Salama,

I'll quickly wrap up the end of December and then move on to January as I have much to tell. After Christmas I returned to site for only a few days and then went to Newala (you can see the town in the picture on the Maps page but it's hidden behind Michelle's name), Michael's site (a PCV from my training group), with Steph for New Years. Newala is on top of the Makonde Plateau and has a beautiful view of the surrounding low lands called the Pit of God. I'll try and remember to bring my camera next time. We watched the sunset after a rain storm on New Year's Eve and then hung out in town and at Mike's house the rest of the evening. You can also see a picture of a scary looking spider we found out on Mike's front porch on the December 2005 picture page.

I have been at site, consistently, for almost a month now but it feels more like 6 or 7. These few weeks have not been easy but I don't want any of you to worry, I'm just going to be honest. Not only is being in a new place hard, but when you're in a different culture that you don't quite understand yet, most of your neighbors speak a language you can't quite converse in, and you're the only non-native with no communication except limited phone use that is usually just text messaging and weekly calls from home (thank goodness for those), it can get pretty lonely. On the plus side, through all of the ups and downs I've never desired to return home. I'm dedicated to being here and have met some wonderful people.

I have been writing snail mail letters to several PCV friends in a different, first person story oriented fashion and have gotten positive responses. So I plan to 'beef up' my online journal to truly live up to the websites new name 'The Intrepid Tales of a Mudtoad in Africa.' For those of you who don't know, I swam on a summer league swim team called the Marlbank Mudtoads for 9 years and coached them for 4. And I feel, in some way or another, the experience on the team, especially coaching, partly influenced me to join the Peace Corps. As for the 'Intrepid Tales', well you'll just have to judge for yourself how courageous they are. Also, these stories are not to judge or put down Tanzanian culture, it's just a different way of life here and I am telling these stories in this way because, sometimes, the differences are humorous. Onto to January...

Adventures in Cooking

It's my first night at site and I need to eat. I never really cooked in this country before, just watched it be done. All I have in my pantry are rice and beans. But Andy, the previous PCV, left me a pressure cooker so I'm fairly confident this won't take too long. Little did I know that beans are not supposed to cook in a pressure cooker because the 'soot', or whatever it's called, produced by the beans blocks the air vent tube, hence defeating the purpose of using a pressure cooker. I arrived on the lorry, big truck, around 3pm and only put the beans into water to soak at 4:30pm. It's now 5:00pm and I'm hungry so I cut some onions and peppers and light the charcoal grill...and wait 15 minutes for it to heat up. To add to my growing list of mistakes, i.e. cooking beans in a pressure cooker and not soaking them for nearly enough time (they usually require an overnight soak-about 20 hours), I realize my weekly call from my parents is coming up in 45 minutes so I fill the pressure cooker with water and wait. I check it before I leave for the phone call but there's not much activity so I'm not worried. Of course, if I knew charcoal grills, which I now do, I would have known it was about to get very hot and speed the cooking process along. 45 minutes later I return from my phone call to the smell of burning beans. I take the pressure cooker off the charcoal and survey the damage-a bunch of burnt beans that are still not cooked. So I make some rice, at least I'm able to do that, and find some mangos, thank goodness for the 2 huge mango trees outside my yard, and have a delightful rice and mango dinner. I leave the beans in their burnt mix to soak overnight for another try tomorrow and this is the last of my mistakes for the night.

The next day I cook the beans in a regular pot and they actually get cooked but the broth is watery and still tastes like burnt beans. My feeble attempt to add flavor is coating the broth in garlic powder (thanks Mom, it's good when I use it right) every 30 minutes. This doesn't help though. To make matters worse I decide to pour the bean mix into the rice and stir it up to make a rice/burnt bean porridge that is absolutely disgusting. Ugh...

But now I can successfully make 3 rice dishes: beans and rice (I got the hang of it-details on the Recipes page), a vegetable/orange powder mix (the orange powder is Tanzanian and I'm not sure exactly what it is but I prepare it like a curry) and rice, and pilau (another vegetable rice dish that has cinnamon in it and is very tasty). I haven't been able to make a tasty spaghetti sauce though, go figure. I can do it in the states but not here. So I basically eat a lot of rice. Meat is very hard to get and expensive so I've only had it once at site and that was when I visited a fellow teacher to learn how to make coconut milk and use it to cook rice and a chicken/vegetable sauce mix to put on top of it. That's been the hardest part of eating here: no meat. But hopefully, soon, I can find out who sells chicken and pork and when to get it because I have a fridge and the electricity is on most of the time.

I keep milk in the fridge and have cereal so breakfast isn't too hard but I have been able to make ugly chapati (like a tortilla) and pretty chocolate batter chocolate chip pancakes (thanks again Mom for the chips and John Stanley for the 'fluffy pancake' recipe).

Local Rollercoaster

I've mentioned a bit about transportation but let me recap to introduce the next story. I am able to go to town Mon-Sat on a truck. It leaves here at 6am and returns anywhere from 3-6pm meaning I leave town anywhere from 1-3pm which means that, yes, the car does sometime breakdown making travel time anywhere from 1.5-3 hours. First we had a lorry, or canter, basically a truck about half the size of a semi with a big truck bed (maybe 10' x 6'), with a roll cage structure on the back to hang on to. This fits anywhere from 45-60 people depending on the amount of stuff also piled in back, usually anywhere from 1-4 tons. Then we were downgraded to a lorry without a roll cage structure so you just held onto what ever was available: the sides of the truck bed, the ropes holding down various items, the items themselves, or some part of a person's body to keep from falling out of the truck from atop the mound of stuff and people packed in. Then we were downgraded to a Land Rover with no roll cage and a 5' x 4' truck bed that managed to fit 26 people, 5 children, a bed frame and 2 tons of stuff some of which was piled on the cab and had 2 people sitting on it. I soon learned, don't sit if there's no roll cage and stand near the front so you can grab onto the cab for support. So the number of desired spaces is very limited and there is no mercy when scrambling for these positions. Push past the old and weak unless you want to fall off the truck later on. That's just how it is. But every once in a while you get an incredible ride like I did on January 21st...

Nature calls me to consciousness around 4:30am to visit the various insects and reptiles living in my choo (pit latrine). This happens almost every morning but I'm thankful to keep so regular in this country even if it's early. I had planned to wake up at 5am anyway to meet Steph (the closest PCV from my training class who also banks, gets mail, etc. in Masasi as I do) in town for the morning. This would be my first time seeing an American in 2 weeks, not that long, but still I was excited. I heat up water for the sun shower (thanks Babc, my grandma, pronounced 'Babch'-short for Babcia-pronounced 'Babshya'-polish for grandmother). By 5:45am I'm outside waiting for the truck. It's a Land Rover with a roll cage; alright, moving back up. The car is turned off as the driver blares the horn and we wait, no one shows up. There are only 3 of us and we get the car started Tanzanian style, pushing it. The car rumbles to life and rolls down the hill...and keeps rolling...and rolling...ok, it's not coming back. So we run to catch up with it and are on our way down the mountain with no brakes, so it's rather difficult to pick people up. The only 'braking' we can do is shift into 1st gear and give the car gas to slow it down; hmmm...interesting and creative. I'm in the truck bed up near the cab holding onto the mid-stomach high roll cage as we fly down the mountain at speeds close to 60 mph on roads that have been well eaten away by the torrential downpours last week. We pass the 3 or 4 steep hills and then come to a dense fog. My glasses are soon fogged up and skin glazed with dew but the sensation is a wonderful contrast from the heat and I stare mouth open, wide eyed as the lush, green forest flies by. A wonderful start to a wonderful day: I got to see Steph, eat chicken for breakfast, then get ice cream, and finally check the post office to find 2 packages and a letter from a fellow PCV waiting for me.

Those are my 2 stories for this month. Most of it was spent preparing for school and fixing up my house. I painted every room, rearranged all the furniture, got a double string bed made, curtains, fixed the broken fridge door, built bamboo shelves for my bathroom to cover the unusable European toilet, and did various other fixer-upper tasks. You can see the difference on the January 2006 pictures page along with some pictures of the surrounding area here in Chidya.

While talking to Mom, during one of our weekly phone calls, she asked me what it's like living in Africa. And I realized I don't really know yet. Even though there was a PCV here before me I'm an oddity who can't yet speak intelligently in the language and is not too sure of himself. Once I get integrated into the community I can describe it later but besides using a pit latrine, clearing 3 hours off my schedule for cooking, and the craziness of transportation I can't say what the people are really like or talk about the culture too much. But during our last few days of training we observed some more comical differences that I wish to share with you now:

Restaurants

Imagine receiving a menu in a restaurant, devouring the many items on the menu with your eyes, and then being told only 1 or 2, no exaggeration, are available. Then one person orders and the waiter/waitress disappears even if there's only 1 item on the menu and everyone MUST order the same thing. Now 1 of 2 things will happen. The waiter/waitress will bring out the one order and try to leave before anyone else orders or s/he will bring out the same thing for everyone even there is more than one item on the menu (or you were able to get 2 or more different orders in). The waiter/waitress will always successfully disappear before you put in drink orders. And finally if you need change when you pay you'll wait while the waiter/waitress goes to nearby stores and restaurants to get change because no matter where you are the store/restaurant will not have change for you. But rest assure if they can't find correct change you'll pay less. The people here are very generous.

Buses

Jeska: 'Can you imagine getting back to the states and squishing 3 people onto one seat on a Greyhound bus when it's not necessary just because it's what we're used to? Or trying to bring an animal onto a bus?'

Jacob: 'The conversation would go something like this: What do you mean you cannot take my goat? I am going to Phoenix and you are passing that way; I have the appropriate fare, what is the problem?'

I'm not sure you'll find them as amusing as we do but we laughed a lot about these differences.

The first week of school we had no class because there were only about 25 students out of 320 here. A lot of families have trouble coming up with school fees, we have a lot of students from far away and travel is not cheap, and we're pretty far removed from town so most students take the first week or two of school just to get here. I spent most of the week planning lessons, visiting my neighbors, and trying to practice Kiswahili. I've had a little trouble with the local kids in the area but I had a talk with them about respect, which was recommended by other Tanzanian adults, that helped. I also got and built my bike, took it out, and got a flat tire the first day because there are a lot of thorns around. But I did get to see some remote villages and good views of the surrounding low lands; nothing as spectacular as the Pit of God though. I made mango juice with my new blender so now I have the choice of water OR mango juice for beverage. Awesome.

I got to teach 5 classes during the second week. I (will) teach 12 double periods a week, 6 classes of each Form (I and III) and two streams, or classes of about 40 students, each. First I taught Form III all in English-it's school policy and they understand it pretty well. Chidya is a very good school: 8th in National Exam scores in the region and this past year all the Form IIs passed the National Exam (taken in Form II and Form IV only) which is very rare. I reviewed Form II material because only about 40% of the students were here by the end of the week. Next I taught Form I: for the first 6 weeks we teach baseline English; basically English that will be used in our classroom. But we have to teach in Kiswahili...yikes! My Kiswahili was amazingly good the first day and all of my questions were answered correctly except for one: can you understand when I speak Kiswahili? 'No,' the students replied. Hmmm...all of my other questions were answered to MY satisfaction so I'm not sure what's lacking. The second day my Kiswahili suffered a little but the last day went well. Hopefully, over the next six weeks the language barrier will shrink for both me and the students.

I am now in Mtwara for a PEPFAR workshop for the week. It's good to see friends but I'm a little frustrated being taken out of school the first REAL week of classes. A lot of students arrived on Friday meaning we could start our lesson plans but my students will just review. Oh well, such is life. I'm so happy to be independent now in Africa and really start learning the language as people speak it in my region and becoming integrated into the community. It will be hard but friends, family, and chocolate will get me through it. Thank you all for the letters and support,

Justin