I'm not on a mission, I'm just here to live.
Two weeks ago, the headmaster of Mateves Secondary School "terminated" our presence at his school. I found out that last year one of the children of OHS attended Mateves Secondary School but was removed when her twenty-one year old teacher tried to hit on her and when she refused, she was slapped across the face. When OHS found out what happened, they went straight to the Ministry of Education to try and get the teacher in jail but he was able to pay off the officials with no consequence.
After teaching at Mateves for nearly three weeks, our coordinator received a letter from the headmaster saying that until the issue from last year was settled, we were no longer welcome to teach at his school. I think the headmaster feared having a bad reputation at the village but there is no reconciling what happened. One thing I've learned from this is that we live in a beautiful world, but there are ugly souls.
Last week I started teaching at a new school called Musa. It's been such a whirlwind, I find myself trying to find consistency but realizing it's impossible when life is so inconsistent.
Last Wednesday I went to a market with other people in my boma. The markets here are so overwhelming, there's just so much going on...hundreds of people, sitting, walking, standing around, animals for sale, music or maybe just noise, food cooking and clouds of smoke, cars trying to drive through the crowds of people...just everything at once. Someone yelled "thief" and all of the chaos merged into one. In the distance, I saw a herd of people with wooden sticks and gardening picks and other tools start running and then there were so many people they couldn't move, they were standing together, waving their weapons in the air. They caught the thief. A few minutes later, I saw two men dragging a third man by his arms and a procession of people followed. They disappeared down an alley but I knew that man probably wouldn't come out a live. I can't describe how I felt when I witnessed this happening...nearly forty people wanting to participate in the death of this man.
Everyday I find myself lost in thought, sometimes to a point where I'm so far out I can't find the end. At least now though I feel awake.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Every morning I wake up around 7am to fetch water. After only living in my home-stay for about a week, my arms are sore and my body is tired. Life here is not easy, despite how simple it may seem. I did laundry for the first time last week, using two buckets and my hands. After attempting to wash my clothes for ten minutes or so, my friend Side (pronounced c-de) came over and showed me how to wash my clothes. All the Tanzanian women who were at the water hole fetching water were definitely making fun of my lack of experience doing laundry. Each item had to be scrubbed, piece by piece, using a technique. By the time I was done, my hands ached and my arms were numb.
Another experience: I had my first bucket shower. Usually we come into Arusha on the weekends so I've been showering in the hostel we stay in. Last week though I decided it was time to experience a bucket shower. Mama was nice enough to warm the water for me (it's been so cold here, I've been sleeping in my fleece every night) so I went outside where our boma made an enclosed closet-sized room for a shower. It was basically four tin walls pinned up against one another, no roof, and just dirt for the ground. I took about five minutes to wash my hair and after a week of not showering, I felt surprisingly clean.
Aside from fetching water, I also help mama with the dishes every day, usually after lunch. The kitchen is separate from the home, it looks similar to the shower except a little bigger and has a roof. Inside mama keeps the buckets that we use to fetch water and then one of the corners there's a stack of wood and rocks that she uses to make a fire each day for cooking. When we do the dishes, I usually just sit on the dirt ground, grab two buckets where I use one to soap the dishes and the other to rinse. The other day Side washed our cups from Chai inside the home, in the living room where we usually have Chai every morning. He poured clean water in the cups and then just poured the water on the floor, the dirt ground that made up the floor to our living room. I asked why he did that, thinking mama would get mad, and he said that the water helps get rid of the dust that builds up on the floor. I've been learning something new everyday.
At home, my mama, Mama Lea, has one older daughter named Lea who lives with the grandmother and one younger daughter named Nipa who lives with us. Nipa is only 18 months old and is so cute. Out of all of the volunteers in our boma, she's only able to say my name which makes me feel special. There is another younger girl named Aisha who is seven years old who lives with us but is not Mama Lea's child. Her mother works at a factory in Mateves named A-Z which makes mosquito nets. It employees nearly 10,000 Tanzanians but is supposed to be horrific, like beyond sweatshop nightmare. Aisha's mama is always working, probably fourteen hours a day or something, I've never met her mama and every morning I wake up Aisha is still at our home. As far as I can tell, Mama Lea takes care of Aisha in return for her help around the home. Aisha usually serves our food, takes care of Nipa, and sometimes does the dishes too. She should be in school but her mother can't afford it.
The education here is so twisted and just incomprehensibly screwed up. The public schools cost money, about 300 dollars a year per student but the education is horrible. The school that I'm teaching at, Mateves Secondary, there are five teachers for 800 students. The students are taught in Swahili all through primary and then when they get to secondary, are no longer taught in Swahili but in English. So all of their books and everything are in English but they can't speak or understand the language. Makes perfect sense, right? On top of that, to qualify to be a teacher, a person just has to graduate with a diploma, or high school, which is like another year of education after secondary school. To put into context, in the states this means that someone who graduates from high school would be qualified to teach anything from K-10th grade.
Most of the families here in Tanzania have at least three kids and 300 dollars/year for an education is really expensive. Therefore, the families have to pick and choose which child gets sent to school and usually that ends up by being the boy, or the oldest son. There are extreme gender inequalities here, not just in school but in all of Tanzania.
We found out yesterday that all of the teachers at Mateves Secondary took a "study tour" to Dar es Salaam BUT the students are still expected to show up for class. So when I went to start teaching on Thursday, the students were just sitting at their desks with no teacher to teach them...some were sleeping, some were drawing, some were chit chatting, and others were outside shoveling dirt (which was their punishment for being late). It is absurd. I heard that last year, the headmaster asked each student to pay 1,000 shilling in order for them to provide a graduation ceremony but when the day came, he canceled the ceremony and just pocketed the money.
I wish I could fill you all in more but I'm in a rush--it's so strange because I always feel this sense of urgency. It's such a dilemma, life here is so lax yet I'm inpatient and always on the go. Anyways, on the bright side...every night I get to see the milky way and venus. The night sky is unbelievable.
Another experience: I had my first bucket shower. Usually we come into Arusha on the weekends so I've been showering in the hostel we stay in. Last week though I decided it was time to experience a bucket shower. Mama was nice enough to warm the water for me (it's been so cold here, I've been sleeping in my fleece every night) so I went outside where our boma made an enclosed closet-sized room for a shower. It was basically four tin walls pinned up against one another, no roof, and just dirt for the ground. I took about five minutes to wash my hair and after a week of not showering, I felt surprisingly clean.
Aside from fetching water, I also help mama with the dishes every day, usually after lunch. The kitchen is separate from the home, it looks similar to the shower except a little bigger and has a roof. Inside mama keeps the buckets that we use to fetch water and then one of the corners there's a stack of wood and rocks that she uses to make a fire each day for cooking. When we do the dishes, I usually just sit on the dirt ground, grab two buckets where I use one to soap the dishes and the other to rinse. The other day Side washed our cups from Chai inside the home, in the living room where we usually have Chai every morning. He poured clean water in the cups and then just poured the water on the floor, the dirt ground that made up the floor to our living room. I asked why he did that, thinking mama would get mad, and he said that the water helps get rid of the dust that builds up on the floor. I've been learning something new everyday.
At home, my mama, Mama Lea, has one older daughter named Lea who lives with the grandmother and one younger daughter named Nipa who lives with us. Nipa is only 18 months old and is so cute. Out of all of the volunteers in our boma, she's only able to say my name which makes me feel special. There is another younger girl named Aisha who is seven years old who lives with us but is not Mama Lea's child. Her mother works at a factory in Mateves named A-Z which makes mosquito nets. It employees nearly 10,000 Tanzanians but is supposed to be horrific, like beyond sweatshop nightmare. Aisha's mama is always working, probably fourteen hours a day or something, I've never met her mama and every morning I wake up Aisha is still at our home. As far as I can tell, Mama Lea takes care of Aisha in return for her help around the home. Aisha usually serves our food, takes care of Nipa, and sometimes does the dishes too. She should be in school but her mother can't afford it.
The education here is so twisted and just incomprehensibly screwed up. The public schools cost money, about 300 dollars a year per student but the education is horrible. The school that I'm teaching at, Mateves Secondary, there are five teachers for 800 students. The students are taught in Swahili all through primary and then when they get to secondary, are no longer taught in Swahili but in English. So all of their books and everything are in English but they can't speak or understand the language. Makes perfect sense, right? On top of that, to qualify to be a teacher, a person just has to graduate with a diploma, or high school, which is like another year of education after secondary school. To put into context, in the states this means that someone who graduates from high school would be qualified to teach anything from K-10th grade.
Most of the families here in Tanzania have at least three kids and 300 dollars/year for an education is really expensive. Therefore, the families have to pick and choose which child gets sent to school and usually that ends up by being the boy, or the oldest son. There are extreme gender inequalities here, not just in school but in all of Tanzania.
We found out yesterday that all of the teachers at Mateves Secondary took a "study tour" to Dar es Salaam BUT the students are still expected to show up for class. So when I went to start teaching on Thursday, the students were just sitting at their desks with no teacher to teach them...some were sleeping, some were drawing, some were chit chatting, and others were outside shoveling dirt (which was their punishment for being late). It is absurd. I heard that last year, the headmaster asked each student to pay 1,000 shilling in order for them to provide a graduation ceremony but when the day came, he canceled the ceremony and just pocketed the money.
I wish I could fill you all in more but I'm in a rush--it's so strange because I always feel this sense of urgency. It's such a dilemma, life here is so lax yet I'm inpatient and always on the go. Anyways, on the bright side...every night I get to see the milky way and venus. The night sky is unbelievable.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
I'm finally settled in. After arriving to Arusha last week we spent one day in the city before leaving to Mateves village. When I was walking over to the internet cafe a man stopped me and asked if he could talk to the "mzungu" (the white foreigner). He said that "white people send him to school." He was studying Tourism at a university in Arusha so I think he wanted to practice talking to a group of "mzungu". Like most Tanzanians, he asked us where we come from and why we are here. I told him that we we're here with OHS and we were teaching about HIV/AIDS in schools around Mateves village and he was very supportive of our cause.
Most of the people in Arusha are Masai, which is a tribe. Masai men usually have multiple wives, the first wife is said to have special privileges. The man that we met was Masai and he said his father had three wives, he told us one day he tried to explain to his father the risks of HIV and his father simply told him his "education was all lies." I've quickly learned that talking about HIV is taboo, hopefully that'll change once I'm the classroom.
I had my first day of teaching on Thursday. I'm teaching at Mateves secondary school and have the oldest age cohort (16-18 years old) and it's just me, my friend Noah, and a Tanzanian volunteer named Rose. There are about 62 students in our class but the classroom is so small, a couple of students were sharing seats and most students were sharing desks. I think there are nearly 800 students and only 5 teachers in the whole school, it just blows my mind. On our first day we decided to give a test to see how much the students already know about HIV, just as a guideline for our curriculum. Most of the students didn't have paper to take the test so I had to rip pages from my journal. After we gave the test we wanted to see what sort of questions the students had about HIV/AIDS before jumping into the curriculum. I knew that there were a lot of misconceptions about the virus but I didn't know to what extent--one kid stood up and said that the only way to get rid of HIV is to kill everyone who has it. I know it's going to be challenge for me and my teaching group to try and break down these beliefs but we're here to teach, to teach the facts.
We only have five weeks at Mateves school because the kids go on break so for the remaining three weeks of the program, I'm going to teach at a private school. I realize that my time at Mateves is short(especially because I only teach Monday and Thursdays for an hour and a half) so aside from sticking to the curriculum and teaching about HIV/AIDS, I really want to empower the kids. From looking over the
tests, a lot of the kids are so smart... they just need to find their voice.
Aside from teaching, I've moved into my home-stay! I'm leaving with Mama Lea, most of the women in the village go by "Mama ____" usually the name of their first son but my mama only has girls, her oldest is named Lea. The home in the is made from mud and cow dung and has tin roofs and all of the door ways have clothes/curtains instead of doors. There are no windows so even during the daytime I usually need my headlamp to get dressed and stuff and at night we have one lantern that we all sit around when we eat dinner and play cards in the evening. We always play the same game, it's called Last Card but I like to think of it as Tanzanian Uno.
I live with two other OHS volunteers and one Tanzanian volunteer, but in our "boma" (or neighborhood), there are about twelve other OHS volunteers. Mateves village is huge, there are probably about 700 families or so, and four to five families live in one boma. OHS is working in about six of the bomas and so the volunteers are spread throughout Mateves, according to which boma their homestay is in.
There are so many kids in my boma! Probably about fifteen or so, one kid is named Baracka and another kid is named is Obama. Basically, they LOVE Obama here. The children also really love soccer, I noticed the other day they found a way to make a ball from tying a rope around a bundle of plastic bags. The women do most of the work around the village, as far as taking care the children, cooking, cleaning, fetching water. I haven't really seen any men around my boma, I found out that there is one man that fathers all of the children. All of the women in my boma are Masai so there is a first wife, a second wife, and a third wife.
Since this week was just my first week in my home-stay, I'm just starting to settle into a routine. Like I said earlier, there's no electricity in the village so I've been going to bed pretty early. Every night I'm in bed by 9 and I wake up around 6 in the morning, my roommates and I will usually walk down to the water hole to fetch water for mama before eating breakfast and beginning our day.
The weekends are a bit different because we usually come into a Arusha so volunteers can shower and use the internet. Yesterday I went on a hike near Mt. Meru, it was about a 4 mile hike. At the end of the hike there was a waterfall that was probably 100 feet or so, it was absolutely beautiful. Next weekend is our first long weekend (I think four days) so I'm either going to go on a Safari or another hike.
The other night I was playing "Tanzanian Pictionary" with some of the kids which was basically them telling me riddles. I leave you with this one: my grandfather sleeps inside, his beard sleeps outside. What is it?
Most of the people in Arusha are Masai, which is a tribe. Masai men usually have multiple wives, the first wife is said to have special privileges. The man that we met was Masai and he said his father had three wives, he told us one day he tried to explain to his father the risks of HIV and his father simply told him his "education was all lies." I've quickly learned that talking about HIV is taboo, hopefully that'll change once I'm the classroom.
I had my first day of teaching on Thursday. I'm teaching at Mateves secondary school and have the oldest age cohort (16-18 years old) and it's just me, my friend Noah, and a Tanzanian volunteer named Rose. There are about 62 students in our class but the classroom is so small, a couple of students were sharing seats and most students were sharing desks. I think there are nearly 800 students and only 5 teachers in the whole school, it just blows my mind. On our first day we decided to give a test to see how much the students already know about HIV, just as a guideline for our curriculum. Most of the students didn't have paper to take the test so I had to rip pages from my journal. After we gave the test we wanted to see what sort of questions the students had about HIV/AIDS before jumping into the curriculum. I knew that there were a lot of misconceptions about the virus but I didn't know to what extent--one kid stood up and said that the only way to get rid of HIV is to kill everyone who has it. I know it's going to be challenge for me and my teaching group to try and break down these beliefs but we're here to teach, to teach the facts.
We only have five weeks at Mateves school because the kids go on break so for the remaining three weeks of the program, I'm going to teach at a private school. I realize that my time at Mateves is short(especially because I only teach Monday and Thursdays for an hour and a half) so aside from sticking to the curriculum and teaching about HIV/AIDS, I really want to empower the kids. From looking over the
tests, a lot of the kids are so smart... they just need to find their voice.
Aside from teaching, I've moved into my home-stay! I'm leaving with Mama Lea, most of the women in the village go by "Mama ____" usually the name of their first son but my mama only has girls, her oldest is named Lea. The home in the is made from mud and cow dung and has tin roofs and all of the door ways have clothes/curtains instead of doors. There are no windows so even during the daytime I usually need my headlamp to get dressed and stuff and at night we have one lantern that we all sit around when we eat dinner and play cards in the evening. We always play the same game, it's called Last Card but I like to think of it as Tanzanian Uno.
I live with two other OHS volunteers and one Tanzanian volunteer, but in our "boma" (or neighborhood), there are about twelve other OHS volunteers. Mateves village is huge, there are probably about 700 families or so, and four to five families live in one boma. OHS is working in about six of the bomas and so the volunteers are spread throughout Mateves, according to which boma their homestay is in.
There are so many kids in my boma! Probably about fifteen or so, one kid is named Baracka and another kid is named is Obama. Basically, they LOVE Obama here. The children also really love soccer, I noticed the other day they found a way to make a ball from tying a rope around a bundle of plastic bags. The women do most of the work around the village, as far as taking care the children, cooking, cleaning, fetching water. I haven't really seen any men around my boma, I found out that there is one man that fathers all of the children. All of the women in my boma are Masai so there is a first wife, a second wife, and a third wife.
Since this week was just my first week in my home-stay, I'm just starting to settle into a routine. Like I said earlier, there's no electricity in the village so I've been going to bed pretty early. Every night I'm in bed by 9 and I wake up around 6 in the morning, my roommates and I will usually walk down to the water hole to fetch water for mama before eating breakfast and beginning our day.
The weekends are a bit different because we usually come into a Arusha so volunteers can shower and use the internet. Yesterday I went on a hike near Mt. Meru, it was about a 4 mile hike. At the end of the hike there was a waterfall that was probably 100 feet or so, it was absolutely beautiful. Next weekend is our first long weekend (I think four days) so I'm either going to go on a Safari or another hike.
The other night I was playing "Tanzanian Pictionary" with some of the kids which was basically them telling me riddles. I leave you with this one: my grandfather sleeps inside, his beard sleeps outside. What is it?
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