August 30th, 2011

To catch up: On Sunday we met a few more new teachers, Becca, Alex, Victoria, and Maureen (they are all 20something girls like me and Kelly). Later in the Afternoon Jose and Monica drove us to the Main Market in front of Shop-rite and the Maasai Craft Market.

On the way there I took pictures of the area that we walk through to get to Shop-Rite. There are other parts of town that are more town-like.

The main market is where you an get anything you need from fruits and vegetables to skirts and homewares. You have to bargain with everyone though, because they see the color of our skin and charge us the muzungu price which is usually A LOT more than their regular one. We were just exploring today so we didn’t end up buying anything; We just wandered everywhere. The housewares and vegetable areas are just like any market, people have stalls with all their stuff and sometimes call out to you to enter and look. The clothing people tend to be a little more pushy and bid you, “Welcome to enter.” Nick, Kelly and I were being adventurous and ended up walking around the back of the market and into the fish area (men there were screaming stuff at the top of their lungs and a few were right in my face. We were unsure if they were advertising their fish or maybe bad talking their neighbor’s fish, or what, but it was very loud. We walked by the butchers area where they had the skinned animals hanging up on hooks. They also had something with a bit of fur still stuck on it. We didn’t know what it was at the time, but in retrospect it was probably goat. We also managed to wander behind the scenes to an area that I think was the back of the little cafés. The ladies that watched us go in there were very friendly and helped us with our Swahili so I don’t think we were breaking any rules. I didn’t take any pictures of the market because people here are still shy of cameras (It makes a lot of people nervous because some still believe that the camera will steal your soul and others will ask for money if they think they are in it).

During our wanders, Kelly ended up buying a baggie of dagar, basically little dried fish that look like minnows. They are eaten as a snack and according to the Tanzanian teachers are much better when cooked and served over rice (I think). Her and I tried one once we got back on the bus. They were not salty (which is what I had been expecting because I had eaten salted fish before) Instead they were fishy tasting and it mellowed as you chewed. It did leave a kinda fish tase in your mouth (which while not being pleasant, was not puke worthy)

Kelly tasting the fish...

The bus then drove us over to the Maasai Craft Market. There are stalls set up selling things like beaded wire baskets, kanga material which is the fabric that the women make their outfits out of, scarves, wooden carvings, jewelry, and other crafty things. They really want to sell you things so everybody welcomes you to their stall and a few even step into your way in the narrow hallways so that you have to go in their stall. (One man actually trapped me in his stall and tried really hard to persuade me to buy a scarf. It took several minutes of emphatic statements on my part to get him to move.) They like to overcharge muzungus so you have to bargain them down, but I wasn’t going to buy anything so I didn’t bother. (My money situation right now is a bit tight and I don’t get paid for a while so no souvenirs for now).

We then headed back to campus and had the new staff bbq . The grills they use are pretty cool; they're halved oil drums. We hung around, ate some fabulous food and drank some beer (or wine) and talked.

I’ve been seeing the monkeys a lot around campus now. One morning they sat and watched us eat breakfast. Other times I see them just wandering about or walking on fences. I’m afraid they are going to get into my classroom and tear things up. As it turns out they’ve got some spunk. The male one apparently chased Monica into the computer lab and the patrolled porch so she couldn’t leave. I saw them growling at Ava (Jose’s maid) the other day. It was quite intimidating, every now and then it would run at her (but then again she was throwing rocks at it)

August 27th, 2011

The past few days have been relatively similar. We’ve woken up in time to go and get breakfast form the cafeteria. Generally toast and a fruit like a banana, and then one morning we had a hard-boiled egg. I have no complaints. For lunch we ate out one day and in the cafeteria the next (rice and potatoes and gravy and watermelon). The cafeteria hasn’t been doing dinner because the boarders aren’t here yet and only a few staff are here, so we’ve eaten at Jose’s house or gone to the coffee lodge. (All the meals will be served starting next week)

During the day we generally explore Arusha. One day we (Me, Kelly, Nick and Maria) took a taxi to a little mall. It had a general store and a movie theater. (Bridesmaids is playing mid September and a group of us plan on going)

Yesterday Kelly and I walked to Shop-rite (we think a 2 mile walk one way) without male accompaniment. Turns out you get a lot more attention as two girls alone. IT was nothing dangerous, but guys would scream things at us and a few would try to stop us to talk. One even reached out his hand and like caressed my face as I walked by. We also got quite a few “muzungu” calls. It wasn’t bad and we would walk it again, no problem.

In a break from the general plan, yesterday morning I helped Monica, Doreen, and Sean (a lower primary teacher) assess the lower primary students. Their parents brought them in and we basically played with then to see how they could emotionally handle being at school, what they knew about colors and letters, and how they interacted with the teachers and other students. The kids were all really cute!

On a different day, in the afternoon, I took my kindle and my hammock and set it up between some trees near the athletic fields and read for a while. That was really relaxing and both (the hammock and the kindle) were good investments. The kindle has come in handy when the power is out because I have 3G so I can still check my email. While I was out there John, one of the guards (we call them askari’s) came to investigate. He wasn’t sure exactly what was hanging from the trees but he laughed when he saw it was me.

That same day I saw the troop of monkeys that live on campus. They are called Vervets or blue-balled monkeys which, if you saw them, you would understand. I saw a daddy monkey, possibly a momma monkey and two babies. The babies were the most adventurous and would get fairly close to me but the daddy monkey kept his distance and watched me suspiciously the whole time. They aren’t too big and therefore not too scary (but apparently they like to kill cats for fun). Kelly and I do not approve of that at all as we are trying to befriend/adopt a little calico kitten who lives near the office.

At night we just hang out sometimes on campus and sometimes at the coffee lodge. One night we headed to bed really early to get rid of the last bits of jet lag and last night we watched a movie with Maria and Nick. Heather went out with some people she knew in Arusha and had a really good time, so one of these nights (hopefully before school starts) we’re gonna head out on the town.

I certainly hope Virginia doesn’t fall apart while I’m gone! What with all the hurricanes and earthquakes….I actually think it’s safer in Africa… (oh, one of the office ladies told us yesterday that if you go walking into the coffee plantations across the street you have to be careful because there is a patch of wild forest area near here that has cheetahs!)

Here is the headmaster's porch where I've been doing most of my blog writing and posting.

August 24, 2011

We got up to our first full day in Tanzania! Breakfast is served at 10am this week so me and Kelly got up and showered just a bit before that. We get meals for free through the school so we wandered down to the cafeteria and had had toast an omelet and a banana as well as some interesting instant coffee. After breakfast we decided to walk with Nick to Shop-rite. This involves going straight down Dodoma Road for maybe two three miles. (I haven’t yet taken pictures of all this because I didn’t want to appear too conspicuous.)

The road is lined with various one storey shack-like buildings that house low budget pubs or sketch kinda lookin shops and people are everywhere! There are people sitting around, people selling things, people pulling carts or shooing animals or talking in groups. And then there are the vehicles cars, bus, carts, motorcycles anything with wheels all careening down this narrow road swerving around each other horns blaring. The horn is very versatile. It can say things like “move over” “Don’t step out I will hit you” “I want to merge” “Do NOT merge” “Stop stopping” “I’m trying to get around you” etc. It can say basically anything and EVERYONE uses them excessivly.

The smells, too, can be quite overwhelming. There is a paved sunken ditch on the sides of the road and this tends to be filled with various trash (damp or burning), sometimes excrement, and very questionable looking liquids. I was very careful around those, I did NOT want to fall in.

The name for white person around here is Muzungu and every now and then people will scream it out cars at us. Touristy looking people are generally thought of as having lots of money and therefore get charged more almost everywhere. There can also be issues with pick pocketing.

Despite this the walk is actually quite safe especially when you are in a group. We got to Shop-rite which is a grocery and convenience store and looked around. We purchased some food and a few house things (even though our apartment is not ready) Here’s a kinda crappy pic. Sorry about that...I call it an apartment but it’s really more of a house. We're not sure which one will be ours but they're all the same anyway.

And then we walked back (I used the bags that Deb and Gram gave me and they were fabulous!) On the way back, we accidentally saw a naked man washing in one of the culverts. Whoops!

We snagged some lunch at the cafeteria. (Beans and rice and bbq) and chatted with the school accountant for a while. (We’ve met a whole bunch of new people but it would be exhausting to catalogue them here. So you’ll just have to meet them as they come up in the narrative.)

Then we wandered around campus taking some pictures...

I'm pretty sure these are dangerous snake holes!

There are two pools next to each other. This is the big one. (hopefully we'll be paying water polo in this later in the year.)

before heading over to the Coffee Lodge to hang out and use the internet.

We figured out some phrases in Swahili. What is your name? (Jina lako ni nani?) My name is… (Jina langu ni…) I like Tanzania. (Nina pendi Tanzania) Bye.(Kwaheri) And tested them out on the Coffee Lodge guards and the guards at our gate; they were all delighted. And really wanted to help us with some more phrases.

Later, Monica and Jose made us dinner and we all (including Heather and Maria) ate on the front porch. Afterwards Kelly and I went to hang out at Maria and Heather’s house. The power was out so we ended up chatting by candlelight (which I rather liked)

An aside about the power situation; Tanzania has really unreliable power. It goes on and off all day and all night. The other night in the Coffee Lodge the power went out and it took a few minutes for the generator to kick on. The school has generators too, but we only use them at certain times. They are on from 630am to 8am so that teachers can get up and shower and cook if they want to. It is on for the school day naturally. And then after school gets out it’s only on from 7pm to 9pm. You may get electricity at other times but it’s not guaranteed and often patchy. The wireless internet also turns off when the power is off. There is one exception to the power rule. There is a second generator for the computer lad that runs basically all the time. This way we at least have the ability to lesson plan at any time of the day or night. It can be a bit of a nuisance sometimes but it’s generally not too bad.

August 23, 2011

My flight left from Richmond International at 6am so Mom and I had to drive to the airport at 4:30am and I didn’t finish packing my bags until 3 that morning. So I stayed up all night. We drive to the airport and dealt with the bag issue….(They don’t joke around with the price of extra bags, especially the overweight ones) Mom and I hugged and then I made it through security. (Those body imaging scan machines, not a big deal. I don’t know what all the fuss was about. And honestly if it means some surly airport official isn’t going to awkwardly pat me down that’s a-ok in my book.) Short flight: we literally got up in the air and then started to descend.

I had to wait about 4 hours for my next flight so I hunkered down in the terminal. I had a minor panic attack about some paperwork I thought I botched (it was a non-issue. I was confused.) It was then that I met up with my (soon to be) roommate Kelly. She’s from Wisconsin and taught one year of middle school social studies before this. She is great. We discussed this so it’s ok to post, but we were both worried that the other would be really dirty or unclean or weird, but thank goodness that’s not the case. And we get along surprisingly well. Our seats on the plane weren’t next to each other though.

Me and Kelly

The plane from Washington to Addis Ababa (and I was pronouncing it correctly, Mom) was fairly calm. It was long, 12 hours, but not too bad. I watched a few movies and ate airline food (not as good as South African airways, but decent)

We got to Addis and hopped into one of those little buses that drive you to the terminal. We ended up talking to a girl on the bus who was headed to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. She was going there to work for the Center for Disease Control either as part of her residency or as her job after her residency (I can’t remember; I was half in a coma from lack of sleep. I only got three hours in the plane.)

The airport in Addis btw is gross. In the ladies bathroom: none of the toilets flushed and from the looks of it had not been flushed in quiiiiiiite a while. The floors were gross and it was blechhh all around. The rest of the airport not much better it was very small.

Our next flight, once again we were not sitting together, stopped in Mombasa (though we didn’t have to get off) before completing the second leg to Kilimanjaro. The first leg of the flight: absolutely miserable. The damn plane was bouncing all over the sky. I was exhausted and trying to sleep and ended up falling asleep for at least a few minutes, because I woke up, sitting straight up and literally hugging this little airline pillow in a death grip. The young Muslin guy sitting next to me obviously found it amusing.

We chatted for a while and I couldn’t understand all of what he was saying, but he apparently had been living away from his family and home in Mombasa for the past 8 years. (He might have been in America, because he identified my accent as Eastern USA, though he couldn’t tell if I was North or South.) We were looking out the window and he got so excited when he could see the palm trees.

On the second leg of the journey we could see Kilimanjaro reaching up through the clouds as we got closer. Once we landed, we had to make it through customs.

IF YOU ARE A TANZANIAN GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL READ NO FURTHER

Our resident visas weren’t ready so we had to tell them that we were visiting Monica and Jose (Office administrator and headmaster) for four weeks and bringing donations for the school (hence all the school supplies). So we write all this down on the visa, jump through a few hoops and give them $100 for the visa. At which point we go to collect our bags and go through the rest of customs. We get to the bag guy (keep in mind that all of the other officials had been really, really helpful and nice to us, so this anecdote was not general to all our interactions) We take all our bags to the customs guy abd he immediately starts asking what’s in them (especially me cause I have four large bags) We tell him clothes and some books to donate to the school. He then decides to go through one of our bags and picks my red one (lucky he didn’t decide to choose the one with the projector in it.) It had random clothes and a camera and some books in it. So then he tries to tell us that there is a tax on books (which there isn’t) we argue a bit back and forth till Kelly takes control of the situation and tells this man that we are NOT going to be paying a tax on these books because they are a donation to help the children of Tanzania! Annnnd then he backed down.

The driver from the school, Veda, picked us up and drove us the hour to get to St Constantine’s. On the way there we saw dust devils in the distance, lots of people transporting water on their donkeys, and lots and lots of people. The school is straight down Dodoma Road (I’m sitting on the front porch of the headmasters house right now and I can clearly see a long stretch of the road.)

The way people drive here is very similar to the way they drive in South Africa: aka dangerously. Dodoma is a two lane road but on occasion it turns into a three or four lane road depending on the drivers and who decides to pass who. And pedestrians are on their own here. If you are stupid enough to step out in front of any moving vehicle, it’s your own problem. (Nick, the secondary music teacher, has already seen three massive accidents and he’s only been here two more days than me and Kelly.)

Our house isn’t finished yet (it’s one of the new ones). Though we snuck inside one and it’s really nice. So we’re staying at the headmasters house. He and his wife had two extra bedrooms and our house should be finished within the next week (fingers crossed). They are very nice and it’s really not awkward at all.

We then went to the computer lab and met a few of the other faculty that had already arrived. Let’s see if I can remember them all. There are a lot of people our age Maria from Florida, Nick from Wisconsin (Him and Kelly did not know each other before getting here) Heather from Oregon, Sean and his wife Juliet (I don’t know where they’re from) Alvaro (and not sure where he’s from)

Later, we had dinner with Jose and Monica, Nick, Maria, and Heather at the Coffee Lodge, an upscale tourist lodge within walking distance from the school. It’s fairly American food, we had penne pasta. (And I was so excited because they have Castle beer up here. It’s what I drank in South Africa) Kelly and I were so exhausted after dinner, that we immediately went back to the house and fell asleep. Under our mosquito netted beds. (I like it. I think the mosquito netting makes them seem more cozy.)

I promise to put more photos and less words in later posts.....I just didn't take many pics of the plane trip.

Arusha, Tanzania!

To make a long story (kinda) short: After my student teaching experience in Berlin, Germany I knew I wanted to go into international teaching. Per this decision I applied to many, many international schools and no schools in Virginia. A few months in my mother had become a bit pessimistic about the whole ordeal. (She asked me in early April if I had heard back from ANY school. Which I had btw. It just wasn’t one I felt like pursuing because they could only offer me a pre-k class. And if you know me well enough to know about my issues with kindergarten you understand why) Annnyway, soon after, about a week before my birthday, I received an email from the headmaster of St. Constantine’s International School in Tanzania. I ended up interviewing with the headmaster over skype two days later. I came downstairs from the interview and told my Mom, “I think he’s going to offer me a job!” (It was just a feeling I had) And sure enough the next day he did. I took two days to think about accepting the position, but really my mind was made up. I accepted a primary (elementary) position on the day of my 23 birthday on April 22. (That same day I totaled my car, but that’s a different story and not one I relish telling) I spent the following months collecting a whole bunch of stuff that I may (not) have been able to take over with me. And waited for August 22nd, which was when my flight left.