It’s hard to imagine that we’ve been at our site for a month now, and we’re beginning to settle into a routine. Michelle hangs out at the health clinic three or four days a week, weighing babies, talking with the patients, and teaching the nurses some basic English. In return, the nurses are trying to teach her Kinyekusa, the main local language, and a bit of Kisafwa, yet another one (there are actually five local languages spoken here, but almost everyone under of the age of 50 or so speaks good Swahili). The health clinic here is pretty functional compared to others we’ve seen in Tanzania (i.e., people actually work there, there’s medication available, etc.), but there’s a lot lacking in the way of basic preventative care and education that Michelle hopes to help improve once we’re a little more established.


Without a captive audience like the health clinic, I’ve been a little slower at carving out my role here. We’ll spend much of October conducting interviews and holding community meetings for the Village Situation Analysis, a process which will help us better identify the needs of the village and hopefully give us both more direction on potential projects. In the meantime, I’m keeping busy by learning about the local environment, talking with farmers, and collecting seeds to start a tree seedling nursery. I’ve planted a couple papaya and avocado trees around the house, and the tomatoes, green peppers, and herbs are going in next week.

A couple days ago, we went across the river to see some of the farms in the outlying subvillages. We saw a big chunk of the village that we haven’t seen yet – including great views of the mountains and some impressively lush fields of spinach, cucumbers, and other vegetables. Along the way, we ran into the Chief’s brother, a witch doctor, who as a blessing gave us eight pounds of carrots and a chicken. Yep, we now own a chicken, tethered in the courtyard. Michelle was excited about the prospect of fresh eggs and a pet until our neighbor told us that it was a young rooster, after which Michelle lost all desire to keep it. Our neighbor agreed to help us butcher it next week, and I might break from vegetarianism for a day and eat that poor sucker before it can completely destroy the garden.

In other news, our furniture has arrived, so our house is no longer an empty concrete box. The only thing is that since Tanzanian home fashion is unavoidably on the tacky side, our living room is adorned with a leopard print couch, green ruffled curtains, and a bookshelf plastered with purple flowered contact paper. It’s certainly a bit clashy and offensive, but we’ve come to embrace it. Seriously, what other time in our lives can we get away with buying a leopard print couch?

We’re in Mbeya for the weekend, stocking up on food we can’t get at home (peanut butter, pasta, cheese), and catching up with other PCVs in the area. Tomorrow the plan is to head to a nearby western-run resort that has pizza, real (not instant) coffee, a pool, and allegedly a ping pong table. Every once in awhile, you just need a break from village life.

Hope everyone’s doing well back home.  We'll leave you with a couple quick pictures:

Our back porch, taken from the courtyard.

 

The kitchen.






Michelle peeling an egg on the leopard print couch.



The view from the hill behind our house.





Well, a lot has changed since our last post – we’re now living on our own in the village! After training was finished and we passed our language exams, we traveled to Dar for the ceremony at the ambassador’s residence that officially made us Peace Corps Volunteers. There, we basked in the luxuries of American food, fluent English speakers, and like-minded friends for a day there before heading out early the next morning to Mbeya. From Dar, we took two days to get there, stopping in Mafinga overnight to let off three new volunteers posted in that region. In Mbeya the next day, a current volunteer took us briefly to buy survival essentials for the first night in our empty home: peanut butter, a loaf of bread, and an overpriced bottle of wine.

In Mbeya, we met with the District and Village officials, who drove us down a rocky road for nearly an hour to our village. To welcome us, the village leaders held a ceremony with drums and dancing and promptly gave us new names. I’m now called James Mwemni, which, depending on pronunciation, means either “James, son of the Chief” or “James of the mango tree.” Michelle is simply called Simwembi, or “Daughter of the Chief,” or alternately she could be called Mama James, because since we don’t have children, I’m taking the place of her firstborn as far as naming rights go. We both agree it’s better than being called Mzungu, which means “white person,” so we’re trying to get used to it.

The villagers have been welcoming, although many people seem to be thoroughly confused as to why there are two wazungu living here now. Thus, we have a lot of explaining to do in our rudimentary Swahili. Our neighbor in particular has been great – he’s taken us around to show us important features of the village and took swift action when the local crazy guy made repeated half-hearted attempts to break into our house. He also has a brother who is a university student and is virtually fluent in English, but he’s busy with school most of the time so we’ve only had a chance to talk to him a little bit – still those few minutes of English were wonderful!

Our house is brand new, and quite big by Peace Corps (and village) standards. It’s near the Health Clinic and has a large living room and three bedrooms, one which we’ll use as a kitchen. Our favorite feature is the large enclosed courtyard out back, complete with a covered porch. And then yesterday an electrician randomly showed up at 6:30am to wire our house for electricity…for free. From the best we can figure out, the Health Clinic is slated to get electricity from the grid next month, and they’ll just string a wire from there to here once it’s connected. Not a bad deal, I’d say.

The landscape here is markedly different than the red clay and coconut palms of the Tanga region where we spent the last two months: the snappy mornings and the gnarly mountain junipers behind our house are more reminiscent of northern Michigan than the typical African scene. Taking two days to travel though the interior of the country to the southwest border was a great way to see the different geography and ecology of Tanzania – the humid coast, the giraffes, zebras, and elephants on the savannas of Mikumi, the rocky baobab valleys north of Iringa, and finally the often desolate highlands of Njombe and Mbeya. The southern highlands have a reputation for being fertile and green, but it’s the dry season now, and the cold and wind have stripped the leaves off many of the trees and turned the rest of the landscape into blowing dust. Not that it isn’t beautiful – it’s scenic indeed – but I’m looking forward to October when the rains begin to green things up again. Maybe I’ll regret that when the road to Mbeya washes out from the deluge, but for now it’s something to look forward to.

Finally, we are in the process of getting a new mailing address. We’ve been advised not to post it on the web, so if you’d like it, just send us an email.

Exciting news this week! Michelle and I found out that we'll be spending the next two years in a small village 30k outside of Mbeya. Mbeya, which is south near the border of Zambia, is alleged to have cheese, coffee, and some of the most spectacular views in all of Tanzania. Ours is a new Peace Corps site, meaning that since we're not replacing an old volunteer, we'll have to start everything from scratch. We're supposed to have a little house with a courtyard next to the Health Clinic, where Michelle will be working. I'll likely be working to develop a land management plan for the village and to educate folks on the sustainable use of the river that flows through the area. We've been given very few details about our site or our work, so unfortunately, Mom, I won't be able to answer all of your questions until we get settled in.

We're currently in Dar for a day, having spent the past week travelling throughout the country to stay with current volunteers to see what life in the field is like. Michelle was up in Moshi, and I was down near Njombe, only a couple hours from Mbeya. For me, highlights were learning to cook pizza on a charcoal stove and seeing elephants, zebras, warthogs, and copious girrafes from the bus when driving through Mikomi National Park southwest of Morogoro. Michelle ate well too, and caught a glimpse of Mount Kilimanjaro. I'm a little jealous, because since Mt. Kili is a three or four day trip from Mbeya, my plans to climb said mountain have become a bit more complicated.

Tomorrow, we'll travel back to Muheza for the final week and a half of homesay/training, before we return to Dar for the "swearing in" ceremony. Our final oral language proficiency exam is on Thursday, so your thoughts, prayers, and positive brain waves are very much appreciated!

Hope all's well back home.

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

OK – here’s one more quick update before we lose internet access for awhile:

Since we arrived last Wednesday, we’ve essentially been on lockdown in an educational/religious compound (whose exact function we’re can’t quite figure out) in Dar es Salaam. We’re a bit too young and tender to be let out on our own, but today we broke loose and went to the market in Dar under the guidance of our LCFs (Language and Culture Facilitators) to buy a few essentials and stutter through basic Swahili greetings. My prize find was a pair of plastic Barack Obama flip flops, which I swear was the only pair of flip flops I could find that were anywhere close to my foot size. Because they’re so awesome, I’ll try to post a picture of these sometime in the future. Michelle picked up a khanga, which is a large, multifunctional piece of fabric that is frequently is worn as a skirt by women around here.

We have a couple more days here in Dar, but as of Wednesday we’ll spend the remaining eight weeks of training in a village called Kibaoni Dilima, as gracious guests of Mr. and Mrs. Ayoub Kassim Mgunya. Michelle and I will be staying together, but I’ll do my daily training in the next village over with a different group than Michelle’s. Roughly speaking, we have “class” from 8 – 5 each day, with topics ranging from language and cultural norms to local ecology and AIDS prevention. We’ll convene back home in the evenings, where we’ll learn from our Mama how to cook, wash clothes, purify water, and navigate domestic life without the help of running water, electricity, or the English language. The latter of these will likely produce many awkward and frustrating moments, but maybe also two reasonably competent Swahili speakers. We’ve talked with some current Peace Corps Volunteers who have been in Tanzania for one year, and they’re virtually fluent – that gives us hope!

Until later,

Justin

Arrival

Good news – we’ve arrived in Tanzania! After recovering from some serious jet lag, we’ve begun the first stage of our training in Dar es Salaam.

Along with the 39 other members of our Peace Corps cohort, we’re staying at the Masembazi center, an educational center for Tanzanians and foreigners that is run by a group of nuns. To our surprise, the center has electricity, running water, three bars (!), and TVs where we’ve been watching the World Cup games, which are sometimes only broadcast in Swahili. We’ll enjoy these amenities of civilization until Tuesday when we’re shipped off to Muheza in the Tanga Region (about 5 hours north of Dar) to live with host families for the remaining eight weeks of training. We were originally told that Michelle and I would be living with different families in different villages during training, but we found out today that we’ll be staying together after all.

So far our training has been fairly general, but we’ll begin intensive language, culture, and technical training once we get to our homestay site next week. The Peace Corps training staff – mostly native Tanzanians - seem very competent and enthusiastic. Although we don’t yet know the specific projects we’ll be involved in, it seems that the health volunteers (e.g., Michelle) work primarily on HIV/AIDS education and prevention. For the environment volunteers (e.g., me), there is a big emphasis on pemagardening and using other agroecological techniques to provide food security, reduce erosion and desertification, and relieve pressure on native forests. Because our two specialty areas are not mutually exclusive, Michelle and I will probably be working together quite a bit when we get to our village.

A word on keeping in touch: Internet access is significantly scarcer here than we originally thought, and it’s possible (though not certain) that we won’t be able to access email or update the blog until after the eight weeks of homestay/training. We’ll be getting cell phones sometime over the next two months as well, and we’ll be sure to pass that info along when we have it.

Hope all is well back home!

Until later,

Justin