Village Life...

So, I have finally uploaded more pictures! I'll add more in two weeks when I'm back in Iringa so you can get the whole experience. For now, here's the address:
http://www1.snapfish.com/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=610376015/a=138243337_138243337/

I'm back from 6 consecutive weeks in the village! Living in an African village is sort of like living in a sitcom. There are so many wacky characters that you run into every day. It's kind of like Twin Peaks, third-world style. We don't have a lady that talks to logs, but we do have a crazy person that runs up and down the main road screaming.

Where to start? well, we're finally getting into the thick of things. I actually started teaching health to both the primary and secondary schools...alone. Rehema had to go home to fill out loan forms for university. She said she'd be gone for 4 days. She was gone 3 weeks. So it was pretty interesting to trudge through a sexual health curriculum in broken Swahili. On my first try, I conducted an hour-long session on "what is AIDS?" to the primary school students, complete with diagrams and posters with copied phrases from Swahili books. At the end, I asked them to write down their questions, (because I'm usually not able to understand them) and half the questions were, "What is AIDS?" So, uh, we're probably going to have to go over that topic again.

The secondary school students were a little more understanding. They all had many questions and were very accepting of my mispronounciation of bodily fluids.

I also managed to conduct a community seminar by myself on using male and female condoms. Our village chairman had organized that all the seminars take place at the local bars...which are basically collections of thatched huts where people drink ulanzi, (bamboo liquor) out of buckets. So, I managed to teach 32 people how to use condoms...and only some of them were totally wasted.

I've also started to teach English in the secondary school to Form 1 (high school freshman). The head of the school has been begging us to do this since we arrived because they only have 4 permanent teachers for 500-600 students. When I asked what I should teach, they just told me, "oh, you know, the students need to know nouns and verbs and stuff like that." So I have a lot of creative license with my lesson plan. They love verb conjugation races and also when I act out nouns and verbs because I look like such an idiot.

Kyler, another SPW volunteer who lives in a village 10 minutes from Mdilidili and who works in the same secondary school, has also begun to teach English. My favorite story of his is when one student asked what the past tense of "lion" was (lioned, duh).

The school is run pretty horribly. The students spend most of the day waiting in classrooms because there are so few teachers. Half of the time the teachers don't actually show up for class - they just give a student their notes to copy on the board so the class can copy from that. There is no accountability for the teachers because the headmaster doesn't care and there's no accountability for the headmaster because nobody ever comes to check up on him. For example, the Tanzanian government requires that all secondary schools teach the students how to use condoms, but the headmaster refuses for us to even talk about condoms because of his own religious beliefs. I showed up one day for class and apparently they had cancelled everything to give corporal punishment to all the students who had been truant that week, (roughly 3/4 of the school). The students would run through a line of teachers who would whip the boys on the behind with a bamboo stick and whip the girls on their hands. In another incident, rocks had been thrown at a teacher's house and they cancelled school for two days to do a thorough investigation. They ended up beating a student until he gave a few names of people who (may or may not) have thrown the rocks. So I'm basically teaching in Guantanamo Bay.

The demographics of my village are very strange. There are millions of children and students, many young people and a gaggle of bibis, (grandmothers). But there are no middle-aged people. My guess is that they are either out working in the fields or they live in faraway villages and send their children to live in Mdilidili because the schools are so close. The bibis are definitely one of my favorite parts of the village. They are so old-school African. They look about 400 years old and wander around barefoot with walking sticks, looking completely lost. None of them has more than three teeth and they wear these colorful pieces of fabric called kangas. Kangas are another very African thing. Women here use them as shirts, skirts, baby slings, headscarves, towels, mops, barf bags, hell, you could probably fry a kanga and eat it if you wanted to. Rehema asked me once if we had kangas in the United States. When I said no, she asked, "well what do women use to give birth?"

That's another question I love:
"Do you have fire in America?"
"Do you have ugali in America?"
"Do you have dinosaurs in America?"

Anyway, back to bibis. The bibis love to party. They are the biggest drinkers in the village, (which is saying a lot because everyone loves drinking here) but that could explain why they seem to get lost in the cornfields so often. They also love talking to me. They stumble up to me and grab my hand and won't let go until they've greeted me about thirty different ways in Pogwe, the tribal language of the region. I always sit in the bibi section when I go to church, because I think it's funny to be a tall white girl in a sea of tiny bibis. I have started to go to church every Sunday because everyone will think there's something wrong with me if I don't. Church is two hours long and it's the only thing in Tanzania that starts on time. It's also a good way to see everyone in the community. I've also recently joined a church singing group. I just kind of mouth the words because I don't know the songs, but I can do the funny dances they do to each of the songs.

This post is only half finished, but I'll be back at a computer in two weeks. Til Then!