I'm back from Kijijini, (village)!!! There is so much to tell, yet so little internet time:



Mdilidili is a twelve hour bus ride from Iringa. It is beautful, but very remote. Our house has electricity, but other than that it's like living in the eighteenth century. We cook on a fire, wash everything by hand, collect rainwater for washing, and boil water for drinking.


Needless to say, I'm terrible at all these things, (Hey! we have machines that do this in America!) My partner, Rehema, has so far only allowed me to wash dishes because I keep using the wrong buckets or pans whenever I do anything else. She told me that I wouldn't make a very good wife. We live with two secondary school girls and another woman just came a few weeks ago and never left. But I like her a lot because she gave me a kitten! I've named the kitten Embe, (mango) because we have a dog in the house named Ndizi (banana) and I wanted to keep with the matunda (fruit) theme. Embe keeps running away to the little store by the side of the main road so every day I have to sheepishly go retrieve her.



We've had a lot of down time in the village. I spend most of it trying to translate a Swahili pamphlet on puberty, so I've become comfortable speaking only in conversations that involve reproductive organs. We've been required to meet will the bigwigs of our village, (the Village Executive Officer and the Village Chairman) in order to start planning educational activities in the community. I spend a lot of time in the meetings saying "what?" or spacing out because I can't understand anything. The VEO and Chairman also start drinking at noon, (they keep asking me to try beer with them) and I've concluded that the Chairman has fallen in love with Rehema.



Despite their sketchy work-hour activities, the VEO and Chairman seem generally supportive of our program. They routinely show up two hours late for meetings or don't show up at all, but that's the culture here. There is no such thing as an appointment, so it is very difficult for anyone to accomplish anything. Besides, people live so far away from each other that they can walk for several hours to attend an hour meeting.



We also work in the local primary and secondary schools. The primary school staff has been very supportive of our work. They've even encouraged us to talk about condoms! The primary schoolchildren are lovely. One of them brought us a bag of fruit and beans to welcome us to the village. Tanzanians are big into sharing, even if they have nothing. They say that if they give the little that they have, God will bless them with even more, (Though I'm still waiting for God to bless me with those 4 AA batteries I gave to Rehema last week).

The poverty is very evident. Most children do not have shoes and their school uniforms are dirty and ripped or about 11 sizes too big. Having no shoes is a huge problem because little worms can get into their feet and cause them to become deformed. Many people end up having trouble walking.

The secondary school has been a different story. The headmaster is very Christian and seems to be unhappy with our presence. First he told us that he had no idea we were coming to the village, then went on a tirade about how we should never talk about condoms and lied to us about the number of teenage pregnancies they had last year, (there were 18, he said there were 3). We finally got him to agree to a day when we could pick peer educators and when we arrived he told us he had "forgotten" about us coming and refused to let us talk to the kids because they were involved in "Environmental Cleaning and Farming Day," which is where they give everyone a hoe and send them out to the fields.

The school system in Tanzania is an unbelievable mess. The test given to pass from primary school to secondary school eliminates almost half of all students. When they get to secondary school they start to learn English and are supposed to be taught completely in English. This rarely happens as most of the teachers don't know English themselves. At the end of secondary school they must take a test in order to get into levels 5 and 6, (Tanzanians have basically an extra two years of high school and most of the time it is at a boarding school far from home). The test is completely in English, so most students cannot understand the test itself. On top of that, the questions are created by Tanzanian English teachers who cannot speak English themselves, so the questions can have multiple right answers, no right asnwers, or don't even make sense. The failure rate is so high that the government has lowered the passing grade to 30%.

Even FURTHER, if you manage to graduate from level 6, (which is where my partner Rehema and the other SPW Tanzanian volunteers are right now) you must take another test to apply for university. Rehema is awaiting her results, which should be ready next week. She has been very nervous about it even though she thinks she did well. But that's not the problem. Apparently the people who grade this test are drunk all the time, so whether you pass or not depends on whether the grader can see straight when he's marking your test.

Which leads us to drinking, which is another huge problem. Many of the villagers cannot afford beer or Konyagi so they drink "ulanzi" which is a homemade bamboo alcohol. Though I haven't noticed too many drunk people in my own village, some of the other SPW volunteers have told me that EVERYONE in their village is drunk all the time, including the Village Executive Officer, Chairman, and even the teachers, (before and during school!). However, every single day I'm offered bamboo juice from random people on the side of the road. (For the record, it supposedly makes white people violently ill).

On the up side of things, I did my first male and female condom demonstration. It was done in a mud shack with no electricity and we used a banana and a toilet paper role for the penis/vagina, respectively. We were training our Community Action Group, (CAG) which are 16 handpicked people chosen to help organize educational activities for the community. Of course only 5 people showed up, (2 hours late) and they promptly invited me out for bamboo juice afterwards, but they did seem generally interested in the presentation as it was happening.

In other wacky news, they found a female wizard in my village. Apparently someone found a woman lying on the road, screaming, just wearing underwear. They brought her back to the hospital where she started speaking "her own language," that nobody could understand. Rehema told me that the wizard has killed lots of people before, but I'm not sure how anyone would know that if they can't understand her. I'm pretty sure the wizard is just a lost SPW volunteer.

Also, it rains at least 7 hours every day. This is good on the one hand because we don't have to go fetch water from the faraway pump. Though one day, when it didn't rain, Rehema and I went to fill our buckets. All the women here carry things on their heads. They are amazing. They could carry a bundle of sticks, a bucket of water, four babies and a pot of ugali on their heads at one time without using their hands. When I first arrived in village, a ten year old girl grabbed my 25lb suitcase from me, plopped it on her head and started walking away. Rehema, always trying to make me better wife material, insisted that I carry the bucket on my head. I could barely stand up with it so they gave me a small bucket and only filled it halfway. As I walked back to the house, people stopped and stared and pointed at the stupid white girl who was stumbling (and soaking wet by that point). It was humiliating. Like middle school all over again.

The rain also creates mud, (matope - this is my most oft-used word in village). Everyone is always falling. It's like some slapstick African comedy show.

We finished our work early so a few volunteers and I got the chance to travel to a place called Matema Beach, which is on the northern tip of Lake Malawi. It was hell to get there, but it was one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. There are big green mountains, (the Livingston mountains, named after the guy who got lost in Africa for decades a few centuries ago) which go right down into the water. The lake is enormous, like the ocean, but it's so warm that you can swim at night.

Our journey was insane, but that's just the fun of being in Africa. It took us 9 hours to travel 30 miles. For 5 of those hours I was sitting on tire in an insanely crowded daladala being driven by a very drunk man. The driver at one point turned around in his seat to touch my friend's long hair and drove off the road, sending parcels on top of the daladala flying into the forest. At another point, we came across an enormous hole in the middle of the road. Tanzanians, being as they are, just filed out of the bus, (tossing babies to strangers from windows, strapping chickens to their backs) and walked around without blinking. The drunk driver then floored the daladala into the mud around the hole, where it tipped to a 45 degree angle, but miraculously righted itself. Then, without incident, babies were tossed back in the windows and everyone got right back in. Five minutes later we stopped at a town for twenty minutes while the driver had another liter of bamboo juice.

I think I've rattled off on most of the highlights (and lowlights). I'm leaving to go back to village tomorrow at 4 am (ugh) and probably won't reach a computer for another month. We have a meeting in Njombe on my birthday, may 26, so I'll get to the internet by then. Hopefully my birthday won't be spent in a a crowded bus with a terrified baby on my lap staring up at my white face, (they look at us and start crying) but I've got a pretty strong suspicion...