Work Like Mama Africa

 I must be fascinated by laundry.  This post is 2 attempts to describe what household water is like in Africa:  First,  I want to set down what I do on Sunday morning, on my 1 day off.  Please remember that here with my host mama there is a maid in the house, and electricity.  Also a gas stove to cook inside, appliances, television and plenty of water, even if it is a little dirty, and not safe to drink.

I wash a small load of laundry:  First, heat a liter or so of water to boiling on the stove.  Mix it in a bucket of cold water to which you then add laundry soap and non-chlorine bleach.  The soap is super full of surfactants and water softener so that it will clean the clothes.  Put the clothes in the bucket of warm soapy water.  Agitate by hand, bending over at the waist for as long as your back will let you.  The water turns red from the dirt in the clothes.  Scrub dirty spots between your knuckles.  Wring out the soap as much as you can and put the clothes in another bucket.  Then put cold water in that bucket to rinse.  The dirty water goes down the drain in the choo, where you are performing this operation. 

Rinse the clothes in the bucket, then wring them out again and rinse them again until the water is clear, maybe 2 more times.  Remember, you didn’t carry the water for this operation into the house, the maid did that.  All you have to do is put it in the bucket and pour it down a drain when you are finished.  Still for a couple to T-shirts and some underwear you are bending, stooping, wringing and carry pounds and pounds of water.  I made the tactical mistake of taking my bath this morning before I started to do this, and by the time I take the clothes outside to hang them on the line, I am dripping with sweat, and my back is in spasm. 

When the clothes are dry, or dry enough as the case may be, you iron them.  Every single piece.  This is because flies lay their eggs on the drying clothes, and if you put them on damp or fail to iron them, the larvae will survive and maybe bore into your skin to pupate.   Again, in this modern house there is electricity, an electric iron, and an ironing board. So I feel very lucky to have these modern conveniences.  Tonight, my clothes will be clean and wearable.  Time estimate, about an hour for the washing and an hour for the drying.  A small load, just a couple of t-shirts, a nightgown, some underwear. 

Now imagine you are Mama Africa.  You haul the water from an outside cistern or tap (when it is running.)  Maybe you haul it from a dirty river or stream, or you haul the clothes down to the stream itself.  You don’t have too much soap, maybe a bar of Fels Naptha (lye soap) and no bleach.  You don’t have hot water.  You scrub the clothes with your fists, or with rocks and your fists, or on rocks.  You dry the clothes and then burn charcoal in a brazier to heat an iron so you can kill the bugs on the clothes.  And you do this for all the laundry of your household, because you do the laundry.  Your husband and your sons and small children don’t, and your bigger daughters are away at school or working, or already married.  You wash, and iron, sheets, towels, work clothes, school clothes and table cloths, every week. 

Thinking about it this way, I am so grateful for my mama (landlady), and for the Peace Corps, which matched me up with her.  I believe Mama Flora really understands how incredibly sheltered and spoiled I am, and she still takes care of me, she doesn’t despise me or hate me.  And I think about Mama Africa, and everything the women on this continent do to keep things going.  No wonder they sometimes look at us carefree mzunza’s, especially the older ones who aren’t even pretty, with suspicion and distrust.  Are we not an admonition?  Or crazy to be here not as tourists, but trying to live?

Mama Flora & Water 

Mama Flora Maringo is 43 and pretty, with soft brown skin and expressive eyes.  She looks alert and smart, but she sings and dances and smiles a lot.  She is single.  Without having discussed too much with her the history of her life, I believe she has never been married.  Her mother is alive and lives in an apartment for the elderly in town.  She has an adopted daughter, Nasra, and she also supports the 4 children of her sister, who passed away 4 years ago from an infection acquired after a C-section.  The baba, their father, is “underemployed” as we would say. The baby, Bessie, is the light of Flora’s eyes.  Flora still misses her sister, her dada, I can tell. 

Flora works hard.  She has a job for a local telephone & communications company.  This keeps her busy Monday thru Saturday.  She also has a guesti or guest house, with 8 small rooms on the property here where her house is.  There is one permanent resident, a good looking young man who teases me about my Kiswahili, and many other people who come and go, mostly young Tanzanians who are traveling, looking for work,  heading somewhere for school or just seeing  another part of the country. Flora tells me that when the local University is in session, which it will not be until Fall, the guesti  fills up with students and  the place is a lot more lively. 

Also on the property is one of 2 small businesses Flora owns and manages.  These are called stationary dukas or shops;  they sell paper, notebooks and school supplies, and offer copying, printing, binding and internet services.  The one here is very small, but still employs full-time a lovely young woman named Grace, whom I talk to as I come and go.  Grace also watches the house during the day if no one else is home, and keeps the keys.  I have taught myself to tell her in Kiswahili that I need the key, or that I am dropping off the key, and what time I will return.  She keeps track and reminds me in a gentle way if I am late.  Mama’s other business is a stationary duka at the University, which she says is a much larger operation, but which only makes money when the students are in town. 

Mama is a woman after my own heart.   The Peace Corps couldn’t have picked a better Home Stay Mama for me.  I hope I have made a friend for life. 

Today, Mama made homemade donuts called andazi for breakfast, and a delicious smoothie-type juice from sweet alligator pears (parachichi) and passionfruit.  I mix a little yogurt in mine and smack my lips as it goes down.  Flora, Nasra and Rehama, the house dada (sister), or house maid, are used to it, but Rehama’s son Hamidi’s eyes widen a little when he sees me spoon in the yogurt;  he doesn’t like yogurt and gives me the universal kid expression for ‘yuck’. 

It is Sunday, so of course I am doing laundry.  I’m getting the hang of it now, and do it entirely outside, and entirely with cold water.  I have not yet started using Fels Naptha, or a bar of lye soap, but I’ve seen Flora, Nasra and Rehama using it and it makes some pretty good suds.  Now, after 6 weeks of laundry, cooking, and bathing, I know much more about water and how it affects the lives of my Host Family.  

First, there are a couple of things that would apply anywhere.  Flora lives in the suburbs, a newer part of town.  So water is not as established here as in the Center.  Second, Morogoro is a growing community, because of its cooler, elevated location, view of the mountains, and proximity to both Dar and the capital, Dodoma.  The increase in population has resulted in a stress on the water system.  

When I arrived in mid-June we were at the tail-end of the rainy season.  It rained, hard, 2 or three times a week.  At those times, water came gushing out of the taps, at high pressure, and very dirty.  Rehama  used 5-gallon buckets to haul it to large plastic lidded garbage cans in the pantry so as to let the dirt settle out of it before we used it.  At the same time, I now know, Mama was storing water in her cistern, located out by the front door, collecting water from the city pipe when it was flowing.   The cistern is made of concrete and lined with sheet metal, contains 600K gallons, and is, I think, unusual, none of the other host families seem to have one.  In this country of everything being constructed laboriously by hand, this cistern must have been made by men with tools:   back hoe, welding, concrete construction.   I have come to see it as very impressive. 

There is also a 2,000 gallon black plastic storage tank of the roof of the house, supplied by city pipes, but I think the water pressure must be very high to get it in to the tank, as there is no pump or other way but water pressure to lift the water into it. It is hooked downstream directly to the house taps.  We checked it this morning, however, and it is empty.  I don’t think It will be in use again until the rains return in November or December. 

None of the water I am describing is potable.  We boil and filter city water for cooking and drinking. 

Since the first part of July, we have had no rain.  Our taps have not run at all since last week.  Mama says they will not run again until November.  No more water from the city.  Now, we haul all our water for laundry, cleaning and bathing from the cistern into the house in plastic buckets.  This morning, for the first time, Mama went out and bought potable water.  She brought it home, 12 litres or about 25 pounds, in a plastic bottle, like you would use in a water cooler, on her head. (I rushed for my camera but didn’t get a picture in time.)  From now on, Mama says, she will buy our drinking and cooking water.  Too much time, and gas, to heat up water from the cistern, which also smells pretty bad.  

So, Mama is lucky in some ways, because she has her big cistern.  Although she can’t take advantage of city water in the dry season when it does flow because the water pressure is too low, from what I have heard, water pressure is dropping all over Kola Hill.  Some of my fellow PCT’s and their host families already don’t have enough pressure to get the water into their houses;  they must go out to a tap in the lowest part of the yard.  On Tuesday, while we were at school, a truck mounted with a loud speaker passed by, telling us that water was to be rationed, only 3 days a week for each neighborhood.  I am now wondering what other families are doing to get their water.  Do they have pumps?  Wells?  Cisterns underground, like Mama's, that can't be seen from the road?

The funny, or maybe sad, thing is that Morogoro is, it appears to me, in a huge watershed, with hundreds of thousands of acres of water coming off the mountain draining to the city during the rainy season. And it rains, hard, every day during the rainy season from November to January and in April and May.  But in this otherwise bustling, growing and peaceful place, there are no dams, no reservoirs.  It makes me wonder if the electricity will become sporadic as the water drains away, since there can be no hydro-electric generation in the dry season if there is no storage of water.  I’ll be leaving in a week to go to my school site, so I won’t know.

As with everything else I have experienced in Africa, there are no easy answers.  I tell Mama about American water companies, public and private, and how dams and wells are built, and how the water runs all year long to every tap in my country, unless there is a bad drought.   Another way in which my country sounds miraculous to the African.  Mama is happy and content with her life, she doesn't want to go anywhere, she just wants what every Mama wants, to get Nasra and her nieces and nephews through school, and settled. She would also like a car, and a flat screen television. Still, America must sound to her like some unknowable paradise. Just as I couldn’t really imagine this place until I came here, so must the US seem to her.

Simba at Mikumi

Simba at Mikumi 

One eagerly anticipated highlight of the Peace Corps Training schedule is designated in our syllabus as “Trainee Directed Activity”, covering 2 days of our 5^th weekend in country.  This is about ½ way through the course.  Since arrival, we have been going to school at least 6 days a week, from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm or thereabouts.  Sundays are for Time with Host Families, but in reality we do our laundry, call home, go downtown to bars to drink beer. 

The “Trainee Directed Activity” is traditional; every year the Trainee group does the same thing.  We go out of town, overnight, as a group, on a completely unchaparoned safari to Mikumi National Game Park about 2 hours south west of Morogoro.   This year the group leader was a quiet and intelligent young woman who handled all the details;  dala dala’s to take us there, reservations at a small hotel just outside the park, tickets to the park itself.   She did a great job, and it looked at first like a lot of work for her, but she was aided by our Training Co-coordinator, who told her what other groups have done in the past, and supplied her with names, references and telephone numbers.  We would bus over, have lunch and go out into the park on the same buses, then come back for dinner and to spend the night.  We were promised simple accommodations with mosquito nets, fans and hot water. The whole thing cost about 90,000 T-shillings, or less than $60.00. 

Out of town!  Two days off in a row!! Wild animals!!!  Whoo hoo!   I was unprepared, although then not too surprised, to learn that a majority in the group under 40 looked forward to getting drunk as early in the outing as possible and staying that way for the duration.  I saw 1 young man’s backpack before we loaded up on Saturday morning:  a pair of clean under wear, a clean T-shirt, and 2 liters of booze.  As a mom, I hope he had his toothbrush packed in there out of sight.  I also hope he was preparing to share.   I was as ready for a break as anybody, and looked forward to seeing actual wild animals in Africa, as opposed to chickens, goats, cows and the ugliest dogs imaginable.   I just didn’t automatically assume that it would involve inebriation.   I am such an old fogey.   

It was a ton of fun though.  We went in dala dala’s, small busses of about 25 passengers each.  After the town rides, which involve maybe twice that many people on the dala’s, these relatively large, newer, and clean busses, all to ourselves, seemed luxurious.  We traveled away from the mountain and out onto a flat, tree-strewn plain.  After only 30 or so miles away from Uluguru, it was drier and dustier, and the red dirt of Morogoro gave way to brown.  Occasionally we would see a baobab tree, like the plane trees, typical of Africa:  huge, fat –looking trunk and spindly, leafless branches.  It is a nightmare tree out of a Tim Burton movie, a child’s drawing of a misshapen creature-tree, it always grows alone, and makes the eye uneasy.  

 We had to cross over Mikumi to get to the hotel and check in before going out to see our animals.  There is a major road thru the park that leads to Iringa, a capital of the mountainous region of the south.  The park officials protect their stock-in-trade from being slaughtered on the road by having it be 50 kilometers of gravel punctuated by speed bumps at about every 50 meters.  So you make a slow, dusty progress, with the drivers still trying to make the best time possible while sparing their suspensions, jockeying for the best cross-over of the bumps, which sometimes puts you on a collision course with a semi coming the other way.   There is lots of traffic.  I was surprised by the number of safi busses, Land Rovers, and modern looking semi’s hauling materials.  

And yes, we saw wild animals.  That first morning we saw zebra, hartebeest, baboons and twiga:  giraffes.  It caused a tremendous amount of excitement, people in my bus were careening from one side of the aisle to the other to get a view, and take pictures. 

The hotel, which was called the Genesis, had a lovely courtyard covered by a bower of bougainvillea, and the rooms were airy, clean and had in-suite baths with toilets and separate showers!  The Hilton couldn’t have been more welcoming or appreciated.  We ate lunch with really cold beer and then set out for the interior of the park. 

I wouldn’t say that Mikumi is a pretty place.  Especially after the red clay hillsides, coconut groves and banana trees of Morogoro, it seemed bare, and flat.   Very Texas-like.   A lot of the grass had recently been burned-over.  Since there are no houses or other structures in the park, it was hard to tell if it had been done on purpose.  The trees were dry land types, shrubby acacia and plane trees.  It looked droughty to me.  We were first driven out to a tank in which resided 5 or 6 shy hippopotamuses.   They stayed in the middle of the pond, huffing and diving and trying not to make eye-contact.  We then sort of drove around aimlessly, although we did see a small family of elephants grazing away by the side of the road.  We saw more twiga and zebra, more hartebeest and baboons.  A lot of people were drinking.  My seatmate, a charming young woman from Long Beach, had a bottle of Konyagi, the local flavored grain beverage.  It tasted like Triple Sec, only less sweet and viscous.  She shared quite a bit of it with me.  Some people were already obviously drunk.  It was fun, not hot at all, a nice way to spend the afternoon. 

As the sun set we crossed the highway to try to bag our last major unsighted wild animal:  Simba.  We had been told that lions are not regularly seen in the park, although they do reside there and eat the zebra and hartebeest.  Our two busses drove quite a ways in to the bush and stopped at a clearing.  We were not allowed to get off, and it was dusk.  No Simba, not even a little roar. 

Africa is black at night.  Some people took off for town to try to eat somewhere else than the hotel.  I elected to stay put and had dinner in the dark, lovely, cool courtyard, but after my second glass of wine I had to turn myself in and go to bed. It is a sign of my advanced years that I can pretty quickly be struck drunk; that’s why I don’t usually drink as much as I did that day. It couldn’t have been more than 8:30 pm.  I was filthy dirty but didn’t take a shower, just put on my night gown and threw myself under the mosquito net.  I slept for a couple of hours and then gradually became aware that people were enjoying themselves quite a bit outside my room.  I think the party was pretty much indoors by 3:00 am.  Some stories just don’t need to be told, especially if they are related to me the next morning over chai.  I don’t deserve to tell them.  But I think it’s safe to say that everybody blew off a head of steam.  Perhaps some special friendships were kindled.  That will be part of the continuing journey that is Peace Corps. 

When I got home I almost cried.  Mama had changed my sheets and done some laundry for me.  I did some more, my clothes from Mikumi were truly filthy; they probably should be washed twice.  The first thing Flora asked me was did we see Simba.  When I told her no, she seemed disappointed.  Later, at dinner, I told her I thought that the park seemed dry, maybe it was a drought, or the fire.  She nodded wisely.  “I think it is because no Simba,” she said.

Morogoro, our home for the next 10 weeks

After 6 nights in Dar, we got on a big bus which was crammed to the gills with ourselves and luggage.   I had a seat, but it was narrow, and my seatmate Doug from Seattle needed part of it, so I sat for most of the time on a duffel which was stacked with many like it in the aisles.  As we headed west, it got higher and cooler, until at last in Morogoro,  the town where we are to stay for the next 2 months, it was like Hawaii, with tall, sculptured hills topped by coconut palms and misty views down green valleys.  The dirt is red, just like Kauai.  The mosquitos here are quite large, the size of flies.  I am not looking forward to seeing the other insects on offer.  And I am not missing a single dose of Mefloquil,  even if it makes me schizophrenic.

 

CBT

CBT stands for Community Based Training.  We are PCT’s (Peace Corps Trainees), and not really PCV’s (Peace Corps Volunteers),  yet.   In Morogoro, the whole group meets and has classes at the Christian Center for Women located on the edge of town.  It is a pleasant compound  with offices, a big Hall (which doubles as the Sanctuary, I think),  and dormitories.  But we don’t  live there.  No, the model is to have us stay with families in town,  as part of a small group of PCT’s , all of whom are staying nearby.  My group consists of all the ‘old people’ in the larger group.  That is, a couple from Florida, a retired teacher from Seattle, a former librarian from LA, and me.  We are the few, the proud, the Seniors.  We work hard to have fun, keep up and, in my case, not seem too didactic.  Naturally, I am a little concerned about being grouped this way, as I think it sends a signal, but I trust that the PC knows what they’re doing.  And, we are closet to the CCT Center and can walk there, which is nice.   I’m very glad to stay off the main roads and the dala dala’s (small buses).  One of our younger members had his pocket picked of his wallet with all his cash, his ATM card  and ID’s on the dala dala the first morning.

Be Safe

As I have said earlier, we get a lot of ‘Be Safe’.  This falls into two categories:  Be Safe from crime and road accidents, and Be Safe from diseases that can kill you or at the very least get you separated from service.  This morning we learned that 1 in 5 of us will be the victim of crime while in the service, which includes petty theft like having your pocket picked or your purse snatched, and all the way up to murder (very rare).   The Peace Corps experience has taught our trainers that the best way to avoid crime is :  don’t be a target.  Know the language, dress down, avoid dangerous situations, and above all, don’t have anything with you that you can’t afford to lose.  Poke your money way down and into separate pockets, conceal your camera, don’t carry your laptop around and use it at the Internet Café.  At  home, lock up, lock up, lock up, and always keep your neighbors on your side, which circles back to knowing the language.  The distilled wisdom seems to be that crime is mostly opportunistic where we are, and we mustn’t appear to make crime pay for our much poorer HCN’s (Host Country Nationals).

In order to avoid road accidents, we have to take safe transportation (safi transportation, in Kiswahili), and not go in private cars or in unsafe buses or lorries on the roads.  The roads are dangerous because of all the things that can go wrong due to poor design and maintenance,  cars and trucks which  go too fast and are poorly maintained, and apparently drunk driving which is endemic, at least at night.

Alcohol has a lot to do with Not Being Safe due to crime and accidents of course.

And also of course, if you are in an accident, emergency help can be hours away or non-existent.

Diseases include all those that you don’t get in America.  Typhoid, Hep’s A-F  (just kidding, there’s only A, B and C.)  Polio, rabies, malaria and meningitis.  Everyday can be a shots day in the Peace Corps, and every day IS a day to take your anti-malarials.  Water quality is a huge deal because dirty water can make you have several of the nastiest  diseases and all of the unpleasant lesser ones, which cause diarrhea, horrible diarrhea, chronic diarrhea, and vomiting.  For some reason, a diagnosis of dysentery is not given in the PC, possibly because it needs a specific  bacterial or amoebic finding, and the PCMD’s will just  treat the symptom with an escalating level of intervention (Pepto-Bismol to evacuation).   We are told to treat, boil, and filter our water,  and two out of three together is best.  The PC has provided us with a nifty ceramic filter and a contraption made from two 5-gallon paint buckets.  Just  boil water and pour thru the filter and your worries will be over, unless you eat at the restaurant with dirty water ,that is, travel, or go to a friend’s house where the water is dirty, and eat there.  Peel food, wash with bleach treated water, boil everything and cook everything hot, hot, hot to kill germs.  I have not had any problems, yet, but I’m just a beginner, and I do have a pepper belly of long standing.

Then there’s STD’s, which is not something I’m particularly worried about, although I do remember what it was like to be 25, and so can see the point of all the gory pictures of pustules, abscesses, and poor runny genitalia. Plus, when I was 25, HIV/Aids had not come to America and the world. It’s real now, and everybody is on warning.  We have at least a dozen condoms in our Med Kit, and HIV PEP (Post Exposure Prophylaxis) is available in Dar and the outlying PC medical centers (only don’t ask for it twice!)

Food

Tanzania is an agrarian society and the food is fresh, available and of limited variety.  The diet is, generally, high carb, high fat, low protein and somewhat low bulk.  Staples are white rice, prepared with lots of oil and sometimes as pilaf, peas, onions, tomatoes, sweet peppers,  greens,  cabbage, maize flour and fruit, mostly the peeled kind, watermelon, oranges, papaya and avocados.  For protein there’s beef, goat, chicken, and beans.   A typical meal is  rice or umgali, a maize flour polenta,  with a sauce made of a few cuts of beef, tomatoes, onions, etc., a cole slaw-type salad made with onions and cabbage, cut up fruit and perhaps stewed greens.   Greens is a ‘mess of greens’ as we would say in the South, made by sautéing in oil with onions, garlic, and sometimes other vegies,  and then cooking to tender with a little hot water.  Barbequed or fried chicken is another meat staple.  The diet doesn’t seem to feature many spices, a few hot peppers and the like, and anything spicey is called Indian food, or maybe Chinese food.   The regular cuisine has few herbs, no turmeric, oregano, etc., and can be VERY salty.  Mama Flora, my homestay host, is an excellent cook and we enjoy very satisfying meals.  But I can see why some PCV’s yearn for sushi, or Chinese food, or a McDonald’s  hamburger.  There is just not a lot of variety in the day-to-day menu.

We eat at a round table with a lazy susan (shades of Casa Linda).  We use forks and soup spoons.  This may or may not be the norm, as we were told that many families eat Arab-style, on the floor and with their hands.  Don’t use the left hand!  I’m just as happy not trying to scoop up a little stew with a ball of umgali.

Outings and shopping

Beer is served in heavy old-fashioned  bottles, 16 oz., and cold, which is nice.  It costs about a dollar and a quarterr, which is a lot in TZ.   I have enjoyed Kilimanjaro Beer, and Safari Beer.  Both are hoppy,  not sweet, and have a higher alcohol content than American beer. Thus, my self-imposed limit is 2 beers.  One beer not enough, 2 too many, is my drinking motto. There are many little cantinas around, and after school there will always be a PCT or 3 congregated at the nearby ones.  Often associated with a bar is a little hot food stand that serves chipsi or other snacks, but it seems to be separate operation from the bar itself.

We were given a chance to go out on our own after about 5 days.  My friend Siobhan and I took a dala dala into town.  A dala dala is a ‘people mover’, the size of a van.  There is a saying, which is true, that in Tanzania (maybe all of Africa, I don’t know) there is always room for one more person on a dala dala.  This was certainly true on Sunday;  on my ride, part of the time I was standing crucified style with my arms spread to brace myself  against the  windows of the vehicle, with my head bent up against the roof.  Surrounding me at body touching distance were my fellow passengers, and there were perhaps  30 people in a van built for 15.  Think the clown car at the circus, or the teenagers in the phone booth.  I was looking down at my purse without being able to get to it,  and if a pickpocket had been next to me, I could have seen his hand slip in there.  But nobody did, and besides, on good advice I had my money in my bra, and at best he would have gotten my water bottle and comb.

Stores tend to be small and specialized.  They are called Dukas.  To go to the store is to ana dukini.  Shoes here,  small electronics  there, a store for paper supplies and a store for kitchenwares.  The floor space seems exceedingly small and the place is crammed with stuff, but it is not accessible, it's behind a counter and sometimes behind a metal grate, so you have to ask for everything and have it handed to you.  The ‘supermarkets’ are scarcely bigger than a 7-11 at home, though they feature a variety not found in other stores.  I found Pears Soap, which made me very happy, and American deodorant and toothpaste.  There are many many food vendors who set up on the curbs with a bushel or less of 1 or two kinds of produce.  Yams and tomatoes here, onions and garlic there.  There are many many  cooked food vendors, too, offering barbequed corn, chicken, juice,  beef on a stick, chapatti, etc.  All this results in busy, if not teeming, streets.  People like to be out and about and talking with their neighbors.  They don’t sit at home by themselves.  I haven’t seen many people making things while they sell, which I have done in other countries.  In fact, so far I haven’t seen much for sale that is hand-made or merely decorative, except for kanga.  But I haven’t been out much except for this time.

There is also a large central market called a Sokoni, but I haven't been there yet.

Shule  (School)

We go to school 6 days a week from 8 to 5 with 2, 15-minute breaks and an hour for lunch.  Subjects are Be Safe, Getting Along in the Culture, How to Teach in Tanzania and language.  The language is a challenge:  The Peace Corps wants us to be able to travel, shop and ‘get along’ culturally in Kiswahili  when we go to our permanent sites in August.  This means the pace of learning is pretty fast, especially for me whose retention is not what it used to be.   It’s not a real complicated language, at least in comparison to English, with its 3 exceptions to every rule and heavy idiomatic use.  And nouns are not declined.  But verbs follow a necessisarily complicated conjugation form.  The nouns and pronouns are not gender-separated, which has an interesting and sometimes challenging side effect in the native Kiswahili speakers who teach us in English:  you never quite know to whom or what they are referring because they use he and she indiscriminately, and almost never the pronoun ‘it’.  

Another problem with me, and with others who came to Tanzania already knowing another language, is that my brain refuses to divulge the Kiswahili word after the English one as I try to speak, even if I have studied and know it (at that time, retention IS a problem).  It always comes up with the Spanish one first.  This is annoying, but I have never spoken so much Spanish in my head.  It’s like my old brain is saying, “You can have 2 languages in here, but not three.  For now I’m choosing that you have  English and Spanish.”   But with much effort I can pry out a short declarative Kiswahili sentence in the present tense if given enough time and encouragement.

The main campus itself is nestled under a small mountain with the pleasing name of Uluguru. All the land on this side of Morogoro sweeps gently up to the foothills of this mountain, and are planted, mostly in corn. There is chai and lunch served everyday pretty much on a schedule, and  the ladies room features a toilet.  There is filtered water readily available, and chickens peck about everywhere.  We saw a baboon on campus yesterday, my first African wildlife.
We also have break out days, and go to shule for language training  just with our CBT mates in the front yard of a house in our neighborhood, Kola Hill.   I think the original plan was to be in a small room that fronts on the road running in front of the house, there are 2, and the other is manned by a guy who cleans and repairs shoes.  (More on the commercial nature of home life in another post).  But the little room was too  hot and we elected to move outside into the yard.  It's buggy, and about once a day 1 of us is birdcrapped on by the big ravens/crows that populate the trees above.  But I absolutely love our language trainer, and after a week or with him in a small group am getting into the study of a new language, if not the actual speaking or reading of it. 

Shule will go on for a few more weeks, then we will begin practice teaching in the Kola HIll Secondary School across the road.

More Dar, and our visit to Peace Corps HQ

 One of our outings in Dar was to the Peace Corps Tanzania headquarters, which was very nice and reminded me a lot of Laredo (lots of white wash, broad leaf Bermuda grass, cool verandas,  woven chairs and ornamental cactus.)   It was nice and many offices we visited, where the acronyms have their work, were air conditioned.  It was interesting to note that the offices of the Wamarekani (Americans) were very cool or cold, and the offices of the Watanzanians were a lot warmer. On the whole it was a peaceful, cheerful place. When we left there we deposited, at least in my case, exactly one half of our luggage.  This is so when we go on our Home Stays on Tuesday we don’t appear to be so rich.   I may never go back to pick mine up.

In Dar we stayed in the Center when not escorted out.  There we had language lessons, cultural transition lessons, lots of ‘Be Safe’  shots (typhoid,  meningococcal, Hep A-R, rabies.  EEK!).  Somehow the Bank and the phones/internet modems never worked even though we paid the equivalent of 2 months’ salary for the communication devices, and the Bank has floated another month’s salary for over a week.   Tanzanians say, It’s Tanzania!, and laugh delightfully.  I think they need a Kiswahili word for SNAFU.  (Another acronym).   This has had the effect of making me care more about $53 than I have for a long time.

Dar es Salaam is super-hot (and it’s winter!), pretty ugly except for  where the PCH is, at least from where I saw, crime-ridden, and crowded.  If the rest of my duty were to be assigned there, I would seriously consider resigning.  However, the Peace Corps has not survived for 50 years for nothing, and we will soon be departing Dar for the cooler highlands and our Home Stay.

Swimming in Africa:  June 11, 2012

Well I’ve made it a week since staging.  Have learned about 25 words of Kiswahili, how to bucket bathe, and just about everybody’s name (50+ people).  Have been on time except for once.  Figured out the charging of my electronics.  I’m still sleeping poorly, I think mostly because of the heat but jet lag, change in diet , the anti-malarials and just plain exhaustion are in there somewhere too.  Oh, and the bed in my room is super uncomfortable.

Just to chronicle:  Arrived in Philadelphia Sunday June 03 after a pleasant flight and got to the hotel at about 9 pm.  Went out to dinner with a group, some of whom I recognized from Fb Tanzania 2012.  I had a roommate for that night, Nicole from Dallas.  Everyone was pretty jazzed.  I tried out one of my Ambien and slept like a baby.

We are official Peace Corps Trainees:

Staging started at noon on Monday,  and began a pattern which has been repeated a number of times since then.  First:  Standing in line to fill out paper work.  Then:  a screw-up, minor.  This first time it was head shots, ordered a.s.a.p. by the Washington office while I was in SF early in the month, were declared non-usable and had to be re-shot.  Then we were introduced to one another and told a)  Be safe  b)  This is going to be hard.  We were given examples of this, and played games and talked and made up skits in small groups to learn this.  Then an introduction to the seemingly endless string of acronyms was begun.  PCV,  PCT, PCD, APCD, PCCD.  Money was discussed in excruciating detail about relatively small sums.

All of these things were to become an integral part of life over the next few days.

After the meeting broke (later than scheduled, another PC tradition),  we all trooped down to the Bar in the lobby to have a shot.  I think I may have impressed some by having a Verde’s (tequila and a Coors beer, thank you Mike Green).  Then it was out to dinner with a smaller group.  Pictures of this showed up on the Internet.  Eek.  Then back upstairs to pack and try to organize once again.  Last warm shower and no sleep time at all before the alarm went off and we were downstairs, buzzing with excitement, at 2:00 am to begin our 35 hour journey to Tanzania.

From there it got a little crazy-making. 

First a bus ride thru the pre-dawn hours, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and finally to the JFK at 5:15 am.  We were deposited unceremoniously in the check-in hall;  the counter   for our airline was not to open for another 2 ½ hours.  So, a long wait there, sitting on the terrazzo floor, talking, getting to know one another, and watching the airport slowly come to life.  Katie Downs-Angus downloaded on to my Kindle a whole raft of books, which I am enjoying.  Then, 2 ½  hours in the departure lounge, scrounging electricity for laptops, eating horrible airport food, and talking.

After all this waiting,  it actually felt good to load in to an air plane seat and crisply begin the 15 hour journey to Johannesburg.  I had a good position on the aisle, and tried to sleep,  achieving little but a sort of unconsciousness that didn’t bring true rest, even with a second Ambien.  But the plane was new, the food edible and I watched The Descendants on the little screen in front of me.

Then, we were in Johannesburg.  There was no question of going into town, we were transiting thru the country,  and it would have been complicated and perhaps dangerous.  It was sort of Disney Africa out there in the lounges.  Lots of really spiffy shops selling Africana and duty-free and travel aids.  I found a “Spa” and spent the absolute last of my dollars on a pedicure.  My feet were badly swollen and it felt good, plus I needed to get the old polish off my toes.

So, 7 hours of waiting there.

Then 3 hours on a small plane to Dar.  The South African guy on one side of  me absolutely didn’t fit in his seat and part of mine.   He even had a giant Apple computer that he worked on while in flight.  The other guy read his Kindle and that made me worry I had left mine on the previous flight (I hadn’t).  The food was edible.  The movie on offer was The Descendants.

So, we got to our hostel , the Mzembazi  Center, at about 10:00 pm on Wednesday.  That’s about noon in Californina.  I got a nice room that must have  been modeled on  every  cheap motel room  built in the 20^th century:  Green walls, not too clean,  scratchy towel, hard mattress and thin pillow.  Furniture  taking too much floor space, tile floor, no place to put the luggage.  I was introduced to the mosquito net;  it and I will be making besties from here on out.  But there was a fan/electric outlet, and the bathroom sported a toilet, not a choo.    I took a ‘bucket bath” and found that I was absolutely filthy from head to toe.  Has to change the water twice.

But it was  ‘not traveling’, and to be my home for 6 nights..  I took  a 3^rd Ambien and can now state that they don’t work with travel, at least not for me.  At this point, I think I might be crazy, and by that I mean,  I thought  I was  insane to be there,  that I had unknowingly joined  a cult that has purposefully kept me awake for 2 days running in order to break me and make me  malleable for their needs and desires.  In other words, paranoid crazy.  Only, not so crazy as not to think , “well, that’s crazy”, when I thought it.

Call for prayer (on a loud speaker that echoes throughout the neighborhood) goes out at about 5 am.   Roosters from then until dawn at 6:30.  Breakfast at 7:00.  Classes begin at 8:00.  How silly I was to think they would give us the  1^st morning off to recover and unpack.  We’re in the Corps now!  No time to rest and maybe get into trouble.  “Class” was more introductions, more ‘Be Safe” and more discussion about money, and of course, more acronyms. There was also some sort of screw up about money but I honestly don’t remember what it was.  I am not feeling quite myself.  It was to be 2 weeks before I started feeling like myself.

Definitions:

Mzimbaze Centre:  Newbies like us cannot be placed in a mere hotel, too much chance of something going wrong.  So we are housed in Catholic Conference Center in a compound that includes an ATM, a bar, a dining room (canteen) and a number of meeting areas, including a hall big enough to stage a huge wedding which they did on Saturday night.  When the Muslims sing the call to prayer, the nuns ring the bells. There are many kuku’s (chickens) and some goats.  It was surrounded by a high wall and guarded at night by men with guns.

Choo:  (Rhymes with dough, not chew)  The African loo, or WC.  When found inside houses, which is by no means not always, a flushable pit latrine.  Also the word for the room itself, which has  tiled floor and walls, so waterproof. Hand washing and teeth brushing take place in a small sink located in the choo or in an anteroom.  Flushing is accomplished by flushing or simply pouring a bucket of water onto and into the fixture.  Five-gallon paint buckets for water are everywhere.

As I write this, have not accomplished  #2 and don’t know if I ever will.  It’s kind of scary to think about that.

Bucket bath:   Neither bathing nor showering.  You fill your 5-gallon bucket from a spigot in the choo, or carry it in if there is no running water.  You have a large cup or small bucket with you, your towel and your soap.  Using the large cup, you dip water and pour it over yourself.  Then you soap, and then dip the rest of the water over yourself to rinse.  The used water goes down the drain, which is in the latrine fixture. (There is a learning curve about not letting your precious American soap slip  from your hands and bounce happily down into the hole, since you are standing near or over the hole.)  We were told that bathinng is typically done morning and night by everybody with a bathing room/choo.

There is no hot water, but in Tanzania this feels rather refreshing.