Justine's Post-Swazi Adventure

Swaziland!

2010-12-23T10:33:00.000+02:00

Sanibonani! I'm back in Swaziland and LOVING it. Nothing has changed in the four months I've been gone. The babies still reek of pee, the men still make inappropriate inquiries into my sexual preferences, the kombi drivers still drive WAY too fast, and it still feels like home to me.

I arrived on Tuesday and made my way to my homestead on Wednesday morning to find Eliza (my dog) in good health, baby Mpendulo Siyabonga walking and pantsless, and everybody else super happy to see me. I've spent the last 2 days watching Disney movies with the kids and visiting homesteads of old friends, where they offer me chicken intestines to snack on and beg me for Christmas presents.

It's good to be home. :)

Now I'm on my way to Pasture Valley Children's Home for Thurs/Fri/Sat for their Christmas festivities, then I'll be back to my homestead on Saturday to celebrate with the family. I'll write a more comprehensive, less scatter-brained blog later this week, too.

Happy holidays to everyone in the US, and I'll be back in a couple weeks!!

Love from the Swaz!
Phindile

Nitaondoka!! (I'm leaving!!)

2010-12-18T10:51:00.000+02:00

My much anticipated return to Swaziland is rapidly approaching, and as I wrap up loose ends in Iringa I thought I'd post a blog with lots of fun pictures of my last 2 weeks. I went hiking, visited an orphanage, went hiking again, cooked lots of delicious Tanzanian food, and took more pictures of Obama things and the vermin with which I cohabitate. Unfortunately, the internet is SUPER slow today and I can't post any of them, so the hour of internet that I bought will now be spent reading CNN.com instead of posting an amazing blog and downloading NPR podcasts as I had originally anticipated.

But TOMORROW I will begin my long-awaited 2 days of travel with an early morning bus to Dar, an overnight in the airport, a 5 hour flight, and another bus. Then, the next day, more buses and one kombi to get back to my homestead. I've never been so excited to sit idle for 36 straight hours...

Anyway, the next time I write I'll be in Swaziland again!! And in just a few weeks, I'll be home! Woot woot!

Bribery, unemployment, and other consequences of bathing

2010-12-14T13:32:00.000+02:00

Saturday morning I woke up mostly deaf in my left ear. At first I thought it was just residual water from some reckless bucket bathing the previous evening, but after failing at all attempts to empty my ear canal I began to worry that it was a side effect of the malaria prophylaxis I’ve been on for the past 2.5 years—a very real and very frightening possibility. (It wasn’t.)

An hour later I found myself in the waiting room at Aga Khan Regional Medical Center in Iringa, my brand new Tanzanian Government Medical Card in one hand and To Kill a Mockingbird in the other. The nurse called my name (“Chestina Amosi” according to my medical card) and escorted me down the hall into Doctors Room 1. The room looked strangely like my dormitory at UKZN in South Africa—the one where I could touch all 4 walls from the comfort of my half-twin-sized bed. There was a cot-like green plastic-coated bed attached to the wall, a broken-down desk at its foot, a built-in wardrobe/closet, a rust-stained sink, and a tiny barred window mostly devoid of glass. A white coat-clad doctor sat at the desk, so fully engaged in some horrible Nigerian soap opera that he didn’t acknowledge my presence for a good 30 seconds after I sat down. Finally he got around to the normal “what’s wrong with you?” doctor questions and scribbled my answers illegibly inside my patient file. He looked into my ear with an ear thingy of questionable cleanliness, petted my hair quite inappropriately while whispering things that in the US would result in a sexual harassment lawsuit, and said “Yes, there’s something in your ear. Give me 30,000 Shillings and I’ll get it out for you.” (30,000/= is $20.)

Me: “Excuse me?” I’d been told that the 1500/= I’d paid at reception was the only charge.

Him: “The fee for the procedure you need is 30,000/=.” He sat back down at his desk and tucked his ear thingy back into its case without cleaning it.

Me: “I don’t even HAVE 30,000/=!” This was absolutely true—I’m on a budget for my last week in Tanzania, and I hadn’t budgeted for an ear debris removal.

Him: “Well then how much can you pay?”

When I saw that he was willing to bargain I knew he was lying. I showed him the lone 4000/= in my wallet, asked him if he could write me a receipt, explained to him that I was a lowly student/volunteer and tried to impress him with my Kiswahili in hopes that he’d help me without paying a bribe…you know, like he’s paid to do. I was polite but confident, and firm in my refusal to pay for anything I wouldn’t get a receipt for.

When he saw that bribery wasn’t going to work, he changed tactics. He got mean. “That is the fee when I treat Wazungu,” he told me. “If you want to be treated like everyone else, you should go to Arusha where all the other Wazungu live and you can see an Mzungu doctor. Or go back to your own country because we don’t want you here.” Then he insulted me by saying, amongst other things, that I was a bad person and a liar, that I was dressed like a man, and that my family should be ashamed of me for wearing jeans and not covering my hair.

I’m stared at him in disbelief, trying to read the nametag clipped to his jacket. He noticed and threw it in his desk drawer. “You’re wasting my time,” he said, resuming his Nigerian soap on his computer and tossing my medical chart into a pile on the window sill. “Leave.”

The Kiswahili word he used to tell me to leave is a vulgar word generally reserved for animals or attempted pickpockets, and would more accurately translate as “f*** off.” I was angry. “What’s your name?” I asked. He ignored me. “I would like to know your name so that I can report your behavior to your boss.”

Him: “I have things to do. You are wasting my time. Leave.”

I found my way down the hallway to the Hospital Administrator’s Office and barged in on a Board Meeting full of Italian(?) nuns and brownish non-Tanzanian men most likely of Yemeni descent. (Iringa is full of Yemenis.) I was given a seat at the table and relayed my list of complaints in impressively fluent Kiswahili while the woman at the head of the table shook her head in disbelief. Apparently, they’d had lots of complaints about this particular doctor, especially from foreigners, and this was going to be the last one. They handed me some paper and asked me to write a formal letter of complaint (in English) while they finished their meeting.

Four hours and a lengthy discussion with the Hospital Administrator later, I left the hospital no less deaf than I’d arrived. Instead, I’d gotten a formal apology, a free bottle of completely ineffectual ear drops, and the satisfaction of knowing that the rude, dishonest, extortionist of a doctor had been fired. Booyah.

If you’re keeping score, that’s Justine: 2, Tanzanian Corruption: 0.

Economists say that the cost of corruption in African countries is as much as 50% of GDP. If my experiences thus far in Tanzania are in any way representative of the country (or continent?) as a whole, I believe it. Another example:

In November TANESCO, the government-run electricity company, began rationing electricity by instituting scheduled power blackouts throughout the Iringa region. My neighborhood had no electricity between 8am and 8pm on Sundays and Thursdays, there was no power in town on Tuesdays and Fridays, and the local radio station (when it had power) announced additional power cuts for other days and evenings on a daily basis. It was extremely inconvenient, both for my computer- and internet-loving self and for every business in town. Government offices were closed on blackout days, butchers’ meat rotted, restaurants stopped selling dairy products and frozen things, and every other business in town was either dark or closed.

Then, last week, the blackouts suddenly stopped after one of the local newspapers exposed the corruption behind the whole ordeal. Apparently the head TANESCO office in Dodoma (the capital city) didn’t even know about these supposedly government-sanctioned blackouts. The fake power shortage had been created by the dishonest employees of the Iringa Regional TANESCO who were looking for unofficial year-end bonuses: any business willing to pay a couple hundred thousand Shillings to the brilliant scheming TANESCO employees flipping the switches wasn’t subject to the power cuts. For the big tobacco, clothing, cooking oil, and candy factories just outside of town, a couple million shillings in bribe money was considerable savings compared to lost days of production at the peak of the consumer season. But while the employees of TANESCO were lining their pockets every other business in town was losing money.

And the costs of corruption aren’t purely economic. Police officers who take bribes in exchange for allowing un-roadworthy and overcrowded public buses and dala-dalas (mini-buses) to continue operating are endangering the lives of everyone taking public transportation. Driving schools that “pass” students in exchange for 100,000/= without any instruction at all fill the roads with horribly unsafe, unlicensed drivers who endanger everyone. In the local police force, the most coveted job is that of traffic patrol on the Ipogoro Highway that connects Dar Es Salaam with the southern parts of Tanzania, Malawi, and Zambia, because the bribes paid by drug smugglers, human traffickers, and overloaded 18-wheelers in a single day can amount to more than an average police officer’s annual salary. Plus, government employees, doctors, and other persons of official capacity who become accustomed to being bribed end up refusing to do their job unless they’re paid a bribe, meaning that law-abiding citizens refusing (or unable) to pay bribes can’t get passports or electricity or debris removed from their ear canals by paying the official price.

In my most recent semi-victory, the non-monetary cost of corruption at the Aga Khan Regional Medical Center is my hearing. After my whole ordeal on Saturday, I learned that the hospital doesn’t even have the tools to remove foreign objects from ear canals, so I actually wouldn’t be any better off had I paid the doctor his 30,000/=. Monday I visited a very friendly non-extortionist doctor at the local public hospital, who helped me for FREE despite the fact that he’s paid about 90% less than the doctors at Aga Khan. He said it was probably just wax (or possibly a dead bug) and gave me some other ear drops and an excuse to lie in bed all afternoon and watch re-run episodes of Scrubs on my computer with my ear full of medicine. (And he assured me that it’s not from the malaria meds, which means it’s not permanent. That’s important to me.) So far, though, nothing’s changed. And it’s super frustrating being half-deaf in a country where, under the best circumstances, I only understand about 50% of what’s going on.

It couldn’t have come at a worse time, either. Since this is my last week in Tanzania, I’ve got a 3-hour oral exam on Thursday which will be recorded and kept on file by the school in case I ever need proof that I speak/understand Kiswahili. Hopefully by then I’ll at least be able to tell how loudly I’m talking and understand all of the examiner’s questions. We’ll see…

Other than my Thursday exam, my last week in Tanzania is shaping up to be just like each of the past 11 weeks. I’ve got 2 days of classroom time, 1 afternoon trip to a local children’s home where a bunch of German doctors are repairing cleft palates (maybe they can fix my ear?), and 2 Tanzanian cooking classes. Then, Sunday morning, I’ll begin a 2-day trip consisting of a 10-hour bus ride to Dar Es Salaam, an overnight in the airport, a red-eye flight to Jo’burg, and a 6-hour bus ride ending in my glorious return to Swaziland.

I’m so excited to be back in the Swaz that I’m already packed for the trip (except for my computer, my Kiswahili books, and 6 meters of wax print fabric that I have yet to buy), and I’ve already sold all of my clothes, blankets, furniture, and other non-essentials that I’ll be leaving behind. I’m giddily eager to see my host family and friends and Eliza, to see the result of my big Partnership Project 4 months later, to visit Jenn and the kids at Pasture Valley Children’s Home, and just to be Phindile Simelane again. I’m going to eat cream cheese and multi-grain Cheerios, drink cheap red wine, and ride 15-passenger mini-buses with less than 30 people on them. Compared to Iringa, Swaziland is a veritable land land of plenty. (Maybe I’ll even find an honest doctor to remove the debris from my ear!)

Then, in 24 short days I’ll be home!

My week in pictures, followed by THREE blogs in one day. Rain makes me productive.

2010-12-07T13:33:00.000+02:00


An "Obama Smoothline" ballpoint pen.

Mwajombe Duka La Vitambaa Bora (Mwajombe Fabric Shop Deluxe) apparently thought it necessary to have a big picture of Obama on their sign. They don't even sell fabric for suits...but they DO sell linoleum and carpet and candy.

Can you find the pretty lizard? He has a blue body and bright red head and stares at me through the window during class sometimes. This is as close as I can get to him before he runs away, though.

I know I post lots of pictures of vermin, but that's because I spend a huge portion of my life dealing with them. This guy I found in my shoe when I wanted to go for a run the other day. Instead I took this picture, squashed him, and watched TV. My Kiswahili teacher says he's poisonous, so I don't feel bad about killing him.

Every time it rains, my house becomes infested with slugs. This one I found in my kitchen on a bag of sugar. Gross.

Slugs! Ew.

Apparently December is the beginning of "fly season," and that's no joke. At any given time, I can clap my hands and kill at least one fly.

Girls and Boys

2010-12-07T12:52:00.001+02:00

Growing up in the US, I’ve always been told I can be anything I want to be. As a kid, I played soccer and learned karate and took piano lessons. I made a self-toothpasting toothbrush for the 4th grade invention fair and competed against boys in history day and debate competitions. I learned how to drive a car and went to college. And I did most of it while wearing pants, despite the fact that I’m a girl.

American women of my generation don’t generally see their gender as a handicap. Sure, statistically women still make less money than men in the corporate world, and there’s that whole biological baby-making thing that separates us from men, but most Americans women don’t view themselves as inherently inferior to men. Most American MEN don’t assume they’re inherently superior to women. We don’t define ourselves in relation to our fathers or our husbands, we sign our own official documents, and it’s been several decades since any woman has happily been called “Mrs. [husband’s name].”

But here in Africa it’s a different story…

When I tell Africans that I’m 24, single, and childless, they pity me. They don’t care that I graduated college with honors, that I’ve accomplished a lot of things professionally, or that I’m happy with my life. I am a childless, husbandless failure of a woman—a failure who insists on wearing the clothes of men and refuses to cover her hair. When I enrolled for my courses abroad in South Africa, because I’m female the university enrollment forms required the signature of my father or, in the case that my father was dead, my paternal grandfather or brother—NOT my mother or the gender neutral “parent or guardian.” (Sorry Dad, I forged your signature…but technically I, too, am J. Amos.)

I’ve written before about the frustration of gender inequalities in both Swaziland and Tanzania. I’ve told stories of spousal abuse and corporal punishment, of girls who have no time for homework because their fathers and brothers expect them to wash clothes and cook meals for them, of smart girls whose post-graduation plans are limited to marriage and motherhood, and of a hundred other manifestations of gender inequality that I witness every day.

Now, as I spend my every morning studying the intricacies of the Swahili language, I’m realizing that even the language is sexist. Sure, Romance languages have masculine and feminine nouns, and there are gender-specific words in English, too, that have somewhat sexist connotations. Feminist linguists argue that words like “human,” “mankind,” and even “woman” are sexist, and at weddings the bride is still symbolically “given away” by her father to her new husband. But Kiswahili takes it to a whole new level, particularly as the language relates to marriage and relationships.

For example, when asking someone if they’re married in Kiswahili, the question depends on the gender of the person you’re asking. To a man, you ask, “Umeoa?” which literally means “Are you married?” To a woman, you ask, “Umeolewa?” which translates to “Have you been married by someone?” The verb that means “to marry” is active for men and passive for women, so men marry and women are the victims of marriage. If someone asks an unmarried woman if she is married, her answer translates as “I am not yet married,” and it’s improper to answer without the “yet” part. But men are simply “not married.”

In divorce, the language is similarly one-sided. The verb “kuacha” means to throw out, to drop, or to leave behind. It also describes what a man does to a woman when he no longer wants to be married to her (aka divorce), but it cannot be done by a woman. Essentially, when a couple divorces in Kiswahili, the man throws away his wife and the woman is thrown away by her husband—even if the woman legally initiates the divorce proceeding, which is rare but allowed in all of East Africa. The woman then becomes an “mke aliyeachewa,” or “woman who has been thrown away by someone” (aka divorcee), but the man simply becomes single again—there is no word to describe a man who is no longer married.

The linguistic inequality, I think, stems from the centuries old legal arrangement of wives being the property of their husbands—a notion that very few modern American woman would agree with, but that still holds true in many developing countries. Similarly, children are the property of their fathers, not their mothers. (This also happens in the US when, by default, children are given their father’s last name, but today it’s really the choice of the mother.) In the Tanzanian National Anthem, the second verse thanks God for blessing Tanzania and for blessing “the wives of men and their children.” NOT women, men and children—the wives who belong to the men, and the children who belong to the men. Apparently nobody cares whether or not God blesses unmarried women.

And maybe this is something that will change in a generation’s time, like it did in the Western world, after girls start going to college and women start getting top jobs in the corporate world or government and start demonstrating their competency outside the realm of cooking, cleaning, and child rearing. Until then, I’ll be frustrating my Kiswahili teacher by making the language of marriage and divorce gender neutral by using a reciprocal verb suffix—“kuoana” (to marry one another) and “kuacha” (to divorce one another)—even though I know it’s technically incorrect. For now, at least.

Mosquito nets, malaria prevention, and the challenge of public health.

2010-12-07T12:39:00.002+02:00

PSI, a US-based NGO that promotes family planning and disease prevention internationally, set up a malaria education/prevention station a couple blocks from my house last week. With funding from the Global Fund to Prevent TB & Malaria and USAID (that’s YOUR tax dollars at work), they distributed free insecticide-treated bed nets to all families with children under the age of 5 and hundreds of malaria prevention pamphlets that are now half-buried in the muddy streets of the neighborhood. In the last decade, programs like this one have reduced the number of malaria-related deaths in children by the millions, but after several years of seeing these programs implemented in Africa, and after discussing the logistics of PSI’s campaign with my Kiswahili teachers, I can’t help but wonder how much more successful such programs would be if the people designing them had a better understanding of the culture of the country in which they’re working.

From an American perspective, we think that by giving people the education and resources they need to prevent themselves from getting a disease, they’ll do it. If we distribute mosquito nets to families and tell them these nets will keep their kids from dying of malaria, they’ll use them. Right? Unfortunately it’s not that simple, for a number of reasons:

1. Since the Global Fund is focusing on preventing disease in children, all the nets PSI distributes are for child-sized beds. This would work in the US, where babies sleep in bassinets and cribs and twin-sized beds, but most African under-5’s sleep in a full-sized bed with their parents or siblings. A crib-sized net is pretty much useless here.

2. Many African families sleep on foam mattresses or grass mats on the floor of a one-room house. During the day, the beds are stacked against the wall and these rooms are used for cooking, bathing, radio listening, tea drinking, homework doing, and a hundred other daily activities, so permanently installing a insecticide-stinking mosquito net in the middle of the room isn’t exactly practical. (In fact, it’s probably a fire hazard.) And taking it down and putting it back up every day gets old really quick.

3. The nets aren’t distributed with the hardware and/or ropes needed to hang them, and most families don’t have these things just lying around. Four little hooks and enough rope to hang a single net cost about 25% of an average family’s monthly income. Who can afford that?

4. There’s no way to ensure that the people receiving the nets actually need them. Families that received free nets last year collected new nets again this year, and there’s no way to prove that someone who says they have a 2-year-old doesn’t actually have a 2-year-old. Since many children are born at home, there’s no master list of all children under the age of 5, and many children aren’t counted by any government registry until they enroll in the first grade. Basically, anybody who wants a net gets a net. Or two.

5. Mosquito nets have considerable market value so many families sell them. Hotels constantly need new nets for their malaria-fearing foreign guests who expect clean, hole-less nets over their beds. Dress-makers use the tulle-like netting as a lining for dresses. Fishermen double up the netting to make low cost fishing nets. And others are just re-sold as is to the net-needing public at the local market, which is how I ended up with my not-free PSI/USAID mosquito net.

6. Treatment for malaria is widely available and 100% free courtesy of USAID, WHO, and other organizations. At any hospital or clinic, children and adults with malaria or malaria-like symptoms gets chloroquine or primiquine, usually with a free overnight stay in a warm, comfy bed and a couple of meals. So why bother prevent it when you can treat it just as easily, plus perks?

I can’t help but wonder if there’s a better way to prevent malaria in Africa. If PSI gave out full-sized nets, how many more malaria-related deaths would be prevented? If the nets came with a couple yards of rope, would more people hang them? If PSI distributed them door-to-door, would fewer nets be given to families that already have nets? If nets were given to new mothers at the hospital or clinic after birth or when the child is brought in for his first vaccinations, would the number of nets distributed more accurately match the number of infants in the country? If retailers found to be re-selling free nets were punished in some way, would they think twice about re-selling the nets? If parents had to pay for malaria treatment, would they try harder to protect their kids from it in the first place?

Most importantly, does the benefit of this kind of mosquito net distribution outweigh the faults of the program and warrant its continuation? I think so.

No public health program implemented in the developing world (or anywhere, really) is 100% effective. The eradication of polio is most often cited as an example of a successful public health initiative, but 10 minutes in any African city full of polio-crippled beggars will prove that polio hasn’t been eradicated. But if the alternative to a program that reduces new infections of HIV by 5% is no program at all, isn’t that 5% still worth working for?

I found myself asking a similar question a few years ago when I was working for A Wider Circle, a fantastic DC-based non-profit that provides nutrition education, after school programs, job training, and furniture to low-income families in DC, Maryland, and Virginia. Day after day I taught low-income seniors how to make heart-healthy fruit smoothies and helped Hurricane Katrina refugees move free furniture from Bethesda demi-mansions into their tiny FEMA-subsidized apartments, and I felt like it was worth it.

But I remember one Saturday morning when a woman with a Baby Phat track suit and a fancy cell phone rolled up in her big black Escalade, a flock of Nike- and Roca Wear-clad children in tow. We helped her load her new bedroom set into her Escalade and strapped a brand new mattress to the roof, reserved for her a dining room set and big color TV, and sent her off with a big bag of day-old high end pastries from a Georgetown bakery. The other volunteers and I couldn’t help feeling taken advantage of. Were we giving up our Saturday mornings to give free things to selfish pseudo-poor people in expensive clothes? If a woman driving an Escalade could get a free queen-sized mattress from an NGO, why was I sleeping on a broken-down twin mattress on the floor of a walk-in closet?

Mark, the organization’s director, was the only one who was still smiling. He asked us, “If 99% of the families we help actually need the help we give them, is it worth putting up with the other 1% who are like that woman?” We agreed that it was. “What if 25% of the people we help are like her, and only 75% actually need the help. Should we keep working?” Sure, we said—those 75% of families are still better off than they would be without our help. “What if 95% of the people we help are like her and only 5% actually needs us?” By our own logic, that’s still 5% of families that are better off because of our work, so we should keep working. But what’s the threshold?

With any project intended to help people, there’s going to be failures. Selfish people who don’t need help will get free stuff, and people who actually need help will be overlooked. Mosquito nets that are intended to protect a child from malaria will be sold so his mother can buy new shoes or pay school fees, and when the child gets sick his new shoe-wearing mother will take him to the hospital for free treatment. Where there’s free stuff, there’s someone waiting to take advantage. But there are also people whose lives can be saved by free food, and children whose lives can be improved by free health care, so shouldn’t we keep providing it? The only alternative is to deny help to EVERYBODY, which punishes the freeloaders of the world by refusing to help people who actually need it. That’s not really fair either, is it?

Even if the world will never be FAIR, I hope that the work that NGOs and aid agencies and I myself do at least helps make life little less UNFAIR. That’s reason enough to keep distributing mosquito nets, to keep learning a seemingly useless African language, to keep trying, right? I think so.

Corruption and the clash of cultures at the Iringa Regional Immigration Office

2010-12-07T12:33:00.002+02:00

94 days ago I got a 90 day visa for a 108 day long stay in Tanzania. Standing at the immigration counter in the Dar Es Salaam airport, sweating profusely and exhausted from fourteen hours of travel, this 18 day discrepancy seemed much less important than taking a cold shower and finding a horizontal place suitable for sleeping. I didn’t worry about it again until about a month ago, when I paid my first visit to the regional immigration office in Iringa.

On my first visit the official on duty told me I didn’t need another visa, despite the fact that my current one would expire 18 days before my flight back to Swaziland; he recommended that I overstay my visa and beg forgiveness at the airport. The next week I went back in search of a more legal answer and was told I could either get a $200 student visa or spend a weekend in Malawi and renew my multiple entry visa by default at the border. On my third visit, after explaining my situation the official launched into a tirade about the theft of culture, which I was clearly guilty of. I smiled, nodded, and pretended to be listening while contemplating the feasibility of a weekend trip to Malawi.

But it got me thinking about the export of culture. For better or worse the internet, cell phones, television, air travel, and technology in general have made the world a much smaller place than it was just a decade ago. Fashion trends, political systems, religion, language, music, cuisine— things once confined to a specific country or culture are now available throughout the world. Many African radio stations broadcast American Evangelists’ sermons and programs like “Focus on the Family,” and in the afternoon every TV in Tanzania is tuned into Spanish soap operas dubbed into English with Swahili subtitles. Muslim women in Zanzibar have Gmail accounts. Swazi grocery stores sell Danish butter cookies made in Dubai and Kellog’s Corn Flakes, and just about everybody wants to learn English. While accusing me of the intellectual theft of his mother tongue, the angry immigration official was wearing dark wash Levi’s with a big knock-off Calvin Klein belt buckle and making notes with a Bic pen imported from Thailand by a South African company.

But even more than dark wash jeans and corn flakes, what amazes (and sometimes appalls) me is the IDEAS that are exported together with all of these THINGS. In Swaziland, people who watch the TV broadcast of the American Bishop T.D. Jakes’ sermon think that America is full of racist Christian fundamentalists; Swazis who watch WWE wrestling think all American women have gigantic boobs encased in vinyl like big pornographic sausages, and that all American men have funny mustaches and fight each other with folding chairs while wearing spandex. A Tanzanian woman who had seen an episode of MTV’s “Cribs” featuring the ridiculous mansion and car collection of the rapper 50 Cent asked me how many Lamborghinis my parents owned, and I have a really hard time convincing people that not everybody in America is white and wealthy. A couple months ago, when walking down the street in wide leg jeans and a ribbed tank top, an older Muslim woman asked me why I was “wearing the uniform of the prostitute,” because clearly anyone who wears pants is a hooker. The understanding of American culture that’s exported around the world is that we’re all gluttonous, wasteful fatties with mattresses stuffed with Dollars where we sleep with a different partner every night and talk about how much we hate Black people.

Every day I spend in Africa I find myself fighting this perception of Americans. Countless times, I’ve explained that not all Americans are White or rich or wear suits to work every day. I’ve explained that not all Americans are Christian, and that American culture is not monolithic; that the US is a country of immigrants and diversity and multiple political parties and socio-economic classes. I’ve tried to explain that if I knew a bunch of multi-millionaires eager to fund the higher education of strangers I wouldn’t be spending my weekends writing essays for scholarship applications, and I try to dispel myths of selfishness and gluttony through my behavior. But as I compete with the TV shows like “Cops,” bags of free food labeled “Aid from the American people,” and the ridiculously short skirts of celebrities in the Entertainment section of the newspaper, sometimes it feels like a losing battle.

In my immigration office standoff, though, I was victorious. After several return trips and many hours of practicing the argumentative tense of Kiswahili, the Regional Immigration Director locked my passport in his desk drawer and demanded that I pay him $100 to get it back. I pulled my other passport out of my bag (I have 2—one that Peace Corps gave me and my personal one) and shrugged off his threat as I showed myself to the door. Ten minutes later, I had a free 30 day visa extension and a mug of sugary tea and biscuits. And now at least one immigration official in Tanzanian knows that Americans are smart, persistent and refuse to pay bribes. Even while wearing a prostitute uniform. That’s me doing my part.

Obama lovin', dresses, and smoked grasshoppers

2010-11-13T14:29:00.000+02:00

Africa LOVES Obama. Obama chewing gum, Obama ballpoint pens, Obama backpacks. You name it, I've seen it. A couple weeks ago, I found Obama underwear at a used clothes market, complete with airbrushed Obama on the butt and a waistband that said "Commander in Chief." Still, who buys used underwear?

It's amazing how an $8 dress with big cartoon fish on it can make me feel pretty, but it does. Fabric here is so ridiculous it's amazing. Last week I found a piece of gray and purple cloth with bright green and orange vacuums vacuuming bright yellow and blue carpets. I had to seriously restrain myself from buying it and having it made into a dress...

On Friday, I had a toasted egg and cheese sandwich with a side of smoked grasshoppers for lunch. Yum! They're super tiny this time of year, crunchy, and taste like just about anything else that's smoked. But they look scary.

In Swahili, L and R are interchangeable, so this actually means "Death Row." I love misspelled graffiti.

I have developed mosquito-squashing skills of epic proportions. Gross, yes, but very necessary.

My life is so uneventful that I take pictures of the baby papaya inside my big papaya. That's exciting to me. (Kind of a cool picture, though.)

How I almost paid $276 for a 16-oz 7-Up

2010-11-08T12:17:00.000+02:00

Yesterday was a typical lazy Tanzanian Sunday. I was awakened at 7:00am by the children discreetly banging on the window by my head in an attempt to wake me up so we could play. An hour later, half-way through the second showing of The Lion King in as many days, my host mother delivered a 5-gallon bucket of heavily chlorinated water from the local price-gouging water distributor (he picks up the slack when the government shuts off the neighborhood’s supply for weeks at a time). Sweet! I washed my hair for the first time in 11 days (gross, I know), threw on some reasonably clean clothes and started the 20-minute walk to town intent on some exercise and several hours of therapeutic online shoe not-buying.

After lunch, I stopped by the ATM and perusing the local market for the week’s stock of fruit and dry goods, browsing a few local wax-print fabric shops along the way. (African fabric is my kryptonite.) An hour later, tired from the hot sun, I was drawn to a tiny fabric-and-cold-drink shop on the corner of the bus rank, where I stopped for a 7-Up. Sitting down on one of the shop’s two stools, my messenger bag between my feet, I struck up a conversation with the shop’s owner and took little notice when two men walked into the shop. They dirty-fingered through the fabric hanging on the walls, and one bought a Coke and introduced himself to me. He knelt in front of me and unfolded a bright orange piece of fabric covered in yellow fish and blue flowers, mumbling something intently to his friend who was kneeling to the side of him. I returned to my conversation with the shop-keeper, sipping my awesomely cold 7-Up.

When I felt him bump my bag, my initial reaction was to reach down and move it out of his way. And then I realized that his hand was deep inside my bag, his dirty fingers wrapped around my wallet. I threw back the gaudy/fabulous fabric as he stood up, my wallet in hand. I demanded my wallet from him as he stared at me with a deer-in-the-headlights look. I lifted up my nearly empty glass 7-Up bottle like I’d seen in bar fights on TV and stared back at him menacingly while his accomplice and the shop-keeper ran out of the shop to escape the crazy white lady. Bewildered, the thief handed me back my wallet and apologized. I told him where he could go and that Jesus had seen the whole thing, stared at him with the evilest, most hateful look in my repertoire and demanded, bottle in hand, that he leave. He protested half-heartedly that he still had half a Coke left as he made his exit, and I rummaged through my bag to make sure my camera and other things were still there. (They were.) A minute later, the shop-keeper came back and apologized for abandoning me and I sat down to finish off the dregs of my 7-Up, recovering from the adrenaline rush that comes from being the almost-victim of an almost-crime and contemplating the almost-weapon in my hand.

To me, the worst thing about being robbed isn’t usually the phone or money (or the fancy Basotho blanket) or whatever I lose, it’s the feeling of being violated. In that sense, an attempted robbery is just as bad as a successful one. And I’m pretty sure those guys followed me from the bank just waiting for the perfect chance to move in, which makes the whole incident even scarier. But at least I know I can hold my own in a fabric slash soda store in the event of an attempted robbery by a pair of unarmed men, assuming I’m drinking a 7-Up. And maybe now I’ll have some sort of post-traumatic aversion to fabric stores and I’ll stop buying wax-print fabric. Probably not, but maybe.

Aside from that, my life is pretty uneventful: class every day, internet café most afternoons, homework in the evenings, and the occasional 24-hour marathon of The Office, which is what I did all day Saturday instead of writing an essay for a scholarship application. Oops.

Anyway, I’ll be home in exactly 2 months! Exciting, right? Can’t wait!

Pictures I've been trying unsuccessfully to load for a week.

2010-11-05T16:42:00.000+02:00

I found this chicken foot on my way home from class the other day. Gross.

I buy milk in bags.

I made DELICIOUS Rice Krispies Treats for my host family, but unfortunately Tanzania only has multi-colored marshmallows and all the green, yellow, and blue ones make green. (The pink seems to be irrelevant in the color mix...)

Tall Horse Cabernet Sauvignon is my best friend. Unfortunately I find it difficult to crave wine when it's a bazillion degrees in my house, which is actually good news for my bank account because this stuff is EXPENSIVE here.

The little shop at my school where I buy stuff during class if I'm hungry. They advertise candy bars, Pringles, Coke, Red Bull, Heinz Baked Beans, Duracell batteries, etc., but really all they sell is deep-fried doughnuts.

Furaha means "happiness." Sometimes when I'm having a bad day, I eat a large quantity of happiness. That's a healthy response to stress.

Democracy Shmemocracy: Party Politics in Tanzania

2010-10-29T14:24:00.003+02:00

Despite a handful of predictable disputes in the voting process, election outcomes, and the fairness of the Electoral College, the US is a democratic country. Even if it’s not a PERFECT democracy—if Wyomingans are over-represented and some voting districts slightly Gerrymandered—there are still certain democratic aspects of our government that we can always count on: We will ALWAYS have an election the second Tuesday of November. The candidate declared the winner will take office, and the loser will peacefully and respectfully leave office. An opposition candidate running for public office isn’t in danger of being assassinated by the incumbent party’s not-so-secret pack of AK-47-wielding thugs. Voters are not threatened or intimidated at the polls, and our votes are confidential so we don’t fear reprisal for voting for one candidate over another. And, most importantly, we assume with pretty much 100% certainty that the number of votes counted is equal to the number of votes cast, and that the outcome of the election isn’t maliciously rigged to ensure an incumbent party victory.

On the other hand, there’s Africa. Here, elections are postponed indefinitely without reason by an incumbent who fears being ousted. When long-awaited elections actually happen, sometimes people’s votes aren’t secret and the government forces are scary enough that everyone votes for the incumbent out of fear. If an incumbent leader happens to lose an election, he stays in office and appoints the actual winner of the election as Prime Minister (Kenya in 2007, Zimbabwe in 2009). Opposition candidates, party leaders and organizers, and vocal individuals who speak out against the government’s policies or management are “disappeared” (kidnapped and killed) or assassinated. And, in many countries, so-called “democratic” elections are more for show than anything, held only to prove to international donors like the US that the government is “trying” to democratize and is therefore worthy of aid. (There’s also an outside chance that a democratically elected leader will be assassinated by an outside force…like the CIA. Ex: Patrice Lumumba of the Congo in 1961.)

Tanzania is a great example of the strange incarnation of “democracy” in Africa. The country held its first post-independence election in 1961, shortly after independence from the British. In this election, Julius Nyerere was elected as the first president of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, which he combined into “The United Republic of Tanzania” (“Tan…ia” for Tanganyika and “…zanz…” for Zanzibar…get it?). Nyerere and his Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM, Party of the Revolution in English) wrote the constitution and established the foundation for modern politics in Tanzania, including the systematic suppression of opposition parties. Nyerere held the presidency for 24 years until the country’s first “multi-party” democratic elections in 1985. Ali Hassan Mwinyi (President 1985-1995), Benjamin Mkapa (1995-2005), and Jakaya Kikwete (2005-present) have all been member of the CCM political party, and Kikwete is expected to be re-elected again this year.

On paper, Tanzania is a democracy. The country has a democratically elected leader voted for by the entire 18-and-over population of Tanzania, and elections are held every 5 years on the last Sunday of October. Opposition parties are allowed to form and operate without official legal repercussions, and the constitution allows Tanzanians the freedom of association with any party they choose. (Currently there are two serious opposition parties: CUF and Chadema. Chadema is the largest opposition party on the mainland, and CUF on Zanzibar.) On election day, people go to the polls and vote in privacy, and votes are sealed in their boxes by officers of the law before being transported to the nearest vote-counting station. The person with the most votes takes office, the other candidates are the losers. Et cetera.

But, in practice, it’s a lot more complicated…and a lot less democratic. Voters are discouraged from registering to vote or kept from voting by tactics similar to those used on African American voters in the 1960s. The CCM uses government funds (a LOT of government funds), government airplanes, government buildings, government workers, and government media and television outlets, and other government resources to promote itself, but the CUF and Chadema have to fund their campaigns through private donations solicited largely from a population of impoverished Tanzanians. There’s even rumor (though somewhat more substantiated than rumor…) of CCM officials buying the voter registration cards of under-35’s for as little as $4 so that they can’t vote for Chadema come election day, or “losing” entire pages of registered voters names at the polling stations. (They have two sections for voting: under 35, and over 35. Since it’s under 35’s who tend to vote Chadema, by losing just one page of voters’ names it’s very easy to eliminate non-CCM votes.) In rural areas, police (who are government employees under the CCM government) intimidate uneducated voters by hinting that their safety could be jeopardized if CCM left power, and on election day they stand outside polls with their automatic weapons so that nobody forgets who holds the power. Candidates who draw attention to CCM corruption or Kikwete’s failed policies end up in jail on “treason” charges and are no longer eligible to run for office; others running for local offices mysteriously die of “natural” causes. This year, the government announced that colleges and universities (which are usually closed until after the election) would open 3 days BEFORE election day, meaning that the largely Chadema-supporting college population will be away at school instead of at home to vote on Sunday, and there’s no option like absentee voting. And then, even if all the CCM-favoring election-skewing plots prove ineffective, there’s always the fall-back option of just tampering with the votes before they’re officially counted. After all, it’s the polling station workers (hired by CCM) and police officers (hired by CCM) who are responsible for securing the votes and certifying their validity.

On Thursday afternoon I attended a Chadema (Chama Cha Demokracia na Maendeleo, or Party of Democracy and Development) political rally for Doctor Slaa, the most popular opposition presidential candidate on the mainland. Despite the fact that he never showed up (TIA, right?) and that I only understood about 40% of what various candidates yelled crazy-African-preacher-style over the loudspeaker, it was a really interesting and enlightening experience. I made friends with two high school teachers and we discussed (in Swahili!) the election, the history of Tanzania, and the platforms and promises of various parties and candidates.

At one point, I asked them if they thought Doctor Slaa would win on Sunday and they both laughed at me like I was ridiculous. They were there to show their support, they said, for any kind of non-CCM change, but it has to happen gradually. Five years ago, an opposition rally like Thursday’s NEVER would have happened. Candidates would have been afraid to speak out against CCM, and people would have been afraid to show up to such a rally for fear that their businesses or families would be harmed as a result of their participation (or just their curiosity). “Chadema isn’t campaigning for 2010, they’re campaigning for 2015. We’re all here to show other people that if they, too, can support another party and not be killed.” They said that if on Sunday they vocally vote for Chadema and then aren’t punished by the CCM, maybe their CCM-fearing friends and neighbors will consider voting for someone other than CCM in 2015.

They also laughed when I asked if Tanzania had ever had “free and fair” elections. According to the Carter Center, which monitors this kind of thing, Tanzania’s 2000 election was fair, but 2005 was rigged in favor of the CCM, and regional elections on the island of Zanzibar have never been fair. But my teacher friends (and most everyone else I talk to about it, including Tanzanians, expats living here, and second- or third-generation immigrants) say that the country’s never had a democratic election. The concept of democracy is simply too new for anyone to trust its effectiveness and safety, so they just vote like they always have, even when CCM was the only party in the race. One of the teachers said he suspected that only about 30% of votes cast for Chadema would actually survive the ballot box long enough to make it to the official count, and that CCM had decades of experience in buying votes, fabricating ballots, and in their own special kind of less-than-impartial vote counting.

Even if this ISN’T true (which, honestly, who knows?), it’s frighteningly undemocratic that the people of Tanzania have so little faith in their trustworthiness of their government, and so little belief in the importance of their vote, that this kind of belief even SEEMS believable. Whether it’s true or not, if you were worried that you might be killed, injured, denied a job, or punished in some other way for voting for an opposition candidate, and were 70% sure that your Chadema/CUF vote would be thrown away anyway, wouldn’t you just vote CCM, too? It’s amazing to me that people still run for office on a non-CCM ticket, or donate to non-CCM political campaigns, or show up to non-CCM political rallies to show their support for NOT the CCM. (There’s no free food at said rallies…but sometimes there is at CCM rallies.) If there was complete political freedom in Tanzania, how many more people would support Chadema over the CCM?

Anyway, it’s something interesting to think about as we near Election Day in the US. When you cast your vote next Tuesday (and please do…especially if you’re a Democrat), you’ll be doing it without fear for your life, and you’ll be confident that your vote counts for something regardless of who you vote for. That’s a right (well, we consider it a right) that most people in the world simply don’t have, even in so-called “democracies.”

Chadema is an approximate acronym that stands for Chama Cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo, or The Party of Democracy and Development. Chadema is the largest opposition party in Tanzania (on the mainland at least), and this is their flag.

Chadema supporters holding up peace signs to show their support of Doctor Slaa, the main challenge to the incumbent President Kikwete in Sunday's election. The sign there translates to "Doctor Slaa--You are our only hope. We believe in you, and we need Chadema!"

Vuvuzelas have taken over the world! This guy is also wearing a Chadema flag as a shirt and his sweet dance moves kept me entertained during long speeches I only partially understood.

A little boy toting around a pro-Chadema sign at the political rally on Thursday afternoon. It translates as "We believe in you, we need you Doctor Slaa! Doctor Slaa is the lion of the war!" And then there's a sentence I can't read because all the letters are crammed together.

The HQ for the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party for the Iringa Region. That guy is President Kikwete.

What's newsworthy, anyway?

2010-10-28T13:00:00.005+02:00

As part of my ongoing quest to reconnect myself with the developed world, I’ve been checking out CNN.com and downloading NPR podcasts and trying to compensate for 2.5 years of being out of the current events loop. In the last month, I’ve learned about the suicides of gay teens in the US, the kidnapping and subsequent release of an aid worker in Somalia, earthquakes and tsunamis in Southeast Asia, the rescue of 33 miners in Chile, an outbreak of cholera in Haiti, a Pennsylvania woman who allegedly killed her 4 children, etc. These things matter.

But right next to those stories I see others about Lindsey Lohan’s most recent “tweets” about her drug problem, rapper TI’s parole violations (he tried to buy several machine guns from the trunk of an undercover cop car in a grocery store parking lot, got out on parole, and then rolled up next to a cop at a stop light while smoking something illegal...), $8000 bejeweled i-phones, and all sorts of things that are of absolutely no consequence to 99.99% of the world.

And I start to wonder: Is this really NEWS? And, more importantly: WHO CARES? Aren’t there more IMPORTANT things going on in the world?

Then yesterday I stumbled across the most recent annual report of UNAIDS (the UN Agency for AIDS) at the UNAIDS Blog (www.unaidstoday.org). Arguably, AIDS is a little bit more important than Sandra Bullock’s most recent beach vacation with her adopted baby boy (especially since it directly affects at least 35 million more people than does their vacation) but stories about HIV/AIDS aren’t really news anymore. And I understand why…it’s depressing and showing no real signs of improvement. Since the “discovery” of the virus in 1981, there have been very few changes in the world of HIV: developments in anti-retroviral drugs that slow the progression of the disease, increases in funding and efforts by humanitarian organizations and governments to thwart the pandemic or mitigate its impact, countless failed vaccine trials and curative drugs for the disease, and a steadily increasing rate of infection with the largest concentration in Sub-Saharan Africa.

But, for the 33.4 million people in the world currently living with HIV, their friends, their families, and their communities, it’s a pretty big deal.

As Americans, HIV is something that we’re able to easily write off as being someone else’s problem. We believe that it’s something that affects people who have casual sex or use drugs, or affects poor Africans that we have no relation to whatsoever, and most of us don’t know anyone who is HIV-positive or who has been affected by HIV in some significant way.

In reality, though, it’s something that affects everyone, not just gay men and drug users and prostitutes you’ll never meet. It affects women who are raped in the Congo. And children of women who are HIV-positive. And people who undergo traditional blood-letting ceremonies as rites of passage, during which they’re cut with shared razor blades. And it affects people of all races, all religions, all nationalities and ethnicities, and in all countries.

Here are the statistics I found most sobering:

There are 1.4 million people in North America living with HIV, and an estimated 55,000 people were infected in 2008 alone. In 2008, there were 25,000 AIDS-related deaths in the US. Though the adult prevalence rate is only 0.4% in the US, some cities (like San Francisco and Washington, DC) have rates higher than those of African countries.

Since the beginning of the epidemic in the 1980s, 60 million people have been infected with the virus, and 25 million have died of AIDS-related causes.

Each year there are an estimated 2.7 million new infections in the world, 40% of which are in young people aged 15-24. Another 430,000 children born with HIV each year.

Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 67% of global HIV infections (22.4 million people), and 91% of new infections among children, and the epidemic has orphaned more than 14 million children in Africa alone.

Less than 40% of people who are HIV-positive know that they are HIV-positive, and unless they know they can’t get treatment or protect their partners and unborn babies.

For every two people starting treatment for HIV, another five are infected with the virus.

Only 38% of HIV-positive children in need of treatment are currently receiving it.

One in three HIV-positive people also suffers from tuberculosis, which is the leading cause of death among HIV-positive people. (Yet TB is both preventable and curable.)

And it’s not just the 33.4 million infected who are affected: it’s the families that take care of them, the children they orphaned, the friends who have to watch them go through depression and eventual decline, the employers who suffer the effects of absenteeism, insurance companies that have to cover the cost of exorbitantly expensive anti-retroviral drugs, the communities that suffer in the absence after their death (especially in the developing world), and everyone else in the world who pays taxes to a government that provides aid for HIV-positive people. (That last category probably includes you.)

See, it’s way more important than Vince Vaughn’s slightly homophobic one-liner in his latest movie, which happened to be the second “Most Popular” story on CNN.com sometime last week…right after “How to make your YouTube video go viral.” Hard-hitting, life-changing stuff, right?

And it’s not just the lack of caring about HIV that gets me, it’s also the KINDS of HIV and AIDS-related things that are deemed newsworthy. (And I’m guilty of it too in this blog post…) All the news is negative. It’s about failures and wasted money and deaths and new infections. There’s nothing about the fact that this year there are 10 times as many people on ARVs than there were just 5 years ago, which means less deaths and less orphans than before. Stories about the rate of HIV infection stabilizing in countries like Botswana and Lesotho are relegated to the bottom of the Africa section on CNN.com, even though for Botswanans and Lesothoans that’s a big deal. Stories about people working to change the lives of HIV-positive children or NGOs that are making headway in preventing new infections are relegated to local newspapers even though those individuals and NGOs are a big part of the reason that the pandemic seems to be slowing in a lot of countries. And every failed drug trial or failed vaccine really is a step closer than the one before, but all we see in the news is that YET ANOTHER drug has failed to prevent/cure HIV.

So, yes, HIV is bad. It’s horrible. I actually can’t imagine anything worse than a virus with a 100% fatality rate that disproportionately affects poor women and children in developing countries. But every step taken against HIV is a step in the right direction. Every 15-year-old HIV-positive child who is still alive thanks to ARVs from WHO is progress. Every teenager who chooses to use condoms to protect himself from HIV infection like his MSF-funded summer camp taught him is one more person who will be spared infection. Every pregnant woman who learns her HIV status at her local free clinic and follows all the rule of PMTCT gives birth to one more HIV-negative baby. Many governments and international organizations, and countless NGOs and individuals are working hard on a regional or individual level, changing future of the pandemic a little bit each day. And researchers are much more familiar with the HIV virus than they were 30 years ago when this whole pandemic started.

So that’s what I call “news.”

Laundry, faith, parasites, dresses, and more laundry

2010-10-23T13:14:00.000+02:00

As I sat through 3 hours of Kiswahili examination on Friday morning, I realized just how far I’ve come since leaving Swaziland only 7 weeks ago. I’ve said goodbye (for now) to some great friends, spent 3 weeks on one of the most beautiful islands in the world, moved into a cute little house in the middle of nowhere in southern Tanzania, and gained a level of proficiency in Kiswahili far beyond what I thought was possible in such a short time. I’ve found a grocery store selling good South African wines and butter without any ingredients derived from plastic (this is an accomplishment in Africa), established myself as a “regular” at both the local internet café and the town library, and perfected the art of haggling for things like papayas and wax-print fabric. It’s amazing how the little things in life can make me feel productive and accomplished.

One thing that never ceases to amaze me here is how much time people—and specifically women (myself included)—spend simply trying to live. After an exhaustingly busy day in Africa it’s possible to have accomplished what would have taken just 30 minutes in the US. Take my host mother, for example. She wakes up every morning at 5:00am to start heating the water for the kids’ morning baths and to get breakfast started. She spends at least an hour grinding maize kernels into a fine maize flour with a mortar and pestle, and then builds a fire in the charcoal stove to make the breakfast porridge. After sending the kids off to school, she sweeps the whole house with a bunch of grass tied together with a string, and “mops” the floors by hand with a bucket and rag, then makes several trips to the river with a 5-gallon bucket to fetch enough water for laundry. She spends several hours every day washing the kids’ school uniforms (which she magically keeps white) and play clothes and everyone’s blankets and towels by hand with a bucket of dirty water and a smelly soap that leaves her hands dry and cracked. If she needs more vegetables or anything for cooking, she walks and hour to the municipal market in town, or catches a chicken in the backyard for slaughter. When it’s time to start preparing the afternoon meal for the kids, she beats stalks of rice against a tarp on the ground to remove the chaff before she can wash and cook it. After the kids have eaten and she’s washed all the dishes, it’s time to fold clothes and then start dinner and, which means more maize grinding or wheat winnowing or picking small stones out of bags of beans. Then, after more dishes and cleaning and sending the kids off to bed, she spends a couple hours sewing with her hand crank-powered museum piece Singer machine making dresses for local women, her only source of much-needed income (about $10 per week) to pay the kids’ school fees and buy their cheap laundry soap and charcoal and support her oldest son and husband’s fondness for beer. Sometime just before midnight she goes to bed to rest up before starting the whole process over the next day. No wonder few women in Africa have jobs…they’re too busy doing work.

And, honestly, it’s not been so long since women in the US lived the same sort of life. Things like indoor plumbing and water heaters that turn bathing into a 5 minute time commitment are relatively recent inventions in human history, and anyone over the age of 40 would likely be wholly unsympathetic to my complaints about hand-washing clothes because they probably had to do it too. But now, Americans have machines that clean dishes and wash and dry clothes and suck the dirt up off the floors, and to heat our stoves we just press a button and wait. We even have slow cookers that cook our food when we’re not home, or restaurants where we go so we don’t have to cook at all. If we want to cook, we drive our cars to the grocery store to buy already-butchered meat and pre-cut and pre-washed frozen vegetables and chaff-less rice, and then store everything in our refrigerators and freezers and cabinets so we don’t have to worry about running out of food for a while. All of the things actually required to live (hygiene, food, etc.) have become something we do in addition to our “jobs” in the US and we don’t consider it work, but here just LIVING takes so much time that women don’t have enough hours in the day to do silly things like study or have a job.

I know I’ve been living like this for 2 and a half years now, but since I bought my plane ticket home a couple of weeks ago I can’t stop making comparisons between my life here and what it would have been like had I decided to return straight home 7 weeks ago. Today, for example, my “laundry day” would have consisted of dragging a bag of clothes to the laundry room, dumping them in the machine with a cup of soap, and pressing a button instead of spending 2 hours scrubbing things by hand. If I’d wanted to check my email or post a blog in the US I would have just sat down at my computer instead of walking an hour to and from town to use the internet. I would’ve just called Domino’s or stopped by a sandwich place for lunch instead of spending an hour making lunch if I was feeling hungry but lazy. When I get back to the US, I’m sure I’ll be much more grateful for things like Chinese take-out and vacuums, I’ll never complain about the $2.50 I have to pay at the Laundromat, and I’ll be just a little bit fascinated when I turn a knob and hot water comes out.

In addition to the mandatory hours of chores and classes I did this week, I also visited a local children’s home with my teacher Upendo as part of a “language out” (field trip) for Kiswahili. Daily Bread Life Children’s Home on the outskirts of Iringa is home to 36 boys and girls between 9 months and 13 years, and it was started in 2006 by a husband and wife team of Tanzanian pastors. It’s an incredible place. They’ve got two big dorm-style buildings for the younger kids (one for boys, one for girls), and a big house for the high school-aged kids that is comparable to an American home. Several house mothers take care of the kids, plus a full-time preschool teacher, a cook, and volunteers who help with homework and things. They’ve got showers and a modern kitchen and school-like cafeteria hall, a library where the kids do their homework, and a preschool for the 12 kids under the age of 6. They also have a small infirmary with a part-time nurse who takes care of the kids when they’re sick, and skills training courses in metal work and sewing for the older kids that double as a source of income for the home. It’s an incredible operation, well-run and done for all the right reasons. I was VERY impressed with the home (and with the home’s ability to raise money from American donors…) and also with the woman running it, with whom I practiced Kiswahili conversation with for about an hour.

One of the things that always amazes me about places like Daily Bread Life Children’s Home (and Pasture Valley in Swaziland for that matter) is that somehow witnessing the misery of children strengthens their founders’ faith in God. Example: The head matron of Daily Bread Life told me the story of a little girl they took in last summer. Her mother had died during childbirth when she was very small, leaving her alone with her father who molested her from the age of 4-6. When she was 6, she almost died of TB, and the government removed her from her father’s custody when she was 7. Now she’s a malnourished 8-year-old HIV-positive orphan whose mental development is so far delayed that she’s ill-prepared for pre-school. For the matron, this story was an example of God’s incredible compassion: He had sent this girl to her so she could live a better life, and so that everyone at the home could be touched by her story. This girl’s suffering had actually strengthened her belief in God.

And then, on the other hand, there’s my reaction to this story, which is basically the exact opposite. When I hear stories like this I’m pretty sure there’s no God. If there was, wouldn’t He prevent things like this from happening? Would He really let poor women die during childbirth just because they don’t have the money to go to a hospital? Would He willingly let a 6-year-old little girl suffer and eventually die from an incurable virus given to her by an evil man? If He really existed, couldn’t He punish the HIV-positive father who molested her instead? I’m pretty sure the all-powerful, all-knowing, all good God that Christians put their faith in and praise every day wouldn’t let things like this happen. It’s stories like this and all the human suffering I’ve seen in the last 2 and a half years that make me think that either He doesn’t exist, He doesn’t care about people, or He’s just plain mean.

Still, if someone is doing something good to reduce the impact of HIV or to improve the lives of children living in poverty, I can hardly criticize them for the root of their motives. After all, her faith is what drives her to work so hard to improve the lives of these kids and what gave her the confidence to start the home in the first place, and that’s a GOOD thing from any perspective. I just happen to do things for a very different, even contradictory reason. I do it precisely because I don’t believe there IS a God looking out for us. I believe we have to take care of ourselves and each other because nobody else is there to pick up the slack if we don’t. The only thing that makes me think that MAYBE there’s a God is that women like the head matron (and Peter and Michelle at Pasture Valley) exist, but if bad things weren’t happening to good people all the time there wouldn’t be any NEED for people like her, right?

Anyway, that’s what I think.

In other news, I learned yesterday that I have Schistosomiasis, a disease also known as Bilharzia or Snail Fever, that's caused by five types of parasitic flatworms or blood flukes (also, snail larvae) called schistosomes that set up camp in your spleen/liver and reproduce until you kill them. It's a mostly Africa thing, I think, and it comes from contact with freshwater, which probably means that there were snail larvae living in my bathwater in Swaziland. Cool! There are no symptoms or anything, and if I never treated it it probably wouldn't be a problem for at least 10 years, but I think it's kind of funny. There are parasites currently living in my spleen/liver/kidneys! It's a pretty unique souvenir of my Peace Corps service... (Maybe I should go to the pharmacy and get some Praziquantel to kill them.)

While I'm in town I'll also be searching for some ridiculous African wax-print fabric so that my host mother can make me a dress in the style of a picture I stole from the J.Crew website. It seems a little funny to use brightly-colored fabric covered in pictures of lipstick or skeleton keys or spaceships or something to imitate a $225 dress, but I’m a fan of dresses and I’m prepared to pay her more than the market price to make it for me, so everybody wins. (Excluding, of course, the people who will have to be seen in public with me when I wear my awesome African dress…)

So, until next time…

Baadaye!
Justine (and her schistosomes)

PS: Sorry I’m picture-less yet again today. I’ve developed a pretty boring daily routine so it’s rare I see or experience anything photo-worthy, unless you think the inside of the library or the internet café are exciting (which they aren’t, I assure you). And I hate drawing more attention to myself by pulling out a camera in public, and think it’s rude to take pictures of people without their consent. But I’ll try to do something exciting this week.

More Kiswahili than you ever wanted to know

2010-10-22T14:42:00.001+02:00

Fact: In Kiswahili, the word “yeye” (pronounced yay-yay) means both “he” and “she,” rendering it impossible to determine the gender of the person about whom you are speaking. And yet the language has 27 different demonstratives to mean “this” or “that.”

I sometimes wonder if some of the grammar rules of Kiswahili were invented just to confuse me, yet I still love the language. Here’s why:

Kiswahili (literally “the language of the Swahili people”) belongs to the Bantu family of languages indigenous to East and Central Africa, and is currently spoken by about 90 million people in Tanzania (including Zanzibar), Kenya, Uganda, northern Mozambique, and some parts of Somalia, DRC, Rwanda, and Burundi. (It’s the national language of Kenya and Tanzania and one of several official languages in Uganda.) Though the language has very African roots, modern-day Kiswahili has been largely influenced by the frequent movement of people throughout the region, by spice and slave traders traveling the coast of East Africa, by indigenous African languages of different dialects, and by colonialism. Today, about 25% of Kiswahili words are of Arabic origin, and there are quite a few recognizably Portuguese, Hindi, German, and English words in the mix, too.

Kiswahili is an “agglutinative” language, meaning that one word (a group of letters between two spaces) is made up of several different parts that take on a certain meaning when put together, kind of like a compound word. Take, for example, the following sentence (pronounce EVERY letter, including vowels, phonetically):

Ninampiga. (pronounced: nee-nah-m-PEE -guh)

This one word, which translates as “I am hitting him” or “I am hitting her,” is a complete sentence that can be broken down into the following parts:

Ni-na-m-piga.

Ni = I (subject)

na = am (present tense marker)

m = him/her (object)

piga = hit (verb)

Seems easy enough, right?

But then come the Noun Classes. In Kiswahili, every noun (person, place, thing, or idea) is assigned to a Noun Class, and each of the 7 Noun Classes comes with its own set of prefixes, pronouns, and complicated rules. For example:

Kitabu hiki ni kikubwa. (This book is large.)

Kitabu = book

hiki = this

ni = is

kikubwa = big/large

Because the noun “kitabu” (which is the subject of the sentence) starts with “ki-,” every subsequent noun or verb has to start with the prefix “ki-“ to make it agree with the subject. So if the subject (noun) changes, EVERYTHING changes. For example:

Kitabu hiki ni kikubwa. (This book is large.)

Vitabu hivi ni vikubwa. (These books are large.)

Vioo vimeharibika. (The mirror is broken.)

Kikombe kimeharibika. (The cup is broken.)

Mkono umeharibika. (The arm is broken.)

Gari limeharibika. (The car is broken.)

Basically, the word “broken” can be written any of the 12 following ways: ameharibika, wameharibika, umeharibika, imeharibika, limeharibika, yameharibika, kimeharibika, vimeharibika, zimeharibika, pameharibika, kumeharibika, or mumeharibika. Oh yes, there’s 12 different ways to say “broken” depending on what noun you’re saying is broken…and that’s just in the present tense.

And then there’re the verbs, which change depending on how they’re being used. There’s a reciprocal formation (“they are hitting each other”), a causative formation (“he caused her to hit him”), a stative formation (“he is being hit”), a prepositional formation (“he hit her with…”), etc., and with each formation the verb itself changes with suffixes. And there’s different rules for verbs that are “pure Swahili” and those which are derived from Arabic and those which are derived from English, for verbs with double vowels, for those with an initial vowel of “u,” etc.

Suffice it to say that it’s a complicated language. But there are rules to explain nearly everything, and there are only a handful of exceptions to the rules so it’s easy enough to remember them. And, for the most part, once you get the hang of it the language makes sense.

Another super complicated concept that actually makes sense is that of Swahili Time. The Swahili are, traditionally, an agricultural people whose day begins at sunrise. Since we’re right around the equator, sunrise happens around 6:00am every morning. So doesn’t it make sense that TIME (the counting of the hours) would start then, too? Thus, “saa moja” (hour one) is what WE Westerners would call 7:00am. “Saa mbili” (hour two) is our 8:00am. And so on. Noon “English” time is “hour six” Swahili time, as is English midnight. It’s not so difficult once you get used to automatically adding and subtracting 6 hours to whatever time people tell you or what you see on your watch. And, honestly, does it really make sense that the rest of the world starts the new day in the middle of the night?

Another sort of linguistic-cultural difference between English and Kiswahili that I really appreciate is the vocabulary used to describe family. While, in English, we have aunts, uncles, cousins, step-parents, half-siblings, etc., in Kiswahili this all changes. The sisters of your mother (maternal aunts)are ALSO called your mother, and you distinguish between “mothers” by stating their place in the birth order. Thus a person who would be called your “aunt” in English is either your “big mother” or “small mother” depending on if she’s older or younger than your biological mother. In the same way, paternal uncles are “big father” and “small father.” And, because you have lots of mothers and fathers, all of their children (which we would call “cousins” in English) are your brothers and sisters. “Cousins” are only the children of your maternal uncle or paternal aunt. And the word “ndugu” describes ANY family relation, whether it be your niece or your step-half-great-aunt. Family is family, and I like that.

(I also really appreciate the fact that Justine is a relatively common name in East Africa so nobody says “oh, like Justin Timberlake” when I introduce myself, and everybody knows how to spell it and pronounce it properly. Amos, my last name, is also a common first name here, so my name is easier in East Africa than it’s ever been in my life! It’s kind of nice. Strange, though, to hear people call my name when they’re not talking to me…that’s never happened to me before.)

So, now that you know more than you ever wanted to know about Kiswahili, here are some marginally useful phrases for you. Try to read them (aloud is easier) pronouncing every consonant phonetically. The emphasis in every word is on the penultimate (second to last) syllable, and vowels are pronounced like this:

A= “ah”

E= “ay”

I= “ee”

O= “oh”

U= “oo”

Jina langu ni Justine. (JEE-nuh LAWN-goo ni Justine: My name is Justine.)

Ninatoka Marekani. (ni-naw-TOE-kuh mah-ray-KAW-nee: I come from America.)

Mimi ni mwanafunzi. (MEE-mee ni mwah-nah-FOON-zee: I am a student.)

Habari yako? (huh-BAR-ee YAH-koh: How are you?)

Nzuri sana. (in-ZOO-ree SAW-nuh: I’m fine.)

Asante sana. (uh-SAWN-tay SAW-nuh: Thank you very much.)

Sasa nimechoka kujifunza kuhusu Kiswahili. (I’m tired of learning about Kiswahili now.)

Because I’m sure you are. Pole sana. (POE-lay SAW-nuh: I’m very sorry.)

Anyway, that’s a basic introduction to what I spend at least 4 hours every day speaking and writing and reading and otherwise studying. I’m halfway through the intermediate level course now and I’m finding I can understand enough of what people say to me to convincingly fake a full understanding of the language, which is really all you ever need.

I’ll write more about the goings on in Iringa slash my life in another Blog, to be posed sometime this weekend. For now, though, I’ve got 2 hours and 14 minutes of battery on my computer and I’m going to watch 2 hours and 13 minutes of the TV show Scrubs from my external hard drive. Afterwards, I’ll write a short summary of each episode in Kiswahili so I can count the whole 2 hours and 13 minutes as productive homework time. I have the kind of master procrastination skills that can only come from years of experience.

Halafu, sasa hivi… (huh-LAW-foo SAW-suh HEE-vee: So, for now…)

Baadaye! (buh-DYE-ay: Later!)

Juh-STEE-n

Stories and skepticism

2010-10-17T10:15:00.000+02:00

I know this may come as a big surprise, but I’m a talker. I strike up conversations with strangers, dogs, children, myself. About anything. Any time. Anywhere. And apparently I’m no less garrulous in Kiswahili, as my teachers Upendo and Steward found out this week. Since my class is one-on-one and tailored to what I want to do and what I want to learn, we spent the whole week practicing conversation before moving on to more advanced-level grammar, which I think was actually really helpful language-wise. It also gave me a great insight into some of the “history” of Iringa and an introduction to the local folk lore.

Folk tales and superstitions are a part of every culture. In American culture, it’s largely luck-related—broken mirrors, walking under ladders, black cats—and most people don’t take it too seriously. Tales of watermelon vines growing in kids’ bellies and the existence of the tooth fairy are something we out-grow by the time we celebrate our first double-digit birthday. In many countries in Africa, though, folk tales once developed as cautionary tales for children or as explanations for the unknown are still very much alive in the modern culture. In Swaziland I heard stories of a man-sized python in the Lubombo region that changed colors and swallowed up cars, held my host sister’s son while she used the toilet so as to not jeopardize his future chances of finding love, and was repeatedly warned against the dangers of star-gazing, which is the leading cause of incontinence.

Here’s one of the local legends of Iringa, as told to me by Upendo and adapted from Kiswahili by yours truly:

About 10 years ago, in a small village outside of Iringa, there lived a man who dreamed of owning a big general store. He desperately wanted to be able to buy his wife new dresses and wanted to send his son to university, but he’d been unlucky in business and, one day, went to an mganga (a traditional spiritual healer or so-called “witch doctor”) as a last resort. The mganga performed some rituals and explained to the man that to be successful in business, he would have to be willing to make some sacrifices, including some which may hurt his family. The man agreed, and the mganga took a few hundred shillings as payment and promised him that his life would soon turn around.

The next week, his healthy teenaged son died in his sleep. Desperately, the man and his wife took the boy to the hospital, hoping the doctors could do something, but to no avail: the boy was dead. Remembering what the mganga had said about needing to make sacrifices for money, the man was angry with himself for killing his son in the name of greed. The day he and his wife buried their son, the man confessed his role in the boy’s death to his wife, who promptly left him. The man fell into a state of despair. He let his hair grow long and spent his nights crying outside the hospital, praying that God would undo what he’d done in the pursuit of money.

After many months, the man went back to the mganga and asked him to bring his son back. The mganga gave him a piece of bark from a secret tree and told the man to keep it in his pocket, wrapped inside his money, but to never let it touch the ground and never let anyone else see it. The man followed these instructions to the letter for many years until, one day, he went to pay his bus fare and dropped all his money and the piece of bark onto the ground. He immediately yelled for everyone on the bus to close their eyes but his strange request begot more questions than compliance, and everyone began arguing over WHY they had to close their eyes. They were worried the man was trying to rob them.

But while they were busy arguing, the piece of bark lying on the ground started to grow into a person. It was a man, about 6 feet tall, with long-neglected hair, an unshaven face, and fingernails so long they were curling. He was completely naked and filthy.

When the people on the bus finally stopped arguing long enough to notice the man, they all ran with fright off the bus at the next stop. All except the man, who stayed on the bus staring into the eyes of his son, brought back to life.

Unable to believe his eyes, the man asked the bus driver to take them to the hospital immediately. There he had doctors and nurses look over the boy to see if he was really real. They cut his fingernails and hair, shaved his beard, washed him up, took his vital signs, and declared him both alive and human. He could breathe, he could walk, his pupils dilated properly in response to light, but he was mute and timid to the point of absurdity.

Then, every Thursday since, the man and his son have stood outside the Iringa Government Hospital to talk about the miracle. For 100/= Tanzanian Shillings you can see the son, who is very much human, and for 100/= more you can even shake his hand!

(When I asked Upendo if I could go and see the man and talk to him about his son as part of a language field trip, she said that several weeks ago the two of them went to Dar es Salaam to visit special speech doctors and figure out why he couldn’t speak, but that SHE saw him last year and can vouch for the authenticity of the story. My other teacher, Steward, confirmed the story and said that when the man and his son return from Dar we can go see them.)

Upendo and Steward went on to tell me that I shouldn’t use the bathroom at night because ghosts (who are the angels of hell) haunt bathrooms at night and will stare at me while I pee, and that that TANESCO (the Tanzanian government-owned electricity company) can’t run power lines through cemeteries because the spirits of the dead disrupt the power supply. I learned that a Chinese-run construction company that’s currently building infrastructure in the area works on roads during the day but on bridges at night because bridge building requires the help of wizards who are allergic to sunlight. They also warned me that if ever I smell the familiar cinnamon-cardamom smell of pilau rice immediately after a loud THUMP on the roof of my house, I should immediately stop talking so that the evil spirits (who dropped the pilau, I guess?) won’t find me.

While I’m steadfastly skeptical about all things even remotely supernatural, I find superstitions and tales like these very interesting from a purely anthropological perspective. For most of these stories, I can imagine a situation in which they were told to teach a lesson (like how it’s bad to blindly pursue money) or to explain something inexplicable (like why the Chinese people work at night). One of the most fascinating things about these kinds of stories, I think, is how they combine traditional aspects of culture (like the mganga) with more modern concepts like hospitals, buses, and electric companies, to make them more relevant and believable, and how they evolve to include specific details like the names of communities and hospitals. They also combine Christian beliefs (like the man praying to God for help and the very existence of cemeteries where people are given Christian burials) and traditional spiritual beliefs indigenous to the culture, which is very much how Christianity works in Africa. (Both Upendo and Steward are devout Born Again Christians, yet they wholeheartedly believe these stories. When I ask how they reconcile the inconsistencies between the two paradigms, they laugh and say I can’t possibly understand because I’m an Mzungu.)

Upendo also told me about a mysterious but very serious illness that afflicts high school-aged girls in Tanzania. Usually at school, the girl falls to the ground and appears to be having a seizure. Her eyes roll back in her head and she begins to speak in an unknown gibberish language, apparently channeling the words of her ancestors or other important people from the world of the dead. Then, after a few minutes, she snaps out of it and has a new sense of spiritual devotion but no memory of the incident itself. The lucky girl then becomes more respected among her peers because of her special connection to another world.

While I’m personally very skeptical (couldn’t girls just be faking seizures to be more popular?), I find striking similarities between this “illness” and a similar condition I’ve heard plagues high school girls in Swaziland. I’ve also read in for a medical anthropology course about similar phenomena in Southeast Asia and some parts of Central America (including the disease “amok” from which the phrase “running amok” is derived). Is it more probable that each culture has developed a strikingly similar lie, or is it possible that it’s true? Does not believing in a such an illness, as Americans, make us immune to it and make believers susceptible to it?

Who am I to judge what is true? I still won’t walk under a ladder.

The best $4 I ever spent! Last weekend, after a night of particularly un-ignorable buzzing in my ear, I overcame my claustrophobic hatred of mosquito nets and got one. It was subsidized by USAID and PSI as part of the “Roll Back Malaria” project funded under PEPFAR (apparently), which is amazing. Since the short rains have KIND of started this past week, the population of mosquitoes in my house has reached epic proportions. One night this week, I woke up in the middle of the night and counted over 40 mosquitoes clinging to the outside of my net just on the section by my head. Without this net (and the malaria prophylaxis I’m taking) it’s a good statistical possibility that I would have malaria by now. Also, it doubles as a very convenient storage/display place for earrings. Thanks PEPFAR!

The Iringa Municipal Market. I spend a lot of time here talking to people in Kiswahili and buying once “exotic” fruits like mangoes and papayas for really, really cheap. The other day I refused to buy a mango for the equivalent of $0.12 because I thought it was too expensive, never mind the fact that in the US I’d pay like $7 for a mango at Whole Foods. This billboard says “Reduce the use of trees for charcoal by properly using your charcoal-burning stove” and has pictures illustrating the importance of little doors and whatnot to protect the flame. Most people here, including my host family, use charcoal stoves to cook. The gas stove that I have is so uncommon that I had to buy it from an Indian restaurant. Those big baskets in the lower left of the photo are the big baskets that all the fruit and veg sellers use to transport their produce. One or two of these big baskets is strapped to the back of a bicycle or Vespa, to the top of a dala-dala (mini-bus), or to a big hand-cart you can hire to transport stuff through the town, kind of like the flat-bed things at Sam’s Club but made of wood.

A vehicle for some political candidate from Chadema party (the largest opposition to the incumbent CCM in the Iringa region). These drive through the town blasting music (its trailer is full of speakers) and singing the praises of the candidate by loud-speaker, kind of like a parade except all the time. There are cars for every candidate, every party, and sometimes non-political things. Like the local church, which advertises the times and topics of its Sunday sermon this way while blaring really loud Tanzanian Gospel music.

The local river, which I cross a minimum of twice daily, is full of trash and dragonflies. (That little orangeish-red guy is a dragonfly.) I would say with 98% certainty that someday I will slip and fall into the river on my way to school. I’ve had some close calls already.

It’s a miracle anything grows here! The “soil” is straight-up sand in most places, and the only consistent water supply comes from the river, which makes terraced gardens like this one on the bank of the river necessary.

Saturday, I bought some nyama ya ng’ombe (beef) from the local butcher nearest my house. It was cheap ($0.60 per pound), but I’m pretty sure it had been hanging in the back of his little shop for many, many days. Those black parts are little bits of kidney that the butcher threw in for free, which I gave to a dog, and the newspaper it’s sitting in is what it came in. In the future, if a butcher shop is so full of flies that I’m afraid to speak for fear of inhaling them, I’ll refrain from buying that butcher’s meat. I cooked up these mysterious bits with a garlic, red onion, and peas, and then made a sauce for the meat with honey and broth. It was delicious, but I’m still waiting for the digestive consequences of this endeavor.

Anonymity and cream puffs

2010-10-10T11:01:00.005+02:00

After an exceptionally sedentary Saturday spent staring at my Kiswahili books and reading a 372-page novel in its entirety, I decided it was time to start my long procrastinated plan of getting in shape by going for a run through the township. I dug out my long neglected running shoes and shorts, stretched my lower extremities, and started out at a pathetic beginner’s pace in the opposite direction of my daily route to school, excited to explore the unknown corners of the neighborhood. I ran past clusters of rickety shacks where wanawake (women) were selling vegetables, past a CCM political rally with speakers blaring musical praises of President Kikwete, past vinyozi (hair salons) where women were having polyester hair extensions painfully braided into their real hair, past a cemetery/community garden where people can buy small plots of land for EITHER burial the burial of a loved one or for planting vegetables (maybe for one until you need the other?), past a small “grocery store” (that sells only booze) where a group of men was passing the afternoon with beer and WWE…

And past and endless chorus of hundreds of children screaming “Mzungu! Mzungu!”

While I realize that most people, especially children, don’t mean anything malicious when they scream “white person” as I walk past their house every day or run past them on the street or sit next to them in a dala-dala (mini-bus), after two and a half years of being constantly reminded of my skin color I’m REALLY tired of it.

As an ex-pat (and white woman) living in Africa, one thing that’s taken a lot of getting used to is the amount of attention I receive. Constantly. Every morning walking to school and every afternoon walking back home, I tell the same 150 curious people that I’m “nzuri” (good) because they always ask. When I buy vegetables at the market, everyone around me stops and whispers to their friends about what I’m buying and what I’m wearing and about my strange yellow hair. School children beside me on the dala-dala surreptitiously touch my hair and giggle. When I’m walking in town, people constantly stop me to ask where I’m coming from, where I’m going, where I’m from, what I’m doing, if I have a boyfriend, where my family lives, if I will pay for their kids to go to school, etc. If I walk into a shop and ask, in flawless Kiswahili, for two rolls of toilet paper, the cashier laughs and then repeats my request to everyone else in the shop as if it’s the funniest thing that’s happened all day.

The attention I receive from men is even MORE ridiculous. If I sit down in the Iringa town park with a book on a warm afternoon, I immediately become a magnet for men begging for money, jobs, or a wife (or, most commonly, all three). Men sit down next to me in the internet café and ask me incredibly personal questions while I try my best to ignore them and focus on the pay-by-the-minute internet in front of me. They slow down in their cars or on their motorcycles to a walking pace so they can pester me for the entirety of my 20 minute walk back to my house in the evening (which I then have to turn into a 40 minute walk as I try to lose them so they don’t know where I live). If at any time any man approaches me in a restaurant, in the market, or in the internet café, 98% of the time this is the conversation that ensues:

Him: “Where are you from?”

Me: (obviously annoyed) “America, but I live in Frelimo.”

Him: “You are beautiful. Do you have a boyfriend?”

Me: “I don’t want one.”

Him: “I will help you by being your boyfriend/Look how nice my body is./How do you control your sexual urges?”

Me: (firm, but polite) “You are rude, please go away.”

Him: “Give me your phone number so I can call you and we can get to know each other.”

Me: “No.” (usually I have to say this MANY times)

Him: “Well then give me money/find me a sponsor in America to pay for my schooling/give me a job.”

Me: “Go away” (in a less polite way, roughly the Kiswahili equivalent of “go screw yourself”)

It’s enough to make me long for the anonymity of being just another white girl in Kansas, or to make me fantasize about public transport in DC where nobody cares where you’re going or where you came from or what you’re doing. I dream of being able to walk down the street and not having a single person ask me for money, try to sell me something, and of going to shops where things have prices not determined by my skin color.

Modest dreams that will be realized in just 89 days.

That’s right, after two and a half years abroad, I have FINALLY bought a return ticket to the US! I’ll be leaving Tanzania on December 20 and returning to Swaziland to spend 2 more weeks with my friends and host family before beginning the 24-hour flight back to the US of A on January 6. I’ll arrive in DC on the morning of January 7 and will spend a day with Jess, Brittney, and any other friends who still remember me after 2 long years, and then return to Kansas the following morning (January 8) to be reacquainted with long-lost grandparents, parents, and siblings.

To recap, I’ll be in…

Tanzania: now to December 19

Swaziland: December 20 to January 6

DC: January 7

Topeka, KS: January 8 to August

When I get back to the US, I plan to spend at least a week eating all the things I’ve missed in Africa (cream puffs from Sam’s Club, margaritas, Guapo’s chips and salsa, strawberry-kiwi Snapple, gourmet cheeses, all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, Dulce de Leche cheesecake from The Cheesecake Factory, Papa Murphy’s Pizza, chocolate silk pie from Perkin’s, etc.) and making up for 6 missed Christmas/Thanksgiving feasts and lots of missed birthday celebrations with family. Then, after getting a new driver’s license and a cell phone and finding a gym so I can lose all the weight I gain from eating half of Topeka, I’ll ideally find some sort of menial but magically high-paying job to occupy my time until I move to New Orleans in August. Woohoo!

Until then, I’ve decided that every time someone yells “Mzungu” at me I’ll stop, look confusedly around, and ask “wapi?” (where?). This makes kids laugh and run away, which gives me a chance to escape. As for fending off the men, I think I’ll ask my Kiswahili teacher to teach me some more offensive phrases on Monday.

The view of the township of Frelimo from atop the ridge by my house. Most of the houses are made of mud bricks or cinder blocks and have corrugated iron roofs which, after a year, become red with rust. All the streets are dirt, which makes it fun when running or walking because every passing car makes it impossible to breathe for a solid 20 seconds. Can’t wait for the rainy season in November, when the streets will be made of mud that I will, undoubtedly, fall face-first into!

The beautiful, allergy-inducing Jacaranda tree-lined streets of the town of Iringa. This is the main street (Uhuru Street) in town, and those vehicles in the picture are dala-dalas.

All around the Iringa municipal vegetable market there are billboards like these with health- or sanitation-focused message, which is something I definitely identify with and appreciate. This particular one makes me laugh. It’s a message about the importance of putting your rubbish in a dumpster to keep the town clean because if you don’t, kids will go through it and play with what they find. If you notice in the foreground of the center panel, a child is blowing up a used condom like a balloon. Yum.

Every morning on my way to school I walk through a big community garden area where people grow vegetables and keep banana orchards. There’s also a brick yard where a man makes and sells mud bricks to people who are in the market for bricks. I think it’s an interesting point of comparison between Swaziland, where the brick yards sell cinder blocks made of cement, and Tanzania, where the bricks are made with dirt and water and are beat into shape with a piece of wood. Welcome to the ‘hood.

This is the “butcher shop” closest to my house…the one my Kiswahili teacher recommends buying my meat from. (No thanks.) Butcher shops here that sell pork say “kiti moto” on them, which literally means “hot chair.” It took me a while to figure out why all the warm furniture stores sold pork.

Slummin' It in Iringa

2010-10-02T13:54:00.002+02:00

I never thought a half dozen of slightly poop-covered eggs could make my day, but as started on the 20 minute walk home from town on Thursday afternoon with my little bag of eggs, I felt an overwhelming sense of accomplishment. I’d asked a random person where I could buy fresh eggs, understood his directions well enough to find the shop, bargained with the shopkeeper, and successfully purchased 6 eggs for a local price. All in Kiswahili.

Booyah!

After almost a week here in Iringa, I think I’m starting to figure out how things work. I’ve found a cute little house just outside of town and staked out the quickest walking routes between home, school, and town. I’ve found a restaurant that serves American-style hamburgers with actual mustard, figured out how much vegetables and things SHOULD cost at the market (prices for everything except bananas are negotiable), and successfully purchased a 3 month supply of things like sugar, salt, and rice by the kilo from random little shops. I’ve mastered the art of the squat toilet (even when wearing pants!) and, after a ridiculously difficult application process, secured a membership to the Iringa Branch of the Tanzania Public Library Service and established myself as a regular in their study room. And I’ve FINALLY stopped saying “sanibonani” and “yebo” to people and started speaking Kiswahili with confidence.

Little bits of confusion (and the popularity of green and pink toilet paper) aside, I’m really starting to like this place.

Iringa is a strange little town. Strategically built on a mountaintop by the Germans in the early 1900s (so they could protect themselves from the rebellions of the colonized peoples below), it’s now the provincial capital for the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, a stop-over for bus-loads of Wazungu (white people) en route to Ruaha National Park, and home to three relatively new universities. Counting college students, the town has a population of about 120,000, but most of those people must live in dorms or slums because the town itself is tiny; I can walk from one side of town to the other in 20 minutes. The town’s population is half Christian and half Muslim (mostly Omani and Yemeni families), which means that I am both awakened by the morning call to prayer and badgered to attend church, and that shops and restaurants are confusingly closed on EITHER Friday or Sunday, depending on the owner’s religious preference. There’s also a sizeable population of Wazungu who all seem to speak Kiswahili proficiently and who hang out at the local internet café all day with their laptops and eat lunch at the cleverly-named Hasty Tasty. I mostly stay away from them because I still find large groups of white people overwhelming…

Lucky for me where I live, I’m the only Mzungu for miles. With the help of my Kiswahili teachers, I found a cute little house about 20 minutes walk from the city center in a township (aka slum) called Frelimo. (Frelimo is the name of the revolutionary party in Mozambique, but I haven’t yet figured out if there’s any connection.) My little hovel is a brand new, freshly painted addition to a family’s existing house, enclosed inside the family’s walled compound. I have my own bedroom, bathroom, partially-enclosed sitting room, and bathroom, and my own burglar gate-covered door. (And my electricity and water are supposed to be connected this week…) It’s a great location—a 12 minute walk to class, a 5 minute walk to the local butcher and vegetable market, and about 2 minutes to my teacher’s house—and I’m enjoying living with a host family again…even if the children just laugh at me when I try to talk to them. I’m still settling in, trying to get used to the blaring music from the neighboring bar and the insistence of the family’s maid who wants to scrub my floor every day, but it’s starting to feel like home. There are, however, two drawbacks to my new location: (1) I have to step over two constantly-flowing streams of sewage to get to my house, including the one connected to my house, and (2) I only have a squat toilet. Personally, I think the extra Kiswahili practice I’ll get from living with a host family is worth the ever-present danger of stepping in human waste.

And my Kiswahili class (the reason I’m here in the first place) is FANTASTIC. I have two very experienced and very patient teachers, Steward and Upendo, and I’m the only student for the time being so it’s really intensive and interactive. Every day I do 2 hours with Upendo and 2 hours with Steward, plus “language out” sessions some afternoons when they follow me around and judge my use of Kiswahili with non-teachers. In my first week of class I had an introduction and orientation to Iringa, took a placement test (I scored a 58%, which I was very happy with), and did an intensive review of everything I learned in Zanzibar to practice conversation and hone in on weaknesses before moving on to more complex grammatical things. I’ve got a solid foundation of grammar and vocabulary, so now I just have to figure out how to use all of it! In addition to the lengthy writing and “research” assignments (mostly I have to interview people and write up the interviews) given to me by Upendo and Steward, I’ve started keeping a journal in Kiswahili and writing short stories in Kiswahili to practice the usage of the various noun classes, and it’s really helping. And I talk to myself a lot in Kiswahili. I’m not crazy, I’m practicing.

On my grand tour around Iringa last week, I asked Upendo if there was a public library in town. “A what?” I explained to her that a public library was a place people could go to borrow books for free for a week or two, just to read. She looked at me incredulously and assured me that NOWHERE in Iringa would I find a place to borrow books for free because only Wazungu read novels, and that the only library that existed in town was just a big room full of tables where high school students did their homework in the afternoons. Unconvinced, I asked the owner of the local internet café about it. He pointed across the street to a big building marked “Maktaba ya Iringa” (Library of Iringa). Bingo! After a complicated application process (I have no address, no school, no employer, and no Tanzanian ID number, plus I’m a single woman without a father or husband to sign the form for me, so it took much negotiation to get a library card), I am now a proud lifetime member of the Tanzania National Library Service.

In the afternoons, after class, I lock myself away in the library’s study hall for a few hours of uninterrupted Kiswahili homework, and peruse the small section of adult fiction mostly donated by the US Embassy. I’m really excited to have a temperature-controlled building full of tables, chairs, and free books within walking distance of my house, which makes me a huge dork (but I’m okay with that). I’ve decided to re-read a lot of the “classics” I hated reading in high school to see if 8 years passing has changed my perspective on them. So far I’ve re-read Animal Farm and Wuthering Heights, and started One Hundred Years of Solitude. Aside from being irritated by how whiney, sickly, and dramatic women are in early 19th Century literature, I’ve so far had a more favorable opinion of the books this second time around. Mrs. Davis, my AP English teacher, would be so proud.

(I feel a little bit like Belle in the opening sequence of “Beauty and the Beast” because everybody here, including the librarian, thinks I’m crazy for wanting to read so much: “Look there she goes, that girl is so peculiar. I wonder if she’s feeling well. With a dreamy far-off look, and her nose stuck in a book. What a puzzle to the rest of us is Belle…”)

Other than class and the library and my little everyday triumphs, my life is pretty uneventful. I’ve been looking for an NGO or children’s home or something else in need of some free labor where I could volunteer in the afternoons/weekends, but so far everybody either wants me to have a $1200 work permit or is located too far outside of town to be a convenient daily commute. So, for now, I’m spending my afternoons doing fake homework I assign myself, reading classic literature, applying for scholarships for grad school (any suggestions?), and wandering around Frelimo with an affected sense of purpose, surreptitiously taking pictures of things I find entertaining and trying not to step in feces.

And using the super fast, super cheap internet at IringaNET every day. $14 for 20 hours. It’s glorious.

Salama,
Justine

My house! The door on the left is my bathroom (I have to go outside to get there, but hey), and the yellow-ish burglar gate is the one leading into my house. The curtain on the left, inside the little "foyer" is my bedroom, and the one straight ahead of the entrance is my kitchen. To the right of my house (in the picture) is my host family's house.

A standard squat toilet. My favorite part about my toilet is how crooked it is in relation to the wall...see the lines of the tiles? Those are square with the wall. I don't understand why it's like that... Until I get my water hooked up (they say "this week" but this is Africa so who knows when it will actually happen), I'm using a bucket to flush. In my first week at my house, I've only used 25 liters of water, counting bathing, cooking, drinking, and toilet flushing! (The toilet flushing water is re-purposed bathing water.) Considering that the average American uses 250+ liters of water per day, I'm pretty proud of that.

And all of that water I used ended up here, in river of sewage number two. When I took this picture, I was standing in the gate leading to my house, so you can see how I physically have to step OVER this. And it smells.

This is, hands down, the WORST thing I have ever tasted in my life--even worse than the cappuccino flavored cola I bought in Zanzibar. The can is in Kiswahili, but it says "Made with the finest hops, malt, and lactose for a rich, creamy taste" or something like that, and then says "Non-Alcoholic" on the top. Had I known what it was prior to purchasing it, I would've bought a Fanta Apple instead. I think if you were to drink a beer and eat a piece of heavily cream-covered pumpkin pie, and then vomit, it would taste like Grand Malt. Why it is so popular, and so expensive, is completely beyond me. I'm nauseated just thinking about it.

(And, yes, I am aware of how much I write in my Blog about food and toilets.)

Why people fly

2010-09-28T12:56:00.002+02:00

After an hour-long trek with 100 pounds of luggage through the seemingly endless maze of streets in Stone Town at 5:30 Saturday morning, I was looking forward to taking a 2 hour nap on the ferry and waking up in Dar Es-Salaam. I tucked my messenger bag under the seat in front of me, fluffed up my travel pillow, settled into my big blue vinyl-upholstered seat on the ferry’s lower cabin and waited to be lulled to sleep by the rocking boat as the ferry pulled out of Zanzibar Harbor.

A man in an Azam Marine Company uniform was walking up and down the aisles of the ferry, handing out little black plastic bags. I thought it humorous that the Azam Marine Company bothered to have their own bags printed up with its logo and “SICK BAG,” and informed him that I didn’t need one. I’d been just fine on the ferry TO Zanzibar, but he insisted I take one.

Ten minutes later, the puking started. As we picked up speed, the rough seas threw our little ferry violently from side to side and my fellow passengers unfolded their sick bags. I understood why the Azam Marine Company guy had insisted that I take one. This trip was NOTHING like the ferry TO Zanzibar; it was like the most nauseating of amusement park rides, complete with the stifling heat and eau de vomit. Of the 20 people sitting in my little section, 4 of them got sick in the first hour. (I had donated my sick bag to the woman in front of me, so getting seasick wasn’t an option for me.) The “puke collectors” (the guys who exchanged used sick bags for new ones) certainly had their work cut out for them.

After I’d become inured to the constant echo of vomiting and the foul odor of the cabin, it was almost humorous. And then we hit a really big wave. Grown men on the left side of the cabin were thrown out of their seats, seasick women lying on the floor rolled violently towards the front deck, and the hysterical screaming began. Though most of the screaming was done in Kiswahili or Arabic (they pray in Arabic), I understood enough to know that everyone was begging Allah to deliver us safely to the mainland. And the hysteria was contagious. One teenage girl’s frantic screaming for her mother inspired twenty 30-something women to throw themselves into the aisles in fits of wailing reminiscent of a pouty 3-year-old. It was dramatic.

I exchanged a very awkward, confused look with the Canadian girl sitting next to me, but the Azam Marine Company man assured us that this was normal. Normal? Really? These people live on an island. Shouldn’t they be used to boats and seasickness and whatnot? (Kudos to the people who work for Azam Marine Company, though. That has to be the worst job ever.)

We docked in Dar around 9:30 and, after all the previously hysterical women pinned their headscarves back in place and regained their composure, disembarked no worse for the wear. I grabbed my bags and set out to find a cheap taxi to the bus rank, eager to get on a bus to Iringa. But first: Subway. I’d been dreaming of Subway sandwiches since learning about it a week earlier, so my taxi waited while I ordered a foot long chicken breast sandwich with spicy Southwest sauce. Then we braved the mid-morning traffic through Dar to the Ubungo bus station.

As we pulled into the bus station we passed the 11:00am bus to Iringa. Leaving. No worries, though…I only had to wait 3 hours for the next one. (The Subway was TOTALLY worth it.) The taxi driver dropped me off outside the office of Abood Bus and dragged all my luggage inside to buy my ticket. Sensing my frustration (really I was just impatient to get on the bus so I could eat my sandwich), the guy behind the Iringa counter let me jump the line and gave me my choice of seats on the 1:00 bus. I paid him the 25,000/= ($16) he asked for, got my ticket and receipt in return, and made my way to the bus.

Sitting on the bus, though, I started to get a little worried that I’d been ripped off or tricked in some way. I’d tried to do everything right: I’d vociferously kept my bags with me at all times so I didn’t have to pay a porter and didn’t have anything stolen, I’d insisted on going to Abood’s office to buy my ticket and asked several employees for the price of the ticket before buying it, checked that the bus was in working order before agreeing to anything, made sure he gave me a receipt for the right amount, and made sure he wrote my name in on the seating chart for the bus. I’d even gotten the name, business card and phone number of the man (Imo) who sold me the ticket in case I needed anything later.

And then, looking at my receipt, I noticed that it was written for 26 September instead of 25 September. I asked the man behind me how much he’d paid for his ticket: 12,000/= less than me. Something wasn’t right.

I called Imo back and asked if he’d meet me at the bus to take me to lunch (I knew he wouldn’t come back if I told him I realized I’d been ripped off), and then confronted him about being a weasel. I threatened to tell his boss if he didn’t give me my money back, and (because he’d been so insistent on telling me he was a Born Again Christian) informed him that Jesus already knew he was a liar. He nervously changed my ticket to the proper day (which I checked and double-checked with the driver of the bus) and refunded me 6,000/= of the money he’d stolen from me. He said he’d spent the rest already on a Coke and a pack of cigarettes, which I believe, but an hour later he brought me a coke and a newspaper, so I think he felt guilty. I still paid 6,000/= more than everyone else on the bus, but, all things considered, $4 extra isn’t too bad for a Mzungu (white person) price.

The 1:00 bus pulled out of the station at 1:30 (of course the 11:00 bus couldn’t have been 30 minutes late leaving…) and began the 500 kilometer, 10 hour trip to Iringa. The first few hours of the trip was uneventful: mostly paved roads, lots of little towns full of goats and bicycles, a couple potty breaks along the way. We drove through Mikumi National Park, past families of giraffes, zebras, elephants and lots of DLCs (deer-like creatures), and survived the winding dirt roads through the Udzungwa Mountains, arriving in Iringa at 10:30 Saturday night.

So today is my first full day in Iringa, and mostly I’m just confused and disoriented and overwhelmed by the lack of English-speakers. So far I’ve found a cheap but safe hotel in a township outside Iringa (where I’ll stay until I can find a flat or a room to rent) and wandered around a bit looking for an internet café and being harassed by men who are quit insistent that they love me. (In Kiswahili…I just pretend not to understand.) I’m REALLY glad I took 3 weeks of Kiswahili class in Zanzibar before I came here because NOBODY speaks English. Not even a little. I suppose that’s a good thing, though, since I’m here to learn Kiswahili anyway.

Tomorrow I start classes again, and hopefully I’ll figure out where things are and how to get there and whatnot in the couple of days. The tourist information place is open tomorrow, which should be helpful. And maybe my teacher can help me find a place to volunteer or something. Until then I’ll just hide in my room and watch BBC Planet Earth and do Kiswahili homework. What a life.

Baadaye!

The new Blogger Photo Uploader thing is really difficult.

2010-09-28T12:41:00.002+02:00

Since the official kickoff of election campaigning two weeks ago, the whole of Zanzibar has been plastered with CCM and CUF campaign posters. Most of them are CCM and they're yellow and green and say "Chague CCM, Chague (name of candidate)" which means "Vote for CCM, Vote for (name of candidate)." And then there are lots of billboards that say things like "CCM is the party of the people" and have pictures of Kikwete (the incumbent) shaking hands with disabled people. It's kind of funny how the posters and whatnot work, though...they're literally EVERYWHERE. Like graffiti.

This delicious chicken breast sandwich with spicy Southwest sauce is the reason I missed my bus to Iringa and had to take the late bus and nearly died. Totally worth it.

View from the bus window. For about 6 hours. (The other 4 hours it was dark.) I'm happy to be back around mountains, though...says the girl from Kansas. Mountains make me think of Swaziland.

Driving through the game park at sunset. Everyone thought I was crazy for taking so many pictures, but I was just bored. Unfortunately, I wasn't taking pictures when we drove past the family of elephants on the side of the road, when we nearly hit a giraffe crossing the road, or when we had to wait for a herd of zebras to cross.

Spelunking in Hammer pants and other things the writers of the Lonely Planet guide clearly didn't do in Zanzibar

2010-09-22T11:35:00.001+02:00

After 90 very long minutes in the back of a sweaty dalla-dalla full of slightly frightened children, Laura and I arrived at the quaint little village of Mangapwani on the northwestern coast of Zanzibar. Our lower extremities mostly numb from the trip, we ungracefully climbed over the mess of stinking plastic bags of fresh-caught octopus, henna-adorned feet, and 25-liter jerry-cans of petrol crowding the narrow aisle and made our way into the coral-stoned streets of the village.

The town of Mangapwani (literally “Omani Beach”) is described in the Lonely Planet guide to East Africa as “small and unremarkable,” which was enough to make me want to visit. It’s a rural village full of shambas (small farms), bent palm trees leaning inland from the incessant wind from the sea, and a ridiculous number of chickens (compared at least to Stone Town). It’s also home to the Mangapwani Coral Cavern, which is why we were there.

The Mangapwani Coral Cavern is a big underground cave full of slightly damp fossilized coral formed an estimated 1.6 million years ago. It was discovered by a shepherd boy in the early 19^th century after one of his goats fell into the opening of the cave, which at the time was just a little hole in the middle of a forest. Unfortunately for the shepherd boy (who was a slave) and his fellow slaves, the discovery of the cave meant that the plantation’s Omani owner, Hamed El-Harthy, could continue to keep slaves even after slavery was officially outlawed some years later—he just hid them in the cave when he wasn’t using them. It wasn’t long, though, before the slaves living in the cave discovered two escape routes: one leading to the ocean (where lots of them drowned trying to get out) and one opening up just 90 meters from the entrance of the cave. Eventually several slaves escaped from this second passage and ran to the neighboring shamba for help, and since then the cave has been uninhabited (unless you believe the guide’s story about the cave’s “magical” python that improves the fertility and election results of anyone who brings it gifts of flowers or food…we didn’t see it).

Anyway, we followed our guide around the cave’s narrow passages, splashing around in potentially python- and parasite-infested waters and trying not to freak out when bats flew very close to our heads (I’m very afraid of bats). Our guide thought we were a hoot, too. We had expected a precariously steep staircase and a short tour and some history about slavery and whatnot, but not the clamoring around on sandy, slippery coral part. Laura was wearing a knee-length plaid skirt and bejeweled sandals, and I was wearing bright purple Hammer pants (like MC Hammer) and Chaco Z’s and carrying a messenger bag full of Kiswahili textbooks. I DID have a headlamp in my bag, which was really fortunate considering that I would have otherwise had to navigate by the dim light of my cell phone. But hey, we lived to tell about it. (And to write to Lonely Planet about their completely insufficient coverage of the Mangapwani Coral Cavern!)

Another must-see in Zanzibar (also neglected by Lonely Planet) is the Capital Art Studio, a little family-owned photography studio in the Shangani neighborhood of town that has photographed every important event and lots of everyday scenes in Zanzibar since the 1950’s. The walls of the shop are covered with black-and-white pictures of foreign dignitaries (including His Majesty King Mswati III) spending holidays in Zanzibar, of shop-keepers and fruit vendors, and of little gems of Zanzibari culture like women sorting fresh cloves and Yemeni boys selling coffee in the streets of Stone Town before the revolution in 1964. The shop’s owner, a second-generation Zanzibari photographer of Indian descent, had a story to go with each photo and as I sorted through a big box of old photos he narrated them with details about the time in which the photo was taken, giving them context and making them so much more interesting. He knew some of the people in the pictures, knew who the children grew up to be or where they fled to after the revolution, what happened to this building during the 1970’s or that building during some tropical storm, and he explained to me the impact of the revolution on the demographic and culture of Zanzibar (when a large part of the island’s resources, farms, business, and homes were nationalized and about 15% of the population, including most foreign-born non-Muslim residents, fled the country). I honestly think I learned more about the history of Zanzibar in an hour with him than from an hour at the Zanzibar National Museum of History! It was incredible to see how much the island has changed in the last half-century, and also how much it’s NOT changed.

Speaking of changes, it’s been a week since the end of Ramadan and I’m very much enjoying being able to eat in public and whatnot. Not much else has really changed except that the food vendors previously selling only at night are now selling during the day, and there’s more litter in the streets because people are eating in public where there aren’t trash cans for all their candy wrappers and plastic bags. And, turns out, like half the men in Zanzibar smoke. Who knew…

To mark the end of Ramadan, Zanzibaris celebrate three days of “Sikukuu.” Basically, it’s a big “we can eat now!” feast that involves fancy coordinating outfits for children and their mothers, the application of lots of colorful eye makeup on any girl old enough to walk, elaborately henna-ed hands and feet, and lots of staying up late and walking around. Kind of like a Muslim Christmas, kids get presents (mostly toy guns) and then parade around the town showing off their new clothes and toys. And they fire the cannons on the waterfront, which is a really scary way to wake up at 6am when you’re foreign and have no idea what is happening or why.

Some friends and I also stumbled upon a Sikukuu part two celebration in the town of Kizimkazi a full week after the rest of the island had finished celebrating. During Ramadan, women are exempted from fasting for the week of their menstruation, so the women of Kizimkazi tack an extra 6 days of fasting onto the end of their Ramadan and then celebrate the holiday a week later. There’s a bit of controversy about the Kizimkazi Sikukuu because it attracts so many prostitutes (which isn’t unlike the usual Sikukuu celebration if you ask me), but we had a good time wandering through tents selling sunglasses (at night?), toy guns, candy, chapatti and kebab at the Kizimkazi fairground. After most of the kids had gone home, we ended up at the “Casino Academy” and danced the night away to surprisingly explicit Swahili hip-hop music. Apparently it’s okay to rap about sex in English and drop F-bombs because nobody understands the words anyway.

In other news, I only have 3 more days of Kiswahili left in Zanzibar! (Sad.) Despite the fact that I really like my Kiswahili class and basically everything else about Zanzibar (including the decades old semi-automatic twin-tub washing machine in my apartment that I FINALLY figured out how to use), I’ve decided to give Iringa a try for two weeks or so before I decide where to live until December. If I don’t like it, I can always come back to Zanzibar. So, Saturday morning I’ll be taking the early ferry back to Dar Es Salaam and HOPEFULLY catching a bus 6 hours south to Iringa on either Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning. Monday morning I start the second phase of my Kiswahili classes at KIU Iringa. Unfortunately, nobody in Zanzibar knows anything about transport between Dar and Iringa so I have no idea how I’m going to get there, but worst case scenario I just hang out in Dar for a couple of days. It’s all part of the adventure, I guess.

Lakini sasa, nimemaliza. (For now, I’m done.)

Over and out.

Yet another sunset over the white sand beaches of Zanzibar, this time at Nungwi beach in the north of the island. I never tire of watching the sun set over the Indian Ocean… Laura, Victoria, and I found a shop that sold (possibly stolen) bottles of expensive South African wine for 15,000 Tanzanian shillings (about $10) each, so instead of going to a party with a cover charge of 5,000Tsh we hung out at some plastic tables outside the shop with a bunch of Rastafarian diving instructors and drank wine.

Me and Laura at the Mangapwani Coral Cavern. The light in the background is coming from the dangerously steep, somewhat slippery staircase that we used to enter the cave. The freshwater spring that pools in one of the passageways of the cave is the only source of clean water in the community, so local people frequent the cave to fetch water. And then walk up those stairs with 25-liter jerry-cans on their heads. The scarves on our shoulders are our “we’re making an effort not to scandalize the locals with our naked white shoulders” scarves, but after 15 minutes in the cave we didn’t care anymore. It was hot and stuffy.

Me trying to get out of the cave at Mangapwani. The slightly moldy tree stump in my right hand is the only thing keeping me from falling 3 meters back into the cave, which I was pretty sure was going to happen. I don’t have enough upper body strength in my gimp right arm to pull myself out of a hole in the ground! (Eventually, though, I got out.) Please note my sweet pants in this picture. My favorite thing about my Hammer pants (aside from the fact that they’re ridiculously comfortable) is that every morning I decide to wear them I end up with “Can’t Touch This” stuck in my head for several hours. It’s a great way to start the day.

There’s a dhow (traditional Swahili sailboat) at the Zanzibar National Museum of History made entirely without nails (which isn’t so remarkable since that’s how they used to be made, but it was new to me). It’s held together with tightly woven ropes laced through the adjoining boards like shoelaces, and the sail is made from tightly woven strips of palm leaf. It’s cool. (This is clearly just a picture of the front of it, which I’m sure has a more correct name than “the front” but I’m not a boat person so I don’t know what it’s called.)

Laura, Victoria, and I spent an afternoon meandering through the Jozani-Chwaka National Park, a big forest full of hundred-year-old mahogany trees and red colobus monkeys. The troop of red colobus monkeys at Jozani, which numbers about 200 individuals, is the largest troop of this particular type of monkeys anywhere in the world, but their numbers are (slowly) on the rise because they’re being protected from poachers and all natural predators.

It was really strange to see how HUMAN they were in their mannerisms, their facial expressions, and their interactions with each other. (And also how NOT afraid they were of me.) Watching them, it’s not hard to believe that we’re in some way related.

I nearly stepped on this guy’s tail when I was walking on the trail through the woods. That would’ve been interesting…monkey fang marks would’ve been kind of a cool souvenir. (Rabies shots not so much.)

Nearly every night in Stone Town (in Kiswahili, "Mji Mkongwe") I venture a couple blocks from my house to Babu Chai, a little stand selling tea, coffee, doughnuts, sweet bread, chapatti, and fried eggs. My usual is a ginger, cinnamon, cardamom, and clove spiced tea with milk and sugar, and a sugar-coated deep-fried doughnut. (Healthy, I know.) Together, the tea and doughnut costs about $0.34, which is quite a good deal. For another $0.80, I can get a “Zanzibar pizza,” which is basically an egg-fried chapatti smothered in cabbage, chili sauce, fresh tamarind, and ketchup. Delish.

After Victoria and Laura left (last Tuesday and Friday respectively), I befriended a Dutch girl, 3 Germans, a Korean girl and another American also studying Kiswahili at the university here, and we made a weekend trip to the town of Kizimkazi in the southern part of the island. Kizimkazi is known for its dolphins (which we saw but didn’t swim with because I think that’s mean) and for its snorkeling. We took a day trip out to a private island, did some snorkeling (over a type of coral I’d never seen before), ate a bunch of barracuda, and then nearly died of sea sickness on the SUPER rough sees (seriously, I thought we would capsize…several times) on the 2 hour trip back to Kizimkazi. Totally worth it.

Our boat guys (friends of a friend…we were staying at their house and it was their boat) cooked us a delicious lunch of barracuda, rice, and a spicy tomato-based sauce, plus lots of fresh fruit. There was a boat full of Italians on the island, too, and we got their leftover lobsters (yum!) and some other stuff they would’ve otherwise wasted. Then, sitting at their fancy picnic table in the shade of their big umbrella, they drank their cold beers and glared at us while we sat in the sand and ate our food with our hands. (And while we rinsed our sandy watermelon in the ocean…) Apparently we’re not “private island” material. My favorite part, though, was GETTING to the little island. The boat dropped my Dutch friend and me off about a kilometer away and we snorkeled through the somewhat rough seas over lots of coral and whatnot all the way back to the island. When I’ve been snorkeling before, I’ve always stayed in a pretty small area around wherever the boat was, but it was incredible to see the diverse kinds of underwater environments I swam over in just a kilometer—live and dead coral, sea anemones of all kinds, fields of seaweed dancing in the current, sandy patches full of little bottom-dwelling critters, etc.

Campaigning for the October election has begun on the island! The ruling party (CCM) has plastered the whole city with green and yellow campaign posters, but the opposition (CUF) is growing in numbers and becoming increasingly vocal. Here, from the window of my classroom, we’re watching a CUF rally where the party officially announced its candidate for the presidency of Zanzibar. The party is lobbying for the independence of Zanzibar from mainland Tanzania and for more Sharia-compliant laws for the island’s Muslim people. It was really interesting to see such a public display of political opposition (something I never saw in Swaziland), and also to see traditional Muslim women wearing mabuibui (black overcoats worn in public) who were politically vocal. It seems strange to me that in a place where the banks are forbidden from offering interest on savings accounts (it’s prohibited under Islamic law for a person to gain interest on savings or charge interests on loans) and where adult women aren’t allowed to ride bicycles, women are still involved in political rallies.

The “chips mayai” (French fry omelet) that I think was responsible for the past ten days of digestive hell. After a week of avoiding all foods served further than 2 meters from a toilet, I finally went to see the doctor. Now, two days of Cipro later, it no longer feels like there’s a cell phone vibrating in my intestines. Oh, the miracle of modern medicine.

My week in Zanzibar, in photos

2010-09-11T11:30:00.004+02:00

The top picture is a typical Soviet-style apartment block in downtown Zanzibar Town, just opposite of the classroom where I have my Swahili classes. (I'm not sure why Blogger won't let me caption the picture properly, but it won't so this is where its caption is going to go.)

The second picture is of the street view on Creek Road in Zanzibar Town. The red-roofed stone building on the left is the Darajani Market (Sokoni Darajani) where I buy my vegetables and spices and whatnot. There's also a big fresh (?) meat and seafood market that smells like I bet you'd imagine an outdoor meat market smells like in the heat of the day on a tropical island. I've gotten really good at holding my breath for extended periods of time when I pass it.

Laura reppin' Swaziland on our dhow (traditional Swahili sailboat) on our trip to Mnemba Atoll. We strung her lihiya (Swazi cloth) up on the mast like a flag and then made jokes about Swazi pirates. (Incidentally, jokes about pirates are not funny in East Africa.)

"Stone Town Conservation and Development Authority" sewer cover in Stone Town. I'm not sure why, but I think they're pretty, especially when covered in sand.

"Warning! Do Not Sit on the Tortoise." After seeing how big the tortoises were at Chunguu Island, I totally understand the need for this sign.

Me hanging out with a 30-year-old Aldabra Tortoise at Chunguu Island. (You can tell she's 30 because her back says so.) She followed me around a lot that day...very slowly. Either turtles are attracted to brightly colored fabric or I am exceptionally attractive to tortoises.

If you tickle their armpits, they stand up like this. Seriously.

Biggest spider thing EVER! They have these in Swaziland, too, but I never got a good picture of them because usually I was too busy trying to get them out of my house. Gross.

Another typical street scene in Zanzibar Town. If I die in the next 2 weeks, it will be while trying to cross the road at this intersection. All of the lights are faded by the sun so they are all white and nobody really knows when they're supposed to go or not go and it's kind of scary. I usually wait to cross the road until a local person is crossing the road and then just go when they go. The truck thing with the red and white side is called a "dalla-dalla" and it's the kombi (mini-bus) of Tanzania/Zanzibar. It's basically a truck with a cover over the bed and wooden benches up against all the "walls." They generally seat 20-30 people (max capacity is stated at 20), plus bananas and doors and goats and bicycles and things strapped on the top. It's not so bad for the first 20 minutes, but after that your butt/legs/feet start to go numb from being all squished up. The worst part is that, as a tall person, when I'm sitting in a dalla-dalla my knees are up higher than the seat, so it's super uncomfortable.

Wild cocoa beans in the forest somewhere in the middle of the island. It tastes nothing like chocolate, unfortunately.

Persian baths in the middle of Zanzibar, built by some Zanzibari nobleman for his Persian wife.

Nutmeg (the brown nut part) and mace (the red part) on the spice tour. These are the only two spices that grow two to a plant, apparently, and it's SUPER expensive in Zanzibar. (Well, expensive relative to the cost of the other spices, but cheaper here than elsewhere in the world.) Really interesting, though. And pretty.

Laura and Victoria building a sand castle with a very confused local. He kept saying, "What is this again? A sand palace?" Which, for some reason, I thought was hilarious.

A dhow (traditional Swahili sailboat) and another little boat at sunset at Kendwa Beach. (You were probably at work while I was watching this.)

Masaai (or fake Masaai) person selling overpriced touristy things to people who don't know any better. As a general rule, it's advisable to say "Eish! Ni ghali sana!" (Whoa! That's too expensive!) to whatever price these guys give you.

"After Ramadan, we will party-party"

2010-09-11T11:24:00.001+02:00

As I sit sweating in the near triple-digit heat of my third floor apartment in Zanzibar’s historic Stone Town, I’m a little overwhelmed by how significantly my life has changed in the last week. I’ve moved from a steadfastly Christian, HIV- and drought-devastated, mostly maize-eating rural homestead in the land-locked, SiSwati-speaking absolute monarchy of Swaziland to the cultural heart of the sun-drenched, 100% Muslim, Kiswahili-speaking, fish- and coconut rice-eating island of Zanzibar...during Ramadan. This place may, in fact, be the opposite of Swaziland. And I’m loving it.

(Sidenote: “Swahili” is the culture of the coastal people from Kenya to Northern Mozambique, including the islands of Lamu, Pemba, Zanzibar and a few others. “Kiswahili” is the language of the Swahili people. Saying that Swahili people speak Swahili is kind of like saying that Americans speak American.)

After several hours of wandering aimlessly through the winding streets of Stone Town last Friday, I finally met up with Victoria and Jenn (PCVs from Swaziland) and Laura (our Finnish friend) so that we could get lost together. Stone Town, where I live, is the centuries old historic district of Zanzibar Town, and it’s BEAUTIFUL, but basically impossible to navigate. Hundreds of narrow cobblestone alleys wind and weave through ten square blocks of three- and four-story white-washed buildings boasting elaborate Arab-influenced archways, European-style latticed balconies and facades, and ornate Swahili hardwood and brass Zanzibar doors. Small shops selling homemade yogurt, glass bottles of orange Fanta, and a random assortment of everyday necessities line the alleyways at the street level, and brightly colored kanga wraps sporting Kiswahili idioms hang from the balconies above. There’s a constant flow of foot, bike, and Vespa traffic through the alleyways, and every couple of blocks the narrow streets open up to courtyards full of chai masala (spiced tea) vendors, fruit sellers, and kofia-clad men passing the heat of the day in the shade of the stoop outside their Mosques. It’s easy to lose a couple of hours strolling through Stone Town, snacking on street food and practicing my Kiswahili with curious little Zanzibari kids, and I LOVE it.

The only problem is that during the day every street looks the same to me, so I have a hard time getting places when I DON’T have a couple hours to spare. I’ve managed to find a few landmarks to help me navigate—things like “the old man I bought bananas from that one time” and “the place with the G Unit graffiti”—but most of my landmarks are completely transformed after dark. Chips mayai (potato omelet) vendors and chai carts replace the old ladies doing henna and the fruit stands, and suddenly I find myself completely disoriented. Some nights, it’s taken me as long as 2 hours to find my house; I just keep wandering around thinking, ‘wait a minute, I’ve been here before,’ but without the slightest idea of where I am in relation to my house. The last two days I’ve made a conscious effort to practice a few direct routes between my house and various places of interest (the market, my classroom, the local yogurt vendor, my favorite chai place, etc.), and I’ve done pretty well not getting lost. But if ever I stray from those paths, all bets are off.

Being here during Ramadan has also been a pretty unique experience. Ramadan is a sort of holy month for Muslims, and it is VERY much observed here in Zanzibar. The vast majority of the over-five population is fasting between sun-up and sundown, and things like smoking and drinking are extra haram (prohibited) in public. This means that 99% of the restaurants are closed, street food is only available from 6:30 to 11:00pm, and I’m not allowed to eat or drink in public places, while walking through the alleys, or in my classroom. (That includes water. Need I remind you that it’s like a million degrees here?) If you don’t count water, I’ve managed for the most part not to eat during the day in observance of Ramadan, but sometimes I still cheat a little in my house when nobody is around to be offended by my munching, and every day I eagerly await the sundown call to prayer that signals the opening of the markets. Fortunately I’ve only got about one more day of Ramadan to survive because Eid (which they call “Sikuku” here) is coming either Friday or Saturday, depending on the visibility of the moon and the whim of the Imam. (Apparently the end of Ramadan is different in Africa than elsewhere, and especially in Zanzibar, so when Ramadan ends elsewhere it doesn’t affect Zanzibari Ramadan.) I’m not sure exactly what to expect from the Eid/Sikuku celebration other than a wide variety of delicious foods that I currently smell cooking in houses throughout Stone Town (including the chickens that are currently hanging out on my landing awaiting their deaths…it’s funny that I still have to walk through chicken poop to get to my house), but the promise of fresh pastry alone is enough to keep me from going to the beach this weekend.

But, to be honest, I’m kind of beached-out already after only a week here. I’m the kind of person who gets bored and whiny after lying on the beach for more than an afternoon, and there’s only so much snorkeling, sunbathing (and sunburning), overpriced beer, and sandy-floored beach bungalow I’m willing to pay for. That combined with my (completely justifiable) fear of the brutally fierce sun is enough to keep me in Stone Town for the majority of the week. Seriously, who wants to sit through a 4 hour Kiswahili class with a painful, itchy sunburn? Not me.

The girls (Jenn, Victoria, Laura) and I DID take a pretty fantastic trip up to Kendwa Beach on the northern tip of the island last weekend. After spending the afternoon sunburning and building sand castles with very curious locals, we hired a dhow (traditional Swahili sailboat) to take us to Mnemba Atoll Marine Reserve for snorkeling, which was absolutely INCREDIBLE. There was at least 40 to 50 meters of visibility in the water (which is unreal) and a wide variety of colorful tropical fish to swim with (sometimes into…they don’t move), tons of starfish, a school (?) of squid, and lots of little tiny jellyfish that left welts all over my bare stomach. Plus the guys sailing the boat caught a big tuna on the way out to Mnemba and cooked it up with coconut rice and vegetables for lunch after snorkeling, all of which was incredibly delicious. (Even the fish eye they made me eat in exchange for a second slice of watermelon. Totally worth it.) We also went on a spice tour through the spice farms in the central part of the island, which was both educational and tasty. I learned that black, white, and red pepper all come from the same plant, and got to taste raw cloves, curry leaves, cocoa, nutmeg, and a whole bunch of other delicious things that I’m now trying to learn how to cook with. Zanzibar is a foodie’s paradise!

I also took a non-food related trip out to Changuu Island (aka Prison Island) with Tim, Jamie, Jason, Erica (all PCVs from Swaziland) and Laura on Wednesday afternoon to see (and touch!) a colony of giant tortoises (kobe in Kiswahili). Changuu is a privately owned island originally used as a quarantine station for ship passengers suspected of having cholera or bubonic plague, but now it’s home to a big resort (“Changuu Private Island Paradise”) and about 100 giant land tortoises. Aldabra Giant Tortoises are, quite logically, endemic to the Aldabra Atoll in the Seychelles and were brought to Zanzibar as a gift from the Seychelles Government to some British military officer in 1919. After 90 years of breeding, there are just over 100 tortoises on the island, including three of the original four shipped over from the Seychelles (they’re each 125 to 150 years old). On average they live to around 100 years, but most of them on Changuu are between 25 and 40 because it took a while to get the colony well established enough to get them to breed (and secure enough to keep people from stealing them to sell their shells). It was kind of surreal being there and getting to walk with them and touch them and feed them spinach, and thinking about all the things that have happened in the world in their lifetime…150 years is a really long time! Also, their skin feels like I imagine a dinosaur’s would, which is really cool. (I guess that’s what 150 years of Zanzibar skin does to unprotected skin. Let this be a lesson on the importance of sunscreen…)

Fishes and tortoises aside, the bulk of my time in Zanzibar has been spent learning or practicing Kiswahili. That is, after all, why I’m here. Zanzibar is such a cool place to study Kiswahili because the language basically originated from the archipelago and, due to the isolated nature of island culture, it still remains more pure (less adulterated by English or tribal languages) here than elsewhere in East Africa. My class, which I’m taking through a language institute called Kiswahili Utamaduni (KIU), is four hours every morning and consists of three students (all American) and two teachers, which means that it’s really intensely interactive (and perfect for attention span-challenged people like me). In my first four days of class I honestly think I’ve learned as much as I did in four months of Kiswahili class in Nairobi, and being in Zanzibar gives me ample opportunity to practice everything I learn in class with everyone I meet on the street or in the market or wherever. As soon as I start TRYING to speak Kiswahili everyone is really excited and helpful and patient with my slow and labored sentences, but practice is definitely doing me good and I find myself much more comfortable using Kiswahili than I was just a week ago. There’s a Dutch girl in the advanced class who has been here for 6 weeks and speaks Kiswahili convincingly enough that I thought she’d been here for YEARS, so I’m pretty excited for the future of my Kiswahili language proficiency.

I’m also LOVING the class and the language. Obviously, I came here because I liked Kiswahili and wanted to learn it, but now I’m remembering exactly why: it makes perfect sense. There are 7 noun classes, 4 completely logical tenses, a total of 4 irregular verbs, and grammar rules that explain the structure of the language perfectly to my rule-oriented mind. It’s not like it’s a SIMPLE language to learn, but it seems to work the same way my brain does so, compared to when I was learning SiSwati, I feel like a genius.

In learning Kiswahili, though, I’ve come to realize just how much SiSwati I actually have in my head. I find myself THINKING in SiSwati and spelling words in slightly complicated SiSwati-esque ways (like adding H’s where they don’t belong) and, occasionally, slipping a SiSwati word into my sentences. It’s kind of annoying (and very confusing for the teacher), but it makes me feel confident that I won’t lose my SiSwati even after being here for a few months. And that’s comforting.

Anyway, I’m supposed to have two more full weeks of Kiswahili here and then move onto the town of Iringa in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania to do an intensive Kiswahili course there, but I’m thinking maybe I’ll see if I can extend my stay here for another month or something so I can stay for longer. I mean, I already have a cheap and convenient place to stay, I like my teachers and the format of the class, and I’m getting increasingly competent at navigating the streets of Stone Town. I’m comfortable and happy here and, increasingly, I’m thinking maybe I should trust that. (Plus when will I ever have another chance to spend a random extra month in Zanzibar??) But maybe I’m just trying to rationalize staying in the land of fresh chapattis and cheap seafood…

Nimemaliza. Baadaye.

(I’m finished. Later.)

Justine

The night market at Forodhani (the water front). It's very touristy but still super delicious. I had a wide assortment of grilled fishes, lobster, calamari, and some Zanzibari soup. All for about $10, which, by Zanzibar standards, is super expensive. We've since found the same places way cheaper elsewhere, and I've learned how to argue with the sellers for "bei mkaazi" (the resident price).

Hello, Zanzibar.

2010-09-03T11:35:00.001+02:00

After an emotionally draining last few days in Swaziland and many hours in transit, I FINALLY arrived in Dar Es Salaam last night. I waited an hour in a line full of impatient South African fishermen to get my visa, had a nice but unsuccessful evening drive through Dar in search of a working ATM, slept a peaceful (but very warm and humid) night at the Safari Inn (I'd recommend it), and then took the 90-minute ferry over to the island of Zanzibar this morning.

As the ferry pulled into the Zanzibar harbor, all my memories from my last trip to Zanzibar (seafood and Fantas from the night market, nearly passing out from the heat on our spice tour, Persian baths, stepping on a sea urchin, more seafood) came rushing back, replacing any apprehension I had about leaving Swaziland with the excitement of getting to spend nearly a MONTH in this island paradise.

I spent my first few hours in Stone Town (the old part of Zanzibar Town) dragging everything I own (literally) through the cracked and puddled cobblestone streets, looking for a backpackers for less than $20 a night. I'm staying here for 3 weeks...I really can't afford $20 a night! So I begged and pleaded and finally found a room to rent in a house near a backpackers for $7 a night. I have my own room with a sagging, grass-filled mattress, a small school desk with an attached chair, and a shared kitchen, bathroom, and living room. (Although the kitchen has no stove because I guess somebody stole it.) Apparently my house mates are a Portuguese couple and a Tanzanian man, but I haven't met them yet, and the other apartments in the building are all full of Zanzibari families that, so far, have been very welcoming.

The one thing I HAVEN'T yet figured out is food. It's Ramadan on the predominately Muslim island of Zanzibar, which means that there's not a whole lot of eating going on between sun up and sun down. Last night I was too tired (and only had $100 bills!) to hunt down food, and today I've been traveling and so preoccupied with finding housing and working ATMs and getting a new sim card and informing people that I'm alive (that's what I'm doing now) that I haven't actually eaten anything since the beef and potatoes on the flight. 19 hours ago. But is it disrespectful to eat in public in front of people who are fasting? Dilemma.

Anyway, I'm off to find a plug adapter for my computer and phone and camera (they use the British 3-prong one here and all I have is the EU one), to find (sea)food, and to find my friends from Swaziland if/when the phone network magically starts working again.

I'll try to make it back to the internet to post photos and whatnot sometime this weekend...If, in the meantime, you need to contact me, my new number for Tanzania (which SHOULD stay the same until December) is: +255 686 205 710. (If you're dialing from the US, you can either dial the + or 011 before the 255. 255 is the country code for Tanzania. Sometimes there's a 0 before the first 6, sometimes not.)

I love my life.

Justine

The end of the world as I know it

2010-08-30T10:02:00.005+02:00

I’d been sitting for nearly 3 hours in the ice box of an office tucked away at the back of the community meeting hall, patiently flipping through the pages of my Lonely Planet guide to East Africa and fantasizing about white sand beaches and temperature-controlled buildings, when the indvuna (chief’s headman) finally called me in to speak. The last time I formally spoke to the chief’s inner council of elders I nervously introduced myself in forced SiSwati. Now, two years later, I stand with confidence in front of strangers turned friends, bow subserviently and avert eye contact with men as though it’s second nature, and say goodbye to my community in relatively fluent SiSwati.

An hour later Peace Corps showed up at my house, loaded all my bags and boxes into a Land Cruiser, and drove me away from my community. By Friday afternoon I’d taken care of all my final paperwork and medical check-ups and whatnot, and I had my official “ringing out” ceremony with Peace Corps staff. (Immediately after which I chipped my tooth and had to make an emergency trip to the dentist before my dental insurance ran out at 5pm. It takes real talent to be so accident prone, but I maintain it’s better than having injured myself on my first day WITHOUT dental insurance.)

So, exactly two years (to the day!) after swearing in as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I am officially unemployed. I’m proud to have made it two full years and, though I’ve certainly had my ups and downs in Swaziland, I can’t think of anything I’d rather have done than Peace Corps, anywhere I’d rather have been than Swaziland, or anyone I’d rather have spent the last two years with than my host family, my fellow PCVs, and all my Swazi and expat friends.

Friday night I celebrated my Close of Service with a bunch of friends at the Bholoja concert at House on Fire. Bholoja is a Swazi musician whose music I LOVE but who I hadn’t managed to see live until that night, so it was a perfect way to end my time in the Swaz. (He’s apparently been nominated as Best New Artist for the African Music Awards or something, which is pretty impressive. Check out his music!) I closed down the dance floor just after 4am Saturday morning, bid farewell to friends I won’t see again until my return to the Swaz in December, and returned to my homestead to spend a few final days with my host family.

Unfortunately, though, it’s Umhlanga (Reed Dance) time, which means that everyone is either gone or busy. Mkhulu and Gogo have gone to a funeral in South Africa, and all of the older boys from the homestead have either gone with them or are staying with their fathers for the week. Both of the older girls, Zandile and Londi, are up in Lobamba dancing for the King, and I haven’t seen the younger girls since early last week. So it’s just me, my one Sisi, baby Mpendulo, and Eliza for the next few days. I guess I’m okay with that though. I’m horrible at saying goodbye so maybe it’s easier to just have people be gone. I’ll see them in December, anyway, right?

So I think this is the last bit of love I’ll be sending from the Swaz…

Thursday morning I’m off to the Jo’burg airport to fly to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. Then Friday morning I’ll take the ferry to the island of Zanzibar, where I’ll be taking my first of two Swahili courses until the 17^th of September. Then I’ll either hang around Zanzibar/Dar Es Salaam until the 25^th of September, or I’ll take the bus up to Nairobi for a week or so to visit old friends and the kids at Mama Ngina’s Children’s Home. My intensive Swahili course in Iringa runs September 27 to December 17, and then I return to Swaziland from December 20 to sometime the first or second week of January. I’ll keep posting Blogs entries and photos and whatnot from my East African adventures but, for now, that’s all.

Love from the Swaz!!

-Phindile/Justine

Michelle and Peter McCubbin from Pasture Valley Children’s Home hosted a going away party for me and Jenn Ritchey (the one in the blue hoodie), who’s been working at Pasture Valley for the past 3 months and who will be going to Zanzibar with me. The kids sang a bunch of songs as a farewell to us (but it was dark so most of the pictures didn’t come out), then we ate lots of unhealthy food and drank wine and watched bad movies. My idea of a perfect evening. This picture is Jenn Gaspers, Jenn Ritchey, and me.

Of course I took pictures of the food! Brandy Balls from Pick N Pay. Imagine the densest, richest chocolate cupcake ever, topped with sprinkles and a dollop of whipped cream. Amazing.

For the past month or so there’s been a bunch of drama about KFC selling Halaal chicken. KFC and many other restaurants/foods have been Halaal (basically like Kosher for Muslims) for YEARS, but Swaziland apparently just took notice of this and decided it was cause to make ignorant and hateful comments about Islam. The Swazi Times has been running articles about how Halaal foods are un-Christian, and Swazis being interviewed have said that Muslims are trying to convert everyone to Islam by tricking them into eating Halaal foods. There was public outcry, lots of factually incorrect editorials, and then a decision to make KFC restaurants sell both Halaal and non-Halaal meats, which is just ridiculous. A couple weeks ago, as a result of this drama, a local church taught a lesson about Muslims and Halaal foods during its Sunday morning sermon. When I asked someone after the service what they’d learned at church that day, they said, “I learned that I hate Muslims and that Christians should not eat at KFC.” I love that the Swazi version of Christianity promotes ignorance and hate.

This article, published sometime last week, says:

“Christians complained of the following:

· Rituals from another religion imposed on Christians

· Franchise (KFC) has violated their constitutional freedom of choice

· Franchise has shown disregard and disrespect of the Christian faith

· Franchise has violated their constitutional freedom of choice

· The religion behind halaal is being made standard for all”

Last Saturday I went hiking at Mahamba Gorge near Nhlangano with the Jenns, a British volunteer named Becca, and my friend Shaun. According to Lonely Planet, it’s the only thing other than the casino to do in the Shiselweni region, so I figured I should do it before I left. I still wonder whether the supposed trail actually existed, but it was a pretty fun hike and a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

I admired this tree’s determination to grow out of the rocks so much that I took a picture of it.

Me sitting on a rock at Mahamba Gorge. After the hike, we took a peek at the rooms at the relatively new Mahamba Lodge. The whole place is solar-powered and built in a luxury version of the traditional Swazi way, which is cool. They also happened to be full of ladybugs, which I see as a bonus.

One of the girls from Pasture Valley Children’s Home painting colors at Nhlangano Central Primary School. They did a great job, but I still have to go back and do some edging before I leave on Thursday (because I’m a perfectionist).

Friday night’s Bholoja concert at House on Fire with Jenn Gaspers and Becca. I’m wearing a black and pink strapless dress that I made on Monday night (before donating my sewing machine to Pasture Valley on Wednesday) when I couldn’t sleep because of the malaria prophylaxis I’m taking. I believe in making productive use of insomnia…

Me, Alice (a British volunteer at a school in Mbabane), and Laura (a Finnish intern at the Mbabane City Council) celebrating Alice’s 21^st birthday at Quartermain’s Restaurant in Ezulwini Valley. I had sushi on both Wednesday and Thursday nights because, well, it’s good and I had cause to celebrate and friends who wanted to accompany me.

I don’t know why, but I always found this particular brand of fruit rather entertaining. “Don’t worry! Eat Fruit.” It’s a good philosophy, I think.

Eliza’s doghouse, almost finished. Please note the new and improved interior which I’ve painted light blue with green polka-dots. I also wrote “I love you, Lize!” over the door on the inside, so if she ever learns to read she’ll know that I love her. At the meeting with the inner council last week, the chief instructed the whole community to be nice to Eliza after I leave, to let her onto their homesteads and into their kitchens to stay warm during winter, and to give her porridge or bones or anything else they have to give her as a way of remembering me. How very un-Swazi…

Me and baby Mpendulo Siyabonga “Noah” Khumalo. He’s finally starting to recognize himself in pictures, I think, because when I show him pictures of us together he laughs. When I come back to visit in December, he’ll be an expert walker! (He tries now but hasn’t yet mastered the art…) It’s crazy how fast they grow up.

Baby Mpendulo Siyabonga hanging out on my front steps. Things to take note of in this picture: (1) Baby has TEETH! (2) Baby is also not wearing pants. Apparently he’s of the age that they just let him urinate and defecate anywhere he wants, which is why I shut him outside. Last time he came in, he pooped on my floor. That’s just plain unsanitary. (3) The waist-high brownness on the house behind him on the right is dirt, not paint. That’s just how high the dirt blows. (4) There is a baby goat entering the thatch-roofed rondavel in the background.

Mission Accomplished!

2010-08-30T10:00:00.002+02:00

Finally, 5 months after funding my big community garden and water project, it’s FINISHED! Mostly.

So far, we’ve found and repaired an existing borehole, installed an electric pump, made and set up a 30,000L capacity water tank, and created a network of 850 meters of underground water pipes leading to 3 taps. We also secured a donation of treated poles and wire mesh fencing from the local Rural Development Fund, which is all we’re waiting on for the completion of the project. (The Sisters at Our Lady of Sorrows Mission will oversee the completion and maintenance of the project in the coming weeks.)

Fifty-one members of the support group participated in the completion of the project (mostly in clearing trees and digging trench), and approximately 376 people will directly benefit from the project (this excludes the families of the people who will directly benefit).

All things considered, it’s a success and I’m leaving Swaziland happy.

I’ll say one final THANK YOU to everyone who helped to make the project possible. Without your donations, several dozen families in my community would still be without water, the high school’s agriculture department wouldn’t be able to do practicals for their classes, and my community’s support group wouldn’t be able to start their community garden. It may not seem like much to you all in America, but it means a lot to the people in my community. (And to me!)

So, in the name of 100% transparency, I’ve adapted (shortened) the answers to my final report and copy-pasted them below, along with the final budget breakdown for the project so you can see exactly what I spent my money on and what the community contributed.

1. What happened during the project? Did the community accomplish its goals?

The goal of this project was to provide members of the local HIV-positive support group and their families with the land and water resources required to maintain a large community garden, and to improve access to clean water for dozens of families in the surrounding communities of Shisizwe and Eposini. As originally proposed, the project was to finance the construction of a fence surrounding the garden, the drilling of a borehole, and the installation of a hand pump and underground pipes to carry water from the borehole to a 5000-liter capacity tank in the garden. Since this original proposal, however, it has evolved to become part of a much larger project supported by Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Mission. While the merging of this project with the work of the mission has significantly altered the proposed budget and slowed the process of the project’s implementation, it has also greatly increased the number of project beneficiaries beyond what was initially envisioned.

Following several months of unanticipated delays, project implementation began in July of 2010. In a meeting with the local traditional leadership, the sisters from Our Lady of Sorrows and I learned of an existing borehole in the vicinity of the proposed new borehole, and were granted permission to use this existing borehole for the proposed project. Subsequently, several tests determined that the quantity and quality of water in the existing borehole was satisfactory, and the focus of the project shifted from the drilling of a new water source to the refurbishment of the existing one.

The following week, support group members and a local contractor began the labor required for the completion of the project. While the contractor cleaned the borehole of twenty years of tree roots and replaced the existing rusted steel casing with a stronger PVC casing, support group members worked for several days to clear an 850-meter path through the forest between the borehole site and the support group’s garden. A team of six men was then hired to dig 850 meters of trench, half a meter deep, along the cleared path to lay pipes connecting a 3 10,000-liter capacity water tanks with three taps. The tank stands, tanks, and taps were installed during the third week of project implementation and, finally, connected to an electric pump.

The previously defunct borehole now provides water to three different populations within the Shisizwe and Eposini communities. The first tap, installed in the support group’s garden, provides support group members with the water required to plant vegetables. Second, as many as 40 families in the surrounding community now have access to a tap providing clean water for drinking, cooking, bathing, and washing. The third tap, installed in a plot of land reserved for the agriculture department at Our Lady of Sorrows High School, will provide water to several classes of high school students studying agriculture, allowing them to practice in a garden the skills they learn in the classroom as early as next term. In this way, the project has been very successful.

However, though the goal of improving the community’s access to water has been accomplished, as of mid-August the project as a whole remains incomplete. An application requesting a donation of 250 creosote-treated poles and 800 meters of chain-link fence from the Rural Development Fund, submitted in April 2010, has been processed and approved, though the support group has not yet received the promised items. Thus, the construction of the fence surrounding the proposed garden has been delayed until these items arrive. In the meantime, the support group has constructed a temporary barbed wire fence around the garden so that they can begin plowing and planting. The poles and fence are anticipated to arrive at Our Lady of Sorrows Mission by the end of August, at which point the support group’s executive committee and the sisters from Our Lady of Sorrows will oversee the construction of the fence and, with it, the completion of the project’s original goals.

2. How did the project build capacity? What new skills did your community gain from this project?

From its conception, this project has been a learning experience for everyone involved. In their role designing and managing the implementation of the project, the six members of the support group’s executive committee gained valuable skills they plan to utilize in implementing future projects. They gained practice in dividing and delegating tasks, in monitoring the progress of project implementation relative to the planned timeline, and in keeping accurate financial records for the successful and honest completion of a project of this scale. They also learned, by necessity, the importance of setting and adjusting project goals as a means of evaluating the progress of a project.

Furthermore, the project helped familiarize everyone involved with the resources available in the community to support similar projects in the future. The support group’s chairman, secretary, and treasurer were actively involved in drafting, revising, and submitting several proposals to the local Rural Development Fund, as well as the weekly correspondence updating the local traditional leadership on the progress of the project. By helping with these aspects of the project, they have now gained the skills and the confidence needed to apply to the Rural Development Fund for a loan to start a large-scale chicken coop income-generating project they hope to begin in the coming months.

In the longer-term, the completion of the project will contribute to the support group members’ understanding of nutrition and gardening techniques, and to their ability to provide balanced meals for themselves and their families.

3. How will community members sustain the benefits of the project or recover recurring costs?

As long as the borehole is in working condition and the garden is being farmed, the benefits of this project will be sustained. To this end, the sisters at Our Lady of Sorrows Mission will be vital to ensuring that the project continues to benefit the support group, the school’s agriculture students, and community as a whole.

While there will be recurring costs associated with the project, including the maintenance of the borehole and the cost of electricity to run the pump, the mission, the clinic’s head nurse, and the executive committee of the support group understand that it is their responsibility to ensure that these costs are covered. A small portion of the support group members’ monthly fees will be set aside to cover the cost of electricity, and each homestead using the tap as its main source of water will pay a nominal fee each month. Additional costs, including the cleaning of the borehole every few years and other incidental costs, will be covered by Our Lady of Sorrows Mission and the Southern African Bishops’ Conference.

And here’s the budget breakdown. The “Partnership Contribution” chart is what the money I raised actually paid for, and “Community Contribution” is Our Lady of Sorrows Mission, community members, and the local Rural Development Fund.

Partnership Contribution

Item	Unit	Quantity	Unit Cost (SZL)	Total Cost (SZL)	Total Cost (USD)
Borehole pump test		1	3,400.00	3,400.00	451.23
PVC casing		1	12,280.00	12,280.00	1,629.73
Surface pipe and fittings		1	12,670.00	12,670.00	1,681.49
Pump and installation		1	20,000.00	20,000.00	2,654.28
Pump installation (labor)		1	3,000.00	3,000.00	398.14
Transport of materials		1	1,500.00	1,500.00	199.07
Trenching and backfilling (labor)		1	6,600.00	6,600.00	875.91
Cement	Bag	12	87.00	1,044.00	138.55
Tank installation (labor)		1	1,500.00	1,500.00	199.07
Transport of tanks and tank stands		1	2,400.00	2,400.00	318.51
Securing wire	Roll	.53	84.40	84.40	11.20

Total Partnership Contribution				64,478.40	8,591.69

Community Contribution

Item	Unit	Quantity Needed	Unit Cost (SZL)	Total Cost (SZL)	Total Cost (USD)
Land	M²	4761	10	47,610	6318.51
10,000L PVC tank		3	8,650.00	25,950.00	3,443.93
10,000L steel tank stand		3	9,880.00	29,640.00	3,933.64
Securing wire	Roll	.47	75.60	75.60	10.03
Cleaning of borehole		1	60,000.00	60,000.00	7,962.84
Cutting of large trees (labor)	Days	5	250.00	1250.00	165.89
Labor (clearing forest, fence)	Hours	450	25.00	11,250.00	1,493.00

Total Community Contribution				175,776.00	23,327.84

Total Project Costs

	% Contribution	Total Cost (SZL)	Total Cost (USD)
Partnership Contribution	27%	64,478.40	8591.69
Community Contribution	73%	175,776.00	23,327.84
Total Project Cost	100%	240,254.40	31,919.53

So that's all for now. I'll post photos of the completed project as soon as I track down my Memory Stick reader, which I think got thrown into the suitcase I'm storing in Mbabane until Wednesday. But I promise they're coming!!!

-Justine/Phindile

Thoughts on a pandemic

2010-08-30T09:59:00.001+02:00

For most Americans, HIV is something that happens to other people. It happens to skinny, uneducated Africans half way around the world, to gay men in San Francisco and people who have sex with prostitutes, or to needle-sharing heroin addicts. Most Americans don’t have friends or family members who are HIV-positive or know anyone who has died of AIDS, and very few even get tested for HIV on a regular basis. In America, HIV just isn’t something people think about every day.

But in Swaziland, as in many African countries, the impact of HIV/AIDS permeates every sector of society. Nearly every family includes someone who is HIV-positive and just about everyone has lost a parent, child, sibling, cousin, friend, classmate, or co-worker to AIDS. There’s a shortage of teachers in Swazi schools because the country’s teacher training colleges haven’t the capacity to train new teachers as quickly as the experienced ones are dying. Credit cards come with funeral benefits instead of Sky Miles.

Needless to say, doing HIV-related work in Swaziland has been a very unique learning experience for me. So what have I learned?

Mostly that HIV is scary. People who get infected with HIV usually have no idea they’re positive for 5-10 years after infection, during which time they’re still transmitting it to others. The delayed onset of symptoms also means that an HIV-positive person can be in denial of or lie about his or her HIV status for several years. But even while an infected person looks and feels healthy, the virus is busy mutating and reproducing at a ridiculous rate in his or her body, meaning that every HIV-positive person in the world has a slightly different disease and that even HIV-positive people can be re-infected with different strains of the disease. HIV is also a relatively smart virus, adapting to any pharmaceutical attempts to slow or reverse the progress of disease. Drug-resistant strains of HIV have developed to all of the anti-retroviral (ARV) medications developed since the beginning of the pandemic, and even the most scientifically advanced of anti-retroviral drugs eventually become ineffective. Based solely on biology, the virus also disproportionately infects women—an already disadvantaged population in most developing countries—and productive young adults, meaning that HIV leaves behind more orphans than diseases like malaria or polio. Most frightening to me is the fact that, after nearly 30 years of research, the world is still no closer to finding a cure or vaccine for the disease. It’s honestly more powerful than we are.

When I came to Swaziland, I naively thought that all that was needed to stop the pandemic was education. I thought people became infected because they didn’t know how the virus was spread, didn’t know how to protect themselves, or didn’t have condoms to prevent transmission. I thought that if they learned how to protect themselves, they would. But, two years later, I can safely say that lack of HIV education and the unavailability of condoms is not the problem in Swaziland.

So what IS the problem? Is it the fact that 30-year-old men and women are still considered “youth” and therefore tend to act without thinking of the consequences? Is it that most people’s outlook for the future is so bleak that they simply don’t care if they get HIV? Do Swazis have more sexual partners than Americans to spread the disease to? (For the record, this isn’t statistically true.) Are Swazis forced by poverty into tough situations like commercial sex and staying in relationships with unfaithful spouses? Are they just so confident that HIV will be cured (either by future pharmaceutical breakthroughs or by dishonest preachers promising miracles) that they don’t care if they become infected? Has the prevalence of HIV in Swaziland caused a sense of fatalism among Swazis, or made “HIV-positive” the new “normal”? Has the existence of disease-delaying ARVs or anti-stigma campaigns made people less afraid of becoming infected? Or are people simply still in “it won’t happen to me” denial?

Honestly, what I’ve seen in Swaziland is a complicated combination of all of those factors…and a thousand more I can’t even begin to understand.

So what is an appropriate response to this pandemic? How do NGOs prevent future HIV infections in countries like Swaziland? What obligation does government have to provide HIV prevention education for youth, or care for HIV-positive people? Should the focus of public health interventions be preventing new infections, improving the health of people currently living with HIV in order to minimize AIDS-related deaths, or care for orphans and others affected by the pandemic?

Obviously, an ideal approach would incorporate all of these things, and in Swaziland that’s kind of happening. ARVs donated by USAID and WHO and various pharmaceutical companies, etc., are distributed to HIV-positive people by MSF and local health workers. HIV education has been incorporated into the curriculum for schools, and flocks of volunteers (like me) and NGO workers have been sent to inundate the masses with slogans about HIV prevention. Government (theoretically) pays school fees for orphans, and community centers provide meals and preschool for OVCs.

But, as I teach in my business classes, everything has an opportunity cost: every dollar spent on ARV distribution is a dollar that isn’t spent on supporting OVCs, etc. So what is the ideal combination of responses? What is most important in the long-term fight against HIV/AIDS?

In my opinion, a response focused on ARV distribution isn’t a long-term solution to the pandemic as long as new infections keep happening. While I understand that keeping HIV-positive people alive is both necessary (for the prevention of orphaning, etc.) and, to a degree, a moral obligation, it seems rather short-sighted and wholly reactive. I understand that, initially, keeping people alive was the most immediate response to the emergency that HIV/AIDS created in the country/continent/world. But why is the number of people receiving ARV treatment still used as an indicator of the success of an HIV-focused intervention? Why is Swaziland proud that 50,000 of its citizens are on ARV treatment? Shouldn’t the country be bragging that 650,000 of its citizens are still HIV-negative?

There are some who see ARV treatment as the wrong approach altogether. They argue that:

· Low adherence to ARVs in rural communities (like mine) leads to a certain level of immunity among infected populations and to drug-resistant mutations of viral strains that otherwise would not exist, making the development of a future cure or vaccine even more complicated and perhaps even eliminating the possibility of a cure for the majority of infected people.

· HIV infection also a woman’s fertility by as much as 50%, but ARV treatment restores it. This means that a woman on ARV treatment is as much as 50% more likely to get pregnant than one not on treatment, but still 100% certain to die of AIDS. In this way, ARVs actually increase the number of future orphans born to HIV-positive women.

· ARV treatment increases the window of time for a person to transmit the virus to others from about 5 years to as long as 25 years, meaning that a person on ARVs can infect as much as 5 times as many people as someone not on ARVs.

· ARVs delay the onset of disease and AIDS, reducing and even eliminating symptoms to the point that HIV-positive people neither look nor feel sick. This makes it easier for HIV-positive people to lie about their status to partners, or makes them feel cured so they don’t take necessary precautions to protect their partners.

· With ARVs, it is easy to deny that a person is sick and, when they die, to deny that the person has died of AIDS. This makes it seem to others in the family/community like HIV/AIDS is not as big a problem as it actually is.

Honestly, all of those things are completely true. But are they really reasons not to provide ARV treatment for HIV-positive individuals? If ARVs were not available to the adults in my host family, probably ALL (instead of just half) of the kids on my homestead would be double orphans. ARVs also reduce viral load (the number of copies of the virus in the body), which actually reduces a positive person’s risk of passing the virus on to a partner compared to an HIV-positive person NOT on ARV treatment. ARVs are also instrumental in preventing the transmission of mother-to-child transmission, which is pretty important. From a social and economic standpoint, they also prolong the life of an HIV-positive person enough that they can still contribute to and support their families/communities just as an HIV-negative person would. Denying HIV-positive people access to ARV treatment would widen exponentially the scope of the virus’s impact on society. (Never mind the moral implications…)

And then there’s the issue of prevention. As far as diseases go, HIV is relatively difficult to transmit. It requires direct contact between one of four infected fluids (semen, vaginal fluid, blood, breast milk) and an uninfected person’s open skin/sore or mucous membrane. It’s not transmitted by shaking hands or coughing or any other sort of casual contact, and it’s pretty easy to avoid the kind of situations that put someone at risk for infection. And yet new infections continue…

The problem lies in the difficulty of affecting behavior change. HIV educators (like myself) can tell Swazi youth about the four fluids and the progression of HIV infection and the importance of using condoms until we’re blue in the face (and we certainly try), but all the HIV prevention education in the world means nothing unless people actually USE it. (And by “it” I mean either abstinence or condoms.) Unfortunately, in my experience in Swaziland, few people care enough about preventing HIV to say “no” or use condoms. HIV is something that people see in the abstract, possibly because it’s everywhere in Swaziland or possibly because it takes so long from infection to onset of symptoms, so they don’t take precautions to keep themselves uninfected.

The other approach to preventing new infections is the development of an HIV vaccine, which has been a discouraging but financially significant part of the fight against since 1981. While an HIV vaccine would eventually eradicate the disease (or at least, like polio, relegate it to only the poorest parts of the developing world), it’s probably still a long way off. And pharmaceutical companies have much greater incentive (and much bigger R&D budgets) to develop ARV-type drugs that HIV-positive people take twice daily for the rest of their lives than to develop a one-time vaccine. And even the best vaccine couldn’t help the 40 million people in the world who are already infected…

Then there are the millions of children orphaned by the pandemic throughout Africa and the rest of the world. As of 2007, 31% of Swazi children had lost one or both of their parents to AIDS, which is a monumental problem. These kids grow up with emotional, nutritional, and developmental problems, and often are abused and/or never attend school. Shouldn’t these blameless victims of the pandemic be the focus of the world’s response? But how to help them? Orphanages or other residential care facilities? Support for extended families raising orphans? Free education and meals at school? As necessary as OVC care really is, it’s just as reactionary as ARV treatment. Effective HIV prevention could have kept the kids’ parents from becoming infected in the first place, and ARVs could have kept them alive. It’s cyclical.

Another approach to the orphan problem is promoting better family planning among HIV-positive women. While I believe that it’s every woman’s right to have children if she so chooses, I sometimes question the prolific nature of HIV-positive women in Swaziland and wonder whether the orphan problem could be somewhat curbed in the long-term by a massive family planning educational campaign. (An interesting side effect of using condoms to prevent pregnancy is the prevention of HIV transmission…)

My HIV-positive sisi (host sister), for example, has gotten pregnant 3 times since learning her status in 1998. Two of those babies died of AIDS-related complications, one during pregnancy and one at about 1 year, and number three (Mpendulo Siyabonga) is 14 months old and confirmed HIV-negative. It’s really great that she sought counseling and did everything right and managed to have a negative baby, but my sisi is in such advanced stages of the disease that he will likely be an orphan by the age of 5. And then where will he live? Who will feed him and pay his school fees? Who will take him to the clinic when he’s sick or instill in him the values he needs to become a responsible and respectable adult? Sadly, maybe no one. (Or, at best, his 11-year-old brother.) No woman would want that hopeless a life for her child, right?

So what should be the priority? Prevention education? Development of a vaccine? More effective, cheaper, or more widely distributed ARVs? The ongoing search for a cure? Care and support of OVCs? Of all the things I’ve learned in the last two years, this is not one of them. I think I’m actually further from an answer than I was when I arrived.

All I know is that current interventions in Swaziland aren’t really working, and that the reasons for the failure are complicated. Sure, people with HIV are living longer and orphans are getting free education and whatnot, but the rate of new infections among 15 to 24-year-olds is actually increasing, which foreshadows an even more serious epidemic to come.

HIV is into its third generation of infection in Swaziland, meaning that children born today will grow up with parents and grandparents also affected by HIV. They won’t know what their families SHOULD be like without HIV infection, or how the demographic of their communities has changed because of AIDS-related deaths. The virus has become a normal part of Swazis’ lives, which is frightening to me. In my opinion, that makes it an even more difficult pandemic to fight than what gay men in the US fought 25 years ago when the disease was still largely a mystery.

Still, there’s reason to continue doing the kind of work I’ve been doing the past 2 years. Baby Mpendulo Siyabonga is negative because of HIV education and the availability of ARV drugs at the local clinic. My gogo (host grandmother) and mkhulu (grandfather) are still alive 15 years after infection because of ARVs, which allows them to take care of all their orphaned grandkids their infected children left behind. That’s something, at least.

But what about the longer term? What of a more active, less defensive response?

If I ever find the answer, I’ll be sure to let you know.

Looking back, moving forward

2010-08-20T12:02:00.004+02:00

Friday afternoon I boarded a kombi (mini-bus) in Nhlangano, headed to Pasture Valley Children’s Home for the weekend. It’s a 15-minute route I’ve ridden a hundred times before, in a town in which I’ve killed countless hours. But on this particular afternoon, as I drove past the big white-washed, green onion-domed mosque on the edge of town, I had a minor epiphany: I think I’m finally ready to leave Swaziland.

For several weeks I’ve been Googling pictures of white sand beaches in Zanzibar and reading other travelers’ online suggestions for hiking routes in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania and flipping through the International Health and Development brochure from Tulane, trying to get myself excited about life after the Peace Corps. But it wasn’t until I saw the parade of white-clad Muslim men entering the mosque on Friday afternoon that I was truly excited for the first time. I think it made me realize that leaving Swaziland isn’t the end of my adventure; it’s the beginning of a brand new adventure in a predominately Muslim East African country, in the region where I first fell in love with Africa, where everyone speaks the language I’ve been itching to learn for years. (A new adventure that will require me to change the title of my Blog…)

So, although I’m having a pretty hard time saying goodbye (or rather “see you in December”) to all the strangers I’ve come to call family and the all friends I’ve made in Swaziland, I realize that it’s time. Swaziland has been an incredible experience for me that I wouldn’t trade for anything. I’ve changed and grown in ways I can’t even imagine, and learned more than I ever thought possible about myself and the world I live in. I’ve met some amazing people who restore my faith in humanity and come to call Swaziland “home.” I’ve had days that have dragged on like years, and months that have flown by like days, but I think that now I’ve given all I have to give, learned all I have to learn, and experienced all I have to experience in Swaziland—for now.

Well, almost. I’ve still got a few things left to do.

My main focus at this point (as for the last month) is my big water and garden project. We’re making progress, but, unfortunately, not the kind of progress that photographs well. (All the pictures I have are either of people digging holes or of them filling the holes back in.) After two consecutive weeks of work (even on Sunday, which is AMAZING for Swaziland), we have about 750 meters of water pipes buried in its half-meter deep trench, and the first of the three taps is installed. Today (Friday), the Swaziland Electricity Board is connecting our borehole to the nearest electrical source, and the big steel stand to hold the water tanks will be delivered on Monday so that the tanks can be set up and connected to the network of underground pipes. Though we’re still waiting on some fencing from the local government (they approved our proposal and promised the fence and poles by mid-August), the water part of the project will be finished by the middle of next week. Yep, by the end of the week, a couple dozen families in my community will have a brand new source of clean, safe water for drinking, cooking, and bathing. Mission nearly accomplished.

Other than my big project, I’ve just got a few loose ends to tie up. I need to find a smaller paintbrush and label the names of smaller cities on the map of Swaziland I painted at the high school, and finish painting in the ABCs in the second grade classrooms at Nhlangano Central Primary School. I have to write my Description of Service (which is what I should be doing now) and my last quarterly report for Peace Corps, and send out “Thank You” notes to people who donated to my project. I have to wash and sort through all my laundry to decide what I’m taking and what I’m leaving behind, and pack up boxes to ship home. I have to buy (and somehow transport) 4 months worth of dog food for Eliza, figure out how to pay in advance for her rabies shot, and paint her name on the front of her dog house. And then say goodbyes to everyone.

Next week, after my official goodbye at the weekly community umphakhatsi meeting, Peace Corps is sending a driver to pick me and my swag up at site and take me up to Mbabane for two intense days of interviews with bosses and final medical checks and the returning of US Government property. Friday morning I have my “ringing out” ceremony, after which I’m pretty much done with Peace Corps (though they’re officially responsible for my well-being until close of business on Saturday the 28th). Then, after a couple post-PC days hanging out with my host family and Eliza, I’ll be on my way to the Jo’burg airport for cheesecake and a roasted chicken sub from Subway. Then, after Subway (which I’m actually very excited about): Zanzibar!!!

But, for the next 13 days, I’ll just smile when I drive by the mosque.

Last Saturday, I took 6 of the older kids from Pasture Valley Children’s Home with me to Nhlangano Central Primary School to paint the second grade classrooms. (Because Pasture Valley has lots of kids who will be in second grade next year.) As is standard in basically all Swazi buildings, we painted the bottom meter with a high gloss dark brown paint and painted the top part cream. I’ve also drawn in ABCs and a couple other things, which we’ll paint this Saturday to add some color and excitement to the classroom. Quite the improvement over the previous decorating scheme: dirty once-cream walls covered in muddy handprints and tiny hand-made posters.

This is the “after” picture, as seen through the burglar bars over the window at the school. It’s actually a really nice school compared to those in my school. I could have counted the number of broken windows on my fingers! Also, while cleaning paint brushes, an avocado blew out of a tree and nearly killed me. I love that falling avocados is one of the hazards of my job.

Darryn, Brandon, Laura, and I finished up all of my bus stops this week! This one, which is opposite my very first bus stop billboard at Florence Christian Academy, says, in Siswati: “You could have TB if…you have been coughing for longer than 2 weeks…you are losing weight…you are coughing blood…you have pain in your chest…you are having night sweats.” The anti-TB logo on the right is the logo of a regional TB education campaign run by Doctors Without Borders (MSF), and all the artwork was done by Darryn. It’s pretty impressive.

Here’s the second bus stop we did this week. This one says: “Breast milk is healthiest! Breastfeed your baby for at least 6 months, but don’t give him any other food!” It’s a word-for-word copy from a poster in the clinic that the nurses use to teach HIV-positive women about exclusive breastfeeding. Generally speaking, it’s better for women in Swaziland, whether HIV-positive or negative, to breastfeed exclusively than to expose their kids to undernourishment (baby formula is expensive) or diarrhea (few homesteads have clean enough water). The Rubanesque baby and mother were drawn by Laura, who actually is rather artistic.

Darryn, me, Laura, and Brandon waiting for the bus to take us to Hluti for lunch after finishing the stop. We also had an audience of about 20 kids standing around, marveling at our artistic ability and begging for money and candy and things.

In the morning, Darryn and I re-painted one of the other stations I painted a few months ago. Remember my baby and the girl with no feet? The background was previously cream and the kids vandalized the crap out of it. Remembering a story on This American Life about how graffiti invites more graffiti, we re-painted it. I wanted to change it altogether and draw a picture of Jesus and a message like “Jesus hates vandalism” but Darryn, being a good Catholic, found that offensive. And I couldn’t decide what color skin Jesus should have (I’ve seen both black and white Jesuses in churches here).

Speaking of churches…This is the Apostolic Church of Christ in the Mathendele township (slum) outside of Nhlangano. It’s one of many churches along the road by the school and, while the others are very church-looking, I found this one to be the most beautiful. It was packed full of singing on Sunday morning, and I found it kind of refreshing that the congregation doesn’t need a big fancy building to worship in. A stick-and-mud building with a broken window works just as well.

And here's yet another feat of architectural brilliance: Eliza’s dog house, almost finished. I just need to put one more board over the door (I ran out of wood) and then write her name in black letters in an arc over the door. I guess I also need to find a place for it to be permanently, since right now it’s sitting in the middle of the homestead on the foundation of the kitchen that blew over in October of last year.

Last week a mother goat got killed by a speeding maize delivery truck and left behind a week-old baby, which my family adopted and tried to keep alive. Unfortunately for the goat but fortunately for Eliza, it died. My family thinks I’m ridiculous because I’m always taking pictures of the gross stuff Eliza drags around. And maybe I am.

The “TB Suspect Register” at the clinic. While I realize there’s nothing funny about TB testing, I find it amusing that they refer to people who may have TB as “TB Suspects.” Is it a crime to have tuberculosis?

Anyway, that's all for now.

Love from the Swaz!!!

Just a note

2010-08-16T10:53:00.005+02:00

Sanibonani, Bekunene!

I don't have time to write an actual post, but I just wanted to drop a note to say that YES I am alive, and YES I am making progress on my big water project, and YES I will post an actual blog (with photos) later this week. Probably Wednesday, but no promises.

My last couple of weeks have been hectic beyond my wildest dreams, and today marks the beginning of the last full week I have in my community before I leave so I'm SUPER stressed. While I am excited for my post-Peace Corps plans (Zanzibar, Swahili classes in Tanzania, hanging out with the parentals, grad school, etc.), leaving Swaziland is more difficult than I anticipated, both mentally and physically. I've got a million things left to do (mostly admin stuff for my project and for Peace Corps), plus I have to say a thousand goodbyes and somehow still find time to spend with all the people I love. And pack. And ship stuff home. And make jewelry gifts for people. And finish my Rosetta Stone for Swahili. And eat all the foods (fat cakes, emahewu, Nik-Naks, etc.) that I know I will miss.

It's crazy, but I've only got 18 days before I'm in Zanzibar! Until then...

Love from the Swaz!
Justine

Adventures in customer service, etc.

2010-08-06T09:49:00.002+02:00

Banks in Africa, much like post offices, are a constant source of stress, disappointment, and frustration. To illustrate this, I present to you the extremely boring story of my Wednesday morning:

I walked into the Nhlangano Standard Bank just before 10:00 am, assuming that the 90 minutes before my 11:30 meeting would be long enough to make a withdrawal to pay the contractor for the borehole for my big project. The place was bustling with its normal activity: two tellers working, two sitting eating boiled peanuts and watching soccer on TV, a very obese man reading the newspaper behind the window marked "Bureau de Change," a long line of frustrated-looking people waiting in an hour-long line to make small deposits and withdrawals. Familiar with this part of the bank experience, I'd packed a bottle of Orangina, a Kit-Kat and a bag of gummy snacks to keep myself sane.

My bank adventure started at the "Enquiries" counter, which is where anybody wanting to do anything at the bank has to go and enquire about how to do it. You know how in American banks there are little tables with bolted-down pens and calculators and deposits slips and whatnot? Well, that arrangement is just too logical for Africa, so instead I waited 20 minutes in line at the Enquiries counter to get a withdrawal slip. After filling in all the ridiculous questions (Why do they need to know my PO Box? Or my cell phone number? Or my employer? It's MY bank account, don't they already have all that info?), I settled into the general queue for the tellers, munching under the "No Food or Drink" sign to pass the time (my way of quietly protesting my having to be there).

Forty minutes later, the teller informs me that I can't withdraw E52,850 (the contractor's invoiced amount) anywhere but in Mbabane because they can't confirm that I have that much money in my account. My response: "Um, you're sitting in front of a computer that says how much I have in my account." He didn't understand how this fact was relevant and kept telling me that the only place I'm allowed to take out more than E5000 in one shot is at the main bank in Mbabane...3 hours away.

I pulled an Angry White Person (looking frustrated, being politely outraged at the inefficiency of the system, stating repeatedly how things work in America, emphasizing the importance of the project you're doing, looking at your watch like you don't have time for foolishness), and they decided they could maybe fax the Mbabane branch and ask for permission to give me my money. (Yes, fax. It's like 1995.) So I wrote a brief cover letter explaining the problem, and they copied it all together with my passport and Kansas drivers' license and Peace Corps ID and my withdrawl slip, and they sent it off to Mbabane. And I went next door for another Kit-Kat while I waited...for 30 more minutes.

Finally, the Mbabane branch called the Enquiries desk and asked for my phone number (you know, the one that's already on the withdrawal slip, and already in my file) to confirm that I was, in fact, the Justine that owned the account. So the guy on the phone asks me my number, then the lady from Mbabane calls me to confirm that I'm me. This part didn't make sense to me. If I HAD been someone else pretending to be Justine Amos, I'd just have given the lady my own phone number and then said "yes" when she asked me if I was Justine. This is what passes for a security check in Swaziland.

Anyway, I got permission. So, letter of permission in hand, I re-joined the massive line for the tellers. Another 40 minutes later, I made it to the teller. On the withdrawal slip, I'd marked the "bank cheque" box to indicate that I would prefer one small, secure slip of paper to a huge bag of cash money, but apparently this, too, was more complicated than it should have been. She could give me the cash, she said, but then I would risk getting robbed of a HUGE bag of money (E52,850 is about $7140, or 5285 100-Emalangeni notes). Otherwise, I had to go BACK to the Enquiries desk and request a "Bank Cheque Request Application." Fine.

Twenty more minutes in line later, I got the form, filled it out, and faxed it to Mbabane to request permission to issue a cheque, etc. Complicated, complicated. (More complicated by the fact that the contractor only has a South African account, so it had to be issued in Rand rather than Emalangeni, which is a pegged currency and should be easy but isn't.) Then I visited the "business banker" (a special teller in a suit who had previously been eating peanuts and watching TV), who actually issued me the stupid cheque and to whom I paid an exorbitant amount of money for "processing."

But, 2 and a half hours, 6 lines later, and approximately 3000 calories later, I got my stupid cheque, showed up late to my meeting, and, eventually, paid my contractor. And I only had to pull the Angry White Person like 3 times.

Anyway...

The project is swiftly moving forward. All the trees in the path of our underground water system have been chopped down and the grasses burned, and the trench digging crew (a hired crew of 6 men) arrive at 7:30am on Monday morning to begin digging the trench. The contractor came out on Thursday and finalized plans for everything, and the pump test confirmed that there's enough water for all our grand plans (approximately 45 gallons per minute). Plus, this week the Regional Administrator for Development called to inform us that the fence and things we requested a million years ago has been approved and will be ready for pick-up by mid-August. I'm not holding my breath, but I'm holding back on buying fence until I see for sure whether it comes through. Amazing if it does, not surprising if it doesn't. Either way, I've got to get all of MY part of the project finished up by the 16th of August when all the paperwork is due. I'm confident it will be done in time.

In other news, the Group 8 trainees finally found out their permanent sites and did their first visits to see what their lives would be like for the next year. After, two trainees--Kris and Lauren--came to stay the night with me to ask a million questions about Peace Corps and Swaziland and vacation options for the next two years. It was a pretty fantastic time and it's always nice to have company (slash an excuse to drink wine and cook actual meals!). They will be officially sworn in as volunteers on 23 August, then move to their permanent sites later that week to start their 2 years of service. In a way, I'm kind of jealous. But, on the other hand...

I move to Zanzibar in just over 3 weeks. Who could possibly be upset about THAT?

This weekend I'm heading up to Mbabane to help with a presentation on recycled art for Bambanani at a Recycling Day sponsored by some other NGOs and the Ministry of Something, and to help Michelle with selling stuff for Bambanani at a monthly craft fair. Then, Saturday night, there's an "anything but clothes"-themed party at the backpackers where I usually stay, which means that you can wear anything not intended to be worn. I've made a cute strapless maxi dress out of feed sacks (they say "Nambitsa chicken chunks" and have red, blue, and yellow roosters on them) and scraps of African print fabric, which I'll wear with leggings (which I'm calling "undergarments" so that it's allowed) and some jewelry made from washers and paper beads and heels. It's like college all over again, and I'm excited.

Anyway, I'll post some photos of the project's progress and whatnot next week. You know, after we've made progress you can actually photograph. Until then...

Love from the Swaz!

Holy Snake Skin!

2010-07-28T15:13:00.007+02:00

Inspired by a Charlie Brown cartoon sent in a care package about 10 months ago, I decided to build Eliza a Snoopy-style dog house. Having never built anything in my life, I drew up an approximate building plan and headed to the hardware store for lumber, nails, a hammer, and paint. Then I realized that I only had a hack saw and, more importantly, that I had no idea how to actually build a dog house, so I let the wood sit in the corner of my house for 10 months. Until this week when I learned a very valuable lesson:

All wood piles, even those indoors, attract snakes.

While doing a thorough cleaning of my hut in preparation for leaving, I found this under my bed:

(Well, there was more to it--almost a foot long--but that was the only intact part.) Anyway, it's a snake skin. From a suspiciously black mamba-looking snake that clearly hung out in my house long enough to shed its skin. Gross AND scary. What if it was under there while I was sleeping?

So, I decided to finally build Eliza her house. I started on Saturday afternoon and I'm ALMOST done. It was quite the learning experience and I had some pretty horrible flashbacks to high school geometry class when trying to figure out how to get 90-degree angles and whatnot. It's not perfect, but it's sturdy and will protect my poor puppy from the wind and the rain after I leave and she's forced to sleep outside like an animal. To finish it off, I'm going to be painting it a glossy red (the white is just primer) and stenciling "Eliza" in block letters over the door. But, for now, this is what it looks like:

Assorted frustrations aside (ie, lack of a claw hammer, the cheap wood splitting, having no power tools, etc.), I think it was a good experience. The kids on my homestead seemed to have fun helping me (and I totally exploited their extensive experience in cutting wood!), and I enjoyed having them around. Plus I spent Sunday afternoon building in front of a bunch of old men, all of whom stared in disbelief at the crazy white girl in the skirt (yes, I was wearing a skirt) who knew how to build a house.

At the end of day one, the older boys really wanted to help with something so I let them paint a coat of primer even though the roof frame wasn't technically done. When it's finished, the inside will stay white and the outside will be red with black lettering.

My host family brothers Samkelo (l) and Kwanele (c) and our neighbor Mathedi (r) helping me cut wood. The whole operation was extremely OHSA non-compliant, but the worst injury was due to my own lack of depth perception with the hammer (I whacked my hand really hard), but there appears to be no permanent damage.

In other manual labor-related news, I also helped two women at the local neighborhood care point (NCP) plant vegetable gardens. The NCP provides lunch to orphans and vulnerable children in the community who may not otherwise have a balanced meal, and does a couple hours of pre-school each day for 20-30 kids. Understanding the need for vegetables as part of a balanced meal for these kids, the head pre-school teacher, Julia, asked if there was any way I could help them start a garden. So, last year I bought lettuce, cabbage, beetroot, spinach, onion, green pepper, and tomato plant seedlings to plant on the land around the NCP building itself, and the 5 women who rotate teaching/cooking duties made up a work schedule to ensure that the plants got watered and weeded every day. It worked alright, but this year they decided to have five individual plots so that each woman would be in charge of one specific plot. They think this will force everyone to put in an equal amount of work because if one woman is slacking, they'll be able to tell by the state of her plot. On Sunday, I helped to plow (by hand! for many hours!) one of the ladies' plots while she was busy finishing up her 30 days of post-partum forced seclusion. Then, just before sundown, we planted cabbage, beetroot, green peppers, and onions. Next week the tomatoes, lettuce, and spinach seedlings will be ready, and I'm also trying to get some fruit trees (oranges, guavas, mangoes, avocados, peaches, litchis, etc.) to start an orchard. Hopefully when I come back in December the plots will be well-tended and fruitful!

This is one of the women, Make Lushaba, planting her cabbage seedlings. They kept going on and on about how I was such a hard worker and how I was doing such a good job with the plowing, but truth be told they put me to shame. Both of the women I was working with are in their mid-30's, HIV-positive, and somewhat malnourished, and yet they kicked my butt when it came to plowing the plots. Seriously, it took me like an hour to do what they did in 20 minutes. But I kept on plowing until sundown. And I've got the blisters on my hands to prove it.

Some of the chief's kids and my fellow gardeners' kids watching me work. They were particularly amused when Eliza, my dog, helped out by digging some holes in the plot where I was working. She got tired quickly, though, and decided after a couple of holes that she'd just lay down in one and whine until I took her home. Yeah, she's spoiled.

Now I'm in Mbabane for 3 days of Close of Service medical clearance, basically to make sure that I don't leave Swaziland with any weird African diseases that Peace Corps will later be liable for. I've already had my dental appointment (no cavities!) and filled out a stack of paperwork, so now I'm waiting patiently for my doctor's appointment. Fun, fun.

So that's all for today. The garden/borehole project is coming along nicely, though I can't give any updates until Friday when I get back to my community. Sister Teresita said she'd call me if there were any problems, and so far I haven't heard from her. No news is good news, right? Here's hoping...

Love (and a few more photos) from the Swaz!

When I came to Swaziland, I was afraid of cows. Especially those with horns. Swazis made fun of me for giving them a wide berth, but I was too afraid of being kicked and/or gouged by horns to care. Two years later, I can walk through a herd of cattle without fear. In fact, that's exactly what I did after taking this photo.

The neighbor Mathedi racing his homemade wire and tin can car down the road. This is a pretty standard Swazi toy, and, honestly, it's genius. The "steering" is controlled by the stick he's holding, which is connected to a rubber band that turns the front axle, and the wheels themselves are made of old Coke cans that have been cut in half and then shoved inside each other for reinforcement. The body is made of bailing wire, I think, and sometimes they put extra decorations on them like plastic bags or playing cards. And then they race them.

And I just thought this picture was cool. Can you guess what it is? (Correct answer: the outside shells of passion fruits, quartered, floating in water I washed a paintbrush in.) It's because I take pictures like these that I end up with a thousand pictures on my camera at the end of each month, but that's the beauty of digital cameras.

Pharyngitis and photos

2010-07-23T14:15:00.012+02:00

And for my FOURTH blog post of the week, photos. I think these pretty well sum up the last 2 weeks of my life.

The only thing missing is a picture of the white pockets of nasty all over my throat, courtesy of a stubbornly persistent case of Strep throat ("non-group A bilateral streptococcal pharyngitis") that took 3 (yes, THREE) courses of antibiotics to get rid of. And then the doctor thought it was mono and took a bunch of my blood for testing, but turns out it was just Strep. And now, as of a doctor's visit this afternoon, I am Strep-free but still have a cold. Curses to African winter.

In other news...

This is one of the bus waiting rooms I painted with Andres Alfonso "Medico" Mendez Medina (Colombians apparently have LOTS of names), a graffiti artist from Colombia who fellow PCV Darryn met in Cape Town. He came to help her with her bus stop art projects, but his painting style (splatter painting, drippings, throwing handfuls of paint at the intended surface, etc.) appealed more to my style of art than hers, so I became his painting partner for a couple of days. This one says "Keep your country beautiful" and then on the yellow part (which I think looks like caution tape) "Don't throw your trash on the ground." We consider it an "environmental health" message, since everything we do has to be health-related. (Oh yeah, Medico is also a doctor. He was in Cape Town doing his surgical residency and just stopped by the Swaz en route to Jo'burg to fly back home.)

Medico painting the hands of random school children who had been standing around watching us for several hours. We did a few handprints on this bus stop, which the kids LOVE. And I think we managed to keep all the paint off their school uniforms...hopefully. Please note, however, Medico's pants...amazing. And if you look at the splatter-painted background, you'll understand why. (My right shoe also looks like that because, well, I'm right-handed and therefore throw paint with my right hand. My left shoe escaped the paint.)

The "dripping" technique that we used to add some color to the outside of the bus stops. When Medico explained to me what we'd be doing that morning, I had my reservations. I'm a very neat painter, and I measure EVERYTHING before I draw or paint it, so this was completely new to me. But I LOVED it.

The final product. I think it's fairly obvious what it says... I like the splatter painting effect because (1) it utilizes the whole space, and (2) it's impossible to vandalize. Go ahead, Swazi children, write your name on this bus stop. Nobody will see it!

"Kulapha Umsheko Ekhaya..." This is one of the two bus stops I painted on my own this week. It roughly translates to: "To treat diarrhea at home: Mix 1 liter of clean water that has been boiled and cooled with half a spoon of salt and 8 spoons sugar." That's the recipe for what we call "oral rehydration solution," which is basically like a nasty version of Gatorade. In this picture, it's not completely done--I had to figure out how to draw a spoon (well, 9 of them) before I could finish, and then I forgot to take photos of the final product. Also, please note the lettering that I drew free-hand rather than measuring out to be exactly uniform. I think I'm becoming increasingly confident in my artistic abilities...thanks to Medico!

Jorge from the borehole-digging company, support group chairman Justice Lukhele, and another support group member checked the existing borehole for depth and water while Sisters Teresita and Ada and I speculated about the presence of snakes in the tall grass surrounding us. The borehole was 55 meters deep, with water at 29 meters from ground level. Good news!

My favorite bus stop so far! "Sebentisa iCondom" means "Use a condom," which I'm sure you could have guessed. Technically, I should've used the word "lijazi," which means sweater, instead of "icondom," but I'm going for a more direct approach. SiSwati is full of euphemisms, which I think complicates discussion of sex and HIV-related topics. For example, the Swazi version of "Always use a condom when you have sex," ("Uma ulalana nabani sebentisa lijazi") actually translates as "Wear a sweater when you sleep next to someone." Sometimes they call a condom a "penis sweater," which I just think is hilarious.

The other day, I stumbled upon a mass slaughtering of pigs and, naturally, decided to take a picture. (I also took a video, only to realize while editing it that it was REALLY disturbing!) One by one, these guys dragged the pigs out of their pens by their back legs, whacked them over the head with a club to knock them unconscious, then slit their throats to kill them and drain some of the blood. Then, after the pig stopped convulsing, they poured boiling water over its body and scraped its bristly hairs off with a razor blade before stacking it on top of the other cleaned pig bodies in the back of a pick-up truck. I stood there for like 15 minutes watching, mezmerized by the sound of the club hitting the pigs' hard skulls and the demon-like screaming of the pigs who knew they were next. Disgusting, I know.

Jorge and the Sisters measuring the distance between the borehole site and the garden, where we'll dig the trench to lay the underground water pipes. The sisters have each been here over 30 years and, in talking with them about their work in the community, I find comfort in the fact that they see the same problems and have the same frustrations and feel taken advantage of in the same ways that I do. I'm wishing I would've worked more closely with them throughout my service, but I guess that's a good thing for the next volunteer to know?? Also, I love this picture. Something about the contrast between their whites (which are the whitest whites I've seen in years) and the dirt road, or the landscape and the sky, or something.

Support group members beginning to clear a path through the forest so we can lay 850 meters of pipes from the borehole to the various taps. I feel bad cutting down all these trees, but then I remind myself that they're all non-indigenous invasive species and they'd be cut down for firewood anyway. I seemed to be the only one concerned about the possibility of snakes in the brush.

Support group chairman Justice clearing the small branches off a tree so it can be carried home as firewood. Mostly the men cut stuff down and the ladies dragged it places and tied it into bundles for firewood. And I just stood and took pictures, using my sandals as an excuse for not helping.

So there it is. The project is coming along nicely, I think. This morning (Friday), I went with the Sisters to talk to Babe Gcina, the Indvuna (head of the chief's advisory council) about the project. He gave his blessing for the project, but said that we should talk to the whole council about the project, and get the chief's blessing on Monday before we start doing actual work. We agreed, then kept doing work anyway. So, Monday morning, I will sit through yet ANOTHER meeting where I understand about 10% of what's being said, and will continue doing exactly what I'm doing now regardless of the outcome. By the end of next week we'll start digging the trench, and by the end of the following week we'll have Jorge and his guys come out to start laying the pipes and installing the water pump and whatnot. They've PROMISED me that it will all be done by 13 August, but I'll keep you all posted on our progress.

Next week, I'll be in Mbabane Tuesday through Friday doing my Close of Service medical exams. I'll have a dental exam, a full physical, TB test, and blood, urine, and stool sample tests to make sure that I don't leave Swaziland with any weird African diseases for doctors in the US to misdiagnose. Strangely enough, the part I hate the most (even more than the stool samples!) is the TB skin test. I just can't handle watching that needle moving around under my skin. Gross.

And on that note, I'm off to sleep another consecutive 14 hours in an attempt to kick this cold. What an exciting Friday night...

Love from the Swaz!

Leaving on a jet plane (but I DO know when I'll be back again)

2010-07-21T15:12:00.005+02:00

Yes, I know this is my THIRD photo-less post of the day, but it's important.

I FINALLY bought my plane ticket. Here's the plan:

I leave Jo'burg for Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) at 2:55pm on Thursday September 2. (Then I go to Zanzibar the next day!!!) Then, 110 days and 109 nights later, I leave Dar headed for Jo'burg at 7:25am on Monday December 20. I arrive in Jo'burg at 10:05am on the 20th, then promptly take public transport to Mbabane, Swaziland.

So if you want to visit me, I will be in:
Stone Town, Unguja Island, Zanzibar: September 3-23
Iringa, Tanzania: September 25-December 18
Swaziland: December 20-???? (Prob the first week of January)

Now I'm going to go eat the king size Crunch bar that was my reward for finally buying my plane ticket. Booya!

[Next day update: The ticket I bought yesterday is half price today. Seriously. I waited and waited and waited to buy that ticket, and then this happens. The universe hates me, apparently.]

And [Jorge] said "Let there be [water]" and there was [water]

2010-07-21T13:14:00.003+02:00

Remember that gigantic project that, seemingly ages ago, I raised $8591.69 for? The one to fence in my local clinic's support group garden and dig a borehole (well) for the community, etc.? The one that I'm sure many of you donated to, then thought I'd forgotten about?

Well, I haven't forgotten. I've just come up against the brick wall that impedes project implementation in Swaziland.

One of the concepts that Peace Corps drills into us as volunteers is "sustainability." With everything we do, we have to consider how it builds the capacity of local individuals or organizations to do similar projects in the future, how it increases the knowledge of community members, and how the benefits of the project can be sustained even after we complete our service. We're told to ensure that the community has "ownership" of projects so that they have a vested interest in maintaining, protecting, and continuing the project.

So that's what I've been TRYING to do with my silly project for the last 3 months.

In Swaziland, it's also important (if VERY frustrating) to go through all the "proper" channels in the community before doing ANYTHING. So, for this project, step one was getting permission from the inkhundla (county) to do the project. We'd talked to the inkhundla committee about the project hypothetically, so getting permission should have been more of a formality than anything. Except that it wasn't. They refused us permission, saying that they wanted to be involved in the project and that, if we re-worked our budget to include them, they would help support the project AND give us permission to do it. Good news, right?

Wrong. After re-working the budget, re-pricing everything, re-evaluating the materials we need for the project, the inkhundla decided that they didn't want to help after all. Or didn't have the money. Or didn't care anymore. So, 6 weeks and several boring meetings later, we were back at square one.

Then, we encountered problems trying to get everything cleared with the community. There are basically 4 neighborhoods in the community, and 3 of them have boreholes. The people from the 4th neighborhood, jealous of those in neighborhood 3, have repeatedly broken the hand pump of their neighbors in the middle of the night by stuffing them with mud and cement and stealing various necessary parts, so we have THAT to deal with. How to implement a project that benefits only part of the community without fueling the ongoing politics of neighborhood jealousy? The only way to be sure that the project isn't sabootaged is to make sure that it benefits EVERYONE and that EVERYONE feels included in the planning and implementation of the project.

So, in an attempt to move forward, I had several meetings with the head nun (Sister Teresita) at Our Lady of Sorrows and together we contacted the contractor who dug the previous failed borehole (they only found white ash-like rock, even 80 meters down). Feeling like he owed the mission some free services, he promised to come down and do his survey and estimates for free, a savings of E15,000. Great! Except that, since we weren't paying, he didn't feel the need to make a special trip all the way down to my neck of the woods--a full 3 or 3.5 hour drive from his office. So, we waited.

Finally, last week I lost my patience and decided that having the project COMPLETED was a little more important than all the sustainability and capacity-building and blah blah blah. So this week, we've started in earnest. Monday morning, I had a meeting with Sister Teresita, the clinic's head nurse Juckie, and the support group's executive committe. We made up a work schedule for the support group's members, and set deadlines for the completion of various stages of the project. The first work shift starts Friday at 8am, when a force of 30 machete-clad support group members will descend on the forest around the borehole site to destroy any an all water-consuming vegetation.

Then, this morning (Wednesday) the sisters and I met with Jorge from the borehole company, and he left all of us feeling quite optimistic about the project! We discovered an old borehole, dug the same month I was born (August 1986), that has been out of service for almost 20 years. The mission has had it cleaned (cleared of tree roots) every couple of years just in case they ever wanted to use it for anything, which works out perfectly for us. It's kind of rusty, so we'll have to re-line it with fresh PVC pipes, but the water table is only 29 meters below the surface, and the hole itself is at least 55 meters deep. An amazing discovery!

So, here's the plan as it stands:

1. This Friday (as in 2 days from now), Sister Teresita, Nurse Juckie, and I will be meeting with the Chief's "spiritual adviser" and the inkhundla committee to secure written permision to use the land, to do the project, and to maintain ownership of all the benefits of the project. If we don't get permission, we're doing it anyway because the land we're using was TECHNICALLY given to the mission by the King and therefore any dispute would be resolved by the King, who happens to very much like Sister Teresita.

2. This Friday and all of next week, the support group members will work in shifts to clear the forest upstream from the borehole, to dig 124 fence post holes and put up the fence, and to burn the future garden area to get it ready for planting. Meanwhile, a hired force of 3-5 men will dig a meter-deep trench the total distance of approximately 845 meters from the borehole site to future site of the public tap and then on to the garden site.

3. Tuesday morning, Jorge will come down with a generator and electric pump to test the water pressure in the existing borehole. It's an additional expense, but we want to be sure that there's enough water to fill our 30,000L tank without affecting the water pressure at the mission and the local school. (Remember, our goal is to help NOT anger the community.)

4. As soon as the brush is cleared and the trench is dug, Jorge and his team will come down and lay the pipes, line the existing borehole with PVC, and connect three taps: one for the community (around which we'll build a fence and hire an operator who will fill jugs 2 hours each day), one for the high school agriculture class's garden, and one for the support group's garden. Then they'll install the electric pump. All of this should take about 2 days, they say, and the mission has offered them room and board so they don't have to make the trip to and from Matsapha every day.

5. Finally, we'll put up a 30,000L tank. Yes, 30,000L is HUGE, but that's the goal. Right now, as the project stands, all labor and materials are running at about 80% of my budget, so we'll see what we can afford. The mission has also volunteered to help with the funding of the project since we've included the high school's agriculture class as beneficiaries. So we'll see...

I kept emphasizing the fact that the whole project needs to be done by 13 August, which is when I need to have all my paperwork turned in to Peace Corps, and they keep laughing and saying that it will be done and I need to calm down. (And then they gave me some delicious apple and cinnamon cookies, presumably because they were tired of my "But what if...?" scenarios.) This is Swaziland, which means that everything takes FOREVER to get started, then magically comes together at the last minute. I'm hoping.

And, if nothing else, I'm learning how to implement a project in an African country. I'm busy building MY capacity to be patient and understanding and trusting and flexible. That's sustainable, right?

Anyway, this project promises to consume about 50% of the next 5 weeks of my life. The other 50% will be filled with a whole bunch of Close of Service formalities for Peace Corps (medical and dental check-ups, paperwork, interviews with senior staff, etc.), finishing up my bus shelter painting project (it's ongoing, I just can't find my memory card reader to post photos!), spending time with the people who have been my friends and family and more for the last 2 years, and preparing for Tanzania (including finishing my Swahili Rosetta Stone). It's not so bad a life.

(I'll post some amazing photos of my increasingly artistic artwork at SOME point this week as soon as I recover my memory card reader from the black hole that is my house. You'll be impressed, I promise.)

Love from the Swaz!

New batteries, same old existential crises.

2010-07-17T14:15:00.004+02:00

[This blog I wrote last week and then accidentally saved as a draft instead of posting!]

I always get a little freaked out when I buy a new pack of batteries because I'm forced to contemplate what I'll be doing in, say, 08/2017 when they expire. When the AAA's I bought yesterday expire, I'll hopefully have completed my Master's Degree, become fluent in Swahili, learned how to drive a Vespa and/or dance salsa, traveled through Asia, gained several years of actual (paid) work experience, and maybe I'll even be married. (I also sincerely hope that I'll be completely unemployable because scientists will have found a cure for HIV/AIDS and the world won't need public health professionals with my speciality...) In a way, it's kind of nice to look at that bigger picture/timeline and realize that no matter how hard it is to get through the day/week/month/last 6 weeks of Peace Corps service, that the future is basically inevitable. Except when you're approaching a HUGE life change, in which case the inevitability of the future is just plain overwhelming.

This week, Peace Corps gave me money to buy a plane ticket home. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. (You'd think I would've stopped being shocked by the whole LEAVING thing by now, but I'm still completely in denial, I think.) I've spent the last 2 afternoons at the Peace Corps office browsing various flight options and, though I'm excited about Tanzania and going back to the US and graduate school, I'm also freaking out about how much different my life will be in 6 very very short weeks. And everything I have to do between now and September 3, which is the day I plan to leave Swaziland. Here's my list:

1. Build Eliza a dog house.
2. Put together a photo album for my host family.
3. Make gifts (jewelry) for the kids on my homestead.
4. Finish my Partnership Project (it's coming along!).
5. Paint 4 bus shelters with health messages.
6. Finish the JA Company program at Jericho High School.
7. Buy lots of dog food to keep Eliza until December when I come back.
8. Pack and prepare my home for a new volunteer.
9. Complete lots of medical and administrative paperwork for Peace Corps.
10. Say good-byes.

The list is pretty attainable, I guess, but that doesn't mean it's going to be easy. Especially the last one.

This week I had to say goodbye to my friend and former language tutor, Sam, who went off to Durban in hopes of finding a job to support her late brother's orphaned children and widow. (She's an extremely bright 21-year-old and the whole family is pinning their hopes on her being able to find a job and send back money, which is exactly how girls end up working as prostitutes.) I knew we'd have to say goodbye eventually, but I didn't realize just how HARD it was going to be until she started crying and then, because I'm a sympathetic crier, I started crying. Then there were hugs, and promises to keep in contact, and I gave her a couple of skirts and a sweater and a pair of handmade earrings as a gift. And then she was gone, walking 12k to the border under cover of darkness in hopes of sneaking into South Africa without a passport.

Meanwhile, my life goes on. I cross days off the calendar and items off my "To Do" list and think about how MY life is about to change. I wonder if I would be happier sleeping in a sand-filled bunk bed at a backpackers in sunny Zanzibar or curled up in my bed with Eliza in my very own bat infested and refrigerator-like hut. And, honestly, I'm not sure...

My plan for the next couple of weeks is to just bury myself in work so that, when I leave, I can do so feeling accomplished and knowing that my host family and my community are better off than when I arrived 2 years ago. I know I certainly am...

But enough of that. I have a plane ticket to buy! (And, for some reason, tickets are $656 every day of September except the one day I want to fly, when they're $759. Does this make sense to you??) Maybe if I figure out everything for Zanzibar (like how I'm getting there, where I'm staying, etc.) I'll feel more ready to leave the Swaz.

Still, for 6 more weeks, love from the Swaz!