The readying

We finished our training here in homestay land today. Tomorrow we have our packing/ saying goodbye day, and the day after, we leave. I think we are all ready for homestay to be over - we know we have bigger fish to fry elsewhere. 

My mama insisted once again that I reapply henna tonight. She says I have to do it again tomorrow too. She will not be satisfied until it is literally black. It's a dark reddish brown currently. So once again I have kanga paw, which of course gets sweaty and awkward in the hot African night. 

This morning, around three a.m., there was a torrential downpour. Like tropical downpour serious. So intense it actually woke me up - that and a few huge drops splat on my cheek; there must be a leak in our roof somewhere. 

Humidity, singing, riding in land cruisers on bumpy red dirt roads. 

A walk in the dark

Never underestimate the odds of having something little and unexpected and awesome interrupt what you anticipated your routine would be. 

Tonight I was resting a bit in my room when my mama called me out. One of my favorite older mamas was there, and was asking me when I had to leave, because she didn't think she'd see me again. We clarified that I'm not leaving for a few days, so we will see each other, but, as they say, one thing leads to another and my mama and I decide to walk her home. We get halfway and my mama turns back, but I'm undecided and our friend laughs and decides I'm going to come visit her. 

My mama gives me her small flashlight, and our friend takes my hand. We walk in pitch darkness, past houses with the front door open, lit only by small oil lamps inside. She greets neighbors as we walk into a part of the village I never actually knew existed. 

We get to her house and meet her neighbor relatives. She invites me inside and summons her thirteen-or-so year old great nephew (is that a thing? Side note: at this stage of my Swahili and cultural comprehension, understanding how people are related to each other is nigh on impossible.) she asks me what kind of soda I want, and I quaver. "Anjari?" The boy asks, and I agree. She unties a bill from the corner of her kanga, and hands it to the boy who goes off. 

We perch on the edge of her bed and I look around her room. She has a beautiful cabinet full of dishes and cookware, and I ask her about the corrugated tin rolls propped against the wall. She says they are for roofing a building nearby. 

Young teen returns with soda - it's cream soda. He is instructed to find me a glass, and rummages through the cabinet by the light of his phone until he finds a small German-style beer stein. It's hard to tell in the light of oil lamps but I think the cream soda is green. It tastes pretty delicious and I can't remember the last time I had two sodas in one day. 

Once I finish, she says that my mama will start to worry if I don't come back soon. We make a quick stop at my mama's sister's house, and she shows me photos of trainees she has hosted - two of them. 

We walk back, the stars incredibly bright on this clear humid night. We stop to greet an old woman near a house, and a tiny child is instructed to greet me. She proffers her hand shyly - her grasp doesn't reach past three of my fingers. 

Dark nights, oil lamps, women full of grace.

School's out

Let me describe my situation right now: I'm typing this with one hand on my phone, because my left hand is swaddled in a kanga. My mama insisted a third installment of henna application was necessary, so about half past six, in the fading light, I reapplied henna to the designs on my left hand. We moved inside as it got dark, my mama brought food from mama Fatuma's house, and I ate with one hand (which is pretty normal because it's considered rude to eat with your left hand, which is your choo or bathroom hand). Then I retired to my room, and since henna is most effective if you let it dry completely and then brush it off, my hand is now wrapped up to keep it from getting on my off-white bedsheets. So this is a little challenging to write. :)

Today was the rather uneventful last day of language classes. To think that we're done with that portion! Only two more days of wrapping up loose ends and presenting our community reports, then host family farewell, and we mobilize for swear-in and installation!

Rains on and off throughout the day. Dramatic skies behind hills and coconut trees.

The last free Sunday in village

Today was the last day we will have, until the day before we leave, that was completely unstructured, where we could hang out with our homestay families and not have to go to class. My mama decided that today was henna day, and prepared two types of henna. Women here use henna to dye their fingernails, as well as make patterns on their skin. The base henna is a light brown, and the second henna you apply is orange, going to almost black the more times you apply it and let it dry on your skin. My mama dyed the tips of my fingers on one hand, and then I decorated my palm. 

My mama also made me pinky swear that I would come back to the village to visit. Now that's a promise I can't break now. :)

My fellow trainees and I got cold soda today, then tried to find certain people to interview for a report we have to write, but none of them were to be found. 

A lazy day. Laundry, henna, cold soda, a tiny cloud rainbow, one of the coolest I've seen.

My toad friend is back! I thought my cats might have eaten him. But no, he's here. :)

Study hard dance harder

Yesterday not a lot happened except for I got LETTERS in the mail (thanks to two people, you know who you are!), which completely made my day better because yesterday was a hard day. We had our LPIs, or Language Proficiency Interviews. These are our interviews where we are expected to have reached a certain level of Swahili, and we are assessed and scored on how well we speak. Luckily I was able to sign up for the second time slot, so I took it in the morning and had the rest of the day to relax. I think it went okay, we will probably get results on Monday. 

Yesterday I was eating dinner and heard something walking on the roof. Then we heard meowing, and it turns out our teenage kitten couldn't figure out how to get out of the rain gutter. I tried to help him, but he's still scared of me, and every time I reached for him he would duck back into the gutter. So I gave up, and I guess he eventually figured out how to get down, because in the morning I saw him walking around on the courtyard wall. My mama and I laughed about that poor cat.

This afternoon we all got together for a talent/ fashion show and cultural exchange. It was an awesome time of decompressing together as a group, relaxing, and dancing. Now if you know me, you know that I'm not a big dancer. But this music, man! Granted I cannot hold a candle to Tanzanians' dancing abilities, but the music is so good, and no one is judgmental, you just have to dance. And it feels great. :)

The speed of village

Today my three fellow trainees in my village and I found out that technically, we don't live in a village - we live in a hamlet. A HAMLET! It sounds pretty mystical and brings lots of images of medieval/ feudal Europe to mind. I must say the reality of our hamlet isn't nearly so glamorous, but it's a fun fact to know. 

After lunch and taking a quick test regarding our readiness to serve, I walked back to my house to get some cord we needed to build a tippy tap at our "school". No one was in my house, but as I was leaving to head back to school I was summoned by my mama, who was sitting inside mama Fatuma's front door, having lunch. (I think my mama, like me, likes vantage points where she can see everything that's going on. :) ) "Kata! NJOO!" Come! My mama yells after me. A lot of people call me Kata, which is actually a verb meaning "to cut", along with several other meanings. 

So I enter mama Fatuma's house, where I find my mama, mama Fatuma, her husband, their son Mustafa, and some other teenage boy who might work for them (there are so many teenage boys everywhere and often it's hard to tell where they come from and what they do exactly). Mama Fatuma tells me I must sit down and eat (this being just about an hour after I already ate lunch at school), and I know it would be a losing battle for me, and there's fresh-cooked ugali and beans so I cave. After a fair amount of ugali and a small bowl of beans, and after chatting and watching Mustafa struggle determinedly and good-naturedly to peel an orange, they finally let me go, probably almost half an hour later, when my mama realizes that my teachers might have wondered where I went off to.

The moral is: never expect to get anywhere or do anything in a timely manner, and if someone is offering you good food, take advantage of it. Especially if they're good company, too. :) 

Transect walk

Today the agriculture trainees took a transect walk with our Peace corps agriculture expert. We started on our training grounds, looking at interesting and important trees, then walked to a water source, then walked to a nearby village to look at farming practices there. 

One of the most interesting trees here is the neem tree, whose name in Swahili translates to "forty" tree, because it is believed that parts of the tree can cure forty different diseases. The second half of the day we learned about integrated pest management, and you can create a tincture or solution from crushing the leaves in water that can be sprayed or applied on plants as a natural pesticide. It also prevents intestinal parasites in goats who eat the leaves, and I believe our instructor said that you can also dry and crush the seeds and feed them to chickens, for the same purpose. We also made different solutions from the giricidia tree leaves, onions, garlic, and vegetable-based soap, as well as learned about using wood ash as a means of controlling pests. 

We walked to a pond that was originally built in the 1970s by foreigners who owned the sisal plantations nearby. Their main purpose for it was to grow fish, which must have at least partially succeeded, because there were some teenagers sitting on the bank across from us today, waiting to fish. The only water source to the reservoir is rainwater, and it has never gone dry, even in the dry season, so it must have been designed and sited well. 

Then we walked to one of the nearby villages, where we mostly looked at methods of raising livestock in confined areas: dairy cattle and donkeys, goats housed "second story" to reduce disease and mite prevalence, and rabbit hutches. Chickens are everywhere, as usual, and ducks are around but less common. 

Learning lessons under the hot sun.