First Week In Tanzania: Rating, Awesome.

I apologize that I haven't posted in awhile. The internet here is pretty expensive so I've been trying to wean myself off of it as much as possible and write offline before I post it online. Rest assured, when I get my own internet modem (I've been using Pepy's) I'll post quite a bit more often.

Yesterday I completed my first whole week in Africa. It feels like I've been here much longer, though. Being tossed from the short, frigid days of winter into the long, hot, beautiful and sunny days of the African summer is quite an overhaul on the mind and body. Nevertheless, it has been a welcome change and I think I'm adjusting as well as I could have hoped.

This past week has just been used as an opportunity for me to get used to my surroundings, see a little bit of the city (courtesy of Pepy, who has been a gloriously helpful and accomodating host), and prepare for my weeks of volunteer work that are upcoming. Tonight I am going to meet Mr. Kawishe, the principal of the Mount Everest School where I will be teaching, and his family. Starting soon I will be living with them during the week, while school is in session, and coming back to live with Pepy on the weekends, and help with the Mashaka Foundation. Once the volunteer house is finished I will be playing the role of volunteer recruiter and coordinator, which is extremely exciting. I have already spoken to one eager volunteer prospect, and can't wait to get this ball rolling as well.

As far as writing about my time here goes, I have been skimming over some very important aspects of the everyday life in my attempt to adequately explain the more extravagant differences between the African and American societies. The daily life here definitely makes me appreciate the luxuries I have at home.

Perpetua's house is very nice in comparison to most of the others here, which often have roofs made of tin and walls of clay. Here, we wake up in the morning and boil water on the stove outside to make tea (which is delicious) and usually have sweet bread to go with it. If there is electricity we use the blender to make fresh mango juice (also delicious), but the power is about 50/50 here. We fill water buckets every day to make sure we have enough to last for showers at night, because the water is turned off from 7pm to 6am.

Showering is quite the experience here. At night we use the cold water from the buckets (Pepy usually heats hers over the stove because she doesn't like the cold water, but I use it as it is because it's so hot outside). In the morning the shower tap is on so we can use the warm water from that.

I could make an entire post about the food here. For one, the experience of cooking is far more hands-on and involved than cooking at home. Perpetua doesn't have a refrigerator (at least, the one she does have doesn't work) so all of our food is fresh. We go to the vegetable stands or the bakery or the butchery to get our food just before cooking it, and the next day we do it all over again. Pepy laughs when I am working with food; she finds the way I peel mangoes especially hilarious.

My first experience with the butchery was a bit shocking. It's a small, one room building with an interior made of tile, with a tile partition between the front customer side and the back butcher side. The smell is absolutely revolting, to be completely honest; after leaving the shop I was happy to be able to breathe freely again. Meat hooks hang everywhere, and it's all I can do to suck in my stomach and keep my arms close to my sides so I don't bump into anything. We went yesterday to get cow heart and cow livers to cook for dinner, and we watched as the took the fresh heart and liver (all the cows are slaughtered early morning on the day they are sold, and they are also completely organic) and used a workbench powersaw to cut it into pieces. They scooped the pieces into a plastic baggie and handed them to Perpetua, who simply stuck it in her purse as though it were a bag of candy.

A few days ago, Perpetua sent me out to the bakery to get some bread. It was my first time venturing out on my own, away from Perpetua and the comfort of a translator and companion, and I was terrified. The bakery is probably less than half a mile away from our house, but still, visions of angry mobs of knife-weilding bakers, offended by my mixing up the words for "bread" and "butthead", flashed through my mind. I told Pepy that if I wasn't back within thirty minutes to please come looking for me. I arrived at the bakery, and asked for the bread ("Mambo, poa, naombe mkatie?") and left without incident, though I had an entire choreography of James Bond-esque defensive maneuvers and backflips planned in my head, just in case.

I have also been to a few of the cultural item markets. Imagine the store Ten Thousand Villages, but on crack. There are hundreds of tiny carved figurines and animal-skin drums, and more necklaces and earrings than I could count. I wondered if all my savings might be enough to simply buy out the shop, but I only bought a pair of metal swirly earrings and a long swath of beautiful blue hand-sewn fabric used as a wrap. If I am allowed to visit the shops too frequently I will soon need another suitcase to tote everything!

Yet the end of another blog post; I hope everyone at home is doing well. I have a plethora of photos of my family and friends stuck everywhere in my room, and I brought plenty of photos of the summertime mountains. I love it here but six months seems a long time to be reunited with the green of the Blue Ridge, when everything here is brown and dry until the rainy season, which is a long ways away.

Love you lots Mom, Dad and Eli.
Kwa heri!