village frustrations and joys

Planning events in villages here is a unique experience. To hold a testing day or community teaching in the farthest subvillage from the center, one must walk 30min to that subvillage, start asking people to help you find the subvillage leader- at his house, the duka, wherever he happens to be - because he doesn't own a cell phone. (When the mayor wants to reach him, he calls the next door neighbor who relays messages). Then we discuss w/ subvillage leader the best day and time for event, agree, and spend several days promoting it and preparing for it. In Swahili-speaking countries, time is measured from sunrise to sunset, meaning that what we would call 7am is referred to as 1 since the sun always rises at 6. the clocks however look just like they would at home, so when the hour hand points to 7 you say it's one o'clock and so on. no one here understands why this is confusing for us initially but we've learned to add or subtract 6 hours to tell time. so we agree w/ subvillage leader that we'll teach at noon, and decided to write 6 on our poster. he then tells us that people in his subvillage are in the habit of showing up exactly 2 hours later for any given event and instead asks us to falsely advertise the time to account for this. (i know a few couples who employ this trick...) so in order to teach at noon we make posters, in Swahili, asking people to please show up at 4am!!! imagine our frustration then, when on that day, we have a poor turn out due to 2 conflicting meetings scheduled for earlier that day - one is required for nearly everyone, the other is about irrigation schedules and therefore essential to anyone who farms, which is basically everyone. How the subvillage leader didn't foresee this is lost on us, but by 12:30 we have a fairly good crowd and teach for several hours. this is not an unusual experience, which for the workaholic, multi-tasking, control freak, type A Americans (guilty as charged, as are most drawn to this NGO) this presents a bit of frustration. We're all getting a lifetime's worth of lessons in patience! :) It will be interesting to try to integrate back into working in the US!

I love teaching in the secondary school! We initially rec'd a lot of support from the headmaster but several misunderstandings and unfortunate timing in relation to national exams combined to slowly deteriorate our relationship with him. First the time per day we were allowed to teach was reduced, then the number of days. We took this in stride, re-arranged lesson plans and made it work. On our school testing day, however, we were told our testing team could only be on campus a brief portion of the day, meaning that only 1/3 of the students would be able to be tested. There are very few things I hate more than breaking a promise to a kid, and it seemed I was being forced to repeatedly do so to many, many kids without being able to offer any explanation. It also didn't help that this was the day after the subvillage teaching described above. I excused myself and walked around the perimeter of the school grounds, finally unable to stop the tears of frustration that had been building up for weeks. I regained composure quickly, but not before being spotted by a few of my students who immediately told me not to cry because they loved me, had missed me in class the day before, and couldn't stand to see me sad! I love my students so much.

The primary school group finished their mural and our secondary school group has formed an enthusiastic group of peer educators. the students got to elect officers and choose the teacher to lead it and he readily agreed, even insisting on making the biology teacher a co-sponsor to make sure the information was always accurate. The kids gave up many hours of their weekend to attend trainings. they know the material well so we were more concerned with getting them comfortable teaching and in leadership roles. First they had to tell us why they were there and what they wanted to accomplish which was a great framework. We had them debate statements like "men are better leaders than women" and "teaching about condoms promotes promiscuity" - debate was heated but I bit my tongue and remained the neutral moderator. (Someday i hope to live in a world where the Bible isn't used as a weapon against women - or at least one in which people are well versed on the story of Deborah...) The next day the kids had to teach us something - some taught us how to make their favorite foods, others retaught part of the curriculum. We were thrilled when one of the guys announced he'd written a song about HIV - his rapping skills are amazing! A teacher later asked us what incentive the kids had for continuing the club since we weren't paying them - I wish I could have shown him a videotape of those sessions. These kids are amazing and I was very sad to leave them. I promised not to adopt them all and bring them home with me but it will be difficult.

Our village experience was supposed to end with a large community day involving lots of teaching and free VCT. This was planned on the day of a mandatory meeting for all 3 subvillages to guarantee a huge crowd and the mayor graciously agreed to give us 30min the official agenda as well. after weeks of planning, we were informed the morning of that the entire meeting was canceled and no one was coming into the center subvillage. We were disappointed to say the least. An hour later, in a meeting with the mayor and other leaders, we were trying to find a way to scrape together some form of the event when we learned the reason that the meeting was canceled: a 9 month old baby had died and the mayor saw no reason to require the grieving community to attend a town council meeting. Tears welled in my eyes, even more so when our field officer later explained to me that the family was well known by our staff and in the preceding weeks they'd visited the house twice begging the mother of the obviously sick child to allow them to pay for a hospital visit. For reasons I don't pretend to understand, she refused with tragic results. (I've heard stories, unconfirmed, of some clinics forcing people to tested for HIV, which of course is illegal. This same woman has also repeatedly declined to be tested, but whether this is related is unclear.) Suddenly our frustrations seemed very very petty. Perspective gained instantly. If anything positive is to be said of this, and I think something must, it is that this was an illustration of just how completely communal life is in villages. It's hard to imagine that even a small town in the U.S. would cancel an event to show support for a grieving family. We did offer VCT that day and tested 67 people not directly affected by the tragedy, which was somewhat miraculously given the size of village and chaos of the day. We also managed to do a few teachings with small groups of people for short periods of the time throughout the day.
A testing day in the other village was also canceled. We were heartbroken to hear that the grandmother of one of the homestay families there had passed away. Both of our groups plan to return to the first 2 villages to hold testing days while we work in the new villages, which hopefully will work out. We do have full time staff in the area though, so our work won't end when we leave.

My roommate, Anna, is one of our Tanzanian teaching partners. At the end of the community day, she pulled me aside to ask if I cried this often in the U.S. or if I was really hating my time in Tanzania. (She was at the school testing day as well) Just to be clear, I love it here and have never regretted coming. Despite everything I really believe our work is effective and I will be sad to leave. I can't believe we're already half way through! If I ever reach a point where I am apathetic about my work, where I can listen to news of death of a child due to neglect without be deeply upset THEN you all should be concerned.

Next village will be Maweni, where I'll be teaching in the primary school. It's supposed to be cooler there, which will be nice.

In other news - the president of France called me. We're going to kill a few elephants while we discuss my career ambitions. Apparently the ivory market is the only one still intact at the moment.

Miss you all! Take care!