Things that Tanzanians love that I do not quite understand:
-Shania Twain
-Ugali: Aka a very popular food. The closest translation I have seen for this is stiff porridge. It's corn flour and water and it tastes like nothing. And they love it.
-George Bush: I have seen several people wearing kangas with George Bush's face on them, with a slogan underneath that said something to the effect of "We Cherish Democracy." I have also met a Tanzanian that owns a hat that has pictures of both Bush and Kikwete on it.
-WWE: My host mama watches this every Saturday night.
-Fried dough in any form: I may not know more than 20 verbs in Swahili, but I do know the names of the plethora of fried dough snacks- andazi, chapati, half-keki, donuti, kitumbua.
Things that Tanzanians love that I find highly amusing:
-Celine Dion
Showing posts with label Pre-Service Training. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pre-Service Training. Show all posts
15 August 2008
12 August 2008
site annoncements
Dear friends,
I am almost done with training. Today I found out where I will be living for the next two years. I will be going to Mtwara Region, which is in southern Tanzania, near Mozambique. It is apparently a few hours away from the beach and very pretty. We are in the capital right now, then we have one more week with our host families and then we move to our sites.
In other news I shadowed another PCV this past week and a Massai family slaughtered a goat for us. I have also bought a cellphone: My number is 785-034-702. The country code for TZ is 255.
I am almost done with training. Today I found out where I will be living for the next two years. I will be going to Mtwara Region, which is in southern Tanzania, near Mozambique. It is apparently a few hours away from the beach and very pretty. We are in the capital right now, then we have one more week with our host families and then we move to our sites.
In other news I shadowed another PCV this past week and a Massai family slaughtered a goat for us. I have also bought a cellphone: My number is 785-034-702. The country code for TZ is 255.
27 July 2008
safaris, spaghetti and sex ed
Recent news in my life:
We went on a mini-safari this past weekend and saw elephants, giraffes, and zebras. Slash the highlight of the trip was being able to take a hot shower, use a western toilet, and eat cheese. I have been enjoying bucket baths, but I have never enjoyed a shower so much in my life.
Being here is basically like being a child in that someone cooks for me and gets my bathwater for me, I have to be home before dark, and I don't get dirty jokes. It has been my quest to prove to my host family that I am not in fact incompetent, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary. So today I decided to cook American food for them. I decided to cook spaghetti, which seemed like a fantastic idea being that I have never made spaghetti sauce from scrath before. I didn't feel like making garlic bread as a side dish so I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches instead. (Yes, there is peanut butter here. But my family still didn't know what it was).
This week we had a very interesting visit to a primary school and learned about their sex education and HIV/AIDS curriculum. I haven't been nearly long enough to understand Tanzanian cultural attitudes about sex, but the little bit I learned this week was super-interesting and contradictory. For example, the government-directed standardized curriculum has kids starting to learn about HIV/AIDS the first year they're in primary school. Kids in Standard 6 (i think around 12-13 yrs old) have to learn how to use condoms correctly. I asked the teacher if there was any resistance to kids learning about sex in school and he said no; that in this town a few people may be unhappy but they haven't complained to the school (but there may be resistance to it in other parts of TZ). We talked to our LCF (language/cross-cultural facilitator) later and she said that parents here rarely talk to their kids about sex; they will get an aunt or uncle to give their kids a sex talk. Our LCF said that she has been struggling with how to talk to her kids about sex, because she wants them to be informed, but if she talks to them about sex, her kids will tell their friends, their friends will tell their parents, and their parents will think that she is trying to ruin their community's morals/culture. She said she has been thinking about hiring someone from an organization that specializes in sex education to talk to her kids, like one of her friends did with her kids. Our LCF is an educated woman living in the capital city, and her friend that hired someone to talk to her kids is getting her PhD.
My question is: where as a PCV do I fit into all of this? I didn't come here to change Tanzanians' cultural values, but doing HIV/AIDS and health education necessitates confronting cultural attitudes about gender and sex.
We went on a mini-safari this past weekend and saw elephants, giraffes, and zebras. Slash the highlight of the trip was being able to take a hot shower, use a western toilet, and eat cheese. I have been enjoying bucket baths, but I have never enjoyed a shower so much in my life.
Being here is basically like being a child in that someone cooks for me and gets my bathwater for me, I have to be home before dark, and I don't get dirty jokes. It has been my quest to prove to my host family that I am not in fact incompetent, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary. So today I decided to cook American food for them. I decided to cook spaghetti, which seemed like a fantastic idea being that I have never made spaghetti sauce from scrath before. I didn't feel like making garlic bread as a side dish so I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches instead. (Yes, there is peanut butter here. But my family still didn't know what it was).
This week we had a very interesting visit to a primary school and learned about their sex education and HIV/AIDS curriculum. I haven't been nearly long enough to understand Tanzanian cultural attitudes about sex, but the little bit I learned this week was super-interesting and contradictory. For example, the government-directed standardized curriculum has kids starting to learn about HIV/AIDS the first year they're in primary school. Kids in Standard 6 (i think around 12-13 yrs old) have to learn how to use condoms correctly. I asked the teacher if there was any resistance to kids learning about sex in school and he said no; that in this town a few people may be unhappy but they haven't complained to the school (but there may be resistance to it in other parts of TZ). We talked to our LCF (language/cross-cultural facilitator) later and she said that parents here rarely talk to their kids about sex; they will get an aunt or uncle to give their kids a sex talk. Our LCF said that she has been struggling with how to talk to her kids about sex, because she wants them to be informed, but if she talks to them about sex, her kids will tell their friends, their friends will tell their parents, and their parents will think that she is trying to ruin their community's morals/culture. She said she has been thinking about hiring someone from an organization that specializes in sex education to talk to her kids, like one of her friends did with her kids. Our LCF is an educated woman living in the capital city, and her friend that hired someone to talk to her kids is getting her PhD.
My question is: where as a PCV do I fit into all of this? I didn't come here to change Tanzanians' cultural values, but doing HIV/AIDS and health education necessitates confronting cultural attitudes about gender and sex.
11 July 2008
Well I am still here and alive. I apologize if I haven't responded to your emails; the internet has been very slow the past few times I have been here.
I think if you feel compelled you should write me a letter, because receiving mail during training has been surprisingly efficient. And every week when they give us our mail I always get my hopes up because they call out my name, when it is really the other Laura here that is getting mail.
I had been wanting to write a fantastic, witty, insightful blog entry before coming here, but since I haven't composed one yet, I will leave you with this list.
Random things I enjoy about Tanzania so far:
-Chai breaks every morning
-Passionfruit juice
-Tanzaznian TV, ie soap operas from other countries dubbed in terrible, awkward English
-Meetings with government officials in which everyone is an hour late and the government officials wear flip-flops and answer their cell phones during the meeting
-When I walk home and the neighborhood kids run and jump on me to get hugs (I admittedly am not a huge fan of children, but this always cheers me up)
-That you are supposed to greet everyone you know, and that initial greetings are supposed to last several minutes before the actual conversation starts
-Bucket baths: they conserve a lot of water
-The fact that Whitney Houston, Phil Collins and the Backstreet Boys have been playing on the stereo in the internet cafe
I think if you feel compelled you should write me a letter, because receiving mail during training has been surprisingly efficient. And every week when they give us our mail I always get my hopes up because they call out my name, when it is really the other Laura here that is getting mail.
I had been wanting to write a fantastic, witty, insightful blog entry before coming here, but since I haven't composed one yet, I will leave you with this list.
Random things I enjoy about Tanzania so far:
-Chai breaks every morning
-Passionfruit juice
-Tanzaznian TV, ie soap operas from other countries dubbed in terrible, awkward English
-Meetings with government officials in which everyone is an hour late and the government officials wear flip-flops and answer their cell phones during the meeting
-When I walk home and the neighborhood kids run and jump on me to get hugs (I admittedly am not a huge fan of children, but this always cheers me up)
-That you are supposed to greet everyone you know, and that initial greetings are supposed to last several minutes before the actual conversation starts
-Bucket baths: they conserve a lot of water
-The fact that Whitney Houston, Phil Collins and the Backstreet Boys have been playing on the stereo in the internet cafe
25 June 2008
hujambo!
Greetings from Tanzania! I am alive and have been in TZ for two weeks. After two days in Dar es salaam and two days in Morogoro we arrived at our homestays at our training site. (Peace Corps advises against me giving away my location in my blog, so I'll leave that a secret for now.) My family is very nice, although I think they just spend a lot of time laughing at me. My father and sister speak pretty good English, so communication is not as difficult as it could be. There are about 8 or 10 people in my family, I haven't quite figured out how everyone is related or who actually lives in the house. We have electricity and eat dinner around the TV, which struck me as so very American. We usually watch soccer, the Tanzanian version of C-SPAN, or these fantastic telenovelas dubbed in awkward English.
We are divided into groups of about five PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees) for training. Here is what an average day in training is like:
8 am: Class
10 am: Chai break
10:30/11 am: Class
12/1 pm: Lunch
2-4ish pm: Class
4-6ish: Hang around town, play frisbee or duck duck goose with neighborhood kids
6 pm: Come home and help with dinner or play with the kids
9/9:30 pm: Dinner
9:30: Bath, bed
My dreams of being a dirty hippie while in TZ have been squashed, as a lot of Tanzanians bathe twice a day; my family gives me hot water to bathe in twice a day. I have not been sick yet, knock on wood, and the squat toilets are not as bad as I had imagined. The food is not bad, mainly rice and beans and spinach and bananas.
Highlight of my week: Yesterday we met with local government officials to ask questions about Tanzanian government structure. My training group wrote a song (in Swahili) about our village, and performed it for them. Since then we have been performing the song for anyone who is willing to listen, along with a lot of people who probably don't want to listen.
I am almost out of internet time so I will write more later.
We are divided into groups of about five PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees) for training. Here is what an average day in training is like:
8 am: Class
10 am: Chai break
10:30/11 am: Class
12/1 pm: Lunch
2-4ish pm: Class
4-6ish: Hang around town, play frisbee or duck duck goose with neighborhood kids
6 pm: Come home and help with dinner or play with the kids
9/9:30 pm: Dinner
9:30: Bath, bed
My dreams of being a dirty hippie while in TZ have been squashed, as a lot of Tanzanians bathe twice a day; my family gives me hot water to bathe in twice a day. I have not been sick yet, knock on wood, and the squat toilets are not as bad as I had imagined. The food is not bad, mainly rice and beans and spinach and bananas.
Highlight of my week: Yesterday we met with local government officials to ask questions about Tanzanian government structure. My training group wrote a song (in Swahili) about our village, and performed it for them. Since then we have been performing the song for anyone who is willing to listen, along with a lot of people who probably don't want to listen.
I am almost out of internet time so I will write more later.
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