This will be our last post from Tanzania.  After a lot of deliberation, we’ve decided to pack things up here and head back home, a bit earlier than we originally planned.  Our current trajectory puts us on American soil in about a week.

As a lot of you know, and as I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, it’s been particularly challenging for me to find much work in the village, and that’s really the main reason for our return.  To their credit, our village has largely avoided the standard, more pressing crises like drought, desertification, and deforestation that plague many parts of Africa and keep environmental development workers busy in those places.  And although there is always room for improvement – planting more trees, better land management, for example – the urgency here, and thus the villagers’ motivation to collaborate on projects, lies more with health issues, and probably rightly so.  The Mbeya region has one of the highest HIV infection rates in East Africa, a fact that overshadows most everything else.

Michelle has had an easier time keeping busy, and I’ve been happy to help out where I can with her work too, although teaching about sexual health to junior high kids is not really my area of expertise, to say the least.  But also, language and cultural barriers make it difficult to assess how much our efforts are really sinking in, and after a year of working in fits and starts on various fronts, we both agree that we could direct our energy and abilities more effectively back home.

Despite our decision to return early, we certainly have no regrets about coming to Tanzania in the first place.  Tanzania is a remarkably beautiful country filled with good-natured people, many of whom we’ll miss.  We’ve thoroughly enjoyed seeing the side of Tanzania most outsiders don’t, tackling the challenges of communicating in a new language, and living squarely within a culture so different than our own.  There are a lot of things we’ll miss about Tanzania.  It’s too early to say all the things we’ve learned from our time here, and I suspect those things will become clearer over time as we readjust to life American life.  But maybe one thing that’s become more solidified in our minds lately is that after we’ve spent the last several years sort of living in temporary situations, here and there, we’re ready to try grounding ourselves a little more permanently in life in America.  

So from here it’s on to Grand Rapids, where we’re looking forward to spending time with family and enjoying things like running water and pizza delivery.  And while I’m sure we’ll quickly be shocked by the mundane realities of everyday life - utility bills, heavy traffic, long Michigan winters, for example - we’ll take the bad with the good.  We’ll see you all soon!

I neglected last month’s update, so here we go:

We’re in town all this week for the Girl’s Empowerment Conference, a weeklong event that’s been in the works since the beginning of the year and put on by all the PCVs in Mbeya Region.  With Michelle and I are five 13- and 14-year-old girls from our recently-finished classes at the primary school, and one more girl who runs a shop near our house.  They’re joined by about 70 other girls brought by volunteers in other villages.  The conference is basically an amplified version of our Life Skills class – a lot of health stuff along with things like building self-esteem and setting life goals.  While Michelle’s busy teaching important, applicable things, I’m mostly reduced to playing the bad guy in a couple skits, where I hit on young girls or pressure kids to drink alcohol, that sort of thing.  The girls seem to be having a good time, though, and maybe even learning something.  It’s been particularly interesting to see village girls operate in a semi-modern setting:  Michelle had to show them how to operate the shower, because they didn’t believe that water would come out above their heads.  And they gave us blank looks when we told them that their room was on the third floor of the dorm – they’d never navigated a flight of stairs before. 

Back in the village, our group of 18 beekeepers underwent a two-day training last month or beekeeping basics, given by the district beekeeping officer.  It was really an excellent training – both Michelle and I were impressed, and I think the group was too.  At the end the trainer gave the group a beehive to get started, and we put it in a grove of trees behind Romano’s house.  We are still waiting to get the protective beekeeping clothes and hive smokers, so we haven’t been able to check, but judging by the sizeable swarm of bees that’s buzzing around the entrance, it seems like a colony has already successfully established, certainly an encouraging sign.  The rest of the hives – one for each group member – should be finished next week, and we’ll get those out in the field as soon as they come in.

Michelle, of course, continues her work at the clinic weighing babies, spreading the gospel of family planning, and giving her Friday mini-seminars.  This month’s topic: malaria. Unlike other areas of Tanzania, it’s really too cold here for malaria to have much of a presence outside of a few stray cases.  So it’s for the patients, yes, but it’s just as much a lesson for the clinic staff, who readily diagnose malaria when anyone comes in complaining of a fever and send them away with antimalarial drugs without checking symptoms or testing for the actual parasite, even though they have the capability to do both.  It’s interesting to see which things take root after Michelle’s prodding and which things don’t – a lot more people get tested for HIV now, but nobody’s very interested in washing their hands with soap, for example.  

We’re looking forward to a visit from my family, who arrive in Dar in a couple weeks.  From there, we’ll head over to Zanzibar, then down to Selous and Ruaha for some safari action, then continue down to the village, where Romano and Tukusuma are almost as excited for their arrival as we are (almost).

Hope all’s well back home, and hope everyone’s enjoying the summer!

We’re in the short rainy season right now, and a little while ago it didn’t rain for nearly two weeks, and we ran into a little snafu with our water situation. Our dry-season water source – the irrigation ditch – has been shut down for repairs until June, and our backup supply, the roofwater collection tank at the clinic, was quickly drained by villagers who were in the same thirsty, dirty predicament as us. Our backup-backup option is to get water from the river, whose water at this time of year is the color of coffee (with cream) and was recently declared by the district government as unsafe for human consumption. The river’s cold, muddy river water worked better than expected for purposes of laundry-doing and bucket-bathing, and even though it has since rained and our water supply has been replenished, we learned our lesson and are taking water conservation a bit more seriously.


Last week I led a seminar on basic agroforestry principles – the benefits of planting various types of trees on your farm, that sort of thing – to a rather small audience near the village center. Despite the villagers’ expressed interest in environmental and agricultural education, I’ve yet to find the thing that gets them really excited, that gets them coming out in droves to my sessions. Romano, who has been helping me with a lot of this stuff, is excited about my upcoming seminar on wildfire prevention. I have some snazzy posters and some CDs with a Bongo Flava (i.e., Tanzanian Hip Hop/Reggae) song about fire prevention to give away, which might lure more people than did the tree seedlings I gave out at the last session. If only I had a Smokey the Bear costume…

On other fronts, I’m also working as a kind of advisor to a group of about 15 fledgling beekeepers, working to find them supplies and coordinating education for their honey production project. And plans for botanically-related work with the Wildlife Conservation Society/Southern Highlands Conservation Porgramme continue to progress, albeit slowly, and fieldwork in the forested mountains near our village is expected to begin within a month or so.

Michelle continues to be busy with work at the health clinic. Last week, two youthful guys rode up on bikes and stopped at the clinic – surprising, certainly, because most men, especially the young, hip ones, are repulsed by the idea of stepping foot in the clinic, seeing it as a place only for women – and asked Michelle for condoms, an even more shocking proposition given the stigma around here associated with condom procurement. Michelle happily dispensed to each a box of 100, along with instructions for their use. Another time an old man came up to the clinic, pulled out a notebook and pen, and copied Michelle’s poster on eating a balanced diet, word for word. It’s difficult to say whether the condoms will prevent someone from getting HIV or an unwanted pregnancy, or if the old man’s nutritional status will improve, but here, small acts like these are sometimes the only visible signs of progress, and is certainly encouragement for the work Michelle is doing.

We also started teaching Life Skills at the primary school once a week – decision making, self-esteem, communication skills, alcohol and sex education – that sort of thing. Not exactly my cup of tea, to be sure, but it’s forced us to learn a lot more abstract Swahili than was necessary before, like words to discuss the hopes and dreams and feelings of pre-pubescent Tanzanian villagers whose lives are markedly different than our own. Probably the most entertaining part for me is the time in each class when we do Question Of The Week. Each student writes down a question, a question about anything at all, and then we choose two or three of them to answer in front of the class the following week. The questions we get range from endearingly excellent (What will happen if we don’t take care of the environment?), to vaguely misinformed (Do people in America learn Swahili in primary or secondary school?), to confused (Who are you?), to just bizarre (Are there wizards in America?) Although never in my life did I think I’d be in front of a classroom of 70 13-year-olds talking about sex, it’s fun to get and answer these sorts of questions.

After a bit of travel to see friends in Iringa and Njombe, besides having a couple friends staying with us for Easter weekend and the occasional trip into town, April and May look to be quieter months of life in the village. For everyone back home, we hope early Spring is progressing well. Our thoughts and prayers are especially with the Kalamazoo crowd as you navigate these difficult days.

Well, February and March more-or-less flew by, thanks to a good deal of travel and things picking up a bit in the village.  Michelle’s parents spent the better part of February with us on a whirlwind tour of the country – up to the Serengeti, a few days in Dar, then down to Mbeya and the village, and back to Dar again – which adds up to a lot of time in crowded buses on slow Tanzanian roads.  It was great to see her parents, of course, but it was also a good reminder of how accustomed we’ve actually become to many of the oddities of life in is country.  Michelle’s Dad’s favorite phrase throughout the trip was “This is not normal.”  Defecating in a hole in the ground – this is not normal; walking through crowded dark alleys in Dar – this is not normal; the mayhem of bus stands – this is not normal, he’d proclaim. And for the most part, these things, if not yet completely normal, are at least necessary parts of life here that we’ve come to accept without too much consideration.  It was also fun to enter into Dumb Tourist Mode for a few days in the Serengeti and at the beach.  Eating pizza – good even by American standards (we think, but can’t quite remember) – and being within near-petting distance of lions, wildabeest, elephants, and the rest, were certainly among the highlights. 

Back in the village, Michelle’s work at the clinic is running full steam.  This month’s lessons on good nutrition have been a big hit with the villagers; she’ll cover diarrhea prevention and basic sanitation next month.  She’s also meeting monthly with an HIV/AIDS support group of about 25 people to provide some education and resources for their work.  Teaching at the primary school has been slow to get going, but we met again with the headmaster this week to hammer out a schedule for us to teach life skills (decision making, self-confidence, etc.), along with health and environment stuff, to students in standards 6 and 7 (like 7^th and 8^th graders) after school once a week.

  

As for me, things continue to be slowish on the work front.  With sluggish support for my work in our village, I went up the mountain to a village where our friend Anna lives and works to run a workshop on soil conservation.  Although nobody showed up for my seminar, I ended up doing an abbreviated version of the lesson for the people bumming around the town center while we waited for our ride to leave.  It turned out surprisingly well considering the circumstances, and I’ll likely head up there again in a month or two and take another crack at it. I’m also changing tactics a bit in our village - instead of continuing to pester the village leadership for consent and coordination, I’m working on self-arranging and publicizing workshops on soil conservation, tree planting, and other such things for farmers in the village.  And it looks like a more formal arrangement doing botanical survey work with the Wildlife Conservation Society might actually take root in April and May.  In the meantime, things like hiking trips, ridiculous rides up mountains, impromptu exposure to the village-level judicial process, and learning that many of our villagers think I’m well into my 40’s keep things from becoming mundane. 

We hope all’s well back home… happy spring!

Me and Michelle doing some soil education in the village of Illembo.  The funniest part of this picture is the sign in the back which says "Mzungu Mgahawa", which means "White Person Restaurant".

Michelle, Anna, and Lola enjoying lunch in a typical Tanzanian restaurant (across the street from Mzungu Mgahawa)

Lion, looking hungrily at Michelle in the Serengeti.

A typical scene from the safari.

Last month, Michelle started officially teaching at the health clinic.  Every Tuesday and Friday (the clinic’s busiest days), she and Tukusuma, one of the nurses, run a half-hour session focusing on some health-related topic, which changes up each month, and which the patients must attend before getting services.  January’s lesson was on the low-hanging fruit of HIV/AIDS prevention.  The times I've attended, it's been amusing to watch the women (and a few men) giggle and squirm with thoughts of HIV transmission and the reproductive system - kind of like in high school Biology - but by the end, they're answering questions cheerfully and taking home boxes of condoms.  Progress, perhaps?  Upcoming monthly topics include good nutrition, basic sanitation, post-natal care, and malaria prevention, always with a smattering of HIV/AIDS thrown in.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working with Romano, my counterpart, to visit the various subvillages in order to peddle our ideas for environmentally-related projects.  At the end of our little shtick, we pass around ballots for people to vote on their favorite idea.  Current projections suggest that basic agricultural and environmental education will be the landslide winner, which is kind of a relief, in a way – education doesn’t require us to wrangle up grant money or outside assistance, and should be easy to sustain over the long term.  But at the same time, it’s perhaps not as sexy as more concrete projects with immediately measurable results (e.g. We planted 500 trees today!).   So I’m beginning to sketch out lesson plans for hands-on workshops focusing on agroforestry, intercropping, tree nurseries, composting, soil conservation, and other such things, and we’ll see where it goes.  Michelle and I might also try to do a health/environment co-teaching day each week, perhaps at the market, maybe at the secondary school, in order to try to reach a broader audience with our respective topics.

We’re squarely in the rainy season now, and it rains pretty solidly at least a couple times a week (although the villagers are complaining about this year’s lack of rain), so we’re able to harvest most of our water off of our roof.  The rest we can get from the gutter-and-tank system next door at the clinic.  All the time not spent fetching water from the river frees us up to work on killing the army of fruit flies (and the occasional mosquito) that have taken up residence in our house.  In addition to contributing to the proliferation of fruit flies, the rain has also turned the brown landscape green, and we’ve been harvesting tomatoes and cucumbers and just planted a bigger garden outside with beans and carrots and potatoes.  We took advantage of this flush of green a couple weeks ago with an impromptu hiking trip to Kitulo National Park – there are no trails really, so we just wandered around on the cold, tundra-like plateau with millions of orchids and other flowers underfoot, feeling small under the huge open sky.

We’re in Mbeya right now, on our way to Dar to pick up Michelle’s parents for a whirlwind tour of Tanzania - Serengeti, Ngorogoro, Kilimanjaro, the beach, down to Mbeya the village, all in about a week and a half.  Should be a hectic, great time.  We’ll pet a wildebeest for all you back home.  Enjoy the snow!

Michelle gives an HIV lesson at the clinic.  Katie and Anna wait to do their condom demo.

The view from Kitulo.

So we’ve been traveling for the last month or so, first to Morogoro for a conference, then over to Dar, and Mafia Island, back to Dar and down to Mbeya.  After being on the road that much, one becomes acutely aware of the sheer variety of transport options available to one in a developing country.  In just the last couple of months, we’ve ridden in the backs of pickup trucks with as many as 31 other people (our usual transport to and from the village), gotten rides in dump trucks and flatbeds, sped through Dar with six people squeezed in a glorified golf cart, been in buses and vans that overheated, ran out of gas, stopped for a half hour so the driver could shop for shoes, or stopped for hours without explanation.  But I think our ferry ride out to Mafia Island might be our most adventurous transport experience to date.

We boarded this rustic vessel – Tuggy the Friendly Tugboat as it became known – with peeling blue paint and a diesel engine that shook the whole boat, and after ferrying through the mangrove swamp, we were out in the ocean, heaving and jolting around in the heavy chop.   If you were on the fence about getting seasick, the roughish seas and the boat’s questionable seaworthiness helped put you over the edge.  Michelle and I made the four-hour trip without suffering such a fate, but the strong crosswind forced us to be on guard for bits of breakfast flying across the deck when someone was hurling over the far rail. By the end, the passengers, laid out on the deck, with their things tied up in plastic bags, children crying close to their mothers, hair matted, hands pruney, eyes stinging from the water thrown up by the bow, evoked a Tanzanian cross between an Ellis Island arrival and Maid of the Mist.  Then after boarding another smaller boat to bring us to shore, this one requiring a full-time bailer to keep it afloat, we arrived on the beach, dripping wet and only a little battered around.

And so Christmas was spent on the beach with nine other Peace Corps volunteers and a couple of British aid workers who brought fruitcake and bad Christmas jokes.  We tried to sing some off-key Christmas carols – so out of place there on the sweltering beach – and constructed a snowman out of sand (a sandman, then?), that despite the festivity and whimsy associated with snowman-making, failed wholeheartedly to be of any use in conjuring up much of the Christmas feeling, which was probably just as well.  

But on Christmas Eve, we went swimming with the whale sharks that migrate between Mafia and the mainland from December to February, feeding on plankton and algae. The gist is this: ride around in a boat until you find a shark, jump out with flippers and masks, swim around with it until it dives too deep or swims away, then repeat.  Since the water is cloudy from all the algae (hence the feeding/migration) you have to be within eight or ten feet of the suckers to really see them.   I swam along side of one that was about twenty feet long – and turns out, a twenty foot giant speckled fish feels much bigger when you’re in the water with it than it looks from the boat – for about a minute, an arm’s length away, a school of little yellow striped fish swimming inches ahead of the shark’s mouth, grabbing bits of food discarded with the seawater from its giant mouth, and other, longer, white fish clustered tight underneath its fins, for reasons not immediately obvious, us together, a whole little Christmas ecosystem swimming there in the bay.

In contrast, we’re in frigid, rainy Mbeya right now, our last stop before returning to the village, where we’ll start to get down to work.  The conference in Morogoro was, I think, beneficial in fleshing out ideas for specific projects we’ll tackle in the village, particularly from Michelle’s standpoint.  Our village has a high prevalence rate of HIV – somewhere between six and eight percent – so Michelle will be working with her counterpart, a nurse at the clinic, to organize a group to help reduce stigma and provide emotional and medical support for people living with HIV/AIDS.  She’ll also begin teaching life skills (self-esteem, decision-making, etc.) at the primary school, and take the lead on some of the organizational, operational, and outreach aspects of the health clinic. 

As I think I’ve suggested before, it’s been a bit more frustrating for me to find work, as there just aren’t that many people in the village interested in pursuing environmentally-related projects.  It’s not to say that more trees couldn’t be planted, water quality couldn’t be improved, etc., but projects without support from the village, however worthy they may be, are bound to fail before too long.  So to start, I’ll likely focus on basic environmental education – a series of hands-on workshops for farmers, perhaps – and see what comes out of that.  I’ve also been talking with folks from the Southern Highlands Conservation Programme, which is the Mbeya branch of the Wildlife Conservation Society, about working with their ecologists on some of their botanically-oriented projects in protected natural areas in the region.  There are a couple logistical things to work out before that happens, and progress can be slow in Tanzania, but I’m hoping that something will come together in the next couple of months.  We’ll be sure to keep you posted.

We hope everyone’s enjoying the snowy weather back home, and we hope you all had a wonderful holiday season.  Happy New Year!

Well, life’s been percolating along here in Tanzania.  In the village, we’ve spent the last month and a half visiting schools, holding community meetings, and conducting family interviews, trying to a better handle on what folks here want us to do.  After spending a lot of time explaining that no, in fact, we’re not here to build a hospital, or put in a new road, or give everyone money, I think we’ve extracted enough useful information about the needs and resources of the village to clear at least some of the fog in our minds about what we’re doing, and we have a few project ideas in the works.  But before we get ahead of ourselves in that regard, we’re headed to Morogoro for the first couple weeks of December with the other 38 or so volunteers in our cohort to discuss our findings and get some new information and training, if needed, so we can hit the ground running shortly after the new year.  A nice perk of the trip (besides having access to electricity and running water for two weeks) is that we’re each able to take someone from the village for part of the training: our neighbor, the head of the village coffee farmer’s association, is coming with me, and Michelle’s taking one of the nurses from the health clinic.  They’ll get some technical training as well as a fuller explanation of the nature of our work than what we have probably been able to communicate effectively with our basic Swahili in the village.

So we’re coming out of the dry season now here in the Southern Highlands:  it rained, really rained, for the first time this week.  We have had a few drippy sputters in the last couple of weeks, but this was a self-respecting rainstorm, complete with a few minutes of hail and enough rain make muddy lakes in the courtyard.  The temperature dropped quickly after it started raining, so to quell the goosebumps, we ran inside to throw on sweatshirts.  After we stood on the porch for awhile watching the rain shivering with semi-chattery teeth, I looked at the thermometer, which said 78°.  Kind of felt pathetic after that.

  

In other news, we recently got a few packages sent from home (thanks Mom H., Kara, Sam, and Beth), containing junk food and magazines, both scarce resources around here.  That’s a good thing because I was beginning to have food-related hallucinations on an increasingly frequent basis.   I’ve had a few dreams in the last couple weeks with pizza as a central theme; this popcorn we found here, I’m convinced, tastes like lobster; and once when I was eating a banana, I swear I tasted hash browns, one bite even with just the right amount of salt and ketchup.  Mercifully, our supply of reading material has also been replenished.  Prior to this week, I had been spending far too much time trolling the fine print of the RV and laundry detergent ads in the July/August issue of Midwest Living, hoping to discover some new tidbit of information about The Land Of Civilization that my brain could mull over during the slow, hot hours of midday.  I’m not kidding here.  So seriously, thank you.

Finally, below are a couple pictures of village life and of our recent trip to Lake Malawi.  Next week we’ll be in Mbeya to celebrate Thanksgiving with the other Peace Corps folk in the region, and a few from the Njombe and Iringa areas too.  Then after Morogoro, we’re headed to Mafia Island, which is south of Zanzibar, for a bit of R & R.  Word on the street (or, in the Lonely Planet guidebook) is that Mafia has some pretty good snorkeling (with whale sharks!), nice beaches, perhaps fishing opportunities, and it’s not as touristy as Zanzibar either.  We’ll return to the village sometime around Christmas. 

Happy Thanksgiving!  We’ll miss you all heading into the Holiday season.

A hike up to a waterfall near Lake Malawi

Sunrise over Lake Malawi at Matema Beach

Villagers drawing a map at a community meeting

Hiking in the mountains above the village

Michelle at the health clinic