Zanzibar Pt. 1

I promised you all a blog about Zanzibar, but then school started and I got busy.  Oops.  The term has been going well so far, though.  I began teaching on the third official day of class when I usually can’t start until the sixth or seventh day.  I’ve also stockpiled a bunch of really good lessons for this term, so teaching has been going exceptionally well.  I’ll have more to report in a couple of weeks.  For now, here’s a rundown of my week in Tanzania.

My travel buddies were fellow PCVs Joey, Kelsey and Andrew.  Hopefully none of them mind being mentioned in my blog.

Day 1

Our journey began Saturday, April 7th.  We woke up at 3:45 in the morning and took a taxi to Nyabugogo, the bus park in Kigali. It was pitch black out and pouring rain.  We had tickets with a bus company called Taqwa, sort of like a Greyhound for all of East Africa.  We left Nyabugogo right on schedule, at 5:00.

There were two drivers, a technician and two other staff people on board.  They were Tanzanian and spoke Swahili, no Kinyarwanda.  It was very relaxing just listening to them talk without comprehending anything.  Tanzanian Swahili sounds like water lapping the side of a boat.

The trip from Kigali to Dar Es Salaam was to take at least 30 hours.  That’s right, 30 hours on a bus!  Fortunately we made lots of unscheduled stops, mostly in the absolute dead middle of nowhere so everyone could get out and pee on the side of the road.  I say “lots,” but that still meant we had to sit on a bus for stretches of eight or nine hours without anywhere to go to the bathroom. I learned to limit my water intake.

There were only two scheduled stops before we reached our destination.  The first was a very brief stop for lunch in a small town outside Dar.  The second was from midnight until 4 am at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere, the purpose of which (as I found out later) was to avoid being attacked by bandits.  None of us could sleep.  We got off the bus and found a canteen where we were served very greasy omelets by a man who told us several times to “be at home” and “have no problems.”

The omelets had fried potatoes in them.  Doused in hot sauce, they were about the most delicious thing I could remember ever eating.

Day 2 (Easter Sunday)

We arrived at the bus park in Dar Es Salaam at around 11 am.  From there we took taxi to the waterfront.

The first thing that struck me about Dar was that it looked like an actual city.  Unlike Kigali, it was dirty and noisy and teeming with life.  It was also a lot more diverse.  There were people in traditional printed cloth outfits and people in Western clothes, but also people in kufi and ikanzu and women in hijab.  There were Masai.  There were people from the Middle East and North Africa and people from India.  There were a few other tourists, but they didn’t stand out like they would have in Kigali.  For once, being foreigners didn’t make us special.

Our first and only order of business in Dar was to catch a ferry to Zanzibar. The ferry was hot and stuffy.  I fell asleep within the first twenty minutes and slept through most of the ride.

We arrived in Zanzibar sometime in the afternoon.  It was like crossing into a whole other country.  I don’t know much about the political relationship between Zanzibar and mainland Tanzania but I do know that to set foot on the island we had to fill out a form and have our passports looked at, just like at an international border.  An immigration official also demanded compensation from Joey for not having his WHO card.  Initially he wanted something like $100 but he eventually accepted $40 “because it’s a holiday.” It was our first direct experience with corruption.  Things like that don’t generally happen in Rwanda.

~

It’s difficult not to have a powerful first impression of Stone Town.  The humidity was oppressive, but the air smelled like seawater and plumeria.  The wharf was lined with coconut palms. The town itself looked more Arab than African, at least based on what I’ve seen in pictures.  There were lots of sun-bleached buildings with little glassless windows and narrow balconies.  And there were stray dogs and cats everywhere.

We ate dinner twice that night, once at a little place right on the waterfront and once at a fantastic Indian restaurant near our hotel.  In between we checked out the fish market.  I wish I’d had time to eat an entire meal there, too.  They sold all kinds of things, grilled barracuda and octopus on skewers.  Who wouldn’t want octopus on a skewer?

Day 3

Monday was Spice Tour Day.

I highly recommend the spice tour for anyone who decides to visit Zanzibar. For something like $10 a guide picked us up at our hotel, drove us to a spice plantation about twenty minutes outside Stone Town, walked us through the whole plantation, gave us lots of spices and fruit to sample, provided us with lunch, and finally drove us down to the coast and let us splash around in the Indian Ocean.  All in all, an incredible deal.

The plantation was fascinating.  I was impressed by the sheer diversity of things they grew there.  In a single tour I got to see teak and mahogany trees, peppercorns, turmeric, cinnamon trees, vanilla, cacao, nutmeg, curry leaves, star fruit, banana trees, two different plants used for dyes and some local varieties of chili pepper.  Nutmeg was probably the most interesting.  The seed is black with a red vein-y coating.  Apparently it’s a traditional drug in Tanzania, but only women take it.  Our guide didn’t say what its effects are supposed to be but he did say that if we ask a Tanzanian woman about nutmeg and she has nothing to say on the subject, she must not be from Zanzibar.

We ate lunch at a nearby village.  It was like Rwandan food but with the addition of spices.  There was pilau rice, beans and vegetables in coconut sauce.  It was delicious.  I lamented the fact that coconut palms don’t seem to grow in Rwanda.

From there we drove to the coast where we were given an abbreviated tour of some caves that were integral to the illegal slave trade in Tanzania.  The caves we saw were in use until 1908, largely because the sultan of Zanzibar wanted to keep the trade going.  It would’ve been a heavy note to end the tour on, but fortunately we were then led down to the beach and given some time to splash around in the ocean.  The water was surprisingly warm, even when it started raining on us.

On the tour we met two PCVs from the Zambia program.  We agreed to meet them for Ethiopian food later that night.  Between us we ate more injeera (sp?) and drank more honey wine than we could easily afford, but it was definitely worth it!

The rest of the week will come later.  For now I have to log off.  Na ejo!

Bless the Rains

It’s raining again.  Raining, after enough dry months to turn the roads to choking red dust, dry up all the water in our rain tankard and raise the price of almost everything at the market.  When it started on Thursday I was so excited I ran outside and did a little dance.  I promptly fell on my butt in front of the gardener, Dina, but he didn’t seem to judge me for it.  He ran over, helped me up and yelled, “Invura yaguye!” The rain is falling! I said “Yep, and me, too.” He didn’t get the joke, but oh well.  It was nice to share my excitement with someone.

After my last post one of you thanked me for the update and said it was good to know how my projects were going, but what about my mental and emotional state?  That’s a harder question.  In general things are fine and I’m happy, but saying that doesn’t really inform anyone of much.  I feel comfortable here, probably more comfortable than I would if I blinked my eyes and found myself back home in California, but there are constant, subtle reminders that I haven’t adapted to Rwanda so much as I’ve learned to take its peculiarities for granted.  When I actually pause to look at things, it’s all still very bewildering.

I’m almost positive the feeling goes two ways.  My village is used to me but my presence is still strange.  It’s all fine and good that the American government sent a volunteer to Gihara to teach English, but why a young woman, and why for two years?  And for God’s sake, if I’m not making any money why would I agree to any of it in the first place?  It makes no sense but they accept it.  After all, I’m clearly not going anywhere until my contract is up.

On Saturday I’ll be taking a vacation in Tanzania.  The plan is to take bus to Dar Es Salaam, then on to Zanzibar from there.  It will be a thirty-hour journey, but according to everyone Zanzibar is worth it.  Of course I’ll tell all about it here as soon as I get back.  In the meantime, here's a picture of the sunrise over my site. Pasika nziza!

Changing Tides

Hello all!  I know it’s been forever since my last update and for that I apologize.  Things have been busy here.  With the second health group finishing service soon, my training class (the second education group) is taking on some new responsibilities.  It’s up to us and the third health group to organize GLOW and BE camps this year.  The GAD committee* has taken on GLOW and BE preparations for the time being but eventually there will be a separate volunteer committee dedicated exclusively to GLOW and BE so that GAD can focus on other stuff.  Needless to say, there are a lot of things in process right now.

We’re also working to expand PSN, the peer support network.  PSN was initiated by the first health and education groups to arrive in Rwanda.  It started out as volunteers helping other volunteers in the field, but now PSN is increasing its involvement in volunteer trainings.  I’m a member of the GAD committee and a GAD-PSN liaison so I’ve been in and out of Kigali for meetings.  Between that and ELT-JCS** I’ve been out of site almost every other weekend.  It’s a substantial change from the slow pace of last year.

There have also been lots of changes at my site.  I met with a guy from the sector office last Thursday and discovered that my headmaster is getting transferred to another school.  Technically he no longer works at St. Dominique but his replacement has yet to arrive.  This comes at the end of a long string of massive changes: the addition of another grade level, the construction of new classrooms, a number of teachers being transferred and new ones brought in, new students getting added to the roster every week.  The changes are mostly positive, but that hasn’t made any of it any less jarring.

We’re also being micromanaged by local government administrators in new and exciting ways.  At one point I was recruited to work with an English teacher from Meredith’s school on a standard scheme of work for lower-secondary English to be used in schools all across the sector.  A scheme of work is like a curriculum but more detailed; it includes a schedule of when to teach what.  I was excited to contribute to a standard document of such importance and I went into it with all kinds of flowery ideas.  Unfortunately the teacher I collaborated with was a bit set in her ways (to put it lightly) so the scheme of work we created looked exactly like the one she uses for her own classes with the addition of a “themes” column and some suggested activities.  As with so many things in Peace Corps, I learned a lot more from the experience than I contributed, but that’s alright with me.  It was an opportunity to work closely with another English teacher, and my name is now permanently attached a document that will be disseminated by the sector office year after year.

My idea for a school library is looking less and less plausible.  The books are there, the room is there, about half of the necessary shelving is there, but with so many other things going on I can’t get access to any of it myself, much less recruit others to help me.  That too might be for the best.  I found out from the sector that there’s a plan in the works for my school to be absorbed by Meredith’s school at the beginning of next year.  Meredith’s school already has a library and a librarian, so I’d only complicate things by creating a distinct organization system and shelf list.  The best I can hope to do is begin labeling our books according to the other school’s system so they’ll be easier to organize when the two schools merge.  Since that’s the most I’ll have time to do before I leave, it’s a perfect situation.  At least that’s how I’m trying to see it.  Admittedly I feel weird knowing my school, the locus of my service, will imminently cease to exist.

Speaking of leaving, many of you have been asking when exactly I’ll finish my service.  There’s no exact date set, but as soon as the school year ends in November, we’ll start leaving in batches.  Everyone from my training class should be out by early December.  It’s all a bit unreal.  Seven-plus months sounds like a lot, and sometimes I feel like it can’t come too soon, but considering how quickly the last three months passed I’ll be back in the States before I even know what happened.

There’s still so much to do I know I can’t waste too much time looking at the finish line.  There’s GLOW and BE camps to plan, an English club to run, and my three sections of S4 to catch up to speed, not to mention my regular S2 sections of almost seventy students each.  There’s a lot going on, and I don’t plan on missing any of it.

*GAD = Gender And Development.  Last year, Peace Corps Rwanda created a GAD committee tasked with creating GAD resources for volunteers and providing support for gender-related projects.  The committee is still defining its role, but so far we’ve been working on GLOW and BE and gathering information relevant to gender and development from volunteers at different sites.

**ELT-JCS = English Language Training for Judges and Court Staff.

New Project

I just came from Nyanza where I spent the weekend at the ILPD, the Institute of Legal Practice and Development.  I was there for my first weekend of teaching with the English Language Training for Judges and Court Staff project.

I was different than I expected, MUCH different from teaching my regular S2 and S4 classes.  There were supposed to be about a dozen students in my class but only seven showed up.  Thus instead of teaching a class of over 60 teenagers, as I’m accustomed to doing, I taught seven quiet, attentive adults.  I ended up finishing our three-hour lesson in just over two hours because I’d unconsciously factored in a bunch of time for disruptions.  The only pauses in the lesson were for thoughtful questions from the students.  It was heaven.

I’m glad my primary assignment isn’t adult ESL.  I really enjoy working with teenagers and I love my secondary-school students dearly.  But I can tell that this once-a-month commitment is going to be a nice change of pace.

Ndakomeza

Life continues as usual in Gihara. There are a ton of new students at St. Dominique which means a whole new batch of kids who need to be taught to call me “teacher” instead of “muzungu.” I spend most of my time at school. We’re rewriting the schedule of classes again at an indeterminate time this week, but until then I plan to keep teaching and running my English club. Soon we’ll be converting one of the old classrooms into a library and the dean has said I’ll be in charge of organizing the books. I’m extremely excited to start. I have big plans for an adapted library of congress system.

We’re in the short dry season now, so everything is dry heat and red dust. Fetching water has become tricky because parched honeybees gather in angry clusters around the water spigot. Sometimes when I get home from school I spend a few minutes lying on the cement floor of my kitchen to cool off.

Perhaps the biggest difference between this year and last year (besides the feeling of normalcy) is having another American with me at site. Meredith and I don’t see each other that often but even our brief and infrequent interactions make a difference. I don’t feel isolated anymore, which is both good and bad. It’s nice not to feel as alone as I did, but I now have appear sane not just to the villagers, but to another American. It’s a challenge.

In some ways I think my presence has had greater impact on her than hers has had on me. Everyone in Gihara knows who I am and they expect Meredith to be the same or similar. I imagine this had made some things easier - Meredith probably spends less time explaining why she has her own moto helmet and doesn’t give handouts - but it also means that people compare her to me. She’s already had to explain why she doesn’t speak as much Kinyarwanda as I do (I’ve been here a year) and that she is my colleague, not my younger sister (you’d think that would be a no-brainer since she’s tall, thin and Korean-American, but I guess not). I feel bad for denying her the clean slate I had when I arrived, but then again her situation is more typical within Peace Corps than mine was. Not many volunteers get to break in new sites.

This year will be all about finding a balance. A balance between projects outside of site and at site. A balance between social time and time alone. Between work and integration. Between worrying about the impact I’m having and allowing myself to relax. I’ll let you know how things play out.

Roll Call

It’s the beginning of a new year. I forgot how chaotic the first week of school is, probably because last year I didn’t even know that I was dealing with chaos. Last year I knew I was supposed to teach two sections of S2, so on the first day of school I strode into an S2 classroom and taught an improvised English lesson for two hours. Later I found out that those were not my hours, nor my students. The schedule of classes hadn’t been written yet. I’d taught a random assortment of senior-level students, some of whom apparently still remember that first lesson.

But this year I knew better. I showed up on the first day of school with a book to read and nothing else. Teachers are supposed to arrive at 7am, but by 7:15 I was still the only one there. At 7:30 a few students arrived and started playing basketball. At 8am the other teachers began trickling in.

Beginning around 9am, we convened in the staff room and had a two-and-a-half-hour meeting to discuss the problem of starting classes late every year.

I spent the rest of that day and most of the next mobilizing students to clean out the classrooms and the teachers’ room which were littered with old homework assignments, candy wrappers, broken pens and other school-related debris. On Wednesday we met with the dean of studies and wrote the schedule of classes collectively - no small feat, since nobody wanted to teach on Fridays or after lunch. When we finally finished, I asked if anyone thought we’d be able to start the following day. Everyone including the dean agreed that we couldn’t start until Monday because attendance wouldn’t be high enough until then.

The next day, I slept in later than I intended. I woke up to a phone call from the dean telling me to come into school. “You’re teaching today,” he said. I told him I didn’t think we were starting until Monday. He chuckled and hung up on me.

When I got to school, the students were mopping out the classrooms for a second time. With nothing else to do, I spent the day getting to know the new secondary school teachers. Most of my friends from last year have been transferred to other schools, but the new teachers seem like a good group. One in particular, a chemistry teacher, has been extremely helpful to me already. He’s taken over Theotine’s job of translating for me during staff meetings.

I started teaching yesterday. We had another staff meeting in the morning but fortunately I wasn’t scheduled to teach until around 11am so I got a chance to introduce myself to both of my English classes. They’re an incredible group, even more enthusiastic than my students last year. I find myself wondering how many of them I’ll really get to know before I leave. Right now there are about 60 students in each section, nearly twice the amount I had at the end of last year - a conspicuous reminder of the staggering dropout rate.

At yesterday’s staff meeting, a district official urged the teachers to “work together as a team” to keep our students in school. He didn’t elaborate. He couldn’t, really - students drop out for a multiplicity of reasons, everything from unplanned pregnancies to sick parents to financial problems. I figure if I can keep just one student in school who might have dropped out otherwise, it‘s a success. I wonder if the other teachers feel the same way.

New year, new faces, new challenges. But this time, I’m at least a little bit better prepared. Last year, my mantra was “don’t panic.” This year, it’s “bring it on”!

Umwaka Mushya Muhire

Well, happy 2012 all! I'm Musanze for our mid-service conference this week; I jump into teaching an all-new batch of S2 students next week. The past few weeks have flown by. I was invited to attend the swearing-in ceremony for the new education group, so I spent a day in Kigali getting to know the freshman class of volunteers. They're a great group, in some ways much better prepared for life at site than I was when I swore in. They spent pre-service training living with host families instead of in houses with other volunteers so they have already experienced epic amounts of stomach sickness, bug bites and minor infections. That and their Kinyarwanda is alarmingly good.

I spent Christmas in Buhanda visiting a new volunteer at his site along with a few of his neighbors. We collaborated on one of the best Christmas dinners I've ever had - steak tacos with homemade flour tortillas. It only took us ten collaborative hours to bring Mexican food to Rwanda!

After such a long break between terms, it's hard to believe that I'll be teaching again in less than a week. But I'm excited to start. Last year, I started the term with no schedule, no curriculum, no experience, no idea what I was doing - and survived. Who knows what's possible this year?