Jesus Music Videos, Bedazzled Clothing and a Meat Grinder

Life in the Peace Corps can change at the drop of a hat. I have found that a few uneventful weeks can go by and then all of a sudden some one turns on a faucet and you find yourself in a flash flood. I guess this is true anywhere you go, but I always figured that life here would always be relatively uneventful. 

Kwanza (First) the relatively uneventful:

-All right you heard it here first—a meat grinder has change my life (at site).  A couple of weeks ago I purchased a meat grinder for about $10 and I can now make hamburgers, sloppy joes, meatloaf, meatballs, meat sauce, Sheppard’s pie….  The possibilities are endless.

- Last week at school I realized I neglected to sign the teachers’ attendance book for three days. Simultaneously I noticed that I had lost my blue pen, so I began to graffiti the attendance book in red pen when I was promptly stopped by one of my co-workers. “AHH Madam! Only the President signs his name in red pen!!! You must use blue or black”. WOAH. (A) I was so taken a back I almost wanted to run away B) What kind of ridiculous rule is that?) I quickly copied over my signature in a borrowed blue pen and profusely apologized. I would just like to send a Thank You to the Peace Corps training staff for giving us a heads up on that rule during training… guess you cannot cover everything.

-Last Tuesday we received a letter addressed to the staff of our school. The letter, which was from a teacher who works at a near by primary school, had a proper heading but was written on notebook paper. The subject of a letter was the woman’s tree, which someone had cut down and possibly used for firewood or charcoal. The primary school teacher was accusing one of the teachers at my school of cutting down her tree and was subsequently asking for them to pay her 10,000 /= (Tanzanian Shillings). She concluded the letter by asking for the payment within 24 hours and her signature. She also included a postscript that read (in Swahili), “Sorry I used bad paper”.  My counterparts and I thought this was pretty fun and decided that the woman would not be getting her 10,000/=. Pole sana. Just goes to show that people here are cordial even when they are pissed off. 

On to the more eventful:

This weekend about 8 volunteers spent the weekend at Matema. Matema is a small village at the northern end of Lake Nyasa or Lake Malwai. To get to the village we departed from my site in the early morning, arrived in Tukuyu, took another coaster to Kyela and then rented a private car for the reminder of the trip. The car ride was interesting. I always seem to forget how lucky I am to live in the southern part of Tanzanian because the main roads are paved, but the road from Kyela to Matema is not. So, we spent about and hour and a half traveling through rice paddies and banana forests in a mini van with four people a breast in a small back seat down a gravel road. When you arrive in Matema it looks like a completely average Tanzanian village. It has a small, sufficient fruit market and plenty of mama run small places to eat. The Lutheran Center, where we stayed, is located right on the beach and boasts 10-15, one, two, three and four bed huts. The beach at Matema is absolutely gorgeous and is one of those places I never believed I would have the opportunity to visit in my lifetime. The water is a bluish turquoise—like the color of your toilet after you use 1,000 flushes—and the sand particles look a little smaller than that of gravel. If you look out at the lake you can see only the horizon in the distance—rightly so because Lake Nyasa is the third largest lake in Africa. To the East of Lake Nyasa lie the Livingston Mountains, which looks as if they rise right out of the water. Having a Jurassic Park feel to them, they are green, luscious and look as if they were folded. The water in the lake supposedly does not contain schistosomiasis (let’s hope not), and is as clear and as warm as bath water.

The locals in the area are very used to seeing travelers and were very welcoming. They also took no real mind and went along with their daily business; fishing in their dugout canoes and washing their clothing on the shores of the lake. I must confess it is a little surreal to be swimming in the lake, glance 100 meters down the beach and see children playing naked in the water and women doing their wash draped in their brightly colored kitenge and head wraps.

The first night a church choir was on the premises shooting a music video. Now when you think of a music video you might get the image of a good sound set up, a couple of cameras, a few famous people, blocked off set, possibly pyrotechnics, back up dancers and an awesome food buffet. Alright, now forget all that, add 15 women and 5 men in matching outfits, dancing/ singing to Jesus music (we all know how I feel about this, if not please refer back to an earlier blog post where said music gave me a migraine). The choreography is minimal, but simple shuffling moves that look almost like a retirement home jazzercise class. The recording equipment looks like something my dad used to film my 10^th birthday in 1997 and the music playback is one gigantic speaker. Also, a loud generator runs all of the electrical equipment. One can only hope that they dub the music over that noise during editing. Oh! Almost forgot. There are about 3 to 4 costume changes for the dancers/ singers and absolutely no set perimeter. I am almost positive that I will be background extra in the next installment of the Matema Beach Christian Choir sing-a-long. I also have no doubt that my home stay mama will buy the DVD when it is released and my home stay sisters will learn all of the dance steps.

It is pretty inexpensive to stay at the center 7,000/= a night with breakfast, so about $5. Breakfast is pretty awesome and I might just be saying this because I have lived here for six months now, but hot cocoa, tea, instant coffee, homemade toasted bread, eggs and warm orange mango jam was pretty amazing! Now some of you might think that is not a lot of food, but for $1.33 it is a great deal. At night we ate in the village—the standard rice and beans, and built a bon fire, complete with ice-cold beers on the beach. Even though it is March it felt so peaceful to sit on the beach in a grass A-frame hut with a cool breeze at dusk sipping a cool African beer.

I should also mention that although it is March, we are still located near the equator and the sun is pretty unforgiving. I am currently nicely toasted, almost like that marshmallow that you tried to brown, but then it catches on fire leaving you cursing and trying to extinguish a flaming ball of gooey sugar. Thankfully, I did not spontaneously combust, but I am a little charred.

One thing I tried to promised myself gong into this 27 month odyssey was that I would not look too far into the future, while this sometimes needs to occur for planning’s sake, I try to take life here one day at a time. If I don’t, I, and yes this has happened on occasion, start to sweat, get a little anxious, nauseous and panicked. Our last day at Matema, I was informed that one of the volunteers from my region was going home early. This was pretty disheartening and gave me one of those panic/ anxiety moments. Sometimes I fear that I am going to wake up one day homesick and that it will not go away. I had a significant scare during home stay, when I was unhappy and unsure of my decision for an entire week. I am petrified of the downward spiral. I have seen things be seemingly fine here one week and disastrous the next. This being said I rarely let myself cry here. Now that may sound strange, but I am afraid that once I start, I won’t stop. And this mainly pertains to missing home – something I have jested about in previous posts, but not actually openly discussed. So here are some obvious questions and answers:

1)   Do I get homesick? – Yes

2)   When? -- Mainly Sunday nights and Monday mornings, but also when I am extremely bored and when I open a pre-packaged card from my parents

3)   What do I do to feel better? -- Exercise, read, talk to other volunteers or counterparts, do work, and write; basically anything to stay busy.

Due to the volunteer’s leaving I adopted an adult dog. Also I should take this time to mention that Argo has gone to a better place. 80% of the puppies in her litter also did not survive due to a parasitic infection. I figured this dog should go to a good home and I could use a companion at site. I am just glad he is trained and mature. Also I should mention that on the way to my site, he got carsick and threw up all over me....

After this weekend I cannot help but think about how luck I am. There are many people who calculate their decisions in life. My decision to join was somewhat calculated, a week +, but in terms of the scale of the decision it could be considered flying by the seat of my pants. But as the Win Borden quote says, “If you wait to do everything until you're sure it's right, you'll probably never do much of anything”. No matter where my service takes me I am happy about my decision. I am happy to wake up in the morning to children singing and dancing before their school day starts, cook all of my meals, wash my clothes in a bucket and use a toilet that does not protrude from the floor. I made the right decision. I tell myself this often because I can easily forget it when I am sitting at a desk starring down 180 notebooks with 10 problems each (1,800 problems to grade), burning beans (only happened once so far) or waking up Monday morning. I think too many volunteers here mask their feelings. I will be the first person to tell you that there are times when I am unhappy, but I acknowledge it and try to not let it bother me. I never deny myself the feeling, but I never let it linger too long.

I should also mention I had my 1^st site visit this past Friday from Peace Corps. James came to see my site, meet my mkuu and observe one of my classes. Things went off without a problem and he even brought me a package that had been stuck in Dar since early November. It contained a bunch of people magazines, pearl earrings (don’t leave home without spares), NYT crosswords and t-shirts. So excited for new clothing, I ripped open the package to find two bejeweled shirts that could have belonged to one of Brett Michael’s girlfriends. I did not want to offend my mother’s, taste, but I considered whether she had paid attention to my wardrobe for the last 24 years and simply said that I was happy to have them (also because most people here would be happy to have a new shirt). When she told me she found them on sale and that I could give them away eventually I told her my true feelings, which produced a good laugh. I will probably don said shirts at some point, but also gifty them when I leave Tanzania.

All right this post has gone on long enough, but I hope everyone is well at home and enjoying the March thaw. Spring is coming! Next week I will be traveling to in-service training in Morogoro. It should be fun to learn to write grants and meet up with everyone from my training class and visit my home stay family again. I will keep you all updated on how it turns out.

All my love from TZ.