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.

 

Favorite Things

• Only Thunderstormy Days and beautiful fluffy-clouded Sunny Days (overcast is very rare) with the mountains in the background on one side and the valley on the other.
• Mangos, Bananas or Passion fruits every day (it is our rainy season until March), also bi-weekly fresh pineapples. Monthly Pineapples, Jackfruit, Avacados or Weird fruit many of which I haven’t been able to discover english names for like SheriSheri, Matunda Damu (apricot-size, sweet tart outside, berry-flavor inside), Zambarau, Unripe dates (euch!),
• Corollary: Juice, I got a cheap blender last time I was in the nearest large city. My school provides free sour Passion fruits any day I want them and it only takes three per person to make great juice.
• My house: it is bigger than anything I would have in the US and I have kind neighbors that work at nearby schools that I visit with regularly. I also have one of those Hawaiian-lei trees *right* outside my living room window making shade and loads of fragrant flowers.
• My Shamba: My field behind my house is about an acre. About three weeks ago my friend and I prepared a garden (Okra, Cucumbers, Carrots, Lettuce, Kale) and then this past week my Househelp (“Mzee”) and I planted maize, sweet potatoes, pigeon peas, pumpkins, chickpea-like flavorwise peanut-like growingwise things (“Njugumawe”) and peanuts in the rest of the space. I can’t wait to see if I get a good harvest. So far the lettuce looks to be coming along. I have had to chase away Guinea Fowl the last few mornings as they were eating my seeds.
• When people perk up when they realize a Mzungu (White person) knows Swahili.
• I like balancing my time in my town (and computers) with some time in the village. In my town most people and businesses live in concrete or wooden-board structures. In the village many people live in Mud houses or wooden pole structures. Completely adequate but it makes for a different atmosphere which is much more peaceful and laid back.
• Solaris at work: Sure, it is fantastically quirky Operating System but I love working with Unix on a daily basis rather than pure-Windows, keeps my tech-learning skills sharpened.
• Keeping busy at work: it interferes with my Swahili learning but it is nice to have an significant plain of computer tasks to explore and improve. ICT teachers spend almost 60 hours a week in the office. I settled on 45-50. PCVs are suppose to do about 30.
• Walking: (and biking) around town.
• Tanzanian Sketches: It seems like all Tanzanians can sketch really well, I don’t know why this is but it is cool.
• Neighbors, Friends and Coworkers: Tanzanians around my life are amazing and “push” more (in the best sense) than I’d expect from the TZ stereotype. The PCVs ’round are fun too, I think they will help me stave off most forms of culture shock.
• Peaceful Tanzania: I am amazed with the Tanzanian leader from about 1960 to 1982, Nyrere. He created this fantastic though very socialistic public employee system where the teachers (and police officers) are assigned to semi-random places around the country not unlike Peace Corps volunteers. This forced the lingua-franca of all Tanzania to be Swahili and not any of the 120 tribal languages: primary schools use it exclusively and secondary schools use it extensively. This and other policies have gone a long way to preventing the kind of serious socio-political-tribal tensions that have been raking Kenya in these past weeks. Also notable is the almost even distribution of Muslim, Christian and indigenous religions (30%/30%/30%).

     

  Hand of bananas ripening in the server room next to the blades.
  

  Things I don’t take for granted:

  Trash: I make a tiny amount of trash in a week. Most of it is paper trash that Tanzanians wouldn’t make like tissue paper or water bottles.

  Electricity: It goes out a lot but I also have it a lot. If I didn’t have it at all I wouldn’t mind but I’m still not accustomed to it being unavailable so when it is gone I’m in a funny spot where it is hard to cook, go out or host guests (which I probably invited days before). This said, a nice jolt of “hakuna umeme” (no electricity in this place) is nice to break up the daily routine and help me do things I wouldn’t regularly do but should be doing like reading a book or writing a letter.

  Rain: This season is not particularly rainy compared to a good year. If it rains we get more better fruit from my school and my field gets greener. I like rain.

  Water: Water is a bit complicated here in the desert. There are two types: “hard” and “soft” but really the hard is so unpalatable that I wouldn’t even translate it as hard. In Swahili they call it salt water, maybe brackish is the best term. My tap produces this type of water though it only works for an hour every two days. I collect it for the days it doesn’t rain and my garden is thirsty. I am very thankful that every couple days my Mzee/Househelp brings 50 or so liters of soft water. The problem with the soft water is that it comes in with lots of mud so it needs to be filtered with ceramic filters and then boiled. I have also casually been collecting rainwater when it has been convenient.

  Pop (English)/Soda (Swahili :): Soda is gloriously made with real sugar instead of corn syrup. When I wish for an occasional sucrose fix, a refreshing taste is ready at almost any duka. Bonus: There are all sorts of unavailable strange and interesting flavors like Gingerbeer, Quinine lemon, 50/50 or Squirt-like grapefruit, Fanta orange and passion and other indescribable varieties. Mmm.

  Imported things: PCVs always have one shop in their city/town which has been lovingly designated “safi duka”. This fun Kiswinglish word translates to “shop (that is) clean/cool/peaceful” but really comes down to having things that aren’t generally available in Tee-Zed: good jam, pasta, Cadbury fruit-n-nut, in big cities even soy sauce, mayo, butter, ice cream, olive oil and oregano. These goods come at quite a premium (butter for $3.50, olive oil $10!) so you have to use them sparingly. Remember I can get 5 tomatoes or one avacado (seasonally) for $0.20; Huge mangos for $0.20, $0.30 is expensive; passion fruits for $0.05. Also all tech things go for normal American prices so I have to change modes and burn lots of cash if I’m in a place (ie. the capital) where they sell good techy things like CDs, keyboards, or voltage stabilizers.

  Personal Space on Mass Transit: Daladalas (like Mutatus in Kenya), stout little busses and Roll-Cage Lori’s are the workhorses of Tanzania for short distance jumps from the big cities to the countryside villages. Gas is expensive, the Tanzanian shilling isn’t worth much, and average pay is small. Consequently Dala fare is about 200 shillings or 20c for most 20 minutes or less hops, not bad. The downside of this is that the Dala is never full. They always fit more people on and if you get on at a late stop on the line it will be quite cramped. Bus companies run between larger cities are a bit better if you pick the right ones.

  Tanzanian Progress: Although on the surface Tanzania seems to have it all, things like:

  • no less than three major sites of human anthropological origin,
  • topographical beauty,
  • amazing wildlife rivaling Kenya,
  • fertile land,
  • people who know how to work land (surprising bits of land get cultivated),
  • land rich in minerals,
  • long-lasting peace (peaceful government change in 1960s from British protectorate),
  • a common language among cultural diversity,
  • Few slums,
  • Had strong, decisive leader from independence through the eighties,
  • Stable democracy (albeit yet single party),
  • some English background.

  It has not progressed past countries like Kenya which lack many of these positive elements. Somehow even by many measures it is one of the twenty poorest countries in the world. The best single reason I have heard so far is that when TZ became an independent nation it had only 8 college graduates residing in the country. TZ was a protectorate not a colony like Kenya and Uganda. Britain had absorbed it as an afterthought once they defeated the Germans. They didn’t pour any money into educating the populace, focusing on their full colonies.

  One more humble outlook offered by some of the seasoned peace corps volunteers is that Tanzanians are happy with what they have. With the exception of starting a small shop in their front room aren’t interested in large-scale business. When they have enough money to get by for the week they’ll just close their shop and go about their personal business. Another alternative perspective was that for years Muslim leadership put a large focus on church schools which concentrated on the holy books instead of the science books. In any case in a country twice the size of California there are only 3000 miles of paved roads. 50% of food grown in the country spoils. People routinely make charcoal ruining the old growth on mountains and in the plains across the country and worsening global warming in their region. Poachers are not always dealt with swiftly as Kenya; they have not yet banned government-run game parks: animals like rhinos roam into this land and are shot for a one time return for the TZ gov’t. Leaders take bribes to overlook large amounts of minerals being carried out of the country.

     
   

  Dubious Things (that I hear about or see)

• Corporal punishment with families
• Corporal punishment at Secondary schools.
• Corruption in the small villages with teachers stealing cement from schools, cement from Peace Corps Volunteers houses. Required bribes with shipping of goods.
• No Cilantro (though I planted a bit of Coriander-spice which I hear is similar when fresh)
• No Nectarines
• Everyone Begging everyone for money (especially including me). Just to give you a sense of how entrenched it is the word for beg in Swahili is basically used instead of “please” in every routine transaction.
• Whenever more than two Wazungu (white people) are together it is assumed that we don’t know Swahili.
• Mosquitos after dark, Malaria, and Malaria prophylaxis side effects (like super-caffeine).
• When cows wander through your field and eat your knee high corn and spices that cannot be found in TZ :( One can pursue serious lawsuits for these offenses but I don’t know whose cows they were and would probably just ask for a week of free milk.

   
 

Stuffed daladalas driving crazily on bad roads(left) and Dry, seasonally green mountains at site.

Coming next: Learning Swahili, Shadow visit, Daily life.

When we arrived we realized how beautiful Tanzania could be. Morogoro is a lush environment that is surrounded by the Uluguru mountain range. Our base was ostensibly a women’s empowerment center but had been largely taken over by PC Tanzania for a few months as our headquarters. It is impossible to forget the cool, calm sunset and full moonrise over the mountain that first night in Moro. We sat on the dining terrace with a mature palm tree and thatched gazebo, some of us played Frisbee. We chatted with the infinitely more seasoned volunteers from the area. Still, we were firmly embubbled. I remember as we drove into this compound being amazed at how one of the largest cities in Tanzania still doesn’t have any two story buildings and at how even in the nice part of the city there were cows, pigs, children and chickens roaming. I guess I came to terms with these things over training, neither of them phase me today. It is Tanzania, a land of awesome agriculture, one story buildings and glorious peace founded on staunch anti-tribalism political policy. After a couple more days of training at that hostel it was time for the bubble to be abandoned. As our first weekend abroad drew to a close we prepared to spend our first night in a Tanzanian home instead of a hostel. That Sunday afternoon they gave us our first language session, a major crash course, four Swahili books: a staff-designed text, a grammar book, a worthless Oxford English→Swahili dictionary and a solid Swahili→English dictionary. Finally they dropped us off at the Home-stay. *Prick* and the semi-permeable cultural bubble is burst.

Arrival: Homestay

Just in time for supper! Well that was the plan. It was 3pm. In my case they had to explain to the family, who spoke not ten words of English, that I didn’t eat meat. Regardless of that: quite possibly my most awkward night, ever. They had warned us that many Tanzanians eat late. I was anxious to share photographs of my family, pull out my maps of Tanzania and the US to see where they were from and to show where I was from with their whole family. That first afternoon and evening I’d sat on the couch waiting for the family to sit down to dinner while my Mama worked in the mini-shop (“duka”) beside the living room. Eventually I came to know this room as a pretty high-end but typical Tanzanian abode but at this point it looked positively foreign: There was a TV but it still had the stickers and labels on it, the remote was still encased in its clear plastic sheath. The decorations in the room were white babies with unintelligible Swahili subtitles and strange doilies made of aluminum pop cans and colored plastic.

For several hours, alone, I studied the two dictionaries and painstakingly crafted a translation of “when is dinner” and “I would like to eat together with the family”. Occasionally the kids would pass and I would smile at them and they would nervously rush past. When I offered it, I thought my translation was somehow successful: I got numbers which resembled times, which I looked up in my dictionaries. They made no sense so I had them write the times down. They wrote “1:30″. Ack! Too late! In such a cultural muddle any expectations are dashed. I ended up eating alone with my eldest sister Stamili at 6:00pm. It turns out that in Swahili, since all Swahili speaking countries straddle the equator, clock times are pushed a further 6 hours from East Africa Time (+3 GMT) to coincide with sunup and sundown as our “midnight” and “noon”. Ages later I learned that “1:30″ meant one and a half hours after sunset. Next, I stumbled to get the names of all of my Homestay siblings. They were all Muslim names, difficult to remember. The task is made more confusing, as they warned us in training, because Tanzanians often have extended family staying at their houses, sometimes very transiently. I wasn’t really certain that I would be seeing these same family members again. Still, we established each others ages and tried to say anything to each other.

At 8:30pm they sent me to bed, I frantically texted our Peace Corps volunteer couple who had lead us around for the past week (and also happen to have lived in my site before me) asking for advice. I thought maybe I’d failed in my cultural exchange. They told me not to worry and I dozed off with much less trouble than I expected for such an early bedtime. I think I also wanted simply to construct some English and be understood–it was the first time in my life where I was truly isolated by language. The following day Swahili class began at the secondary school not so far away–only a 35 minute walk. I had my first Bucket bath, not so bad but they are certainly more effort than an overhead pressure-driven shower. My TZ Mama walks to school with me, I was reunited with a few nearby trainees–it felt like a full week had passed! Amazing how time gets drawn out in these kind of core-gritty cultural exchanges.

* I have no idea why TZers don’t smile in pictures unless asked, still good kids.

to be continued…next 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.

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.

• Lisp and Functional Programming – Reddit collectively says it’s so great
• Semantic Web – I just finished my entire senior project at University on processing websites and I have had the sneaking suspicion that Semantic Web might be The Proper Way to accomplish my goals. That said, no tools from that camp presented themselves in research. More on that project later perhaps.
• “Web Services” – Mashups are one thing, but where do you draw the line? I love dapper which makes RSS/XML from bloody ugly old fashioned sites!
• Unix (not Linux) – It always feels wrong. Props to Stallman and GNU, there is something to those tools.
• YouTube

I do get:

• Twitter (I like the Group Instant Messaging idea)
• Google Reader (Podcasts, News, Blogs)
• IMAP – Store email on the server so it is always in the cloud, Gmail works too, less personal with the benefit of free backups.
• Google Desktop- Google for my mind. Now on Linux, Mac AND Windows. I hope that they have porting tools to move the data files between platforms!?
• Greasemonkey – I should do one of those cliched posts where I list all the scripts I use.

Further explore and accept:

• RAW camera formats - Here I come Nikon D80.
• FreeBSD – Installed but it’s still not me. Gentoo makes more sense.
• Grandcentral.com – Route all your calls through one number? Google just bought them.

Facebook might be like AOL but College students have free audiences there, more than can be said for most blogs.