More of my favorite things

Some more favorite moments recently:

Girls Empowerment Conference:
-Taking fifty girls to the beach (most of whom had not been to the beach before), especially when they freaked out at the sight of boats, and when they picked up and tore apart some jellyfish trying to figure out what they were,.
-When some high energy and some hand-clapping games at dinner spontaneously turned into a two-hour singing and dancing party, with no other music besides their voices and buckets being used as drums, and relieving PCVs of the responsibility of having to plan a night activity to entertain them.
-The girls singing for the entire three-hour bus ride back home, and comparing that to the first-day bus ride which was completely silent

Making a difference? A month or so after teaching budget-making and saving money to my PLWHA group, I was sitting with a couple of the members and one was saying how she took my advice and started putting a little aside each day, and one day she didn't have any money to buy vegetables for lunch so she looked in the place she had been keeping her money and discovered she had saved 2000 shillings. (Around $1.50...But enough to buy food that day, anyway).

When my neighbor who has known me for almost two years and who is much more educated than most people I know here, asked me if America was in Europe (I gave him a map later).

Learning about devils and possession:
-According to my students:
1) Incense is the cure for possession; it makes the devils go away, at least temporarily.
2) "Wanachangamka wakiona bahari." (They get excited when they see the ocean).
-According to my neighbor:
1) Only Muslims get mashetani (devils)
2) Only females get mashetani
3) "A lot of people get possessed when I am the teacher on duty, but not when the other teachers are on duty. I don't understand why."
4) Only Muslims get possessed because they believe in possession; Christians here don't believe in it.

Boys Conference:
-When a photographer showed up at the beach and at least half the boys wanted their picture taken with me and another female PCV... Glad to know I am popular with male Tanzanian teenagers.
-Having some good discussions about the meaning of love and if girls & boys can be friends without having sex
-Having the students cook dinner the first night, and one group somehow managed to make their white rice look a very non-appetizing shade of gray. They then said that they had cooked pilau (a spicy rice dish which is usually brown). It did not taste like pilau.
-Teaching yoga, and hearing the boys compare the cobra position to "popo bawa," which is, legend has it, a large bat that lives on Zanzibar and rapes men.

Some favorite things

Some of my favorite moments lately:
-Exact quote from a secondary school debate: "Please explain your truth."
-Some members of my PLWHA group looking at the pictures in my photo album and exclaiming about how beautiful I look... in my graduation cap and gown
-While staying at a hotel in town with another PCV: It's about 7 pm and getting dark. My friend goes to shower, comes back and is confused why I am sitting in the room in the dark...I have gotten so used to not having electricity, it honestly didn't occur to me to turn on the light.
-Talking with a traditional healer in my village, and getting some medicine from her that is supposed to bring me good luck
-My PLWHA group and their chicken-building project: the members are super-motivated and have been doing a lot of work, like walking 5 kilometers to talk to someone that sells bricks, carrying water in order to make the cement, making food for the carpenters
-Having a serious conversation with some secondary school teachers about what they can do to help prevent teen pregnancy and STDs

Not-so-favorite moments lately:
-Village politics in all aspects, particularly when it makes getting things done a lot more complicated than necessary, and even more particularly when people accuse me of doing sketchy things with money.
- Going over budget on projects: Do chickens really need a seven-foot tall house with a metal roof? Pretty sure they wouldn't notice if they had a grass roof... But what do I know.
-Fourteen hour bus-ride to Dar that should take 8 hours... It's amazing that they have been working on that road for say, the past five years, and it still seems like not much has been accomplished
-Planning for conferences = stressful, particularly when water is suddently unavailable in the town were are doing the conferences in and we are probably going to have to spend over a hundred dollars just on water for bathing and cooking

Another list

I was making a list of random things. Not sure what the list is of exactly, but these things are on it. I think it's things I like. Or things I am grateful for.

-The other day I was on my porch and I saw a complete rainbow in the field in front of my house. The entire arch was visible. I've never seen that before.
-Two health workers I have been working with asked me to give them a test on what I have taught them. And then spent five minutes talking about how excited they were to take the test and how well they were going to do.
-New-found appreciation for: toast and hot chocolate. (Ie you know you are in Peace Corps when toast is about the most delicious food ever, and something you look forward to, like I can't wait to get home tonight and eat my toast for dinner and listen to the BBC).
-Had a good conversation with my neighbor the other day. And realized that we are actually in really similar situations. That is, neither of us are from Nanganga but we came here for work. We are both often frustrated and confused by some of the customs in this area. And we both miss and fantasize about food from home frequently. (Apparently food in Northern Tanzania is better?)
-24-box of crayola crayons I bought on the street
-Walking through my village and randomly stumbling upon a guy selling hundreds of organic flavored instant oatmeal packets
-The boys from one of the schools that came to our boys' conference started teaching the other students what they had learned at the conference, with absolutely no prompting from the PCV at their school
-My PCV family, especially the volunteers in my region. And dance parties and bonfires and smores on the beach.

Revelation

Something I often finding myself wondering: Is there just something wrong with the people of Nanganga?

Other villages just a few kilometers away from Nanganga have groups that start projects, and actually succeed at carrying out and finishing these projects. To my knowledge, there are no active groups in Nanganga. Groups start and then die after a month, and rarely start projects, and never finish them. Other Peace Corps volunteers talk about the numerous groups that they have started or work with in their villages, while I can barely succeed at getting five people to show up to a meeting. Other communities build schools or wells by getting villagers to contribute money or labor, but the district government had to cancel a water project for Nanganga because the villagers wouldn't contribute to the project. Recently, I even told a group that I would GIVE THEM MONEY TO START A PROJECT if they would just come up with a project they want to do, and submit a project plan. No one showed up to the next meeting.

Is there something wrong with what I am doing?

Well, probably, but I am a minor celebrity in my village, and I have decided that as a celebrity it is my prerogative to blame things on others. Therefore, back to blaming the village. But there being something inherently wrong with the villagers doesn't make sense either. There are a few good, motivated people. And people aren't just born to be lazy thieves. So what is the deal here?

For awhile I thought it had something to do with the village being on the main road. People don't have to work as hard here as if they would in a village in the middle of nowhere? The lure of pool tables and buses and other distractions and income opportunities at the road has somehow made people uninterested in development activities? That doesn't make sense either. There are plenty of villages on this same road with active groups, with villagers that contribute to community projects, with motivated people. So it's not the road.

Is it just that Nanganga is a big village, and getting projects done and trying to do anything communally is always a tremendous challenge, and corruption is going to be a big problem wherever you are in Tanzania, and I am just having a hard time finding the right people? Maybe.

But all of these explanations don't seem to quite add up. Surely there must be a bigger explanation.


Two days ago I finally found out the reason. I present you with-
THE REASON WHY NANGANGA SEEMS TO BE FULL OF LAZY ASSHOLES:

German missionaries were in Nanganga from the 1920s to the early 2000s. Since the 1920s. I am competing with 90 years of handouts and viewing wazungu as walking banks. No wonder I can't get shit done. No wonder when I tell people I am not rich and can't give them money they just don't get it. In the past people could just go to the missionaries if they were having problems, and it seems the missionaries would just help them out. Now the missionaries are gone and they don't know what to do.

(Now, I'm not entirely dismissing the work that missionaries do. Missionaries have definitely started some hugely important projects and provided important services in Tanzania, especially in Mtwara region- ie the hospitals in Ndanda and Nyangao. And building schools in villages. Etc. However, based on some anecdotal evidence and my entirely biased views, it also seems to me you can't deny the fact that a constant presence of missionaries whose role largely consists of giving out handouts of some sort can have a negative effect...)


Other contributing factors (told to me by a friend, who didn't grow up in Nanganga but who lives here now, so the accuracy of this information can be disputed):
-In old times (not sure what year), Nanganga was populated by only the Makua tribe (now it is Makua, Makonde, Mwera, and maybe a few Waio). The Makua chief was apparently a greedy bastard and stole a lot of stuff from his citizens, and people were required to pay him bribes all the time, and stuff like that. Other villagers saw that the only way for them to get ahead was for them to be greedy corrupt bastards too, and their children followed suit, and their children followed suit...
-Apparently people's income for a long time was based on "kuchimba madini" (digging for minerals) and not on farming. (This explains why people come up to me every month trying to sell me gold. I was always wondering where this gold was coming from. There seems to be a mine of some sort not too far from Nanganga). So a lot of people just aren't used to farming, and I guess even though these days there aren't too many minerals to be found, people still don't want to farm because they haven't for so long. This combined with the fact that Nanganga has a large youth population, and, in general, youth these days don't really want to farm for a living either.


So now I know some of/most of the reasons it is so and difficult to get things done in Nanganga. What do I do with this new knowledge?

I need some inspiration here...

I wrote the following several months ago with the intention of submitting it to one of PC TZ's newsletters. Haven't done that yet, but am posting it here anyway.

Giving credit where credit is due: The ideas and quotes in this essay are all taken The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, edited by Paul Rogat Loeb. Which in turn was given to me by an awesome college professor, Sherryl Kleinman. If you haven't read the book, I highly recommend it, by the way.

Is anything I am doing here making a difference?

This is a question I have been asking myself a lot lately. I have been at site for almost a year and a half, and what do I have to show for my efforts? Sure, I've been teaching and starting groups and doing workshops and trainings and conferences, but to what avail? Does all this work have any tangible effect? Or do people just come to listen to the crazy mzungu speak bad Kiswahili, then continue on with their lives as before? The problems we're working on as Peace Corps volunteers, HIV/AIDS, poverty, malnutrition, even helping kids pass secondary school, are so big and complex and beyond our ability to solve, and we're working on them alone in our villages with a handful of motivated villagers. Is it possible for us to make a difference at all?

I don't think I am alone in wondering these things. At mid-service conference in August, it seemed like a lot of my fellow volunteers were feeling frustrated and burnt-out. (And I doubt Peace Corps staff were encouraged by a half-hour long question session about the advantages of finishing one's service versus ET-ing). I remember one volunteer asking, "Is there any hope in combating HIV/AIDS in Tanzania? Because I'm tired, and I need to know that there is hope."

I didn't respond to this volunteer's question during the conference, because it was a question I didn't want to think about too deeply, but I've thought about it now and I'm answering: I do think there is hope. Maybe not hope in the conventional sense. Not hope that we will see resulrs now or by the end of our Peace Corps service. The kind of hope I'm talking about isn't dependent on results. Vaclav Havel (former president of the Czech Republic), defines hope as this:

"I understand hope above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul; it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit; an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons."

"Hope in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as job that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."

I think we PCVs all have a little of this kind of hope within us, or we wouldn't be here in Tanzania right now. Something in us made us choose Peace Corps instead of something else, because we saw something meaningful in this kind of work. This work is hard and frustrating and even impossible at times, but as journalist I.F. Stone says, "The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins."

Resigning ourselves to the possibility that we are going to lose may seem scary and counter-intuitive, like we are resigning ourselves to despair. This seems especially dangerous if one is working on literally life or death matters, like HIV/AIDS or hunger. Letting go of the desire for success, though, can be liberating. Social activist writes about Havel's definition of hope, saying:
"Havel seems to be describing not hope, but hopelessness. Being liberated from results, giving up outcomes, doing what feels right rather than effective. He helps me recall the Buddhist teaching that hopelessness is not the opposite of hope. Fear is. Hope and fear are inescapable partners. Anytime we hope for a certain outcome, and work hard to make it happen, then we also introduce fear. Fear of failing, fear of loss. Hopelessness is free of fear and thus can feel quite liberating...Thomas Merton, the late Christian mystic, clarified further the journey into hopelessness. "Do not depend on the hope of results...you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no results at all, if not perhaps results

opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to

concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself."

Let us do our work as volunteers not because we expect to save the world or our villages or even one villager, but because we find this work meaningful and important. Let me work on HIV/AIDS education because I think the HIV/AIDS crisis is a problem and something needs to be done about it, and I need to do what I can, in my own limited way, to try to solve the problem. Let us enjoy our work not for any successful outcomes we have achieved, but because we know that there is value in our purpose. Let us focus on gaining insight and enjoyment from our everyday experiences, instead of binding our happiness to whether we meet all the goals we set for ourselves. Let's cherish small successes and victories when we achieve them, and let's not get down on ourselves for not achieving bigger and better things.

In college I was part of a small, semi-radical feminist student group. One of our goals my senior year was to put plaques by certain buildings on campus, drawing attention to the fact that the people the buildings were named after owned slaves or participated in racist activities. This campaign never took off, however, because our group got bogged down by lack of experience and a small membership and inter-organizational politics, and we never succeeded in putting up any kind of plaques. Does this mean that I view our efforts as a failure? No, because I learned a lot about myself and group organizing that I didn't know before, and so did the other members of the group, and I think that there is value in this knowledge, regardless of whether we achieved our goal.

Peace Corps expects us to account for our efforts with tangible "outcomes" and "indicators" and "results" and numbers of people and concrete goals reached. I understand the need for this, and that we need to constantly examine what we are doing in order to find ways to work more effectively, but I don't think these "results" and "outcomes" should be the sole focus of my work, especially if it means that I get overwhelmed and depressed when I think about the huge scope of the problem and what little difference I am making.

Moreover, I think the effect of a lot of what we are doing, especially in HIV/AIDS prevention, is something that can only be measured over a long period of time. One of my friends is the third volunteer at her site. HIV is openly talked about in her village, and a fairly large number of people get tested every month. In a village a few kilometers away from her, however, HIV/AIDS is highly stigmatized and rarely talked about. Could this difference between the two villages be attributed to the presence of Peace Corps volunteers? I think so. I also think that we are making differences in our villages that we simply aren't aware of. I have done several week-long camps for secondary students. After the camps were over, none of the students came up to me to thank me and tell me how much they learned at the camp, like I was fantasizing that they would. But does that mean that they didn't learn anything? I don't think so.

I think the best we can do is to just keep trying. Keep trying and be there for each other, lame or trite as that sounds. In the words of that popular bonga flava song, "Bado nipo nipo sana." I need to stay here and keep trying, because the other option is to give up and not try, and that is not really an option at all. Mary Wynne Ashford says, "Since you cannot see into the future, you simply put one stone on top of another, and another on top of that. If the stones get knocked down, you begin again, because if you don't nothing will get built...Whether or not we succeed in pushing the rock up the hill, there is meaning in the journey, not in the hope that one time we'll be able to shed the rock forever and live in a perfect world."

Let's enjoy and learn from this journey.

"We can redream this world and make the dream real."
-Ben Okri, The Famished Road

Only Justice Can Stop a Curse

All we own, at least for the short time we have it, is our life. With it we write what we come to know of the world. I believe the Earth s good. That people, untortured by circumstance or fate, are also good. I do not believe the people of the world are naturally my enemies, or that animals, including snakes, are, or that Nature is. Whenever I experience evil, and it is not, unfortunately, uncommon to experience it in these times, my deepest feeling is disappointment. I have learned to accept the fact that we risk disappointment, disillusionment, even despair, every time we act. Every time we decide to believe the world can be better. Every time we decide to trust others to be as noble as we think they are. And that there might be years during which our grief is equal to, or even greater than, our hope. The alternative, however, not to act, and therefore to miss experiencing other people at their best, reaching toward their fullness, has never appealed to me.

-Alice Walker, "Only Justice Can Stop a Curse"

Changes

Follow-up on my last entry: The districts in my region are giving out food aid, a certain number of kilos of corn for each household. Someone in a village near me supposedly died of hunger...I don't really believe this is true though.

It's been awhile since I've posted about what I've been doing. So: in addition to my regular teaching around the schools and at baby weighings and distributing condoms, I went to a community theater workshop in July, did a HIV/AIDS and life skills training for 52 primary and secondary school teachers, and am planning a variety of activities, including: a teacher training in another PCV's village, a camp for secondary school boys, an HIV education week and testing day in November, a first aid training for the community health workers in my area, and a grant to fix the broken water pumps in my village. I also just went to the Mid-Service Conference for my training group, where I got to catch up with everyone I haven't seen in a long time, had a five-minute dentist appointment, and learned some more about HIV (and I thought I knew everything already...). So that's my life in a nutshell.

One of the things we talked about at our Mid-Service Conference was behavior change, specifically how to promote behavior change through our education programs. Despite some of my qualms with the behavior change framework, I thought this portion of the workshop was really interesting (and would have been a lot more useful had we learned it sooner, Peace Corps...). We divided into groups and picked an example "target audience" that we want to work with. My group decided to discuss ways to work with men that have multiple sexual partners in addition to their wives. After some discussion we decided that it would be imposible to expect that men would be faithful to their wives, and also impossible to expect them to use condoms with their wives, so we decided our goal would be for men with multiple partners to use condoms in their extramarital relationships. We already felt like our expectations were pretty low, but then the facilitator said maybe we should set our expectations a little lower and have our goal be for the men to simply discuss condom use with their partners. Because in behavior change programs, change takes a long time and you have to set realistic, small, attainable goals that gradually build on the past education efforts you have done.

This is fine and logical, but part of me wants to know: Is that really all I can expect from the work I am doing? I know you have to start somewhere, and changing attitudes about anything, but especially about sex, is extremely difficult. But good god if the only thing that comes out of my two years here is that people will have had discussions about condoms...Is this really all the millions of dollars being spent on HIV/AIDS prevention is accomplishing?

A lot of the volunteers at the MSC seemed tired and frustrated and discouraged. A major topic of discussion was: "What are the consequences if I decide to leave before completing my two years of service?"

And I'm tired too. I'm tired of feeling like I'm doing no good. I'm tired of being seen as a walking dollar sign. I'm tired of people telling me that they want me to teach them or help them do things, when what they really mean is, "We want money and/or presents." I'm tired of people saying they will help me do projects and then not showing up. I'm tired of people thinking that they need to be paid for listening to me teach. I'm tired of the fact that it seems impossible to motivate people to do anything if they aren't getting some material benefit. I'm tired of teachers and health workers that never do their jobs and then complaining to me about how their lives are hard. I'm tired of convincing myself that there really are good, motivated people in this village. I'm tired of people making me feel like I'm useless because I haven't lifted everyone out of poverty.

Sometimes I want to yell at everyone: "This is why there is no development in this country! No one wants to do anything to help themselves! You just want handouts!"

In my head though, I know I need to take a step back and stop putting all the blame on the villagers. I know Tanzania has been receiving foreign aid for a long time, and it's not wonder that people see a white person and automatically see a dollar sign. And I know that poverty creates a disempowered mentality among the poor and that is probably why people here feel like they can't do anything to change their situations. And I know it must be horrific to farm every year of your life, only to see your crops fail half the time because there's been no rain, or bugs or birds or rats ate them, or hippos walked on them, or someone stole them. Or the crops didn't fail, but the price of whatever you are selling did, so you still don't have any money. Or maybe you have a little money, but one of your kids is sick and the other four are in school and need new uniforms and shoes, and it's several months until harvest season, and last years' supply of corn has run out, and you don't know what your family is going to eat for the next few months. And then some white girl who speaks weird Swahili tells you that you should be worried about AIDS, because you can get really sick and die after ten years. Why should you worry about what your health status will be in ten years, when you don't have anything to eat today? So you ask this white girl for money, since she's from America and clearly has money. She gives you a disgusted look and tries to explain that she can't help every single person in the village, and you say, it's not every person, just help me.


I'm still here though. In the words of a popular bongo flava song, "Bado nipo nipo sana." (Roughly, I'm still very much here.)

Peace Corps' motto is: "The toughest job you'll ever love." I don't know if I love it, but it sure is challenging.

things on my mind

For those who were wondering, I survived the 56k bike trip and it only took around 8 hours. This included my pedal falling off halfway through the ride, walking 1 km to get it fixed; resting for an hour and a half for lunch; having a random guy try to sell me a Makonde wood carving, and then giving it to me as a gift after i refused to buy it; then taking a short nap under a tree before gearing myself up for the last 10 km of the ride. My ass was sore for about a week.

The following are things that I have been thinking about for a long time. I don't really have anyone here to discuss these things with, so I'm releasing these thoughts into cyberspace.

-Is Peace Corps, and the idea that a foreigner can come help communities "develop," inherently imperialistic? Or is it possible for Peace Corps Volunteers to effect, positive, albeit small-scale, change? Or is Peace Corps something that privileged Americans do to feel good about themselves, that in the end has very marginal effects on the communities, either positive or negative?

-For that matter, Peace Corps has been in Tanzania since 1961. What exactly has been accomplished?

-As an employee of the US government working in the Global South, on a project partly funded by PEPFAR, how am I perpetuating the very systems that I have problems with?

-Tanzania was colonized by Germany. My family heritage is largely German. Am I perpetuating the domination carried out by my ancestors? Or is it possible that I can try to rectify some of the damage they caused?

-Why are the overwhelming majority of PCVs white?

-Peace Corps talks a lot about being "culturally appropriate." What exactly does this mean? Tanzania has over 100 tribes and 35 million people. I'm still learning about TZ, but surely the idea that there is one, homogenous culture and a uniform conception of what is appropriate is ridiculous.

-Why do I get upset when people ask me for money? I'm American and a foreigner and still making more than a lot of people in my village (even though PC living allowance is supposed to put you at the same standard of living as an "average" Tanzanian). So of course people are going to ask me for money. I know I shouldn't get upset, but I still do. Is it because it happens every time I leave my house, which gets old after awhile? Or is it simply because I feel uncomfortable at my privilege being pointed out constantly?

-As part of my job in health/HIV/AIDS education I'm supposed to educate youths about "life skills," ie communication skills, decision-making skills, relationship skills, in hopes that such life skills will prevent youths from making "risky" decisions and participating in "risky behavior" that causes the spread of HIV/AIDS. I have a few problems with this approach:
1) By blaming an individual/an individual's "risky behavior" on HIV/AIDS, this framework ignores the role that structural/social and economic inequalities and inequitable access to services and resources have in affecting one's health and behavior.
2) Blaming the spread of HIV/AIDS on risky behavior ignores the fact that many girls/women are coerced/forced into sex or are unable to negotiate condom use with their partner.

So. What is a more effective method of HIV/AIDS prevention? Any input on this or my other questions is appreciated.