Majengo: Wiki 2

Another week, and the days are moving faster and faster. I thought I would get more homesick as the days went on, but I think I've finally gotten over the hump and am starting to feel kind of comfortable in this land that is so far away from everything I know. It's weird to walk around Arusha and feel anger toward the tourists who have no respect for the culture, have made no effort to learn the language, and simply make stupid decisions. And it's nice to know that I'm not that tourist any more. I keep joking that I want to make a shirt that says, "I'm not a tourist, I'm a volunteer!" Every time I see groups of white people, I shout "wazungu!" in my head (or sometimes outloud) just like the people do here. I know I stand out walking around, but all of us are beginning to feel more and more African. There are still stupid things like the use of toilet paper and brushing teeth that we haven't completely given up on, but there are so many American luxuries that I've sort of just forgotten about. It'll be weird when I get back, that's for sure.

This week we continued school teaching and began working more intensively with other projects that we have to complete while in the village. In addition to teaching the SIC curriculum to our six classes, we are responsible for:

- Community Groups: we have another huge one tomorrow! and Shujaa and I did a short one this week with some young male farm workers, which was good. They were really scared of getting tested though, largely because they've heard that people get really depressed when they find out that they are positive. So we tried to convince them that it's better to know your status, and get treatment, than be ignorant, and probably live a short life in the long run. We're also in the process of setting up community teachings with groups of Mamas, the church choir, and some other groups. Should be good.

- Condom Availability Surveys: we go around to every single store (duka) in the entire village and ask them if they sell condoms. these stores are literally little shacks or huts with windows that you look into to see if there's anything you want to buy. They sell things like soda, soap, batteries, maybe food. The duka owners go to town and get stuff on the weekends, or whenever, so they charge a lot for the stuff because they are the ones going to get it from Moshi or Arusha (the two closest large cities). Only one of the dukas we've been to so far has sold condoms. One has refused to sell. And the rest have said they would be willing to potentially sell in the future. When they say they want to try it out, SIC provides one free box of condoms, and then we explain that if they want to continue selling they can buy them in town. So far we've only distributed male condoms, but we also provide and promote female condoms. All of the ones we promote and provide, both male and female, are made in Tanzania. One duka owner was so excited for his free box of condoms that he gave us free sodas!

- Mapping: These areas are not on Google Maps. In general, these communities are rarely mapped, and extremely spread out. So we're supposed to somehow make an understandable map of Majengo. We'll see how that goes.

- Testing Days: We schedule and run days for the SIC mobile VCT (voluntary counseling and testing) units to come to our village.

- Community Days: A bigger version of the testing day, with games and activities for kids, as well as tables with different topics being taught, and other HIV/AIDS related info. We usually do Ward-wide community days, which would encompass 3 villages, but since my village is so far away from other villages (a half day walk, pretty much), we have to plan and run our own. It's going pretty well. I'm on the SIC Community Day Committee and we've started to plan activities and make posters. Our tentative date is October 30th. Should be awesome!

Also, in order to make our classroom teachings sustainable we have two programs implemented:

- Field Officers: SIC staff members who have offices near the villages and are the contact point person for the leaders and teachers in that area. They also work with Community Health Workers, also trained Tanzanian SIC staff members, who work in the communities for counseling and advising purposes.

- Peer Educators: Our sustainable programs at the schools involve choosing a few outstanding students from each grade level at each school and training them how to continue HIV/AIDS education at their schools and communities. We review all of the information, and also train them how to give class presentations and other leadership and life skills. Also, a teacher is chosen at each school to run the PE program after SIC has left. So right now we're in the process of choosing our PEs and getting ready to start training them.

This week was a very smooth week in terms of teaching. We completed the curriculum at one of our schools, and got pretty far at the others. We've played a lot of games with them, and it looks like they are really learning the material. Their favorite (and ours too), is the ABK song. These are the ABKs of sexual prevention. Acha Kabisa (Abstinence), Baki Mwaminifu (Be Faithful), and tumia Kondom (use a Condom). Some of these kids have rhythm! It's kind of hard to describe in words what it's like to be in a classroom full of yelling kids, dancing and singing, excited to learn about the ways to prevent HIV transmission. They think we're so cool, and we think they are so cool...and it's just so cool to be there. I love being in the classroom. Even if I wake up in the morning and dread the hour long walk to school, the 2-3 hours in the classroom makes the entire day worth while.

Shijaa, the HIV+ 5-year-old at one of our schools, continues to be one our favorite parts of the week. This week, he followed us into one our classrooms and hung onto us for the entire class periods. He's figured out how to take my watch off my wrist, put it on his, and then take it off his and put it back on mine. Which is impressive, considering how sick he is. He can't even really speak. It's really sad. I want to take him home with me.

Speaking of good parts of the week, Jess and I have continued to run almost every day, and it's probably the best part of the day. We run at sunset, the beautiful perfect, clear-skied African sunset, and between and 2 kids (depending on the day) have made it a habit to run with us. They recognize us from school, sing the ABK song with us, and yell out our names, constantly asking "Umechoka?" (are you tired?). It's also a wonderful time of the day for us to clear our heads, and bounce thoughts off of each other. We've run about 20-30 mins each day, but it's enough to make me feel a lot better when I go to sleep a few hours later.

In other news, my family is doing pretty well. We've been eating dinner slightly earlier, playing with kids as usual, and just hanging out a lot. Although more and more of our days are becoming dedicated to SIC work.

Last weekend, Jessica's phone was stolen from her homestay. Kind of a weird chain of events. We think it was a random miner, but we're not sure. And all of our homestay Baba's were pissed off because they felt that it was a personal attack on the family. We never got it back, and we think the sim card was probably pulled out. But we were fully prepared to have the guy meet us somewhere, and then "grab him until he gives it back..." Yea...

Some recent dinner conversations have included:
- a discussion of how fish are kept as pets in America, in tanks, inside, and not just to eat
- marriage practices in the US. Apparently in Majengo, or in my family's tribe, men must bring 3 buckets of soda or alcohol and present it to a woman's family before he wants to marry her. He also must pay a dowry. They asked me how much it costs to marry a woman in America
- another conversation about religion. They laughed at me when I explained that I believe in evolution. They legitimately had never heard that theory before, and could not believe that someone would begin to think that.

My Swahili is becoming better, but I'm still kind of depending on Shujaa. At least I know how to say basic things, and enough to get by in town for sure. When flycatchers (people who try to sell you things on the street) approach us, we either don't talk to them at all, or bust out our Swahili - both methods work perfectly well in dumbfounding them enough to make them walk away. But actually, we've been around long enough so that most flycatchers recognize us when we go to town and we don't get bothered much any more.

In other news, my Baba recently got Malaria, in addition to 2 more SICers. Which means a total of 3 people in my household have gotten in the past 2 weeks. And a total of 3 SICers have gotten malaria in the past 2 weeks, one on each of the 3 major prophylactic drugs (larium, malarone, and doxy - which is mine).

One of the villages attended a funeral this week of a little girl who died of malaria. She was sick for 2 months. Her family was too poor to get her to a clinic, and when she finally made it there, they ran out of malaria tests. So it was too late by the time they realized what it was, and the family couldn't afford the medication. $20 could have saved this little girl's life. Things like that seem so unfair. This village saw several of their students on the floor in hysterics as they grieved. They were asked to put flowers on the little girl's grave. It's just so unfair. My village isn't poor, they can afford to go to the clinic, half of them own motorcycles, and all of them have cows and donkeys. But there are areas around here, even some of the other villages, that are in such a state of poverty that they can't afford to feed their kids more than one meal a day. Even some of the richer families only eat once a day. Things like that are such a wake up call. At one of our schools, actually, the students are so hungry by 12 that they fall asleep during class so we have to have them do stretches or run to a tree and back outside just to keep them awake during our lessons. They also don't drink any water. They bring water to school, but it's for the teachers.

In a little less sad news, there was also a request to talk about the weather, so here goes. The days and nights are usually pretty hot and dry. My village has been having a drought for a few years, but it has rained for 5 or 10 minutes at a time once or twice this week. It gets really windy, and it's really really dusty, so when it gets windy, you can hardly see the house next door. At night, it's usually a good temperature. The nights are beautiful, especially the skies - I can't get over it - except when we see scorpions - kind of scary.

- - - - -

And now it's the weekend. During the weekends we come to town and stay at a hostel on the main road of Arusha town. It mostly consists of eating non-village food, running errands, doing internet, and, little special visits.


Last week, I visited WODSTA (Women Development for Science and Technology Association), with a few other volunteers. I rode a Daladala for the first time, which was quite an experience, but not THAT bad considering I actually had my own seat (that doesn't usually happen, from what I hear). WODSTA is a few year old non-profit aimed at helping women become more efficient and ecologically friendly at home. We helped with some manual labor for a while involving bricks made out of compacted sawdust, and a learned a little about the organization. One of the things that SIC prides itself on is being really involved in the non-profit circle in Arusha. So we have connections to a lot of other organizations that are on the rise, which is really awesome for the future of SIC and all that it may be able to accomplish.

Last weekend, we also experienced our first very, very drunk taxi ride. Most taxi drivers at night, especially on the weekends, are more than slightly intoxicated. But this driver drove on the wrong side of the street for most of the drive, swerving back and forth even more than usual. We were kind of scared for our lives for a moment. But we did make it home.

Also last week, when we went out one night to Via Via again and some of the volunteers witnesses an incident of mob violence that was pretty traumatizing. In Tanzania, if someone is caught stealing, or anything else remotely wrong, other people will start beating them and hitting them, sometimes to death. These "other people" often involve the police. One of the volunteers was so upset that she tried to stop it, but only made it worse. The last they saw was the man being carted away in the back of a car.

This weekend, I visited an orphanage in a village right next to Arusha town. The orphanage was partially founded and funded by two past SIC volunteers, so we have some deep-rooted connections to the place. The building where the 28 orphans live, about half boys and half girls ranging from 1 to 18, has a living/playing area, two small bedrooms, where 12+ boys or girls share a bunkbed and floorspace in each room, and a storage room. There are also 4 women who love the kids, live with them, cook for them, and care for them in every way possible. These women are amazing.

Many of the kids were severely abused or traumatized when they were younger, brought to the orphanage by leaders of their villages hoping to give the children a safe haven. All of the school-age kids in the orphanage attend school, which is great, and the kids certainly eat enough. However, they are still certainly struggling. They seem happy, they sing, they dance, they play, but every day is hard.

For their hardships, they turn to Jesus. We played a lot of games with them, they held our hangs, sang in both Swahili and English, but so many of their songs involved thanking the Lord. Many of these were in English, so some of them probably didn't know what they were saying, but it's still extremely interesting to see how religion has bonded these kids together, and made everything ok even among such horrible hardship. They sing songs about their mothers and fathers, but they don't have parents. And they sing about a Christ that has somehow saved them, when they have so little. It made me really think about the role of religion in so many people's lives here in Africa. Do they turn to God because they need some sort of being to tell them that there is a reason to live? Do they turn to God because they need to believe in something that those around them are believing? Or does their Christianity really benefit their inner being, deep down, to a profound level. I still don't understand religion, I've decided.

I'm hoping to go back to the same orphanage some time soon, and I'm definitely going back at some point during the program. And I also think I want to visit an orphanage in America, and see what I can do.

Next week, I'm going to visit some patients with AIDS. I've been hearing stories about other people's patient visits, but I'll wait to share those until I have mine to share as well.

Thanks for reading, peace and love,

Devon


p.s. I've added a few more pictures...still lots more to go, but it's kind of an update?