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.