One Month On

Well that didn't go well. The football that is. I'd rather not talk about it. Anyway, like I said in my last post here is a summary of my first month of volunteering in Arusha, Tanzania.

Before I came to Tanzania I wrote about my goals:

1. Learn Swahili.

2. Read more.

3. Get fitter.

4. Learn to cook a new cuisine.

5. Appreciate what I have at home and not take things for granted.
6. Gain a unique experience.

So, in order, my Swahili is very limited, basic greetings are pretty much all I know other than a few odd words here and there. I should proably increase my efforts to learn in the next month. I have managed to read a bit more, mostly on Sundays when there is very little to do. I have read The Old Man and the Sea and 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' and have just started A Farewell to Arms. I think I've lost a bit of weight but I haven't done as much exercise as I would have liked. I need to start going to the gym or swimming now that I don't have to be at work by 7:30am every weekday morning. I've learned and noted down one recipe but that is all. I want to try and learn more but finding the time is a bit tricky as of late. However, the last two have been, I think, more successful. Sort of. I think I will appreciate more of my home comforts at home, especially the freedom granted to me by my parents. The experiences are definitely worthwhile and will hopefully be unique enough to help me land a job when I get back home. Whether I have any truly unique experience remains to be seen, I guess, so we shall find out in June.

I think what I have really experienced in this first month is a complete change of culture, while the house that I live in and the people that I hang around with gives me the perfect opportunity to compare the contrasting attitudes between the Tanzanian people and the Western volunteers. I have had a great time teaching the children at Gohechi, who have been at times funny, strange, infuriating, ridiculous and adorable. I have laughed so much while teaching the kids and it has been a great experience. I am, however, ready to move on but, from what I've heard, the human rights project doesn't exactly have structure. I won't miss the 6am alarm though! The climate in Tanzania has taken some getting used to. The heat is searing in the middle of the day and one needs to learn to walk slowly when the Sun is up.

Another thing I've had to adapt to is living in someone else's house. I can no longer raid the larder for a packet of crisps or take a look in the fridge for some olives or some cheese. The food has been mostly good, but I'm still not keen on cooked banana. One thing that had me talking with a few volunteers is how we barter for everything. We will try and get that 200 TSH (~8p) off the bracelet we're buying for 1700 TSH (~50p) or complaining that we have to pay 4000 TSH for a coffee (~£1.60) when it costs me upwards of £3 in Starbucks.

Anyway, yesterday I cooked my family an English breakfast which my host sister, Glory, seemed to love. Next up, a stir-fry then a pie or something.

Lego!

Thursday marked the end of exams for class two while class three had one final exam in the morning. The day was used to allow the children to relax after the exams and as we moved all the tables to the side of the room, a box full of Lego appeared. I wasn't entirely sure who was more excited by this, the children or their twenty-two year old teacher. Getting the children to be quiet and play nicely was a huge challenge and we were constantly bombarded with complaints of one person stealing something off another. However, when the children finally did start behaving and building stuff on their own, it was nice to see how something that gave me endless amounts of joy when I was younger could do the same for these children brought up in another part of the world with a completely different background. The children built a variety of things, most simply stacking things to make a tower before holding it triumphantly like a trophy when I went round with my camera. Others were building forts and space stations with one child in particular, one who is usually very disruptive, showed a concentration which could only be dreamed of when it came to academic work to build a large manned station complete with wings and a makeshift Tanzanian flag. Photos will be on my Facebook soon! Soon after it was the turn of class three and similar towers began popping up. They were much better behaved though, probably because of the smaller class size meaning there was more Lego to go around. Two other things caught my eye: one was the large ship one child managed to build, as well as making a wheelbarrow-like machine out of Lego technik stuff (or whatever it's called); the second was that there was far more co-operation between classmates. After school, we were subjected to a workshop on various topics, explained mostly in Swahili so I was pretty damn bored throughout.

Later that evening was the Projects Abroad social, starting with a dance show where volunteers would have the chance to learn some traditional Tanzanian dances. Some volunteers took part when we were given the chance and I was one of them. Many of the moves were fairly simple, using at most four steps, but the speed at which some of it went meant that it was really tiring, especially in the heat. Afterwards, we headed to the Chinese Dragon restaurant for, you guessed it, Chinese food. Having not eaten noodles for nearly a month, it was a relief, although the owners spoke Mandarin and not Cantonese. I had beef ho fun, which wasn't on the menu but the manager told me they could have it made. The portion was huge and the food was goo enough. We then headed back to Via Via for the night.

Waking in the morning, late, I had to run to catch the dala-dala to get to school on time while feeling pretty rough. It was the last of my volunteering and the last day of school before Easter break for the children. They were having a party for the last day, with the school providing food and drinks. There was a lot of singing and drumming of tables which doesn't do hangovers any good but it was nice to watch. I have a video to upload, but that may have to wait until I'm back in the UK with broadband.

Friday afternoon consisted of a HIV/AIDS workshop put on by Projects Abroad which was basically a refresher of my Biology lessons but there were useful bits on the rate and methods of infection specifically for Tanzania and the work that some organisations are attempting to do. It lasted for an hour and a half and included a, frankly ridiculous, clapping game. Afterwards, Quirine and I met some other volunteers and headed to Africafe for a drink and then on to Picasso, a restaurant based near the Impala hotel. The menu was extensive and the cocktails being prepared for another table looked rather tempting but I decided to rest my liver for a day. The menu is fairly extensive, with European dishes ranging upwards of 15000TSH for a main course. I had calamari with some sautéed vegetables and French fries for 17500TSH, a Sprite for 1500TSH and a rich chocolate brownie, which was delightful, for 4000TSH. Speaking of desserts, too, the café has a nice selection of desserts including: the brownie I had, huge slices of Black Forest gateaux, lemon meringue pie, cheesecake, and carrot cake. So a main, drink and dessert for under £10 and this was one of the more expensive meals that I have eaten so far in Tanzania.

The whole dinner was arranged by a girl who is leaving Tanzania on Sunday and even though I have only known her for less than a month, it's sad to see someone leave. But those are the facts I suppose. I have met so many great people over this last month, and will meet so many more until I fly back to the UK in June, but it is hard to say who, if any, I will ever see again in my lifetime. I hope I keep in touch with as many as possible but I'm notoriously bad at that, as my friends back home can probably attest to after this last month. Definitely need to get on Facebook more so I can find out what's going on with everyone at home. Blogging is great method of telling people what's happening to you. This, for example, is informing anyone at home wanting to read what I have done in this truly wonderful past month but it is a one way conversation. Now that I have blogged for an entire month, I need to make more of an effort to find out how everyone else is. Be less self-absorbed should probably have been one of my goals! Speaking of which, I'll give an update of those tomorrow but tonight I head to watch the mighty Arsenal. 'Til tomorrow.

Weekend 10/3/12-11/3/12

When you go from working every weekend, with the odd weekend in Lancaster or Preston thrown in, to having no plans in a small town in Tanzania, it is a bit of a shock. On Saturday I spent the day walking around town checking out the exchange bureaus in order to get the best rate on my pounds and looking for somewhere to buy a USB stick. I found a place selling a 1TB external hard drive and considered buying it to take home as my 2TB one is more or less full now but it was US$210. No thanks. The day was a brilliant one and walking back in the middle of the day in clear blue skies granted me views that should not be described with words but, as I forgot my camera, words will have to do. Walking through the dusty roads of a poor part of town devoid of high rise office building sites and trees allowed me full view of Mount Meru in the distance with a single, solitary cloud suspended in the sky just above its peak. Anyone who had managed to climb to the summit that day must have had the most amazing view over the surrounding area and on towards Kilimanjaro. I really want to be able to climb Mount Meru as it is closer and not as expensive as Kilimanjaro. However, it will still provide all the challenges as its larger, more famous cousin and I will definitely need to improve my fitness and lose some weight but that is hard when I am eating much more than I did back in England. I really need to exercise more in order to counteract the amount of food I am being given to eat by my host family and I don't want to offend anyone by refusing their hospitality.

We also were without water or electricity for the entire day and this, like at home, meant limited use of the television or laptop and therefore extreme boredom for Quirine, Glory and me. We all become so used to electricity and our electrical products that we depend on them. It gave me a chance to start some of the reading that I have brought and I began with Ernest Hemingway's 'The Old Man and the Sea', the short story that won him a Nobel Prize for Literature. Thus starts my progress towards another one of my goals that I set out in an earlier post. The host family also have the collected works of Hans Christian Anderson and all of the Stieg Larsson books for me to crack on with after I have finished my ones. Later that afternoon, Quirine and I went to the Maasai market and I was able to have my first taste of Tanzanian bargaining. I ended up buying some candlesticks for 13000 TSH each and a necklace for 1500TSH. As we walked to the market, we passed through what could have passed for suburban America had the road been in a better condition and the houses not been surrounded by prison like walls. It could have been the setting for a Tanzanian version of Desperate Housewives. The market itself was not particularly spectacular. Many different stores sat in a small semi-circle with their owners effectively blocking your passage until you entered their store. The problem was that nearly every store sold similar if not exactly the same merchandise. Very rarely would I find something that caught my eye because it was different. The candlesticks did, as did a few other items like the malachite chess sets (valued at over 100000TSH by the owner but I could probably knock it down to under 50000TSH) or a hanging painting.

Afterwards, we had lunch at a local bar with two other volunteers. It was a European style sports bar and it was a relief to have a greasy cheeseburger and chips with lots of tomato ketchup. There are a few things that I miss about England and the food is one of them. Sometimes it was nice to just be able to have a monstrously unhealthy kebab or a Subway or brie. Now I'm hungry.   

Happiness 02/03/12

Are you happy in life? How happy are you? On a scale of 1 to 100 with 1 being completely unhappy and 100 perfectly happy, where would you land? These are questions that I often ask myself. I am a pretty analytical person; I believe that I have the ability to take a step back from the mess and confusion that is everyday life and look at events and circumstances with a more objective opinion that my involvement usually allows. However, these are rarely questions that get fully discussed in the open. We all like to think we're happy. We all like to think the people surrounding us are happy. I suppose it allows us to accept our first world guilt when the media bombards us, once or twice a year when its Comic/Sports Relief time, with images of poverty in India or Africa. It also allows us to accept any decisions we make as the right ones and, as narcissitic creatures, we like to think we always make and always have made the right decision.
There usually comes a point, though, when we look at our lives and are not completely satisfied. We decide to change things. This usually happens on January 1st of each year when countless resolutions are made and then forgotten a week later. How many times have you decided to change your diet to lose weight? Do more chores to help out your parents? Watch less TV and read more books? Learn a second language? I've done all of these and, to be honest, I do them all regularly in cycles. I have never followed one of these through. Sure, for two weeks I might pick up a book instead of switching on my laptop but that soon ends when I discover a new internet obsession. When faced with such a drastic change in circumstances, one is forced to change, to reevaluate. For the next three months I won't have the unlimited bandwidth and broadband speeds I have at home. The people around me will all speak Swahili, not perfect English. This is an opportunity for me to improve, to experience new culture and situations not available to me living in England.
So, what are my goals?

1. Learn Swahili. There are multiple reasons for this, first and foremost because it will make life in Tanzania so much easier. Secondary reasons include becoming bilingual and speaking a language that much of my family speak (Yes, I will learn Cantonese at some point too. Sit down).

2. Read more. I'm an English Literature graduate for crying out loud. I should be reading often anyway. But I don't. I brought with me a collection of Hemingway's, The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, Yann Martel's Life of Pi, a Fitzgerald collection of short stories including 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button', and Friedrich Nietzsche's Why I Am So Wise.

3. Get fitter. I hope that the lack of TV will give me more time to do some exercise. I really need to get into shape.

4. Learn to cook a new cuisine. My cooking repetoire is fairly limited and needs expanding. My list of impressive (personal opinion) limited to about two. Being able to cook some unusual Tanzanian dishes would be a quirky alternative for dinner parties.

5. Appreaciate what I have at home and not take things for granted. We are spoiled in the West. I have never really appreciated the fact that I have been able to have an education of the quality that I have. This needs to change before law school.

6. Gain a unique experience. In today's job market you need something to make you stand out and I hope this will help me on my way to standing out.
So, there it is. We shall see in June how far I got.