It's been a while since I posted last. Again, there's so much to talk about... and I won't cover it all. I'm trying to journal to keep up a bit and hopefully write about it later.
I moved into my new village this week on Monday. We're now in another ward called Nduruma. I'm in the farthest-out village from Arusha city, and it's called Majimoto, which literally translates to "hot water," and it's very different from Maroroni! I'm also in a new teaching group. There are four American volunteers--Ashley, Bonnie, Joey and me--and two Tanzanian teaching partners--Jacob and Dhulfa.
I'm living in a homestay with Mama Juliana (also known as Mama Noah, as Noah is her oldest son) and some kids. She's a widow and she's awesome. She has three kids, ages 20, 17 and 13, the middle child being her only daughter. They live together with Mama's little grand nephew in the room across from my and my roommate's room (I'm living with one of my former sorority sisters, Ashley), the only other bedroom in the house. The littl'n is called Junior, and he's a year and ten months old and very cute. He's a chubby little snotty-nosed toddler, and he gets cuter as he becomes less and less terrified of us wazungu. He can now be near us or even simply look at us without crying. haha!
Our home is a small, three-room house with two bedrooms and two doors, total, one of which is to kmy room. Mama sleeps iln the room accross the way with her daughter and Junior, and they don't have a door to their room--just a purple cloth hanging in the threshold. We have rough dirt floors that I don't need to worry about keeping clean or spilling hot chai on. Ashley and I each have our own bed over which we hung our mosquito nets from an electrical wire tied across the room. Now worries, there is absolutely no electricity in this village. [I asked some men fixing the chicken coop door if there were any cold sodas in Majimoto, and they said no. I also asked where I could charge my phone, and they sort of laughed and suggested that I get a bike.] Ashley and I appear to have the only lock in the house, and it was brand new when it was given to us. There's no ceiling but a tin roof, and the two windows on either side of our room let in a very nice breeze when opened. [Mind, by 'windows' I mean framed holes in the walls with shudders. No glass, of course.]
Our choo--though not quite as nice as my last homestay's--is nice, well cemented and has thus far, to my knowledge, very little wildlife. I've actually seen a few more cockroaches on our bedroom walls than I have in the choo. I, once again, live at the homestay with the enviable choo, according to my other teaching group members. They come to my house to go.
There are two water spicketts in our yard: one behind the house next to the small banana tree forest and one in what feels like a slight extension of our front yard. On move-in day they were both very colorful and busy with many mamas and colorful plastic buckets. We had our first idea of where we could teach.
The village is much much greener than Maroroni was and much closer together, too. I feel like I actually live in an African neighborhood, and all of us volunteers live very close to each other, with my house being the central point. Although it's much greener, it is also much dustier... or at least it was until it started raining at night and drizzling during the day. Thank you! It's nice to cool off sometimes.
It's also much different in the sense that it is much less conservative than Maroroni. For one, people are drunk all over the place. Fortunately, in my village, I don't feel threatened by the people that have been drinking, though I still won't walk anywhere at night, and they're just very friendly... and ironically inviting to their Catholic church. People actually smoke here, too, and when we went to the duka to buy a soda (not cold: "shady"), we saw a box of condoms in clear view for sale, kicking us off for our duka condom survey of the village. Maroroni didn't sell alcohol or cigarrettes and would not sell condoms, for religious reasons. Also, people seemed to know right away why we were there, moving into the village. Several people asked me on the first day when we would be testing (woot!) and over the course of the week, people have been very receptive to us and our 'mission' here as well as probing us to tell them when we would be teaching ("Lini utafundisha semina?").
Interesting... so on our first night I woke up because I heard something that sounded like a radio with voices. I woke up a little more and decided it was something that I had heard of before in other villages but hadn't experienced in Maroroni: a town crier. It was a man on a truck driving around with a megaphone, yelling to all the people... something in Swahili... I asked around the next day and found out that it was, indeed, a town crier, and that it came by our house at 4AM and that it was announcing that all the men needed to go to build trenches the next day to bring more water to ours. I found this out because the former Mwenye kiti of the village came by my house one day and talked to me in our yard for quite a while. He has very good English and loved to speak it--about anything. I took the opportunity to ask him what that was all about, so he was the one who explained it to me. He also explained that the work was mandatory for anyone who was not old or a student, and that they would fine you if you didn't go like you were supposed to. Every night this week around 5PM we've seen the men coming home on their bikes or by foot, in groups, with their shovels, picks and other such digging instruments. We also saw a roudy group of them walking behind a man who was leading a calf by a rope around its neck... apparently being reposessed from someone who did not show up for the work! Fined. I expect that we'll be able to use the "mandatory attendance" system already in place in the village to teach the most people as possible. The Mwenye kiti is schedulling subvillage teachings for us that will be mandatory for the villagers. Woot!
On Tuesday I went to kindergarden. It was incredibly cute. Just behind my house and across the road is the village office next to t he kindergarden. Bonnie, Dhulfa and Ashley were already there, squatting in rows in the dirt with the rest of the class, when I arrived. Dhulfa caught me up on what to do: write my name and my father's name in the dirt in front of me. My personal blackboard. The teacher came by and checked our work, and then had us read our names at the same time, which we did standing, straddling the word on the ground, doubled over, pointint a finger from the end of our swinging arm, roughly underscoring the word over and over again, saying it out loud over and over again. We continued with our father's names, followed by the writing of "mama" (me-ah-me-ah, mama!) The mwalimu (teacher) would ocme around and put a check mark next to it in the dirt if you had done it right, and enthusiastically slapped us wazungu on the back, laughing histerically at our success. There was a boy in a yellow, non-uniform shirt who wrote and spelled everything perfectly, except for the fact that it was completely backwards. The students around him helped him, including us, hoping to be encouraging to him. We also wrote "baba", "dada", "bibi" and "mtoto", which are father, sister, grandmother, child, respectively. We've since not joined kindergarden again, but we've been waiting for a meeting with the mwenye kiti at the same time the kindergarden is happening outside, so we've gotten to watch a few times. Unfortunately, the teacher carries a stick that she doesn't only use for making checkmarks in the dirt for corrections. I don't like seeing four, five and six year-olds being whipped for now knowing how to write, sometimes out of fear of their teacher.
Photos: I can't take as many as I would really like to be taking, for a number of reasons, including but not limited to... if I take out a camera, people will ask me for the camera, incessantly ask me to take their picture, ask me for another gift, ask me for money, freak out at the possibility of me taking their picture without permission, ask me to marry them, ask me to fly them to America, ask me to fly my parent's car to them... Oh, wait... that happens anyway. But really. I won't be taking my camera out until the last week. It's better that people don't know that I have it, as much as I would like to visually document my experience.
