Strength

I've spent a lot of my weekend walking back and forth to the main road. Because of the rain, we've had very sporadic electricity so haven't been able to cook since Friday. A lot of the places in town (Mwanza) have generators so on days without electricity the best thing to do is (if you're a wimp like me) walk to the main road, catch the dalla-dalla in to town and grab a bite to eat and catch up on emails. My diet for the past couple of weeks has been almost completely rice and bread, so I'm hoping the 2 hours (minimum!) of walking I'm doing every day will help work off all the bad food.

On my walk into town today I ran into Sabina and her family coming home from church. Sabina looked really sweet in her best Sunday dress, and it was really nice to see that she does have a family looking after her. Last week we had a meeting with Fred (the director of Hisani) and he told us that many, if not most, of the community children that come for lessons everyday are also orphans, they have just been absorbed by the extended family or neighbors. Alot of the children that come everyday are clearly not very well looked after at home, they are often really dirty and sick.

Most of the children living at the orphanage were street children from Kagera (an area with the highest HIV prevalence rate in Tanazania). Although there alot of these children are also AIDS orphans, usually the reason the children are on the streets is because they are fleeing abusive living situations. A couple of the children at Hisani were found living on their own, sometimes for years, after their parents had died. One poor boy watched his parents die only to be taken in by his grandparents who also died. Before he came to the orphanage he lived by himself for over a year; neighbors dropped off food to keep him alive but he had no other contact with people. It is truly incredible that the children are as loving and hopeful as they are.

Mangoti, one of the community children

Rats

I think I must have been tempting fate by writing the post about animals the other day. I woke up in the middle of friday night to some strange rustling noises. After a few minutes of thinking it must be a cat, then remembering there wasn't a cat in the house, then hearing screetching noises, I realised I was sharing my room with a rat. The rains have flooded the rivers and forced the rats up higher than normal and into the houses. I heard it rummaging around in the chest of drawers for hours. Needless to say, I didn't sleep much for the rest of the evening!

It's rainy season

I read a lot of things about travelling in Tanzania, only to arrive here and think, no, that doesn`t really happen. I read the mosquitos were really bad, but then there was hardly a sign of them so I thought it was all a bit exaggerated until Rachel caught malaria. I read loads of posts on a travel site about people being hustled out of money in Dar es Salaam but thought that no traveler would be silly enough to get in a car with people they don`t know; only to hear this morning that TWO of the volunteers got hustled in Dar by the exact same scheme.

I`d heard about May being rainy season here, but after two weeks of hardly a drop of rain, I didn`t really believe it. Yesterday we passed the new Canadian girls on the dirt path to the orphanage and joked about it looking a little rainy. It started dribbling a bit a few minutes later, and literally as soon as we stepped foot in the orphanage the heavens opened. It must have poured down for at least an hour - the dirt roads all flooded and the girls came running back after about twenty minutes drenched to the bone.

This afternoon, Rachel and I decided to try and find a new internet cafe in Nyakato, much closer to Buswelu and without all the hassles of town. As we set off the sky looked a little dark but we figured we`d get there before the rain started. We got on the dalla-dalla at Buswelu and had a really nice conversation with an old man opposite us. The roads had been made even worse by the rains yesterday and the dalla-dalla almost tipped over going round a corner. I couldn`t stand it any longer and said "shusha" (stop) and the old man laughed a little and said make sure you tell people what it`s like here, how bad things are.

It's so hard to describe, but the roads are horrendous. Only on the main road and in the very centre of town are they paved. All of the outskirts and villages are on dirt roads, which were bad to begin with but have now had two months of torrential rains and are virtually unpassable. Noone I know in the West would drive a car on these roads, yet Tanzanians are forced to travel squished into minivans and the back of pickup trucks without safety belts or often even seats. Every day we read in the paper about crashes that kill and wound most, if not all, the people onboard. My co-volunteers think I am totally nuts, but after so little time I have already reached the point that I would prefer to walk 45 minutes to the main road than risk it riding in a dalla-dalla.

So we walked to the main road and jumped on another dalla-dalla to Nyakato, only to get out and not be able to find the place. The rain started to come down and the choice was into Mwanza or go home. We went onto Mwanza and got out of the (THIRD!) dalla-dalla just in time to give the locals a wonderful view of two soaked muzungos. I think Rachel`s white t-shirt and blue bra made quite an impression on the men!

Choices

I feel quite settled in Buswelu and I'm really enjoying my time here. I've had my morning class for almost two weeks and we are starting to have a lot of fun together. After writing and drawing in their exercise books this morning I read them a story (one of my sister Abby's old Winnie the Pooh books) - which was really fun! They don't know many English words so I was basically acting the whole thing out and they loved joining in. Almost everything I said they would repeat with the actions - they especially liked the bouncing tigger bit!

Cody is leaving Hisani tomorrow and last night the volunteers and I had an incredible goodbye feast for him at Happiness' house. Happiness and her family have been so wonderful to the volunteers - they really have been so welcoming and kind and truly given us a home away from home.

One of the things I'm finding hardest is that the people I meet who are doing wonderful things here all want to leave. Grace, one of the teachers at the orphanage, wants to leave Tanzania because she doesn't think she'll find a man here who will respect her. Caf, also a teacher, wants to leave and go to Uni in the West because he can't afford school here (even if he could, the schools here aren't very good) and thinks he will be better off. I never know what to tell people who tell me they want to leave Tanzania. The ones that have (or can get) the means to leave are usually the ones that could help the country the most by staying: doctors, nurses, teachers. I've met some really wonderful people here and I wish that life was much easier for them, but I know that life in the West would be very different than what they imagine.

Cody's goodbye dinner

The Buswelu wildlife

This morning my class played a memory game - we had cards with lots of different animals turned face down and the kids had to find the pairs. Every time someone turned over an animal I had the class say the name in Swahili and English. My fave Swahili word has got to be Punda Millia (Zebra). I keep getting emails from people asking about the animals here, but I saw more wildlife on the cards this morning than I have in the almost two weeks that I've been in Tanzania. I've seen plenty of cows and goats, and there are an awful lot of chickens and ducks running around freely. One of the other volunteers told me that the fine for killing a chicken that isn't yours is 50,000 Tsh ($50) - a HUGE amount of money here, though it's hard to understand how people would know which chickens are which as they all seem to be running wild.

The animals in Buswelu are the kind you don't really want to write home about. Bats fly overhead frequently. There are MASSIVE spiders around the house - the American boys spent a few hours trying to kill one just outside a few days ago. It took most of a can of deet (insect repellent) and quite a bit of fire to finish it off. We've spotted dead scorpions quite a few times, frightening as the house has many, many dark corners where they like to hide. Rachel and I saw a creature we think was an enormous centipede slithering across the road last night - I've only ever seen something like it in Sci-Fi movies. Last but not least - loads and loads of mozzies. Rachel and Grace (one of the staff at Hisani) both have malaria, so I am being really careful about covering up and keeping insect repellent on!

Rangi

One of the things I've noticed about the children here, is that while most of them are quite intelligent, and all are both studious and hard working, they are not very good at thinking for themselves. The culture in Tanzania is very different to the type of environment that I grew up in. Children are taught to be absolutely respectful of their elders and are regularly beaten at school and home. I think this makes them very good at imitating: they learn to copy and to repeat things, but are too afraid to be creative and make mistakes. The consequence of this is that a lot of the chidren in the upper classes don't really know how to read, draw or write. They can copy something perfectly but don't know what it actually means.

The past week or so that I have had my set morning class, I've tried very hard to incorporate creativity into the lessons. This morning, I tried to have the kids make playdoh animals. I told them the name of the animal in English and had them all make their own one in different colour. Fish were quite easy, as were birds. After trying rabbits and cats for about half an hour we were all laughing too hard to keep going! My next ingenious (!) idea was to have everyone paint a picture with watercolours. I'm sure you can guess that after painting two pictures, a giraffe (triga) and an elephant (tembo), there was more paint on me, the children and the seats than on the pictures. They all had a good time though, and I'm sure with more practice they will get better. Last week I had them colour (rangi) things like 'a is for apple' all week: at the beginning all they did was scribble but by friday they were colouring in properly.

Happiness

Yesterday I took a big step... had my first solo trip into town. It was really nice to do some exploring on my own and I had a relaxed afternoon in the wonderful veggie Indian restaurant writing letters and talking to people. I've noticed that when I'm out and about by myself people talk to me a lot more, I think a big group of muzungos is a bit intimidating to the locals.

In the evening, Cody took me out to dinner with his wonderful Tanzanian family. Up until last week, Cody was the volunteer coordinator for Hisani, and he has been here the longest (by far). His friend Caf's family has adopted him for his stay in Tanzania. Caf lives with his sister Happiness, her five children and another family. Last night Happiness, Caf, Cody and I went to the Tilapia Hotel for a half-Thai and half-Indian meal. The meal was wonderful and the company even better. After the meal, Caf and Happiness insisted we stay the night at theirs and I had the best night's sleep since I've been here in a double bed with a real mattress and HUGE mozzie net. They've invited me round for supper tomorrow night which I'm really looking forward to.

I taught my wonderful nursery class this morning and afterwards headed straight down to the Hisani office in town. Fred told us about the Hisani programmes both currently and in the past. Although I have been involved only with the orphanage so far, Hisani works with both women and children. The programmes for women are mainly focussed on empowerment and trying to end discrimination. At the moment, Hisani runs a food and clothing drop off for women in jail and an HIV counseling programme for women and their husbands. They had a microcredit programme that ran successfully for two years until it ran out of funding and this is something that the other volunteers and I would like to restart if we can find funding. Rachel and I came away from the meeting with the task of putting together a sex and HIV education programme for the orphanage which I am really looking forward to getting stuck into tomorrow!

Cody and Molokusi

Sean teaching

Sukuma's and the FA Cup

Yesterday Sean, Kate, Zara and I went to the Sukuma cultural and museum in Bujora, a village about 10 kilometres from Buswelo. The Sukuma tribe is the largest tribe in Tanzania and makes up about 13% of the population. We had heard that on Saturday afternoons Sukuma dancers perform their snake dance to drums and wanted to tour the museum as well. It took three (terrifying!) dalla-dalla rides to arive in Bujora. We arrived in Bujora at about 1 o'clock, just in time to start our 2k uphill walk to the centre in the heat of the day! Along the way we chatted to lots and lots of people. Tanzanians are really friendly and almost all of them greet you when you walk by, lots also want to practice their English, so getting anywhere always takes longer than you would expect!

Eventually we reached the Sukuma centre to find it almost desserted. After lingering around the gift shop for a few minutes the museum manager arrived. He told us that the Sukuma dancers were performing somewhere else but offered to take us on a tour of the centre, which we accepted. The centre was founded by a Canadian missionary in the 50's, and it's kindof a strange combination of Sukuma cultural preservation centre and mission. There is a big Catholic church built in the style of a Sukuma hut, but much bigger and made from concrete. The inside has been decorated with symbolic Sukuma decorations adapted to fit into a Catholic church (or maybe it's the other way around!). It was really interesting to see, but we were all dissapointed we didn't see the dancers. Fortunately, we found out that starting next Sunday the big one week dance off competition between the Bagula and Bagika tribes begins. We are all going to go on Saturday for the final (and most frenetic!) day. More information about the Sukuma dance competition can be found here.

On the way home we stopped at the Gidelli Lodge to watch the FA cup final. We thought there might be a few people watching, but we never expected the scene that greeted us: every chair and every available surface in the place was occupied by what must have been every man in Gidelli sitting in front of the tiny tv watching the game! Arsenal won in the penalty kick off after two extra times, and the bar went nuts. You hear that football is watched around the world, but to see that kindof reaction to a game between to English teams half way round the world was pretty incredible.

Sabina and the community girls

The first week...

has flown by. It feels like I've been here forever, or at least it's been forever since I was anywhere but here. Time seems to stand still and rush past at the same time in Tanzania.

The past couple of days my morning class has grown- I now have eight students in the nursery class. Sabina is my favourite but she's a little monkey and very smart. All week Sabina has talked nonstop for the two hour class. She starts with "Madam" very loudly and then says loads of things which are gibberish to me. Grace, the lady that runs the Hisani Centre, told me that Sabina is correcting my Swahili when she does this. Everything I give her to do she races through and does very well. Today I think she was a bit bored and naughty so I made her sit behind the blackboard for a few minutes as punishment, when she came back to class she seemed really embarrassed and made me feel quite guilty. By the end of class she was happy again and walked back into the village with the other volunteers and I.

You can find my pictures here.

Last night all the volunteers went out for Chinese at a really swanky place. It was absolutely fabulous, and a VERY welcome change from rice and beans. After the meal, Max and I talked to Robert, our waiter, who told us about living in Tanzania. He usually works a 'double' (from ten am till after midnight) in the restaurant and takes home what is considered a "really good wage" in Mwanza - about $100 a month. Although we had a really lovely evening, it really put things into perspective. What the ten of us had just spent on dinner Robert earned in a month of working incredibly hard.

the basics

So far I've talked mostly about volunteering, this post I thought I'd say a bit about the rest of life in Tanzania.

There are ten volunteers at the orphanage (more arrive on Friday) - we come from the UK, US, Canada and Australia, soon there will be some New Zealanders as well. We are staying in an area we call the volunteer village, it is a fenced in compound with four houses that are still in various stages of completion. By the standards of Buswelo, we are very, very well off. We have electricity and running water. Compared to life in the West, things are primitive. Our electricity works in fits and starts - while cooking dinner the other night we had to stop half way through because the electrical socket caught on fire. Lights tend to have a strobe effects, if they work at all. Toilets are holes in the ground that sometimes flush and sometimes don't. I think the biggest thing I had to get used to was freezing cold showers. Hot water is unheard of in Buswelo. I've been here less than a week and learned that I can't face the cold water first thing in the morning (when the air is still chilly) so I wash my hair around noon when the sun is out in full force and it's quite refreshing then.

None of us expected there to be so many volunteers, so we are all adjusting to sharing rooms and group outings. Some have a much greater affinity to ice-breakers than others and there is an interesting dynamic between the extroverts and introverts in the group. It is really nice to have other people around to talk to and do things with, but coordination can be difficult.

My standard 5 class

Moja, mbili, tatu

Yesterday was my first full day of lessons. I have nursery in the mornings and level 5 in the afternoons The mornings are great fun, but a lot of hard work. I spend most of the time frantically looking up words in my swahili phrase book and asking the older children what things mean. The kids think it is fantastic I have no idea what is going on most of the time but my swahili is improving so they will have to watch out! Today I was trying to teach the kids how to say how old they were in English, but it turned into another swahili lesson. They know how to count to ten in English, but it was quickly apparent that they had learned the numbers by rote and had no idea what they meant. So we had most of the two hour lesson repeating "Una miaka mingapi" (how old are you) and counting in swahili: moja, mbili, tatu, nne, tano, sita, saba, nane, tisa, kumi and then repeating in English to try and teach them what the words meant. The children are really studious and tried to copy everything (and I mean everything) down in their composition books, even at five and six years old.

Yesterday John, one of the little boys, lost his pencil and burst into tears. These kids are hit in the face with a basketball while playing and don't even whimper, but cry if they lose a pencil. This morning when we arrived it was easy to understand why: the orphanage was in the middle of a big cleaning and all the children had moved their belongings outside. Each child had one small suitcase or plastic bag full of everything they own in the world. Most of them don't have anything to remember their families by, just a change of clothes and a couple of exercise books if they're lucky. They all know if they don't study hard and learn enough to pass the secondary school exams they will be homeless at 16.

Chini! Chini!

After having a fabulous Indian in town yesterday Max, Rachel (two of the other volunteers) and I piled into the back of a dalla-dalla and set off back to Buswelu. Dalla-dallas are mini-vans that function as buses connecting the villages to the town. Probably about 15 people could fit comfortably, but in the couple of rides I've had it usually seems to be between 20-25 people squished in together. The dalla-dallas are never in great condition, but this one seemed to have no suspension left what so ever. We were all sweating and slipping around as the dalla-dalla slammed into every bump in the road.

After our nerve-racking 1/2 hour, we arrived a short walk from the orphanage and stopped to see the children. Although it was a Saturday, all the community children had come for school so we spent the rest of the afternoon teaching. I took the littlest ones for my first lesson, thinking they would be the easiest. I had about 25 kids between 3-7. It started out quite well, but I think they realised quickly that I didn't know Swahili and then they all started jumping around. I quickly learned the word for sit down and told them chini! chini! which worked on some, but not all. I was trying to teach them numbers in English, so we counted to ten and then I had the kids come up and write them on the board. They were all very enthusiastic and tried very hard. Some were really shy but by the end of the hour they had all come up at least once to try and write a number. Some of them had far more fun rubbing the coloured chalk all over themselves than writing on the board! After their lesson, the girls and boys broke into circles and played catch with a tennis ball for a bit until it was time for dinner, when the community children went home and the children from the orphanage chowed down on their spinach and rice.

The other volunteers and I walked home around seven and it was already dark by the time we arrived at the complex. Kate and Zara (two of the Ozzie volunteers) had made all ten of us supper so we sat around and had pasta together. The rule with food here is eat lots when you can. We don't have a fridge so everything must be eaten when it's cooked. It's easy to get fruit, eggs, bread, rice and pasta, but veggies are hard to come by. Its my turn to cook supper tonight so I'll be trying to find something in the market later to throw together - fingers crossed!

Jambo

A big hello from sunny and beautiful Tanzania!

A driver met me at Mwanza airport yesterday and drove me the 1/2 hour or so to the orphanage. The airport is on the outskirts of Mwanza, and the Hisani Centre is in a village called Buswelu on the other side of the city. 600,000 people live in and around Mwanza, but you would never know that from looking at the structural dent people have made on the landscape. There is a small centre with buildings, but most of the surroundings have been built in to the hills and lots of people live in lean-tos and huts. The rock formations (at the bottom of this page) are incredible. They jut out of the landscape all over the country.

My initial impressions have been just shock and awe. It is so incredible different than anything I've experienced before. The noise, the smells, the colours. Everything is bright and colorful and everyone here seem so strong and beautiful.

I arrived at Hisani just before noon and the children all gathered round to meet me. The older ones were at school, so it was all the little ones that came up and talked . Two tiny children (TINY!) picked up my massive 30+kilo bag (more than 60 pounds) and carried it inside. They've learned to say 'Hello Madam' and their name and age in English, and so they introduced themselves one by one and asked me my name and how old I was. We had lunch and I unpacked everything for the orphanage. The children loved the toys, they had never had baby's toys before and seemed really pleased with them. I have some brilliant pictures of them playing with them. The kids love having their pictures taken and seeing the pictures afterwards. They all seem really small for their age, but are incredibly strong. Robbie, a 13 year old boy who seemed more like the size of a ten year old to me, picked up my suitcase and carried it on his head the entire 15 minute walk from the orphanage to the 'volunteer village' where we are staying. I couldn't believe he could manage it!

Serendipity

From the moment I arrived at the airport on Thursday I've had the most amazing good fortune. I changed my flights easily. No que when I arrived, so check in took ten minutes. I was more than ten kilos over weight (which should have cost 248 pounds extra), but when I told the lady at the ticket desk I was bringing donations for an orphanage she waived the charge.

Sitting having a glass of wine in an aiport bar I looked up and saw my friend Kym, from DC who I haven't seen in months. She had just flown in from India and was flying at the same time as I was to Uganda, so we had an hour to catch up while waiting to board.

My seat was 13A which I thought was a good sign. It wasn't until I boarded the plane I realised I've been given an upgrade so I had loads of leg room on my ten hour flight. The woman next to me was from Zanzibar, lives on the beach and has invited me to stay with her family if I go.

When I landed in Dar es Salaam customs was a breeze, my suitcase was intact and came out very fast. I was at the ticket desk to buy my connecting ticket to Mwanza in less than 1/2 an hour, which was extremely lucky because when I asked for a flight to Mwanza they said one was leaving in twenty minutes and held the plane for me.

The flight from Dar to Mwanza took about two hours and was very smooth. I got an amazing picture of the very top of Mount Kilimanjaro poking through the clouds, and saw the Ngogoro Crater from the air. Tanzania is so huge and so empty. Flying over it you just see huge areas of fields and wilderness.