Blog Update: Marathon Weekend, etc etc

Work life and as a result, things in general, have gotten easier over the past 2 weeks. Although that one chick I was talking about is still not my favorite person, things have smoothed over a bit and she is keeping her distance. I’m hanging in there because I realized that the kids are worth staying around for. This week I’ve been teaching art classes (and one piano lesson), and started drawing a animal mural on the wall of the dining hall which the kids seem to like. Next week, I'll start painting, which will be a lot more chaotic. A lot of the younger kids have a hard time not drawing without copying photos, so I've been doing a lot more craft projects with them like making lion/simba puppets out of paper bags. Last Friday, the entire staff and all the kids cleaned the school. We each got assigned to a different area (mine was the girls bedroom) and scrubbed the walls and the floor, etc. I thought the kids would be pests about the whole thing but they actually had a great attitude about it. None of them were wearing their shoes and they were all sliding back and forth for fun along the floors, which were slippery from the soap and water. I kind of felt like I was in “Anne,” without the music and all the white people.

In domestic news I bought a (dead) chicken last week….eek. It was way too intimate of a process. My good friend Marilyn who works at the local hospital KCMC has a friend who owns 200 chickens (200! How does she ever sleep?!), so a few of us decided to buy 1 each from her for $5. The chicken came frozen with its neck still attached and the head, feet and organs stuffed inside…um, yea. Marilyn took the reins of reaching inside the chicken’s private area. Oy. So first I had to boil those lovely unwanted parts and then give them to our dog and her friends who lounge around outside…otherwise they would have just rotted in our trash pit in the yard and made the dogs sick. Then I roasted the chicken and pried all the edible meat off of it and broke up the carcass and all of the bones into bits under Marilyn’s instructions and fed them to the dogs. Bleh, gross. Protein other than beans is nice and everything but still…

Dogs are really poorly treated here and also feared incredibly. Most people abuse them terribly and only have them around as guards for their property. Sometimes I get woken up by people screaming in the middle of the night because they see a dog. Because of this, the dog living here Luna has started attracting her other neighborhood pals seeking refuge from abusive humans. So we now have 4 dogs in the yard and I feel like I live at an animal shelter (and one of the dogs is covered in flies and fleas.)

Marilyn was supposed to be here until July, but because the economy is so bad her husband has asked her to come back to Portland, so she’ll be leaving in April now. She is a really wonderful person and I’ll miss her terribly…I was actually already dreading having to say goodbye to her and now it’s come too soon.

There were a lot of foreigners here from all around the world as well as all around Africa (especially Kenya and South Africa) last weekend for the annual Kilimanjaro Marathon, which was a really fun community event. I saw a lot of Tanzanians I knew and some of the Amani kids attended the big party in the stadium at the end. It felt really nice to be a part of everything. Moshi was really bustling, which was kind of a nice change from the slow pace. The day of the marathon my roommates and I ran the 5K race (definitely at different paces!) and it was actually really fun! I had planned to walk it because it’s always so freaking hot here and I haven’t run in months, but it was easy to be swept up in all the camaraderie. We ran thru part of town and there were a few bands playing trumpets and things on the sidelines. I felt pretty smooth drinking water from the pit stops whilst still running. The funny thing was, the kids were all so incredibly fast and the marathon runners were running the opposite direction on the same road. Damiono, a 16 year old who lives at Amani, came in 11th place in the 5K. There was also a guy who ran in a lion suit and many people running to raise awareness about Albino Tanzanians being killed or violently attacked because of witch doctors encouraging people that their bones are magical…very sad and a huge issue here.

Tanzanians and Kenyans all came in top places in the half marathon and marathon, and their bodies are incredible to watch in action. The first male marathon runner finished at the same time as many of the half marathoners. How is this physically possible? Some of the first male finishers I saw (although plenty of women ran too), looked like they were about to fall over from exhaustion. One of the western women who finished the half marathon looked like she was approaching 70. What a badass! There was also a kid who was about 9 or 10 who ran the half marathon. Very cool. I took pictures of my co-worker Petro (a Tanzanian), as he came in from the marathon, and hope to make prints this weekend for him. This was his sixth time running the marathon and his shoes are basically converse. Incredible! They were selling nice running shoes at the stadium where everyone ended up for $25 USD and I really wanted him to buy a pair (although this was all in my head). I’m guessing he makes around $100 a month or less, so spending a quarter of your salary on shoes doesn’t make too much sense.

For the most part, I’m really enjoying living here. That’s not to stay that there aren’t some days where I want to flee the country and go to Europe. It’s difficult to always be looked at as different and constantly be asked for something, whether it’s money or candy or what have you. Sometimes when I’m walking down the long dirt road to work I really want everyone to just stop staring already, but I feel really grateful to be living in such a different part of the world. Most Tanzanians I’ve talked to have never left their own country, and Nairobi is an 8-hour bus ride away. This is definitely due to the cost of bus fare and the price of entering a foreign country.

Now it’s the weekend and I’m very happy to pumzika (relax).

Weekend njema!

Whitney (…people keep calling me Witness. This would be because people here have names here like Happiness, Goodluck, Godslove, Loveness, Wisdom, Gellas…and I met a baby named Talent the other day).