Take a Moment

Yesterday I found out that on Tuesday, Joseph Chow, an Education volunteer from the class before me, died in a rock climbing accident. I had never met him, but it affects everyone in the PC community and I plan to go to his memorial service this weekend. Since he was in the training class before me, this meant that he was scheduled to go home in November/December. I can't imagine what his family and friends at home as well as here in PC are going through. This has been a tough year for PC/Tz, with a lot of volunteers going home, especially for the Ed class before me. I hope that our support has been and continues to be helpful.

I don't think there's an appropriate segue, so I'll just take a deep breath and finish this blog entry that I had started to write. But its painful how the world keeps on turning and it seems that nothing stops to take notice when we lose someone.

I arrived in Tanzania more than a year ago! And I still love it :)

It's nearly the end of September and our school year ends in November (the schedule's set but will undoubtedly change), and unfortunately the rest of the year is probably going to see little teaching. First our midterm break was moved up by two weeks, to the second week of September, because of concerns about scheduling conflicts for graduation and midterms. Then midterms started 3 days after they were scheduled because students who hadn't brought their contribution for the graduation party were sent home to get said money (the day classes began after our break) and we waited until a reasonable number returned to start the tests. (Every student is supposed to contribute for the costs of the party, which is an all-day affair with food and student performances to celebrate the Form 4 students finishing their O-level studies.) The delay in starting the tests meant that they ran into our week reserved for graduation prep, so we only have 1.5 instead of 4 days to prepare. This didn't bother me nearly as much as setting aside 4 days of prospective teaching to practice performances and clean the school grounds. The initial delay, however, pissed me off A LOT -- I was lucky enough to have a friend visiting at the time, though, so I was able to vent to a receptive audience :) Students were ostensibly reminded about their debts before break, but it couldn't have been much because so many came back without their contributions -- and so had to turn around and go home again the day after getting back to school. For these students whose families are already struggling to keep their kids in school, the extra travel expenses do not help! Aside from the money issue, the way the whole situation was handled was simply ridiculous.
We had a school "meeting" starting around 7.30, by which time teachers are supposed to have arrived, on the first day back at school when exams were supposed to start at 8am. It was decided that it would be better to postpone exams and send the students home immediately rather than continue with exams and send them home afterwards (because then they would delay in returning because they'd know that week was reserved for cleaning the school). This was decided a little after 8am, and so teachers were told we could continue teaching according to the normal schedule. The only problem was that the students were all sitting in their classrooms waiting to take tests -- so they had pens and pencils but no notebooks, because notebooks are not allowed when taking tests. The notebooks were in the dormitories, which are locked during classes. I did a quick review for the exam with my scheduled class so that I wouldn't lose more time, and then went to ask the teacher in charge of the dormitories if she would unlock it so that my students (and all the others, although I was apparently the only one who cared because none of the other 20+ teachers had gone to their classes) could have their notebooks. She told me that if she unlocked it then the students would go to "get their notebooks" and not return to class, and anyways the tea/breakfast break was in 45 minutes so there wasn't much time left and the students would be told then, so no worries. I proceeded to do the same type of review in another class before the break, and finished up the other classes after the break. So from 7.30-10.10, all of Forms 1 to 3 (approximately 500 students) were sitting in their classrooms with no way to study and no idea what was going on. After breakfast, they were allowed to take their notebooks into the classroom but were still not told about the schedule change until after school! And in all this time, I did not see another teacher enter any of those classrooms. (Form 4 was having classes as usual because their National exams are in a few weeks, so that meant maybe 1 of 4 teachers went to their assigned class.) I would be so angry if I were a student in this country! Families scrounge and sacrifice to send kids to school and then the teachers don't teach, schedules change and students' opinions/feelings/rights are rarely considered. Aaaaaaaaaarrrrrg!

One last note on this whole schedule and administrative debacle -- I helped the secretaries type up our exams again, because I type so much faster. My school is relatively wealthy and fortunate because we have a computer and a big printer machine, so as long as we have money for paper and toner we can print our own tests. This is awesome, considering that most schools have these crazy hand-crank photocopy machines that make unreadable copies, which is fun for test taking! Anyways, so even though exams were scheduled to start on Monday, the secretaries found me and asked me to help them type because they hadn't finished. I did, on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday. The whole idea of being ready on time isn't quite as important as at home.

On to graduation! The graduation party for Form 4 students is the 25th of September, before the national exams that determine whether or not they pass -- and, thus, whether they officially graduate. Teachers will be grading midterms for a while, some will have to help with the national exams, and after the exams some will be called to grade the tests. All of this means that my expectations of teachers entering the classroom are lower than usual for the rest of the year (maybe you thought it was impossible, but turns out it's not). My current hope, which I hope wont turn out to be too far-fetched, is to not have my classes interrupted so that I can at least go to teach my periods. I'll also try to steal extra periods, but there might be too many disturbances to squeeze in more than the scheduled periods. Then I expect we'll close up shop soon after teachers return from marking the national exams, so finals and the end of the term will be before the scheduled last week in November. Then there'll be more grading and administrative stuff (using carbon paper to make sure there are 2 copies of each report card we write) before I'm able to focus on my life skills/health classes with the older students and visit other PCVs' villages!

Graduation is a big deal here, which makes sense considering the small percentage of kids who even go to O-level at all, but while I accept the cultural significance and am excited to participate, it's still odd for me that everyone thinks it's necessary to have a huge celebration BEFORE the outcome is known (and the majority of our students will fail the national exam) and to take away precious teaching time to prepare for that celebration. Anyways, I've been put on the food committee -- can you imagine cooking for 800+ people? I can't. We had our first meeting on Wednesday to plan out the logistics. I found out that the cooks make 200kg of rice for the students on rice days. Whaaaaaaaaaaat!! We're going to have chicken (I'm not sure how many), cow (I think only 1....), and fish along with plain rice, leafy greens cooked in oil, and pilau (rice, potatoes, garlic, onions, and meat made together with a yummy spice mixture). On the party day, we'll provide tea in the morning, all of the above food in the afternoon, and chips (wedges/thick french fries) and meat at night. Oh, eggs are also somehow going to be in there, sometimes hardboiled and sometimes cooked with the chips (to make chipsi mayai, a delicious "fast-food" that I am repeatedly told would be a hit in America and a great way for me to make lots of money -- by Tanzanians). Thursday morning we are meeting to start sorting the rice... more than 200 kilos worth. We sort rice because there are stones in it, although it's still a good idea to chew carefully because sorting rarely catches everything. Most of the stones are tiny shards about the size of a grain of rice, but I have seen some clunkers the size of marbles! It's the small ones that do the damage, though, because you're bound to feel a stone the size of a marble pretty quickly. If, on the other hand, you bite down too hard on a small one, you might be going to Nairobi for dental. I'm looking forward to spending time with the other people on the food committee, but I'm pretty sure I'll have had enough before I'm through.

The weather's gotten really warm -- I'm down to 2 or 3 blankets from 5 and I no longer need to have my stove on at night. The sun is REALLY strong and by late morning I've been going outside in just my skirt and a t-shirt. And I can see the heat shimmering in the distance. The dust is still incredible, in some places it's inches deep and buses have stopped running! I've put plastic over my windows and makeshift doormats under my doors to stop the dust from getting inside my house, but my hair still gets insanely dusty just from passing vehicles. I'm not sure that I'm wishing for mud, though, because that makes travel a lot more difficult and because I like the sun a lot, so I'm not looking forward to the rainy season when I see it (maybe) once a week :( The rainy season will mean the end of the term, though, so it will herald a long break full of hanging out in the village, traveling, friends and family!

I still get tired of being the outsider and alternate between good-naturedly joking with people who call me "mzungu," ask for money or candy, or talk bout me in Kiswahili and ignoring them completely (or sometimes staring them down). (On that note, I made 2 small children cry today :( both under 3 years and happy until my white skin approached them.) But sometimes I do feel very integrated, welcome, and accepted in the community, so I try to focus on that and put myself in their position and imagine how strange it would be to see someone as outwardly different show up for the first time. It's just hard to think that even though 2 years sounds and sometimes feels like a long time, it's not much of anything to the community in general. That's why I think it's important for PC to place volunteers consecutively at a site a few times, so that we can build on previous work. Because although I think a longer time commitment is more helpful, I know PC's numbers would reduce drastically if it were longer than it already is. But then again, there are so many villages that we can work in, so we've got to go to new ones as well! I'm the first volunteer here, and I'm really happy about it. Sometimes it's difficult to see other volunteers who are the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th PCVs at their sites and all the relationships and activities they could just slip into, as well as just having the community be used to having a PCV around (even if they get called by a former volunteer's name or, as happens with one friend up north, they are incorrectly called sir or madam -- he's the 4th or 5th volunteer but the first male, so all the little kids say "good morning madam!"). But then again they also have to deal with deciding to continue or discontinue projects or relationships from the previous PCV and being compared to them. Overall, I like being the first PCV here.

Some Tanzanian habits and norms have snuck up on me, which can make for some odd realizations. Tight clothes and seeing women's knees revealed come to mind immediately -- though only here, not when I see pictures from home. I've actually been almost uncomfortable sometimes when I see a foreigner in borderline-appropriate clothes (borderline because it's a foreigner wearing them, on a Tanzanian it would clearly be over the border) like tight jeans, though at home it never bothered me (although I may not have been comfortable wearing something, it didn't bother me if someone else did... right? Or am I having a selective memory?). Another thing is breasts and breast-feeding; breast-feeding is natural and happens all the time in public here. If a kid's fussy on the bus or in church or walking through town, no biggie, just feed him/her. I've seen women walking down the road and buying things in stores and singing in church while breast-feeding a child. And I couldn't even count the number of times I've had a conversation with a women who was breast-feeding or who pulled out a breast to start breast-feeding during a conversation. But I wonder if Tanzanians would be so non-chalant about a white breast? I mean, what if a foreigner (I'm equating this with white skin because that's how Tanzanians differentiate between Africans and Tanzanians -- the word mzungu means foreigner, but is really a designation of skin color) pulled one out to feed her kid in public? Most foreigners here are white, but I'd also be curious to see the reaction to an East Asian or Middle Eastern or South American or Central American or Pacific Islander (or...or...or) foreigner doing the same thing. I've made a promise not to test out my theory though, so I may just keep on wondering forever :) And while breasts are fine in public and not considered sexual, thighs are hugely so -- hence why tight clothes and bottoms above the knee are scandalous. I had some friends stay over last week, and at 2 different times, 2 different female friends were wearing shorts around my house and I found myself surprised as well as drawn to but trying not to look at their thighs! WEIRD!

That's it for now, hope you're doing well and enjoying the fall!