Farewell, Tanzania

I'm home.

RELIEF
is getting home 24 hours later than expected after spending a full day stuck in the Nairobi airport, and then almost a full day in London. With all my bags (after being transferred from plane to plane an uncountable number of times).

JOY
is coming home to the people I love, hearing voices and seeing faces. Playing a song on the piano, brushing my teeth without using bottled water, taking a warm shower for as long as I want, and eating what I want, when I want it, without it being boiled, cooked, or peeled. Christmas, New Year's, the holiday spirit, and general happiness all around (I can feel it in my fingers...and in my toes...?).

SADNESS
is already missing those left behind, knowing that this life-changing event is over and now I have to move on with my life.

REGRET
is wishing that I could have done more, knowing that I could have, knowing that I didn't.

PRIDE
is knowing that we did make a difference, testing over 700 people, teaching almost 8,000. 700 people who know their status, 8,000 who can protect themselves from the world's deadliest virus.

INSPIRATION
is working with so many talented, dedicated, and motivated people, learning about how an NGO works, how the non-profit world fits in with the rest of the society, and how I can use what I've learned to make the world a better place.

- - - - - -

I made it! Doubters, show yourselves now!

The last week in Marurani was tedious, frustrating, but quite cleansing. As an SIC organization, even in the last week of low energy and lack of motivation, we managed to test several hundred, and teach almost 1,000 people. Walking through the village on the last morning, I felt more comfortable than I've felt in a village at any point. Maybe it was partially my happinness that I was leaving, that the night before was my last (perhaps ever) cockroach infested shower, and that afternoon was my last lunch of rice and beans. But it tells me a lot about how I've grown. I can speak the language (not fluently, but enough), I can walk down the street and feel safe, I know how this society works.

The summer program is only 6 weeks in the village, as opposed to 10. Trust me, it makes a huge difference. Working with SIC for 4 weeks longer allowed us to dig even deeper into the workings of a fledgling NGO, an experience that has undoubtedlty changed my entire outlook on the concept of global charity, and probably steered my future in at least a slightly new direction. Also the extra 4 weeks allow you to absorb the culture that much more. Living in two villages, which seem so similar on some levels, but were actually immensely different, was a much more enriching experience.

It's weird to say that 3 months is life changing. Peace Corps volunteers dedicate 2 years of their lives to their work. Others move around the world helping people for years, decades at a time. And here I am declaring that not even 4 months of work in just one foreign country has left me a changed person. I'm not saying that my outlook on life has changed completely; I'm not going to come back performing tribal African rituals or with a new taste in clothes and music. I haven't changed inherently as a person any more than any 3 month period of someone's life allows them to change. But I will carry these 3 months with me for a long, long time. I will carry the faces of the children we taught, and I will carry the gratitude of the communities we were graciously invited into.

So now it's my responsibility to use all of my experiences to infuse my art for the next who knows how many years of my life. I definitely want to make at least one film somehow related to the to the AIDS pandemic. Maybe a book will come of it? Most certainly some sort of story for a magazine...if I figure out how to shop that around. Not really sure what will be the concrete result, but I know for sure that this experience has left an unforgettable footprint on the rest of my life.

I miss you already, Tanzania. But, wow, it's good to be back.

Last Chance

Yesterday morning, I got up at 8 a.m.

To put this in perspective...I haven't gotten up after 7 a.m. for over a month. Even weekends, getting a late start means 7:30, out of the room and eating breakfast by 8 (a good breakfast is white toast, some sort of egg...and recently, corn flakes with a banana), and then out and around. Last night I stayed up past 11. Woah. Past 10, woah.

So this is our last weekend in Arusha. By this time next weekend I will be sleeping in a hotel on the sandy beaches of Zanzibar, and getting ready to wake up so I can live the hard life for 5 days at one of the most beautiful places in the world. This morning we walked to two markets to get some last minute shopping done for homestay families, etc. and I remember just how completely dumbfounded I was when I first arrived in Tanzania. The same walk I did today was completely disorienting and I wanted to take pictures at every corner just so I would never forget this trippy little town in the middle of Africa. People are usually surprised when I tell them I've never been out of North America before (my only outside of US experience is Canada and TJ..), because I guess I handle culture shock pretty well. I'm laid back, decently flexible, and, most importantly, had 6 months to let it sink that I would be LIVING IN AFRICA for over 3 months. It's kind of weird to just go live in Africa, right? But I don't feel like it's weird any more. I'm surrounded by people who have been doing it...SIC, other NGO workers, ex-pats. It's not a bad way of life, just a different way of life.

You buy fruit and vegetables from the ladies down the street. Most clothes are second hand from America for men, and made out of some combination of ultra-colorful fabric for women. Your toilet isn't a toilet, probably a hole in the ground, and probably with cockroaches at night. You shower with a bucket, while fending off the frogs. You wake up to the roosters crowing. Being fat is good, being skinny is bad. Jogging is weird. Football is soccer, and soccer is life.

But you can see every star in the sky at night. And Mt. Kilimanjaro, one of the biggest mountains in the world, for a few minutes every day. The walk between homes is a parade (constantly waving and greeting), and the walk to school is a safari.

Woah it's so close to the end. I can't believe it.

We went to the orphanage one last time tomorrow to say goodbye to the kids. Some fishy stuff has been going on there - a few of the girls in the program have been doing some investigating and trying to figure out how to make life for these kids as good as possible. But my best contribution at this point is just to give them a distraction for an hour or two, bring some bubbles, play a few circle games, maybe throw a ball or two (or 500).

This weekend were also our last dinners in Arusha. Next Friday, the day we move out, is closing dinner, which is at Masai Camp (always at Masai Camp), a restaurant, bar, and campsite. Yep - you can camp at Masai Camp if you want. I don't think I'll miss Arusha's restaurants. I've had more Indian food than I can handle. Some of the more "wazungu" places are supposedly racist. And most of the meat just isn't that good. Plus I'm looking forward to cooking for myself again. I want salmon. Broccoli. I dunno. Just stuff you can't get here. I don't even like cooking.

This past week was frustrating, yet pretty successful. Members of Parliament (MP's as they call them) apparently like to make unexpected appearances in our ward, so we had to cancel our big meeting scheduled for this week. But, thankfully, our big meeting was also canceled last week..and moved to this week, so we did end up teaching 160 people. Then we also, because of scheduling and bad luck, had our testing day on the same day as our teaching, which SIC has never done before. But it worked pretty well - we got 74 people tested, for a total of 89 in Marurani so far! AND, even cooler, because our testing day was the first of 3 that happened last week in our ward, a lot of the Marurani villagers went to the testing days in Mzimuni and Nduruma on Wednesday and Thursday!

So, our village is convinced that we've come to bring HIV to the community. This is a product of town gossip, which seems to become worse and worse every week. The parents are also convinced that we're teaching their children how to have sex by teaching them about condoms. Really, they've turned one 10 minute lesson about condoms into an entire curriculum about how to have sex. And some of them have heard us teach for sure...we've taught one member per household of over 300 households so far! Sure, we answer questions like "what's oral sex?" but that's the closest we get. So on Thursday a group of Mamas stared us down when we went to teach at school.

I suppose it's just one of the challenges we have to face as HIV/AIDS educators in a community. We were lucky in Majengo - the leaders were supportive, the community wanted to learn, and we were accepted as part of the village because of our homestay situation and ability to work as a group. Marurani isn't so accepting. But it's just something we have to deal with. And only one week left!

Part of our way of doing this is sponsoring the first SIC-sponsored soccer tournament among the villages. The concelation game is on Sunday, and the Final game is on Monday, which is our Community Day. Our games have been bringing out between 700 and 2,000 people over the past week or so. The winning team gets a goat. The second place team gets a chicken. Pretty good prizes, eh?

BUT, if we can bring 2,000 to one place, and test just 10% of those people, we can potentially have the best testing day in the history of SIC. We have some factors against us. The kids are no longer in school - so where the kids performing HIV-related songs and raps in the last ward was a main feature of the event, we don't have that this time. Also, a LOT of people still don't trust us, and still don't know why we're here. But we'll see.

We also had seminars this week. The low point was walking an hour to school to find 7 boys there (all the girls were fetching water for their mamas, of course). Two of the boys ran away as soon as we god there. So we had 5. And believe it or not, teaching 5 boys is a LOT harder than teaching 70. Which is how many we had at our close school on the best seminar day. We taught them goal setting this week, and did a few other pretty cool things. It's just sad when you know most of the kids aren't there because either their parents think we're giving them AIDS or they just have so much work to do at home that they can't spare an hour or two of time. Unless of course they've been called to do work at the school. Once a week, each of the students are required to come to school for something like "environmental care learning" and spend an hour dusting off the dirt from the dirt, and the leaves from the leaves. It's really ridiculous.

So next week is our last chance to make an impact in our community. Test more people! Teach more people! Even if they learn one thing, remember it for the rest of their lives, and share it with their neighbor, we've done our job. So wish me luck and off we go!

Also our last week with the wonderful people of SIC. I will have lived with Shujaa for 12 weeks. Except last week I lived by myself because he had to get his wisdom teeth taken out. A discovery he made after it hurt so much that he couldn't sleep, so they did an x-ray to find out that his teeth were growing horizontally, thus pushing his other teeth. So he was in pretty bad pain this week, and couldn't eat or talk. But anyway, I'll probably never see most of these people again. It's horrible to feel sick of some of them (I am), because they live all over the world. Maybe I'll go to London some day. Maybe I'll even come back to Tanzania. But it's sad. I miss home, but I'm going to make the most of my last week with SIC (except when I do campus coordinating when I get back in January...um...APPLY FOR SIC! I might get to interview you!). So I'll hopefully have a lot of good news and fun times to share about my last week in the villages of Arusha.

Til then, best wishes - Happy Hanukkah! - and peace and love as usual,

Devon

p.s. Some people are beginning to wonder what the heck I'm doing with my life now that I'm actually come back to America to start the whole "real world" thing. My plans so far are:

December 21-30/31: San Diego
January 1-6: Los Angeles
January 7-14: New York
January 15 --> forever?: Los Angeles

At this point I'll be in full search of a job somehow related to the film industry. I don't even know exactly what I want yet...I figured I would start looking and see what I stumble across. BUT, if anyone has any connections of course, and knows someone looking for a recent UCLA grad with a lot of film experience, as an office assistant, production assistant, something...i dunno...let me know! My goal is to have a good decent job by February first, and we'll see what happens.

World AIDS Day, winding down

The week in the village was semi-uneventful. About 1/3 of each class showed up to the seminars at our first school, and about 1/4 of each class showed up at our second school. We had a testing day during which we tested only 15 people, and then Nelea led us in a "Problem Tree" exercise, during which we dissected the reasons why people hadn't shown up to our testing day, when 150 people came to the teaching. Our conclusions were: #1) religion #2) stigma and #3) fear. These are issues we can address through education (done and done), but more specifically by going to teach at individual churches and address how getting tested does not in any way contradict religious faith.

The rainy season has brought mild sickness upon all of SIC. We all have colds and flus, and we're all also getting a little bit burned out from the program. It's been a long year, and as our kids are heading into their holiday season and summer break (December = summer!), we still have work left to do. So it's a weird mixture of feelings. I want to be home, but I want to be here. I know I'm going to miss Tanzania three days after I come back. But it wouldn't be so bad to be home right now, even just for a day.

Also, the feelings of leaving a place, knowing that you have done so much, yet could have done so much more, are starting to creep in. Yesterday was World AIDS Day. SIC helped make all the AIDS ribbons for the event, helped set up the entire event, and we were also a large part of the march through town (which was sooo cool! drums, trumpets, signs, signing...way cooler than UCLA's marches, sorry Bruins). The march ended at a soccer field where different AIDS-related organizations set up booths and testing units. Our favorite taxi driver came and got tested by SIC! The day ended with a soccer game between a women's team and an HIV+ team.

SIC contributed a lot to the day's events, but at the end, we still feel we could have done more. We spread awareness, tested people, and educated. And that's what we're there to do. But it's pretty much impossible to avoid even the slightest regret, knowing we've made the effort to come all the way out here, yet still feeling like a little bit more energy, a few more minutes of time, a few more smiles, could have been used to effect just a few more people and make our impact that much greater.

So that's that. This week should be another fairly uneventful week. With the school year officially over, most of what we do is hang around hoping to get the chance to teach one person here, two people there. And really, even though it's slow and monotonous, and we want to be quick and efficient, that is what we're there for. Whether we want to accept it or not.

Until wiki kesho,
Devon