My water project was approved and I need your help! Your donation is tax deductible and 100% of it goes to help provide clean water for the village. For a description see Nov. 24 blog entry.

The rains are here! So here's a quiz.
Which of these animals can be found on my farm?
a. chameleons
b. monkeys
c. cows
d. donkeys
e. frogs
f. crows in tuxedos
e. chickens
f. lions
e. drunk people

If you guessed all of them, you would be close. There are no lions, and I haven't seen any monkeys yet. People say that monkeys are around, though. The cows and donkeys are unwanted visitors; I have to chase them away so they don't devour my sprouting crops. Usually this is a result of a careless cattle rancher (a five-year-old with a stick who is supposed to keep the cows OFF other people's farms). The chickens, who belong to my neighbors, come along to eat up the bugs from the freshly-dug ground (the same phenomenon that happens right after a person has been buried). The crows in tuxedos may look elegant from afar with their white collars, but they are just as annoying as regular old crows. They sometimes carry off baby chicks. And I have to be very careful not to accidentally slice the frogs and chameleons with my hoe (I've come close many times). Finally, the drunk people often wander onto the farm to help me dig for a few minutes. Notably, there are also sober people who do this, but not quite as often.

My Water Project was Approved!! Your donation is tax deductible and 100% of it goes to help provide clean water for the village. For a description see Nov. 24 blog entry.
LEARN MORE/DONATE
I apologize to Canada. I have been told that online donations to the water project from Canada do not work. You have the option of writing a cheque to "Peace Corps Partnership", referring to Project #621-156, and mailing to:
Peace Corps Partnership Program
Paul D. Coverdell Peace Corps Headquarters
1111 20th Street NW
Washington, DC 20526

Time for another quiz: In the Southern Highlands, what can you look for to indicate whether you’ve stumbled upon a wedding or a funeral?

a. Enormous vats of food being cooked
b. Women wearing swathes of bright, patterned cloth (vitenge)
c. At least two people who look incredibly unhappy
d. Drum-dancing
e. There are several people with little notebooks collecting donations
f. People are laughing, joking and telling stories

And the answer is… b. If all the women are wearing vitenge, usually one wrapped around the waist and one covering the torso and/or head, it is most likely a funeral. These are normal-wear in the village, but especially important at funerals. At a wedding, people tend to wear skirts and shirts that have been sewn from these swathes of cloth.

At weddings, the two people who are obligated to look unhappy are the bride and groom, and in addition the bride’s family members are not supposed to be happy as their little girl is leaving the family.

At first, I thought it was disrespectful to be cheerful at a funeral. I soon found you should be solemn when inside the house where family members sit with the corpse, but outside it is normal to be social. A large portion of the village shows up to each funeral, therefore not all of them are terribly close relatives of the deceased.

In some parts, the Wahehe relatives shave their heads completely bald the day after the funeral. Then it is easy to tell who the bereaved are.

A particularly beautiful part of the culture is the drum-dancing. At funerals, they sometimes wear bells on their ankles and dance all night, singing songs about the deceased.

My Water Project was Approved!!
LEARN MORE/DONATE
Your donation is tax deductible and 100% of it goes to help provide clean water for the village.

Most of the small talk in my village, especially in the dry season, revolves around water problems. When all of the water taps are broken we must haul water from the river. I am lucky to live only half a kilometer away. Few of the villagers have this advantage. Many women spend several hours a day just making the trip to the nearest stream to get water for household use. With a single primary school serving an area that takes 2 or 3 hours to traverse, children are forced to spend sunrise to sunset away from home. I often see these children drinking from the streams they cross on their way home, where floating cowpies decorate the streambeds. Often villagers spend all day at their farms, rarely returning home for a safe glass of boiled water. Diarrhea is one of the most common complaints at the mission hospital (where 1 health-care worker is responsible for an area of about 10,000 people), most likely as a result of a poor source of drinking water. Most villagers cite the lack of a reliable source of water as one of their major challenges. The proposed project aims to provide at least 6 functioning public water taps. If you would like to help provide clean water for these villagers, please visit the link above.

Poor Poor Mr. Condom
I was informed yesterday that the man who invented condoms was a Russian whose name was “Condom” and he forgot to put his condoms in the refrigerator so he died of AIDS. I had been invited to teach about HIV/AIDS to a group of about 30 young people who were having a religious retreat at the Roman Catholic Mission. I knew it would be a challenge to tread lightly on the subject of condoms and family planning, and I had devised a strategy of asking questions and emphasizing that the only sure way to avoid the disease was abstinence. I didn’t count on the fact that the kids would start a barrage of questions and unsubstantiated, hostile convictions (for example white men invented condoms but they only work for people who have access to refrigerators to keep them cool, so they are useless in Africa), expect me to magically know answers to vague questions such as “why do women give birth prematurely and have miscarriages,” and respond to claims that birth control makes you sterile for life. Despite the mis-information brought by my audience, I think I managed to get the vital message across: if you don’t want AIDS don’t have unprotected sex with people whose status you do not know. If you don’t trust condoms, don’t use them but don’t have sex. I must have repeated variations of these messages about 20 times over the course of an hour. It didn’t help that I had been notified that I was needed to teach the AIDS seminar 5 minutes before they wanted me to start. I kept finding myself responding to condom questions and praying the priests wouldn’t choose that moment to walk by the classroom. I kept an eye out for them and planned to say “Many people choose not to use condoms due to their religious beliefs,” very loudly just to be safe. It will be very telling whether I am invited back to teach the next group of young Catholics.

More Names
I have a couple more names to add to the list: Sickola and Moody. The search for a “Fungus” continues.

Nighttime at a Glance
Sometimes as I sit by candlelight I imagine what’s going on in the homes around my village. Young kids put the cows to bed and head home to their one meal of ugali (stiff boiled corn flour) and fried greens, cooked on a firewood stove in a smoke-filled kitchen, digging into the communal bowls with greedy fingers. Fat mission employees finish off their beers, then clasp hands in prayer before digging their forks into slabs of meat and rice. Elementary school teachers tune into the news on the radio while they stir their ugali on charcoal stoves, then study for their high school exams late into the night. The small-shop owners sell portions of cooking oil and salt to customers cloaked in colorful kangas emerging from the night into the glow of the shop’s kerosene lantern. Women who have slaved all day collecting firewood, hauling water, cooking, farming and cleaning, wrestle unwilling children into wash basins to scrub the dirt of evening playtime from their skin, then slather oil on their shining shivering bodies. The hard-working men arrive home from the fields or pastures to a steaming bucket bath and a meal. The lazy men are still at the club where local brew will be served until 10 pm, and then they will stumble home in the dark. Children will squeeze 7 at once into a little room on bamboo-frame beds or grass mats. If there is a funeral or a wedding, large groups will be up late into the night, crying, singing, drinking, telling stories. And I sit with my book and my journal, relaxing to the familiar tunes of American and Latin music or strumming my guitar, waiting for a pot of potatoes to boil.

Let's go to the Funeral
When people saw my hair last week, most burst into laughter. They never thought braids could happen to a mzungu, with our slippery hair. The unfortunately named “Tuende kilioni” style (meaning let’s go to the funeral) was right on, as this week I attended two funerals. I think next time I’ll get the “Kilimanjaro” style, which involves your hair ending up on the top of your head like a mountain peak. There’s another style which is named something having to do with getting revenge on your husband’s other wife, but I can’t remember exactly what it’s called or what it looks like.

Maize and Beans
Most people cannot fathom that maize and beans did not come from Africa, as they are so much a part of life in the Southern Highlands. This week I had the students draw a rough map of the world on the board and had them guess the origins of the commonly-grown crops of Tanzania. I liked that I could shock them by moving the papers around on the board. They were surprised that beans and maize came from Central America, cabbage and sugarcane from Asia, and coffee originated in Africa. The only crop with African roots that is still grown in our area is cassava. Then we had a very ruthless competition, in which two teams of students had 10 minutes to collect samples of different native plants with uses for humans. They came up with about 20 different plants, with uses from stomach medicine to natural pesticides.

One thing I enjoy so much about Peace Corps work is the variety. My work in one week has involved teaching Mamas about the dangers of drinking while pregnant, teaching about the manufacturing industry to secondary school students, convincing women that birth control pills are used in the US (and are not poison that Europeans have forced upon Africa), leading a seminar on emotional support for orphans, and teaching English and permaculture. If only real jobs could be this varied.

A Young Composer
“Gailo will be so happy when her mother comes to visit! She will throw a party because there will be another mzungu in the village! We will come and drink soda!”
(A song, translated from Swahili, composed by Lightness, my 4-year-old neighbor, when asked what she would say to my mother when she visits. She was lying in the sand in my garden, a stuffed bear tied to her back like a baby, getting ready to go dig up sweet potatoes I planted early this year.)

From Donkeys to Heroes

As soon as I stepped in the classroom I could sense my students were abnormally happy. Either I had gotten chalk all over my butt, I thought, or they were about to get me with some practical joke (maybe they had rubbed the cow-itch plant all over the piece of old mattress we use as an eraser). I thought they had finally realized how powerless I would be if they all turned against me, the soft teacher who doesn’t beat kids, my thin façade of control breaking down. I asked them what had gotten into them, and (as usual), 40 heads turned down to their desks and after a good 30 seconds one kid raised his hand. “The rains are near,” he mumbled. That was a relief! I should never have doubted these incredible kids. As we waited for some students to bring us some bamboo rods for the days lesson I gave an impromptu speech about Alaska—I still haven’t gotten used to the fact that here nobody bats an eyelash when I say that’s where I’m from, but these kids were a captive audience so I babbled on and on. Even as it started to rain and the bamboo arrived, the kids managed to pay decent attention to the task of building an A-frame. I love these kids who seem a different species from some of the monsters I tried to teach in the States or Mexico.

Just after the lesson, two men came up the hill toward the school leading two children whose hands had been shackled with heavy rusty chains and secured with a giant lock. I recognized one of them as a kid from my environmental club who had skipped the session. They must have stolen a bunch of chickens (a high crime in our town) or were caught with marijuana, I thought. The grandfather of one of the kids addressed the teachers. “These children were caught skipping school and playing cards!” he announced. The reaction wasn’t quite what he had hoped. I was a little hurt that the kids would rather do this than attend my club meeting (which usually involves a game or competition), but the shackles on these docile children seemed as necessary as harnessing a dead dog. I left at this point, only to hear the beating stick echoing from the school grounds, and to see an excited mob run onto my land after one of the boys and drag him back to the school by the hands and feet.

You might feel outraged at how I could just stand back and let this happen. But what I know about the system is that it is going to be a long slow transition. More than just a shift from corporal punishment, it will take a shift from people viewing children as pack animals whose wild spirits must be broken, to fostering respect for them. We are taking minute steps.

The headmaster at the primary school is transformed every Tuesday and Thursday when we teach 1/3 of the 6th grade class “Hero Books.” These are books that should help the students pick out goals and figure out what the obstacles are to getting there. They should also help them psychologically to realize who they can go to for help. The headmaster, usually feared by the children, reminds me of Beauty’s Beast as he tames his natural tendency to intimidate the kids, and calls for mutual respect. I explained to him that I think children need to learn out of a desire to reach goals, and earn praise from others, rather than the fear of being beaten so it hurts to sit on the hard school benches. I think most of the teachers agree in principle, but behavior change is very tough to bring about.

A 20-year-old villager told me that until he was in the 5th grade, he would run off with his friends and gamble with whatever they could find—100 shillings, a piece of sugarcane, an egg. One day he was caught, and the headmaster gave him the maximum beating allowed. He said he is so glad, as ever since that day he turned into a studious and diligent student, often coming home from vacations from boarding school and locking himself in his room to study for 16 hours a day. He was the top student in his class all four years of high school, and from my view is on his way to being the most educated person in the village. There goes my theory out the door.

Magic
I tried to introduce the concept of grafting to a (hilarious) health volunteer friend of mine, who told me to stop making up Lord-of-the-Rings magic-type lies. How could you take a piece of one tree and stick it on another, improving the trees and even changing the type of fruit it produces? Grafting is pretty much the coolest thing I’ve done in my life. Yesterday we started the grafting of 800 avocado trees, the first step in my master plan to turn my village into the hub of guacamole-making in Tanzania.

Amazing Guests
“If you saw me on the street, would you ever believe I have AIDS?” the young woman asked a group of my villagers. They adamantly shook their heads. How could such a stunning, cheerful, confident young woman be infected with the deadly disease? I invited two people living openly with HIV to come to my village and talk about their experiences with the disease, and halfway through the young woman realized that her audience thought she was acting. She then pulled out her record of CD4 (white blood cell) counts at the hospital to prove it to the group of women she was addressing. More self-assured than the vast majority of females in the village, our guest shared her story of getting married, falling sick with tuberculosis, the death of her husband and youngest child, getting tested for HIV, and how she now lives positively with her remaining two children. Stories like hers are so common among young women. The difference is that she is one of the few who has been tested and has begun to take antiretroviral drugs, which have changed her life. She appears strong and healthy, and asserts proudly that she could now ride her bike all the way to town without any problems, while in the past she was bedridden. The two guests made quite an impact on me, and I hope the villagers were as moved as I was.

Yet More Fatness
While filling out the cards used to chart the weight of growing children, I asked the nurse what she intended to name her future kids. She said it was funny I should ask because she had just been telling someone the other day that if she has a girl it will be named Gail (but spelled Gell so that people will be able to pronounce it), and a boy will be named “Beckham.”
I will add to the growing list of excellent names: Redness (and her brother Swelling?), God, Nitishie ("Scare me" in Swahili), Rechina, Bathroomeo (ok, maybe it had only 1 “o”), Enjoy.

I used to think icebreakers were a good idea for getting people to talk at seminars. Sunday, the seminar my counterpart and I were giving for guardians of orphaned children got off to a rough and awkward start. There was such a mix of people; orphaned kids themselves in school uniforms, brothers and sisters who cared for them, aunts and uncles, and wrinkled grandparents embarassed to speak Swahili. I picked an icebreaker that seemed to be appropriate for all ages, but it was a complete flop. You had to choose an emotion and then act it out for others to guess. The most we got were two of the students standing up and looking ashamed. Then one of the attendees stood up and explained that it was a hard game because they were not prepared. And when I stood back and looked at it, the concept did seem unimportant and a little ridiculous, so we jumped right into the seminar.

The point of it is to make “Memory Books” for kids with information about their parents, families, ancestors, and themselves in their childhood. As Americans, we tend to think that kids in difficult situations need emotional support, and we see the Memory Book idea as a good way to help with self confidence. This seems to be a new concept in my village. They seemed more to see it as a good way to record information in case anything happened to them, the guardians.

At one point my counterpart was explaining to a 13-year-old orphan and her brother/guardian how to fill out a certain part of the book which asked for a list of important people in the girl’s life. The girl could read and write, but her brother couldn’t even sign his name. They both looked very scared and submissive. When asked who was important in her life, the girl said “My parents.” My counterpart just looked at her and said “They’re dead, choose someone else.” It occurred about 5 times in the course of their conversation that he reminded her of this unfortunate fact. I know the girl was aware that her parents were dead, but to me it seemed insensitive keep telling her. In this culture though, this bluntness is very prevalent and accepted.

Fatness, Part 2
I told a friend of mine about my goal of convincing someone to name a baby Fatness, and to my absolute delight he said “I have a friend named Fatness.” I suppose I do not set my goals high enough. I now hope that I can meet a “Fatness” before I leave.

The teachers told me that often people hear a word or see it written and decide to use it as a name. They said that if the parents are at the hospital and a bus passes, the baby might end up with the name of the bus line. There are luckily no Greyhound buses here, but there is “Superfeo” (which means super ugly in Spanish), and according to the teachers, there are some unfortunate children running around with that tag.

They also claim that if I come back in 15 years I will encounter kids with my name. Somehow I’m not so confident that it would actually be “Gail.” More likely, it would be Gillr, Ger, Girl, or Piskops. It would be worth it to return just to give my condolences to those poor children.

Tuesday I went to help out with the monthly weighing of village babies, and discovered a new hobby: checking out the names on the cards. Here are some of my favorites: Agape, Abass, Big, Godness, Skolastika, Sist, Ravuness, Jailos, Albino, Milkson, Herigod, Heribert, Frolida (I’m sure that’s supposed to be Florida, but they switched the l and the r), Jeronimus, Loines (sorry about that!), Pili (meaning “second”), Sijali (I don’t care), and Hatunahaki (meaning “we have no rights”).

Chuchu the Goat
The other day I helped my friend buy an orphaned goat from an old farmer. We got it back to her house and started trying to feed it random things. It didn’t like powdered cows’ milk from a bottle, but it did have a taste for all the little green things in her courtyard, sausage, spaghetti, and eucalyptus leaves. It was being loud and obnoxious all night, and all of a sudden we heard one of my friends who was sleeping on the floor yell “Quit it!!” I guess the goat had kicked the door until it broke into the house and had crawled into bed with him. As an added bonus, the goat left us presents all over the floor, which were hard to avoid stepping in at 6 am when we had to get up to catch the bus.

Botany and Tears
The other day I stumped my environmental club students when I asked them to compare the functions of a plant to the functions of a human. They had no problem comparing eating food to a plant being out in the sun, having babies to making seeds, drinking to taking up water from the soil. But two questions I asked stumped them. The first was why plants show off their reproductive organs so ostentatiously, while respectable humans (in most societies) hide theirs. The second was why many plants encase their offspring in delicious food, while any human mother with a heart would never stick her baby in a cake and set it out where animals could devour it. They obviously are completely unaccustomed to this type of question, and I had to lead them to the conclusions of pollination and seed dispersal by means of animal digestive tracts (and at this age, anything that even remotely involves poop is hilarious to them). I’m not sure they like the idea of eating swollen ovaries whenever they bite into a fruit, but it gave them something to think about.

After the lesson, I made a few kids cry. It was one of the more rewarding experiences in my teaching history. We played a game where you had to make a circle and say something environment-related within a certain category (for instance edible plants), and then point to another person meaning they had to quickly say another word within the same category. If you delayed or repeated a word, you were in the middle of the circle until someone else messed up. The kids loved the game so much that two or three were laughing so hard they could hardly speak and had tears rolling down their cheeks.

Another Happy Wife
One of my best friends was sold yesterday. I went to her bride-price party, which was much like the last one. I spent most of the time sitting in a dark room with her waiting for the price-negotiations to be done so they could ship her off to her new house, about 4k away. It was sad, and interesting. She had a really horrible cough, but seemed to be in decently high spirits. Mostly I think she was just resigned to her fate. She said she wouldn’t get to rest until midnight, because once she got to her house she would have to unpack everything and cook for her new husband. I managed to shock her with tales of weddings in our culture: she couldn’t imagine the bride and groom dancing together at a wedding, especially in front of their parents. Nor could she believe the bride and her parents are supposed to be cheerful at the occasion.

Fatness
One thing I love about being here is how people laugh when I say my name is Gail and then say “My name is Goodluck,” or something equally as ridiculous. They laugh at my name because is sounds like "Girl." I'm so sick of this predictable response that sometimes I just introduce myself as "Peace Corpse." (The common pronunciation of Peace Corps)

Here’s another quiz: Which of these are actual names given to Tanzanians?

Loveness, Lightness, Gladness, Fatness, Happy, Gift, Wheatness, Kolonel, Urea, Agbert, Toadbert, Gozbert, Cuthbert, Sixbert, Filthbert, and Field Marshall

There are only 3 that I made up. This said, I wouldn’t be surprised to meet a “Fatness,” a “Toadbert,” or a “Filthbert.” It is, in fact, one of my goals to convince a family to name their child “Fatness.” You might think that cruel, but as fatness is a positive trait here, I think it couldn’t hurt.

Then there are some common historical names like: Boutros, Jackson, Adolf and Hitler. (Hitler is my bus conductor.)

Then the names that start out ok, but seem to get confused midway through: Juliethar, Anether, Jimson, Gerson, Glbart. (spelled exactly this way by a 4th grader of mine.)

And finally the names that are actually in Swahili but mean something sad:
Sikujua- I didn’t know
Mengi- A lot
Sijaona- I’ve never seen
Tuombe- Let us pray
Sifai- There’s something wrong with me (literally: I don’t work)
Shida- Issues
Lusungu- Pity
Simtaki- I don’t want him/her
These are just some examples. I've heard an unsubstantiated claim that these names are picked to deter the Devil from wanting to take the children. Others just say that the names are a brutally honest memory of what is going on when the child is born.
The beauty of names here is that people just make them up. Nice for parents, but you can't help but feel bad for poor little Spleenbert and Turdson. My heart goes out to these unfortunate younguns. I just try to give them hope by encouraging them to look forward to the day when they have children of their own.

A Health Festival
It’s not easy for a young mzungu female to get a captive audience of young Tanzanian males, but there’s really no way for them to escape if they are in the middle of a soccer game for which you have provided the ball. Last week we had our “Health Cup” soccer and netball tournaments, and I went to each of the 6 games with my counterpart to do skits at halftime. We tried to make them funny but with the main message that people should get tested for HIV. The first was about a person who had HIV but it was hard to believe because she seemed to be plump and healthy. The second was about a girl who didn’t want to get tested because she didn’t have time or money and was scared of the results. The third and fourth were about a couple where the girl refused to marry the guy until he got tested. The last two were about testing for the health of an unborn child.

I think the one they liked best was when I dressed up as a man who fell in love with a young girl (my counterpart). I came to her very shyly and tried to tell her that I wanted to get married, but the words for “to kill” and “to marry” are very similar, so I pretended to get them mixed up. Another way to say “to marry” is similar to how you say “close the bucket,” so I explained how I wanted us to “close the bucket” together. Then when we got it sorted out, I told her that we weren’t communicating because her Swahili was not very good, and she only knew “Kihehehe.” I was very surprised that she would refuse to marry me until I got an HIV test, and I told her that I’d never done “wheat” before in my life (the words for wheat and sex are only 1 letter off). I wasn’t sure at the time whether people were actually accepting the message of the skits, or whether they just found them amusing.

It seems that everyone in my village has a strong opinion about voluntary HIV counseling and testing. A great majority thinks testing is a good thing to do. Many are scared to get tested and don’t see the point as there is no cure. A few see it as a bad thing, and claim that people who know they are infected will deliberately go and infect others so that they will not die alone. A few fear the doctors, think they are liars or crooks, or suspect someone involved in the process must have ulterior motives for doing the testing. But it’s always healthy to have a few skeptics.

At 10:00 in the morning on Saturday I started to panic. The “Health Festival” signs had been posted, flyers distributed, and announcements had been made at funerals. Everyone in town, and many from the surrounding areas knew that there would be music, entertainment, soccer and netball finals, and, most importantly, HIV testing on Saturday starting at 9:00 am. Five different people had already told me they wanted to be first on the list to get tested, but the testers hadn’t shown up and I was starting to sweat. One man had accused us of lying to the villagers and was threatening to start telling everyone to go home (which I found odd because things generally start at least 2 hours late in the village).

The generator and TV set-up that we planned to rent from the next village up had fallen through (the owner had realized that morning that the TV wasn’t really working). About 30 villagers had gathered already, along with primary and secondary school students, and were waiting for things to start.

The sound of a car pulling up was music to my straining ears. The doctors gathered and gave a speech about HIV and testing under the bamboo/sisal “tent,” whose skeleton, left over from the grade 7 graduation, had been resurrected for the event. One thing they mentioned was that usually the vast majority of people who show up for testing are female, but they were surprised that it wasn’t the case in my village. I think this might be due to our efforts to target young males with our mid-soccer-game skits, but I can’t be sure.

The villagers gathered at the primary school and went in to one room for testing, and then waited to enter another room to receive their results one-by-one. While people jostled each other at the classroom doors (lines are non-existent here) we played music and watched plays performed by various groups.

I had expected maybe 30 people to get tested, but was hoping for 100. By the end of the testing, a total of 238 villagers had been tested, 22 of whom were positive. I realized upon hearing these results that I had been hoping unrealistically that nobody would be positive. The idea of testing is that those who are negative will be happy to hear their results and will continue to take care of their health. Those who are positive will lead healthier lives, avoid infecting anyone else, get further counseling and possibly go on anti-retroviral therapy. The results cannot be considered a good representation of the number of infected individuals in the area because testing is voluntary, but it’s better than nothing.

The day ended with the netball and soccer tournaments, and me going home to find my cat in labor. It was a hectic day, but I was very happy with the number of people tested.

Yesterday I solved a mystery. Just recently the local store has started carrying toilet paper, which I found weird, as I am the only person who would buy it. It was a mystery. Then I went to the seventh grade graduation, and was made to sit up in front of the graduating class and their parents in a special little lean-to made for the day. It was all decorated with brightly colored kangas (a sheet of fabric worn by women in East Africa) and also with none other than bright pink toilet paper. Mystery solved.

Last year I showed up to the graduation and was handed a schedule that had my name on it, and a word I didn't understand in Swahili, which I soon found out means 'speech,' and an allotted time of 10 minutes. I was fresh out of training, so it was a blundering, half-English attempt, which lasted about 30 seconds. Which is probably why I was not invited to give a speech this year.

Notes from a visit to Dar es Salaam

9/15/07
Today I made a friend. She came up to me at the orphanage while we were doing some permaculture on the grounds. She held my hand, and swung from my arm, and rode around on my hip. I figured the tiny little girl was about 4, but she would suddenly burst out with incredibly confident instructions for her friends: "get that water" or "let me see what you're holding." She said she was 7, but it's hard to tell when nobody celebrates birthdays, and many don't know when their birthdays are. We spent the day at the orphanage here in Dar and were part of an ongoing project to turn the grounds into a thriving, food-dense farm and gardens.


9/14/07
I'm in the land of giants. Living in a village where I can see the tops of almost everyone's heads, it's striking to come to Tanzania's biggest city where I'm not towering over the majority like an awkward snowman. And there are so many melanin-lacking individuals who I have never met. People like Dar because you can get anything you could ever imagine here, but you can also get anything you could ever imagine stolen here. My friend just bought a cell phone for a villager, and had it for 5 minutes before he was ever-so-gracefully relieved of it while using public transportation. I like to stick to splurging on food (from ice cream to elegant Ethiopian food), as it's safe once you get it in your mouth.

One thing I like though is the feeling of meeting a Hehe person here in the melting pot, and the feeling of solidarity that grows between us when they realize that I live with other Hehes. Strangely enough it's a stronger feeling than when I meet another American.


9/11/07
It's time for another quiz:
What is the most culturally inappropriate thing you could do in my village?

a. Pick your nose while giving a speech

b. Ask someone his religion when you've only just met him

c. Ask a pregnant woman when her baby is due

d. Tell your friend she is fatter than a barrel, an elephant, a blimp, etc.

To be honest, I have been involved in all of these situations. I have not, personally, picked my nose during a speech, but it will surely be some sort of rite of passage. I am constantly having to fend off offers to be baptized at the Roman Catholic Church or be saved at the Pentecostal one; usually by people I've just met. And I have, of course, been compared to all-things-fat in this world. I'm told I must stay in Tanzania, because the weather here likes me, which is why I am so healthy and plump. But I have avoided the embarrassing subject of pregnancy, which is referred to as an illness. The correct answer is therefore d. A pregnant woman hides her belly as best she can, coming down the path suddenly with a newborn, causing me to suspect delivery-by-stork or baby-stealing. It is best to also avoid asking people directly about their husbands, instead referring to them as the father of their mutual child, as in "Baba Gail". That would be my father. Many of the very traditional women are more likely to utter the word "my fungal infection" than the words "my husband."

Livestock, Love and Bricks

It is the cows' job to stand looking radiant and expensive. It is the female guests' job to cut up onions and greens, pick rocks out of the rice, and gawk at the radiant cows. It is the male guests' job to become intoxicated and be impressed by the magnificent cows. It is the bride's job to hide in her room, pretend she has no affiliation with the groom, be completely bored with the entire event, and eat half of a fried chicken. She does not get to look at the cows. It is the groom's job to become intoxicated, pretend the bride does not exist, and to consume the other half of the chicken. The couples' parents' job is to negotiate the price that will be paid for the girl, to stomp-dance to drum music, and to become less intoxicated than the guests. At this particular bride-price-reception party it was my job to try and say interesting things about America, eat rice with beans and chewy meat, gawk admiringly at the cows while trying to pretend I was unfazed by the trade of bride for bovine, and to fry up the chicken in a smoke-filled little kitchen. I'd say it was a successful party.

Also, I have recently acquired livestock. Well, a livestock. I have a pig, which now doubles as a garbage disposal. It is the type of pig that apparently comes from Guinea. My seven-year old neighbor likes to bring his Guinea pig over and exclaim "They love each other!"

The future president of Tanzania is a 7th grade girl in my village. She revealed this to me in one of two life skills lessons I was teaching before their graduation. I'm not sure if anyone has ever asked these kids what they want to be when they grow up, but there are potential doctors, drivers, pilots, politicians, and a single scientist. We also got to play "Vichwa juu, saba juu" or "Head's up Seven up." I was also treating them as Guinea pigs, figuring out what works and what doesn't. It was the only time I've ever been clapped for at the end of a class. So I think I probably did all right.

I will never look at a brick the same way again. No, not because I was hit in the head with one, but because I now have learned the art of brick-making. It was a job that I actually did not get fired from, despite warnings from villagers that it would be impossible/hilarious for me to try. The bricks will be a drop in a bucket towards building a secondary school and a dispensary. To make bricks you need water and clayey soil. You pour the water on the soil and stomp around in it until it is a consistency somewhere between that of playdough and applesauce (much like ugali, if you are familiar with that). Then you must slap it into a brick frame and plunk it onto a flat piece of land. After the bricks have dried out a couple days, they must be stacked into a giant kiln-like structure into which firewood can be loaded. Then you have bricks!

This week I played a role in the fate of a six-hour baby, survived a midnight attack of carnivorous ants, and jumped out of a bus window.

I remember once when I was taking role for a class on AIDS and one girl would write "Lukia" as her first name one day, and "Rukia" the next. It unfailingly alternated. Spelling here is like the points on "Who's Line is it Anyway"; it just doesn't matter. So I shouldn't have been surprised when I asked the new mother her 6-hour-old baby's name, and the nurse recorded it without asking how it was spelled. Then, when I read aloud what she had written, she said "Oops! Oh well."

If I had woken up 20 minutes later, it probably would have been to the tune of ants munching away at my toes. Luckily, for some reason I scanned the wall, or what was visible of it under the wallpaper of ants, with my flashlight. Scanning the floor, I saw I would have to make a dash for the living room as they were starting to cover that too. Soon after my escape, they were marching across my bed as well. My entire courtyard was throbbing with them. Environmentalists, skip to the next paragraph: I draw the line at attacks in my bed. I had a spray can of Raid, and let loose on the ants, finally able to return to my bed about 2 hours after I was so rudely awakened.

Usually I like to pretend that I can blend in with a crowd here, but last Wednesday I didn't even try. The bus conductor's generally foul mood changed to astonishment when I motioned to him that instead of force my way through a thick crowd of people, chickens and donkeys (ok, no donkeys, but there could have been), I'd simply jump out the window when it came to my stop. The other passengers thought this was a riot. The pressure was on, and I worried a little bit about hurting myself or chickening out. Luckily, the only thing bruised in the process was my papaya.

For those who enjoyed the quizzes earlier, here's another:
Which of these have I carried on the back of my bike?
a. a kindergartener
b. 6 chickens
c. a pregnant woman and a baby
d. a Wisconsonian
e. an 80-year-old farmer
f. an 80-year-old nun

Here's a hint: There's only 1 wrong answer. Giving "liftis" is part of the culture here. I have never carried livestock on my bike (so letter b is out), but I can't say no if someone is walking down a hill that I am biking down. I wanted to ask the nun if I could try on her nun-hat (wimple?) but I was too shy. Probably for the better, but I couldn't help think that it would be a fair trade for the ride I gave her. There is constant controversy among non-nun villagers about what their hair looks like under there. I've never been friends with any nuns before I came to Tanzania, but the ones in my village are really cool. There's one who punches me in the arm if I say "Shikamoo"(the Kiswahili greeting of respect) instead of Kamwene (the tribal greeting) to her.

A Fish Tale

Generally whenever I try something new here, be it digging a garden bed, washing my clothes or adding salt to a dish, I get fired. My host family would take the knife from me if I tried to cut cabbage, or the jam-making instructor would snatch the spoon from my hands (who knew that stirring was a talent? Apparently I don’t have it). Finally I tried something that didn’t get me fired yesterday... and I’m taking it as a sign of my fate. I think I’m destined to be a fisherman (fisherperson?) in Tanzania.

Obviously the adventure was a spectacle: definitely the first time anyone in my village has seen a mzungu waist-deep in the water, covered in muck, grabbing at fish and wearing pants. Net-fishing in stocked ponds is a far cry from the idyllic image that the word “fishing” conjures of waiting patiently on the river for a bite, beer in hand, but it was one of the most fun things I have done at site. There are three fishponds in my village, the largest of which is about 6 meters by 6 meters. It took about 9 people every time we dragged the pond. Some held the net to the bottom of the pond, and others walked along the edge holding the poles at the end of the net. The excitement began as we all lifted together to see whether we’d gotten any fish. Then there was chaos as fish flew through the air: small ones were chucked into a holding pond, larger ones into a bucket for dinner. Frogs unwittingly caught in the net jumped to freedom, crabs scuttled away, some of the largest beetles I’ve seen (easily as big as the mid-sized fish) dazedly made their way back to the pond. It's tough and dirty work, and one of the fishermen kept saying "Its nothing like raising chickens!" over and over. I nearly gave the chairman of the fish group a heart attack by trying to hand him a frog instead of a fish—he has no problem with fish, but he acted like the frog was a handful of raw sewage. If only frog-legs were a delicacy here, the group could have been rich. It was a learning experience; we chalked up a poor harvest to the fact that we hadn’t let out enough of the water to keep the fish from hiding in holes on the edges. We got enough fish for dinner though (I fried mine up with butter and spices), and it was delicious!

Ten ways to know Tanzania is seeping into your subconscious:
1. The sight of a 20-liter bucket perched on a stool by the side of the road makes you salivate (obviously there must be delicious fried food for sale inside)
2. When a guest comes over, you immediately abandon him so you can prepare a meal or at least some chai
3. You sweep the dirt outside your house to keep it nice and clean
4. Elbows and determination are more important at the store than lines
5. You refuse to eat bananas before they’ve been washed
6. You feel uncomfortable leaving the house in pants, and shorts would be almost as bad as going naked (for girls anyway)
7. A kissing noise makes you automatically run to get out of the way (of someone on a bike with no bell)
8. You chop vegetables in your hand, and chop them really, really tiny
9. When kids come running at you with dirty hands outstretched, instead of fleeing, you bow down so they can touch your head (respectful way of greeting)
10. You turn down wedding proposals by telling the guys they don’t have enough livestock to satisfy your parents

And a good indicator that the Southern Highlands are affecting you is that you can’t give a handshake without bending your knees (the curtsey is something I’m going to have to work to kick).

On Monday I may have acquired a reputation as a pathological liar when I co-taught my first environmental lesson at the primary school. One girl sitting at the back wore the expression you'd wear if someone told you that in their country fish rode bicycles and spoke Chinese, and many others looked quite skeptical. I noted this just after I had explained hibernation and the fact that it's only around the equator that day and night are roughly 12 hours each year round. I tried to describe how cold it gets in northern regions, but all I could think of was to say "you have to wear loooooooooooots of coats." Most of the kids have never been anywhere outside of the Southern Highlands, have never seen ice or snow, and cannot possibly imagine anything colder than June in our district. I'm lucky to be teaching with a really energetic young teacher, who helps to explain things that I probably didn't grasp fully until I got to college (such as the relationship of earth and sun and its influence on climate). The class/meeting went much better than I expected (much better than attempting to teach English as a third language to a special education class using Swahili as the language of instruction-blog entry Sept. 18 2006), and most of the sixty-one 5th-7th grade students who signed up actually showed up.

Yesterday I had just finished an agroforestry consultation visit and the farmer I was visiting wanted to thank me for coming by giving me some eggs. So he called his 4-year-old son and hoisted him through a small window about 4 feet off the ground; the only entry into the grain storage hut to search for eggs. I realized a little detail about Tanzanian rural life: It is possible to rely on a structure that requires a small child for its use because there always seem to be plenty around! In my experience, the average family has 7 or 8 children, and they are always shocked that I am one of three kids in our family.

Today I'm getting a "shadower." This is a new Peace Corps trainee who comes to my village to see what I do every day. Compared to other Peace Corpses' houses, mine is not set up at all... I crouch next to a bucket to do my dishes and sweep with a grass handle-less broom, for instance. But I made a chocolate fudge cake, hoping to pull an “Amelia Bedelia.”

Last week I found my self in the middle of a crowded bus stand, telling people I didn't want to get tested for HIV because my husband would think I was a prostitute. And no, I'm not crazy. It was part of a community theater workshop in Iringa town. First we did research by going into the community and asking people if they had been tested for HIV, and finding out what prevented them from getting tested. Then we wrote interactive plays to persuade people to change their minds. On the day we went to perform, we marched into the bus stand and started playing the drums and dancing in a circle. People started to gather around, and when there were about 60 people, we began our plays. Ours involved a group of people who saw a poster about HIV testing, and had various reasons for not going. One man thought it was a conspiracy, one said he knew he was infected (a true story from the research we did), one woman had no time due to her many kids. Then a friend came to convince us that we should get tested. When she failed, she went to the crowd for help. They argued with each of the actors until each of us was convinced to get tested (also realistic, as often during our research people claimed that they would get tested later that day). The second group of volunteers and counterparts did a fantastic interpretive dance, in which the main character, a beautiful girl, refused to "dance with" a guy who wouldn't get tested. I used to scoff at interpretive dances, but I got chills when they did it, it was that good. Then the crowd tried to convince him to get tested. When he was still unsure, the dance continued with another guy coming into the picture, getting tested, and getting the girl. Now I am really excited to try and use community theater in my village, even though many of the things we did in Iringa town would not go over well in our conservative little village.

Last Sunday I was part of the receiving party for the Tanzanian Torch of Freedom. From what I gather, the first Tanzanian president started the torch as a symbol for freedom, and now it travels around the whole country each year, passing through different villages, with a certain message that they want all Tanzanians to know (this year it was "Get tested for AIDS" and "Down with Corruption"). I expected it to be kind of like the Olympic torch, and maybe we'd get to hold it and run around a bit while some people waved gigantic flags, but I was let down. The preparations for receiving the torch took several weeks. They decorated the streets, fixed roads, and had matching (hideous) suits sewn (yes, I wore one too). I was surprised to see that the torch itself was rather small, and it was so windy that several people had to stand around it blocking it from the wind (and also from sight). I was with the AIDS choir, and when the fifteen cars showed up with various government officials and other important people, we sang some songs about being really happy to get the torch. Then they gave some speeches and jumped in their cars to go to the next village on the list. The singing and dancing were fun, and the speeches were really good, but I expected to feel just a little more like an Olympic athlete.

I just made a new friend with beautiful green eyes and a Hitler moustache (although thankfully none of his tendencies so far). Her name's Johnny, and she's been living with me for the past week. I think she's pregnant. Most of my dialogue with her consists of me saying "Leave that frog alone. Do not eat that frog," to which she generally just meows or purrs in response. Upon my return from Morogoro, I found it impossible to sleep as my house was overrun with rats due to the departure of my old cat last month. A volunteer who's leaving invited me to take her cat, and I gratefully agreed.

This morning as I was biking to the main road I was passed by two large herds (swarms?) of sugarcane boys; the largest herds I've ever seen. The sugarcane boys travel in flocks of 2-15, and are usually between the ages of 6-14, I think. They ride on wooden downhill bikes (two-wheeled things that you sit on to go down hills). I think of them like sleds but scarier. Even the wheels are made of wood, often with old tire-tread nailed to them. I got out of the way as they barreled down the hill, some of them greeting me in Hehe or Swahili, others going too fast to say anything, and others grinning ear-to-ear and shouting "Good morning madam!" or "Good morning sir!" They transport sugarcane from the village on their wooden bikey-things to the main road (for sale in the bigger towns I think).

As I navigate treacherous footpaths on my bike while balancing a 6-foot long bamboo contraption tied together with string, the majority of villagers guess that I'm either mad, going fishing, or trying out a new torture device. The truth is much more mundane, so I like to make them guess first. The bamboo, when assembled, is actually a magical device called an "A-frame," which allows farmers to redecorate their farms so that not only are they much more aesthetically pleasing, but much less prone to erosion. The A-frame is used to measure contour lines, so that ditches can be dug or vegetative strips can be left on the contour. I feel like some kind of opposite Santa Claus, as I show up to peoples' homes bearing strange gifts to the tune of children fleeing, and neighbors peeping warily out of their doors at me. One of my main priorities in the village is getting people to stop flat-farming on the slopes, and watching year after year as their topsoil is flushed into streams and rivers. I have set up a schedule with everyone who was interested, to visit their farms and come up with a plan to plant long-lived nitrogen-fixing trees or shrubs, and to dig contour ditches and plant or leave vegetated strips. As I mentioned, I got people to come to a seminar by advertising that they should come if they had trouble with fertilizer. Many of them thought that I was going to give out bags of free fertilizer. I was a little worried that this would lead to some hostility when they found out that I was just going to teach a session. But when I showed them the math on how much money they would spend on fertilizer for an acre, and how much they would spend on intercropping nitrogen-fixing trees on their land, and the subsequent benefits, they stopped clenching their fists under the table and thanked me for the ideas. The message was that you can spend the American equivalent of $2.25 to plant trees on one acre (instead of $25-50 on commercial fertilizer), and over time the benefits can reach $2,000-3,000.

QUIZ #2

I just got to visit my homestay family again after 10 months, which was terrific. It was a happy reunion, because I could actually understand what was being said and respond in a comprehensible way. It is crazy how fast kids change. I also remember being incredibly intimidated to walk down the street during training, fearing that I'd greet someone improperly, or be harassed for money. Now it seems so natural; it's like returning to your old elementary school as an adult and wondering how you could ever have found it so intimidating with its knee-high desks and water-fountains. Now I'm headed back to site, where I hope to get a lot of villagers to come to an agroforestry introduction by advertising it as cheap fertilizer. We'll see how that goes.

Here's another quiz for those of you who liked the last one: I live in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania. Which of these can be found at my site?

a. dancing chameleons
b. giant crabs that climb coconut trees and steal the coconuts
c. coconut trees
d. big hairy spiders
e. cobras
f. trees with huge seed-pods shaped just like sausages
g. trees with huge seed-pods shaped just like eggs
h. trees with huge seed-pods shaped like Belgian waffles with whipped cream
i. donkeys
j. lions

Here are the correct answers: a,d,e*,f,i

There are no lions, coconut trees, or giant crabs (I'm about a 12 hour bus-ride from the ocean, but these do exist on Zanzibar), and there is only one type of breakfast-food-like seed-pod that grows on trees.
There are chameleons that change color and they walk kind of like the moves to “Walk Like an Egyptian,” which I've been told is to fool predators into thinking they are sickly (because anyone who would do that dance in public must be deranged). Sometimes it's hard not to run them over on your bike. There are lots of big hairy spiders that like to watch over me as I sleep, so I can vouch for their existence. To my neighbors, anything that squirms is deemed a “cobra,” hence dangerous and thus must be exterminated. But I could swear that most of the time they are garter snakes or even earthworms. If I look skeptical at my neighbors' classification of the creatures, they will clarify: “a baby cobra.” Sausage trees ARE as gross-looking as they sound, but I've heard that you can carve the pods into chairs and have a comfy sit-down. I've never tried it, nor seen any that are big enough for that. Oh, and donkeys are kind of boring, but useful and present in small numbers. Thanks for playing! Hope you did well.

These days my main project is guacamole. Most people here have never had it, but I am hoping that after 3 years the village will abound with the two essential ingredients, avocados and lemons, which grow on trees and we are planting those trees.

I also want to start a dictionary of Swanglish words. Some of the words that everyone uses in English (even though you native-English-speakers may never have heard of them) are:

1. Frumpin
2. Piss Kop
3. Watakani
4. Pipe wrange
5. Godown

You might be able to decipher a couple of them. They mean (respectively) frying pan, Peace Corps, watering can, pipe wrench, and the "go down" is, inexplicably, a granary. There are many words that you can just add extra I's to if you want to Swahilify them. A good example is wikiendi (weekend).

This morning before I left my village I had the new experience of going to a grave-building party. My counterpart's mother died a long time ago, but he explained that they still needed to build a tombstone so that nobody will ever build a house on top of her. I arrived at 7:30 in the morning and was greeted by some already-tipsy old ladies who didn't understand when I declined their offers of local brew by saying "it's too early for drinking." Unfortunately I had to leave before any of the grave-building fun could begin. Maybe next time.

The 200 Shilling Question

I am definitely living in rural Tanzania. See if you can guess which one of the following things happened yesterday at the village meeting:

a. The meeting had to be postponed because of a pack of baboons ravaging a nearby maize field.

b. The meeting ended with all the village leaders crouched in a field eating bugs.

c. The meeting was interrupted because we had to go to a burning to drive out the witchcraft that had taken hold of one of the village elders.

d. People arrived on time.

If you guessed a, you are wrong, but good guess because I have heard (although haven't actually seen) that baboons are a real threat to maize fields.

If you guessed c, you are wrong, but good guess, because I have been to a meeting where everyone was even later than usual because the pastor was performing an exorcism of bad magic which involved burning, but luckily, as I found out, not of people.

If you guessed d, haha. Not in a million years.

If you guessed b, you have just won 200 Tanzanian shillings! (Please visit Tanzania to collect your prize before May 26, 2007).



If you want to try again, here's another test:

Which of these tales is true?

a. While barreling down the hill on my bike I was flagged over by a guy going uphill. He apparently thought the best tactic for convincing me to marry him was telling me that I had already agreed. "So, remember when we decided to get married? Yeah, so when's that going to happen?" I have seen him twice before in my life, and have had the formulaic Kihehe (local language) conversation with him, which he must have read too much into.

b. My four-year-old neighbor told me I was going to heaven due to my sweet-potato-planting skills.

c. I carried water on my head and nobody gawked.

d. Frozen precipitation fell from the sky.

e. I turned into a young (and less felonious) Martha Stewart, making bean "tacos." This entailed growing beans, tomatoes, carrots, and corn, harvesting them, and then drying the corn and getting it ground into a flour to be used for tortillas*. They were... edible.

*I am using a loose definition of tortillas, as the flour didn't stick together so came out in little thick chunks. Eating it was much less graceful than you might imagine.

Answer: All of the above except c. No chance of even breathing without being gawked at.

Thanks for playing.

The dry and "cold" season has begun. I am hoping that contour-ridging on my farm has managed to save enough moisture to push through my remaining crops: a little bit of wheat, broccoli and sunflowers.

My main activities these days have been AIDS-related. I just finished a seminar for a group of about 15 out-of-school youth who were interested in becoming AIDS educators. I looked forward to teaching them every day because they were pretty enthusiastic, and so grateful for my time. Tomorrow we are having a pretty big party for those who passed the test to become AIDS educators. They organized the whole thing and invited all the village leaders from surrounding areas. I only have to provide them with certificates. There is rice involved, and you know that if there is rice involved in any kind of party, it must be pretty special. I'd say it's pretty much the same way a birthday cake makes a birthday party.

There was also a big village-wide meeting that came at the request of another NGO which is apparently giving money for AIDS education. The point of the meeting was to determine why villagers thought AIDS was so prevalent in the area. They divided into groups and then were supposed to say what caused AIDS. Topping the list was drunkenness, followed by "careless sexual practices," which I took to mean without a condom, but there was absolutely no mention of condoms outright. It was a very interesting learning experience for me. I gave a short speech about life skills, AIDS testing, and stigma about AIDS, but was careful not to alienate myself by bringing up the topic of condoms. On Thursday, all interested villagers are invited to a lesson about AIDS, which will mainly be determining what they want and need to know about the disease. But I will be very surprised if anyone shows up. Farm work has died down, but there have been so many deaths in the village recently (averaging 2 per week for the last month) that it has been hard to get any work done.

The rainy season is nearing its end, and it’s not looking pretty for the people in our region. Last year the rainy season was too short, leading to bad yields, and this year the rains were on time, but much heavier than expected, and the flat-farming of maize and beans practiced on our rolling hills suffered, and has led to predictions of famine. The yellow bean leaves and corn that tassled at the height of my knees are a hauntingly common sight. You can see that the topsoil has been washed away and there is devastating erosion in some places. The saddest thing though, is that a lot of it could have been prevented by a little bit of terracing, and digging ditches on the contours. I have my work for this year cut out for me.

Yesterday my Country Director and the Permaculture Specialist came to my site on their rounds of visiting all of the volunteers. They were very happy with my farm, which I never really considered Peace Corps work because it’s just something I do in my free time. They recognized it as just the first attempt a green farmer (green because I’m a novice, green because it’s organic, and maybe green due to weeds), and definitely found a lot of things I could work on to make it more productive, but said that it was a great example, especially due to the central location (right outside the school on the main road where everyone can see it). Who knew that it’s considered work just because I can’t go 5 minutes without talking to the people that pass by the farm and exchange advice? In the past 4 months I have progressed from being shocked every time green things come out of the ground because I put seeds in it, to having to plan my diet around what's ready. The list of things growing now includes corn, beans, cabbage, pumpkins, peanuts, garlic, onions, Chinese cabbage, broccoli, carrots, bambarra nuts (yeah, I didn’t know what they were either! They grow like peanuts), lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, cilantro, basil, nasturtiums, mango trees, pigeon peas, and soy beans, and the sunflower and wheat have been planted but have yet to sprout.

I did get the kitten I had mentioned, but so far her contribution to my living situation has not included killing any rats. Her pastimes do include climbing me, eating enough food to make her stomach almost drag on the floor, and stealing sponges.

Small projects I am working on are a brief lesson for all the Mamas in the village about respiratory tract infections, an AIDs seminar for the teachers, a primary school environmental club, and a tree nursery group.

I recently had a good conversation with our new head teacher, as I had planned to discuss the problem of elementary school students who live far away. Just like many American students (especially Alaskans in winter), these kids get up before the sun rises, but then they walk an hour or an hour and a half to school (or run some of the way), endure beatings if they’re late, spend the entire day at school (even the 2 hour break which should be for lunch), and walk all the way home, arriving after dark for their 1 meal of the day. It would be incredibly hard to orchestrate a school-lunch program that would be sustainable, but we are going to try and get parents to start packing lunches for their kids, and the teachers will put the lunches in a safe place.

Projects

On Wednesday I did my first project requiring grant money. It required bringing 350 fruit tree seedlings to the village to be sold (we bought for the US equivalent of 50 cents each, and sold for 5 cents each so that everyone could afford them). I went in the morning with my village's Agricultural Extension Officer to pick up the trees, and upon returning to the village, found that a thief had been caught. All I could think was "Oh no, I left 200,000 shillings (about $150) in my house for the project because I didn't want to travel with it, and now it's been stolen." But it turned out he had just stolen some chickens and a small radio. The thief was not from my village; he was from a village about 5k away. They were taking him to the village office to deal with him (yell at, beat, psychologically harass, and negotiate a punishment). Incidentally the village office was where the tree project, which consisted of a short seminar on seedling outplanting and care as well as the selling of the trees, was to take place. This was both good and bad. It meant that there were a lot of people at the office, but they were mostly distracted, and had not really come with the intent of buying trees. They all decided to take a small break from the thief and sit and listen to the Agricultural Extension Officer give his spiel right outside the office, while the thief was locked up inside with the windows open. People were showing up to look in the window at him while the lesson was going on. All in all, the project went well, and despite everyone telling me how few trees we had bought, it turned out to be the exactly perfect number. Now we will see how many of the seedlings survive!

My other main project right now is a seminar to teach the leaders of the AIDS Committee in my village about AIDS and how to teach about it. It is going pretty well, though a couple of the people have to walk from about an hour away to get to my house where we are holding the seminar, and sometimes communication is difficult.

I am going to get a cat next week which should help because my house is overrun (that is not an understatement) with rats. They don't even mind when I'm around anymore, they just look at me and continue chewing whatever random thing they might get their teeth on (toothbrushes, toothpaste containers, my phone, potatoes, plastic bottles, iron supplements, etc.).

It's good to be busy, but it means I have had very little time to work on my farm, so it is looking very neglected!

A PEPFAR Grant and Training

My first grant went through! It's only for about $180, but it went through just fine, so next weekend we are going to sell fruit tree seedlings in the village (orange, lemon, passion fruit, custard apple, guava and a few more). We are buying them for the equivalent of 50 cents and selling them to villagers who attend a seminar for 5 cents each. We're doing a seminar on how to care for seedlings properly, so that hopefully they will all survive. The grant is PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), so I had to make the project relate to AIDS as much as possible. There's a group that takes care of orphans by providing them with a plot of land to farm and seeds when they graduate from the 7th grade, and they get to order seedlings first. Then the seminar will include a little spiel about how fruit relates to proper nutrition, and how proper nutrition is so important for people with diseases like AIDS. I'm excited.

We are in Iringa for AIDS education training, so today we went to an elementary school and taught two lessons. It was surprising to me how much the kids already know. I think what is really needed are more life skills lessons, where they learn and practice skills like saying "no" assertively, having positive role models and developing goals. I hadn't really thought much about how important those things are until recently. I can see how much easier it would be to do the right thing in a tough situation if you'd done a skit about it in class, or if you had some lines prepared to say to someone who was pressuring you. It is a lot like the DARE program from elementary school (Drug Abuse Resistance Education). My counterpart and I are thinking about how we are going to teach when we get back to the village.














It is nice to be in town and get things like cheese and chocolate, but it will be nice to get back to my little farm!

HAPPY NEW YEAR

The past month has been so busy, with our in-service training, a visit from my friend Rafael on his winter vacation from Nova Scotia, and now a President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief seminar. We are now allowed to start projects, so I am working on trying to get fruit tree seedlings to plant before we get too far into the rainy season.

Rafael was a terrific guest; we didn't actually do any of the typical touristy things. Instead we spent the majority of the time in my village, meeting villagers (a few of whom spoke English with him, a few of whom rattled on in Swahili or even Kihehe heedless of his confusion). He even tagged along to another subvillage where I was doing evaluations of permaculture seminars, and got a tour of some farmers' fields. My friend, who owns a little shop where she sells maandazi (fried dough) and milk, was very impressed when he quickly learned to fry the maandazi. It was nice because men in the village don't cook if they are married, so to see the mzungu frying maandazi was quite a wake-up call. I explained how men in Canada and the US often will cook, clean and even do laundry for themselves, even when they're married! They thought that was hilarious. We have a long way to go.

It was also really nice to have a friend helping out on the farm. I have only a half or a third of an acre, but it's taking me quite a while to get the whole thing prepped and planted. I have about 1/3 of it done so far, but will get back to work when I return next Saturday. It is nice because people come by and ask me why I'm farming the way I do. This year the rains are incredibly heavy, and many many people have lost their bean crops and have had parts of their fields washed away. I've had a number of people say that if they'd known the rains would be so strong, they would have done their farms like me (that is with contour ridging and ditches). I am currently on a campaign to get everyone to dig ditches, which I think is the most important thing I could possibly get them to change at this point.




Me in my contoured and ditched garden.






We spent Christmas with about 25 other wazungu at my friend's village in Njombe. It was a lot of fun, and if the idea of a fat man who lives in the North Pole and spies on you all year to judge your behavior and then comes around to put presents or coal in your socks isn't weird enough, we decided to have a Christmas pinata. We hung it out on a tree and a bunch of villagers gathered around and watched us beat the thing. Some even joined in. It was a blast. We also had a deep-fried turkey.

I hope everyone had as lovely and interesting holidays as we did here!