally, I try to dress modestly when I’m in public but I’m a little more lax around the house, especially when I’m cleaning or exercising. In the excitement, I’d run outside in my short robe and flip flops and was now standing in front of my mkuu’s house wearing next to nothing, swinging and smashing a large stick and screaming “&*#@$ you, you &^#!@ dogs! Get the #$%* out of here!” So much for Peace Corps Core Expectation #9 (Recognize that you will be perceived, in your host country and community, as a representative of the people, culture, values, and traditions of the United States of America).

I went back in the house to check on Nulty and she was still cowering under the bed and growling. I managed to drag her out, which caused her to whine loudly, so I realized she was probably in a lot of pain. I couldn’t see any bites then (it turned out that she did have one right on her behind that was bleeding) but when I touched her she felt sort of squishy, or crinkly (if that makes any sense) so I thought she might have internal injuries and/or bleeding. She was very resistant to touch, only let me clean her up a little bit and cowered under the bed. Eventually, she came out to pee (on the kitchen floor – I gave her a pass on that one, considering the circumstances) and drink some water. I put her up on the bed, but she kept moving and shifting, as if she wouldn’t find a comfortable position. Her heart was beating very quickly, and she kept up a steady stream of growls and whines, so I knew she was miserable. I Googled a variety of cat-related terms and all the information I found said the same thing – that I had to get her to a vet as soon as possible. This would not be a problem in most places in the United States, where there is probably a 24-hour emergency veterinary facility within driving distance of most people. But at 7PM on a Saturday evening in Ilembo veterinary service is not an option.

I was convinced that she was bleeding internally and I was hoping that I’d be able to take her to town the next morning and find a vet that would see her on a Sunday. She eventually settled in a spot on the couch, and I stayed with her most of the night, only moving to my bed when I realized my presence was probably just making her more uncomfortable. But I got up and checked on her every hour or so, just to make sure she was still breathing. Mubalikiwe does its morning run out of Ilembo at 5:30AM (although, like all transportation in Tanzania, that time is variable), but when my alarm went off at 4:30AM, it was freezing cold and drizzling and I was exhausted and I didn’t know if the long trip into town in the cold would be worse for her than keeping her at home and stable. I decided it was safer to wait until I could talk to a vet and see what they recommended I do. Finally, at 8AM, I couldn’t wait any longer and I called all of the numbers I had for the vet clinic (most of which were cell phone numbers – very few businesses have a land line here) where I’d had Nulty fixed back in February. The first number I dialed was answered by someone that didn’t speak English, didn’t seem to understand my (crappy) Kiswahili and ended the conversation like many Tanzanians do, by saying “well…” and hanging up. I didn’t know if he was going to call me back or what, so I waited a few minutes, sent a text and then started call the other numbers I had. Finally, I got an answer on the third number. “Hello! How is Ilembo?” the voice on the other end said in greeting. I recognized it immediately as belonging to the vet that had fixed Nulty. I explained the situation briefly and he said, “I can see her at 10:30AM”, which in Tanzania on a Sunday is nothing short of a miracle. I explained that I was in Ilembo and didn’t have a car so it would take me a while to get to town, but that I would call him as soon as I was on the road. He said that was fine and that he’d see me soon. I quickly got dressed, through some items in a backpack; got out the fluffiest towel I own and put it in Nulty’s carrier and, as gently as possible, lifted her in to it. She immediately started meowing in protest but I ran out of the house before I could change my mind. We got up to the center of town in a few minutes but there were only a couple of lorries parked and one that was being worked on (it looked like they were soldering something on the undercarriage) and didn’t look like it would be going anywhere any time soon. I walked up and down the road, just to make sure there weren’t any transportation options I was missing but realized I could do nothing but wait.

As the only mzungu in the village, I already attract a good deal of attention on my own but carrying a cat in a bag multiplied it times ten. Nulty and I settled down on a table (they are used by vendors to display their goods on market day) so everyone could casually wander by and gawk at us. Some people asked why I had a cat with me and when I explained we were going to the doctor, they thought it was hilarious. Sick people here sometimes aren’t able to go to see the doctor so the idea of taking a cat to the doctor is viewed as ridiculous (and, perhaps, rightfully so). After about an hour, the lorry that was being fixed was deemed as ready for travel, and Nulty and I managed to score a seat up front. (This is one of the many perks of being a teacher- and, who are we kidding, a mzungu; we are usually able to ride up front with the driver, depending on the amount of passengers and availability of seats.) The driver and another man sat in the front seats, and Nulty and I and a woman with her own sick child shared the bench area behind the seats.

We started out for town pretty quickly once the lorry was loaded up, but the trip was a very slow one. The driver was being very careful not to break whatever had just been fixed so we puttered along to town down the long, bumpy dirt road (none of the lorries have great shocks, but this ride was particularly rough) and I tried to keep Nulty as comfortable as possible. I started feeling more hopeful about her chances when she started looking around and being interested in the (slowly) passing scenery, but I was also worried that the rough ride could exacerbate her injuries if she had any broken bones or internal injuries.

Unfortunately, we broke down about half way into town and all of the passengers had to get out and sit by the side of the road while the driver and kondas attempted to fix the problem. Nulty was getting quite worked up from all of the excitement, so I started petting her and talking to her soothingly, much to the amusement of my fellow passengers. A very nice older man started talking to me, asking about Nulty and where we were going. He even petted her, which most Tanzanians aren’t interested in, and complimented me on how big and strong she was. He explained to me that the other passengers were saying that I must love the cat very much because I was obviously so worried about her. (I think he was just being kind to me – I’m pretty sure the other passengers had decided that I was completely certifiable.) After about forty-five minutes, the lorry was fixed and we started off again. We had just settled back into our seats when Nulty decided to pee. Miraculously, she managed to get none on herself or the carrier and a only little on the towel but soaked my skirt, shirt and backpack. So the last two hours of the trip were stinkier and slower (the driver was being even more cautious after the breakdown) but we eventually made it into Mbalizi a little after 2PM.

Nulty and I took a cab into town, where we met the very patient veterinarian at his office. After I explained to him what had happened, he looked her over, listened to her heart and announced she had muscle trauma and would need antibiotics and some vitamins to help her muscles heal. I was sure I had missed an important part of the conversation due to my poor Kiswahili comprehension so I switched to English and asked him how bad her internal injuries and bleeding were. He explained that he did not believe she had any internal bleeding because you can usually hear the blood very clearly and he didn’t hear any at all when he listened to her heart. Then he handed the stethoscope over to me and had me listen.

“So, she’s okay? She’s not going to die?” I asked.

“Of course, she will be fine!” he said.

I almost cried from relief. And, despite it being a Sunday and having already waited over 4 hours for me to arrive at his office, the vet then informed me that the other doctor that worked with him had used all of the antibiotics from their stock and asked would I mind waiting while he went to a duka (store) to get some more for Nulty? And then, when he returned an hour later, he apologized for making me wait so long and explained that he had to go to 5 different dukas to find one that was open and had the antibiotics in stock. This would be above and beyond the call of duty even in America, but in Tanzania this is really nothing short of miraculous. To top it off, he charged me a very reasonable rate (less than $30 USD)! All I have to say is, if you ever find yourself in Mbeya Town and in need of a veterinarian, Dr. Mwakalukwa is your man!

Of course, after the good news, Nulty and I now had to figure out how to get back to site that evening so I’d be able to teach my classes the next morning. After thanking Dr. Mwakalukwa profusely (and getting instructions on how to administer the antibiotic and steroid shots Nulty would need for the next few days), we hopped on a very crowded daladala (is there any other kind?) and headed back to Mbalizi.

We pulled into the junction town at 4:45PM and I was sure we were out of luck, as both Mubalikiwe and most of the lorries have usually departed for their journey back up the mountain long before. However, as Nulty and I around the corner to the spot where the lorries load up before they leave, I saw that there was still one parked there. It was almost full, so I starting jogging towards it, hoping to be able to jump in the back before it took off, and was met halfway by one of the kondas. It turned out that it was the same lorry we’d come to town on and they’d saved a seat for us up front! Everyone was quite happy (and still quite amused) to hear that Nulty had been given a positive diagnosis by the doctor. And everyone was polite enough not to mention that I still smelled like cat urine.

We started our trek back up the mountain at about 5:30PM. It was slow going and it was well after dark by the time we were approaching Ilembo. I was exhausted (as was Nulty) and happy to be almost home but, this being Tanzania, I should have realized we’d already used up more than our fair share of transportation luck for the day. We were about a mile or so from Ilembo when we had to stop because another lorry had gotten stuck in the mud (apparently, there had been heavy rains in Ilembo that afternoon) and was blocking the road. After several men attempted and failed to free the stuck lorry, the konda announced that I’d have to walk the rest of the way. He was kind enough to find another passenger (a woman who was riding in the back) to walk with me. Her name was Sala and, as we walked in the dark, she carried on a long conversation with me, speaking in what I’m pretty sure was a mixture of Kiswahili and Kimalila . I tried to explain to her that I was still learning Kiswahili and was having trouble understanding her but I could barely speak English at that point, much less Kiswahili, so she just kept chatting on and I just decided to nod and say, “Ndiyo” (Yes), “Sawa” (Okay) and “Nzuri” (Good) at what seemed like appropriate intervals. Nulty chimed in with an occasional meow to contribute her 2 cents.

As I mentioned, it was very dark at this point, so it was difficult to see. One of the great aspects of Tanzanian cell phones is that most of them have a torch light feature, so you basically have a flashlight with you at all times. Of course, when I upgraded to my fancy internet-capable phone in December, it had many wonderful, advanced features but no torch light option. I still use my old cheap phone that I got when I first arrived in country – both as an alarm clock and for the torch light- but in my hurry to get out of the house that morning, I’d left it behind. Sala’s phone had a torch light, and she guided us as far as the Secondary School, where I turned off for home and she continued on to her neighboring village. I assured her that I’d be fine, and demonstrated that I’d use the screen of my super fancy smart phone to light my way. Needless to say, about 3 seconds after we parted, I stepped into a giant puddle, and was covered up to my ankle in mud. By the time I got to my front door, Nulty and I were completely exhausted, both physically and emotionally. I was struggling to fit my key in the padlock when I realized that I hadn’t had a chance to use a restroom all day. And I had to pee very badly. And the padlock was not opening as quickly as I’d like it to. I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say I didn’t just smell like cat urine by the time I got the door open.

The good news is that Nulty is well on her way to recovery. She finished all of her (unfortunately, quite painful) shots and is healing a little more each day. Here’s a photo of her on Thursday, just five days after the attack:

Nulty looking none the worse for wear, despite her ordeal.

And, to end things on a lighter note, I rode into town in the back of a lorry yesterday with a chicken that was wearing what I’m pretty sure is a really bad toupee:

Seriously, who does he think he’s fooling with that thing?

I Put A Spell On You

It’s the last day of the month so that means it’s time for another blog post! (I really don’t mean to always leave it until the last minute, but that seems to be the trend lately.)

I have been here in Tanzania almost ten months now and I think the novelty has officially worn off. I’ve definitely been suffering from a case of the blahs lately. It hasn’t helped that the rainy season is still going on – I am apparently in the one part of Tanzania where the rainy season lasts seven months (as opposed to three or less). And once the rainy season finally does end in May I apparently have bitterly cold temperatures to look forward to! I realize that I’m fortunate not to have to deal with water shortages and constant, oppressive heat, but when I’m in bed at night, wearing a fleece jacket, lying under three wool blankets and a shuka (a Maasai wrap/blanket) and the rain is deafeningly loud on the roof and my bedroom ceiling springs yet another leak, it’s hard to remember that. Pair that with transportation that has been even more unreliable than usual (the rain doesn’t exactly help) and my decision to give up alcohol for Lent and this has been one of the more challenging months that I’ve been here. I don’t know if this advice will ever come in handy for any of you, but I strongly suggest that you don’t give up drinking alcohol if you ever find yourself living in a developing country. I don’t drink often here, but those few beers or glasses of wine every other weekend when I’m in town I’ve found are a very necessary part of my coping strategy.

Teaching has been interesting this year – unfortunately, my students did very poorly on the standardized Baseline exam (I kind of knew from one quick look at it that it was way beyond their skill set) but it at least has helped me identify some of their weaker areas that I should focus on. Like verbs. And nouns. And pronouns. And English. But, before I could get to any of these grammar lessons, I had a much more pressing problem I needed to address. After correcting a couple of tests and homework assignments and trying to enter those grades into my student roster, I realized that the names the students were writing on their tests and exercise books didn’t match most of the names on my roster. They would either write their first name and middle name (I had a middle initial for each student so I would try to figure out who was who by guessing) or their middle name and last name or some portion of their name (first, middle or last) with completely different names added on and/or spelling mistakes. And then they would not even use the wrong names consistently, which further complicated things. Grading 200+ assignments is hard enough work itself but with all of the name issues, it became impossibly time consuming. I asked some of the other teachers about this and they were just as frustrated as I was. Apparently, part of the issue may stem from the fact that when some students do not pass their standard 7 exam their parents will, ahem, “encourage” their teachers to pass them anyway and that process may or may not involve enrolling the student in secondary school under a completely different name. (Although I have yet to figure out the specific details of this scheme – are they taking the names of students that did pass the exam? If so, where are those students? I believe the parents have to provide some form of identification for their children, but I don’t have any idea what that might be as birth certificates aren’t very common in my area, according to my fellow teachers.)

So I decided to spend a solid week on how to write names and fill out other important information (date of birth, age, etc.). First I asked if they knew what names they had been registered for school under and they all said they did. They’re always big on giving me the answer they think I want to hear, so I wasn’t entirely convinced that they were being honest. So I asked some of the students individually why the name they wrote on their tests or exercise books was different from the name that they were registered under. The most consistent answer was that they were writing names that they “liked”. For the sake of expediency (and my own sanity) I told them that they could call themselves any name they wanted in class or with their friends, but that when they wrote their name on any school assignment or document they had to make sure that they wrote the name that they were registered under. So I gave them a couple of in-class assignments and a lot of lectures on what names should go where. Being the teenagers that they are, they rolled their eyes and acted as if I was insulting their intelligence. Of course, when I corrected their first in-class assignment, they were still not writing their names correctly. So they got another round of lessons and lectures on name writing (and I got another round of eye rolls and loud sighs from them). I think I finally broke them because by the second assignment most of them had started writing their actual registered names. It’s the small victories that keep me going here.

Another area that they had difficulty with was their age. All of my students seemed to know their dates of birth (whether they actually wrote them correctly the first time was another matter) but the majority seemed to have problems calculating their correct ages. Math is probably one of their worst subjects (in terms of test scores – I blame this on the fact that NECTA doesn’t give them partial credit for their work, which doesn’t really encourage kids to try to work out problems) but basic subtraction seems like it was something they should have mastered. I eventually figured out that they were just subtracting their birth year from the current year, regardless of whether or not their birthday had happened yet this year. (For example, a student born in December 1988 was saying they were 15, when in fact they were still 14.) Again, they seemed quite put upon that I would dare to suggest that they would not already know this, but I find it’s best just to repeat stuff over and over until they finally do it right just to shut me up. (Basically, I’m torturing them.) I had a very amusing moment when one of the biggest eye-rollers in the class, a boy who sits in the front of my 1B class, responded loudly and super sarcastically “Ndiyo” (“Yes”) when I asked, for perhaps the 92nd time, if they understood that current year minus birth year only worked if their month and day of birth had passed in the current year. So, I decided to check his exercise book and, sure enough, he had written his age wrong, which I was able to gently tease him about, much to the delight of the rest of the students. Normally, I don’t call out my students on their errors in front of the whole class but self-confidence is not one of this kid’s problem areas.

Another success is that I’ve finally found a way to keep my students from going completely berserk in class. As I’ve mentioned before, this year’s group of Form Ones are generally much better behaved than last year’s, but they all love to chat with their neighbors and when there are 60 or 80 or more students in one room, noise can get out of control pretty quickly. I found out last year that yelling was only temporarily successful, things like having them repeat claps or chants to indicate that they’re listening doesn’t seem to work with this group, and if I stop talking and wait for them to quiet down, they don’t catch on for several minutes which wastes lots of valuable class time. One of the education volunteers from the class before us that helped us with teacher training at IST said that her students hated when she would tap them on the head or their sweaters with an eraser full of chalk, so I tried that this year and it has been working great. It’s gotten to the point that most of the time, all I have to do is hold up the eraser and ask, “Mna taka kichwa wa vumbi?” (which roughly – very roughly – translates to “Do you want a head of dust?”) and that settles them down. I still have to actually use the eraser on a couple of kids each week, but I tend to save that for serial offenders.

I took some photos of the path that I take from my house to the school every morning (part of my daily routine that I talked about in my last post). I’m going to try to take some photos of the school grounds and students and post those in the next month or two. For now, here is what I see on my morning “commute”:

Part one of my daily commute to the school – I’ve just passed my mkuu’s house here.

Part two of my commute – the school gardens are up and on the left here, a grove of mostly pine trees are on the right.

The school is on the left here. This section of the path gets incredibly slippery when it rains – I’ve fallen here more times than I care to count. I think I need to get some cleats just to make it home safely every day.

This is the hill that leads from the school (and my house) up to the village. If nothing else, living here is a great fitness regimen:

This is the hill that I have to walk up to get to the village. It doesn’t look that bad, but it’s a killer. Especially when I’m heading to town and carrying bags.

One of my favorite things about Ilembo are all of the mbuzi (goats) that wander around the village. I think they are the most adorable things, which perplexes everyone here. I am always chasing after them, trying to pet them (especially the babies) but they are quite wary of humans, which is probably understandable because when a person grabs them the next stop is usually the slaughterhouse. No one seems to understand my affection for what they view as walking plates of food, but I am undaunted. My site mate, Andrew, is always telling me to cool it with the goats because the villagers will think I’m crazy but I think we all know it’s a little late for that. That train left the station back when I started carrying Nulty around and calling her my “mtoto” (baby).

Some mbuzi hanging out in front of the local hair salon. The streets of Ilembo are littered with mbuzi – they are everywhere. Alas, they seem determined not to let me pet them, despite my many attempts.

Another shot of mbuzi at the local hair salon.

Speaking of Nulty, her latest accomplishment is that she has learned how to climb up on the roof. I think she thinks she will be able to catch one of the wife-beater birds that hang around up there but the birds are pretty savvy and don’t come around when there’s a cat sitting in plain view. Even without the birds, she gets super excited/crazed when she’s up there – I think it’s like a Titanic “I’m king of the world” moment for her, so I let her hang out there as much as she wants.

Nulty has finally figured out how to get on the roof. Here she is surveying her kingdom.

And here she is looking drunk with the power that she thinks her new perch gives her.

And a glamour shot. Like Barbra Streisand, Nulty insists on having only her best side photographed.

And, finally, I had a couple of photo requests on my last post, so here’s a picture of some of the local flora (per Joan’s request):

Just one of the many lovely flowering bushes on the school grounds.

And my sister requested a photo of one of my coloring masterpieces. (I’m working on getting a photo of Rosie – I want to check to make sure it’s okay with her mom before I plaster her little face on the internet.)

I have spent many an evening coloring by candlelight in the “My Pony and Friends” coloring book.

The good news is that I’m heading home to the U.S. for three weeks in June. I am sooooooooooooo excited! I’ll be on the East Coast only, visiting my parents in Connecticut. I’d love to make it all the way out to L.A. but I don’t really have enough time and I’m worried that I may never leave if I go there. (I’m imagining a scenario where I chain myself to the fountain at The Grove or something.) So even if I don’t get to see you when I’m there, I’d definitely love to talk on the phone (or Skype or FaceTime) with as many of you as possible.

Happy Easter! I hope the bunny was good to all of you!

A Day In The Life

So a lot of you have asked what a typical day is like for me here. (Okay, not a lot of you – I think maybe one person, but it’s hard to come up with topics for these posts!) I thought I would document a typical weekday here in Ilembo:

6:30am
My alarm goes off. School starts at 8:00pm and some of the teachers start showing up at 7:00am, but the hour before is usually just for students to clean up the school grounds, fetch water for the school and there is a morning assembly every day at 7:30am. The morning assembly usually consists of a series of announcements in Kiswahili that I don’t understand and lots of student discipline (i.e. hitting them with sticks), so I try to skip it as much of it as possible. I don’t think I’ll ever get comfortable with the corporal punishment they use here. Generally speaking, I’m not particularly squeamish about violence but the power imbalance here makes me super uncomfortable and sometimes sick to my stomach. In my understanding, the official rule about corporal punishment is that teachers are supposed to report students to the discipline master and only the DM is supposed to strike students but the reality is that all the teachers hit students and the students have no recourse if the punishment was unfair or unwarranted. In addition, students are beaten for things as minor as messy uniforms (not tucking in shirts, etc.) and also things that are beyond their control, like their parent’s failure to pay school fees on time. There’s a definite cycle of violence here – the teachers were hit when they were students so now they hit students and I’m sure some of the current students will become teachers and they will hit their students, etc. The most frustrating part is the students’ attitude towards beatings – they actually seem to think it is a necessary part of education! I have tried to get students to express their opinions on corporal punishment in some of my English classes (as part of the unit on “expressing preferences and opinions” in the Tanzanian syllabus) and they were all in favor of it. When I asked why, they said they thought it made them behave better. I’m sure this is in no small part due to them being trained to tell teachers what they think they want to hear, but I was still pretty shocked by their attitude.

6:40am-7:20am
Alarm goes off every ten minutes and I repeatedly hit the snooze button. Nulty attempts to resettle herself after every time I turn to snooze the clock, occasionally expressing her discontent by yowling loudly.

7:30am
I’m usually able to get myself up and out of bed by this time. I head outside to use the choo and Nulty uses this opportunity to sneak out in the courtyard to chew on some grass. If she’s being particularly bad, she’ll hop up on the wall and I’ll have to spend precious time trying to lure her down – either with the promise of treats or by just dragging a chair outside, climbing on it and grabbing her. When we’re back inside, I brush my teeth and put some degas (dried fish, kind of like anchovies) in Nulty’s bowl and make sure she’s got enough relatively clean water. Nulty is super spoiled by Tanzanian standards, but she has been raised by American PCVs so she doesn’t know that, and she usually gives me an “Is that it? These damn fish again?” look after I feed her.

7:40am
I get dressed (in clothes that would make any Fundamentalist Mormon proud: long skirts, conservative tops), put my hair in a bun- partly because it’s easy and partly because my hair usually has not been washed in a while- and start my morning beauty routine.

7:41am
Morning beauty routine completed. (It really only consists of putting on deodorant and slapping some moisturizer with sunscreen on my face. Occasionally I skip the moisturizer/sunscreen step – it’s pretty cloudy here most of the time so sun exposure isn’t as big a concern as it is when I’m in town.)

7:42am
I fill my travel mug with some hot water (boiled the night before and stored in my thermos) and dump some instant coffee in. If by some chance I’ve actually gotten up earlier and have a few minutes, I might make some instant oatmeal but usually I just grab a protein bar (thanks for all of the care packages, folks!) and shove it in my backpack to eat later.

7:45am
I check my backpack and make sure I’ve got my laptop (so I can charge it at school) and the books/materials I’ll need for teaching that day. It is at this point that I realize I’m really going to be late if I don’t hurry. I spend a few minutes figuring out whether I’ll need a scarf, sweater, raincoat, umbrella and/or rain boots, depending on the weather, and then try to actually locate the necessary item of clothing in my bedroom.

7:50am
I am fully dressed and ready to head out, but am usually stopped by Nulty, who hops up on the coffee table and begs for a few treats, which I always give her out of guilt for leaving her alone all day.

7:51am
I walk to school, which is only about 5 minutes away. I usually use this time to check email and the internet on my phone. I try to read the Google news headlines and check TMZ for any breaking Lindsay Lohan and/or Octomom news.

7:56am
I arrive at school, greet my other teachers in Kiswahili and sign in to the teacher’s log. If the morning assembly is still in progress (it often runs long), I’ll stand up front with the other teachers and try my best to translate into English what is being said. I’m usually able to recognize a lot of the words but I’m not quite at the point where I actually understand what they mean together. Usually it’s something like “teachers” “potato”, “mzungu” (always followed by a big laugh) and “giraffe” and I try to brainstorm the potential sentences that might use all of those words together. Thankfully, my counterpart, Mr. Komba (who is head of the English Department) will translate any important announcements for me. While the official language of secondary education is English, the reality is that most school related meetings or gatherings are conducted in Kiswahili. I am extremely lucky in that my mkuu is very conscientious about making sure any issues that relate to me are either discussed in English or are translated for me. And most of the teachers at my school speak excellent English, so I am quite spoiled. I try to use Kiswahili as much as possible, but I usually have to resort to English to discuss anything that is a remotely complex concept or idea. I’m told that the older you are, the longer it takes to learn a foreign language but you are able to retain it longer. I’m hoping this is true – I definitely feel like I’m improving every week (if not every day) but I definitely still consider myself a novice speaker. Maybe low Intermediate on a good day.

8:00am-ish
Classes officially start at 8:00, but sometimes the morning assembly runs long or it takes students a while to get to their classrooms, find their seats and settle down. A class period here is 40 minutes long, but most classes are double periods (80 minutes). 40 minutes seems like not enough time and 80 minutes always feels like a little too much. This year, there are 3 streams of Form I (so far – it’s possible a fourth stream will be added later, depending on how many students decide to enroll later in the year, which is what happened last year) so, during our Baseline English orientation (which just wrapped up last week), I taught 3 double periods, 3 or 4 days of the week.

11:00am
Chai time! Students and teachers get a 20-minute chai break every day. Teachers get a cup of chai and some mandazi (little fried dough things – delicious). This is usually the highlight of my morning. The Baseline schedule was such that if we had a 10:50am-12:10pm class, we missed the chai break. Often, I had two classes back to back, from 10:50am all the way until 1:30pm, so by the time I got to the teacher’s lounge there was some tea left but the mandazi was all gone. It was the saddest thing ever. But at least I usually had a protein bar with me to keep me from starving.

11:20am
Chai break ends and everyone heads back to their classrooms. Teaching itself really varies from day to day, depending on the lesson and how the students are behaving. If I’m teaching a topic that I’m able to tie in some class participation activities to, it tends to be more of a success. Last week, I did a lesson on some basic locative prepositions (top, bottom, front, back, side, corner) and there was some group work and I had students come up to the board to write when we were reviewing the correct answers, so that was a success with all of my streams. Plus, the Kiswahili translations of the vocabulary words were pretty straightforward so that always makes it much easier for the students to grasp concepts. I taught a lesson on the simple past tense a couple of weeks ago and that was rough. It was supposed to be reinforcement of what they’d already learned but they were completely unfamiliar with the concept. It’s always a surprise to me when I realize topics that are assumed by the Tanzanian syllabus to be review are in fact brand new to my students. There are so many holes in their English education and I never know when I’ll stumble into them. It makes lesson planning interesting, to say the least. I try to plan an 80 minute lesson and include what I think will be 10 minutes of quick review, only to realize it’s an entirely new concept and I have to scrap my lesson plan and spend the entire period introducing some basic grammar item that should have been covered in primary school. (Some days it’s hard to restrain myself from marching up to the local primary school and giving a piece of my mind to the teachers there- although, to be fair, our secondary school students attended several different primary schools in the area, so it’s not right to just blame the one. They all seem to suck equally. Yeah, I know the PC doesn’t want me to say anything that reflects negatively on the education system here, but you try to restrain yourself when students that have allegedly been learning English for 7 years are unfamiliar with what a noun is. I’m not even going to get into the black hole that is adverbs.)

2:20pm
Usually by this time, I am finished teaching. Some days are heavier than others, depending on the class schedule. Any downtime during the day is spent in the teacher’s lounge (either working on lessons or grading), working in the library sorting and cataloging books or, if I’m feeling particularly ambitious, trying to get an internet signal on my laptop and check email. I have email on my phone, but I’m not able to download big files on it and I’m limited to about 500 characters (although I’m not actually sure because there’s no counter) for each message.

I also spend a lot of non-teaching time hanging out with Rosie, who is the daughter of one of the other teachers. She is 3 years old and is in a preschool-type program for part of the day, but usually spends the rest of her day in the teachers lounge. Rosie calls me “Auntie Mzungu”, which I think is hilarious, and asks me to draw pictures of cats, carry her around the school grounds, and make paper airplanes, which she then throws at the other teachers. Rosie is probably my best buddy here. She’s the only one that seems to understand my Kiswahili, and is always trying to correct my pronunciation and teach me new vocabulary, and I do my best to keep up. In turn, I try to add to her already solid English skills. Sometimes, we’ll watch animated movies on my laptop – her favorite seems to be “The Lion King”, although she was also partial to “Toy Story 3″. We’ll also pay visits to any of the current inhabitants of our school’s “animal jail” (my term), which is where the school pens any animals- usually goats and cows- that have wandered onto the school property. The school holds them until the owner comes and bails them out by paying a small fee. Rosie and I will feed them grass and other greens we can find around the campus.

One of the recent inhabitants of “animal jail”

2:30pm
This year, the school has actually been serving the teachers lunch. (Students go home for lunch and return later in the day for classes or academic clubs.) Lunch is usually beans and rice, which I’m thrilled about. I hate cooking beans myself because it takes so long so it’s been wonderful to not have to deal with it this year.

4:00pm
Students return from lunch. I don’t usually teach in the afternoon sessions so I usually head back to my house around this time. I’ll use this time to buy anything I need in my village, do house cleaning, fetch water (if there’s none in my rain collecting buckets, which is a rarity at this time of year, but in a couple of months when rainy season is over, I’ll be back to carrying water every day) and start my jiko. I’m much better at starting a fire now (the secret is kerosene and lots of it) but it still takes time for the coals to heat up. Nulty loves this time of day because this is when she gets to lounge in the courtyard or hop up on the wall and check out what’s going on in the neighborhood. Frequently, she’ll hop right over the fence and I have to chase her down and bring her back. She’s currently obsessed with my neighbor’s chickens so usually I find her poking around my neighbor’s courtyard or garden. I think she thinks she’ll actually be able to catch a chicken, but most of them are bigger than her and would probably beat her in a fight if it came to that.

6:30pm
Dinner time! Usually I’m not too hungry because of the late lunch I’ve had at school, but I’ll usually have some rice or soup or mashed potatoes to eat. Some of the other PCVs have become quite accomplished chefs on the jiko, but I’m still stuck on the basics. I can handle boiling water and adding something to it, but anything that requires additional steps is beyond my current skill set.

7:00pm
The sun is starting to go down by this point. Nulty usually tries to make one last dash over the wall, and I’m usually able to corral her back in the house by the time it actually gets dark. I clean up all of the dishes from dinner and fill the Thermos full of boiled water so I’ll have some for the next morning.

7:30pm
I use this time to work on lesson plans for the following day. I’m usually able to use the same lessons for each of my streams so that saves me quite a bit of work. I’ll make sure I have all of the teaching aids and materials I’ll need and find or create any that I am missing. As it’s usually gotten dark by now, I will light candles and/or turn on my solar lamps. I also strap on my headlamp so I have light if I need to go out to the choo or into one of my unlit rooms.

8:30pm
This is usually my entertainment time – reading, watching movies on my laptop or, if all the batteries have died, I will color in the coloring books that the previous volunteer left behind. Thankfully, coloring nights are few and far between.

10:00pm
I brush my teeth, wash my face and do a very basic sponge bath in the kitchen. Any heavy-duty bathing is done on the weekends or when I’m in town. Thankfully, my site is pretty cold so I don’t get too sweaty. My feet, on the other hand, are usually incredibly dirty.

10:30pm
I head to bed. Sometimes, I’ll stay up and read for a while but usually I’m so tired at this point, I have no problem going right to sleep. Nulty waits until I’m settled in and then jumps up to claim a spot on my legs, usually right on my knees which is not the most comfortable option for me.

So, it’s not a terribly exciting life here in Ilembo, but it keeps me busy most of the day. Big chores, like laundry, are saved for the weekends that I stay at site. It still amazes me how much longer everything takes when you’re not aided by machines. I am usually exhausted by the end of the day, and I’ve probably only done about 40% of the work a typical Tanzanian woman does every day. And, despite my daily cleaning, my house is not nearly as spotless as many of the other homes in the village that I’ve seen.

There have been a few notable things that happened in February. I finally got Nulty fixed, which I’d been meaning to do for a while but had a hard time finding a good vet. She made it through the operation just fine (and just in the nick of time- the male cat that followed her home after one of her all night jaunts apparently had knocked her up so the vet had to perform a very early abortion while he was in there). The vet I went to allowed me to be in the room while they were operating on her (I didn’t stay for the whole time, just the beginning and the end) and I took the opportunity to snap some photos.

This one I call “The Last Temptation of Nulty” because of her pose:

The Last Temptation of Nulty

And she’s out cold here, but apparently cat’s eyes don’t close while they are under anesthesia, which made for this bizarre and fascinating shot:

Nulty mid-surgery (I swear she was completely out – the plastic straw thing is to keep her mouth open so she doesn’t bite or swallow her tongue.)

Heavy rains are the norm here but last week we also had a pretty intense hailstorm, which I was quite freaked out about (rain is loud enough on a tin roof but hail is absolutely deafening).

The stuff on the ground in front of the doorway is hail!

A closer shot of the hail. It was huge!

There was also a small lake that formed in front of my house from all the rain:

At some point, I’m thinking my house will just float away.

While I was sorting through the books in the library, I found out that someone had written a book about me:

The Story of Me

Please note: I cheated a little on this post and put a placeholder on my blog on February 28th, but didn’t actually upload until March 2nd. I think posting every two weeks is a bit too ambitious for me, but I’m determined to keep up with at least one post a month (even if I have to fudge it slightly on occasion.)

Anybody Seen The Popos?

Happy 2013! As one of my PCV friends pointed out, I can now officially say I am coming home next year, which seems unbelievable to me.

My first holiday season here in Tanzania was lovely. I spent a few nights at the Utengule Coffee Lodge for Christmas. It was, hands down, the nicest bed I’ve slept in since I’ve been here. There was an actual comforter and everything. It was like I had died and gone to heaven. The food was terrific, although I only managed to eat two big meals a day – I realized that I have not been eating nearly as much here as I do back at home. I really wanted to eat 3 meals a day, but my stomach wasn’t having it. I did manage to eat breakfast every morning. It was amazing and included juice, a fruit plate, an omelet, corn flakes (!!!) and a large basket of toast (actual toasted bread!) with butter that I polished off every morning. It was incredible.

My room at Utengule – I probably should have made the bed before I took this picture.

The view from my room at Utengule.

Sunset at Utengule.

To ring in the New Year, I joined some of my fellow PCVs at Matema Beach, on the northern edge of Lake Malawi. Matema is in the Mbeya region so in theory it should be a relatively short trip but it took an entire day to get there. I started out from Mbeya Town with Zoe, one of the volunteers from the new Health & Environment class. We got on a coaster (small shuttle-type bus) at about 10:30 in the morning. There were a couple of long stops on the way, but we made relatively good time to the town of Tukuyu (the other banking town in the Mbeya region), where we met up with Stephanie, a PCV from my Education class and one of my BFFs here in Mbeya. Then, things took a turn for the worse: we ended up sitting on a coaster in Tukuyu for at least an hour and a half, waiting as they loaded more passengers until the coaster was completely packed. (Timetables don’t seem to really mean anything here – vehicles leave when they are full, not according to any schedule.) Finally, they were satisfied with the sardine can level of passengers and we were on our way again.

We arrived in Kyela, where we would have to change coasters to continue on to Matema, in the late afternoon. We rushed to get on a Matema coaster, only to end up waiting once again to load additional passengers. An hour or so later, we finally set off down a bumpy dirt road to Matema. (Tanzanians apparently believe that opening all of the windows while going through dusty terrain is the way to minimize the dust – we tried to explain that closing the windows might work better, but we were outnumbered.) About 45 minutes into the journey, the konda started collecting fares from all the Tanzanian passengers but skipped over us wazungu (there were also a quartet of German volunteers on the coaster with us). We thought this was strange, but soon realized what was up when the bus stopped and the konda announced we had to stop to fix a mechanical issue. It would seem that they wanted to collect all the fares before they broke down and knew the wazungu would complain if they took are money beforehand. I was pretty pissed me off on behalf of the Tanzanians, but were not too upset about it (or at least didn’t openly display their upset). Tanzanians generally have a much more accepting attitude towards these sort of injustices, which drives me crazy. Occasionally, there will be a mama or bibi that causes a stink when these things happen but in general people don’t get too worked up. (This probably has a lot to do with the non-existent concept of customer service here, but I’ll spare you my usual long-winded rant about that – at least for now.)

All of the passengers were sitting by the side of the road, waiting for the coaster to be repaired, when a daladala happened by. Stephanie, Zoe and I decided to take the dala into the next town and see if we could find transport to Matema from there. We were feeling pretty good about things when we got off the dala and the konda told us to get on a coaster marked “Matema”. We were wary of this, as it was headed back in the direction we came from, but the dala konda and the coaster driver both insisted they were turning around and heading to Matema immediately. Well, of course, we got on the coaster and it just kept going in the wrong direction. We eventually figured out that it was going back to pick up the passengers from the broken down coaster we just got off of. Stephanie used her Kiswahili (way better than mine) to tell them to let us off, but the driver, who had been chatting with her only moments before, suddenly developed a hearing problem and continued on his way, with us basically prisoners at that point. So, we backtracked all the way to our old coaster, waited around while they loaded everyone again and finally, finally headed towards Matema (after driving in reverse for an uncomfortably long period of time). We again reached the town we had taken the dala to earlier, only to – you guessed it – stop for another hour plus so they could load even more passengers and baggage. The sun was starting to go down as we finally headed down the even bumpier dirt road to Matema. We moved along at a breakneck speed of about 10 km/hour, stopping several more times to let passengers board and get off. It was about 9PM when the coaster finally pulled into Matema. We were tired, hungry and hot and decided to head to the water immediately for a swim. I was expecting the lake to be like the lakes I grew up near in New England – with cloudy water and slimy leaf-covered bottoms- but this was something else entirely: clear, warm water, sandy beaches, completely undeveloped and beautiful. Lake Malawi is the third largest lake in Africa and apparently there are also areas where the water is full of crocodiles, but Matema Beach is gorgeous. I highly recommend it to anyone visiting the Mbeya region, but I strongly suggest hiring a car to take you there and back.

In Matema, we met up with a bunch of other PCVs and spent the next few days swimming, lying in the sun, eating cheap & delicious food, drinking cold beer and hanging around a bonfire on the beach at night. It was amazing, and the perfect way to ring in 2013.

Matema Beach – the water is amazing.

Another shot of the water at Matema – it looks a little bit like Hawaii from this angle.

A rainbow over Matema.

Eventually, I had to leave paradise and return to my little house on the mountain. I had lots of work to do on the school library before school started, and I was finally able to finish the mini-catalog (really, just a spreadsheet) of our collection of books (close to 900) and materials purchased by Anna, the Health volunteer that was stationed in Ilembo before me. I think I’ve figured out a low-tech security system (my mkuu is concerned that materials may be stolen by students) so I’m hoping to get the place cleaned up and open for student use in the very near future. I will post photos in a future blog post when the place is finally up and running.

While I was home, I also did a major housecleaning, which I had been putting off for a while. I washed hundreds of insect corpses, dirt and cobwebs off all of my walls, moved around furniture and finally putting my kitchen in reasonable order. I’m still waiting on a few pieces of furniture that I ordered (I have asked several times when the furniture- that I ordered in August- will be finished, and am told “bado”, which means “later” in Kiswahili but, in my experience, actually translates more closely to “not during your lifetime, mzungu”) but it already feels more like home. In fact, I did such a good job cleaning the place that some bats (or popos, as they are called in Kiswahili) decided to move in too.

I had been hearing strange scraping noises in my bedroom in the mornings and evenings for a few weeks, but I chalked it up to the wife beater birds, assuming they were building a next on the roof. Of course, the fact that I never actually saw any birds or a nest the several times I went outside and looked should have tipped me off but I think I was in denial. (My coping strategy for dealing with most of the creepy crawly issues I encounter here pretty much amounts to sticking my fingers in my ear and saying “la la la” very loudly. It’s worked pretty well so far.) Then, on the night after the first day of school, I was pretty tired so I decided to go to bed early. Nulty and I had just settled in under the covers when I started hearing the scraping/scratching noise again, very loudly, and Nulty suddenly became very interested in the bedroom ceiling. I got out of bed, grabbed the flashlight and looked up at the beams (there is no ceiling board in my house- this is a very important aspect of this story) and saw a hideous little creature, its head popped out over the top of the wall, staring back at me. As it scooted its way up the rafter, I saw its wings and realized it was a bat. In my house. Hanging out right over the top of my bed. Nulty was going absolutely crazy – she jumped up on the top of the wall, pacing back and forth, meowing and trying to get close enough to it to grab it. I did the brave thing and climbed back in bed, pulling the blanket over my head and Googling “how to get rid of bats” on my new internet equipped cell phone (which I bought in December as a Christmas present to myself). I was still under the blanket, waiting for a page to load, when I heard a huge commotion in my room. I peeked out to see a bat flying directly towards me, with Nulty flying off the wall behind it in hot pursuit. I shrieked loudly and hid under the covers again, emerging only when I heard Nulty meowing and batting something around on the floor. Sure enough, she had disabled the bat and was trying to prod it to continue playing with her (she does the same with the panya she catches before she eats them). Just to tell you how dedicated I am to this blog, the first thing I did was grab my camera to try to take a picture, but as I was fumbling with the buttons, it occurred to me that Nulty did not have a rabies shot and the bat was still alert enough to possibly bite her. I yelled at Nulty to get away from the bat (which she, of course, ignored) and ran around the house, screeching loudly and trying to find something to scoop up the bat with. I could have gone with work gloves and/or a bucket, both of which were available, but for some reason I decided that bubble wrap was the better option. Nulty tried to help me corral the bat, which was now limping around, semi-pitifully, but it managed to hop under my bed and into the corner of my room, where I realized the dirt I’d been sweeping up from there for the past few weeks was actually piles of bat poop.

Eventually, I was able to bubble wrap the bat and brought it outside, where I tossed it into the field in front of my house, again shrieking like a small child. (My neighbors are apparently quite used to living next to me by now because none of this racket prompted even a peek out of their window.) Nulty and I then crawled back into bed, where I covered us both in blankets from head to toe and cowered for the rest of the night. It eventually quieted down and I relaxed, thinking Nulty and I had permanently eliminated the problem. But, of course, I was awoken at dawn by the same scratching sound. Thinking our injured bat friend had recuperated and was trying to re-enter the house, I went outside only to see a bunch of bats swooping in and under the eaves of my house, where a whole band of them had apparently set up their house.

The next day, I shared the bat news with my fellow teachers and several of them advised me to just accept the bats as part of my household, as a few popos were inevitable in any house here. I was very resistant to this idea as, again, I do not have ceiling board (like many of them do) so the bats are not just flying around in my attic – they’re flying around the entire damn house. Also, from the research I’d done online, it was pretty obvious sleeping next to a pile of bat poop and pee every night was not exactly recommended for good health. Plus, I had Nulty to worry about – she was not about to ignore the bats and I was really concerned she would contract rabies. My mkuu agreed, and assigned a couple of teachers from the housing committee (my house is owned by the school and the housing committee deals with any repairs or problems I have) to help me out. Originally, the plan was to do a bat exclusion, which involves installing pipes and/or netting that will allow the bats to exit the house but won’t let them get back in. However, the materials I would need were not available here and/or are prohibitively expensive. There was talk of using poison, but anything lethal enough to kill the bats would probably take out Nulty and me as well.

Now, the whole time the issue of the best way to get rid of the bats was being debated, I was living in the house with the bats. Every morning they would wake me before sunrise when they returned home after a long night of whatever it is bats do. Occasionally, one would fly around the house in the morning, with Nulty chasing after it and me cowering under the covers. I took to wearing a shuka (a traditional Maasai wrap) over my head while I slept to avoid any bat contact. The worst were the evenings – right after the sun went down, the bats would wake up and one or two would fly around the house, dive bombing towards me and stubbornly refusing to leave out the front door that I had opened for them. One night, I was checking on the clothes that I was drying inside (there was too much rain to dry them out in the courtyard, where I usually hang them) and I heard the unmistakable sound of flapping and felt something rubbing up against my back. Needless to say, I freaked out. Freaking out became a regular occurrence. My endless shrieking would eventually stress Nulty out so much that she’d run out the open door and then I’d have to go out and look for her in the dark. Once and a while, Nulty or I would knock one of them out of the air and they would flop around on the floor, squealing until I was able to knock them out with a broom and sweep them outside. But one of the bats refused to leave – about a half an hour after I’d managed to whack it good and get it out of the house, I opened the front door, only to see it dragging itself back up the step and trying to get back in the house. It was like a horror movie where the killer just won’t die.

This went on for about a week and a half, with me getting little or no sleep most nights and being completely exhausted during the day, until finally I couldn’t take it any more. I went into the teacher’s lounge one morning and declared that either the bats would go or Nulty and I would. I think the other teachers thought I was overreacting but I tried to explain that there were about 20 bats in my house. They all enjoyed another hearty laugh at the crazy mzungu (they were convinced I was exaggerating the bat population), but my mkuu put his foot down and told them to deal with the situation that day. So, a couple of the male teachers and a few students headed over to my house in the middle of the school day, armed with long sticks, with me trailing behind. Half of them went inside to try to force the bats out of the walls and rafters while the others stayed outside and tried to whack the bats once they came out. I contributed by milling around and shrieking loudly at any sign of any bat movement. About an hour or so later, the tally was 21 dead bats and 7 escapees. We stuffed some plastic into the entry and exit holes temporarily, and the teachers said they’d find a fundi (workman) to come by and permanently seal them off.

I would have preferred to get all of the bats out unharmed and just had them move along to another location, but these bats gave me no other choice. I really believe they thought that they could take over the whole house and drive Nulty and me out. Now, I know some of you are going to say that bats are great to have around because they eat lots of insects but I think this is just pro-bat propaganda, as there were more bugs than usual in my place while they were squatting with me. Apparently, it is illegal to kill bats in most places in the U.S., which I can only attribute to bats having very powerful lobbyists working on their behalf. Why are rats uniformly reviled but what are essentially rats with wings protected by law? I am suspicious of the whole bat community.

As if it wasn’t enough fun dealing with the bats, the solar system at my school blew out over the break and I was not able to charge my laptop or any of my other electronic items for a few weeks. Thankfully, I had my new phone, which allows me to check email, and some back up batteries for it while I waited for the school to fix the solar system. I have to say, the two weeks the system was out were the longest weeks I’ve had here. I didn’t realize how much I had been depending on it to keep me sane. Once my laptop battery died (which was pretty quick- the solar charge does not last long as a regular electronic charge), it was like I was suddenly Amish. I actually don’t mind not having electricity in general – I don’t really care about having lights, but I am completely lost without my laptop. I use it for lesson planning, my library work and it’s also my home entertainment system. I have so much respect for the PCVs that served in the years before technology was readily available. How they lived without cell phones and email is beyond me. I would definitely not have been able to cut it here without the ability to communicate with folks back home, not to mention the PC administration (especially the medical staff) and the other PCVs here in country.

As I mentioned earlier, the new school year has started but the first week primarily involves dealing with administrative matters- enrolling students, setting up class schedules, etc.- and cleaning the school up. Plus, only about 40 of the 250+ Form 1 students that were expected actually showed up on the first day. Apparently, the first day of school as dictated by the Ministry of Education is viewed as more of a suggestion rather than a rule by parents here. Even now, at the end of the second week, new students are showing up each day to register. It is so incredibly frustrating! I am teaching all of the Form 1 students again this year, and we will be using the Baseline system. Baseline is an orientation course that is designed to help students transition into English-only education. For the next six weeks, they’ll get daily lessons in the English, Social Sciences, Math and Science. I am very optimistic that this will help my students tremendously, so fingers crossed. I’m also going to do my best not to yell at the students this year, but we’ll see how long that lasts…

I leave you with the requisite Nulty photos:

I bought these baskets to hang in my kitchen and store food in, but Nulty decided they worked better as a cat bed.

Nulty practices her catwalk moves in the courtyard.

Nulty and I pose in the courtyard. Her eyes are pleading for someone to rescue her from this crazy cat lady.

I hope 2013 is treating you all well so far!

For A Few Daladalas More

One of the most challenging aspects of village life in Tanzania is transportation. The Peace Corps does not allow us to drive cars (or anything else) during our service, so we rely on other forms of transportation to get us from place to place. Ilembo has one bus, called Mubalikiwe, which leaves at 4:30am (at least, you have to be ready to take it at 4:30am, it sometimes doesn’t actually come until an hour or so after that) and goes to Mbalizi, our junction town. From Mbalizi, we take a daladala to Mbeya Town. The whole process can take as little as 3 hours, but often takes longer than that due to road conditions (our road to town is unpaved and the condition deteriorates even further during the rainy season), breakdowns and/or stops to pick up additional passengers along the way. Mubalikiwe is usually stuffed to the gills, as it’s the one somewhat consistent form of transportation and the only one that gets you into town at a relatively early hour. It is one of the 3+2 buses, which means there are 5 seats to a row (3 on one side and 2 on the other) and a very narrow aisle. The buses in Tanzania all seem to come from somewhere else in the world – Africa seems to be the final stop in the worldwide hand me down system. Once buses have too many miles on them or get worn out from use in other countries, many of them end up here. The newest ones are used by bus lines for long distance journeys (bus travel is the most popular form of travel in Tanzania – airfare is expensive and only goes to a few major cities, trains are slow and unreliable and most Tanzanians can not afford cars) – these are the buses that I have taken from Dar Es Salaam to Mbeya Town, from Mbeya Town to Morogoro, etc. They log probably hundreds of thousands of additional miles before they are retired by the bus lines – and then are sold to smaller bus lines to be used for village transport. So, Mubalikiwe (bless its heart) is quite old, worn out and in constant need of repair. Many of the windows don’t open, there are almost always mechanics working on the axles/tires and many trips are interrupted for repairs and servicing – last weekend, we stopped before the usual Ilembo stop to have an interior poll soldered. (I imagine it was supporting something important if we had to interrupt a trip to fix it.) I was close enough to home that I didn’t want to wait, so I got out and walked the rest of the way, carting all 4 of my bags with me (all of those wonderful letters, cards and care packages arrive in Mbeya Town and ride back to the village with me).

In addition to all of the seats being full, there are always tons of people in the aisle and lots of cargo – sacks full of corn, onions and other items being taken to town to sell, buckets (full of a variety of items) and the occasional chicken(s). Every afternoon, the bus leaves Mbalizi at 2:00pm (again, just the time it’s scheduled to depart – it often has no relation to the time it actually leaves) – as packed as it is in the morning, it’s nothing in comparison to how full it is on the return trip. Because there are many items not available in Ilembo, people use Mubalikiwe to transport not only themselves but also all of the items they have purchased in town – again, sacks of food and grains, more buckets, crates of beer and soda, mattresses, cushions, luggage and I even saw a sewing table last time I took it. The guys who work for Mubalkiwe are expert packers – watching them load the bottom of the bus is like watching a game of Tetris played by a master. Every time, I’m sure all of the stuff is not going to fit and every time they get almost most of it (if not all of it) in. Often, excess cargo ends up inside the bus, in the aisles, around the driver’s seat, hanging from the ceiling and in every nook and cranny that can be found. So once the bus is packed full of people and cargo, it starts its journey up the mountain. At this point, it is almost always an hour or two behind the schedule 2:00pm departure time. It usually travels only about 5 or 10 minutes before stopping again to allow more people and cargo to board. There are often 30+ people crammed in the aisle, many of them holding bags or boxes or buckets. Even if you were lucky enough (and willing to pay more) to have a seat, the people in the aisle are often sharing your space with you. They lean in front of you, behind you, on top of you and shove baggage underneath you. There is really no concept of “personal space” here in Tanzania, which I am still trying to get used to (although I think I know myself well enough to know I’ll never actually get used to it – the best I can hope for is to endure it and only be driven mildly crazy by it), so every inch not occupied by something else is seen as available space to be utilized. People often have to crawl or walk on the headrests to get off the bus. If you’re riding Mubalikiwe, you had better be prepared to be jostled, pushed, smothered and otherwise molested by your fellow passengers and cargo. I had to take several weeks off from Mubalkiwe because of a particularly hellish journey in which I spent 3 plus hours being whacked in the back of the head by a woman holding a large TV box (and I’m not talking flat screen). The fact that most of the people on the bus (with the exception of me) are usually in good spirits is a testament to Tanzanians’ extraordinary flexibility and coping skills.

The only other real alternative to Mubalikiwe is trying to get a ride in one of the lorries that travel up and down mountain every day, bringing all of the other goods that can’t fit in Mubalikiwe. My site mate, Andrew, and I are often able to hitch a ride with one of the lorry drivers into town every Friday. We’re usually able to snag seats in the cab, which is a huge luxury and makes the journey much more pleasant that riding in the back. The only downside to taking a lorry is the unpredictable schedule – they leave Mbalizi in the morning but depending on how many stops they make on the way up, and how much cargo they have to load, they can arrive in Ilembo at any time between 10:00am and 1:00pm. Andrew and I usually claim our seats up front and then settle in for what can be a long wait until we depart. We usually wait for a couple of hours but it can be longer depending on the weather and the amount of passengers and cargo to be loaded (I can’t really blame the drivers for wanting to maximize their profits by wanting to fill up with as many people and items as possible). As you’ve probably already picked up on, life in Tanzania involves a lot of waiting around. For an extremely impatient person like myself, getting used to his has been a challenge. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a few moments (okay, many moments) of anger, frustration, and, occasionally, agony.

The longest it’s ever taken me to get to town was 8+ hours – it’s a story I like to think is on par with Homer’s Odyssey. It begins as most trips to town do, with a panicked call from Andrew, telling me I have to get up to the village right away or I’d miss our ride into town (I live near the secondary school, which is down a large hill from the commercial center of the village, where the lorries stop). I hurried to finish packing, made sure Nulty had enough food and supplies to hold her over in my absence and ran up the hill, hauling my bags with me. I arrived at the lorry stop, sweaty and out of breath, only to find Andrew sitting outside one of the dukas and telling me that our lorry hadn’t arrived yet, but was due to any minute. He does this to me every time.

Here he is, the man, the myth, the legend: my site mate, Andrew, on Mubalikiwe.

After everything and everybody was finally loaded up, we left the village, only to have the driver tell us that we were going to have to take a small detour on our way into town. Uh oh. Sure enough, instead of going straight down the hill into Mbalizi, halfway there we took a left and headed for parts unknown (at least for me). It was actually a pleasant trip, and I got to see some of the villages that I’d heard about (including one that a current Health PCV is stationed in) and see some of the beautiful countryside. Sure, we were behind schedule, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it at that point so I just decided to settle in and enjoy the ride. And then the driver informed us that we had to get out and walk for a little bit, because we were going down a steep, windy hill, the road was bad and there was a sheer drop off to one side. I couldn’t scramble out of the cab fast enough. It was also good timing because after all of those hours waiting in Ilembo, I really had to use the restroom. (It is always a delicate balancing act on long trips to try to take in just enough water so that you are not dehydrated, but not so much that you have to pee every 5 minutes – even the long haul buses don’t have bathrooms so they only stop to let passengers use restrooms every 4 hours or so.) I walked down the hill with everyone else, looking for a place off the road where I could answer the call of nature in relative privacy. I finally found one that looked good, and climbed up a small hill and situated myself behind a pine tree that shielded me from view of the lorry folks. I was midway through my business when I heard footsteps behind me. I was in such a hurry to pee, that I had only thought about being out of view of the other passengers and hadn’t bothered to notice that I was crouched next to what was apparently a pathway used by locals in the area. It was too late to stop, and dignity was one of the first things I had to part with while living here, so I just called out “Samahani!” (which means “excuse me, sorry, etc.” – I use that one a lot) to the villager passing by. He took being mooned by a mzungu woman in stride and called out “Hamna shida” (no problem) as he walked by me, carefully stepping over the river I was creating over the path. Whoops. Just as I finished, I heard the truck starting its descent down the hill (it had waited at the top for all of the people to reach the bottom, I’m guessing to avoid running us all over if its brakes failed on the way down). I hurried to catch up with Andrew and the rest of the passengers, only to slip on some loose gravel, fall flat on my face and scrape up my knee and elbow in the process. Andrew, of course, found all of this hilarious – I am an endless source of entertainment for him, a veritable one-woman blooper reel running on constant loop. I climbed back into the cab, bloody, bruised and grumbling for the one-millionth time about how much I missed driving my own car.

A few hours later, we finally rolled into Mbalizi, broken, battered but not yet done with our journey because we still had to make our way to Mbeya Town. For this leg of the trip, we ride on a daladala, which are vans that are the equivalent of city buses here in Tanzania. No one seems to know where the name daladala comes from, but I believe the literal English translation is “clown car”. This is because in their former lives, dalas were probably outfitted to seat 9 or 10 people at most but with some clever reconfiguring of the seats, a lot of determination and a complete lack of concern for passenger safety and comfort, they usually fit 2 or 3 times that number of people inside them. I have ridden in dalas that contained as many as 26 people and I’m sure that’s not even close to being a record. Tanzanians have a saying, “There’s always room for one more on the daladala” and they are not kidding. The kondas (conductors) are always trying to entice more passengers into their sardine can on wheels. I’ve ridden on dalas where only the ball of one of my feet actually touched the ground during the whole ride – I remained upright only because I was wedged in place by the other bodies around me. It’s like a traveling game of Twister that occasionally includes a goat. When we first arrived in Dar Es Salaam, the Peace Corps held a session instructing us on riding on daladalas and how to protect ourselves against pickpockets while on-board (the upside of being smashed inside one with 25 other people is that no one can actually move their hands more than 2 centimeters in any direction, much less reach into someone else’s pockets or bags and take something). This was immediately followed by an information session with a safety officer from the U.S. Embassy who told us the best way we could avoid being targets of crime while in the country was to avoid riding daladalas. This sort of sums up my Peace Corps training experience in a nice little package.

An empty daladala – normally there would be at least 25 people crammed in there.

It’s been a busy couple of months here, as the school year wrapped up and I traveled back up to Morogoro for our Peace Corps in-service training at the end of November. It was great to catch up with everyone from my training class and hear how their first few months at site have been. We had almost a full two weeks of training sessions but the best part, of course, were the extracurricular activities. There was lots of pizza eating and beer drinking at Dragonaire’s, swimming at the Morogoro Hotel’s amazing pool, something called Battle Royale (which is a cross between a drinking game and The Rocky Horror Picture Show – I am a little fuzzy on what the movie is actually about but I remember declaring it “the best film I’ve ever seen” about a half an hour and half a box of wine into it), a fantastic monkey sighting right outside the front gates of the training venue (but, alas, no photo evidence and no monkey companion returned with me to Ilembo – the search continues…) and we even had a prom. And, just as my legs were in danger of being completely healed from all of my PST bug bites, I was again eaten alive by mosquitoes. I am apparently irresistible to them – I’m convinced my vegetarian blood is some kind of mosquito delicacy.

My prom date, Drew, and I strike a traditional pose.

The Mbeya Crew does the prom thing.

After saying goodbye to everyone, I started the long trek back to Mbeya Town with a couple of other PCVs. As I’ve mentioned before, long bus trips are never pleasant but this one was particularly horrific. I had purchased my seat two days before leaving Morogoro, foolishly assuming this would mean that I would actually have a seat for the trip. Once I got on and headed to the seat number on my ticket, I found someone else sitting there who also had a ticket with the same seat number on it. When I brought this to the attention of the bus company employee dealing with seating issues, he basically shrugged, said something like “wow, that’s quite a problem there” and wandered back down the aisle. It took 15 minutes of arguing, complaining and, finally, demanding a refund (which seems to be the only way to accomplish anything customer service-related here) before they managed to find me another seat and we were finally on our way. Less than two hours into the trip, I started to notice an awful smell. A really, really awful smell. After several other passengers complained, it was eventually determined that the kid (he looked to be about 12 years old and was traveling alone) sitting directly in front of me must have had some sort of stomach bug and – there’s no delicate way to say this – pooped his pants. Fortunately, a bibi (which literally means grandmother, but refers to any older woman) took charge of the situation and got the bus to stop so he could get himself cleaned up and got the bus kondas to round up a change of clothes for him. They also found some cardboard for him to sit on because there had apparently been some leakage that got into the seat. Being seated directly behind ground zero, I got to enjoy the smell for the next 8 hours of travel. I have nothing but empathy for the poor kid (on any given day here, we’re really all just one stomach bug away from being in his pants) and more admiration than ever for Tanzanian bibis. There is no crisis, large or small, that a bibi cannot handle with grace and style. One of the most valuable pieces of advice that we were given during our pre-service training was if you ever find yourself in trouble, find a bibi to help you out. I am still in awe of the bibi that I ran into while filling my water buckets at site one day. After she filled her 20-liter bucket, she asked me to help her. I assumed that she wanted me to carry her bucket home for her and, because she was a tiny woman that looked to be about 80 years old, I was happy to help. But, no, she just wanted me to help her lift the bucket (which weighs about 40 pounds) on top of her head so she could carry it home herself! These ladies constantly humble me.

I am currently staying at the Utengule Coffee Lodge for the Christmas holiday – it is probably the nicest hotel in the Mbeya region. December 6th marked six months since I’ve arrived in Tanzania so I splurged a bit to celebrate. (I wasn’t always sure I’d make it six weeks here, much less six months.) It’s lovely here and the bed is most comfortable one I’ve been in for a long time. I’m pretty much going to spend the next 3 days swimming in the pool, watching movies in bed (I downloaded “It’s A Wonderful Life” before I got here – it’s just not Christmas without Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed dong the Charleston into that pool under the gymnasium floor) and taking a minimum of four hot showers a day.

And no blog post of mine would be complete without the requisite Nulty photo(s). You can take the crazy cat lady out of Los Angeles but you can’t take the crazy out of the cat lady (or something like that).

Nulty tries to pretend she’s not about to attempt escape over the wall.

Nulty sees freedom within her grasp.

I close with some photos of the largest rat I’ve ever seen in my life. It was literally the same size as, and maybe a little bigger than, Nulty. I saw its recently deceased corpse on the sidewalk outside of my bank and I knew no one would believe me without photo evidence.

The biggest rat I’ve ever seen in my life.

Another view of the dead rat – it’s definitely not a possum.

Consider that my holiday gift to you. You’re welcome!

Happy Holidays!!

Rain, Rain Go Away

So, it looks like I’m averaging one post a month, which is a little less than I was originally hoping for but posting from site is unreliable and my trips into town are only every other weekend and go by way too fast. This one will be a long one, so hopefully it will tide you over until my next update.

Teaching is slowly coming along. The students have settled down a bit – I think the novelty of having a mzungu teacher has worn off, but they never seem to tire of laughing at my attempts to speak to them in Kiswahili. I’ve only got two more weeks of actual teaching left for this school year. There are technically three more weeks of instruction on the calendar but I will be attending Peace Corps training the final week and won’t be done with that until after the students have begun their final exams.

One of the biggest challenges I’ve been facing is coming up with lesson plans. There is a Form One syllabus that the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training (MoEVT) publishes that details a range of topics that must be covered by all teachers in Tanzania. The syllabus lists the topics to be covered (Giving Directions, Expressing Likes and Dislikes, Talking about One’s Family, etc.) and includes some vocabulary and specific objectives but, for the most part, it does not dictate when or where grammatical concepts should be taught. So part of the challenge is trying to figure out what grammar the students have already learned and what they need to have covered by the end of the year.

There is a textbook that the school uses and the Peace Corps also provided us with several textbooks and other materials to help us but it has been difficult to find exercises that are suitable for my students’ level of English (even though I’m teaching Form One, the Form One books are often above their skill level). And because there are not enough textbooks for all of the students, I have to write the lessons on the board (old school chalkboards that leave me covered in a thin layer of chalk dust at all times- dustless chalk has apparently not arrived in Tanzania yet). The students then copy them into their English exercise books and study from those.

It has been interesting trying to find readings that contain an appropriate level of vocabulary and do not contain too much violent content. For some reason, there is a fixation with death and maiming in Tanzanian textbooks. Even stories that have the most innocuous subjects manage to end violently. A story about a daladala ride turns deadly when the conductor pushes a student out of the bus and she falls into the road and dies. A story about a teacher stealing a student’s bike (which is weird enough already) ends with the teacher getting hit by a truck and – you guessed it – dying. There seems to be no topic that the Tanzanians can’t find a story for that ends in sudden and violent death. It’s almost a relief to find one where someone only ends up in the hospital recuperating from their injuries from a fiery car crash- that pretty much qualifies as a happy ending here.

Another big challenge has been just trying to find my students. The NECTA exams have been underway for the past month or so and the students have all been relocated from their usual classrooms (usually the Form 1A stream is in the Form 1A room, the Form 1B stream is in the Form 1B room, etc.) to other rooms. They did the same thing when the held the regional exams back in September, so I assumed they would move everyone to the same rooms they had been in previously. So, a few weeks ago, I taught what I thought was my 1D class in the morning. Everything went fine, except I thought it was a little strange that one of my best 1D students wasn’t there, but there is a lot of truancy so I didn’t think too much about it. Then I went to teach Form 1A that afternoon and I saw that very same 1D student in that classroom and realized something was up. It turns out I had actually taught 1A in the morning. But I had asked them if they were 1D and they all said yes! And of course 1D had class for another subject at the time that I thought I was supposed to be teaching 1A so they ended up missing class that day. Oops.

In my defense, it is pretty difficult to tell most of the students (and classes) apart because they all wear uniforms and they all have the same shaved haircut (all the kids in all the government schools have to keep their hair super short – I’ve heard it is to prevent the spread of lice but I’m not sure if that’s actually true.) Half the time I have to look down to see if they are wearing pants or a skirt to tell if they are a boy or a girl. I can usually remember the very good students and the troublemakers, but that’s about it. I made an attempt to learn everyone’s names, but I don’t have a class roster (I’ve asked for one) and there are so many students in every class and I seem to forget names about 5 minutes after I learn them, so that wasn’t particularly successful. I’m hoping I’ll be able to come up with a system for the new school year that starts in January but that might be wishful thinking.

Aside from teaching, life is rolling along here. I am slowly getting used to life in Tanzania. And while I tend to go into great detail about those things that are frustrating, there are also some great things about living here.

For example, I’ve gotten used to having chai (tea) every day. Chai time is usually around 11AM every morning. In addition to tea, there is always some sort of food involved: mandazi (little bready/pastry type things), rolls, or chapati (my favorite – it is basically an oilier version of a flour tortilla). Tanzanians love their tea – you can get chai maziwa (with milk) or chai ya rangi (black) – and they love their sugar. I started out as a typical American, using just a little sprinkle of sugar in my chai but now I consider it perfectly reasonable to put two or three heaping spoonfuls of sugar in a small cup of tea. A cup of hot, sugary chai and a couple of chapati are a great mid-morning meal. They do not have a lunch period at my school so chai is the meal that tides you over between breakfast and the end of school when you can go home and cook lunch.

And because there is rampant thievery here (the Peace Corps pretty much drilled into our head that we will all get robbed at least once during our service) we are encouraged to carry our money and ID in a secure place (or places) on your person. For women, that means keeping everything in your bra. I usually can carry my wallet, a phone, some lipstick and various other sundries in the old Maidenform. It took a while to get used to the fact that while it is taboo to show your knees or shoulders in public, it is apparently perfectly appropriate to dig around in your bra for five minutes, trying to find exact change on the daladala. And because I don’t usually carry a purse (although I do bring a backpack to school with my laptop, books and other school supplies) my bra becomes the go to place for storing small items. Getting undressed at night is always interesting because there’s always something in there that I’ve forgotten about. Often, I’ll find money that I just stuffed loosely in my bra. Some nights it’s like being a human slot machine.

This is what I carry around in my bra on a typical day here.

And there is also the delicious goodness of Stoney Tangawizi. It’s ginger ale that is apparently only sold in East Africa and it is delicious. I’m convinced the secret ingredient is heroin, because I just can’t get enough of it. Seriously, if you’re ever in East Africa, you’ve got to try this stuff.

Stoney Tangawizi – this is good stuff.

So I’ll return to the United States with a lumpy bra, a ginger ale addiction and possibly minus a few teeth.

In other news, the rainy season has officially begun here. It apparently will last until about April, which is depressing beyond belief to me – fortunately so far we have had intermittent sunny days, but I’m not sure how long those will last. One of the reasons I wanted to come to Africa was because of its sunny and hot climate and somehow I managed to get myself assigned to somewhere cold and rainy – Ilembo is like a mini Seattle. And with the rains come the bugs – lots and lots of bugs. I probably average 25 insect kills a day. There are big bugs and small bugs, flying bugs and creepy crawly bugs, biting bugs and stinging bugs and the worst of all are the damn fire ants (they call them siafu here, what I personally call them is not appropriate for a PG rated blog). They travel in packs of millions (literally) and they are known to devour anything in their path, including any livestock that can’t get away from them. They have tried to invade my home twice – the first time was right after I first moved in and they tried to take over my courtyard. Thankfully, I had an industrial sized can of bug spray and managed to kill most of them – it was like an ant graveyard back there for a while. Apparently, the word of my conquest spread to their fire ant brothers and sisters because they mounted another attack on my place from the front after the last heavy rains. I was trying to unlock my front door and felt a bunch of tiny, sharp pains on my feet and looked down and they were swarming all over me. My site mate, Andrew, was right behind me and they didn’t bother him at all. And, later that day, I was talking with my mkuu and they came after me again and left him alone. Clearly this is personal. Again, I used my handy dandy bug spray on them and that seems to have cleared them out for now but I am sure they will be back with a vengeance.

Nulty is happy about the rainy season because it brings out the rodents (panya) and it’s been an all you can eat buffet for her. She has scared off all of the mice from my house, so she will jump over the courtyard wall to hunt them down and come back with one in her mouth. Here is a picture of one of her larger captures:

Nulty eating a mouse the size of a small Buick.

I worry constantly about Nulty getting eaten by wild animals but she is determined to be an at least part-time outside cat. And it turns out its not just wild animals that I have to worry about because I learned that the people in my village enjoy the occasional cat for dinner. I try not to be judgmental about this – food is scarce and meat is meat, but this is not making me worry any less about Nulty. She usually sticks close to the area around my house but even that can be risky because there are lots of people that use the area next to my house as a short cut. Just last week, I was trying to chase Nulty back into the courtyard and was walking up the hill behind her when I heard a teenager (kijana) excitedly say “Paka!” (“Cat!”). As I came around the corner behind Nulty, I saw him slowly reaching for a bucket. I quickly caught up to Nulty, scooped her in my arms and started calling her “mtoto” (child) so he’d get the picture that this cat was off limits. Once he realized the cat belonged to the crazy mzungu, he backed off but I’m having my mother send me a collar and tag for Nulty. I’m hoping that will keep her somewhat safe on her jaunts over the courtyard wall – it’s impossible to keep her inside because she’s too fast and the lure of the panya is too much for her to resist. Needless to say, I’ll be a nervous wreck for the next two years trying to keep that cat alive. I’ve been so consumed with keeping Nulty safe that I haven’t had time to devote to Project Monkey Adoption. I’m going to have to re-devote myself to that in the new year.

In addition to “Crazy Mzungu with a cat baby” I am also known around my village as the sicker lady. Apparently, the last volunteer was famous for handing out stickers to the kids and I am expected to take over her role (and there’s also the fact that most of the kids can’t distinguish between the two of us and think we’re the same person. I always hear kids yelling “Anna! Anna! ” to me when I walk through the village. I tried correcting them and telling them I was not Anna and my name was Mwinga, but I’ve all but given up on that. They care less about the name and more about the stickers.) Thanks to all of you that have sent me stickers in your care packages – you are making the children of Ilembo very happy. The other day I was followed home by this group of hooligans:

Local shake down artists display their latest take.

I gave them one sticker each and then asked if I could take a picture of them. Their ringleader negotiated another sticker per kid for the picture, which I agreed to. Then he kept trying to get me to take more pictures so he could get more stickers. I would have been annoyed, but frankly I had to admire the kid’s business savvy.

I hope you are all well and all you folks on the East Coast made it safely through the hurricane. I leave you with the obligatory photo of Nulty hanging out on the courtyard wall on a particularly gray day:

Nulty surveys the perimeter for panya.

PS: Please note that I have a new mailing address (see sidebar) – I’ll be sharing a PO box with my site mate Andrew. Anything sent to me at school will still reach me but I’ve been getting so many packages and letters (thank you!!) that it’s just easier to share Andrew’s box rather than the school’s.

I’m A Hero!

So, I single-handedly put out a large grass fire by myself last weekend. Okay, technically the whole story includes the small detail that I also started the fire, but I don’t think we should focus on the negative here.

It all started last Sunday when I finally ran out of excuses to put off the major housecleaning that I had been meaning to do since I moved in. The previous PCV who lived in the house left behind a bunch of stuff, 95% of which was not usable – my site mate and the villagers had taken most of the good things because they did not think a new PCV would be assigned to the site. Some of the stuff had been around since the volunteer before the last volunteer and had just been taking up space and accumulating dust and spiders. So I finally packed up everything and took it out to the garbage pit in back of my house. Usually kids or villagers will go through the pile and pick out anything that they can reuse and the rest will eventually get burned.

Everyone here burns his or her garbage – I was taught how to do it by my 7-year-old host family dada, which was a strange experience (granted, I don’t have kids, but I’m pretty sure adults are not supposed to allow children to start fires in front of them, much less get pointers from them on how to do it.) It’s not uncommon to be out walking in the middle of nowhere and see piles of smoldering garbage on the side of the road. It’s taken me a while to get used to: my environmentally-conscious-recycling-like-a-good-Southern-Californian self just couldn’t wrap my head around burning plastic, much less standing around next to it and inhaling all of the fumes, but when in Rome (or Ilembo)…

Because my village is always windy, I have yet to burn any of my trash because I was afraid of starting a forest fire. But with the latest additions to the pit the garbage was starting to accumulate, even after kids had sorted through it, and some of the paper trash was starting to blow away. So I decided there wouldn’t be anything wrong with starting a teeny tiny fire, just to burn away some of the paper trash and some of the older stuff that was beginning to rot. Sure, it was a little windy, but I would just watch it carefully and put it out if it started to get out of hand. Well, I think anyone who has spent more than five minutes around me can guess what happened next. It took a while to get the flame going but once it started, it grew quickly, the wind picked up at just the wrong time and, within a minute or two, it was already out of control. The flames leapt out of the pit and started to travel up the hill towards my house and in the other direction, heading straight for my mkuu’s house. Uh oh. Of course, this was the one time there was not villagers hanging around my house catching up on their favorite real time soap opera, “The Days of Our Mzungu”, so there was no one but me to watch the disaster unfolding, much less help me put the fire out. At this point, I may have started shrieking like a small child.

I ran into the house to find water and realized I only had one bucket left after filling them up earlier that morning. I grabbed that, tossed it on the fire and…it pretty much did nothing. (There may or may not have been more shrieking and/or cursing at this point.) Now here’s where being an slightly compulsive, Type A personality comes in handy. I’m big on planning for the worst possible case scenario. (Even though during training, it was inferred that I was a control freak because I wanted to – god forbid- get some information before things happened in order to, oh I don’t know, actually prepare for them? They were all, “You shouldn’t plan for anything because everything is unpredictable. Who needs information ahead of time? You can’t control anything. If things start to go bad just eat some organic granola and think about how rainbows smell, blah, blah, blah…” Whatever, hippies. Good luck with that.) So when I moved in to my house, I bought two ginormous (about 45 liter) buckets to hold some water reserves. At the time, the memory of water rationing in Morogoro was still fresh in my mind so I thought it would be best to have them around for peace of mind if nothing else.

But now, as I watched the flames move quickly up the hill, getting closer and closer to my mkuu’s house, I realized those huge buckets were actually good for something. I ran into the kitchen, tore the top off one of them, filled up my smaller bucket and ran outside again to dump it on the fire. I did this several more times until there were only a few small spots in the grass that were smoking and I just stamped those out with the bucket itself. At that point, my neighbor came out of her house, no doubt to try to figure out what the crazy mzungu next door had done this time. “Hamna shida. Moto kidogo. Sawa, sawa,” I told her in Kiswahili that would make any 4-year-old Tanzanian proud. She took one look at the still smoking pit and burned patch of grass, apparently decided the less she knew about my firebug shenanigans, the better and went back inside.

Here is a picture of the aftermath:

The aftermath

JUST KIDDING!

Here’s the real picture:

The real aftermath

Needless to say, it will be a while before I burn any more trash. I think the lesson I learned from this was there is a reason people start fires by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere and not behind their own house. Also, hippies are always wrong about everything. (I kid, I kid. Sort of.)