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.