MAJENGO!

On Thursday morning we took the long drive to our villages out of Arusha. Majengo is actually the farthest away from Arusha, and something like a 4 hour walk from our homestays to the next closest village. So we're pretty much stranded. But it's also good because we can really get to know our community.

I live in one of the three houses in Majengo that has electricity. And boy, are they proud of their electricity. Our house is a little smaller than my apartment, the living room is the size of a small bedroom, and our bedrooms are the size of our beds. The walls, both inside and out, feature cracking brightly colored paint jobs. We don't really have any other decorations on our walls, but Joyce's home has a picture framed picture of Arnold in some sort of wrestling costume over the doorway. And a jesus clock. There are a lot of jesus clocks around, most without batteries...so they just sort of sit there as decoration.

All three of our homestay families are part of the same family, which is probably one of the most wealthy families in the area. My Baba and Mama are the grandparents of the family, and their youngest daughter, Rebecca, is 17. Our other kakas and dadas (brothers and sisters) are all grown up have their own kids. Two of their sons own the other homestay houses and thus are the Babas of Jess/Laura and Joyce. So all of our families are extremely related, meaning they are at each other's houses all the time, we are always welcome to go back and forth between the houses to play with the grandchildren/children, and, because each home is only a 5 minute walk from the other, it's a pretty nifty situation.

In our home, there are always people, everywhere. The main industries in Majengo are mining and farming. And because we are one of the closest villages to the mines, we also have some of the most uneducated people living in our area. We can't actually go the mines to teach on a regular basis, but we are hoping to get a large contingent of SICers to actually take a trip out there one day and teach during their lunch break or something. Mining men are at such high risk because they are away from home for long periods of time, miss their wives or girlfriends, and thus find prostitutes and insist on not using condoms. It's really horrible. But we also truly believe that these men will want to hear what we have to say for the most part once we start telling them how they can save their lives.

Laura and Jess's Baba is a miner, but a legit miner, while my Baba runs a big farm. We actually also own some of the only vehicles in town, including a tractor and a large truck that comes home full of maize almost every day. I practically live on a farm, so we also have several cows, goats, sheep, donkeys, a dog, a cat, and too many chickens. Sleeping is difficult once the sun rises because the roosters decide it is time for the entire village to wake up. And thus, the family wakes up, and then radio turns on. Since we do have electricity, my family sure does like their radio and we frequently listen to Bongo Flavor (Tanzanian Hip Hop) and American R&B, with a mix of gospel music on the side. Starting at 6am. Until about 10pm. Yea, they like their radio.

Eating is a big deal here. If I go visit one of the other homestays, I have to eat otherwise it's rude. So sometimes I have 2 lunches. And maybe two dinners. The most important thing in this culture when having a guest over, is to feed them, especially chai. So I have a lot of tea. A LOT of tea. I've been eating a lot of starches, such as Ugali, which is a mixture of flour and water that we eat with our hands - just a stomach filler, and lots of rice and lots of potatos. We eat cooked/fried vegetables pretty frequently, and a lot of bananas (they're sort of like dessert, except extremely plentiful and very cheap). I've eaten goat, a few types of fish, beef and chicken, but the meat in general hasn't been sitting well with me... I'd say in general most of us have stomach pains of some sort on a regular basis. It's because we're eating so much grease and oil all the time. Oh, what I would do for a fresh green salad right now. We can't eat raw fruits in vegetables, unless they have been peeled, because the water here is so bad that it can give people amoebas. Actually, Laura got an amoeba. Not fun. Clearly, between Laura and me so far, our village is slightly bit cursed.

Anhway, we also pray before every meal, and before bed. I don't understand any of it, and it's kind of awkward, but it's really sweet to see my Mama, who is a 60 something year old lady extremely proud of her family and home, sitting on the couch and praying.

And along that line, when I said I didn't have a religion, my family got really excited and they offered to baptise me.

Our kitchen is located right next to our choo (the "toilet" and shower), which is a hole in ground in shed near the back of the house, so it's definitely an experience to wonder what the food will smell like during the next meal. That and our animals have free reign of the property (hence the goat on the bed incident).

So I won't go into 100% of the gruesome detail, but let's just say that on Friday morning, everything that I had eaten on Thursday, was no longer in my body and instead had come out of my mouth. Still kind of gruesome, sorry.

For those of you who have not had malaria (so...everyone except Amber), it's not fun. It's sort of like the flu, except by far the worst flu I've ever had. Thankfully, after neck/back aches, shortness of breath, horrible stomach pains, vomiting (couldn't eat for a few days...people said I lost weight...that's bad...), and just general tiredness, I pretty quickly realized that something was wrong and they took me to a clinic that night. I caught it early, so I'm lucky. It's not really life-threatening in Tanzanian, because it's a fairly gentle strain, but it's still good we caught it early. I spent the weekend in town, so I missed a few cultural experiences over the weekend, but it could have been a lot worse. But I'm all better - yay! I have my appetite back finally and I'm trying to fatten up. Many of my friends have even offered some of their extra fat to me, which is very generous of them. haha.

This week we also did our first teachings. I'm actually running short on time now, but they were pretty amazing. In each school we teach a total of 3 classes, standards 4, 5, and 6. Both of them, Engatani and Majengo, are primary schools (like our elementary school, so it's sort of equivalent to grades 4, 5, and 6). Instead, except of moving on to secondary school automatically, most people stop their education at level 6. Some don't even start school until they are 9 or 10 years old, or even older, so our students range in age from 8 to 19. But we can tell they're learning. And after the second day in the standard 4 class that I taught with Joyce last wedesday, the kids asked "when are you coming back?" "can't you come every day!?"

On tuesday, instead of teaching in the schools like we usually will, we were invited to a village meeting with 130 people. The village leaders required one member from each major household to attend the meeting, because they were to talk about bringing more electricity to the village. But, the leaders forced everyone to show up 3 hours before the electricity representative was to come...so that we could teach them!! Crazy. So Shujaa and I taught about 80 men, and the girls taught about 50 women...the entire SIC curriculum. We got some crazy questions (i'll tell you later), but it was SO AWESOME to teach so many people and answer their questions and clear up misconceptions about HIV. SO COOL. So we stood under a large tree near a water storage container in the middle of the village and taught the entire curriculum, condom demonstrations and all, as the men laughed at us, but now can't wait to get tested for HIV. That's why we're there.

I figured out that for sure I NEED to be a teacher at some point in my life. I need to have control over a classroom and be able to watch my kids learn and it's just such a rewarding and amazing experience to stand in front of a room full of excited eyes and watch as it clicks and they learn something. We've only taught in each classroom once or twice, and the preparation and lull time can get on our nerves, but it's all worth it once we step into those mud-brick rooms with dirt floors and dilapidated wooden desks and they yell out the cells of the immune system with such glee. Haha. Oh the little things...

So yea, having had malaria and all, I decided not to climb Mt. Meru, the 5th highest mountain in Africa, this weekend. And instead I am enjoying a relaxing weekend in town. We love our villages, but the culture shock is a little intense at times and it's nice to get away for a little while. Which is why I will be back here in town almost every weekend for the next 10 weeks.

It's starting to hit me more and more that people actually have HIV here. It's not just a ghost we talk about, trying to prevent it from happening, but not really understanding that it's here. We met an 8 year old HIV+ orphan at one of the schools. One of the teachers has taken him in along with the responsibility of getting his medications. He is clearly sick, and so shy, and we played with him for about 30 minutes between our classes on thursday...and it just hit us. There is so much we can do to help. But, there still is only so much we can do. We can't save every orphan, or help every HIV positive person in the country. The best we can do is educate. And there you have it.