Happy New Year! I can’t believe it’s already January! I got here in stinkin’ June! Time is flying by, which absolutely scares me that 2 years will be over and I will have done nothing successful. YIKES! I hope though that everyone is doing well and I wish you 2011 full of good health, excitement, and loads of love!
So after being gone for the Peace corps seminar and then for the holidays I am back in the village (well not right now obviously, because I’m on the computer!!). I just came into town yesterday because I have a bunch of work-related stuff to do. I think maybe I already said that my environment really changed, just after being gone for the two weeks for the seminar, from two days of rain. It is just so green, it doesn’t feel like the same place. Actually when I walk around my village now, I sometimes get confused about where I am because things just look soooo different! The other day I walked with a friend to go visit his grandmother and the whole time I kept asking him, ‘’where are we going?’’ Then all of a sudden we were coming up behind the school, a place I am every day! There are so many baobob trees in my village, but they are usually bare and so besides the trunk you can see right through. But now they are covered in big green leaves and the ground is also covered in big, green, leafy bushes.
Life in the village is very different since I have returned home too. Once the rains really began people started working really hard on their farms (just going to tell you that in Swahili farm is shamba because even when I’m speaking English here I say shamba so I may accidentally slip that in instead of farm! There are several words like that which most volunteers just don’t translate when we’re talking to each other because they are words we use so frequently, like water-maji). The majority of people are going to their farms every day except for Sunday. Some leave their houses as early as five am and don’t return until six pm. There is work to do with hand hoes and then lots of people use donkeys or oxen to pull a plow and till up their land. I have been trying to go with people when I can and help them out. Many people planted their crops while I was gone and so they are going now to weed and maintain with the hoe, acres and acres of land. They think that in America everybody does farm work with machines so they don’t believe me that I can use a hand hoe until they actually see me do it. The first day I went and did work, every person that walked by laughed and asked the family that I was with how I was doing. And the family I was working with kept telling me to stop and rest or I would get too tired! Oh there are so many misconceptions about me! It’s fun to show them though, that I am capable! One person told me that he could never marry an American because after at least three years of working like a Tanzanian on the farm they would surely just die. Oh goodness! Also though school just opened last Monday, the 10th, and so I am there for a couple of hours each day. I won’t be teaching every day once things really get rolling, but right now we only have four teachers including me, for 350 students and nine subjects so I’m trying to help out where I can. During the day though, when I’m not at school the village is just so empty of people. I walk out my door and don’t see a single person and even when I walk into the village ‘’town’’ there are so few people. It’s sort of eerie and I really don’t like it. I was just with friends for basically a month and so the change just feels really drastic. I was expecting to feel a bit lonesome after being with friends for a while and then going back to being alone in my village but I didn’t realize that it would be so extreme. One of the goals I made prior to returning was to try and be more social, go and visit more homes, let people feed me more and just try to meet more people, so when I can I am spending more time with others which I am really enjoying. Its amazing how giving and unselfish people are here. Anytime people are eating and a person walks by they welcome them to join for food. I just think that its so interesting because people are really struggling to have enough food for their families alone but even so they are so willing to share. And they love when I eat with them because its still so crazy to them that I eat ugali, with my hands nonetheless, the greens that they eat, uji, chapati, etc. I am actually really starting to like the food of Tanzania though, even though it is a very basic and limited diet. They eat the same few things over and over, with nothing really to flavour things other than salt. Sometimes I am concerned about nutrition-and maybe that’s why this training for the kiliminjaro marathon is sometimes quite the struggle!! I am absolutely going to get a kick out of connor eating ugali with his hands when he comes to visit, as picky as he is at home anyway!!! But it’s part of the cultural experience (right connor?!) there is actually a new green, leafy vegetable that is growing on their shambas right now and so I had it for the first time last week. They first boiled it down with water, like they do with all their greens (nutrition lesson for the future perhaps) then fried some onions in a bit of oil, added the greens, and then added some ground up peanuts. It was delicious! I ate so much ugali that day because I kept wanting to eat the greens!!!
Anyway, things are coming along slowly. I have so many project ideas but I’m not really sure which ones to try or really, which ones will benefit the village or excite the village the most. Its really hard getting things going too. I’m just starting slowly at the school, teaching English, hopefully life skills, then working with the biology club students and maintaining the tree nurseries. I have started a garden behind my house-preparing it at least, and I hope to plant this week, which is really exciting!! As far as other projects go, I am just trying to do some research and gauge interest for now, while people are busy with their own work anyway. Also the village as a whole has lots of projects that they are trying to develop. It’s difficult to try and explain the way the culture works here in terms of trying to get things accomplished. In short I suppose I could say that things just take a lot of time.
Well, I think for now I will close.
