Almost There

July 27, 2008 Almost There

It’s hard to believe that training is almost over. We only have 3 and a half more weeks, and only two of those weeks are here in Kilosa, and not even two of those days are left to be in the classroom. I realized that I’ll only be with my host family for another week and a half if you subtract the time that we will be shadowing and in Dar, so I tried to spend some time with them when I got home from school today.
We learned the national anthem in class today so we all sang that together while we were waiting for dinner. Then of course they wanted me to sing the American national anthem, which kind of sucked, but I did it anyway. Then they were asking me to sing Akon and Ne-yo, as usual, so I suggested that I get out my computer and put on my music, but when I got it out they all wanted to watch a movie instead since they all saw a little glimpse of one that I was watching last week. So I put on The Princess Bride and had my whole family come sit in my room and watch it. It was great. Most of them don’t speak English, so they were just guessing what was going on, but I think they understood that one a lot better than they were following Say Anything the other day. They loved Andre the Giant and they thought it was hilarious when the Spaniard kept repeating, “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” I’m always happy to spread a little Princess Bride love.
Before that happened, we went to MATI for peer teaching from the environment volunteers today. We had the options of learning two of three options: jam making, composting and gardening. I signed up for jam making and composting, but apparently I missed the cue to switch sessions and I ended up staying with the jam making session and made some pretty awesome papaya jam. I think I might actually try to make it for myself when I’m at site. It didn’t seem that complicated, but then again I am kind of concerned that I would end up giving myself botulism by not sealing the jars properly or something ridiculous like that.
I had another rat run-in today, literally. This time when I was outside helping with the jam making rather than inside our classroom though. A little field mouse scurried up and hit me in the foot and ran off and hid. It was interesting. I felt kind of bad for it because I saw it get eaten by a cat a few minutes later. Pole sana panya.
Friday night I cooked for my family. It actually worked out really well. I was kind of worried about cooking for 14 people, but it was fine. I felt kind of bad because we had gone to MATI that day to play sports again, like the 4th of July, and we got home a little later than usual so I didn’t get to start cooking as early as I should have. It took me almost three hours to cook and we didn’t start eating until about 9:15pm and by that time a couple of the younger kids had already gone to sleep. But those who stayed awake to eat seemed to really like what I made. I cooked garlic mashed potatoes, fried okra and corn and we had oranges for dessert. They really like the fried okra once they tried it. They were really confused as they all sat there and watched me cook it because I think that they just usually cook it in a sauce pan with some tomatoes. It was my first time making all of those things all by myself and I’m proud of the way it turned out. Except what you would probably think would be the easiest to cook, the corn, turned out to be the most problematic. Their corn here is just different. I thought it was different when I ate it before just because of the way it was grilled, but that’s not it. It’s just a lot tougher and not sweet like American corn. I still like it, but I don’t think it’s meant to be boiled. It boiled for about an hour and was still really tough.
I finally got my first package from home Thursday. I say finally only because I’ve know that I had Hot ‘n Spicy Cheez-its and Fruity Pebbles in the mail for a month now and the anticipation has been killing me. Now that I have that, plus the glorious additions of animal crackers, honey roasted peanut butter, and Wheat Thins, I’m really trying to save them for when I really need them. I’m not sure how long that’s going to last. I’ve had kind of a rough week and I really thought I deserved some Hot ‘n Spicy Cheez-its, but I’m trying to ration them. I’m pretty sure I’m going to bust into them next week though. Otherwise I’m worried that I’ll just save them until they are stale, and that would be tragic.



July 28, 2008 My First Bout of Sickness


I finally got sick for the first time today. It seems like a lot of people have been coming down with something lately and I was just waiting for it to get to me. I got to school this morning and felt really nauseous and ending up puking and going back home. Lovely I know. It wasn’t so bad though, I pretty much slept it off. It was kind of funny that it is true that people think any time you are sick around here you have malaria. I came home early from school and told my mom that I was sick and the first thing she asked was if I had malaria. Then the rest of the day they kept telling me to take some medicine (which I don’t think they have a medicine to make you not puke, but they weren’t accepting that explanation that I was just going to let it run its course). So if I wasn’t going to take some medicine, they at least wanted me to eat some ugali (that play-doh like food they eat all the time here that is just corn flour and water), so I finally came out of my room to eat some ugali and okra and managed to keep it down so I think I’m over whatever it was that was going on this morning.
I did however realize that it is going to pretty much suck when I get sick here. Because in the States, I’m a pretty pitiful sick person. I like to lay in bed all day long and watch tv and eat popcicles. It’s going to be really boring to be sick here with no tv to veg out in front of. It wasn’t so bad today because I have power here at my host family’s house so I ended up watching Across the Universe on my computer, but if I don’t have electricity my computer battery isn’t going to last long enough for me to sit around watching movies all day.
Being sick today I missed out on our practice teaching in the schools. We had prepared a pretty fun lesson on how to keep the immune system healthy and showing them how to wash their hands properly and whatnot. I was really wishing that I could show the episode of the Nick Jr. Show Yo! Gabba Gabba that talks about germs because that one was my favorite from my days of working in the Kid’s Club at Gainesville Health and Fitness, but unfortunately they don’t get Nickolodean here. What a shame.
They may not have Nickolodean, however they do have Pretty Woman. Oh yeah, that’s right, I said it. Yesterday afternoon the five people in my CBT went to our friend Kenneth’s house for lunch. He runs a drug store across from our school and he speaks really good English so we hang out with him for a few minutes on most days after school or during our lunch break and he wanted to have us over sometime before we left Magomeni. So yesterday we went over there and had lunch and sodas and sat on some fluffy couches and watched Pretty Woman. He had one of those disks that have like 40 movies on one CD that you can get around here, because don’t we all love a little pirated entertainment? And the whole disk was of Julia Roberts movies in English and/or something like Korean. Good stuff. That certainly wasn’t something I expected to do here in Tanzania. You just never know what this country has in store.