Semi-Annual Report Card

Chicken drama at Ruth's house. Fighting over a girl chicken, 

of course.

I arrived in January with lots of plans, always lots of plans, rolling around in my head day and night, making it hard to sleep. Berega needs everything, so it doesn't take a mental giant to develop a list of projects, what's difficult is to focus on just one or two at a time. Then there's the time factor.

Chased him all the way across the yard and down the road.

As an American raised in Hawaii, my sense of time and urgency, or lack thereof, rests comfortably between wazungu and African. The pace here doesn't drive me crazy, but then, maybe I've just adapted. In America, time is money. In Africa, time is time, and hamna shida, there's plenty of it.

Just painting a classroom involves a multitude of delays. If I run out of blue paint I go into town and back, which takes all day, or I can ask Abdallah (handsome daladala driver and one of my adult students) to pick it up for me, again all day . Lots of things here take all day, or longer.  But I usually work multiple projects, so I can flit from one to another depending upon the availability of supplies.

The winner. Hard to imagine a 

chicken looking proud of 

himself, but this one does. 

Yes, this is what I do with my time.

But sooner or later (mostly later), things get done and ninafurahi kabisa to announce that the checkechea is finished. It's been likizo so I was able to proceed unimpeded by classes and kids. On Monday, Martha , Mary and I will prepare the room for school on Tuesday. The screens are about as dusty as they can get while still letting in light and air. The floors are a horror.

Berega Community Library. 

Told you it was small. I'm going to

Dar this weekend to beef up 

the English grammar, math, and

 the health and medicine section.

The kids have done very well, everyone knows their letters and numbers, in and out of order. Some can count up to 150. In varying degrees, they can write numbers from 1-150 as we call them out, read a few words, do simple addition, speak some English, lots of stuff. I'm really impressed, and the parents are more than happy.

Animals labeled in English and Kiswahili. 

Used the same as 

everything else on the walls. 

Nothing is just one thing. Everything 

a color, a sound...

AND the Berega Community Library is done as well. It's smaller than small, we just painted the walls white, borrowed some bricks from the pastor next door, and laid planks over them, old hippie style. As we get more books, we can add more bricks and planks, but it's operational. People are filtering in, getting books, and telling their friends.
We offer the usual library menu, adventure, mystery, and a few bodice rippers, lakini as it's located inside the Anglican Church school building I've avoided titles featuring words like heaving, throbbing or burgeoning. We also have a Kiswahili section for adults and kids, lots of English story books, and grammar books for all levels. There's a bilingual health and medicine section, and some of the hospital staff and nursing students are coming to get books to improve their English and prepare for exams.

Aissa and Jeska, two of my adult students, pluralizing. 

Kiswahili pluralizes from the front, and doesn't use a or an.

It's a process.

Last week I sent out a gangmail asking for money for a laminator, and accessories. Thanks to Evelyn, Patti, Chris, and whoever put money directly in my bank account, I have enough. There's some surplus which I will use to buy yet more books, if that's ok with the donors.
One of the things I plan to do is rip out the pages from all the workbooks I've collected, erase the answers, and laminate them so we can use them milele na milele. Schools here are generally resource free, so hopefully after I've plasticized everything in sight we can have a teachers resource section.

This is how we teach numbers, 

and fruit, and sentences. Also

a and an. I want an apple and a banana.

Last week I was talking with Sylvia and Isabelle, the owners of Ricky's Cafe (home of Black Forest Cake and ice cream). I mentioned needing books for the library, so they took me to a tiny hole in the wall shop way in the back of the market and I bought over 100 books, 20 plastic animals and about 30 little matchbox cars for 60,000 tsh, a good deal.This is why I talk to everyone. S and I are also boxing up some old books for me.
The kids are nuts over the cars and plastic animals, and spent about an hour lining them up till I showed them how to push the cars up and down every available surface. Now they're crawling all over the place. African kids are creative, and make their own toys out of sticks and mud and anything else lying around. I save my plastic bags and broken flip flops for them and they use them to make soccer balls, lorry tires, lots of stuff, but these are new and different and the word is out. I can hardly walk down the street without a troop of dusty little watoto trailing behind. Wait till I've finished the blocks.

Days of the week and below greetings using position of the sun.

There's a group of fundi wa mbao (carpenters) that work near my house, and they saved all the end pieces and made about 200 blocks, all different sizes and shapes. I'm painting them now, planning to draw numbers and letters and words on them as well, because Mungu forbid something should just be fun. The thing is, preschool is just games, so the kids are learning painlessly and playfully, and it's fun to watch.

Where the kids practice writing letters. Also note the letters 

out of order. Below is the transport section we use for sentences,

letter sounds...

Wall mural. Hard to see but we 

use this to teach nouns, verbs 

and pronouns. The boy is sitting on the rock. 

He is swimming in the river...

We do math with little blocks, and if I say to make 5 + 5 they make 2 groups of five, then count 'em up. The usual. One day after 5+5  I said "Now make 6 + 4" and two of the kids just moved a block from one pile to another. Ninashangaa sana. That's pretty sophisticated for a five year old who hasn't had a TV or computer or books. Smart kids.
The adult students are doing fine. They aren't as fast as the kids, but they work, farm, cook... Still they've made a lot of progress but I've decided that English is a dopey language. It's totally unexplainable, there's exceptions to every rule, and homonyms are just unfair.
Kiswahili has its wierdness as well, but on the plus side, there's fewer words to learn. Big is kubwa, very big is kubwa sana and really really big is kubwa kabisa and that's pretty much it for big. So I showed them the probably 200 English words for big in my laptop thesaurus. They looked appropriately intimidated.

At first we taught up to 20, then 40, 

and it was so easy we upped 

to 150 and they're learning it. 

So that's how the first six months have gone, and I'm satisfied. I hope all the Sisters at St. Theresa's and Sacred Hearts are happy to see that I'm finally "using my free time wisely." The plan now is to paint the Kiswahili chekechea across the courtyard. But I think I might take a few weeks off from painting to get the smell of paint thinner out of my skin and scrub off the remaining paint splatters on my person. It's a handy way to teach colors though, half the village knows all their primary colors from watching me walk home from work.
Brad Logan is coming next week, he's the doc who runs Hands4Africa, the org that sent me here. I gave him a yard long Santa list and he's got it all. Some exciting things coming, equipment, computer stuff, but most important, a box of Oreos. By and large the cookies hare are stale, or taste like pesticide, or both. I still eat them, it's what we have, but I'm looking forward to eating the middle out of my favorite store bought cookie.

Shapes and colors.

And THEN, Patti is sending me some home made chocolate chip walnut cookies in the mail. Yes, you can do that, if anyone else feels the urge. Not sure how well peanut butter cookies would travel but hamna shida, I would suck up the crumbs without complaint.
Just ate an eye, a little one, but an eye nonetheless. I've been avoiding eating eyes, picking around them while politely refusing the actual orb. In Ghana, one of the kids rolled a couple across my desk just to see what I'd do. I looked at the eyes, they looked at me, and I rolled them back to Alice, who ate them. Guess I've gotten over the trauma, because today I caved under the pressure and had a little fried fish, guppy sized, with the eyes still attached. From Moshi, where apparently the fish is good. Maybe by the next six month report I'll have eaten a big eyed fish, you never know.


Nakupenda.

Firsts

Just got back from 5 days in Arusha, aka wazungu paradise. I've never seen so many white people in an African city. Apparently Arusha is the seat of international relations and tourism in Tanzania. But the real draw is an actual coffee house with muffins and everything, which is what I ate, everything. Plus great Indian food. I did other things besides eat, but I will admit it was a major focus.

Soko Kuu picture taken at waist level, the best I could do.

My purpose was actually twofold, to explore the big city book market and to visit my friend James. Also wanted to see a man about some walls but the internet was so bad I couldn't  contact him. Hard to believe that the seat of international relations and tourism has such spotty electricity, we do better in Berega with our little solar panels. I'm told it's a political issue, but I'm willing to bet the president and all his cronies have a reliable connection.

A store in Arusha. Interesting sign, I almost 

went in to investigate but decided on a 

coffee instead, the American lubricant.

It's about 10 hours by bus from Berega to Arusha, big buses, no goats or chickens, but packed tightly enough with humans. The seats are almost big enough for the average sized African, which I am not, but I had a book so was fine. The hotel was mzuri sana. Very clean, self contained, and affordable, much classier than my usual lodgings when I'm  in Dar. I could have gotten into a backpackers hostel for about 1/3 the price but Been There Done That, and if I can't afford a room with a toilet at my age then something has gone horribly wrong.




Spent most of the days walking the streets looking for book shops. I was looking for books to help my adult students, plus novels for the library.The actual stores were great, lots of variety and reasonably priced, but the street vendors are the mother lode. Some have a small wooden booth, others a table on the sidewalk or down an alley, still others a big cart with all types of books thrown in. They're like potato chips, I can't pass by and I can't just visit one. In the stores the prices are set, and written on the cover, but on the street it's all about bargaining.

Walking home

At one cart I picked about fifteen books. The vendor was never far, gently offering me this and that, but when the bargaining began a dozen guys appeared, all wanting to weigh in. Just random guys on the street, other vendors, passing Massai, whoever. I offered a lump sum, but evidently the vendor wanted to extol the merits of EACH book and dicker till the goats came home.

Where the goats sleep

I don't mind bargaining, it's the culture, but there's a limit. Plus, every time I tried to talk him down I got mafuta mafuta (petrol).This is the usual crap I get when they want to jack up the price because I'm mzungu. My friend calls it the skin tax. Apparently the cost of transporting books into Arusha is factored into the price as though each book is brought into town in it's own car. I kept telling him siyo mtalii (not a tourist) and it finally sunk in and I got a decent price. As this entire transaction was conducted in Kiswahili, you'd think he'd have realized I wasn't new to the bargaining table, but they see my white skin and figure I've got a load of money on me, which by their standards I absolutely do. In the end, I paid partial skin tax and everyone was happy, including all the extra guys hanging about.

In between the bookstores I visited the coffee shop. Yes, I've been talking a lot about food, but in the village my choices are limited, and that's putting it kindly, so when presented with actual variety I'm like a prisoner on death row. They have black forest cake there too, even better than in Morogoro. And shakes, shakes of all varieties. I will return occasionally till I have eaten my way through the menu.




Had a great paneer tikka at a small Indian place in the middle of town, and spent most of the meal talking to the owner, Albert, who has a cousin in Morogoro working in education. So he will call her and she and I will meet. Also the sweet lassi was great.

Massai market, again at waist level.

I talk to everyone, it's just the way I am, you never know who you're going to meet. I was hanging around the soko kuu (big market), just looking around, surreptitiously taking pictures. I usually hold my camera at waist level and hope for the best, asante Mungu for the delete button. Markets are so alive, lots of vendors, noise, things to buy and sell. While I was there I was talking to a shop owner and he invited me home to lunch with his family. What's nice about being my age is invitations to lunch are usually just that. I met his family, and had a wonderful lunch. Her samosas were terminally delicious.




I was complimenting her on the food, and mentioned that I generally avoid cooking, which she thought was hysterically funny. Their family is originally from India, where women cook, and she spends a good part of every day doing just that. I really need to go to India siku moja (one day). I got karibu tenaed (welcomed again), and will hopefully see them next trip. I'm sure she'd delighted to show me how to make vegetable samosas, convert me into a proper cooking woman and all that.

James village, a nice place to live

Africans of any origin are probably the most welcoming people on the planet. They generally have little, but are more than happy to share. When they say karibu, they don't mean "let's have lunch sometime", but now, and stay awhile if you like. Bring some luggage.

Massai BBQ, note hanging meat in background.

My friend James worked in the lab at Berega Hospital, and now lives and works in Arusha. He's the same age as my kids, likes music as much as I do, and we got to be friends. He's very forthcoming about African culture, and very curious about mine. Plus he's fluent in English so we can and will discuss any topic.




I had heard that there was a theater in Arusha, and spent an inordinate amount of time locating it. Having done that, I asked James if he likes the movies and he said he'd never been. Imagine. So we went.

There were 2 options, a Bollywood film and Hangover 2. I'd never seen Hangover 1, would never have seen it if I was in America, but there's only one theater and it shows only two movies, so we chose Hangover. Had a burrito first, also a first for James. The movie was a hoot, and we had popcorn too. James was astounded by the whole experience, and vows to go again. He also had his first Indian meal. Another hit.

Burros are used widely in this area, for 

carrying everything, especially water

Ladies in this area carry loads in this fashion,
looks hard on the neck.

James is half Massai, and comes from a village "not far" from Arusha. I've mentioned before that wazungu and Africans differ in our concept of distance. "Not far" entailed a cab ride, 2 daladalas and a pikipiki, but it was well worth the trip. His village is in the hills, so it was nice and cool, and as it was Saturday, there was the weekly Massai market. We wandered around and then went to his house, further into the hills where they grow maize, and millet for beer.

James shucking mahindi for ugali.

This was just a day trip, but James' mom karibued me for a week next time, and I'd love to go. This village is beautiful, interesting and new. Massai have an entirely different culture, and I'd love to tramp around in it for a week. He knows every one in the village, so I can take a million pictures.

Not sure this is why God made nostrils, 

but if you have to cook a goat head...

Local Massai house made of dirt, cow manure and ash.

Many Massai have left the village to get educated and find better jobs, after which they support their relatives. I asked if it's difficult straddling two cultures, and he said it's ok, because the world has changed so he has also. He said he wants an educated, uncut wife, and will do his best to educate his kids and teach them English. He wears western clothes, but he's still just another moran when he's in the village.




Most Massai recognize the need for some to go out and do what James and others have done. But he said next time we go to his village he'll take me further back where they live in the truly old style.

Going home from the market

Moving into the first world is a balancing act, you get the good with the bad, and in the end, each culture will pick and choose what suits them. But it will be a sad day when I see fat, diabetic Massai eating take out pizza and watching Hawaii 5-0 reruns.

We visited with his mom and sisters, then headed back to the market to catch the daladala. It was the end of market day, getting dark, and there was a crowd. When the daladala came, there was the usual last helicopter from Hanoi pushing and shoving. They offered me a seat, cause I'm mzungu, but I really hate that, and it's never a good ride when you sit in the front while everyone else sits packed like a can of dagaa in the back.




So while we waited, James and I exchanged war stories about shoving our way into various African transports. Eventually you have to, or else you just stand there till you die. To my shame, I once elbowed a kid so I could get into the bus. In my defense, he was a medium sized kid, and he was looking to shove me too, I just beat him to it.

The last daladala arrived, and as people were exiting the bus, folks were entering. It's a mad rush. We were in the front of the entering group, and were more or less pushed into the front seat, which was just fine. We just got settled in when my door opened and a very tall Massai teenager with baggage jumped in and sat on my lap. No hello, no do you mind, just plop, there she was. I love this place.

It was a good trip, but after five days I had spent and eaten more than I had planned, and was starting to get headaches from the exhaust fumes and general city pollution so am now back home, where the sky is clear, the food is way too predictable, and I don't have to pay the skin tax. Life is good. Always good.

Nakupenda