More Engaruka, Week One

           We taught in an open air class room in one of the only shady areas in Engaruka Juu (the village is divided into two parts, Juu and Chini, Upper and Lower).  There was one man in our class who had had 7 (yes, that says 7) siblings die from HIV, and his mother was infected. She had actually contracted the disease while taking care of one her daughters who was dying from HIV. Hearing stories like this is awful, but it makes it seem like we're doing something worthwhile while we're here. Everyone in our class was negative, and we later found out, that Engaruka has a very low percentage of HIV infected people within its population. This is great because in small villages, particularly Maasai villages, HIV can spread very quickly.
          It is very common in Maasai culture for men to have more than one wife, for wives to have boyfriends, and for teenagers to become sexually active at very young ages. If a girl has a baby before she is married (in their culture) it is seen as a sign that she is fertile and will be able to produce many offspring for her future husband. For this reason, girls try to get pregnant when they are 14, 15, and 16 years old, when they are still in school and years before they will probably be married. Many times they don't worry (or care) about who the father is. This concept is starting to die out as the Maasai become more and more assimilated to a world culture, but it still runs rampant in many rural areas.
        It is conundrums like this that make it particularly hard to teach here. How do you teach someone to only be faithful not just to his 1 wife but to all 2 or 3 or 4 of his wives or to his wives and to his girlfriend in order to stop the spread of HIV? Or how do you explain that if someone finds a new girlfriend, he should go get tested before he sleeps with his wife (afterall its basically his right to sleep with her whenever he wants- in his eyes)?  The cultural differences are hard to take in and even harder to adapt a western mindset around.
          While we taught, people asked us tons of questions pertaining to healthcare. The problem is that to many of the questions, the only answer we had was to say, "you need to find a doctor." There isn't a great supply (or barely one in most regions) of doctors in rural areas. And unfortunately most people that live in these areas don't have electricity, forms of communication, or forms of transportation with which they could provide more proper medical care. It was depressing because we don't know anything more than to tell them to have good hygiene (this is really hard to tell people: when they don't have running water its really hard for them to be concerned with washing their hands all the time, washing all of their dishes when they're just going to be putting the same thing back into it,  or washing sharp instruments. ) and to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables (also hard to do in an area that has been plagued with a drought for almost a year).
          We got to experience first hand what could happen to people without available medical care when 6 people of the 16 we went with all became sick.  We never found out what it was. (which is very unfortunate because we are going to be there for another two weeks). It could have been the unclean water, improper handling of food, or just bad food. It wasn't just white people that got sick, so we knew that it was probably something serious, since normally Tanzanians don't get ill when white people do (they're stomachs are used to handling parasites and bacteria that ours just haven't grown up dealing with).  It was pretty bad though, especially because we really didn't have lots of available clean water to give them, it was really hot with little shade, and there weren't any hospitals that were close enough that it was worth making someone with frequent vomiting and diarrhea sit in a car on along drive (it would have been close to two hours on a bad and bumpy road).
           Even now, some people are still ill from last week. I started feeling sick on Friday our last day there but fortunately we went to Arusha soon afterwards so I had a nice bed to sleep in and it was much cooler, and I had nice, clean, boiled water to drink.
           On Friday when we returned, five of us went out for pizza. It's expensive to eat mzungo food here (dinner cost me approximately $6, about 3 times as expensive as for what i could have had food at a Tanzanian restaurant).  But after eating badly cooked (and just plain not good) food consisting mostly of half burnt rice, beans, and unidentifiable meat (probably beef, but weird body parts- like stomach, and other organs), we felt like we deserved it. It was so good. A very typical Tanzanian pizza has mango and pineapple with white cheese and tomato sauce on it.  Its surprisingly delicious.
We ate in Njero, a place filled with white and rich people (sadly, these are normally the same, except for government officials).  As Alana pointed out while we were eating in a courtyard surrounded by nice restaurants and a movie theater (that plays movies in English), we could have been somewhere in California. 
           Speaking of government officials, I am getting a clearer and clearer idea of how different the Tanzanian government is from ours. I hear stories of how local officials will let people starve or go without medial treatment because a law or policy isn't being enforced while they have multiple houses, and while the Tanzanian government buys EVERY parliament member a car so that they can make sure they have transportation (this is in addition to the salary they make which is roughly ten to twenty times the listed average salary in the country - $600 a year).   A parliament member who lives relatively close to me, just gave his house away to some friends of his because he has four more and didn't really need it.

Obviously not everyone in the government is like this, but it is disheartening to hear so many tales of the lives of wealthy, while I see people who survive on almost nothing every day.  A major problem we encounter is that the government offers to give free ARVs to all people infected with HIV who have CD4 levels below 200. The problem is that if these hardcore drugs aren't taken with lots of food and water they can make people really really really sick. Alot of the people that have CD4 levels this low have already lost/quit any job they had and have to rely on others for food, shelter etc. The government gives no help to these people to help them find food and water to take with their medications. In many ways, giving them these drugs is hurting them more than it is helping them. Of course, I don't know the whole story behind this and don't know if the government has ever tried to put a program to help this in place. I just know what I see around me everyday, and what people in our classes tell us. 

Many NGOs are reaching out to people, like GSC, and working to help bring education, food, and clean water to these people.  But it still makes me greatful that I live in a country where most people don't have to be afraid that they won't be able to find clean water to drink or at least some food to eat.