safari ni hatua

Just got back from our IST (in-service training) down in Iringa.  Fun week for the most part, and was nice to see everyone again.  We're down to 35 from our original group of 41, which I think for the most part is fairly average for Peace Corps.  The weather was cold, and by cold I don't mean in the Tanzanian sense, where as soon as the temperature drops below 80 degrees it's time to put on a jacket.  I mean actual cold.  I figured that would be nice, but I actually didn't like it so much, mostly because just as you will almost never find air-conditioning in this country, you also won't find heating.  And taking a cold shower when the air temperature is probably in the 50s was...painful.  I'm actually glad it's not quite that cold at my school, because then I would have to stop being lazy and actually heat water up to take a hot bucket bath every day instead of a cold shower.

I've been thinking about all of the stuff I want to do while I'm here, and it's realistically impossible that I'll get it all done in the time I have.  Which is just something I have to come to grips with, but at the same time is hard to swallow for a person who really hates leaving stuff un-done.  I've put possible projects into two groups: those that need money, and those that don't.

Money projects:

• Purchasing textbooks so that the students actually have something to read in the library which was recently opened
• Putting the chemistry lab in working order, which will most likely entail purchasing chemicals/labaratory apparatus
• Increasing the number of computers
• Building a modern kitchen for the school, because the current one is...bad
• Installing solar power for the times the electricity is cut

Non-money projects:

• Volunteering at a local NGO that works with HIV/AIDS patients and orphans
• Organizing my health club to get students out into the community teaching about health-related issues (mostly HIV/AIDS)
• Offering computer classes to villagers once the internet cafe opens at our school
• Organizing an English club - not sure where I'll get the time to do that, but English proficiency is such a huge issue that this is something I'd like to do
• Starting a Permaculture/Bio-intensive garden (basically allows you to grow a larger amount of food in a smaller space - we learned about this at IST), and showing it to students/teachers/villagers as a way to increase food production

And there's probably other stuff I'm forgetting as well.  Of course, all of this is in addition to teaching 34 periods a week, and trying to improve the quality of education my students receive through more innovative classroom teaching methods, which are my "primary" reasons for being here as a PCV.

There really is so much need here, and I do feel like I can make meaningful, lasting contributions to both my school and community.  At the same time, I have always felt that life here is generally better than I ever would have imagined it being, simply due to the distorted view we have of Africa as a place where everyone is starving and destitute.  That's not true at all, and yet at the same time an experience I had while visiting my host family in Morogoro on my way back from IST also really drove home the fact that there most certainly ARE people in this country for whom life is as bad as we think it is.

The story is this: my host mama recently got a new housegirl (as the other one was a relative who has recently gone back to school up in Arusha).  My mama was telling me how this girl is mshamba, which you could roughly equate to being called a redneck, though she didn't mean it in a malicious way.  The word shamba means farm, so mshamba means a person from the farm - i.e. a real villager who doesn't know the "sophisticated" ways of city life.

So this girl was apparently breaking all of the glasses and dishes in the house the first week she was there (she's 15-16 years old) because I guess she had just never used such things before.  She was also initially scared of the electric lights in the house, because she had never see them before.  She didn't even know how to wash clothes - this is due to the fact that at her actual home (near Dodoma, which is a pretty desert-like area) there were major water problems, and there wasn't enough water to wash clothes with.

She's the oldest of 4 children - her father abandoned her mother after she gave birth to a child with no eyes (that subsequently died).  She married again and had 3 more kids, but the second husband ran away after she gave birth to another physically defective kid.  Remember in my last post how I was talking about it being hard not to get extremely pessimistic about the male sex here?  Yeah.

So they had no water, their only source of income was working on other peoples' farms, and they slept on the floor every night because they didn't have beds.  Apparently this girl had worked for another family somewhere as a house girl, but they treated her like dirt - telling her to sleep on the floor (even though there were beds in the house) because that's what she did at home, not giving her food, etc.  So she went back home, but now is living at my host mama's house.  She told me that when the girl first showed up she was very thin, didn't know much Swahili (yes, that's the case with some people here), and had a bad case of scabies.  She also doesn't even know basic mathematics, as she dropped out of primary school in Standard 4 (which is the equivalent of fourth grade, but in reality much less than that) so my host mama can't even send her to the local shops to buy stuff.

She's doing much better now, thankfully, because she's actually eating, and my host mama is teaching her things such as cooking, cleaning, and Swahili.  She said that people were telling her to send the girl home when she first arrived, because none of them thought she would last long or be able to function.  But she seemed to be doing fine when I was there.  My host mama had mentioned that she was trying to see if this girl wanted to continue her education, but the girl refused, mostly I think because she didn't want to be a financial burden to my host mama.  So I talked with my host mama and told her I would be willing to pay for her education if she wanted to go back and finish primary school (or to go to a trade school, nursing school, or something else).  My host mama told her this, and she seemed much more eager about returning to school.  Now she has to look for a school for this girl, and hopefully she'll still be serious about continuing.

It's a good situation for me, because I know that this girl truly needs help, as I trust my host mama completely.  She told me that this girl doesn't want to go home, and that she can't ask her too many questions about her family at a time, because she just starts crying.  Even my host mama said that if she herself thinks about this girl's situation too much, she starts crying.  And that kind of emotion is something I've never seen from a Tanzanian before.

For those of you who have seen the Constant Gardener, being in this situation reminds me of when Ralph Fiennes's character is driving his wife back home after she had the miscarriage, and they passed the brother of the young girl who had died in the hospital after giving birth.  His wife wanted to give the boy a ride home because it was a very long way away, and Fiennes' character told her "we can't involve ourselves in their lives - that's what the aid agencies are for", to which she replied "but this is one person we can help".  And I basically felt the same way.  How, after hearing about this girl's completely poverty-stricken life, could I not do anything?  I may not have much money right now, but I would give all of it to make sure that this girl didn't have to continue with the life she had been leading.

But thankfully she is out of that situation now that she's living with my host mama, who is a really good person and will treat her well.  I will be able to provide the ability for her to go back to school, and my host mama will be able to provide her with basic life skills that she just wasn't getting at home.  It would be wonderful if she finished primary school and did well enough to continue on to secondary school.  Just going to school could be a life-changing experience for her, and I'm glad that I have the opportunity to give her a chance she might never have had otherwise.

All in all, it was a very eye-opening experience for me.  As both a trainee and now as a full-fledged PCV, I have lived a life that has been very much insulated from the truly abject poverty that does exist here in Tanzania.  Our host families were all middle-class (or upper-middle class) families, and at my school, I'm not dealing with truly poor people either.  The teachers all make decent salaries, and if a student's parents can afford the ~280,000 shillings per year that it costs to send that student to our school, they're not insanely poor either.  I've mentioned that life here is much better than I thought it would be, and that's mostly true - for many people, life really is pretty good here.  But I wasn't really seeing the other side of the coin, namely that there most definitely are people in Tanzania who lead depressingly bad lives, and who need a lot of help.

All of this is making me realize more and more that this is work I want to continue doing for the rest of my life.  There are still more decisions to be made (as development work entails just about every kind of work imaginable), but finally finding some clarity about the direction I want my life to take has been an immensely joyous discovery.