Easter Monday, Easter Tuesday

Yesterday was Easter Monday, and although we had class, we finished after lunch, so a few of us headed into town to hang out before returning to our villages. Riding on the daladala is always interesting: I was the last one to fit into the tiny bus (more like a van, really), and I was pressed against another trainee and several strangers, standing practically in the sliding door well, hunched over with my neck bent because the ceilings in daladalas do lot allow for tall people to stand upright. Luckily, about halfway to our destination, one of the other trainees and I were summoned to go sit up front, so there we were sharing the slightly-wide seat, me in the middle, the driver bumping my knee every time he shifted gears. 

I bought more kitenge (fabric), this time because its pattern reminds me of the Camino. Once I get to site, I will find a fundi to make something out of it - maybe a skirt or shirt. We walked around in the heat, shopping languidly, and eventually making our way to the duka that has ice cream and cold soda and juice. 

I followed the trainees who knew a back way, slightly uphill, almost into the residential part of town: clay buildings, melting brick, thatched roofs. Palm and banana trees everywhere. Wooden boards bridge small ruts and ravines, and suddenly you see more vendors along the path, tucked in small corridors alongside buildings and among the tropical vegetation. It is a very strange juxtaposition of nature and the world of brightly-colored plastics, shortwave radios, and cheap clothing. We climbed some more and found ourselves at a corner of the bus stand. We got ice cream and found we still had time to kill, so we headed to a bar, where we got cold Safaris and relaxed in the shade, a football match playing on the tv several yards away with many young boys watching, sitting in plastic chairs they pulled up close. 

After long chats and relaxation, we headed back to our bus station, and were happily reunited with the daladala that drove us here and the sweet young boy who was manning its door and fares. We found seats and watched the outdoors fly by: row upon row of sisal, cows grazing by the road, teenage boys on motorcycles passing by us. The upper half of the daladala windows block out light, so you dip your head to see outside, then raise your head, losing vistas, and seeing only asphalt speeding by. 

Today is Easter Tuesday. I watched one of my language teachers kill and clean a chicken. Seeing someone take an animal's life capably, knowledgeably, and respectfully is a pretty amazing thing. Although I prefer not to eat animals, seeing him slaughter a chicken today instilled in me a lot of respect, maybe even awe, for people with this capability. 

Then I went home and ate potatoes. :)

Today was a day just like any other

Today is Easter. I would never have known, except I found out on Friday that it was Good Friday. The only sign of Easter I have experienced today is it being mentioned a few times on the Tanzanian radio station my baba was playing most of the day ("Pasaka" is Easter in Swahili).

So since it was a normal day off, I did much-needed laundry (hadn't been able to since two weeks ago, before site visits), cleaned and mopped my room, helped cook, and tried to study but ended up napping sweatily in the heat of the day.

What I ate today: breakfast: tea, mandazi (slightly sweet fried bread), and a hard-boiled egg. Elevenses: tea, a bread roll, mandazi. Lunch: beef broth soup, ugali, potatoes with beef, and mchunga (bitter spinach-like plant). Dinner: stewed plantains with potato, a banana, tea. 

A few notes on the food: yes, it's pretty much carbs, carbs, and more carbs. Also, when I say "plantain" I really mean just green banana. I find it a little funny that cooked plantains and ripe bananas often have a way of appearing in the same meal. :)

Typical food, typical day, in a tiny Muslim village in the heat of Tanzania. 

Reptile ramblings

We were sitting in our school today and it was raining. Now that we're in long rain season, when it rains, it pours. It will rain for a while and then stop, and you go outside and the top three inches of red clay is saturated, your shoes sinking in and sliding every which way. 

Today, when it was still raining, we heard someone outside and our teacher went to see who it was. She came back in, asking if we had talked to someone about a turtle. We all laugh, remembering yesterday, and go outside to see the man from yesterday, who apparently had found a turtle and brought it to us! It was a small box turtle, very cute and sturdy. He placed it on our railing, told us we could take it, and left a few minutes later. 

So then we had two class animals for a few hours: the turtle, and Mhitaji, our dear house cat (the name we gave him translates to "Needy", because whenever we are eating he comes in and begs incessantly).

We took turns checking on the turtle, who mostly hung out on our front porch, getting stuck in the holes between the bricks of the railing wall. After class was over, one of my fellow trainees took the turtle back to the river from whence he came. 

Another day of finishing class early and none of us wanting to go home just yet. We followed the pattern of yesterday: heading to the village up the way for some of us to play Settlers of Catan, heading back down through my village after for cold soda, then heading to the river, to poke around, look at tadpoles, and breathe river air. 

The insects are loud tonight.

All weather, no seasons

It is a very strange thing to realize that Lent is over, and that I wasn't really aware of it at all. I realized it was Good Friday today around noon. It is strange to be so distant from and unaware of the passing of the Church year. Maybe my failure to observe Lent this year can be made up for, in part, by joining in Ramadan this year, as I will be in a very Muslim community, similar to the village I am living in now.

When you are living on the other side of the equator in a different culture with different religions and holidays, all of a sudden all the markers of the passage of time, such as winter, spring, Lent, and Easter, aren't relevant anymore. You think in terms of hunger seasons, long rain seasons, mango seasons, and the season the river will be so high that the crocodiles will come back. 

Every day is only a little less hot than the tea you drink, cup by cup, sweating and thinking you made a mistake, until all of a sudden you don't feel quite so hot anymore.

We had the afternoon off, so the eight of us (from our village and the next) decided it was time to go to the river and look for the crocodiles we heard live there. Red clay rutted trails through the bright greenery, downhill all the way, getting cooler as we descended into shade and cool air, and we saw the river. A group of women downstream washing their clothes greeted us. A dog rested next to a pile of harvested sticks and a machete. We peered into the slow water, then walked along a trail upriver, finding a man and two boys washing their clothes too. The man was gutting two catfish he caught, and told us the river was too low for crocodiles, but that there were turtles around. He offered to go get one, leaving his catfish on the flat rock and running up the trail.

We chatted with the young boys for a few minutes, waiting until the man returned, empty handed. "The turtle ran away," he told us. We laughed, thanked him, and made our way back to our villages.

This is Tanzania, where life slows down so much that even tortoises have a fighting chance. :)

Simulation day

"Don't forget that everything you deal with is only one thing and nothing else."

-Paulo Coelho, "The Alchemist"

Today was simulation day, also known as a somewhat stressful day for us trainees. Peace corps brings in professionals for these exercises: immigration officers to interrogate us, police officers to write up the "crimes" we are reporting, and "youth out of school", or young adults who we give mini-lessons to about life skills or other fun topics. 

It was a little stressful waiting for my turn and trying to keep all the Swahili I would need in the front lines in my head. But all went fairly well, and although we were scored on our performance, we couldn't have really failed as it doesn't really count for anything. 

This is the final stretch of training, where the assignments are piled on, the activities are more intense, and you're trying to find time and energy to do everything that needs to get done. When you look at the whole picture, it seems nigh on impossible that in three weeks we'll be sworn in (God willing) and departing for our sites. 

It's too much when you look at it all together, so you have to remember that everything you deal with is only one thing and nothing else. And then it starts to look a little more feasible.

These are the days

We did our family picture this morning. As soon as the volunteers from down the road arrived with their camera, my mama hurriedly put her pretty black shawl on, and summoned my baba from his room. We waited a few more minutes, to get our neighbor couple and their daughter into the picture. The six of us posed, me with the only toothy smile (many adults here take having their picture taken very seriously).

We had more Swahili lessons this morning, then went up the road to the next village to learn how to make tippy taps. Tippy taps are a simple construction to provide hand-washing stations wherever needed, such as a home or school. It is basically a water jug with strategic holes that is suspended on a simple frame, that, when made properly, will tip out a sprinkle of water when you step on a foot pedal. My homestay actually already has one, but it was good to see how one is made from scratch.

Today was very hot, and after our learning session several of us decided it was a soda baridi day. So we walked the mile or so to get cold soda. Always worth it.

My village trainees split off on the way back to take our last trainee's family picture, as we need to submit them tomorrow, to be sent to the city, printed, and framed to be gifts for our host family. The sun fell hot on his courtyard, but we spent a few minutes relaxing on the mat on his front porch, the breeze and shade taking away the heat.

Our final task for the day was to build a fence for the garden we have started to build near our "school". We gathered our tools and started to formulate our plan, hammering poles into the ground surrounding our garden. We were soon assisted by a young boy, probably ten or eleven, and another guy about our age, who live nearby. The boy schooled us on machete skills, and the guy took charge of our slow decision-making and directed us in the construction. Building a fence had never been so much fun as the six of us speaking two different languages, not really understanding what one another was saying, but understanding the project we were working on.

The sun set and we headed home. The mountains were beautiful in the distance. 

Someone noticed

Today we got "report cards" regarding how we have performed on various assessments so far in training. Mine was pretty good news, and there was even a note on it that said I had "wonderful flexibility in where to be placed". I must admit I was a little happy to see that they acknowledged and appreciated that. 

As we had site visit debriefing today and as I heard more about everyone's sites, I am very thankful for the living situation I will have (God willing). I will be living in my own new house, with my own new courtyard I won't have to share with any other people, and there is no one currently occupying my house who I will have to worry about moving out before I move in. My community seems enthusiastic and up for the experience of being home to a Peace corps volunteer. In general, everything I have heard and experienced about my future village has been positive.

One of our ducks hatched her eggs today. She rested in the coop today, and I caught glimpses of bright yellow ducklings huddling under her.