10/2008
1/2009
So, in my final episode of abbreviated glass I review my last few weeks with my camera. Also I am pleased to report that a friend from my training group managed to return with a new camera to me on her trip back from America. Thanks!
October was probably one of the most frustrating months at site just based on physical environment. I was very thankful for my cushy Zanzibar vacation weeks before. It is pretty depressing when the mountains all around are completely barren and formerly lush cropland is nothing but sand. Fortunately I got another volunteer at my college in the middle of the month. Two Wazungu volunteers (white westerners) total joined my district bringing us back up to six individuals. In October, many new birds started to pass through too though this one is pretty common all year. The Cordon Blue darts around my house eating seeds, presumably.
Sometimes sunsets do great things with the otherwise dull brown. My counterpart Allan swings by my house to say hello on a slow afternoon without electricity. “Counterpart” is a loose Peace Corps term which indicates somebody who you like to work with in your community. You’re only suppose to have a couple but I end up throwing the term around a lot in various contexts.
Power was a big frustration this season: shortages of water mean hydroelectric plants starts to fail and our electric company was preparing for the strong rains so was taking the power down for 12 hours every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday to replace termite eaten poles in the hundred-some miles straight of non-redundant medium-capacity wires running from our regional capital, Dodoma town. They then run back down into the distant bottom of our large-ish district by another route which has a dam and reservoir. Our district sources its own power but quixotically has the most unreliable coverage from these services.
A random classroom at my college adjacent to my IT compound. Thank goodness for student teachers for watering all the plants keeping my workplace green as it was. Unfortunately this term turned out to only have six weeks of time with students around and four or five weeks of students in classes. This effectively means I saw each of my students four times in the entire term and for many, half of these times were without power. Thankfully, we have a generator which can run all ~100 computers so in at least half of the classes we generated power to teach computers (at significant expense). Almost none of the other 33 teachers colleges in Tanzania have generators so would be completely stranded by periods like this.
The problems which delay and shorten the national teachers college term are many but initially most of the problems stemmed back to the Ministry of Education which was several months late in accepting and assigning student teachers to the individual national teachers colleges. A mitigating factor: after national exams are graded many of the students are waiting to hear about university acceptances and often decline at the last possible minute. Another factor: the Ministry of Education seems to have lost a huge chunk of its funding thanks to a parliamentary gambit to shirk transparency requirements made by donor nations. In recent months this has caused mild but persistent teacher unrest due to unpaid salaries.
Secondary school students from distant Chamwino Secondary catch a breeze with me near the cell phone tower on the hill above my town. Initially they were a bit skittish about helping a Mzungu white person with his photography–you should see the smeared expression on their faces in a panorama I was trying to cut them out of. Then I explained I was a teacher and that I actually knew some of their teachers and that I was a teacher. They quickly cooled off as we chatted about their school and even smiled! I love cultural connections. Its also fortunate that teachers are one of the most culturally respected positions in Tanzania (much like doctors in America) .
I ventured up the mountain for the first time in quite a while as the first rain in some eight weeks had just plowed the dust from the skies leading to some of the best dry season vistas yet. My two other fast friends on the hill included the guards of the cell phone tower. Here they are resting in the moist air as the rain dissipated.
The guards’ adobe. I wish I had caught the contrast between it and the tower just behind the camera which has electric fences, 24 hour air conditioning and a huge modern generator. He had been working here for several months and had recently changed jobs: he used to be a guard at our nearby mountain livestock college. He hadn’t yet been through a rainy season. I’m anxious to visit him again and ask about how it has gone now that everything is green, green, green.
Above my house; Find the red flame tree in the right half of the image and look for the blue door hiding under it. That is my house. The satellite dish near the bottom-middle flame tree are my nearest neighbors houses. The sat-dish house is my counterpart Allan’s. The flame trees are typically called Christmas trees around here since their fantastic color lasts until about that time.
A hunch and little patience on the hill rewarded: Here is a very mildly High-dynamic range (HDR) shot taken from the cell tower just after a fierce twenty minute rain storm forced me into the little hut pictured above.
Rains aren’t all fun and blossoms. My poor students didn’t realize it would rain today, after all for the most part it hadn’t since they started term. Their shoes got soaked. The rain also brought out a number of sleeping critters: winged, awkwardly flight-capable termites who use it as a signal to fly into the air, get knocked down by raindrops, promptly lose their wings, mate and proliferate randomly around for maximum dispersal.
Frogs and toads seem to have caught onto this behavior and they also are awakened by this first major rain. I spotted 15 in the small green area around our ICT compound
Scorpions aren’t so much cued as forced out of their crannies by the flood. This one decided higher ground was the nook under my doorstep. Scorpions bark is much worse than their bite (granted I haven’t been bitten) but they are sure fun to play with when you have stove tongs (pictured decending).
So I admit, I chucked him into the spiders nest hoping to force a faceoff. No such luck.
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In the second week of my shooting I arranged a visit to one of my neighbor “site mates” in his small village. We hiked perhaps 10 kilometers to his water source, a mountain stream overlooking his valley.
The village kids haven’t noticed me yet, they’re throwing rocks into the tree to knock down the dried tart Vitamin C filled fruits of this giant Baobao tree. This one is probably pretty well known and picked over, a good challenge. Worthless for firewood, there are thousands of these trees around our district (i.e. county).
The Center of Attention in the village is always you. Whether people are asking for a bit of food, begging for pictures taken of them (i.e. children) or just warmly greeting you as you pass their hovels. Contrary to the previous picture the kids have spotted me and are caught in mid-bound in my direction.
Living handholds. People sometimes borrow some bark from these monsters to make twine and leave indentations which are pretty good for climbing. Pictured is my nearest sitemate, Ben.
A writers desk in the village with solar lamp, speakers & CD player, my fresh overcropped haircut, water bottles, mild vices, varmint proof basket, american style calendar. Evenings in the village move slowly and there’s usually not too much to do besides chat and cook dinner after the sun sets at 7pm.
Village Intake. This is a small concrete dam backed by a pipe which catches the water for these friends’ entire village (and another). It starts here, forks to the second village, passes a cattle watering station and ends up next to my friend’s house. Obviously the water is anything but crystal clear and villagers have to come up and flush the mud from it once in a while but the maji was quite plentiful. I heard that some villages nearby were not so lucky with their intakes that week. Water is life.
This water also has the valuable feature of not being very hard and salty. My house taps produce nearly undrinkable water, even after boiling and filtering, while this can be made as sweet as bottled water. This sort, called maji baridi, fed from a large damp plateau above the village is infinitely nicer to bathe in as well. Its alternative, Maji chumvi hardly lathers and sits on your skin like you’ve just exited the ocean.
(Pictured Ben & his counterpart Stanley)
Various Acacia seedpods & flowers. Remember those flat topped scraggly looking trees you always see on the African plains–the ones with the fierce thorns to deter thousands of years of large mammals? It turns out there are hundreds, maybe thousands of different varieties of them in Tanzania and in my Dodoma region. It seems that nearly every sort has its own beautiful method of proliferating.
Unlikely Dependants. These two kids are fixtures at my sitemates place. The one on the left is deaf and unable to communicate outside of personal hand gestures. He has had a lot of trouble interacting with impatient adults and teasing children. He is also a bit sneaky and has grown up taking what he needs. His cousin, right, can hear and speak the local tribal language kigogo but is often struck brutally by his father.
I should note that even with Ben’s hard won fluency in the national language of Swahili, none of them share a language: Gestures, Kiswahili, Kigogo, respectably. There is no one else for them. Ben does his best to welcome them into his house, carving out an impressive life of facilitating environmental projects like beekeeping, caring when it matters, and writing.
I venture into the villages every few months from my cushy, well educated bubble of the Teachers’ College community. It is tantalizingly easy to forget that just an hour away, deep in my district, there are people living day by day, completely dependant on crops and not contemporary education. It is tempting to write them off as “peasants”. Recently the Peace Corps staff met with our district government and we could hear the mild derision in the executive’s voice whenever he said it, overemphasized “peesants”. It was depressing meeting leaving little room for faith in our local executives. Even if your parents could never afford secondary school you are still a person. Even if you work a farm for your livelihood you can value the companionship of other people, strive to improve the work you can do and deserve attention for social support when the very local community doesn’t quite have sufficient internal resources to offer it.
Unfortunately despite the obvious value of these volunteers in bringing new ideas and changes, Peace Corps is moving away. In a few years there will likely be no environmental volunteers here through a combination of this administrative apathy for social and community works and a wild-west-esque influx of sapphire mining. Thankfully the neighboring district has shown more enthusiasm for their communities and has welcomed our organization with open arms.
To be continued with an account of the first rain and the first signs of the segue into the wet season…
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