Not to make anybody jealous, but as I’m writing this, the sun is rising over the Indian Ocean, and I’m seated comfortably on the porch of a poolside bungalow on Pangani Beach, an hour drive from Tanga. Five monkeys are playing in the lawn amid the palms, and I just finished a cup of coffee. It’s our mid-training break, a welcomed weekend hiatus from the rigors of learning to live and work in rural Tanzania.

I’d be lying if I said that homestay was a walk in the park, but I guess there’s a reason why they call these two months of training “Peace Corps Boot Camp.” Life can be particularly exciting at home for Michelle and I because our host mom is the village traditional healer (a.k.a. witch doctor), and she sometimes hosts gatherings where jubilant singing and possession by Maasai spirits goes late into the night. She invites us to these ceremonies too, which is pretty surreal sometimes when we realize that this isn’t a tourist shtick or that the director’s not going to yell “cut” at the end of the scene. Our host father has a more conventional occupation – he’s a farmer who grows corn, oranges, lemons, and bananas.

To their credit, our host family takes their job of training us seriously, but they’re clearly under the impression that we are incapable of doing anything on our own. When our host mom was showing me how to peel potatoes and I told her that I already knew how, she informed me that no, I can’t possibly know how to peel potatoes by hand, because in American everything is done by machines. These little cultural snafus are compounded by the facts that 1) Our language skills are still fairly limited, and 2) Tanzanian communication is very indirect, so in order to say you’re sick of eating ugali every day and the thought of eating it again tomorrow makes your stomach turn, you have to say something like “This ugali is very delicious, but maybe tomorrow I’ll prefer cassava.” A month of such cultural-personal misunderstandings begins to wear at your ego, for better or worse, but the upside is that our previous grievances, including the bountiful outhouse wildlife, have become more-or-less mundane.

This weekend marks the end of four weeks of intensive language classes, and we’re looking forward to beginning the more technical aspects of training next week. There is a lot of overlap in our training sessions, but Michelle will be learning about HIV/AIDS and other health issues in the rural context, and much of the environmental training for me will focus on permagardening and tree propagation. I’ve been anxious to pick the brains of the botanically-oriented Peace Corps staff, but since learning Latin names of plants takes up approximately the same brain space as learning Swahili, I’ll be content to just enjoy the greenery for now.

Since the word is out that parents of other PCTs have been reading these little updates, I can vouch that everyone here is doing just fine – nobody’s gotten malaria, there’ve been only two hospital visits, and from what we can tell, just a few emotional meltdowns.

Well, off to the beach!

Well, we’ve successfully made it through our first of eight weeks of the homestay portion of our training! We live in a hardened mud house with a tin roof in a dainty little village called Kibaoni Dilima, which is strewn along a dirt road about 10 miles from Muheza in the Tanga region. Three other PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees) live with other families in the village, and there are five others who live in the neighboring village. The ten of us are split into two groups for language, culture, and technical training, which keep us busy from 8am to 5pm, Monday through Saturday. The rest of the time we spend practicing our Swahili with our host Mom and Dad, who also help us learn to do basic household chores without the help of electricity or running water.

Our host father is a farmer, and in addition to growing corn and oranges, he also keeps cows, goats, sheep, and chickens, the latter of which are abundant and like to visit us in our room from time to time. We’ve become familiar with some of the local wildlife, too. Rats and large spiders are a part of daily (or nightly) life, and Michelle has worked out an agreement with the bat that inhabits our outhouse. Needless to say, we had to quickly adjust our ideas of what is normal.

People here have been complaining about how cold it is here. True, it’s not unbearably hot (in the 80s each day), but it’s humid enough that any sustained movement induces a sweat. Some of the local kids have been wearing hooded sweatshirts, which goes to show how much further we have to go to get used to the elements here.

So far, the food has not been entirely unpalatable, but I have to say that I’d pay serious money for a pizza right now. The ubiquitous ugali, a polenta-like staple, leaves something to be desired, but we’ve been impressed with chipsi mayai (a french-fry omelet) and a sweet banana dish made with tomatoes and onions. Our Swahili is coming along slowly, but we’re beginning to at least understand parts of conversations and interpolate from the few words we know what is going on around us. It’s a bit nerve-wracking to think that we’ll have to pass a language proficiency test in less than seven weeks, but it seems like we’ll make it with any luck.

We hope you are all doing well back home, and we wish you the best from Tanzania!

Until later,

Justin