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.