8.22.2005
Travels in Tanzania
Originally sent July 14, 2005. This is the seventh of 8 mass emails I sent while living in Tanzania.
Dear readers of E, The Newsletter.
It's been a while since my last update, and apologies are in order because this one's a whopper. About a month ago now, we had a big event at our school. We brought together kids from both of our Arusha projects, their siblings and some of my neighbors for four days at our main site. Where we would usually have 30 kids, we suddenly had 93. Despite my initial concerns, we made it through the weekend with no runaways, major fires, or fatalities, and when not running around herding children into their groups, or giving the cooks more rice, or organizing clothes for handing out, I was happy to see the kids enjoying themselves. At the staff's request, we celebrated the end of the camp with a "goat cake". Despite my hopes, there was nothing cakey about it--it was a whole goat, roasted on a spit. Although I observed the process at several key moments, I was not prepared for the sight of the whole carcass, propped up with leaves stuffed in its mouth. The assembled Tanzanians looked at it with appetite--the assembled foreigners with disgust bordering on horror.
At the close of the camp, we sent all the kids home for a two week vacation. Sharifu, the boy who stayed with me over the Christmas break, was with me again, and my roommate Glory and I had fun being his two moms. Unfortunately, he is going through a bit of a bedwetting phase which would not have been a problem if he had his own bed and we had a washing machine. As it was, however, we groggily tried to wake him up several times each night and frantically did handwash so he would have dry, non-urine smelling clothes to wear.
A week or so after the kids had returned to school and things had returned to normal, I was lucky to take a trip to Shinyanga, a mostly rural region in the west of the country where we have a project. It was a lovely visit, bookended by two very arduous bus rides. On the way there, the trip took a total of 25 hours and featured a cast of characters including: 50 Disgruntled Standing Passengers, 2 Constantly Complaining Women, 2 Loudly Arguing Men, and, squished between these last four with an unfortunately timed stomach ailment, me. On the other hand, the ride back to Arusha only took 14 hours and despite all the dust and the rattling, seemed like a luxury coach after the hellish journey out.
But the stay itself, as I said, was lovely. I was visiting our third and smallest project for the first time. In addition to young children (mostly AIDS orphans), this project helps homeless elderly people who are feeble and nearly impossible to please. But they all have very sad stories of being rejected by their families, and it is obvious that despite their complaining, they are pleased to have a project serving them. They laughed and laughed when I played Ring around the Rosy and London Bridges with the kids; it was a beautiful sound that I will never forget.
All I had been told about Shinyanga was that it was hot and dusty. It was, but it was also beautiful. The flat landscape was studded with baobob and acacia trees, and the fields not under cultivation were waist-high with yellow grasses. Houses were square, built out of red blocks and roofed with thatch; the yards were sand and tidily swept each morning. But my favorite part was that, because the terrain is so flat and the villages are spread out, everyone gets around on bicycles, my favorites being fat people, women with babies on their backs, children on adult-sized bikes. We took "bicycle taxis", which are bicycles with a narrow second seat welded over the back wheel. Gripping this seat tightly and riding side-saddle, I was ferried around like a decorative parcel on several occasions, to general laughter.
I guess that laughter was actually my favorite part of the stay. My boss has a lot of relatives--her mother was the third wife and had 12 children of her own. I think people were excited to meet a foreigner who knows Swahili, and I spent long hours fumbling to explain various aspects of life back home--skyscrapers, winter, milking machines, the subway--to the hysterical laughter of my boss' sisters. "We'll never be able to do that, Emily", the eighth-born sister told me after I explained the Washington Metro. "We wake up in the morning, wash our faces, then look for shade to sit in. The rest of the day, we just move our chairs to stay in the shade." She was exaggerating: despite her 7th grade education, she herself was in the midst of campaigning to represent women's interests to the local municipal council, and ultimately won.
While I was in Shinyanga, I also got to visit my friend from college, Brian, who is in the Peace Corps near the city of Mwanza. It was great to see his set up (he's got a whole house all to himself!) and hear about his work teaching and training about AIDS. It was fun comparing notes with him, and the two of us were a pretty funny spectacle to the Tanzanians; both of us are fluent in Swahili now, but have different dialects because of where we've been living. We visited people in the town where he lives, and went to Mwanza itself for a day. We went to a museum about thelocal culture; a bizarre institution which needs its own email, and perhaps an anthropologist's doctoral dissertation. Mwanza is on Lake Victoria, surrounded by hills studded with large, smooth boulders. We climbed one of these hills, and, with falcons circling overhead and the breeze in our faces, looked out where the lake, shimmering, disappeared into the horizon.
Now I am back in Arusha, wrapping up with work and making good on promises I made of things I would do before I go. I'm glad to be here and glad to be going home too. Yet I find it alarming how the days slip through my fingers. I can say: I am bracing myself for the final goodbyes.
Many thanks for reading, and all my love to all of you,
Emily
Dear readers of E, The Newsletter.
It's been a while since my last update, and apologies are in order because this one's a whopper. About a month ago now, we had a big event at our school. We brought together kids from both of our Arusha projects, their siblings and some of my neighbors for four days at our main site. Where we would usually have 30 kids, we suddenly had 93. Despite my initial concerns, we made it through the weekend with no runaways, major fires, or fatalities, and when not running around herding children into their groups, or giving the cooks more rice, or organizing clothes for handing out, I was happy to see the kids enjoying themselves. At the staff's request, we celebrated the end of the camp with a "goat cake". Despite my hopes, there was nothing cakey about it--it was a whole goat, roasted on a spit. Although I observed the process at several key moments, I was not prepared for the sight of the whole carcass, propped up with leaves stuffed in its mouth. The assembled Tanzanians looked at it with appetite--the assembled foreigners with disgust bordering on horror.
At the close of the camp, we sent all the kids home for a two week vacation. Sharifu, the boy who stayed with me over the Christmas break, was with me again, and my roommate Glory and I had fun being his two moms. Unfortunately, he is going through a bit of a bedwetting phase which would not have been a problem if he had his own bed and we had a washing machine. As it was, however, we groggily tried to wake him up several times each night and frantically did handwash so he would have dry, non-urine smelling clothes to wear.
A week or so after the kids had returned to school and things had returned to normal, I was lucky to take a trip to Shinyanga, a mostly rural region in the west of the country where we have a project. It was a lovely visit, bookended by two very arduous bus rides. On the way there, the trip took a total of 25 hours and featured a cast of characters including: 50 Disgruntled Standing Passengers, 2 Constantly Complaining Women, 2 Loudly Arguing Men, and, squished between these last four with an unfortunately timed stomach ailment, me. On the other hand, the ride back to Arusha only took 14 hours and despite all the dust and the rattling, seemed like a luxury coach after the hellish journey out.
But the stay itself, as I said, was lovely. I was visiting our third and smallest project for the first time. In addition to young children (mostly AIDS orphans), this project helps homeless elderly people who are feeble and nearly impossible to please. But they all have very sad stories of being rejected by their families, and it is obvious that despite their complaining, they are pleased to have a project serving them. They laughed and laughed when I played Ring around the Rosy and London Bridges with the kids; it was a beautiful sound that I will never forget.
All I had been told about Shinyanga was that it was hot and dusty. It was, but it was also beautiful. The flat landscape was studded with baobob and acacia trees, and the fields not under cultivation were waist-high with yellow grasses. Houses were square, built out of red blocks and roofed with thatch; the yards were sand and tidily swept each morning. But my favorite part was that, because the terrain is so flat and the villages are spread out, everyone gets around on bicycles, my favorites being fat people, women with babies on their backs, children on adult-sized bikes. We took "bicycle taxis", which are bicycles with a narrow second seat welded over the back wheel. Gripping this seat tightly and riding side-saddle, I was ferried around like a decorative parcel on several occasions, to general laughter.
I guess that laughter was actually my favorite part of the stay. My boss has a lot of relatives--her mother was the third wife and had 12 children of her own. I think people were excited to meet a foreigner who knows Swahili, and I spent long hours fumbling to explain various aspects of life back home--skyscrapers, winter, milking machines, the subway--to the hysterical laughter of my boss' sisters. "We'll never be able to do that, Emily", the eighth-born sister told me after I explained the Washington Metro. "We wake up in the morning, wash our faces, then look for shade to sit in. The rest of the day, we just move our chairs to stay in the shade." She was exaggerating: despite her 7th grade education, she herself was in the midst of campaigning to represent women's interests to the local municipal council, and ultimately won.
While I was in Shinyanga, I also got to visit my friend from college, Brian, who is in the Peace Corps near the city of Mwanza. It was great to see his set up (he's got a whole house all to himself!) and hear about his work teaching and training about AIDS. It was fun comparing notes with him, and the two of us were a pretty funny spectacle to the Tanzanians; both of us are fluent in Swahili now, but have different dialects because of where we've been living. We visited people in the town where he lives, and went to Mwanza itself for a day. We went to a museum about thelocal culture; a bizarre institution which needs its own email, and perhaps an anthropologist's doctoral dissertation. Mwanza is on Lake Victoria, surrounded by hills studded with large, smooth boulders. We climbed one of these hills, and, with falcons circling overhead and the breeze in our faces, looked out where the lake, shimmering, disappeared into the horizon.
Now I am back in Arusha, wrapping up with work and making good on promises I made of things I would do before I go. I'm glad to be here and glad to be going home too. Yet I find it alarming how the days slip through my fingers. I can say: I am bracing myself for the final goodbyes.
Many thanks for reading, and all my love to all of you,
Emily
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