While I was typing the last two entries, the following problems occurred:

-the keyboard on my computer stopped working. I had to save the half-finished donkey entry and move to another computer.

-an internet cafe employee scanned a document using my computer (I had been moved to an employee computer when my keyboard broke)

-the electricity went out for a minute, then came back on. Or maybe the generator kicked in.

Ah, computers in Tanzania. Things will seem far too smooth and simple when I go home.

This year, I set up the national exam practicals for biology. One month before the exam, I received the following advance instructions. (these are excerpts, the instructions also included chemicals and lab apparatus)

BIOLOGY PRACTICAL 2A

Specimens:

Each student must be provided with a liver fluke.

BIOLOGY PRACTICAL 2B

Specimens:

Each student must be provided with:

-a lizard (may be shared by several students)

-a centipede

-a hibiscus leaf

-a cypress branch

-a scapula bone

-radius and ulna bones

-a rib bone

I nearly panicked at these instructions. A liver fluke? What's a liver fluke? What's a cypress tree? How am I going to get enough scapula bones to put one on each table in the lab?

Tanzania has no biological supply houses. You can't just fill out an order for 15 liver flukes, 8 scapula bones, and 4 centipedes. You have to find everything yourself: in short, you go on a scavenger hunt. A scavenger hunt where the stakes are the students' exam scores and possibly their educational futures.

Okay, liver flukes. Liver flukes are parasites that live in livestock livers, specifically in the gall ducts. Apparently, the cows in my district are not infected with liver flukes. So, where to get them?

Try one: the headmaster's cow is being slaughtered for school graduation celebrations. I talk to the students doing the slaughtering and ask them to take a look at the liver. I also put an order in for ribs and scapula bones. I end up with two small, immature liver flukes and seven ribs covered with rotting meet (I received them three days after the celebrations, due to poorly timed travelling on my part). The scapulas were somehow lost. But I did get two from a goat that was slaughtered for another graduation party.

Try two: talk to friends. I have a friend in town, a biology and chemistry teacher who is super-enthusiastic about practicals. He runs the district branch of the Tanzanian science teachers' association, and has hosted several workshops training the local teachers to use the labs. He also has connections. I initially got two liver flukes from him, and got eight more later.

Try three: the mnaada. The mnaada is a monthly market and livestock auction. It also happens to be two days before the biology exam. I bike to the neighboring village on mnaada day, carrying a small container of formaldehyde tucked in an old powdered milk can. The cows being butchered have liver flukes--lots of them! The butchers initially want to charge me for taking parasitic worms off their hands, but fortunately the district meat inspector intervenes. I split up the liver flukes with some teachers from another secondary school, and end up with enough liver flukes to put out one per student. The mnaada also provides four scapula bones--not quite enough, but maybe the students can share.

As for the rest...I get radius and ulna bones by scavenging wing bones from chickens at lunch time. The lab contains a single dry lizard and a single centipede. There are a few cypress trees in town. Fortunately, hibiscuses grow at the school.

So the practicals went reasonably smoothly. There were some last minute preparations, some rushing around the lab to label things correctly, some quick additions of solutions to student tables. But the specimens were there, and it wasn't a disaster. And now I have 15 liver flukes preserved in formaldehyde for next year.

It's been a while since I've posted--a busy few months of national exams and the end of the term. I'll try to make up for it with a series of posts, of which this will be the first.

--

Donkeys

It was the last week of the dry season. My water supplies were running low, despite the presence of two 60-litre buckets, three 20-litre buckets, and three 10-litre buckets in my house. The water wasn't running during mid-day,only at 5 am and occasionally at night. So, around 9 pm, I went out to check on the faucet by my house.

A miracle: the water was running. Slowly, maybe two litres a minute, but it was running. I ran inside to grab my buckets before a student or neighbor heard the water and came to fetch as well. I put a twenty-litre bucket under the faucet, and sat down to wait.

The beautiful sound of water hitting a bucket. Stars filling the sky above. I really don't mind fetching water at night. The school is quiet and peaceful, and the sky is beautiful.

But then, footsteps. Shadows. Something large nearby. Something very large. Or somethings?

I look up to find four donkeys standing in front of me, staring at the water.

At the end of the dry season, farmers just let their livestock wander around the school ground. It's against the rules. They risk a five thousand shilling ($4) fine. But the well-watered school flower beds and teachers' gardens are one of the only sources of food at this time of year. And so, the school grounds fill with donkeys and pigs looking for food.

Apparently, nobody comes to give these donkeys water. The donkeys are staring very thirstily at my bucket.

Hmm. The donkeys are several times stronger than me. The donkeys have sharp hooves. The donkeys could easily kick me and steal my water.

One donkey nudges its companion. The companion takes a step forward.

I take a step forward and stomp my feet. The donkey backs off.

We stare at each other. A donkey steps forward. I stomp my feet; it backs off.

This goes on for several minutes. Donkeys are docile animals; they don't attack me and take the water. But neither do they go away. Finally I get tired of being stared at by donkeys, turn off the faucets, and move inside with my buckets. With no water coming out of the faucets, the donkeys lose interest and walk away. I return to fetch water a few minutes later, while the donkeys eat the school flowerbeds.

--

Rain

After months of the dry season--from May through the end of October--it's finally started raining again. Water is coming out of the faucet reliably. Grass is beginning to sprout. The air smells beautifully of rain. And the desperate feeling of the dry season, of suspended animation, of just getting by, is finally over.

I've never appreciated rain so much.

It's been exactly two years since the day I first came to Tanzania.

When I came here, life felt like an adventure. Everything was new, exciting, unpredictable. I was excited to practice my Swahili by talking to the person sitting next to me on the bus, excited and a bit afraid to try the local transportation and to see new parts of the country. Life was hard at times, but at the end of the day, I always had a good story.

Now, life here feels normal. The lack of entries in this blog lately aren't due to a lack of good stories, but rather to the fact that what used to strike me as an interesting story now strikes me as normal life. I talk casually about cars running out of gas in the middle of the road, about marriage proposal from the person next to me on the bus, about having 50 students in the lab using bunsen burners at once at school. A good book I just read (Collapse by Jared Diamond) refers to our changing perceptions of what is normal over a long time as "creeping normalcy". Normalcy has crept up on me in Tanzania, and now it's here.

This has its ups and its downs. The good news is that life here takes much less effort. I know where to find the things I need. I know what I can expect to take a lot of time, and how much I can expect to get done in a day. On the other hand, the loss of the feeling of adventure makes the downs a lot harder. Since I no longer have a sense of excitement to get me through hard days, annoyances become simple annoyances, frustration becomes simple frustration.

Exams are approaching at school, and it will be exciting to watch the students I've been teaching biology for two years take their exams. I'll post some stories on that once the exams are over (practical exams always lead to some interesting stories...).

Once Form 4 finish their exams, I'll be left with my Form 3 chemistry students, who I plan to teach for another 6 months before leaving.

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I'll try to catch up once national exams are over.

To quote a popular Bongo Flava (Tanzanian hip hop) song, I'm still here! It's been a while since I've posted. Some news:

-I've extended my service, and will be here until June.

-My town is developing! In small ways, but ones that make my life considerably more cheerful. When I got here, the only bread available was stale factory bread from Arusha; now there are two bakeries in town. My favorite restaurant now sells passion fruit juice--one of my favorite juices in Tanzania, but one that had never been available here. And there's a place with satellite internet in town...though admittedly, the connection is fairly unreliable.

-Speaking of development, I was talking to a guy from Denmark who'd been in my town in the nineties. I'd already known that there was no paved road to the town in 1995. According to him, there was also no electricity and only two shops. He remembers the first bar in town to install a television, after electricity finally came. And he remembers there being only one bank.

Well, now there are four banks in town, a paved road, electricity, and innumerable shops. Buildings are going up at an amazing rate. Land is being bought for tourist hotels, to the point where it's so expensive that many of the locals can't afford it. There are two places with internet, and the town feels very, very much connected to the outside world. And like it's continuing to change very, very fast. I'll be interested to come back here in ten or twenty years and see what things are like.

-I had my close of service conference, at a beautiful and tranquil beach hotel on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam. After nearly two years here, the first volunteers from my group are beginning to return home. It's an uncertain time for a lot of people, as most of us aren't sure what we'll do next. And, after adjusting to life in Africa for two years, it's going to be hard to adjust to life in the States again.

I've put all this off my extending. But next June, I'll be going through the same thing. In the meantime, I watch my training group slowly leave, send them my good wishes, write down their email addresses and promise to keep in touch...then take a car back to my village. Nipo nipo bado.

On the map, my village is near the border of Lake Manyara National Park. I've always thought that, if I simply ride my bike in the correct direction, I'll find a view of the lake.

But until now, I've never had the time to go looking for one.

That changed this week. My school cancelled final exams due to a photocopying issue (the place printing the exams wanted more money than we had, there was a misunderstanding over pricing...long story short, we couldn't have final exams because we couldn't pay for them to be printed). So, suddenly I had a free week of time on my hands.

The first time I saw Lake Manyara was in my own village. I went hiking with a friend and a friend of a friend to the hills above the village. After about an hour and a half of climbing up and down, up and down, we reached a hill with a church on top. And there before us was a view of Lake Manyara.

Beautiful. But not as beautiful as the view in a neighboring village.

I've been promising to visit some friends in a neighboring village for a few weeks now. This week, I finally biked to their house with a neighbor to guide me. We had lunch (chicken--it's customary to kill a chicken for a guest), then went on a two hour hike/bike ride toward Lake Manyara. Our destination: a campsite for tourists with a view of the entire lake, a mere half hour's walk from the border of the park. I didn't even know there were campsites for tourists in the villages of my area! The view was absolutely amazing: we could see the entire lake, and the forests stretching in front of it, and various towns that I've travelled through on the other side of the lake. We even saw a gazelle of some sort in the forest, and the tower of the ranger station in the park.

It took me a year and a half to find out that this view was here. A year and a half! I guess that shows how long it takes to truly get to know a place. It's a good thing the Peace Corps puts us here for two years--I'm only just starting to feel like I know my area.

And a belated thanks to the Peace Corps staff who placed me here. Not only does the mountain containing Ngorongoro Crater rise above the cornfields of my village, Lake Manyara is only a few hours walk away. I feel very, very lucky.

Just a short update to let you all know I'm still here. School break starts in about a week and a half, after two more days of teaching followed by a week of exams. Teaching wise, it's been a long but good term. I finally feel like my students understand what I want from them, and that they trust me to know what I'm doing. Plus, I finally do feel comfortable here--Tanzania really does feel like home these days. I'll be traveling for much of the month of June (I do need the break from my village), but I'm looking forward to continuing my teaching in July. More blog updates coming as soon as break starts!

[note: sorry to snake-lovers out there--there's significant violence to snakes in this entry. Killing snakes is a normal part of Tanzanian culture, probably because there are so many poisonous snakes in this country. It's just assumed that if you see a snake, the next step you take is to kill it].

There are very few things that terrify me. Lots of things make me nervous, and lots of things give me stress, but very few things set my heart pounding to the point where I can't think clearly.

Snakes are one of those things.

Tanzania has many, many species of snakes, several of which are poisonous. Yet in first year and a half in Tanzania, I managed not to run into any of them. During this time my friends were killing snakes with iron bars in their gardens, and pushing them into buckets with pieces of hose in their hallways...but I lived blissfully snake-free. That changed yesterday.

I was cleaning my spare bedroom in preparation for some guests that are coming this weekend. It's not a room I clean very often. I store books and papers on the bed, and backpacks full of more papers on the floor. Plus there's a pile of cardboard boxes under the bed. If I were a snake, I'd think of it as the perfect room to hide in.

It was about six in the evening, and I had my radio on to my favorite VOA music request show. I had moved the bed out of the way so I could start sweeping. I was just picking up the pile of cardboard from under the bed when I noticed something moving in the place where the cardboard had been.

Nyoka!

Now, before you start worrying too much for me, this snake was really small. Probably about the length of a computer keyboard. And it was thin, too. Honestly, it looked a whole lot like the garden snakes I used to see in my backyard at home.

But this is Tanzania, not Massachusetts. I don't know if this snake is poisonous. I have no idea what kind of snake it is.

If I leave my house to get help, it might go hide in the pile of junk in my room. I'll spend the next week on edge, expecting to run into it every time I pick up something from the floor.

But can I really deal with it myself?

My heart is pounding at this point. I'm thinking of all sorts of schemes, from killing it with my hoe to somehow forcing it into a bucket. I bring a bucket into the room for the purpose, then decide it's too narrow throw over the snake. I bring my hoe into the room and wonder what the metal blade will do to my concrete floor. Plus, this is something that requires resolve. If I decide to kill the snake, I need to put all my effort into it. I can't start to hit it with the hoe, then pull my arm back. I need to hit it, and hit it hard, on the first blow.

One part of my brain tells me I have the ability to do this. Another part tells me I don't have to. Tanzanians are really, really good at killing snakes.

So I throw a basin over the snake to keep in from finding another spot to hide, and go over to a neighbor's house. Samweli is lying on the couch, asleep with the flu.

"Samweli, Samweli. Samahani. How are you feeling? You probably shouldn't go anywhere, you're sick, but...there's a snake in my house."

"Nyoka? There's a snake?" Samweli is suddenly wide awake and out of bed. There's nothing like the word 'nyoka' to wake someone up in Tanzania.

We go over to my house, where I hand Samweli the large stick I use to harvest papayas. It looks like I'll get the job of pulling off the basin, while Samweli braces himself with the stick. I yank the basin away and jump back.

Nothing.

Well, not nothing. There's a broom under the basin as well. And maybe the snake is under the broom.

Samweli pushes the broom away. There's the snake, moving past in panic. Samweli starts hitting.

Whack! Whack! The snake is angry now, and trying to jump. Fortunately that's really hard on a slippery concrete floor. After what seems like far too long, but was probably only five or six whacks, the snake is dead. We put it out in the compost pit in my garden.

All right, I want to know. "Samweli, is this snake poisonous?"

"Ndiyo, ina sumu kali sana." Yes, it has very strong poison.

Hmm. Good to know. I return to my house and clean my room really, really well. From now on, I'm going to store as little on the floor as possible. And keep a big stick around, just in case.

It's been a busy week of travel.

Arusha to Manyara to Singida to Shinyanga to Mwanza on Lake Victoria. Mwanza back to Singida and on to Dodoma. Dodoma to Morogoro to Pwani to Tanga. Tanga to Kilimanjaro

and finally, back to Arusha. Somehow, I've managed to visit ten regions of Tanzania in as many days. And take about 4 eight to twelve hour bus rides. It's been a good break. But man, it's good to be home. I think it's time for a good two months in my village without going anywhere farther than the nearest town.

It's a weekday evening during break. I'm at a friend's house in a distant region when the phone rings.

Hey, it's Samweli, the guy who's watering my garden while I'm traveling. Hey, Samweli. How's the village? How's my garden doing?

Everything's fine, teacher. But...

Suddenly the network goes bad. Yet I distinctly catch one word: "imeibiwa". Something was stolen.

I panic. "What? What was stolen? Kitu gani kimeibiwa?"

"Sukumawiki yako." Your collard greens.

"What? They stole my sukumawiki?"

The two Peace Corps volunteers sitting next to me start laughing.

"Wait a minute, Samweli. What do you mean they stole my collard greens? Did they just take a few leaves? Or did they pull up the entire plant?"

"They took the entire plant. All the plants. Hawa ni watu wabaya--they're very bad people."

For a minute, I can't help but laugh myself. It's just such a ridiculous thing to have stolen. My collard greens?

But then, I put a lot of work into those greens. I was the only one watering my garden during a two-month drought, so now I'm the only one who has seedlings in my garden. But those seedlings are still small enough that they could be transplanted to another garden and survive. Apparently, someone did just that.

I'm kind of annoyed that someone else is benefiting from my two months of watering work. (It's a pain to water a garden by hand!). I'm kind of resigned: there's a drought, people are hungry, petty theft of greens isn't that bad compared to what they could be stealing. And, a large part of me wants to laugh. The things I've had stolen so far in Tanzania? A bucket, an A-level chemistry book, and three beds of collard greens.

Tanzania has about 120 tribes, and most of them are fairly small. But there are a few larger tribes. One of them is the Sukuma. At 15% of the population, they're one of the largest tribes in the country.

Yesterday, we went to a Sukuma cultural museum about 40 minutes out of Mwanza. In a way, the museum reminded me of places like Plymouth Plantation and Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts, which show us how our ancestors lived. There was a hut built in the traditional Sukuma style (but of concrete so it would last longer), and inside it held the tools that a Sukuma would have used in the past: traps for catching fish and birds, clay containers for holding drinking water, a cup woven like a basket for drinking traditional beer, a hoe and a spear made by local blacksmiths. There were pavilions with displays on blacksmiths, showing a pit used for extracting iron from ore, and local bellows used to heat the charcoal in the pit. There was a pavilion full of royal drums, huge drums used to announce important events related to the king. Another hut showed tools used by traditional healers, and another was about Sukuma dances and dance competitions.

It's funny that, looking at African cultures, we tend to focus on things that are 'exotic' or different from Western culture. But in many ways, when we look at African tribes, we are also looking at our own past. It's true that the Sukuma entered the Industrial Age later than white Europeans, and that they were forging hoes by hand and using clay pots far more recently. But, with the exception of more culturally-specific items involved in dances or religion, many of the things I saw wouldn't have looked out of place in a museum about how Americans or Europeans lived in the distant past.

Another observation: the Sukuma have a museum to preserve their past. Most tribes don't. The tribe I live with, the Iraqw, seem to have lost most of their traditions. They certainly don't wear traditional clothes, the underground houses they used to build have entirely disappeared, and traditional dance troupes are few and far between. I don't know much about what tribal culture used to be like, so I don't know what else has been lost. But from what the older people tell me, the culture has changed and is changing fast. It's merging with the dominant Tanzanian culture, at the same time as Tanzanian culture is itself Westernizing. This isn't necessarily bad--in some ways, the changes are bringing development and the chance of a better future. But to lose a culture and a history so fast...it's disorienting. And it's hard to have pride in your past when your past is rapidly being obliterated by an outside culture. It'd be good if every tribe at least had a way to preserve their past, and write their history, before it's entirely lost.

Tanzania has about 120 tribes, and most of them are fairly small. But there are a few larger tribes. One of them is the Sukuma. At 15% of the population, they're one of the largest tribes in the country.

Yesterday, we went to a Sukuma cultural museum about 40 minutes out of Mwanza. In a way, the museum reminded me of places like Plymouth Plantation and Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts, which show us how our ancestors lived. There was a hut built in the traditional Sukuma style (but of concrete so it would last longer), and inside it held the tools that a Sukuma would have used in the past: traps for catching fish and birds, clay containers for holding drinking water, a cup woven like a basket for drinking traditional beer, a hoe and a spear made by local blacksmiths. There were pavilions with displays on blacksmiths, showing a pit used for extracting iron from ore, and local bellows used to heat the charcoal in the pit. There was a pavilion full of royal drums, huge drums used to announce important events related to the king. Another hut showed tools used by traditional healers, and another was about Sukuma dances and dance competitions.

It's funny that, looking at African cultures, we tend to focus on things that are 'exotic' or different from Western culture. But in many ways, when we look at African tribes, we are also looking at our own past. It's true that the Sukuma entered the Industrial Age later than white Europeans, and that they were forging hoes by hand and using clay pots far more recently. But, with the exception of more culturally-specific items involved in dances or religion, many of the things I saw wouldn't have looked out of place in a museum about how Americans or Europeans lived in the distant past.

Another observation: the Sukuma have a museum to preserve their past. Most tribes don't. The tribe I live with, the Iraqw, seem to have lost most of their traditions. They certainly don't wear traditional clothes, the underground houses they used to build have entirely disappeared, and traditional dance troupes are few and far between. I don't know much about what tribal culture used to be like, so I don't know what else has been lost. But from what the older people tell me, the culture has changed and is changing fast. It's merging with the dominant Tanzanian culture, at the same time as Tanzanian culture is itself Westernizing. This isn't necessarily bad--in some ways, the changes are bringing development and the chance of a better future. But to lose a culture and a history so fast...it's disorienting. And it's hard to have pride in your past when your past is rapidly being obliterated by an outside culture. It'd be good if every tribe at least had a way to preserve their past, and write their history, before it's entirely lost.

It's Easter break, and I'm on the road again.

This break, I decided I wanted to visit Mwanza. Mwanza is the second largest city in Tanzania, after Dar es Salaam. Like Dar, it's a port, but not an ocean port. Mwanza is on Lake Victoria, which is both the source of the Nile River and the largest lake in Africa. Well, I thought, I'll probably never have another chance to see Lake Victoria in my life. So I made plans to go to Mwanza for break.

Finding information on transport here was difficult. My guidebook claimed the road was unpaved, and that it could take days to reach the city. Tanzanians told me the road was recently paved and that you could get there in a day from Arusha. Unsure who to believe, I decided to plan a two day trip.

And so, on Saturday, I stood along the paved road from Arusha, trying to flag down a bus going to the town of Singida. The plan was to stay in Singida, the half-way point, for the night, then go to Mwanza in the morning.

By 6:45 am, I was sitting on my bags in the middle of the aisle of a bus. It was going fast. Way too fast, in my humble, I-don't-want-to-die-today opinion. But I was on, and the fare was paid, and the chances of finding a safer and slower bus were rather low.

We turned off the paved road onto the dirt road, and settled in for a bumpy five hour ride to Singida. On dirt roads, buses should slow down. This one didn't. I was like a student sitting on the back of a school bus as it goes over speed bumps: every time there was a bump, I bumped straight into the air with it. The guy behind me asked me if I wanted his seat. 'No, don't worry about it,' I said, not wanting to take the comfortable seat he'd paid good shilingi for. 'Someone will probably get off in Babati, and then I'll get a seat'.

Incidentally, Babati is a beautiful town, green and fertile. But people didn't get off in Babati: they got on instead. The bus was soon filled with students in brown sweaters and black pants, standing in the aisle on their way home for Easter break. Fortunately, I'd gotten a seat by now: when the bus had stopped for people to go to the bathroom, the guy on the seat next to me had gotten off, and had refused to take his seat back when he reboarded the bus. By that point, my arms were tired enough from clutching the seats on both sides of me that I was just happy to sit down.

We pulled into the town of Katesh around 10:30 am. I looked at my watch, amazed. We'd be in Singida by noon. Given my bus's speed, it probably wasn't just going to Singida...it was probably racing all the way to Mwanza. I started texting desperately back and forth with the friend I was supposed to meet in Mwanza. Would he get there today? Could he get there today? Could we meet in Mwanza instead?

And given that I'd already tested my luck for the last six hours, should I really stay on this bus?

Well, my friend wasn't sure he'd make it to Mwanza, but he thought it was likely. Given the choice between spending the night alone in Singida and having a chance of meeting up with him in Mwanza, I'd much rather go straight to Mwanza. The road to Mwanza was supposedly paved...that meant the bus would be slightly better driven. All right. I'll buy a ticket through to Mwanza.

And so, after a brief stop at a gas station for some really sketchy looking chicken and chipsi (french fries), we were off into the unknown.

Two observations about the next six hours:

-the road from Singida to Mwanza is, indeed, paved

-the view on that road is really, really boring

(flat, sparsely populated, farmland...ah well, I've been spoiled by having to pass through a national park every time I leave my town for Arusha)

At 6 pm, after an amazingly smooth journey, we pulled into Mwanza. By 7, I'd found my friend (who had, indeed, managed to arrive) and dropped off my bags at our hotel.

Journeys in Tanzania are usually full of stories of what went wrong: a broken-down bus, a long wait, a three hour engine-fixing break at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. This journey was, by Tanzanian standards, remarkably smooth. Yes, I sat in the aisle for a few hours. Yes, the conductor tried to cheat me and give me a higher fare--twice. But somehow, we covered five regions of Tanzania in twelve hours. That's pretty amazing, and I give thanks for my good luck.

This week, we had an emergency meeting after chai at my school. Emergency means that it was called at the last minute and interrupted teaching. I was less annoyed than usual: for once, I had written my notes neatly enough that I could simply hand them to the class monitor to write on the board. At least my students wouldn't be too far behind because of the meeting.

The meeting's agenda:

1) The teacher's field trip to Lake Manyara Nat Park is still being planned.

2) There will be a party for students who did well on their Form II exams soon.

3) A teacher is getting married.

The third item was the actual reason for the meeting. The rest were just after thoughts, news to tell us while we were there. The actual news--and the bulk of the meeting--was about the wedding.

In Tanzania, you don't plan your own wedding. You get together a bunch of your friends/co-workers/neighbors and tell them you're getting married. Your friends then form a committee to plan your wedding. First they choose a chairman for the committee--people are nominated and a vote is taken, then that person is chairman whether they want to be or not. It's the same for the secretary and treasurer.

One of the biggest jobs of the wedding committee is to raise money. In Tanzania, the entire community funds your wedding. You send out cards asking for contributions, and may get anything between about $2 and $50 from a single person, depending on how well they know you and how much money they make. The average contribution from a co-worker at my school is about $8.

Then, your friends plan the wedding. They find the place where it will be held. They buy the food and cook. Of course they ask you for your input, but the majority of the planning is up to them.

So, we're planning another wedding. The fourth since I"ve been here. At least I"m not the treasurer this time.

A Tanzanian school is like a bucket with a hole in it. You can keep putting in more teachers, over and over, until the bucket should be overflowing. And yet somehow, at the end of the day, there are never enough teachers to fill all the classrooms.

My school briefly had enough teachers. Back around August, we had teachers come to do their student teaching. Then other teachers left to go study. And slowly, as they finished their student teaching, the student teachers left too.

Now there are about 14 of us, for 550 students, all of whom study 10 subjects. There are two chemistry teachers (I'm one), two physics teachers, one history teacher. This puts us in a good position compared to many of the schools in the area, but it certainly doesn't mean we have enough teachers. Last year, we filled all the slots on the school schedule, even if only in name (one teacher had more periods than there were in a week). This year, some slots are empty. Other slots contain teachers who have already left, or who never came back after winter break.

So much turnover. For a country where some people never go much farther than the home village, there's an amazing amount of movement in Tanzania. The educated class of teachers is constantly moving, looking for a better place to teach, looking for a place to continue their studies. It's awesome that teachers are going to university and reaching a level of education that their parents or grandparents could only have dreamed of. But what do we do about all the students who are left without teachers?

As I was walking through town this morning, I notice a kid selling necklaces walking towards me. This is normal: souvenir sellers move toward wazungu like iron to a magnet.

'Jambo!' he said.

I don't like being taken for a tourist. I responded rather grumpily, 'Habari za asubuhi?'

'Ah!' he said, his tone changing. 'Where is teacher?'

'Mimi ni teacher'. I am a teacher.

'The other teacher. Peter.'

'He'll be in town in a few hours.'

A short exchange, but a heartening one. After only a few moments, he recognized me! He knows I'm the random white teacher who walks around with the other white teacher--a great improvement over being seen as the random white tourist. I may finally be on my way to becoming a local.

Highest score on my chemistry monthly test: 100

Lowest score on my chemistry monthly test: 0

No wonder I'm never sure what pace to teach at.

[this was written two weeks ago. Since then, it's started raining! My buckets are full of water from my roof. Farmers are crowding into agricultural stores in town to buy corn seeds. I can hear the sound of tractors at night, as for some reason people like plowing at night. My neighbors have started preparing their gardens, as have I. Tunashukuru sana kwa mvua]

The farmers here depend on rain. There's no irrigation, and even the village water pipes run

badly when it hasn't rained for a while.

Usually,there are two rainy seasons: the short rains in December, and the longer rains in March.

The short rains should last most of the month of December, and maybe into January. They're long

enough that one can plant and harvest beans before the land becomes too dry.

This year, it began raining at the beginning of December. The water faucets started to run well.

The farmers plowed their fields and planted beans.

By mid-December, it had stopped raining. By January, the bean plants were all dead. No one harvested

beans this year.

It's dry and dusty in my village now. The water only comes out of the faucet quickly in the mornings.

Yesterday it almost rained: the sky grew dark and it got windy, so windy my formerly-thriving papaya seedling

blew over. But then the sun burned through the clouds, and there was no rain.

Now the time for planting corn is coming. The farmers in my area have usually planted

their corn, mbaazi, and sunflowers by the beginning of February. What if it hasn't rained by February? For

a farmer, crops are food for their family, and crops are money for their children to go to school. If it doesn't

rain this year, most of the people in my village will be in trouble.

Tunamwomba Mungu. At every church in my village, from the Catholics to the Lutherans to the Pentecostals,

people will be praying for rain.

[note: this was written two weeks ago, but the Internet connection wasn't good enough to post it at the time]

School opened on Tuesday (Jan 13) to very few students. This is normal. Everyone knows teachers don't

teach the first week, so why come the first week? And of course, all the teachers know that students don't

come the first week. So why teach the first week? If only half the students are in class,

you'll just have to teach that lesson again.

It's an endless cycle: students come late because teachers wait to start teaching. Teachers wait

to start teaching because students come late. At my school, it's not too bad: most of the students

are usually there by the middle of the second week. Universities may wait over three weeks until

enough students show up to start.

So there was no teaching on the first day of school. The students spent most of the morning doing maintenance:

cleaning the classrooms, pruning bushes, watering plants. In mid-morning, the academic master posted a notice

to all teachers: let us start teaching even if the students are few. Okay, I thought. I'll

return the biology final exams to my students and go over the answers. I started to gather my

papers together. Then the school bell, an old metal car piece hanging from a tree, rang. Or rather,

was banged on by a student. Bing bing bing bing bing bing bing! If the bell rings many times, it means there's

an assembly.

We all gathered under the trees behind the school. The students sat on the ground, while the teachers sat in

chairs facing them. The headmaster addressed the students about various aspects of the new school term.

After a while, I started drifting off. Then suddenly the headmaster was saying,'Maybe Kristen doesn't know about

this--do people do this in America?"

Me (a bit peevishly): Watu ni watu tu. Wanafanya hivi Marekani pia. People are people, they

do this in America too.

Everyone started laughing. I don't know what I said Americans do, but apparently it was funny.

Maybe witchcraft? (Part of the headmaster's speech had to do with the students' bad behavior and the fact that students

had been paying local witch doctors to make charms that would cause the teachers to ignore their

bad behavior).

We had lunch after the assembly. Usually, students bring bags of corn and beans to school as

part of their school fees. So usually, lunch is a combination of corn and beans: either ugali and beans

or makande (corn kernels boiled and mixed with beans).

This year, no one has beans. Beans are usually planted in December during the short rains. Well, this year

they were planted at the beginning December, when it started raining. And they all died by the end of December, when the

rains had already stopped. The students were told that instead of beans, they could bring mbaazi (pigeon peas),

which had been harvested back in August.

So we had a lunch of ugali and mbaazi. There were two periods after lunch, but few and scattered students. I decided to wait

another day to start teaching.

(A summary of the rest of the week: taught unusually small classes on Wednesday--20 students instead of 40 per class. On Thursday,

all the students who hadn't paid their school fees were sent home, and my classes only had 10 students. I decided not to teach. On

Friday, I had about 12 students per class, and divided them into small groups to draw posters. Maybe next week I'll have enough students

to start teaching new topics?)

Habari za siku nyingi?

Yes, it's been a while since I've last written. I've been traveling for almost a month now, and will finally be heading back to my house this afternoon. This will, unfortunately, be a very short entry, as the car to my village leaves in twenty minutes.

First: pictures! Go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/kgtanzania to see some pictures from a Christmas hike up Mt. Hanang.

Second: a brief summary of my holiday travels. I visited a Tanzanian friend's village near Babati, then headed over to a volunteer's house in a village near the town of Katesh on Christmas eve. I spent Christmas climbing Mt. Hanang with another volunteer (we got near the top but didn't quite make it due to a storm). Then we headed to his site in Dodoma, rested a few days there, and spent New Years' with a volunteer in Mpwapwa. After some beautiful hiking in the hills of Mpwapwa, I headed to Morogoro to visit my host family for a day. Then it was on to Dar es Salaam, for a week of Peace Corps mid-service training and medical exams. And now? I'm back at my site, and school starts tomorrow morning. It's going to be a quick adjustment from traveling to teaching...though given normal delays in student arrival, I probably won't be teaching until next week.

Third: I'll be continuing with my students from last year, meaning I'll be teaching Form 3 chemistry and Form 4 biology. Form 3 chemistry covers titrations, moles, stoichiometry, electrochemistry, and fuels; Form 4 biology has genetics, growth/mitosis, ecology, and evolution. And since it's Form 4, the last year of secondary school, I'll be trying to review everything from previous years as well so my students will be ready for their exams.

I'll do my best to upload some travel stories and updates on teaching in the next few weeks. I hope everyone had a great New Year!

Around two weeks ago, I finally went to Ngorongoro Crater. This after a year of seeing tourists every time I went to town, and looking at the mountain that contains Ngorongoro from my village every day.

And yes, it is truly beautiful. After hearing about it so much I was kind of skeptical--when you live next to a park for so long, it starts to seem ordinary. But Ngorongoro is amazing and looks nothing like my domesticated, farming village. To get there, you first climb up the mountain, through jungle with baboons and views of forested hills. Then you reach the top, and there's an amazing view of the crater below: long, long stretches of grass dotted with lakes and rivers. You descend into the crater and suddenly you're in the grasslands. It's not high grass, but rather a low, bright green grass, well-cropped by the local grazing animals. And on all sides of you, encircling you, are the green slopes of the crater.

There are an incredible number of animals. We saw huge herds of buffalo grazing together with zebra. We saw a male lion dragging a recently killed zebra across the road, with three female lions watching from the branches of a tree (yes lions climb trees!). We saw a cheetah stalking gazelle, and another cheetah having its kill stolen by hyenas. There was a pool full of hippos with birds perched on their backs. There were warthogs rooting in the dirt,and herds of gazelle everywhere. No elephants or giraffes--they're rarely found inside the crater--but we did see a rhinoceros in the far, far distance.

That's Ngorongoro, the bluish mountain I see everyday from my site. I look at it from farmland, from a land of cows and corn, of tractors and plows pulled by oxen. But from close up, it's clear that Ngorongoro is another world: a bit of the western idea of Africa, a bit of how much of this area looked years ago, and, very much, the world of African nature documentaries. I highly recommend a visit.

(I'll post pictures in a few weeks when I have a good internet connection).

Yes, I'm back to making my garden grow. It's the short rainy season, and while it hasn't rained in a week or so, the soil is now soft enough to work without simply sending clouds of dusts at one's nostrils.

Last year,when I used a hoe to dig my garden, a crowd of neighbors formed around me. I became the neighborhood entertainment. My method of holding a hoe (or perhaps the simple fact that I was using one) was apparently highly amusing.

This year, thankfully, I'm a normal and boring part of the surroundings. Occasionally people shout "Pole na kazi!" (sorry about the work!), but they don't stand and stare, and even when I do something weird in their eyes-like wearing wool winter gloves as gardening gloves-they don't come to grab the hoe from my hands and do the job for me. Which is just as well. I'm gardening more because I enjoy the work and watching the plants grow than because of the vegetables I'll acquire; the process is as important as the product to me. So it's nice that my neighbors no longer consider me incompetent, and that I can stand and slam my hoe into the soil in peace.

Also, my two new garden-related obsessions:

1) Water. Ever since the local water supply became super unreliable in November, I've been paranoid about water. All my buckets must always be full, giving me around 150 liters in storage. Since my garden is about to grow larger, I'm even more worried about water. It's probably time to buy another 60 L bucket for the purpose of holding garden water.

2) Fences. Animals wander around the neighborhood of the school, sometimes watched by their owners, sometimes not. There are donkeys, cows, pigs, sheep, goats. My garden is surrounded by a fence with thorns threaded through it, but it's not a sturdy fence, and a section of it fell apart in November, allowing a donkey into my garden. These days, you'll see me walking along the fence in the evenings, prying for weaknesses, and fixing them rather inexpertly by using branches and planks lashed on with twine.

I've built several beds, but haven't actually planted anything yet, as I'll be traveling for the next three weeks (I did put cow manure--straight from the cow's owner!--around my fruit trees). More garden news will be coming in mid-January, when I return from my travels.

For a short, blessed period, my school had enough teachers. There were over twenty names in the sign-in book each morning. Teaching loads were reasonable, and classes were being taught. It felt as if things were functioning well.

Then, as if the school had become a bucket with a small hole at the bottom, the number of teachers began to decrease. Six teachers left for university, bringing the number of teachers down to about 15. This was still reasonable. But there was a problem.

Every July, the Tanzanian teachers' colleges send their teachers throughout the country to do student teaching. Secondary schools around Tanzanian rejoice, as the number of teachers at their school doubles and the teaching loads finally become reasonable.

But then, every December, the student teachers leave. And the schools are again left without enough teachers.

So. We may have 15 or 16 teachers, but half of them are student teachers. When we open again in January, they'll be gone.

And in March, we receive A-level students. Not only will we need enough teachers to maintain a reasonable standard of education for our O-level students, we'll need extra, university-educated teachers for A-level.

It looks like we'll open next year with about ten teachers. This number may be a little higher, as my headmaster is quite good at finding new teachers. And we may get some extra teachers in February, when the Form 6 students finish their exams and head out in search of temporary teaching jobs. Perhaps we'll also get some more teachers from the government when the teaching college students graduate in March. This will help. But it will not fix the hole in the bucket, the basic problem in the Tanzanian school system.

Quite simply, teaching is hard. Teaching in a rural school with no electricity is especially hard. There's too much work, too many students, not enough support and not enough money. A lot of teachers aren't teaching because it's a great job, or because they love teaching. They're teaching because it's the job they can get, while they fill out applications to universities or save up money to pay tuition. Some of these people are truly great teachers, and their students love them, but the fact is that they won't be teaching for a long time. A year or two, and then they move on...and the school is again left to search for new teachers.

So. We may get more teachers, but even if we do, I'll probably be writing this entry again next year. In American schools, I grew used to stability: teachers came and went, but you could at least rely on them staying for the whole school year. Here, a single class may have four different chemistry teachers in a year. Stability is elusive and there is little the students can depend on. Sometimes, it's no wonder that the most successful students are the ones who've become so used to studying on their own that they're not sure what to do when a teacher enters the class.

The other day, a Tanzanian asked why so many Americans and Europeans come here to see the parks. "Do you not have parks in America? Are there no wild animals there?"

This is a fairly common questions. Tanzanians are well-aware that tourists come here from around the world to see their parks, but that doesn't mean they know why. If you've lived in a country with elephants, lions, and giraffes all your life, and haven't traveled to another country or seen much TV, it's won't be obvious to you that not all countries have lions. Nor will you realize that these animals, which have always been in your country and have always seemed like ordinary wildlife to you, fascinate people in countries many thousands of miles away.

My favorite part of answering these questions is trying to explain American wildlife. I have yet to find a good way to explain bears. "They're like, uh, uh...well, a little like a lion but not exactly, uh...let me show you a picture in this biology book."

Just to let you all know, I've posted some new photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kgtanzania.

One step forward, one step back.

I had about 14 fruit trees in my garden. The garden is surrounded by a wooden fence, built by a local craftsman from trees he cut down with his machete. For 11 months, it successfully protected my garden from the donkeys, cows, pigs, and goats that wander around the school ground. But it was starting to fall apart, and my attempts at repairing it by tying flimsy planks across the fence with twine were not very successful. Two weeks ago, on Sunday morning, a donkey entered my garden. It ate the tops off my papaya trees, chopped my formerly-thriving passion fruit vines down to a few leaves, and pulled my stafeli tree out of the ground.

Eight months of watering, and the passion vines are back to where they started. The papaya and stafeli trees may or may not make it. Yeah, I've been a little demoralized garden-wise. But there are still many trees the donkey didn't touch, and the fence has been rebuilt, complete with thorns. Hopefully, when I return to my site from travelling, enough time will have passed that I'll be motivated to work on my garden again.

(I've been watering my trees every day for months now, and watching them slowly grow taller provides some stability to my life and helps me keep my sanity. Seeing them eaten by donkeys was not good for my mental equilibrium).

But in good news, I built a brick oven! I took this idea from another volunteer, whose been baking bread for himself for months now. It turns out to be much easier than I thought to build an oven. Basically, you need a pile of bricks and some metal window mesh. You make a U-shape (three sides of a rectangle, with the fourth side left open) two bricks high. Then you lay a piece of window mesh across the bricks, for hot charcoal to sit on. Then you add two more layers of bricks, followed by another piece of window mesh (this one is for the thing you're cooking to sit on). Then two more layers of bricks, or three if you expect to cook something big.

The next steps are to close the top and front of the oven. To close the top, you can use a piece of metal roofing with dirt or bricks piled on top as insulation. I don't have metal roofing, so I used a piece of window mesh, plus a plank to strengthen the mesh. I then piled bricks on top of the oven. I left a small opening for a chimney, which is made of a can with the bottom cut out.

To close the front of the oven, I used bricks. You need to leave a space on the bottom for air to blow in, so I placed two bricks to either side of the front of the oven, then placed one brick across them to make a sort of arch. I then piled bricks in front of the rest of the oven.

To use the oven, I simply place lit charcoal in the lower piece of window mesh, place the pan of whatever I'm cooking on the higher piece of window mesh, and close the oven with a large pile of bricks in the front. And wait. Bread takes about an hour to an hour and a half to cook, and quick bread takes only 30 minutes.

So: donkeys are bad, but fresh bread is awesome. That's my conclusion for the week.

(You can see pictures of the oven at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kgtanzania)

Yesterday morning, I was in my office, listening to Obama’s acceptance speech on the radio. A teacher came by with a common sight: a sheet of paper requesting michango, or contributions. Michango can be for weddings, for graduation ceremonies, for funerals. This one was for a funeral.

To be honest, I didn’t sign the sheet at the time. I told her to come back when the speech was over. And then told a second teacher the same thing. But later that day, I did give my 1000 Tsh (about eighty cents, a common donation sum) in michango. And thought no more of it.

Until about 5:30 that evening, when a teacher came by. “Sorry I’m late. Are you ready to go?”

To go? Where?

“To visit the family of the deceased. We’re leaving now.”

But…I’ve never met the deceased.

“Neither have many of us, but she is mwenzetu, our companion, because she was a teacher like us. So we are visiting the family to give them support.”

But…I’m not dressed nicely enough. I’m not ready to go.

“No problem. We can wait for you.”

This is clearly a community duty. And besides, what reasons do I have not to go? I didn’t have any other plans, other than listening to the radio and writing in my journal.

So I put on a nice set of clothes, and climb into the back of a pick-up truck with a crowd of teachers.

There is much conversation about Obama on the way there. Can it be called the White House, now that a black man is president? Will there start to be prejudice against white people instead of against black people? There seems to be an assumption that whoever’s in power will give advantages to their “tribe”; I try to explain that things don’t quite work that way in America. At least they shouldn’t, if we’re living up to our ideals.

We bump over dirt roads, ducking down so that branches don’t hit our heads. As we travel, I see what most of my region looks like: hills, rolling fields, scattered mud houses with thatched roof. There’s not a high population density here. A family, a few cows, a large field for corn and grazing. Then open space. Then another few houses, another herd of cows, more fields. There are parts of Tanzania where you can’t walk for more than a few minutes without walking into someone’s yard. I’m not living in one of those areas.

We arrive at the house, greet the family, and sit down for tea. As we chat, my headmaster notes the two old men who are sitting with us: one man, already in his late sixties, is the son of the older man. “How old is he?” we ask the son. “One hundred twenty three,” the son says. “How old are you?” we ask. “Sixty eight. But I’m his fourth son.” I don’t quite buy that the older man is a hundred twenty three, but I’ll believe that he’s over a hundred. When he was a child, Tanganyika was a German colony. He tells us of carrying stones for the German colonists, and how each person had to pay a tax of one rupiah (three shillings, less than a cent in current money) per year.

Lots of tea, lots of conversation. At the end we take pictures. Me with the old man, our hands held together and up in the air as if we’re running for office. Some students from my school with the two old men: the new generation that’s only known a free Tanzania, and a generation that saw both German and British colonist. Me with some children of the family. Then we leave the house, climb into the pick-up truck, and crouch down in the bed for a bumpy ride home in the dark.

Water is a problem. The faucet next to my house is broken. The faucet at the other end of the row of teachers' houses has a line starting at 5:30 in the morning. When the water runs, it runs slowly. Sometimes a liter a minute. Sometimes 2 liters a minute. In the morning, when things are best, maybe a respectable 5 liters a minute. But by 8 or 9 am the water pressure is low, and by 4 pm the water may not be running at all.

Water is necessary. There's 14 fruit tree seedlings in your garden, and every day they dry up in the hot sun. There are clothes to be washed. There are dishes to clean. You need to bathe, and you should probably filter a bit of water for drinking as well. How to prioritize? The trees can get dirty dish water, but will they die if the water contains laundry soap? You can bathe and wash clothes less, but how much less? And how often do you want to get up at 5:30 am to fetch water?

Water is a blessing. Sometimes, amazingly, it falls from the sky. There is no line for it. There's no long wait. You simply run around as fast as you can, putting every bucket, pot, and bowl you own under the roof to catch the rain water. For the next three days, you have enough water to wash clothes, bathe, and water your fourteen fruit tree seedlings, all without every waiting in line.

Maji ni uhai. Water is life. More and more, as the dry season continues, I realize this. It is dusty, amazingly dusty, and every time I see a lake or a river I am amazed at how much water exists in this world. I have developed an appreciation, almost an obsession, over clean, clear water. It will be a long time until I take water for granted again. Even after I return to the U.S., it will be a long, long time until it feels normal not to have several 20 liter buckets of water stored in my house, just in case.

It is nearly a year since the day I boarded a plane to Tanzania. A year since I came out of the airport into the humidity of Dar es Salaam, half-asleep, disoriented, and more than a little afraid. I remember walking into my room that night and feeling a sudden, overwhelming feeling of loneliness: I was alone in a room in a country I didn’t know, surrounded by people speaking a language I didn’t understand. I never stopped to ask myself, “Was my decision to come here wrong? Should I go back to the U.S.?” I never thought about running back to where I came from. But that first night, as I walked alone into my room, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of being utterly, completely alone.

I’m now on my way back to that same hotel, to meet the new trainees who will be arriving by plane in just a few days. I’ll be looking back in time, at the person I once was, as the trainees make their way to the hotel from the airport. It’s the perfect place to be on my year anniversary of arriving in Tanzania. And it leads me to look back and think, how have I changed since I’ve arrived here?

It’s a hard question for someone to answer for themselves, as change is slow and hard to measure while it’s happening. If you want a really good answer, you’ll have to come visit me and tell me how I’ve changed. All that said, though, here are some thoughts on life after a year in Tanzania:

1) Tanzania is home.

I rarely think about the country I left behind. I don’t think about TVs or paved roads, American food or reliable electricity sources. I have long ago stopped yearning for things which I can’t find here, and which after months of living here I have forgotten about anyway. Tanzania is now home. It’s normal for chickens and cows to be walking along the road beside me. It’s normal to pass women carrying baskets of bananas on their heads, small children walking by themselves, and school-children dressed in uniforms. It’s normal for greetings to be an important and daily part of life, for the public transportation to be crowded daladalas, for meals to be beans and rice or ugali and greens. I no longer feel the constant pressure one feels as a newcomer. Am I doing this right? Will I offend someone? Is this area safe to walk in? Does the guy next to me want to steal my phone? These and a thousand other little things used to put pressure on me. Now the pressure, if it comes, arises simply from daily life. I worry about things like whether I will teach my students enough of the syllabus before their exams, whether my neighbors are watering my garden while I’m traveling, and whether the ATM at the bank will be working when I reach town. Life in Tanzania is no longer daunting, yet neither is each event an adventure and each day a subject for an excited journal entry. After a year here, life in Tanzania is simply life.

2) Plans? What plans?

The bus is an hour late? No problem, I’ll sit here and read my book. Classes are canceled today, with no advance warning? Well, I guess I’ll sit in my office and correct exams, and maybe we can do that debate I scheduled for today later this week. I’m the type of person who likes to plan ahead and to know what’s coming next. Even now, after a year of having my plans foiled, I still write down what I want to do with my classes for the next two weeks, and I still have a grand, carefully-scheduled scheme in my mind. The difference is that I no longer expect this scheme to work. I write plans with the expectation that they will change. I walk to the school in the morning expecting to have to improvise and change my schedule at the last minute. I no longer worry about foiled lessons and destroyed schedules, nor do I blame myself for these problems. As a wise friend said, “Prepare for but neither worry about nor depend on what you expect from the future.” It’s a good way to live in Tanzania.

3) Learning to be assertive

I wasn’t particularly good at saying no in the U.S. You want me to help you with your chemistry homework? Well, I have a thesis due in two weeks and I’m way behind in all my other classes, but sure, I’ll help you. You want to borrow this book? Well, I kind of need it, but sure, as long as you give it back later.

I stayed reasonably sane in the U.S. despite being unable to refuse people, because people rarely asked me for things. Here, people ask for me things all the time. Can I borrow your watering can? Your camera? Your chemistry book? Can you leave the class you’re teaching to take a picture of me? My parents’ house is too far from the school, can I live in your house with you? I just met you, but can I marry you?

With a barrage of questions of this type, I quickly learned to say no. Drawing lines has been a little harder—I’m still deciding what I’m willing to lend out and what I’m not, who I’m willing to go out of my way for and who is definitely not worth the time and trouble. But while I’m still drawing lines, once the line is drawn, it stays there. No, I need to water my garden this afternoon. My camera batteries are dead. I need my chemistry book to write lesson plans. No way, I’m not leaving the forty students I’m teaching to take a picture of you. Sorry, I’d love to let you live in my house, but my organization doesn’t let me live with anyone else. And I suppose you could marry me…if you’re willing to cook, wash my clothes, learn fluent English, and give fifty cows to my father. Oh, and I should mention I have no intention of getting married soon, maybe you should come back in ten years with those cows.

If there’s any useful skill I’ll be taking back with me to the U.S., it’s the ability to say no when necessary. And to differentiate who I should say no to firmly and possibly rudely, and who is important/nice/friendly enough to say no to in a polite or humorous way.

4) The importance of relationships

I have always been an introspective person. In the U.S., this also meant I was a bit of a loner. I was perfectly happy spending hours by myself reading, writing, or simply thinking. I enjoyed the time I spent with my friends, but at the same time, I had no problem with being alone.

Tanzania has changed this. I have become good at being an extrovert. I can make small talk with the person next to me on the bus, and chat about anything from the school I teach at to the state of the local crops to American culture with neighbors who invite me to dinner. I have learned to make friends with a few words: to find out where people are from so I can greet them in their tribal language, or to find out where people have traveled and worked so I can make a connection with them based on places we have both been. I have a collection of phone numbers and e-mail addresses for Tanzanians I will probably never meet again—but who may prove helpful should I ever pass through their village. I have a wealth of stories of coincidences, from the guy on the computer next to me in Morogoro who knew a teacher that lives only a few houses down from me, to the guy on a bus seven hours from my village who had once been a student at my school.

It seems that I can't go anywhere in Tanzania without meeting either someone I know or someone who is a relative or friend of someone I know. Fairly amazing, considering that the population of the country is as large as that of California.

At the same time as I've become more extroverted, I've come to place a greater value on relationships. One of the main things we were taught during training is that Tanzanians place a greater value on relationships than on things like productivity, directness, and arriving places on time. This has become my view as well. I've learned to expect that a trip to the store to buy soap will take two hours, because I have to greet everyone on the way there and back. I stop by neighbors’ houses just to say hi and to exchange news. And while I won't give money to the drunken old men who sit around by the village stores, I will lend money to neighbors, or simply give them money in the case of weddings, funerals, and sick relatives.

As I've become more extroverted and more accustomed to having relationships with my neighbors, I've become worse at being alone. I'll find myself alone in my house for the first time in a while, and I'll simply think, now what? I've gone from being accustomed to spending my free time alone with a book or a pen, to having no idea what to do with myself when there's no one there to talk to.

Tanzania has taught be to how to start relationships with strangers, how to keep up relationships with neighbors, and, most importantly, how to treasure the relationships I have. I hope to take this skill back to America with me—and to learn to use it in a place where it is much harder to start conversations with strangers and much more challenging to keep up relationships with neighbors.

A last thought: Peace Corps volunteers often say that the days pass slowly, but the months pass quickly. This is very true. When I look back, the past year doesn't seem to have gone by in the blink of an eye, but it does seem to have gone by quickly. And, perhaps more strangely, it feels utterly and completely gone: the events seem so distant, so faded in my memory, that I wonder if I arrived here five years ago rather than one. As my second year in Tanzania begins, I have only one goal: to simply enjoy and make the best of each day, because before I know it, I'll be writing an entry like this again. And a blink of an eye later, whether or not I'm ready, I'll be on a plane home. So this year, I plan to simply take things slowly, do my best not to stress too much, and enjoy my life here while I can.

(read the entry after this one first--this is part 2)

DAY 2: BABATI TO DODOMA

I woke up that morning on a tight schedule. If there are no delays, it takes three hours to get from Babati to Kondoa, and five to get from Kondoa to Dodoma. Eight hours total, if there are no delays. I needed to get to Dodoma by 4 to catch a car to my friend’s site. My thoughts: get on a bus at 7 am. Kondoa by 10 am. Dodoma by 3 pm. Mungu akipenda, God willing, I’ll be in time to catch the car at 4 pm. And if the normal Tanzanian delays catch up with me? Well…I won’t think about that yet.

Things began well. I awoke at 5:30 am and went to eat breakfast. The missionaries were not yet up, but we’d discussed my plans the night before, and they’d left out cereal, a bowl, and a spoon. Cereal! This is a food that doesn’t exist in rural Tanzania, and is only available in expensive imported boxes in the cities. I happily downed two bowls of cereal with milk. Then (with the family’s two dogs nipping at my ankles and setting off my fear of dogs), I shouldered my bags and walked out into the streets of Babati.

For my whole life, I have had a terrible sense of direction. I consistently walk out of classrooms, offices, and bathrooms and turn the wrong way. That morning was no exception. I walked for ten minutes before I saw someone else, and when I did, I prompty asked if I was going the right way. The answer? Definitely not. I turned around and went back the way I’d come.

6:45 am. 6:50 am. I looked worriedly at my watch, afraid I’d miss the 7 am bus and be stuck in town until 8. But that day, Mungu was on my side, and things worked out. I arrived at the bus stand in time to buy one of the last three tickets for the 7 am bus to Kondoa. And by 7:15 am, we were on our way.

Bumpety bump, bumpety bump. Since I’d bought one of the last tickets, I was in the very back of the bus. What this means is that each time we went over a bump, I was temporarily in the air. I’d be talking with my neighbor, then WHEE!, our butts would bump out of our seats and then plop back down.

My neighbor: Are you afraid of Osama bin Laden?

Me: Not really. I don’t see the point in being afraid of things I have no control over. For example, this bus is going rather quickly, and it’s possible it could get into a crash. But I have no control over it, therefore I don’t see a point in worrying about it.

(Superstitious side of self: what if by mentioning this I cause a crash?)

No fears, the bus did make it safely to Kondoa, and there was no sign of Osama on the road. Although there was a store called the “George Bush shop” in Kondoa. But I neither entered to George Bush shop, nor even stopped to go to the bathroom. For the second time that day, I barely made a connection. I hopped directly from my bus out of Babati to the nearly full 10:30 bus to Dodoma. And by 10:45 am, we were on our way south.

Bumpety bump, bumpety bump. I spent the first 15 minutes wondering if we’d even make it out of Kondoa. The bus looked like it’d been welded together and could fall apart at the slightest tap. The bumpiness came from the bus itself as much as from the road. Bumpety bump, bumpety bump. Should I have taken another bus? Will we break down in the middle of nowhere? Questions bounced around in my head, but after a few more bumps, they bounced out. I have no control over this. Worrying about it isn’t going to help. Sit calmly, look out the window, and hope for the best.

And the land out the window was…empty. Not empty in terms of plants, but in terms of people. There was low scrub forest, hills, giant boulders. But there was none of what I’ve grown used to seeing in Tanzania: huts, stores, cornfields, cows…signs of people. There was no one on the road, not one guy carrying a bag of charcoal on his bike, not one small child herding cows. There were no huts, no stores, no fields. We were passing through true wilderness. If there were people there, they were well-hidden. Thirty minutes passed between when we left Kondoa and when I finally saw a hut. It was a single hut, with a small cornfield nearby and a few cows. But it was enough to make me heave a sigh of relief. There are people in this world after all. It’s not an endless, empty land.

The bus continued to make its way over the dirt road, slow but steady. It wasn’t as empty as it had been, but it certainly wasn’t populated. We’d pass occasional groups of huts and even villages, but there were long, long stretches of empty land between them. And the area was one of the poorest I’ve yet seen in the country. Most of the villages consisted simply of dirt huts in the desert, with no electricity or water. There were few if any schools in the area. And the closest paved road—and most likely the closest hospital as well—was many, many hours away.

We stopped at one of the main villages along the road to pick up passengers. People ran to the window, selling food. Peanuts! Mishkaki (spiced barbecued beef)! Water! Ndege!

Ndege?

The ndege seller was holding a pot of what looked to be small pieces of meat. But there was something odd about them: despite being so small, they didn’t looked like they’d been cut.

I asked the passenger in front of me what ndege was.

“They’re small wild birds, which they catch and then cook.”

Hmm. Makes sense. Ndege means bird, and wild birds were one of the few resources in the area. But this was the first time I had ever heard of wild birds being eaten in Tanzania, and certainly the first time I’d seen them for sale.

I bought some peanuts, deciding to leave the ndege for another time. The bus continued on its way. I counted the kilometers on the signs for Dodoma: 150 km left, 100 km, 50 km, 20 km. Somewhere around 10 km from Dodoma, we hit paved road. But the bus was in such bad condition that it continued to feel just as bumpy.

10 km, 9 km, 8 km, 7 km. 6.5 km. 6 km. 5.5 km.

It’s common for things to seem very, very slow as one approaches a long-desired goal. In the case of the bus, this was made worse by the fact that many of the passengers wanted to be let off at the outskirts of the city. We stopped to let people off. They spent five minutes finding the bags they’d stowed in the compartment beneath the bus, and the next five minutes either chatting with or arguing with the conductor. Finally, finally, we started moving again. Five minutes later we stopped and repeated the whole procedure.

I spent a lot of time staring at my watch. And tapping my feet in impatience. And listening to my heart pound. 3:20 pm. 3:30. 3:45. Will I really get there by 4?

At 3:50 pm, we pulled into the bus station. By 3:55, I was on a taxi headed toward the stand for the cars to my friend’s village. By 4:05, I was at the stand, chatting with the driver of the village car.

“When’s the car leaving?”

“Around 4:30.”

I sat down to a meal of chipsi (french fries) and soda with a sigh of relief.

And in typical Tanzanian style, we didn’t actually leave until 5 pm. And then, we circled around the area for 15 minutes before finally heading south on the road to the village. I stood in the back of a crowded pick-up truck, talking with a student about American culture and male and female gender roles, ignoring the ravings of the drunken conductor, and feeling more elated and relieved than I had felt in a long time. Sixteen hours of bumpy dirt roads, two cars and four buses, and somehow, in a land of delays and broken-down buses, I had made it. Nashukuru. It’s proof of one of my theories about Tanzania. In the middle of a journey or project, things often seem to be wrong, even utterly and hopelessly wrong. Yet, in some magical and inexplicable way, they usually do work out.

Take out a map of Tanzania, and look for two towns: Karatu and Dodoma. If you can't find Karatu, look for Arusha instead. Found them? Good. Now, tell me: what do you think would be the fastest route between these two places?

If you said 'Head straight south', your answer is logical...but wrong. The fastest way from Karatu to Dodoma is to go from Karatu to Moshi, Moshi to Morogoro, Morogoro to Dodoma. In other words, to go east, then south, then west again.

Why? Because that's where the paved roads are. The land between Karatu and Dodoma is sparsely settled and undeveloped. As a result, the roads are unpaved, and the buses that travel them are old and poorly-maintained. I have asked many Tanzanians, 'What about the road south to Dodoma?' The answer is always the same: Don't even think about it. Take the paved road through Arusha.

Sound attractive? I thought it did. So about a week ago, I forsook the paved road through Arusha, and hopped on a car headed for the bumpy southern road.

The plan was as follows:

Day 1: Karatu to Mbulu, Mbulu to Babati. A night staying with American missionaries in Babati.

Day 2: Babati to Kondoa, Kondoa to Dodoma, Dodoma to my friend's school. This was iffy, as I'd need to get to Dodoma by 4 pm to catch the car to his school, and Babati to Kondoa is 8 hours if everything goes as planned (and when does everything go as planned in rural Tanzania?).

DAY 1: KARATU TO BABATI

I awoke at 5:30 am with a plan to be at the main road waiting for a car by 7 am. As usual, Tanzania foiled my carefully-laid plans. It took longer than expected to get everything ready: to pack my bags, sweep my floor, and leave my house clean for me to come back to. It also took longer than expected to give neighbors my watering can and buckets so they could water my garden when I was gone. Greetings are important in Tanzania, you can’t hurry through them. And if your headmaster wants you to write a letter for him before you leave, well, you write it and arrive, with a sigh, at the road at 8:30.

I was headed toward the town of Mbulu. Of course, since I was headed toward Mbulu, all the cars that passed were going the other way. I finally got in an Mbulu-bound private car after over an hour of waiting, and reached Mbulu by noon.

A quick lunch and a glance around Mbulu: a quiet, forested town, too bad I’m in too much of a hurry to stay. I asked around the small bus stand for transport to Babati. “The Babati buses all left already, you could come back in the morning.” Umm, no, it’s necessary I reach Babati today. “Then take a Katesh bus and get off at Dereda.” I was pointed to a bus that already looked full. “Can you stand?” the conductor asked. “Um…sure.” I got on and crowded into the already-full aisle.

It was the first day of school vacation, and all the students were leaving their schools in town to go back to their home villages. Hence, a very crowded bus, but also a bus full of the people I’m most used to interacting with: students. The crowded, cramped four hour ride felt a little shorter due to conversations with my neighbors. I did eventually get a seat—with bags and a child on my lap—but was nevertheless very happy when we finally reached the town of Dereda, and I switched for a shorter, much less crowded bus to Babati.

Babati is not a big town. But it is the capital of its region, which means it has paved roads and electricity. We had views of the town’s namesake lake, Lake Babati, on the way in. And the town as a whole was much greener than I expected. Thanks to seeing the lake and the trees and to arriving successfully before dark, I was in a good mood as I got off the bus and started walking to the missionaries’ house.

A side note, in case you’re wondering, how did you meet missionaries? The short story is that another Peace Corps volunteer gave me their phone number. The longer story is that there’s a sort of network of Americans in Tanzania who welcome Peace Corps volunteers to their houses. Not everyone’s in it; there are plenty of Americans living in Tanzania who have no interest in hosting Peace Corps volunteers. But there are others who open their houses to us, and encourage us to pass on their phone numbers to our friends. The missionaries are in this group. Even though the Peace Corps philosophy is very, very different from the missionary philosophy, the shared experience of being foreigners in Tanzania is the same. We don’t meet with the intention of changing each other’s political or religious views, we simply meet to share stories of living here, and to give or take hospitality as it’s offered.

And so, I spent my evening in Babati in America. At least that’s what it felt like. The missionaries have four children, meaning that they wanted their house to be fairly American. A hot shower! Pizza and lemonade for dinner! Styrofoam plates! Children sitting on the floor, watching a movie! I went to bed feeling very thankful for the hospitality. Day one was a success, but I still had the bumpy roads and unknown territory of northern Dodoma region ahead of me.

(continued in the entry above this one)

It's been a while. Here's a quick update, hopefully to be followed by more detailed entries in the next few days.

1) Where am I now?

I'm in Morogoro, the city where I had my Peace Corps training. I'll be helping with the training of the new Peace Corps volunteers that will arrive this week. I'll be meeting them at the airport in Dar es Salaam, then heading with them to Morogoro for their first week of training.

2) Where have I been?

I took the 16 hour dirt road south from my site to Dodoma. It was interesting. Look on a map-I passed through Mbulu, spent a night in Babati, passed through Kondoa, and finally reached Dodoma. Details coming soon.

3) How's school?

Due to another teacher's absence, I was put in charge of running chemistry practicals. Practical 1: titration. Mouth pipetting is completely normal in Tanzania. Practical 2: Qualitative analysis. I had no idea how to do this myself until a week before the practical. Again, details coming soon.

How many random thoughts can one type in 13 minutes of Internet time?

-Having a camera makes you the village photographer. And students have no idea how much of a pain it can be to get digital pictures developed. The next day: Have you developed the pictures yet? Where's my picture? You haven't developed it? Well, why not?

-Phone companies constantly change names in Africa too. I was becoming rather attached to my Celtel phone and the rather large amount of Celtel vouchers I was buying each week. They've changed names: now they're called Zain.

-Sharing is expected and automatic. I gave a student a chocolate bar for getting all the questions right on a quiz. Two minutes later, it had been split into six tiny pieces, and five of his friends had a piece (impressive given that my students never, ever eat chocolate!).

-My favorite sign in Tanzania: the sign for MIT at the central roundabout in Moshi. MIT=Moshi Institute of Technology, a tiny school in Moshi. I took a picture of my sitemate (an MIT graduate) there yesterday. Maybe it will make the alumni magazine?

Yep, there are long weekends in Tanzania too. Friday was Nane Nane (August 8), also known as peasants' day--basically a holiday in honor of farmers. Which also means no school...and a chance to travel!

Now, I rarely travel. My fellow volunteers in Kilimanjaro region call me "site rat" because I hardly ever leave my site. At least from their point of view. In truth, I go to town about every two weeks, but rarely go as far as Moshi because it's a six hour ride, and that's a long way to go if I leave Saturday morning and have to return Sunday evening. Peace Corps groups Arusha and Kili regions together as a single "super-region", but really, Kilimanjaro region is a world away from me. The sites of the Kilimanjaro volunteers are mountainous, green, and full of banana trees; mine is a rolling plain full of cattle and corn.

But this weekend, I realized Friday was free, and I actually had time to reach Moshi. And a great thing about travelling this weekend: there are shadowers here! These are environmental and health trainees who are about to finish their training, and spent a week visiting other volunteers as part of the end of their training. I met 5 of them last night, and 3 more in Moshi this afternoon. After nearly 11 months in Tanzania, it's hard to believe that I was once like this too: excited but also overwhelmed, confused, and often exhausted by the new environment and new language. I'm creeping up on a year in Tanzania now. It's been a while. And still about 16 months to go...I wonder how I'll look back on my current self 16 months from now.

My chemistry Form II students have their national exams in November. But there are regional mock exams in September. And district mock exams a little over three weeks from now. They're stressed out.

Every day I hear, "when will we reach balancing equations? when will we reach ionic equations?". They study past exams and so have a good idea of what questions are asked a lot. And they're very, very worried we won't reach certain common topics before the district mock exams. Namely, balancing equations.

Now, let me point out that I had a teaching plan. A good, logical teaching plan, where I carefully teach one topic before starting a new topic whose very foundations depend on the previous topic. Also in this plan--which looked great back in January--we would have reached chemical equations back in May.

Well, things happen. Days of school were missed, sometimes weeks of school were missed. The plan fell a little behind. At our current rate, we'll reach chemical equations just about when the district exams start.

Mwalimu, tutafika chemical equations lini? When are we starting chemical equations?

I never before appreciated how much pressure high-stakes national exams put on the teacher. And these exams are much, much more high-stakes than any we have in the U.S. The students know very well that their future depends on the outcome. I know very well that their future depends on the outcome. And while I realize that their success or failure depends on a lot more than just me, I'd like to do my best to make sure they succeed.

Mwalimu, tutafika chemical equations lini?

(Sigh). It messes with my teaching plan and my general ideas of the best way to teach, but we might just skip covalent compounds--which admittedly you don't need to know to balance a chemical equation, though they're rather important in chemistry--and go straight to chemical equations. Otherwise, my students will be so panicked they won't hear a single thing I say.

Today, I happened to be going to town with the daughter of a friend of my headmaster's family, who had been staying at the headmaster's house. As we neared town, she said "Karibu kwetu", welcome to my house. I was in no hurry and some of my best moments in Tanzania have come from following random calls of "Karibu kwetu". So, we got off a little before town and went to her house.

As it turns out, she lives at a sort of hospice for sick people. Her mother is a nurse, and takes care of the people living there. I mostly met the people there in passing, simply greeting them as I entered or left. But there was one, a blind and deaf man, who I spent a bit longer 'talking' to.

Being blind, he couldn't see me to know that I wasn't Tanzanian. Being deaf, he also couldn't hear me. I talked to him by writing letters on the palm of his hand with my finger. I wrote: "Habari?"--how are you? He replied aloud "Nzuri, nzuri"--good, good. The grandmother who was helping me communicate with him told me to say who I was. I wrote "Mzungu" (white person). This was apparently such a random thing to say that it took the help of a more expert writer-of-letters-on-palms for the message to get through. She wrote very fast, and I have no idea what was said. I ended with "Pole" (condolences) and I think she then wrote "Goodbye" on his hand.

For all the adventures I've had trying to communicate in Kiswahili and Kiiraqw, this is the most interesting and unexpected communication experience I've had in Tanzania.

School opens again tomorrow.

Now, I had big plans to use this vacation to prepare my classes. I was going to fill notebooks with notes to put on the board. Plan big projects for the reproduction section of the biology syllabus. Overhaul my chemistry teaching plans so I could cover the whole syllabus before the national exams, while also reviewing the whole Form I syllabus. Come up with innovative ways to teach the memorization-heavy biology syllabus so I stop feeling like a machine that exists to put notes on the board.

That was the plan. What did I actually do? Well . . . I traveled. I hiked up two mountains. I saw friends. I visited my host family. I built a solar oven. I did spend a little time messing around in a chemistry lab, and came up with one good demonstration. But mostly, I caught up with friends, saw more of Tanzania, and relaxed.

Today I return to notebooks that are not filled with lesson plans, demos, or brilliant innovative teaching ideas. I return this afternoon with school starting tomorrow, and all I have ready are a week's worth of lesson plans which are adequate but not particularly exciting. Do I feel good about this? No. I wish I had written up more lesson plans, and I especially wish I had thought more about my biology teaching plans. I won't say I have no regrets, that would be a lie.

But, coming from the other side: do I feel particularly bad about this? The answer, again, is no. I didn't realize how exhausted I was until I finally did go on vacation. How much stress I had built up inside me, and how much it was affecting my personality in ways I didn't like. I was snapping at people on the smallest provocation. I was losing my ability to respond to daily annoyances with humor and patience. I was teaching, yes, but my mood outside of teaching was anything but good.

I didn't get much planning done on this break. But I did relax. I caught up with friends and had a lot of cathartic conversations. By exchanging stories with others, I realized that I wasn't alone in the problems and annoyances I face. By seeing other schools and hearing others' stories about teaching, I got inspired to start teaching again. And simply by taking a break from my site, I cleared the built-up annoyance and stress from my system, and got ready to return and live there again for the next many months.

I don't return to notebooks full of lesson plans. Nor do I return with a clear framework of my plans for the semester, or even a general idea of what I want to achieve. But I return relaxed, with a clear mind, without any stress or pressure built up inside. I return emotionally calm and stable and ready to deal with whatever this semester brings. I'm often a perfectionist and of course I'd love to return to those piles of prepared lesson plans and a clear list of goals for the next several months. But as I've realized more and more in Tanzania, the most important thing is not crossing off every item on my to-do list, but rather keeping mentally calm and peaceful enough that I'm ready for any situation. Given the choice between that pile of notebooks and mental peace, I'm glad I took a long vacation. If nothing else, I'll return to school with my patience, humor, and ability to simply enjoy life restored to me.

There is something beautiful about harvesting corn. Standing in the sun surrounded by corn stalks, the blue sky overhead. The colors of the world are vivid and pure: blue sky, brown earth, golden corn. You peel back the leaves around the corn cobs, revealing golden tassels that look like blond hair, then the golden kernels of the corn itself.

The work is easy, repetitive. And yet it feels significant in a deep and undescribable way. Peeling the leaves off the ears of corn, throwing the cobs into piles, you feel yourself a part of the rhythm of life. In December, when you reached your village, this soil was bare but for a few stubby pieces of grass. In early January, you hoed it with a lot of help from neighbors. In mid-January, a neighbor planted corn and beans for you, because those are the crops that everyone plants. You watched the corn sprout from the soil, and then grow tall and green. For two months it formed an emerald fence around your garden. And then, slowly, it began to turn brown. The stalks became dry; the ears golden. And now you're out in the field, piling the corn cobs, breaking the stalks. Two days of work, a pile of corn drying in your courtyard, the cornstalks carted away to feed to a neighbor's cow. And now we're back at the beginning, the land bare and empty, only a few blades of grass hinting at its fertility.

The cycle of the seasons. The cycle of birth and death, growing and dying. A cycle which has set the days of all human lives until very recently, and which still measures the rhythm of life in a rural village. It can be a hard cycle, an exhausting cycle, a cycle full of blisters and sweat and hands stained with dirt. But at it's deepest level, there is something beautiful about it. In an often unstable existence, there is something calming and peaceful about being so close to the eternal cycle of life.

I've been traveling a lot lately, mostly on work-related leave. Which means that I spent a good deal of time messing around in the lab at a friends' site. Productive? Well, some of our attempts were, and the biggest failure is a good story. Here's some of what I did.

1) Goats' blood

I've been invited to give a science presentation using local materials at a district science teachers' convention. I brainstormed with a friend and came up with what sounded like a great idea: extract DNA using soap, salt, and ethanol. Sound easy? We thought so. You just scrape the inside of your cheek, put the cheek cells in salt water, mix with detergent, and add ethanol. The DNA should precipitate beautifully at the ethanol-water interface.

We tried this first with cheek cells. No luck. We thought, maybe cheek cells don't have enough DNA. How about blood?

Now admittedly, red blood cells have no nucleus and therefore no DNA. But white blood cells should have plenty of DNA. We went to the butcher to request cow or goats' blood. The butcher was closed. We went back a second time; still closed. By this time, all the people in the area of the butchery knew we wanted goats' blood. But we figured we wouldn't be able to get it until the butchery finally opened the next day.

That night, there's a knock at the door. "I heard you wanted goats' blood." It's a guy carrying a cup of coagulated goats' blood. Er...yeah, we did want blood, let me go get a container. There was a jar of goats' blood in the refrigerator overnight, and we headed to the lab again in the morning.

As for the experiment? Still no luck. We tried it with goats' blood and pure ethanol and with Konyagi (the local hard liquor). We tried two types of detergents. Back when we were using cheek cells, we even tried a sketchy industrial alcohol we'd bought in town, which was purple and smelled like ashtrays. No luck all around. We sterilized the coagulated goats' blood with the purple alcohol, and dumped them both, with a good deal of relief, in the school trashpit.

2) Flower petals

Clearly, a different plan was needed for my science demonstration. We'd also read that you can make acid-base indicators by extracting the color from flower petals with alcohol. This one worked beautifully.

Take the petals of a local flower (I think we used bougainvillea). Combine with Konyagi or ethanol and crush with a mortar and pestle. Filter. You should have a pink liquid.

Add acid to this pink liquid. It turns slightly purple. Hmm. Not very exciting. Maybe it won't work, we thought.

But then! Add base (sodium hydroxide). Whoa! It turned yellow. A pink liquid made from flower petals, turning yellow when combined with something clear? That's cool! I think I have a science demo :-).

When people think of the Peace Corps, they often picture living in a mud hut with a thatched roof, cooking over a fire and fetching water in buckets from a river. And while it's very possible that some environmental volunteers live this way, education volunteers are usually in less remote areas, and live in teachers' houses (which are nicer than the average village house). Here's a glimpse of the spectrum of volunteers' houses.

On one end: concrete house with a metal roof. Concrete floors. No electricity. No water. This is my house. The house itself is great: there's a dining/living room and three other rooms, a walled courtyard in the back, and a pit toilet, room for bathing, room for cooking, and room for storage behind the courtyard. I use a kerosene lamp at night, cook on a charcoal stove or a kerosene stove, and fetch water in 20 L or 40 L buckets from the faucet by my house. It's simple, but functional. And--I should say this before I go on--I love my house. While I wouldn't complain if electricity miraculously reached my village while I leave there, I wouldn't leave my pit toilet, bucket baths, and kerosene lamps for another site.

More in-between: I visited a friend on the slopes of Kilimanjaro, who has running water and a sink, but no electricity. She has a shower and flush toilet, and cooks on a gas stove. The stove is powered by a large propane tank, which she occasionally carries to a neighbor's store so that it can be taken to town and refilled.

Safi sana! (very nice): I've visited two friends who teach at teachers' training colleges. These sites are generally very well set-up. They have both electricity and water in their house, at least in theory (I say in theory because both the electricity and the water can be unreliable). One has an small electric stove he bought for himself, the other a propane-powered gas stove the head of his school bought him as a welcoming gift. And of course, having electricity allows one to get all sorts of useful things, from blenders to refrigerators to laptops.

So there's a sample of the spectrum of Peace Corps teachers' houses. In many ways they're very similar: all concrete houses with metal roofs and concrete floors, and generally furnished with maps on the walls and random piles of books, old boxes that came by mail, and Newsweeks from Peace Corps. And, no matter how many blenders or refrigerators or laptops people have, we all share one more thing in common: no washers or dryers. Some people may be washing clothes while their blender whirs and their plugged-in iPod plays music in the background, but we're all washing our underwear by hand.

It's been a busy, awesome week. Since I last wrote here, I've travelled from Dar es Salaam to Morogoro, Morogoro to Mpwapwa, Mpwapwa to Dodoma. From the coast to the mountains to the desert. It's a good break and a good chance to see a lot of friends I haven't seen in months.

Dar: went to an awesome Ethiopian restaurant. And to a movie! There must be a wormhole somewhere in Tanzania that transports people from Dar to America. The movie was at a theater in a shopping mall, and felt exactly like a mall in the U.S. Well, except that some of the signs at the clothing stores were in Swahili, and you're assigned a seat in the theater when you buy your movie ticket.

Morogoro: I saw my host family for the first time in six months! And it really did feel like coming home to visit family. I ate far too well, caught up on the family news (one host sister got married!), went out with friends and came back-by taxi-after dark. It's good to know that somewhere in Tanzania, there's a door I can knock on, at any time of the day or night, and be welcomed.

Also, I'd forgotten how beautiful the mountains in Morogoro are. I went hiking there for the first time. After living in arid Arusha region, they are incredibly green! Every slope is planted with vegetable fields or banana trees, everything that's not cultivated is covered with the native trees and vegetables. When you hike in the U.S., you're usually in the wilderness, where no one lives. When you hike in Tanzania, even in the mountains, you're often walking past peoples' farms and houses.

Mpwapwa: This is an area in Dodoma region. Dodoma is in the center of the country and is famous for being dry, flat, and boring. It's a false rumor. Dodoma may be dry, but Mpwapwa is mountainous and beautiful. We went hiking again here. The mountains unfortunately had very few trees, and for an obvious reason: there were charcoal-making fires everywhere. People climb up the mountain, cut down a tree, and set it on fire. The burning tree is then buried under sand and dirt, where it continues to smolder and turn into charcoal. Days later, the person who cut the tree will return to bag the charcoal, and drag it down the mountain to sell it. It's hard work. And it's devastating for the forests. But until people have a better, equally cheap fuel to cook with, it's a problem that's going to continue.

Dodoma: the parliamentary capital of Tanzania! It's hot. And dry. But the city is spacious and well-planned. I'm on the way to visit a friend's school, and will write more about it when I return.

Something that's been on my mind a lot lately. What do I want to achieve here in Tanzania? How am I trying to change things? What do I want to leave behind? In short, what am I doing here?

It's not an easy question. A lot of people who join the Peace Corps are idealists, myself included. And we want to leave something concrete behind. A library that we built, a computer lab we founded, a science lab we improved. Or we want to know we did something big and useful: started a health club that trained hundreds of students, or founded a school garden that fed vegetables to the whole school. There's a peculiar pressure in being a Peace Corps volunteer, of wanting to do one's job of teaching well, while also wanting to save the world.

Which brings us back to the question, what am I doing here? On a daily basis, I'm not saving the world. I'm simply teaching. I'm explaining the structure of the ear or the meaning of chemical formulas. I'm correcting notebooks or writing exams. My daily life of teaching is not so different from teaching in the U.S. Nor does it feel particularly heroic. It's simply a job-a good job, a job I enjoy, but a job nonetheless.

I'm not coming in with perseverance and expertise to save a desperate school. My school is well run and is considered the best in the district. Most of the teachers are motivated, and most of the classes are taught. The headmaster is there whenever he doesn't have to travel for business, and he's quick to address any problems the school is having. On some days, I'll look out at the school and think, I'm not needed here. And by this I don't mean that my teaching isn't important, or that I'm not having some kind of influence, but that the school would run perfectly fine without me. Which is a good thing and gives me great hope for the future of my village.

But it does leave me adrift. What is my purpose here? What am I here to achieve? Perhaps more importantly, what do I want to achieve? I'm wandering, searching for a place where my skills will be useful, where I can do something that couldn't have done without me.

Searching. It's a common position in life: searching for meaning, searching for a place. I'll let you know when I find mine.

I'm currently on a trip that will take me through several regions of Tanzania. In the last few days I've travelling, I've gotten a good reminder of just how varied this place is.

First day: my site. Corn fields and cows as far as the eye can see. A hazy, bluish Ngorongoro in the distance.

Second day: Masai land. The classic African bush. Plains spotted with low shrubs and the occasional trees, Masai herders who look like they could have come out of National Geographic in their traditional shukas (though they probably have cell phones as well).

Third day: The slopes of Kilimanjaro. A banana tree jungle, steep windy roads, so much vegetation that you never know what's around the corner or what's past the nearest house. And--had it not been hidden by clouds--the peak of Kilimanjaro, watching over the scene.

Now: The coast. Dar es Salaam: large buildings, traffic jams, crowds everywhere. Passing by the Indian Ocean in the morning on the way to the Peace Corps office. Palm trees, humidity. Mall grocery stores selling Kelloggs' cereal and American candy, at double what they would cost in the U.S. A world away from my cows and corn.

Next: Dodoma and the desert. And then back to my site, passing from the desert to the coast to the bush to my cornfields again. Magazines may show Africa as all jungle, or as only an endless savannah. But in Tanzania,you take a three hour bus ride, and you're in another world. And not only is the landscape different, the tribal language and customs could be worlds away from the place you just left.

Yesterday was mnaada day in town. The mnaada (which may be spelled mnada) is a cross between a livestock auction, market, and county fair. It's held on the seventh of every month, and it's a huge social event. People come from towns all over the area, as much to see each other as to bargain for cheap prices on cloth, pots, used clothes, plastic containers . . . and goats, cows, chickens, and sheep.

The mnaada is held on a field on the outskirts of town. Looking at it from the road, one sees a huge crowd of people, with daladalas (minibuses) and herds of livestock on the outskirts. And there's a haze of smoke and dust, from the countless people trampling on the dusty ground and the many fires grilling meat.

The mnaada is both exhilarating and overwhelming. You plunge into the crowd and shouts from the sellers assault you from all sides. "Kitenge cloth! Kitenge cloth only 4000 shillings!" "Pots! Pots for sale!" "Sugar cane, sugar cane!" It's especially overwhelming if you're white and therefore, clearly rich and interested in buying souvenirs. "Mzungu! Here!" "My friend, bananas!" "Masai beads, Masai necklaces!"

All the mnaada needs is some cotton candy, fiddle music, and a ferris wheel, and it'd be a county fair. It has its own fair food: sugar cane (which is rarely available in town at other times), grilled meat, sodas. It has the livestock and the jostling crowds of people. And, above all, it has the same function of being a social occasion. Realistically, there's not much you can get at the mnaada that's not available on a daily basis. The prices may be better, but they're not necessarily so much better that they're worth the fare to town and back. And sometimes, people will only come back with one or two things: a pot, a cup or two. But you don't go to the mnaada just to buy things, you go there because it's the big event in town, the monthly festival, the change from day to day life. In my mind, that's the main function it serves, and that's why all the students want permission to leave school early and go to town on the seventh of every month.

The computer I'm typing on has spacebar issues, which makes writing long entries rather frustrating. So, quickly:

-biked the 21 km to town for the first time today. Verdict: exhausting but exhilarating, worth doing once in a while but it won't become my usual way of reaching town. And after biking on a dirt road for 21 km,the paved road in town felt amazing.

-Proctored (here they say invigiliated) 9 out of 10 final exams. Yikes. I think I'm getting better at catching cheating, but there's a lot of it. New rule: one student goes to the bathroom at a time, no taking pens or paper. As the test reaches its end, general panic and a ton of note-passing set in, and I end up snatching a lot of exams out of student hands before time is up. It makes for some good stories, but it's by far my least favorite job at school.

Just passed my six month anniversary at site on June 1. Half a year! These days, my village feels like home and the U.S. feels very distant. It's going to be strange returning to the U.S. 1.5 years from now.

Six months also means the end of my first term teaching; vacation began Friday. Or perhaps I should say 'vacation', as the Form 2 and Form 4 students return Monday, and study through all of break (they have national exams coming up). I plan to travel for part of break, but will be teaching my Form 2 students chemistry on the days that I'm around.

Yesterday:

Awoke at 4:40 am and finished packing my bags. In a taxi to the Dar es Salaam bus station with three other volunteers by 5:15 am. On a bus by 5:50 am, on my way to Arusha by 6:15 am. We pass Tanga region, Moshi, Arusha. But clearly, Arusha isn't far enough in one day (actually I just hate spending the night in hectic, hassle-filled Arusha). So I continue to the town near my village. Arrival time in town: 7:15 pm. Arrival time at my sitemate's house: 8 pm. Nimechoka! [I'm tired!] Thanks god for sitemates who live in town and cook delicious dinners :-).

Today: Reach town from my sitemate's house at 10:30 am. Race to a town 35 minutes away to buy fruit tree seedlings for my school; daladala driver wants me to pay fare for myself and the heavy box of trees despite the fact that the car is half empty; I argue and almost lose my temper. (a sure sign that I'm sick of travel, but it worked, I only paid one fare). Carry the heavy box of trees the 2 minute walk to the village car. And if the car leaves on time, I'll be headed back to my village 15 minutes from now. It will be nice to be home. And I would say, it would be nice to rest, but there are clothes to wash, lessons to plan, neighbors who will want news . . . ah well, at least school vacation is only a few weeks away.