Hello everyone,
I’ve owed you all this note for quite a while but I wanted to make sure that everything was stable before I sat down to write it. Training was two months of constant language learning and culture exploration. The first two weeks in country felt like two months. The past five months have felt somehow like nine but also like no time at all. As the Peace Corps’ volunteers’ Half-Kenyan, Half-Tanzanian friend here in my town happily asserts whenever “African time” interrupts an appointment, “time flies”. There have been enough experiences and people to squeeze into miezi nane (eight months) but I still can’t imagine that more than a few days time has passed over there stateside (“parle Merekani”).
Preface: I think this note is necessary to set the tone. Before I came to Tanzania I read a bunch of blogs and conceived many inaccurate views of what life in Peace Corps Tanzania would be like. One of my fellow trainees insisted that it was impossible to render a remotely accurate experience from words or pictures. He might be right but I’d prefer it if he was not. That is depressing–all those books, pictures and movies must have some semblance of veracity. In photos you can see the tattered buildings but you need to also see that there is no destructive winter and plenty of horizontal space to make complicated vertical buildings and insulation unnecessary. People only make low dollar figures each month but buy only fuel for cooking (often charcoal) and a few other small necessities. Anyway, please realize that Africa is not completely backwards or upside down, people are people and many things are just like they are in the states with a few deviations. Easy to say, easy to forget.
So here is my story: My training was two months long, The first three days of training were probably the busiest days of my life (besides the two days before my Western College Thesis was due). These took place in Pittsburg, Philadelphia, New York and Amsterdam. They entailed the flight from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia at 6am, locating of the fine hotel in the historic district of Philly, meeting 40 new teachers-to-be who I would spend the next two month with, checking and signing about eight different documents, some with six layers of carbon paper (really!) and subsequently training on all matters of peace corps policy with careful warnings of nasty crimes. After all that was finished we boarded a bus to New York City JFK airport where we waiting for several hours, we finally boarded a plane, stopped over in Amsterdam and 25 or so hours later we were arriving in country to meet the country director and staff of Peace Corps Tanzania. I had no idea what to expect, none of us did. Even when we were in Philadelphia the Peace Corps staff doing the “Staging” had never been to Tanzania and so could not give us any concrete information on our country that we would collectively be spending our next two years in. They were great but there was a serious information vacuum.
This is probably the most prevalent sensation in Peace Corps Training–”What is Going On, Exactly?”. When I visited Kenya several years ago I was amazed at how little my friend Willis had to explain to us of his discussion in Swahili for us to get by. We referred to the atmosphere as “shadiness”. We all felt a little bewildered but we were fine. I’d previously passed it off as my total ignorance of Swahili but now that I can at least follow a conversation in that language at a cursory level, I’m pretty sure that this atmosphere is pretty common in East Africa. The reason no one is saying exactly what the state of affairs is, is that they’re probably not sure either. In America I think we take for granted that we can understand everything happening around us. Here, not so. Once I accepted that cultural tidbit I relaxed. It even fits in pretty well with the general Peace Corps mantra of not telling volunteers what sort of job to do, where, until site announcements the final week of training, only a handful of days before you actually travel hundreds of kilometers to your “kituo cha kazi” (site). For two months I thought I had a pretty good chance of teaching to Secondary school kids (i.e. High School/Junior High) without electricity and computers. However, here I am at a teachers college teaching teachers and surfing the net. Thirty six of the trainees went to secondary schools while two went to teachers colleges. I suspect that they knew for more or less the total period of training that I was going to a teachers college (I hadn’t asked for a teaching position in my application process but an IT position which is what this sort of turns out to be). Still, I sat through weeks of training on how to be a Secondary school teacher and asked hundreds of questions on the topic which all was somehow instantly mooted in mid-November when I got my assignment.
To Be Continued…later this week
The contents of this Web site are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the U.S. Government or the Peace Corps.
Recent Comments