My Hovercraft Is Full Of Eels

Day 20 (7/7):

So a lot of us have been trading books within the group, and I was able to get my hands on a copy of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo which I had planned on picking up at the airport on my way here, but was only able to find the second two books. In any case, I have been reading it voraciously.

After class today a bunch of us headed to the Peace Center to do research and to meet with our volunteer coordinators. We did that and discussed small arms proliferation with out guy. It was a pretty interesting conversation, considering the differences in gun laws between the United States and Tanzania and the amount of illegal small arms and light weapons that are trafficked into and through the country.

By the time Libby and I left the Center, we were starving. We hit up Bamboo for some samosas and went back to the hotel. Emily and Libby took a walk to find a pharmacy, since the high content of tomatos and other fruits in our diet had given her canker sores, but the town was closed since it was a national holiday.

I read a lot while they were gone, and I got pretty sucked into the book. When they got back, Libby and I hung out and talked in my room. After a little bit, Emily started cracking up and called us into her room. She had been researching basic Swahili phrases to try to improve her speaking skills, and the website, duly named Useful Swahili Phrases, was what she was looking at. She asked us to look at the list of phrases and see if there was anything strange. We scanned the list and saw things like No, Thank You, and Police! and other normal useful phrases. Second from the bottom, however, we found the discrepancy. Right below, Happy Birthday! was the phrase : My hovercraft is full of eels, with the Swahili listed as: Gari Langu linaloangama lemejaa na mikunga. We cracked up about that for a good little while, and then decided to cross check it with GoogleTranslate, we stuck the Swahili translation into GoogleTranslate and this is what it produced: My car is dominated by midwife linaloangama. Priceless. We had fun with that for a good long time.

At around 6, Libby and I met up with our two group members, Amanda and Maureen about a group discussion we had to outline for the following day. Instead of having regular lecture, Charles assigned everyone into groups of four or five and then gave each group a question to explore and bring ready to discuss the following day. Our question was, “How does the diversity of beliefs and values affect the universality of human rights.” We liked the question a lot. It didn’t take us long to jot down some talking points, and then some possible discussion questions if we need to get things going with the class. All-in-all, successful meeting.

After dinner, our friend Alex came over to our apartment to watch the Spain v. Germany world cup game with us. We all hung out on Emily’s huge bed and just sat around, listened to music, and talked about life. It was nice.

Day 21 (7/8):
So class today: as previously mentioned, instead of class we had group discussion projects. Our group went first and we rocked that joint. It was awesome. We definitely set the standard high for the rest of the groups, and we hadn’t even bothered with a PowerPoint like some of the other groups did. All we needed were some talking points, and that got us going with our conversation, which in turn spurred the class to jump in. It felt really good. We talked a lot about how corruption within African governments need to be seriously stifled and that bringing in leaders that know the sustainability of investing in their people would be a huge turning point. I mean, we obviously discussed our question too, that’s just a point I specifically remembered from later in the discussion. We were all pretty pleased with the outcome.

During the break, I tried to get money out of an ATM near our class and failed. I was able to pull money out after class though, at a different machine. Right after class we had lunch at the hotel (we usually have dinner) since we were going to Via-Via later that night for dinner and music. Lunch was good.

At around 2 o’clock, Albert (the trustworthy taxi driver) came and picked me and Libby and Emily up to go to a place outside of town called Peace House. Emily was here for two weeks before she came to Arusha in a town called Iringa, in southern Tanzania. She worked with a Christian youth group and volunteered at a similar place to Shanga (read earlier blog posts), called Neema. They also employ physically handicapped people and empower them through work and respect. From there Emily came to the Arcadia program here in Arusha, and for two weeks after the program ended she would be staying at Peace House, which was only 20 minutes outside of the city. Peace House is run by the Lutherans and is basically a scholarship-based boarding school for high school students in Tanzania whose family has been affected by AIDs. The application process is long and difficult (I don’t even feel like explaining) but believe you me, the people they accept to live there are completely deserving. The school year goes from January to May and then from middle of July to December.

Peace House is located on 100 acres of land owned by the Lutheran Church. All the buildings are open and airy and beautifully spread out across the grounds. They are able to house 250 students, all the teachers, all the staff, and they still have room to spare. That’s unusual with volunteer work in Africa since most places don’t have enough space for what they want to do. Let me tell you guys, if I said before that I didn’t think I could ever fall in love with Tanzania, I was wrong. I could do it here. Just walking around the grounds was amazing. It made me realize that it’s not the people I dislike or the landscape, it’s really just being in the city and the restrictive feeling I have of not being free and independent to move about as I please. Being out in the country a littler further, away from the city, made me understand that there is totally a chance I could fall in love with the country. They say on a clear day you can see Mt. Longido, Mt. Meru, AND Mt. Kilimanjaro. Amazing.

I’m not going to lie, I was super jealous that Emily got to stay and volunteer with them. It was just so quiet and…peaceful, lol. I’m sure it’s more noisy and full of life when the students aren’t on their break, but still. I can just imagine living there and volunteering and being happy. I don’t know. Definitely something to look into for after college or maybe for part of grad school.

We got back from Peace House and did our own thing until dinner. We got ready to head out around 7:30 and then we all trooped up to Via-Via for dinner. That’s the restaurant set in the gardens behind our classroom. It was really nice and all the trees had lights in them. The food took forever, but that’s Africa for you. In the meantime they had a band who just played instrumental music while we were there. It was pretty cool.

Day 22 (7/9):

Today we had a field trip into Moshi, a city about 90 km away from Arusha. We were going to visit the Women’s Education and Economic Center (WEECE) location, since we had representatives come visit our class and talk to us about the organization last week.

We had to wake up earlier than normal (6:30 am) to get breakfast and catch the bus by 7:30. It only takes about an hour to drive to Moshi, and the views on the way are splendid. You get closer to Kilimanjaro as you drive, and on a clear day I’m sure it’s really beautiful. Our morning, however, was cloudy and cold, so we didn’t get to see the mountain.

We arrived at WEECE around 9 am and spent the morning meeting with the head coordinator, a funny, brash, large woman named Mama Valeria. She was amazing. She showed us around the facility and then had us gather in the tiny classroom to hear her story. She grew up playing with her brothers, and whenever her mother would call her away from play to do “woman’s work,” Valeria would question it. She would always ask why the boys got to ride the bicycle and why she had to work. She told us that either her mother would beat her for asking questions like that, or give her a vague answer that didn’t really satisfy her. By the time she reached 7th grade, her parents only had money to send her brothers on to secondary school and not her. She would go to the convent nearby a lot to pray, and became close with the nuns there. They asked her why she wasn’t in school, and she told them it was because her parents couldn’t afford the school fees for her. They asked her if they paid the fees, would she like to go to school? She replied yes, of course.

What followed were chance encounters mixed in with Valeria’s own drive to change social norms and break everyone’s expectations of her as a female. She got amazing grades in high school and was awarded a scholarship to study Women and Development in Nova Scotia, Canada.

She came back to Tanzania and worked for a while, raising her son as a single mother, and though she had fulfilled many of her goals and fulfilled expectations that she had set for herself, she laid her future plans aside to raise her son. Unfortunately, when he was a teenager, her son died in an accident on the way to school. The strength of this woman is incredible. Instead of lying down and giving up, she thought to herself “God must have loved him more than I did” and accepted whatever plan God had laid out for her. She realized that her life path was directing her back to working with women and development. It was after the accident that she founded WEECE. For a refresher on what it is (or if you just haven’t read that far back in my blog) WEECE is an organization that educates women on problem-solving, self-esteem, decision-making, basic economic principles, how to run a small business, computers, and various other skills that they are not able to learn anywhere else. The small compound where WEECE is located has two offices, a classroom, and a very small hostel where the students live. A lot of the women that come are divorced and struggle to make a living since the law in Tanzania says that women can’t own anything.

WEECE provides the women with a small amount of capital to start up the business, and then sees that the business succeeds. WEECE has 100% loan repayment. Not only do they empower women, but they give them the tools to succeed in a society that doesn’t see the value in them.

(www.weece.org)

The organization doesn’t always work with divorced women, some of the women are married and have supportive husbands who help them through the process. It was a funny discussion, towards the end, since Mama Valeria went off on a tangent about Tanzanian/African men. She is by far the most God-fearing woman I’ve met so far, but she candidly spoke about why female genital mutilation is wrong (it allows the men to have a subservient wife back in the village, while they go to the city and pay for prostitutes, marry other women, and squander the money on alcohol and billiards), how men don’t understand that they don’t show women love, but they need them all the same, and how the education of women is the key to empowerment.

It’s funny that education is a recurring theme as to what will turn African countries around. It was also interesting because this woman was not the picturesque feminist that we think of in the United States. She was a home-grown Tanzanian woman who saw inequality, called it out, and worked with women in the community to turn things around.

If you remember a few blog posts ago, from the camel-safari, how I was talking about that I didn’t feel like it was my place to judge the Maasai people for circumcising their females since it was part of their culture and they considered it a celebration, and a right of passage into woman-hood. It kind of blew my mind to meet a strong woman in Tanzania who saw the flaws in such a tradition and condemned it as an act of oppression.

After she had talked to us for a while, she had us walk around the neighborhood with her and meet a bunch of the local women who had started small businesses with WEECE. These women had shops selling anything from a groceries, to a hair salon, to selling hot food. Most of them were married and the breadwinner of the family, and the money they made with their business was sending their children to school. One of Mama Valerie’s good friends and the secretary at WEECE, Mama Tedi, runs her own pig business and makes enough money to send all three of her children to university, AND she’s married.

We visited Mama Tedi’s pig farm last of all, which was really fun, even if it was smelly. The pigs were adorable and the pictures we took were awesome.

After seeing the pigs, we stopped and had packed lunches on the bus, before hitting our final stop of the day in Moshi. Our last stop was a small shop called Kwera. Kwera is the Swahili word for weaver bird, and the shop sold beautiful hand-woven products as well as jewelry and wax candles and other things. After we shopped (endorsing the business was a must) we were able to see their workshop. They have three different looms, one of which was in use (I’d never seen someone literally weaving something before) and then several different sewing machines and craft tables. It was pretty cool, and the women working were all really welcoming and friendly.

We left Moshi around 2pm and got back to Arusha around 3. We were all pretty tired from a full morning and early afternoon, so a lot of people just went to take naps. I wrote this blog post and I think I’m going to work on my paper before dinner.

Tomorrow: back to Shanga for shopping.
Sunday: Tengeru, cultural tourism hiking and visiting a coffee plantation.


Love you, Miss you,

Colleen