8.19.2005
In Tanzania and Doing Fine
Originally sent October 3, 2004. This is the first of eight mass emails I sent while living in Tanzania.
Hello again, all--Well, I have successfully arrived in Tanzania and settled in. The trip involved spending much more time on an airplane than I would ever like to spend again, so I won't be returning to the States.
Just kidding, of course, though my return to the US is contingent on the outcome of the presidential election. My job has turned out to be completely incredible and it involves a wide range of tasks from chasing Tanzanian bureaucrats, dealing with bedwetting, counting out cups of rice and beans, and writing funding proposals. I'm basically the right hand person for the lady who runs the organization, which is alternately stimulating, frustrating, rewarding, and boring.
I'm living in a house with a host family for now, but I will be moving in to my own place in December. My host family is big and complicated. Running the house are two women who are widows of the same man (yes, married at the same time). Also living there are the children of these two women, plus one son of the husband's first wife (who departed when the second one arrived and remarried), a granddaughter from a daughter from the second wife's first marriage, the daughter of the third wife's best friend, and another girl who is not related but has been living there so long she just decided to stay. I thinkthat's everyone.
One of the people in my host family is Irene. She is 18, and, having failed to pass an exam after 7th grade, is finished with her schooling. Irene speaks no English but yells a lot in Swahili and has the habit of explaining words to me by way of examples that include vocabulary much more difficult than what she is trying to explain.The other day I asked her what she did that day, and here is what she said: washed dishes, mopped, cooked lunch, did laundry, watered the yard (to keep the dust down), cooked dinner. She then asked me if my family has a worker and I said no, and she said, but who does all the work? and I said, well, machines do it. And then I discovered that my Swahili is not yet good enough to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who has never seen wall to wall carpet. Last Sunday I went to church with my host family. I didn't know much about the church except that they went there often, almost every day. I don't know what kind of church it was, so I will just describe it. It was the type of church where, two hours into the service (the halfway point, as it turns out) after a rousing sermon and the offertory, everyone gets filled with the holy spirit and goes completely nuts. There was screaming and crying and people fainting and the girl behind me, for some reason, kept shouting "push" in English. Since I was not doing any of those things, I was unsure ofthe etiquette of the situation and felt even more conspicuous than usual. So I just sat there primly and waited for things to die down and tried not to stare. This week I went to a Lutheran church.
There is something else I want to say about my host family. The father died in his forties after a months-long illness. He had worked in the mines, and as a result, lived away from his wives for a long time. No one here will say the word, but the evidence points towards AIDS. Sometimes when all of us are sitting down to dinner and the Swahili soaps are blaring and I am being urged to eat another plate of food I think about all that churchgoing and the afternoons of rest that my two host mothers take and I think about how AIDS is not just stick-thin people drawing their last breaths but also the uncertaintythat hangs over those boisterous gatherings like a cloud.
Well I said I'd try not to be longwinded, but I didn't promise, so hopefully you all will forgive me and write back soon.
Doing, truly, fine,
Emily
Hello again, all--Well, I have successfully arrived in Tanzania and settled in. The trip involved spending much more time on an airplane than I would ever like to spend again, so I won't be returning to the States.
Just kidding, of course, though my return to the US is contingent on the outcome of the presidential election. My job has turned out to be completely incredible and it involves a wide range of tasks from chasing Tanzanian bureaucrats, dealing with bedwetting, counting out cups of rice and beans, and writing funding proposals. I'm basically the right hand person for the lady who runs the organization, which is alternately stimulating, frustrating, rewarding, and boring.
I'm living in a house with a host family for now, but I will be moving in to my own place in December. My host family is big and complicated. Running the house are two women who are widows of the same man (yes, married at the same time). Also living there are the children of these two women, plus one son of the husband's first wife (who departed when the second one arrived and remarried), a granddaughter from a daughter from the second wife's first marriage, the daughter of the third wife's best friend, and another girl who is not related but has been living there so long she just decided to stay. I thinkthat's everyone.
One of the people in my host family is Irene. She is 18, and, having failed to pass an exam after 7th grade, is finished with her schooling. Irene speaks no English but yells a lot in Swahili and has the habit of explaining words to me by way of examples that include vocabulary much more difficult than what she is trying to explain.The other day I asked her what she did that day, and here is what she said: washed dishes, mopped, cooked lunch, did laundry, watered the yard (to keep the dust down), cooked dinner. She then asked me if my family has a worker and I said no, and she said, but who does all the work? and I said, well, machines do it. And then I discovered that my Swahili is not yet good enough to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who has never seen wall to wall carpet. Last Sunday I went to church with my host family. I didn't know much about the church except that they went there often, almost every day. I don't know what kind of church it was, so I will just describe it. It was the type of church where, two hours into the service (the halfway point, as it turns out) after a rousing sermon and the offertory, everyone gets filled with the holy spirit and goes completely nuts. There was screaming and crying and people fainting and the girl behind me, for some reason, kept shouting "push" in English. Since I was not doing any of those things, I was unsure ofthe etiquette of the situation and felt even more conspicuous than usual. So I just sat there primly and waited for things to die down and tried not to stare. This week I went to a Lutheran church.
There is something else I want to say about my host family. The father died in his forties after a months-long illness. He had worked in the mines, and as a result, lived away from his wives for a long time. No one here will say the word, but the evidence points towards AIDS. Sometimes when all of us are sitting down to dinner and the Swahili soaps are blaring and I am being urged to eat another plate of food I think about all that churchgoing and the afternoons of rest that my two host mothers take and I think about how AIDS is not just stick-thin people drawing their last breaths but also the uncertaintythat hangs over those boisterous gatherings like a cloud.
Well I said I'd try not to be longwinded, but I didn't promise, so hopefully you all will forgive me and write back soon.
Doing, truly, fine,
Emily
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