Disclaimer: The contents of this page, and all links appearing on this page, do not represent the positions, views or intents of the U.S. Government, or the United States Peace Corps.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

New Pictures!

Tuesday, June 16, 2010 8:57pm

Beans cooked with pizza spice is not as good as it sounds. Which is truly a shame since it doesn’t even sound all that good.

But it is different. An appreciated change from the norm, and edible. Sadly, the rice too, is plagued by these small mostly clear whitish rocks, which as you can imagine are impossible to pick out when cleaning. Flora warned me about them, as they showed up in her rice too, and explained how to clean them out. But I seem to have failed miserably.

So pizza beans and rocky rice paired with an orange (they are coming in huge numbers from Tonga now) after a day of laundry and cleaning and putting together lesson plans and preparing for the onslaught of tomorrow through Monday.

Tomorrow, ISF will be coming for a meeting. The Spanish version of engineers without borders who have devastated our existing water system and are coming back, I hope, to make amends and fix things. They left the village before I came, and the stories surrounding the event are varied so I will try to remain neutral in saying that the work they completed did not provide adequate water. They were updating and refurnishing an existing system that when they finished provided significantly less water than when started. Part of this is due to drought. The other reasons I will let you speculate in order to remain neutral as a good little Peace Corps Volunteer is supposed to be on a public blog such as this.

Needless to say, the villagers where very upset when water became inadequate, and arguments began. ISF left without finishing most of their work about a year before I came to the village. In order to do my initial report, I tried my best to get an accurate picture of what had happened, and what could be done. Water, as has been mentioned in previous posts, is the biggest problem in my village, and can be traced to be the source of most other problems (along with lack of education). Without water, there is no life.

My initial thought was to figure out the source of the conflict and then A: try to collaborate with ISF to return to the village and finish their work as well as look into the reasons of the failure of completed projects or B: Find the original contract ISF signed with the government of the village as well as the Government in Same and hold them accountable to finish the work described within to an acceptable standard.

Sadly, due to a total lack of adequate communication and a number of failed meetings, and the inability to find the contract due to a change in local government, I put all that by the wayside and started working with the villagers to think of other ways to find adequate water.

And now all the sudden ISF has shown back up. And tomorrow I will sit through my first meeting with them and my villagers. They have come 2 other days now, which I had already scheduled projects.

I am very interested in what they have to say.
I am also nervous they will let my villagers down again.

It might be a contributing reason to their lack of confidence in my larger projects coming through and their reluctance to take part, contribute labor, money, or resources to projects that seem so obviously propitious to all to me. But they have been let down now. And who knows how many other times before.

Friday morning (8am) I have a meeting with the Forest Committee. We will be planting a tree nursery with 2 trainers from Same. We are hoping to plant about 500 seedlings. I have promised to bake banana bread, and made sure that was written into the announcement (meetings are announced by letter which are distributed usually by children or whoever happens to be going near the home of that person, as we don’t have cell network and people don’t own cellphones. . and no, no landlines either) The bread is a bribe for people to show up – as well as show up on time.

Just this last week I went to a meeting, planned between myself and important gov’t officials (I won’t name) about a big project I am trying to get running, and not a single person came. Not even the unnamed gov’t officials. I sat for 2 hours in the hope that another single soul would arrive.

So I have come to bribing them with banana bread. And I pray that it works.


In the afternoon I have my very first PLWHA (People Living with HIV/AIDS) meeting. This took a long time because they had to become used to me and trust me. Also, I have to be known as working with many clubs and groups in the village. Because no one is ‘out’ in my village due to tremendous stigma, it is important that they are seen as just another group of people that I am working with.

I am excited, which seems an inappropriate reaction. I have met with many of them individually, taken them food and sat with them to discuss the difficulties they face in getting medicine and proper care, and many even adequate food for themselves and their families. One of them is a dear friend of mine who is sick and has been in and out of the hospital, and just yesterday showed me the rash that she has all across her stomach and side. The doctors say it is a bacterial infection, but she is not getting better.

I worry about her. I visit her often.

She is known and loved in her subvillage. I wonder what would happen if they knew she had HIV.


On Saturday I will be heading into Same to teach a group of Secondary students English for the weekend. Mostly form 4 students who will be taking their national exam soon (August I think) and are in Same for ‘tuition’ which consists of classes held by teachers during school breaks (such as right now) for a small fee usually about 100/= (about $0.10) per class.

Anyways, sleepy now. Pizza beans and rocky rice makes for a heavy dinner J

Monday, June 14, 2010

Thursday June 10, 2010 6:55pm

There’s this time of day just before sunset where light rakes across the landscape and I remember why I so love photography. Because really, photography is a love of light. A delicate understanding of the relationship between objects and (as most often in my case) the sun.

I climbed a small mountain, what some might consider a large hill, near my house today. I am on a quest to find personal space, peace and quiet, me time. Most of you who know me know how prone I am to cram my schedule full of productive activities, leaving me exhausted but fulfilled, moving ever forward in my somewhat eclectic life story.

But here, in Africa, in my little village, with my 2,204 villagers spread out over 8 hours of foothills and mountains, whatever I do never seems to be enough. And I am exhausted. So my plan is to do less.

Counterintuitive? Nah. I’m just tired. I feel like all of my projects are suffering from the lack of time to commit to any one single project. So I am cutting back, and wandering a bit, on my own.

And on top of that little mountain, looking down at the sun raking over the cornfields and the scrubby brush, over the mountains beyond, and the mountains farther beyond, I felt happy. And that’s a start.

So I climbed back down off the mountain, aiming haphazardly towards the primary school, cut through the soccer game, and went to my newest phone-signal spot down the road. There, I met a drunk man. Harmless, rather friendly in a comfortingly non-hitting-on-me way, which is unusual for drunk men. Instead he wanted to talk about our local Catholic priest.

In my first week here in my village, I had an unfortunate encounter with this priest. I will spare you the details as this is a very public venue, but needless to say, it was an un-priest-like encounter. Since then I have had numerous conversations with women here in the village, after I got a lot more comfortable of course, and found that everybody already knows that the guy is a creep.

So tonight, this drunk fellow is telling me that his wife’s sister recently got a ride with the priest as she was walking into town (the priest has a car, and is one of the 2 people in the village with this privilege). And he stopped the car and made, shall we say, (again because this is very public, we’ll leave out details) a forceful and graphic invitation.

I try to reason with this drunk man, making him aware that I know of the priest’s behavior and am rather furious and confused as to why the community both knows about it and still tolerates his presence in our village and in our church. He tells me this: because it is the custom of the Pare people, he put a medicine on his wife. If the priest sleeps with his wife, he will be stuck to her, unable to separate. And then the man will know that his wife has been unfaithful.

And my answer is: “Huh?” no but really? I asked him what the name of this medicine is and how it works but he said it was something known to him and his people. I suggested strongly and repeatedly he simply have a few words with the priest about his behavior, and he agreed that he would do that in addition.

And then he invited me to dinner. Which I declined. (As a rule, I don’t go home with drunk people)

So now I am eating my beans. Without rice or anything else cuz I don’t feel like cooking any more. And cooked with tea spices because I misplaced my curry powder cleaning today. Which I have to say makes for interestingly flavoured beans.

It’s these long evenings by myself that kill me.

Sunday June 13, 2010 8:47pm

Tomorrow I will walk into Same. My bike, as usual, has a flat tire, and in the soft glow of afternoon errands I couldn’t bring myself to again ask the fellow who always repairs my flat tires to help me yet again. Sometime soon I will have to learn how to do it myself.

Tuesday I will be leaving early in the morning to spend a solid 24 hours with a local group called Muhama, which is also the name of a local tree, who do a number of great things along with sing and dance in the traditional Pare tribal custom. They have invited me to come with them to guard and celebrate the Mwenge – the freedom torch of Tanzania – as it passes through Same.

They warned there will be no sleeping, only singing and dancing and staying with the torch as it travels through villages and towns. And at least the dancing part I can handle. The songs, I usually catch on in time.

I am not allowed to bring my camera, I have been warned time and again, that the photography surrounding the mwenge can only be done by government registered photographers, and one person even related a story of a poor Norwegian tourist whose camera was . . removed from her possession. So you will only get my written account, but I promise to draw pictures with my words, as best as I can.

For now I am off to prepare for these next few busy days.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

I hope you enjoy the new improved blog with pictures! I tried for a good long time to get a nice slideshow from my picasa web album on the side of the blog but it doesn't want to show up in the widget to choose.

So I'm gonna go back to sleep cuz I'm sick and really sleepy.

At Site