Tangazo, a hatmaker in our village.

He uses thin strips of baobab bark and painstakingly stitches them together.

Potters in a neighboring village. Their pots are made by pulling the clay from the inside of a solid lump of clay and working it upwards into the walls of the pot.

Hello everyone! This post will be devoted entirely to our village's Primary School, including lots of pictures. The school has about 450 students from 1st grade to 7th grade. When we arrived the school had 7 teachers, most of whom live on the grounds of the school. Unfortunately, one of the teachers died this March after being in the hospital for over a month. Needless to say, this has affected the school greatly, and we witnessed a long line of students making small (10 to 20 shillings) donations to the teacher's family. All of the pictures below were taken in about early February. We apologize to James' aunt who has probably been waiting for news about the 2nd grade class that has been communicating with her class in Texas. We hope this helps!

Part One: The Road to School

Someone giving 2 students a "lifty"

Part Two: Big School Pic and Cathy's Friendship Class

Maria Ngatunga, teacher of the friendship class

Students who wrote letters to Cathy's class

Other students in the friendship class

In the classroom

Part Three: A Meal A Day and the Student Shamba (Farm)

Thanks to an outside project (not Peace Corps), students have started receiving a meal a day in the form of uji, a stiff porridge made from corn flour, peanut flour, sugar, and salt. We were thrilled to see this since even after the rains started the village was experiencing food shortages, an obvious obstacle to learning. According to the head teacher, school attendance has increased from 57% to about 84% daily average since the program started. Also, teachers and students have been working together in the student shamba, growing corn and peanuts to keep the project going.

The line for uji. Students bring their own cups.

Teacher in the kitchen.

Student hoes outside a classroom

In the peanut field with teachers

In the corn field

The End. Til next time, take care of eachother.

Our kids :) (well, ok, actually our neighbors kids) They're sitting in our courtyard:

Loni (our nearest PC neighbor) and James visiting potters at a nearby village. There is unfortunately very little clay in our village.

Wilson, the chairman of our village's organization of small groups who is working closely with us, teaches us to build a fuel efficient stove in front of our house:

The local cement fundi helping us build a rainwater catchment tank. We're trying to follow a design to use less water. And on the very first day... The rains come!!!

(the road in front of our house!)

On our trip to the south (near Njombe) to shadow another volunteer, the wonderful Bibi Kay:

In Morogoro:

At our swearing in:

(Our host families made us all outfits. Most of us matched our host mom or dad.)

Group pics: trainees in our homestay group and volunteers in our region

(*note from Christy: I promise to take more pictures so there will be more with James in them!)

Warm welcome to Tanzania from Peace Corps staff:

With our host family in the village:

(Baba Senyagwa after miraculously fixing the tractor we had assumed was a permanently broken outdoor accessory!)

(local brick maker)

(Festo is the youth who herded our host family's many goats. He is Mgogo, and the Gogo people live mostly in the Dodoma region, where we are now. Festo went home right before we left our host family, but before we knew where we would be placed. We keep hoping that we will run into him.)

(sunset over the sisal field)

(Our host mama was very sweet, contrary to appearances in the picture)

After learning to make papaya jam:

On a bike ride with other volunteers:

To make the most efficient use of our time online, we're just going to throw up pictures by category, starting from when we first arrived in Tanzania all the way to some pics of our site. As we've said, our camera battery charger was stolen right after we arrived at site, so it will take some time until we get a new system to keep our camera going and can show more current pics. Anyway, we love and miss you all. Enjoy the pics! :)

As many of you already know, we have been hit pretty hard emotionally this last month as we've learned the challenges faced by the people living in our village. The Dodoma region (which is typically characterized by a rainfall season of 300-500 mm over several months followed by a longer completely dry season) has suffered several droughts recently. Last year was a particularly difficult one, with the rains coming late and lasting only briefly. Since everyone in our village lives mostly by farming, this was a very serious catastrophe. We are now approaching the end of the long dry season. The water source for our village (a spring several miles away in the mountains that has been tapped to flow down to several villages in rotation throughout the week) is drying up, and so each day is a new struggle for people to find food and water for their families. In brief, following are the key problems we have identified through observations and conversations (in Kiswahili, at which we are trying our best!). 1. SEEDS Because harvests were lost, people were not able to save seeds. In some cases, such as peanuts, an important cash crop, the seeds have been eaten by families seeking to survive in the short run. And of course incomes were much lower than normal, so they can't easily buy seeds either. This is a sad problem created by the droughts: seeds will be a problem this year whether rains come on time or not.2. SCHOOLS The secondary school is just getting started, with only it's first class of students in attendance. Unfortunately, students have stopped being able to pay their fees, and began to be turned away just after James and I arrived.Students at the primary school are luckier, because the government requires them to receive an education whether they pay fees or not. Our village's school has tried to ask each student to pay 100 shillings (less than 10 cents) each month, but has received little to none. So the school is run using the government salaries of its teachers and facilities that are in most ways either dilapidated or cramped (although it has received aid to build 2 new classrooms beginning after the rainy season). The primary school teachers have identified the following priorities for their school: housing for teachers (These are old buildings, in some cases originally intended for grain storage, with huge cracks in the cement. In one case the teachers worked together to fill in a large gap with mud where the wall is falling away from the building.); an office (all 7 teachers share one narrow cramped room) and 2 more classrooms in addition to the two currently planned; food (in other areas one meal a day of uji [gruel] is offered) for students, many of whom don't come to school or can't learn because of hunger; and a tank to harvest rain water off the roof for teachers' use and for a school garden in the dry season. This last one is an ideal Peace Corps project, which we hope to apply for funding for soon, although tank construction can't begin until after this rainy season. We'll let you know how you could help this project through the Partnership Program for grant funding once it's underway.3. WATER This is pretty much everyone in the village's number one priority, but it is still unclear to us how much we can do within the scale of a Peace Corps project. We're looking into water conserving gardening projects and cheap, simple technologies for harvesting rainwater. Some surveying work has been done by engineers looking into tapping an additional spring or building a small pond to catch rainwater runoff from a nearby mountain. We may be able to work with other organizations to keep those ideas moving.4. DEFORESTATION This is a big problem directly related to the low water table and quite possibly decreasing rainfall. Wood is a scarce resource that is in high demand for fuel and construction. We hope to target both conservation and replanting. Recently a villager who was trained in construction of fuel efficient stoves helped us build one in front of our house as a demonstration. We will be trying it for the first time when we get back.5. VULNERABLE COMMUNITY MEMBERS We are just starting to understand the situations of orphans and elderly persons without a responsible adult child to assist them. We know that they face even greater problems of access to water, food, clothing, housing, bedding, education, love, and care, and we are looking for ways to work together with other villagers to address these problems.6. OTHER MISCELLANEOUS training in animal (chickens, cows, pigs, goats) care, small business start-up assistance, family planning, women's health, nutrition, and HIV/AIDS education. Some of these lend themselves easily to Peace Corps projects James and I can start, and others do not. We are trying to prepare to be as effective, helpful, and empowering of others as possible. We were initially overwhelmed by the poverty in our village, and I think to live here responsibly we will always be mourning the injustice of so much hunger and vulnerability to the elements faced by people in this particular corner of the world. However, living here will become much easier once we are more actively engaged each day with our neighbors in work to make things better. On a related note, we went to our first funeral in the village last week. It was for the 18 month old son of a friend of ours, a man whose teenage daughters sometimes study using the dictionaries at our house in the evenings and who we are paying to make small desks for this purpose and also other furniture. All we know is that the child was sick with a very high fever for 24 hours, was taken to the hospital in the nearest city and died there. Sounds like malaria, but there are no mosquitos here. The common consensus at the funeral was that this was "mpango wa Mungu, " the plan of God. My personal thoughts on this are that while suffering is unquestionably part of the role of humans on earth, it is in no way God's plan that we should simply accept such unequal suffering as currently exists. Therefore I can not accept that it was God's plan that I should never personally known a single baby to die in 24 years of living in the United States and have met one of what presumably will be many in only one month living here.)

We recently completed a five day permaculture workshop in Dodoma. We were accompanied by two counterparts from our village who learned alongside us so that when we return we can work together and communicate more easily with our villagers.

The teacher of the workshop focused on biointensive agriculture or gardening near the home for family consumption. The people in our village are very use to farming 10 or more acres each season for profit. Biointensive permaculture is a much smaller scale and its primary goal is to produce healthy vegetables for the family.

The specifics of bioentensive include:

1: preparing very rich compost from dead leaves or grasses, green materials, manure, woodash, and water. All of these materials are easily availabe to most Tanzanian farmers at little or no cost.

2: preparing beds 1 meter or less wide, so that the farmer can strattle it, and at least 5 meters long. The main difference to ordinary gardening is that the beds must be 2 feet deep. We learned an easy, though initially time consuming, method to achieve this with only a hoe. Dont step on your beds ever.

3: Plant the plants in a diagonal and spaced appropriately so that the leaves of one plant just touch the leaves of its neighbor thus creating a canopy. This process keeps the sun off the soil thus retaining moisture, nitrogen and Carbon Dioxide

4: we also discussed companion planting and more specifics to what to plant.

If you are interested chech out "How To Grow More Vegetables" by John Jeavors

It definitely takes a little work but it will produce the best healthiest vegetables you can imagine.

Hello again :) We're back in Dodoma this week for a Permaculture/Bio-intensive gardening conference. We'll post more news, but first here are (finally!) some pictures. Unfortunately, due to poor planning, we can only show you these three very random ones, but since we now know how to do this, we will do better next time.

First, these are boys near our house in the village. They had just finished making new soccer balls out of plastic trash that they find and strips of fabric/rope. They can be found playing behind our house most evenings until the sun goes down.

These next two our from our days with our host family. One is of Christy cooking with mama and her youngest daughter, Hogra. The other is of Festo, Hogra (who delights in being at the front of every picture), and a new baby goat. Festo is a young boy who herds goats for babu (our host grandfather).

Hello to everyone and thank you for your patience. We have finally arrived at our permanent site, and even though we have more spare time now that training is over, we are actually further from internet than we were before (a 3 hour bus ride to the capitol city, Dodoma.) We are hoping internet access will come soon to the nearer large town, Mpwapwa. Until then, we'll do our best to update every few weeks. Please note that our email address has changed forever to olneycox@gmail.com and won't be changing again! We will only be including general information on this blog, for security reasons.

OK! Now for the news. It comes in 2 parts:

Part 1: Peace Corps Training (The short version, by Christy)

We were trained in a group of 40 health and environment volunteers in the Kilosa region. We stayed in a small rural village along with 2 other environment volunteers. The characteristics of this village were: population 2000; one sisal rope making factory owned by Chinese national (employing 500, and therefore pretty much supporting the town); lots of rows of sisal plants; a nice view of distant mountains; lots of cows, goats, and chickens; a couple of tractors; and a lot of very patient and welcoming babus (grandfathers), bibis (grandmothers), parents and children.

James and I stayed with a family that included: a mom who works hard (including while she was sick with malaria) all day processing food harvested from the family's shamba (cultivated field), cooking outside on a charcoal and/or firewood stove, carrying buckets of water on her head from the relatively-nearby hand pump well, washing clothes by hand, caring for children, and generally keeping the household running smoothly; a dad who runs a bar in a nearby town (also a PC training site) and undoubtely works hard, but we can't say for sure because we generally only saw him late at night, early in the morning, or when we visited said bar by bicycle; a brother, age 9; a sister, age 7; a sister, age 5; a niece, age 15, and an adorable babu and bibi who lived next door; and two young teenage boys who herd the families goats and cows and sleep in a building which also happened to be our temporary school for learning Swahili with the other two trainees in our village.

In the village we learned, among other things, how to cook ugali and other Tanzanian food dishes, how to bathe regularly out of a bucket, the basics of Swahili, and how to feel comfortable in a culture where you are generally always surrounded by people and always expected to greet and engage anyone anywhere however often you see them (basically we unlearned our expectations of privacy). We also dipped into a range of topics during technical training, from beekeeping to jam making to permaculture to giving vacinations to livestock.

Part 2: Why are you where? (by James)

As many of you are itching to know where we are and what the hell we are doing in Tanzania, Christy and I are trying to figure these questions out for ourselves.

About a month ago we finally reported to our permanant site in the region of Dodoma. Our small rural town is population of about 2000 people spread out over a large area. Land is very, very dry and suffering from two years of drought. The people are very hungry and thirsty and many dont have seeds to plant when the rains do hopefully come between November and January. We are struggling to live responsibly as their neighbors and helpers.

Water is definitely the most important issue in our town.

At the back of our Texas garden...

Goodbye everyone, and don't forget to write. :)

Program: Community Based Natural Resource Project

Job Title: Environmental Village Extension Volunteer

What does this mean? We'll have a much better idea in a few months. James and I have both been given this same assignment. From the descriptions we've seen so far, it can involve a whole range of projects related to agriculture and environmental education (as well as girls empowerment and AIDS education), the success of which will depend on how well we can integrate into our particular village. Thank goodness for the 2 month training period.

We finally received our staging packet, which reveals the following schedule:

DFW to Philadelphia Monday morning June 12 for registration, training, and vaccinations.

(Hey Bryn Mawr people, if you'll be there and want to try to see us for lunch or something, let us know!)

Arrive in Tanzania on June 15. Exciting!