Sick and Dirty

(written 8/31)

A small breakdown did happen, but it wasn’t too bad. Between being sick (and consequently not being able to be upright for more than ~15 min), having ants crawling all over my room, and having our drinking water be brown with scum on top, being here is a bit hard. Many of you guys know I’m not the world’s cleanest person, but I enjoy having the option of being clean- which I don’t really think I’ll have here. Also, I really believe in good sanitation and the fact that no one uses soap and we have to clean our dishes in water full of bacteria that we’re not supposed to drink without boiling, all really make me squeamish.

We’ve been boiling our water and then putting it in water bottles, but I’m having a hard time drinking it because it has a bunch of particles that look like disintegrated fish food floating around in it. This has been making me think a lot about our American concept of what good drinking water is- much of which I think is due to bottled water advertisements. We are bombarded with ideas of crystal clear natural spring water from fresh snowmelt as the perfect kind of water. I’ve seen a million commercials of well-lit slow-motion water being poured out of a bottle against a white background. In comparison, this funny smelling water full of fish flakes is pretty disgusting, even though I know that we’ve killed the harmful bacteria. However, the PCs before me drank this water and did just fine, and at some point I will too once I get over the fact that it doesn’t look like water in commercials.

As I’ve been lying in bed sick, Ashley’s been an angel and has continued cleaning the house- at this point she’s mostly been working on the kitchen. It’s looking infinitely better and almost ready to start putting food in. I’m pretty sure our neighbors are all puzzled that we’re spending so much time inside.

My small bit of cleaning is trying to eradicate the ants in my room. I think I’ve almost succeeded. This either means I’ve killed most of the ant colony, of the subtle persuasion of mass murder has convinced them to seek their fortunes elsewhere. I’m a bit worried that some night the ants are going to exact their revenge on me and carry me away in the middle of the night. If you never hear from me again, you know why.

…and we signed up for this why?

(written 8/29)
3rd day in Tabora

Ashley and I are both feeling a bit overwhelmed being here. Our reaction to actually moving into our home is ‘what am I doing here? Why did I decide to come do this again?’ We found a letter from Rachael and Ros to us describing exactly how we are felling and assured us that things will get better. It was really wonderful, as was a conversation with Sam in which he assured us that our job for this first week is just to set up our house and get outside and interact with people. Ashley has been doing the latter a bit more than I have, but everyone is really pleased to have us around and they don’t seem to mind our bad Swahili. Trying to talk to them is just really tiring to me though, so I’m glad I have a house to retreat to.

Getting to know the women

Our conversations with the villagers are full of ‘Karibu’ (welcome), What is your name?, Do you speak Swahili?, We are learning, Who is older, Ashley is very tall and Jamie is very small, Jamie’s hair is very short.
We’ve been in a number of houses and, I feel stupid for not realizing this, but they are all incredibly dark inside. Many of the houses have wooden frames covered with mud and thatched roofs. This means that they let very little light in during the day- which explains why everyone spends there time outside. The sit in the shade cast by their houses, and move to the opposite side of the house after the sun shifts. Our house has these nice big windows that let in lots of light and let us spend time inside during the day. However, we have mostly covered the windows with cloth to keep people from staring at us and seeing how much stuff we own.

Our neighbor’s house (not all houses here have rainbows coming out of them)

While walking around with our landlord (Msembe), we got to hold a 22 day old baby and a 6 year old one, both of whom were incredibly precious. There are baby animals all over here (cows, goats, dogs, sheep, chickens, ducks), which makes me very happy (and makes me puzzled, as a though many animals had their babies in the spring, but it is technically winter here).

Another note about animals- we live fairly close to Maasai (a nomadic herding tribe that has the distinction of being able to legally cross country lines without passports.) and they frequent the land around Tabora to graze their cattle. All of their cows are beautiful, have sleek coats, and look well fed. This is a huge contrast to the cows in the village, many of whom only have a small area of of land to graze on and live tethered to a tree. (edit: I later learned that there are many healthy looking Taboran cows and many skinny Maasai cows)

More about the children- they are incredibly curious and spend lots of time just coming by to look at us. Ashley broke out her football and we’ve been tossing it around with the kids. When we do this, they constantly call our names of ‘hapa’(here) because they all want it. Some of them are very shy when we interact with them but others are incredibly eager for attention. They constantly yell at each other and hit each other, which makes me uncomfortable. I’m not really sure what to do when that happened, especially because I don’t understand Swahili well enough to know what it’s about.

I’ve met a few kids (but no adults yet) with visible differences. There is one kid with fairly light skin and hair (although much darker than me and Ashley). Some of the other kids seemed to be making fun of her by saying she was one of us and not one of them. The other kids- one has a hand that doesn’t work and was very shy about playing ball because of it, there is a little girl who looks like her whole right arm was burned, and a girl that has bumps all over her skin. The last kid worries me a bit because I wonder if it’s a contagious parasite, but she seems equally included in everything by the other kids. I think the Tanzanian relationship with disability is something I will keep an eye out to understanding. I was pleased to see that none of these kids seemed to be shunned, although I’m sure I will figure out the nuances of how others relate to them as time goes on.

Also, while I enjoy playing with the kids while outside, they annoy me so much while I’m inside. They are always yelling, crying, and making noise and are often on our porch calling our names or peeping through our windows. I’ve decided I am just never going to respond, as it’s not a behavior I want to encourage.

As Sam and Ana have explained to us, this is perfectly normal as the Tanzanians don’t really have a concept of personal space. They told us for our mental health we needed to very strongly establish that others cannot enter our house. Apparently here, people walk into each other’s houses all the time. I’m glad 2Seeds has figured out a way to give us a safe space where we can be alone (to do things like use our electronics.)

On the topic of our house, we’ve spent quite a bit of time cleaning and it is almost totally livable. Everything has been swept, the mouse-chewed foodstuffs (and plastic- god knows why) have been cleaned out and all that’s left to do in the kitchen is wash anything. However, today I discovered an ant colony in my room (which luckily has no yet found my food) that Is pent quite a lot of time cleaning up. I hope they don’t return and that our house stops producing surprises soon.

Also, I’m feeling a bit sick and am not that happy. We haven’t started cooking yet, so we have no control over our food. I’m a bit squeamish about our water and sanitation, and everything is very loud and unfamiliar. I predict tomorrow I will have a full meltdown and will decide this was a terrible idea. For now, I will go eat some cranberries, go to bed, and listen to Harry Potter.