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!