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.