My pictures!!

so I know I haven't posted tons of pictures. But I dont want to leave you guys out in the cold on what I get to see everyday. So you can check them out at this website!  http://picasaweb.google.com/gabbiesskoob

Used Clothes Market

Last weekend, Kristy and I decided to go exploring around Arusha a bit. We left on Saturday morning to go to the used clothes market where most Arushans buy western clothing.  There was as much clothing in the market as I have seen in any department store in the USA, with far more variety. The clothing was from all over Europe, Asia, and North America.  As we looked through the clothing we found tags still on many of the articles from stores like Talbots, Anne Taylor, and J. Crew. We also found many things with price tags from Goodwill and the Salvation army.

 Tanzanians have little concept of how much American dollars are worth and this was never more apparent than shopping in this market. Many times natives will mark up their prices for muzongos, knowing that we can afford higher prices than locals. But even when they attempt to over charge us, many times it is still a lot cheaper than anything we would pay in the U.S.  Although I didn’t buy anything, Kristy bought two skirts. One had a price tag on it for $35 (American), she ended up paying Tsh 3000 (about $2. 50).

Here is a  picture of the market.

why my posts are not consistent...

I can’t remember if I have mentioned this before or not, but my access to internet is very limited. So many times for the next few months I will probably only be able to post on weekends (and even then very sporadically). Some of this will be due to my changed schedule.

 Although I will still be teaching about HIV/AIDS and Nutrition, where and to whom I will be teaching has changed from what I had originally thought.  As everything here is, this can be attributed to the phrase, “this is Tanzania.” Many times people are hours late, or don’t even show up to appointments, meetings, and classes. This civilization has existed for so long without clocks, watches, schedules, or even electricity that all of this is not only accepted but also expected to some extent. Because of this, it is very hard to plan ahead.

This past week I was supposed to teach a group of adults in a village called Ngurdoto. But upon arriving on Monday morning, we found that someone had died and the entire class had left for the week to go to the funeral. So Kristy and I ended up helping the sustainable agriculture division of GSC vaccinate chickens (kuku in Swahili) against Newcastle Disease.  If nothing else, being here has taught me to “roll with the punches.”

So my new schedule will now look something like this: during the week we will travel to villages far away from Arusha and camp out in the outskirts of the villages. Once there we will teach classes in both schools and education centers and in HIV/AIDS support groups. On the weekends, we will return to Arusha where we will get to do laundry, sleep in real beds (not in sleeping bags in tents) and enjoy our weekend before venturing out to another village (sometimes ones that are hours away). On occasion we will also be teaching in local schools in Arusha. On the weeks that we do that I will get to stay with my homestay on the weekdays also.

Kristy and I will also be revamping the HIV/AIDS lesson plans and curriculum. I am especially looking forward to creating a lesson plan for children in standards 5-8 (grades 4-7 in America) about puberty, reproductive health, and healthy lifestyles .

I have realized that I have not shown you any pictures of where I am living. I have not taken pictures of anyone I live with yet, but I promise the pictures are coming. I have taken a picture of my room (seen here on the left).  It is quite spacious. I have a window to the outside and both a light and a electrical socket so  I can plug things in.  The window does not have glass but has bars over it so no one can climb in and I have wooden shutters I can shut in the evening.  The white draping material over my bed is the mosquito netting that I let down at night.

There are so many things I do every day and I want to share every new insight and experience I have. But alas, I have had far more adventures than I have time to write about.  So forgive me when I talk about things that happened days (or weeks ago). I still want to share them, I just didn’t have time to share them at the time they happened.

So two weeks ago, we visited an orphanage. Most orphanages around here are run by either private organizations or individuals.  There are still many parentless children who live on the streets though, so the children that make it to the orphanages are fortunate to be there.  The one we visited is just outside of Arusha and is run by a middle aged Tanzanian couple.  The children were (of course) adorable and so excited to speak with muzungos  (white foreigners). They sang to us and wanted us to take copious amounts of pictures with them. They got so excited when they could see the pictures of themselves on the displays of our digital cameras.

We have also visited a Livestock and Agricultural college that is in the village of Tengeru.  We learned about how to double dig beds for vegetables and what plants to grow around gardens and farms to prevent insects and animals from infesting the crops. This helps people to cut down on pesticide use so that crops are safer to eat and it’s a much cheaper option for farmers.   The area surrounding the village and college were beautiful, especially the flowers.

On the same day we also visited Peacehouse Secondary School. This is a private high school completely funded by a wealthy American anesthesiologist (he invented some Hug-A-Bear thing that warms people back up to body temperature after surgery..if someone knows what this is ,let me know and I’ll post the information up here).  All of the children at the school admitted to the school come from really poor families. They cannot have the capabilities to go to school any other way (secondary school is not mandatory and the expense is quite prohibitive to a lot of families).  They must also have received very high marks in primary school.  In exchange for this, the children receive free tuition, room, and board  year round for their entire high school education.  The school grounds and buildings were the nicest I have seen of any school buildings so far in TZ.  In their dormitories they slept four to a room, but with plenty of space to store their belongings .  The classrooms are still in the process of being equipped with textbooks, computers, and lap equipment (for the science classrooms) but classes are in full swing and students are making do without.  While the headmistress of the school is Tanzanian, many of the teachers are international with a good number of them being native English speakers (all high schools are taught in English in TZ).

I've already been here for two weeks!

It's crazy I know.

I have finally started to become a little bit organized and have learned how to post pictures and link to pictures and the whole bit.

Last week we went camping in MtoWaMbu (Mosquito River in Swahili), which is the gateway village for safaris to the Serengeti and Ngorogoro Crater. It was a town aimed at tourists. But they also have a staggeringly high rate of HIV (most likely due to the heavy tourist traffic that they get). Our group led 7 classes of HIV and Nutrition education classes as well as teaching them how to make sack gardens in their backyards so they can grow their own vegetables (which people tend to neglect in their diets here).

I really enjoyed the whole week except for the food. Because basically the whole organization was there for one and we had over thirty people there, we had a restaurant cook food for us (buffet style) for every meal. We ate the same thing for lunch and dinner every single day. By the end I was eating just chapatti (like fried thin (not sweet)pancakes)and mangos for every meal. Beans, rice, and beef and (cooked) bananas gets old very quickly. This picture is what I saw from the restaurant every day while I was eating, its pretty suggestive of what most of the village looks like.

Just so you have an idea of what I see on an daily basis in Arusha (besides the brewery): every day Kristy and I have a 45 min walk from our houses (which are practically right next door to each other) to the GSC office. We have to walk through our village then along a set of abandoned railroad tracks that run between huge piles of trash (there isn't any garbage collection so people just throw trash wherever they want- garbage bins are completely unheard of). There are a ton of goats, dogs, and chickens that run rampant along these railroad ties and trash piles. We frequently have to push the goats out of the way so we can walk home.  The picture to the right is of some of the goats just before the railroad ties and trash piles that we get to see on our walk home. The beginning of the village is in the background. The water running alongside of the road is for drainage from the road as well as from some of the local houses (from the few people that have running water in the area).


I also didn't have time to share more about our orientation last week. We got to visit Makumira College, a local university just outside of Arusha. It was started as a Lutheran seminary (remember I said that alot of things were started by religious organizations) but four years ago added on a law school, business school, music program and an education department. The professor in charge of the music school is an American who has been living in TZ for the past four years (he developed the music program). His wife also teaches music classes at the school. They have two children who they homeschool as well. It was fun to speak with an American (outside of GSC employees) who have been living here for a long time. It was also interesting to see the students and what their classes were like. Alot of people here don't go to college until they are older because it is so expensive so many people were in the thirties.We got a tour of the campus, got to eat in the university cafeteria and sit in on one of the traditional African dance classes. 

We also visited a local hospital. We learned that the hospital system in TZ is organized into a tiered system. You have to work your way through the different levels when you get injured. What this means is that even if you are seriously ill, the first place to go is the local dispensary. Once there, they will decide if you are sick enough to have to go to the district hospital and then there they can decide if you need a specialist or what you need to do. Its kind of a screwy system, I'm still not actually sure how the heirarchy works. But we got to go on a tour of the closest district hospital to Arusha.
     
The Hospital was completely different than anything I had expected. There were many buildings with one central building for offices and filing. They had different buildings each for men, women, and children. Then surgery had its own building, as did the laboratories, the kitchen, the pharmacy and the building for those with HIV. They had multiple little houses set far back behind the hospital for those with Tuberculosis.  It was dirty and very open. We were allowed to walk through all of the operating rooms, while patients were in them. We also walked through the men's and women's wards where all of the patients' beds were. It was strange that they didn't have any rights to privacy. There weren't even curtains to go around every bed. Every bed did, though, have mosquito netting to cover it.

Everything we see here is a completely new experience. I'm starting to get used to being here, so I think that I nothing will surprise me. But something does every day. I really like experiencing this new culture though.

Its thunderstorming now, which means the power is going to go off  (and so I will get kicked off the internet). So I'm going to stop writing for now. But no worries. I will continue to share soon. Kwaheri!

Next days stuff. Sorry its kind of frantically written!!! I will have more free time later this week!

Hujambo!

I have a little bit more time now to write and post pictures now that it’s the weekend. I will start at the beginning ( from when I got here)  and work my way through the past week.

I arrived in Arusha (the third largest city in TZ) around midnight, on the night of Saturday the 2; I left Ohio on Thursday the and hanging out in airports since then. The traveling wasn’t that bad, I found lots of things to do. I read, wrote some papers that I needed to get done, and watched movies on my laptop.

Due to a switched flight time, I had a 15 hour layover in Nairobi. Since I 1) didn’t know the language at all and couldn’t figure out what to do/where to go, and 2) wasn’t supposed to leave the airport because I didn’t go through customs, I just hung out at the airport the whole time. It wasn’t too awful. Jomo International looks like a giant indoor strip mall with very few places to sit (picture to the right). They did though, have lots of little nooks in the walls on ledges about 4 inches high, so that people could sit or sleep on them and be out of the walkway. I ended up sleeping in one of these nooks for about 3 hours. They also had a café with free wireless. This was the most exciting part, I got to facebook and email people for a very long time.

I was picked up at the airport in Kilimanjaro and driven to Arusha to stay in the Center House Hostel. It is a relatively cheap hostel (and also fairly clean), run by the Catholic diocese.  I have included a picture of my room. The bed with the mosquito netting covering it is mine. The hostel also gives free breakfast every morning: three slices of white toast with butter and mango jelly, half of a banana, tea, and a fried egg. The eggs in TZ are very strange. I’ll include a picture later on. They don’t have  orange yolks. They are just white.  I haven’t figured out yet if the yolk is just really small and white and we can’t see it, or if it just isn’t there.  But ALL eggs in TZ are like that. (they still taste the same).

Most organized or nice- ish things in Arusha are run by either The Catholic diocese or the Lutheran Church. 

Anyway, that first day no one else had arrived yet so I just wandered around the city. I met a nice man who showed me where the market was, and some major landmarks. He then tried to sell me a picture that he had painted for $45 (and he wanted paid in American money). But after I refused, he very politely told me I could still be his “rafiki” even if I wouldn’t help support his career. He also helped me find the street that the hostel was on, after I was done walking around. I have included a picture of him, his name was Stephen (and turns out, someone I now work with knows him and is friends with him. I’m glad I didn’t make friends with any crazy people).

That evening Kristy arrived. We shared a room at the hostel. She will be here until May with me. We have now moved into houses with our host families and conveniently we are living in homes very close to one another. About 12 other students are here, but they are only here for two weeks, doing a service/tourism trip. They will be working in the schools with us next week and then they will leave. Most of the students are nursing students from Salisbury, which is a university on the
eastern shore of Maryland.

For the last couple of days, we have been having orientation, getting used to the country and meeting the people. There are three people that are here already (they have been here since last fall) and will be working with me and Kristy this spring.  The cars here drive on the left side of the road. This was the first thing I noticed and it is so strange.  I keep expecting the dalla-dallas (the bus system) to crash as I see them turn into what I think should be oncoming traffic. But its always alright.  My Swahili is coming along, I now know yes (ndiyo) and no (hapana) and some other useful phrases (how much is bei gani).
My family is nice but really small. They live in a wood and mud house, with a concret block base. There isn’t any running water, but they do have electricity (although it goes out frequently). The toilet is a hole in the ground that sometimes has toilet paper (outside of the house). To take baths, they heat up a bucket of water and you pour cups of it over your body (they have a small shack to do this in outside).  Kristy and I have about a 45 walk every morning to get to work. Its not bad though, its very green and we walk past the Kilimanjaro brewery ( a Tanzanian beer) so that is exciting  (picture to the right).

We have met with many HIV positive people and learned how to lead classes on teaching people.  Next week we will go to a small village about an hour and a half drive from Arusha and lead classes there all week. (We will camp out in the yard of the village leader).

First Few Days

Hi everyone!

So I did have this really cool post written out  about all of my adventures. But I can't use my laptop because I only found wifi about 20 minutes ago and my laptop isn't with me.

Anyway, I will post pictures and the whole bit later this week when I can bring my laptop back into town. I am currently staying at the Center House Hostel, a local relatively cheap hostel run by the Catholic diocese. There is a shared bathroom for about 20 people, but other than that its fine. Free breakfast everyday of three slices of white toast, butter, orange or mango jelly, instant coffee or tea, and a fried egg (that doesn't have any yolk- I haven't figured that part out yet- what do they do with them?)

We have orientation this week, so touring the town, meeting the people and learning swahili. Ndizi is banana, elephant is tembo, and everything you've ever learned in the Lion King is correct: Simba is lion, Rafiki is friend, and Hakuna Matata is no worries (which people actually say here all the time). They also say poli poli which means slowly slowly.

So thats the quick update. I'll include more later.

Ciao!