Blog Update: Manual labor and white sand beaches

I’ve been out of touch for a while…so here it goes:

Right now I’ve been nursing the flu for a while, which is unfortunate because the weather is changing and it is now blazing hot in East Africa again with wind and dust. I also had a bad infection over the weekend which gave me fever and chills. This country…. Anyways, the older kids have at Amani graduate this Friday as they’ve taken their test to get into secondary school. Kids trying to get into secondary school have one chance to take the national exam to be able to go on in their education. One chance. If they don’t pass, their only option is vocational training for jobs like plumbing, electricity or sewing. I can’t imagine a single test I took at sixteen determining my life’s path. The test is in English and not easy. Fro Friday, I’m working on the slideshow I’ve been making as a present to them, which I’ll show at graduation. However since my body has decided to turn against itself with another regional illness, I’m a little nervous about making it the best version of what it could be.

In other news, a few weeks ago the volunteers, a few staff members, and mostly all of the kids went to the Amani shamba (farm) to harvest corn. It’s about a twenty-minute walk or so into the bush from the center. I wish I had brought a camera. The kids looked so beautiful set in a background of dried yellow cornhusks. I wasn’t sure how to harvest corn. It’s strange how we eat all these foods in the U.S. we don’t know how to cultivate or properly take care of from scratch. Anyways, the dry husk covers the corn, and there are about two to three on every stalk. Once you find the corn you peel off most of the husk and twist it off the stalk, then peel off the rest of it. It was pretty fun and exciting at first and I felt like an African Mama, but then the bugs started. There are these microscopic bugs that live in the fuzz at the top of the corn and eat away at the kernels. You don’t notice it at first but then the itching intensifies and every part of my body that wasn’t covered with clothing was red and swollen. It’s Ramadan right now (actually it just ended) so the Muslim kids (there are about twenty) aren’t eating or drinking during the day. They were all exhausted during the harvest, which went on for about three hours and itching like crazy. Since then the corn has been drying out in the basement and yesterday and today the kids were smashing the corn with sticks to get all the kernels off. It looked really strange….like farm kung-fu….and oddly therapeutic.

Last weekend I went to Dar es Salaam on the coast (the commercial capital of TZ), with my roommate Anna. Her boyfriend is Tanzanian and lives in Dar. It was sort of a culture shock (i.e. there is an actual mall in Dar with thirty stores and air conditioning), but I had a good weekend and I’m glad I went considering I was thinking of writing my whole blog before I left about Tanzanian men all being pigs. Really, I cannot even begin to count how many men have either a) asked me for money or b) been sexually inappropriate. Granted, I’m pretty tired of men from all countries- I don’t discriminate. In the past eight months numerous old men have told me to buy them sodas, or pay for their bus ride, which they tell the bus conductors in Swahili and think I won’t understand. The women ask too but the men are the worst. Kids are taught to beg here from a young age as well. The most frustrating part is when people ask me for things and they clearly have jobs and are wearing nice clothes. I mean, really? When so much of the country is poor and suffering that sort of thing upsets me. There’s also this crazy old woman who yelled at me once for taking a taxi to Amani. Really I’m just sick of getting treated as a means to an end or old geezers asking me for presents or sex. Doctors also ask me for presents from America. What the hell? If so many of my relatives didn’t have access to this, I would use many expletives right now. Anyways, the nice part about Dar is harassment happens less since it’s such a big city.

Dar was a nice break though. We ate at a really wonderful Ethiopian restaurant furnished with beautifully carved chairs, old lanterns and colorful umbrellas. I had never eaten Ethiopian food before and always think of famine when I think of that country, but it was really delicious! (It really made me want to go to Ethiopia and explore). You eat as a group with your hands and the plate is delicious and edible. Best of all it was all things I could eat since the bread is this spongy sourdough type thing made from rice and other gluten-free grains. The wine was a little too sweet since it’s made with honey but the food was excellent- different meats and vegetables marinated in spices and sauces. On Saturday we took a five minute ferry to an island across from the city that only cost 100 shillings (ten cents). Dar is large and congested and reminds me of California since everything is spread out and you really need a car to get around, which is why I was surprised that this island is lined with beautiful white sand, turquoise water beaches. About eight of us went…a few Tanzanians but mostly American college students doing research on public health issues in Tanz. We rented army tents outside that looked like they were from the 70s and it was strangely freezing that night. Down the beach there was a Rasta drum circle that went on until dawn. They were all incredibly stoned and excellent at making us feel continuously slightly awkward. Because of my distrust and bitterness toward Tanzanian men as well as my disinterest in the ganga or “sticky icky” as they like to call it, I didn’t stay for long. My friend Anna wanted to go for a late night moonlit swim in the ocean with her boyfriend, which we all thought was romantic from a distance, but it turned out that she swam right into some sort of spiky anemone that stuck into her leg, hand and foot, which her boyfriend later had to painfully extract from her skin. I went swimming most of the time we were there or drank passion fruit juice, which is the idea of a lovely time in my book.

At the moment I’m pretty preoccupied trying to figure my life out for the next year. Since I’m applying for grad school in international social work for the fall it’s difficult to look for an actual “job job” as I like to say. I finish at Amani end of October/early November, but I actually think it will be a lot harder for me than the kids. Three new long-term volunteers have come who I’m sure the kids will bond with, but I know I’ll think of the kids constantly. I sort of wish I had told my boss I could stay until the end of the year...but when he asked me a few months ago I wasn’t sure financially and he found a replacement art teacher incredibly fast. But to be honest, I’m also sort of burnt out. The holidays really aren’t a big deal to me and I’m sure it would be really wonderful to spend with the kids…but I will be in California by Christmas. The kids get shoeboxes every year filled with little things like pencils and stickers, etc. I’m not really sure what to do for the eight months I have until I start the school that I’ll hopefully get into. I would love to stay in Tanzania but money-wise it’s really not possible. I also want to avoid turning into a twenty-something loser who relies on her parents constantly financially. Then again I wouldn’t want to stay in Moshi and not see the kids…it’d be too difficult. I was hoping to try and stay here longer by bartending at the ex-pat bar in town but the boss (my boss’s wife) isn’t hiring until at least January….and volunteering on the side. I met a girl from Dartmouth who somehow knows the president of AMREF and she had some good contacts…including an American PHD student focusing on street children who might be looking for a research assistant in Dar so I’ve emailed the professor and I’m still fishing around for possibilities.

I feel like I really know what I want to do and surprisingly, it makes everything harder. I know I want to be a social worker, specifically working with homeless or previously homeless kids. I didn’t expect to figure that out this year but I just sort of feel it in my malaria-affected gut that this is what I’m meant to do. Maybe I’ll read this in a few years and think about how naïve I was, but for now, I feel pretty certain. The part that makes it hard is the idea of doing different things and being unsatisfied. Sometimes I think I’m so focused on thinking about the life I want to be living that I forget to live the life I have now. It’s just part of being human I suppose, but sometimes it can be crippling. I don’t want to turn into someone who is so scared of being unhappy in the future that she forgets to be happy in the present.

I feel pretty tough or at least like I have a thicker skin from working at Amani. It’s a strange feeling when new volunteers come in…just to get their perspective on what they think of Amani and the kids and I inevitably think about how much they don’t know and that I was once in their place. Just to hear the kids’ stories and see them leave and know that they’ve struggled without family or adults to lean on. Some of them are not really kids at all, more often “the child” part of them just leaves their eyes. Other times I forget what they’ve gone through, both individually and collectively, because they are still able to experience some part of childhood.

My good friend, roommate and co-worker Anna is working on a drug-intake form to be filled out by kids when they first arrive. She’s in Arusha now visiting the kids on the street. The drugs kids most commonly do are glue and “mari-ja-juana” as they say (both about twenty cents U.S.). Others include “kiwi” or shoe polish, coke (which is becoming more and more popular as it becomes more prominent across East Africa), and car petrol from fuel tanks (which is inhaled).

I know it’ll be nice to go back to the U.S., especially to see a doctor who, say…doesn’t use a flashlight from their cell phone to look into my mouth and ears. Ha! But when I really think about it, I don’t really miss the U.S. that much. I miss food at times and new music and not being a minority, but really, I like the challenge of living here. I’m sure I bitch about it a lot, but I really do feel blessed to be able to live in another country. I love speaking another language the majority of the time, unless it’s with a lot of perverts. I don’t know how much I’ve really helped the kids, and I still think at times that I’m doing more of a disservice becoming attached to the kids and then leaving them. I’m pretty sure that they’ve given me more happiness than I could ever give to them. I do know that I don’t regret coming here and a part of my heart, like any place that I live, will stay here forever.

All the best…. Whitney