New Days

Since starting the Peace Corps, I have become exposed to many holidays that I never would have recognized before.  To begin with, there are the Tanzanian holidays, e.g.: Julius Nyerere Day (TZ’s first president), Nane Nane (Farmers), May Day (Workers), Unification Day (Tanganyika+Zanzibar=Tanzania). Then there is the constellation of  “World ____ Day”s , which are almost exclusively recognized by Peace Corps communities, e.g.: World AIDS Day, World Women’s Day, World Tree Day, World Malaria Day.  In America, we make up holidays to sell more greeting cards; in the Peace Corps world, we make up holidays to write more grants and have events. 

April 25^th is World Malaria Day, and in recognition of this we hosted a 3-day malaria training in my village this past week.  Actually, I’m proud to say that this event was completed without a grant (you don’t need money to do work!), although it couldn’t have been done without the help and expertise of my fellow volunteer, Steph.  Malaria trainings are Steph’s bread and butter and I was grateful to take advantage of her expertise. 

On the first day we taught 55 sixth graders some basic facts of malaria while dispelling some myths.  Some of these facts were new to me when I came to Tanzania and might be new to some of you in non-malaria endemic areas:

-Malaria is spread by only a specific type of mosquito: the female anopheles mosquito. 

-Female mosquitoes bite humans in order to develop their eggs, but rely on sources of sugar for energy.  That means that the only mosquitoes that are biting you are females, the males are off finding food from fruit.

-The anopheles mosquito is active only at night.

We were very happy with the pre vs. post-test results that showed our students learned a lot, despite the flippant attitude among many Tanzanians that malaria education here has reached saturation.  The most important thing that they learned was that mosquitoes get infected with malaria after biting a person with malaria—not all anopheles mosquitoes have malaria—and that there are points in every stage of the transmission cycle where spread can be prevented.  The students who performed the best on the test and in class were invited to teach the 7^th and 5^th graders the next day and I was so proud of them and their leadership skills!

The next day was also a success teaching about pre-natal prophylaxis for the mamas at the health center.  As is typical with teaching at the health center, there were just a few engaged mamas who asked great questions. (Q: Is there malaria in America? A: Yes, there is, actually*).  As an unfortunate coda to the event, a woman having a miscarriage was brought in to the health center who had been hiding and denying her pregnancy for at least seven months.  The child is alive although very premature and drinking breastmilk drawn from the mother.  I couldn’t help but think that her unfortunate situation really underscored how crucial it is for pregnant women to get pre-natal check-ups and prophylaxis.

Altogether, our 3-day event was a huge success and completely exhausting.  Thank you so much to Steph and to everyone in Itiso who helped make it happen!

There is currently an initiative across Africa to interrupt malaria transmission in Africa through vector control and education.  Stomping Out Malaria in Africa stompoutmalaria.org/

* Although 90% of the 1 million malaria deaths are in sub-Saharan Africa, malaria can be wherever anopheles is.  Although malaria transmission in America was stopped in the 1950s, there are still a few reported cases of malaria usually acquired from travelling.  http://www.cdc.gov/features/dsmalariasurveillance/

New Days

Since starting the Peace Corps, I have become exposed to many holidays that I never would have recognized before.  To begin with, there are the Tanzanian holidays, e.g.: Julius Nyerere Day (TZ’s first president), Nane Nane (Farmers), May Day (Workers), Unification Day (Tanganyika+Zanzibar=Tanzania). Then there is the constellation of  “World ____ Day”s , which are almost exclusively recognized by Peace Corps communities, e.g.: World AIDS Day, World Women’s Day, World Tree Day, World Malaria Day.  In America, we make up holidays to sell more greeting cards; in the Peace Corps world, we make up holidays to write more grants and have events. 

April 25^th is World Malaria Day, and in recognition of this we hosted a 3-day malaria training in my village this past week.  Actually, I’m proud to say that this event was completed without a grant (you don’t need money to do work!), although it couldn’t have been done without the help and expertise of my fellow volunteer, Steph.  Malaria trainings are Steph’s bread and butter and I was grateful to take advantage of her expertise. 

On the first day we taught 55 sixth graders some basic facts of malaria while dispelling some myths.  Some of these facts were new to me when I came to Tanzania and might be new to some of you in non-malaria endemic areas:

-Malaria is spread by only a specific type of mosquito: the female anopheles mosquito. 

-Female mosquitoes bite humans in order to develop their eggs, but rely on sources of sugar for energy.  That means that the only mosquitoes that are biting you are females, the males are off finding food from fruit.

-The anopheles mosquito is active only at night.

We were very happy with the pre vs. post-test results that showed our students learned a lot, despite the flippant attitude among many Tanzanians that malaria education here has reached saturation.  The most important thing that they learned was that mosquitoes get infected with malaria after biting a person with malaria—not all anopheles mosquitoes have malaria—and that there are points in every stage of the transmission cycle where spread can be prevented.  The students who performed the best on the test and in class were invited to teach the 7^th and 5^th graders the next day and I was so proud of them and their leadership skills!

The next day was also a success teaching about pre-natal prophylaxis for the mamas at the health center.  As is typical with teaching at the health center, there were just a few engaged mamas who asked great questions. (Q: Is there malaria in America? A: Yes, there is, actually*).  As an unfortunate coda to the event, a woman having a miscarriage was brought in to the health center who had been hiding and denying her pregnancy for at least seven months.  The child is alive although very premature and drinking breastmilk drawn from the mother.  I couldn’t help but think that her unfortunate situation really underscored how crucial it is for pregnant women to get pre-natal check-ups and prophylaxis.

Altogether, our 3-day event was a huge success and completely exhausting.  Thank you so much to Steph and to everyone in Itiso who helped make it happen!

There is currently an initiative across Africa to interrupt malaria transmission in Africa through vector control and education.  Stomping Out Malaria in Africa stompoutmalaria.org/

* Although 90% of the 1 million malaria deaths are in sub-Saharan Africa, malaria can be wherever anopheles is.  Although malaria transmission in America was stopped in the 1950s, there are still a few reported cases of malaria usually acquired from travelling.  http://www.cdc.gov/features/dsmalariasurveillance/

Maternity Ward Bathroom

In my village, we are working on a project to give pregnant women a sanitary space in which to give birth. We need a ridiculously small amount of money for this hugely impactful project. Check out the project at this website and contribute to the awesome organization that is helping me do this:

http://appropriateprojects.com/node/1474

Thank you so much to the friends who have already donated $455!  Amazing.  If you have a minute check out this organization--they're awesome.

http://appropriateprojects.com/

The Epic Weather Forecast, Big Parties, Shangazi

Back in September I was very amused by an official report from the Tanzanian government that I found on my counterpart’s desk.  It was a weather forecast for November.  I am no skeptic of the art of weather forecasting (I am a devoted follower of Tom Skilling on Facebook), but c’mon, a weather forecast two months in advance?  Well the 10-page report predicted rains bigger and more frequent than usual that would begin a month early, probably the first week of November.  And I’ll be damned, it started raining the first week of November and it has been exactly as they predicted: huge.  Farmers are very excited about the abundant rain, and I too love the rain—everything is green again plus I’m relieved of the daily chore of fetching water.  However, last year’s rains were very light, so I never saw just how, well, flooded things can get.  My house is at the primary school, across a small stream from the village.  There is a nice footbridge over the stream.  As of this morning, it serves as a nice break halfway through 100 yards of knee-deep wading.  The field around the stream is Flooded.  For mom: I’m sure the water is perfectly clean and there are no parasites in it.  This rainy season I am going to have to a) work very hard at motivating to venture into the village b) pick up more periods at the primary school and c) maintain a generous stock of food and New Yorkers in my house. 

On the first of this month, my village hosted Chamwino district’s World AIDS Day event.  Back in September, I went to the district office to request HIV tests and testers.  Not only did they accept, they said that because I was the first to plan an event, they would do the district event in my village.  It was a nice-ish surprise, because it meant a bigger event, but it also meant…a bigger event.  With a vijana (youth) group, we had a 2-day seminar on HIV peer education, then we planned a weeklong soccer tournament.  At every game they did condom demonstrations, games and skits.  The final game was World AIDS Day.  The night before, an organization from Dodoma came to show a movie about HIV at the health center.  Hundreds of people came to watch, and people started testing and continued until past 1am.  The day of the event, we had traditional drummers from sub-villages (they were amazing), some young people performed raps they had written, our vijana group did their skits, there were many speeches and games.  And then there was a feast! Overall, it was a huge success. 

Tanzanian celebrations are pretty funny to me because they throw this big celebration but everything is for the invited guests.  The district coordinators and officers and chairpeople and school principles and committee leaders and all the fat cats sit in rows under a tent at a table decorated with fake flowers and the performances are all directed to the one very special guest.  Then the villagers crowd around in a horseshoe around the performances.   For a similar event in America, the performances would be directed towards the crowd, directed towards the people they're trying to send a message to.  But in Tanzania, people get really worked up about having a special guest, and the event is for him or her.  The food is all for the invited guests. The day before the event, a student was asking me about the event.  "And when Kikwete coming, tomorrow?" Kikwete is the president of Tanzania.  Um...no.

227 people tested and since World AIDS Day there has been a 500% increase of people asking to be tested at the health center.  Of those who tested 2 people tested positive, which is very low compared to typical rates in Tanzania.  One of those people is refusing to get treatment and tell her husband so that he can get tested, which of course is incredibly disheartening and challenging to say the least.  But the other person who tested positive is an inspiration—she is exceedingly open about her situation, very open to advice and help.  She has already adjusted her diet and she is learning different ways to increase her CD4 count.  We can only hope that that first woman will eventually come to accept her situation after she has had some time to digest her results.  Is it even legal in America do willfully hide your status from your partner?

Since my last post, I have continued with Pre-Form 1 English, the intensive English program for kids going into Secondary school, and it ended this week with school’s closing.  It went pretty well.  There were fewer students than I had hoped for, but it’s hard to get kids to show up to school when school is already out.  But for the kids who did show up, their progress was amazing to see.  Some kids came every day, but others showed up once in a while, and contrasting the abilities of the kids with perfect attendance with the ones who hadn’t been keeping up, their progress was so evident; it made me so proud!  When the new school year starts in January, it will be interesting to see how it works out teaching the curriculum over the course of a year instead of a few weeks. 

In October, I had an amazing visit with my dear Aunt. We visited my village where she tasted ugali, met all my friends and schmoozed with the nuns. And we went on an amazing safari.  We saw the staggering wildebeest crossing at the Mara River, got charged by a rhino, flew in thrillingly small and old planes and identified over 100 new birds to add to my list.  Incredible.  Oh that trip could take up a blog entry all of its own, but for another day.

Nane nane and other updates

I have delayed finishing/posting this blog for a while, obviously…it may be out of date but still accurate.

8/8, the eighth of August, was a national holiday for farmers in Tanzania.  Dodoma hosts the national 8/8 festival.  It was like a county fair but African, and people came from all over to see it over the course of a week.  Each district had displays of their best crops and various products.  Chamwino district, my district, had an impressive display with beautiful veggies, lots of honey and baobob products.  Baobob oil is a popular product selling at around $20/liter, said to help control obesity and perform numerous other health miracles.  Beside the agricultural products, flocks of people showed up to hock crappy chinese trinkets, nice maasai jewelry, used American clothes, and housewares.  Guys rolled in with trucks full of housewares and huge P.A. systems and they rapped rambling sales pitches to Tanzanian pop music for their buckets, basins and bowls as they juggled a housewares acrobatics, launching them into the air and catching them.  As impressive as the spectacle was, I wasn’t moved to buy any buckets. 

The biggest attraction was the menagerie of African animals.  They had surprisingly humane mews displaying a leopard, hyenas, a lion, an enormous tortoise, a chimpanzee, a python, monkeys and other animals.  My friend and I met a couple of wildlife master’s degree students who told us a bit about some of the animals, which was a lucky encounter.  The highlight for me was seeing a 10-frame Langstroth beehive from Arusha.  My beekeeping counterpart/carpenter was in town, so I called him up and we met so that we could look at it together and he was able to talk to a Tanzanian about how it works.  We had already looked at pictures together and I had talked at length about the Langstroth hive, but I was nervous about him building one with only a vague idea of what it should look like.  This was an excellent opportunity to show him a model without having to go out and buy an example.  It was also a relief for me to see that Tanzanians are actually using this kind of hive, and it’s not just me trying to introduce this technology that no Tanzanian is going to use.

And now more than a month has passed since 8/8.  Since then, I have continued teaching, and I was lucky enough to travel to a short training on teaching English.  There is an excellent organization called Village Schools Tanzania that builds secondary schools in villages (in Tanzania, could you have guessed?)  The villages put forward a significant contribution of rocks, sand and bricks, and VST provides the other materials that are difficult to access.  They have a “pre-form” English curriculum, designed so that students can learn the English they should have learned in primary school had they been taught properly, to prepare them to start secondary school.  I am so excited to have materials and a curriculum to help my students! 

It was also fascinating to be introduced to VST.  For whatever reason, I have a reflex to be skeptical of missionary work, but this organization, although started by missionaries, does excellent work with education and HIV/AIDS, and doesn’t seem concerned with converting muslims or translating the bible.  The missionary couple who hosted us have been living in Tanzania for more than a decade, and their approach to development seems a lot like life-long Peace Corps service.  They live modestly and the strength of their work is based in human relationships.  They get paid even less than I do, and they seem to spend all of their time in the village.  They built an HIV/AIDS treatment and counseling center where people can come to get medicine and checkups.  They also send patients with the skin cancer associated with AIDS to receive radiation treatment using designated funds.  It was inspiring to see this model of development that appears to be the most effective of anything I’ve yet to see.  If anyone were to ask for my advice on making donations to organizations in Tanzania, I would first recommend Village Schools Tanzania without hesitation. 

More updates later, for now I’m going to throw this post up so that my mom will stop bugging me to update my blog. Hi mom! 

A To Do

I have been living in my village for more than seven months now.  Where does the time go?   No, literally, what have I spend all these months doing?  Well truthfully, the days are generally filled by ordinary tasks that just take up much more time than they would in America.  For instance, doing laundry by hand:  a time consuming task that could take me all day if I was doing the equivalent of a full load, but I’ll be the first to say that this might be due to my domestic ineptitude rather than the size of the task.  Fetching a 20-liter bucket of water takes around 20 minutes, not including crucial schmooze time with the nuns at the mission, where I fill up every day.  And then just boiling water for breakfast takes about 40 minutes.  These are some of the tasks that set the rhythm for my days. 

Ok, so I can set aside a good chunk of time every day that is spent completing these routines, but then there are the things that are not on this daily to-do list.  For example: taking 40 minutes to individually remove dozens and dozens of ants from a kilo of sugar.  Generally speaking, a lot of my time is spent on Removing Ants From _______.   And then of course waiting takes up a lot of time: waiting for people to show up, waiting for my change, waiting for the bus to show up.  I bet this I true of life in America, too, but trust me--the waiting is on a different level here.  Oh, also I’ve spent a shameful amount of time scanning the shortwave radio’s 100’s of channels trying to find the news in English. 

Another example, of the unexpected things that fill my days, is stumbling upon a Kigogo celebration.   This month being the harvest season, people are feeling flush with money, and so it is the season to party.  I’ve heard some people criticize this as an extravagance—come next February all that money’s gone and food becomes scarce.  But either way, it is fascinating to experience these celebrations. 

Last week I was invited to a party for a young girl on the event of her first period.  I was invited by the girl’s dad!  My dad has been incredibly supportive of me throughout all the stages of my life, but I could never imagine, let alone want at all such a celebration organized by my father!  That aside, the customs observed at such a celebration are really neat.  The girl was wearing beautiful new clothes, henna, beads, bangles and a whimsical headdress.  The girl and some elders of both genders led a procession from the house to a little hill nearby where they placed a gourd on her head and tucked Tsh10,000 (big bucks!) underneath it.  They hooked an axe over her shoulder and then said a bunch of stuff in Kigogo that I didn’t understand.  An old lady had made a small hole in a baobob pod, poured honey inside it, then mixed the honey and baobob fruit well with a stick.  She was dipping the stick into the pod and feeding herself the baobob-honey and then feeding the girl.  The girl did not seem to like it, but the old lady sure did.  Then the girl held two babies, a boy and a girl. 

I found out that the axe symbolizes that the girl should hike up Kinyami, the big mountain by the village and cut down a tree to make a beehive out of it.  The gourd is what she will put her honey harvest into, and the baobob-honey is the food she will make with the honey, and the cash is the money she will make from the honey.  The two babies symbolizes that she will have both boy and girl babies.  Then we enjoyed tasty food and a lot of old mamas playing drums and singing Kigogo songs and that was it. 

As if there was any doubt in my mind as to just what kind of region I am in, I can now be certain that I am in bee and baobob country.  I can already see myself craving baobob when I have gone back to America.  Baobob fruit comes in a thick, fuzzy and bulbous pod.  Inside, the seeds are coated in a chalky layer of fruit.  It tastes pretty tangy and only mildly sweet; it’s a great snack and it also makes a very tasty juice. 

In other news, or rather to add to my “everyday to-do list,” this month I started teaching Life Skills at the secondary school and English at the primary school.  Yeah…I don’t have any background in ESL but the students can use any help they can get.  Likewise I can use any help I can get--please send me your best practices if you have any tips!

Storming the Castle by Night

Some days I just feel like getting under my mosquito net as soon as the sun sets.  This day was one of those days.  I had found another snake in my house, a really small one, but a snake nonetheless, and I don’t trust a single one of them.  I grabbed a stick and killed it myself. Three months ago, I literally ran out of my house screaming.  I am now flaunting this as proof that I am becoming a tough Tanzanian broad.  I still need to work on hoisting a full bucket of water on my head by myself, cooking ugali, working constantly from sunup to sundown with a baby on my back like a real Tanzanian woman…okay so I have quite a ways to go before being tough like a Tanzanian lady, but I am proud of this self defense milestone.  Anyway I found the snake at dusk and at sun down, I was in my net with a book and my stick just in case they work in pairs.   About an hour later, I got a call from a friend and he was outside waiting for me to go beekeeping with him.  At last!  But wait, I said to myself, is my Swahili really still that bad that I didn’t understand that this was the plan for tonight?  No matter, I need to get out of my pajamas and into something to go beekeeping in!  Ah! All my pants are still wet from doing laundry!  Spandex and skirt will have to do. 

Off we went into the night with about four vijana (young people) and flashlights.  When we got to the trees with the beehives, they started a fire and once it made coals, they blew it out so that it would smoke and not give off much light.  One of the vijana climbed a tree to lower a hive and we all turned out our flashlights.  There was the sound of breaking branches (he was climbing a tree in the dark!) and then we could hear when reached the hive because the otherwise silent night filled with the urgent hum of bees.  I took several steps backward.  I was terrified.

Working in the dark, only occasionally using the lamps in short flashes (the bees are attracted to light), they cracked the hollow-log hive open once it hit the ground.  The hum grew even more urgent and again I took several steps backward.  They dragged the two halves just downwind of the smoking coals.  I wasn’t wearing a veil or gloves--hell, I was wearing a skirt!  African honey bees are notoriously aggressive! That’s why beekeepers open the hives at night here, doing this in the daytime is practically unthinkable.  The thought of beekeeping unprotected with these bees...I was resigned to just observe in the dim light from afar.  But after a little while, I mustered up some nerve to go a little closer, then closer, and closer until I was taking out a piece of honey comb with my bare hands.  Soon both my hands were dowsed with honey as I placed comb into the buckets.  The comb was attached in broad stretches across the length of the log.  The honey was concentrated at the periphery and the brood in the center, the same pattern as in any healthy hive.  We basically had to just dig in and grab a chunk of comb and pick all the bees off it, hoping not to get stung.  Chewing on beeswax and licking the dripping honey off my hands, I was feeling very Pooh Bear.

That night we harvested from four hives, and we harvested everything: honey, brood, pollen, keeping the honey separate from the rest.  It was really hard to take part in the destruction of a hive—the brood pattern was perfect and the hive was so healthy, and we just gutted it.  In a stroke of amazing luck, I found the queen on a segment of comb that I was de-beeing.  I called to the vijana and my friend to come see, and the first one to come over started to flick her off—he thought she was just another bee.  When I told them they were looking at the queen, they were amazed.  “I say!” they exclaimed in an adorable Anglicism.  Decades of beekeeping and they had never seen a queen!  They all wanted to hold her, and they asked all sorts of questions about her as she darted around their hands. “How many eggs does she lay? Can she fly? Can she sting? Are all of these bees her babies?”  They took special care to put her some place safe, even though we had just destroyed her hive. 

I can firmly say that that was the last time that I go beekeeping in Africa in a skirt.  Although the spandex blunted many of the stings to my butt and thighs, I definitely learned my lesson.  I was stung two times on my hand, as well, without the buffer of spandex.  For the next two days my right hand was 50% larger than my left!  The sugar high was first to wear off after the adrenaline, then the swelling, but I’m still swooning from my first beekeeping outing in Tanzania.