Life in Songea: The Two Month Benchmark

So, this week wraps up my second month at site.  I don’t know how it’s been for you guys back in the states, but time has flown by here… I can hardly believe I’ve been in country for over four months, and I’ve finally settled into a real rhythm of work, play, and concertina.  Lots of concertina.  I’ve seriously gotten really good.  But more on that later.  For now, here are a few snippets/updates regarding my life so far in Tanzania:

1. For the majority of my being in Songea, I’ve spent most of my free time away from site and in town.  There was a practical reason for this---namely, I needed to furnish my house from the ground up, and most crucial items (stoves, buckets, toilet paper, contact with people who speak English, etc.) can only be found in the town proper, 15 kilometers from my house.  Lately, however, I’ve taken to meandering around my home village, and I’ve come to the realization that I may have the best damned site in all of Peace Corps Tanzania.  I literally live right on the edge of town and countryside.  Exiting my front door, if you turn left, you’ll hit the school, some shops, and the daladala (minibus) into town; if you turn right, though, you hit endless farmland---green, rolling hills eventually giving way to a particularly statuesque mountain (Mt. Mletele) rising in the east.  About a 30-minute hike away is the cone-shaped hill of Unangwa (I think that’s its name), which offers a beautiful, 360-degree panoramic view of the entire Songea district, with tons of boulders to climb on and all the mangoes you can eat.  Top it off with some local maduka (shops) that supply all the essentials and, more importantly, reliable electricity/running water in my house (working >50% of the time = “reliable”), and you have a pretty awesome place to live.  The only real downside is the bugs, but once you murder your first hundred or so, the next hundred don’t seem so bad.

2. So, I have a confession to make: I may have entered another facial hair pact with a few of my PCV classmates.  That’s right… I had so much fun growing a crust-stache for swearing in that I just had to do it again.  Over the past month or so, I’ve grown out pretty much everything my half-Asian heritage will allow me---a moustache, coupled with a little soul-patch/goatee number.  I affectionately call it my "ronin-stache," since (a) it kinda reminds me of the mustaches I’ve seen some Japanese guys sport, and (b) it evokes much more romantic imagery than the name "dweeby Asian-stache."  What’s nice is that most Tanzanians don’t really know what American facial hair looks like, so I could rock the lamest pencil-stache in the world and still have it be considered socially acceptable (well, mostly).  In truth, the heretofore-dubbed "ronin-stache" was born out of laziness... shaving with cold, muddy water is no picnic.  But, over time, it's grown on me (pun definitely intended), and I now thoroughly enjoy stroking my goatee pensively or tweaking my whiskers Snidely Whiplash-style in front of my students every day during class.  The response from my peers regarding my new look has been decidedly mixed: I’ve had people say that I look older, younger, “like a pirate,” “like a wannabe cholo,” “like you grew out your peach fuzz and dyed it black,” and, of course, “really f***ing stupid” (thanks, Veronica).  Couple that with my flowing locks (I have yet to cut my hair in country), weight loss, and perpetually dirty clothes, and you can see that I’ve thoroughly adopted the “shabby-chic” look so popular among Peace Corps volunteers around the world.

3. Teaching has been a bit of a mixed bag.  On the one hand, it’s fun: I really like geeking out about physics stuff in class, and I really love it when some of the brighter kids geek out with me.  On the other hand, though, it can be frustrating… there’s nothing like grading ~200 midterm examinations, especially when the class average is around 50% (even though you made the test non-cumulative and gave liberal partial credit).  It doesn’t help that the teaching schedule is a bit on the relaxed side, last month in particular.  The first week in January, everyone was coming back from the holiday break, so we had to take a few days off to re-acclimate ourselves to the school environment.  The second week, we had Zanzibar Revolution Day on Wednesday and midterms on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, so normal classes couldn’t be held then, either.  The third week, we had a giant, day-long staff meeting, which wasn’t terribly meaningful for me since my Kiswahili still needs work.  Finally, last week we had the graduation ceremony for the Form VI students, and so the whole school had to prepare for the occasion (cleaning, mopping, cutting grass, etc.), which means classes couldn’t be held again.  I’m not saying that the Tanzanian system is bad, per se (and I’m not saying that I love the American education system either), but it certainly takes a little getting used to.

4. My cooking ability, while still lacking, is coming along slowly.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve been attempting to diversify my palate by cooking things aside from fried potatoes---a task that has been helped immensely by the spices (thanks again, Mom and Dad!) and other food products (thanks again, Ah-yi!) I’ve received from the US.  The only real downside to my continued culinary enthusiasm is that my electric hot plates (and, in fact, most electronic appliances in my house) have developed a nasty habit of shocking me whenever they’re plugged in, even when the outlet is switched off.  It’s gotten so bad that I can’t crack my eggs over my frying pan anymore, since the pan is made of cast iron and the current travels through the yolk and into my arms, giving me some unwanted defibrillation.  I’ve told the electrician at my school about this, and he assures me that there isn’t anything he can do.  Looks like I either have to find a new electrician or prepare my food in rubber gloves from now on.

5. While I can say that my cooking skills are improving, my gardening skills are still languishing in the doldrums of mediocrity.  I embarked on a major campaign two weeks ago to transform my garden from “utter trainwreck” to “not a complete disaster,” re-digging all the burms and beds while desperately scrounging around campus for any and all manure I could get my grubby, blistered hands on.  In other words, there was literally a three day period in which I would finish class, go home, put on my (particularly) dirty clothes, grab a 10-liter bucket and a shovel, and go out stable-raiding for a few hours… dignified, I know.  The result, at least initially, looked pretty good: I had four nicely dug beds, freshly planted with both local seeds and seeds from home (again, thanks Mom and Dad), with a nice border of matembele (sweet potato) surrounding the garden.  Within 24 hours, however, literally all my matembele was dead---a fact that still astounds me since matembele is essentially just a particularly edible weed that grows pretty much anywhere.  This was followed by a two-week drought, which cut off my water supply and ensured that I didn’t have nearly enough reserves to spare for my garden.  As of now, it’s just begun to rain again, but I’m quite confident that everything in my garden is either dead or has fallen victim to the merciless talons of rampaging chickens (if Tanzania has taught me anything, it’s to hate chickens with a fiery passion).  Regardless, I still have a few seeds left… maybe I’ll try again this week or the next.

6. If you feel like it's been too long since you've giggled uncontrollably like a little schoolgirl, have your local Tanzanian say the word "chlorofluorocarbon" or "parallelogram."  The results may surprise and delight you!

Okay, that’s enough of an update for now.  Later!

Mustaches, Celebrity Status, and the End of Summer Camp

Hey, folks!  It's been a little while since the last post, and A LOT has gone down in the meantime.  Luckily, now that I'm here in Songea, I've progressed from the incredibly structured life of the Peace Corps Trainee to the incredibly unstructured life of the Peace Corps Volunteer, which means I have a little more time to organize my thoughts.  With that, here's a disjointed highlight reel of the past two weeks of my life:

1) Swearing in was a blast.  A few weeks prior to the event, all the PCT males got together and formed a pact to grow the most hideous mustaches possible for the event (heretofore known as the almighty "Swear-In 'Staches").  The result was about 15 guys dressed in their most formal African-style clothing at an official US Embassy event, sporting the most ATROCIOUS mustaches imaginable.  For the more facial hair-challenged (like me), this resulted in a pretty ugly crust-stache/Fu Manchu look.  However, there were some real winners in the bunch: collectively, we rocked the "Tennessee Highway," the "Hulk Hogan," the "Dog the Bounty Hunter," the "Lightning-Sideburns," the "Muttonstache," the "70's Porn Star," the "Mario," and, of course, the "Ned Flanders," to name a few.  The pictures are hilarious... I think they're going to post one on the official PC website, and if it's the one I think it is, it's a doozy.  Here's hoping this tradition continues with the next trainee class.

2) As for the actual swearing in, things went pretty smoothly.  My speech for our class, while nerve-wracking (I was giving it at a formal US Embassy event in front of ~100 people... completely in Kiswahili), went by without too many hiccups, and afterward people said it was pretty good.  I was also recruited to play the Tanzanian and American national anthems on my concertina on stage, as well as a Kiswahili rendition of "Little Help from My Friends" for our class, and I didn't mess up---too much---on any of those numbers.  One thing of note: during the proceedings, there were a few ITV (the Tanzanian version of CNN) guys with cameras, but I didn't think too much of them at the time.  As I learned from our Country Director the following day, those guys apparently broadcast the majority of my speech/musical performance nationwide that evening.  This has been both completely awesome and completely embarrassing.  On the one hand, holy crap, I was just on the most-watched news network in the country speaking Kiswahili for ~10 minutes---a fact that has catapulted me to quasi-celebrity status (I've already had a bunch of people in Dar, on the bus to Songea, and in Songea recognize me).  On the other hand, holy crap, this is so embarrassing: I look pretty stupid in my pre-pubescent crust-stache playing the concertina, I totally botched a few parts of all three songs, and my entire speech was filled with so-called "American Sarcasm"---squat toilet references, tongue-in-cheek criticisms of Tanzanian chicken-slaughtering practices, and numerous zings at Kenya.  Well, I guess if my speech was good enough to be quoted in Majira (a national Tanzanian newspaper), I didn't offend too many people.  In any case, I'm looking into getting a copy of the footage, so stay tuned.

3) Songea is great.  It's a nice little town, pretty out of the way as far as the tourist circuit is concerned, but accessible enough that Dar is (in theory) a one-day trip.  I'm a big fan of my house: it's big, it has electricity, and it has running water.  Of course, the electricity and running water aren't on all the time, but who's complaining?  The people here are also fantastic, and all of the Songea crew threw a big Thanksgiving bash to welcome my classmate Veronica and me to site, which was definitely a lot of fun.  In all, things are looking up: good house, good site, good friends... hopefully this should be a fun two years.

4) If I must complain about one thing at site, though, it's the arthropod invasion that occurs at my house every night.  In Morogoro, I was in a never-ending, losing battle against the dust in the area... here in Songea, I'm locked in a never-ending, losing struggle for supremacy with the local insect population.  My house has the unfortunate combination of large windows and bright, incandescent lighting, meaning that every night I have to erect a zombie apocalypse-style barrier against the hordes of cockroaches, june bugs, mosquitoes, ants, spiders, and other creepy-crawlies that try to get in.  It's eerie sometimes... once the sun goes down, I rush inside, draw my curtains, and simply listen to the soft pitter-patter of bugs smacking into my windows for most of the night. Of course, no defense is perfect, and there have been a few breaches in my homemade defense system.  The first few days at site were spent murdering dozens of two-inch long cockroaches, followed by fending off a flanking movement of mosquitoes coming in through a hole in my bathroom.  While I've mostly managed to stymie these two incursions, my house has recently been completely overrun with ants: a leaked ~3mL puddle of palm oil was apparently enough to summon a freaking legion of ants ACROSS the entirety of my house... I don't think I've ever seen---or killed---so many living things in my life.  And I don't think this war is over, either.

5) Living alone at site has reminded me of how pitifully uneducated I am when it comes to food preparation.  I've mostly been putting off cooking for myself as long as possible, eating cold samosas or simply going hungry.  However, due partly to boredom and partly to shame, I've started making forays into the market to try cooking for myself.  My first food run in town yesterday yielded a kilo of beef (note to self: a kilo is WAY too much), three unknown spices, some overpriced vegetables, and a whole bunch of flour (whether it's corn or wheat, I don't know).  The idea was to make Chinese peppersteak per the instructions listed in the Peace Corps Cookbook, but I altered pretty much everything... I'm pretty sure, for example, that Chinese food doesn't have that much cumin in it.  I can say this much: whatever I cooked last night has beef, onion, and green pepper in it... just like real Chinese peppersteak, only without the deliciousness.  I'm also pretty sure I'm going to get heart failure from all the oil I've been using, or parasites from all the raw meat I've been handling.  Such is life, I guess.

Okay, this post is long enough.  I'm starting teaching next week, and I have to stop procrastinating.  The secondmaster says that my first class is going to have ~200 kids, so this'll definitely be interesting.  Wish me luck!