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Thursday May 31, 2007

Kijijini continues

hi,

sorry Ive been away for so long, spent the last 4 or 5 weeks in village, i almost forgot that there were other wazungu in the world. Life is going well here, its still hard work ,and we are continualy either on an up or a down, there is no medium. after returning to kijijini last time my phone broke, and as i have 15 pounds to last me until june i cant afford to fix it, so life has been slightly removed from the real world.

 Im not sure how much I've talked about my partner Happiness.She is 21 and like me will continue onto university after we finish in september. we spent 1 month training, in which we wrote down preferences for partners, and lucky me and happy agreed on each other. We are very similar in many ways...eg, we both have short fuses, we both sulk, we both hate mornings, and we both have short attention spans. As you can imagine mixing all that togther makes for a volitile relationship. we laugh and joke a lot, and often she helps me and encourages me with my swahilli, but on the other hand we have many screaming matches involving throwing of maize and slamming of doors, but its good fun. She works hard in village and we try to help each other as much a possible. Often it is her leading things as she is fluent in swahili, understands the culture and naturally likes to be in charge.  Often it can be frustrating, but i am incharge of small things that i take great pride in, such as the end of term "festival" and all our paper work.  Despite our stuggles i really appreciate her, especially after talking to other volunteers this time im in town and finding out 2 national partners have run off, one to get married, the other to her home in dar es salam, several are spending weeks away from village, and most of my fellow wazungu are severly unhappy. maybee i have been lucky, maybe im just more positive, or maybe my african heritage about 20 generations back has kicked in slightly!!

 Village life can become very lonley, especially for me as my skills at language are minimal, and i take a long time to learn, but i have made some firm friends here now, with students, teachers and community members. Happy and I have successfully finished 1 term at both the secondary and the primary school, and held a "festival" at the secondary school last week. There were dramas and role plays, songs and a comedy show, it went really well, and all of it was based around reproductive health. There was sketches on teenage pregnancy, women and men having affairs, hiv transmittion and  the dangers of  unprotected sex. Almost all the students attended, and so the audience was about 150 strong. Everyone laughed a lot, not only at the comedy shows, but at the maandazi (small doughnut) eatting competition, inwhich the boys cheated an unbelievable amount, all to win a bottle of soda. I was really proud of the students, so many of them worked really hard to pull it off, as in true tanzanian style there were no preparations till the day before. Like i said life here is either a high or a low, and things like that help so much, it shows that as little as we appear to do, just our presence makes a difference, because it makes them talk about the subjects.

The biggest struggle in life at the moment is keeping quiet in the school staff rooms. Every day I have to watch children being beaten, as young as 4 or 5 years old, for terrible crimes such as sending a note in class, or getting a maths problem wrong. I may know very little about child psychology,. but it seems to me that if a child is shown why they have done wrong, and shown the choices they have, then surely they will learn the right and wrong choices. Children here live in fear of all teachers, and follow instructions blindly and it really makes me sad. I was a very awkward child for my teachers, because my family always taught me to follow my judgement and beliefs, and so I often refused to do things that seemed pointless or immoral to my young self, but I now completly trust my judgement, and learnt when young to follow what i believe and not what i am told. Its something i think a lot about, a hope I have influence in a small way either now or later in my life.

 Over the months i have ajusted to a slow pace, and doing only one thing a day, but village is something else when it comes to time. there is the complete opposites of the schools being run like military  camps, and children making sure they are on time to avoid a beating. and the community, where people take it as normal to turn up 2 hrs or 2 days late, therefore me and happy are always early for the community meetings, but late for school.

We have 2 weeks left before we have 1 week holiday, in which my mum is visiting, and i am apparently going to meet the infamous Bannana Zoro in dar es salam (hes a big star here, who lives down the same street as 1 of my students) after that we return for the final two months of placement.

Think thats about all for now, hopefully add on of my TIT(This Is Tanzania) moments soon, such as assisting in an operation, chassing my dinner through a field, or catching a bus with 150 students with a goat n the roof!

em x

Posted by Emily ( 11:02 AM )
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