Sunday, August 18, 2013

Winter in Dodoma

(Written July 2013)


Hello Winter!
In the thick of dry season here, which means lots of dust, cold and wind. I’m still a fan of the cold weather but the rest of this season I could do without. Availability of water is getting progressively scarcer as our water source, which is a natural spring in the mountains, dries up. The dust is quite intense. Everything in my house is constantly covered in a thin layer of red dirt, including me. Enough about the weather though…

Couple significant things in my life – electricity and a new bike! Yup, the long anticipated electricity is finally here, and it was worth the wait. Electricity is awesome. I feel like a much more productive person now, although it also comes with its distractions… such as the ability to watch tv shows and movies until late into the night… But it also means that I can write fun blog posts like this. Also a surprising large amount of my Peace Corps work requires a computer, so it’s nice to be able to work on that stuff in the village when I have the most free time instead of when I’m in town. So yeah, don’t feel too bad for me out here, I’d say I’m living pretty comfortably these days. If I could only find more water and maybe some western food, life would be grand. But then that would kind of defeat the point of being here…

Having a bike is nice now too. Just biked into town and back today, so I’m feeling pretty productive. Although the road right now is more like a sand pit, so that made riding a bit difficult, but I think I’ll probably get the hang of it eventually. My Tanzanian friend in town was nice enough to bike back with me most of the way to the village and gave me pointers on how to bike in sand. Going to town is mostly downhill and I made it less than 30 min, but getting back is a bit tricky, so it was nice to have company for that part.

Let’s see, what have I been up to the past month or so… Well last month I took a little vacation and went to the island of Pemba to get scuba certified. There’s a great little beach resort on the island that gives volunteers a really good discount, so it was too good a deal to pass up. Turns out the coral reefs off the island are some of the best preserved reefs in the world, so that was pretty amazing to see. I’m pretty sure I saw every sea creature in Finding Nemo. And I have a new fascination with nudibranches. There were also the best tide pools I’ve ever checked out. Stay tuned for pictures to come! Now that I’m scuba certified I’m looking into other dive sites around Tanzania. I hear there’s a good spot to dive with whale sharks, but I’ve got a little phobia to get over before I agree to do that…

In village news…
I actually had a bit of a downer week recently. The day after I got back from my vacation my mama’s brother died in Dar es Salaam where he was living. He’s actually the same brother I wrote about in my last post who came to the village to sacrifice a sheep to ask for help from the deceased. I don’t know what trouble he had gotten into before, but his family says it wasn’t health related and they thought he was in good health. There was a dengue fever outbreak in Dar es Salaam a couple of weeks ago though and it sounds like that might have been what he died from. The symptoms are similar to malaria but more extreme, and unlike malaria there is no medicine to treat it. From what I’ve heard people who get it just have to try and get past the pain and wait for it to pass. His death was a major shock to the family and my mama is just now getting back to her normal routine. Since I’m really close to her family I spent the whole week helping out at the house and helping them get ready for the funeral. It took a couple of days for the family to raise enough money to transport the body to the village from Dar, so in the meantime I just tried to be as helpful as I could, cleaning the house, helping with the cooking and just being there for my mama. In one respects it was nice to see how the village really comes together after a death. There is a village group that comes over to the family of the deceased house and cooks all the meals on the day of the funeral so that that’s at least one thing the family doesn’t have to worry about. Extended family, neighbors and friends also spent every day leading up to the funeral at the house helping out and just providing support. It’s common and usually expected that most will also sleep at the house the night before the funeral. The women wear two kangas to cover themselves to show respect, and so I did the same. I’ve been to quite a few funerals in the village since moving here because it’s expected that all villagers will at least make an effort to go to a funeral if its in the village and if you are in anyway related to the family it’s definitely expected that you show up. This is the first funeral I’ve been to though where I actually knew the person who died and knew the family well. My mama’s family was very welcoming to me though and considered me as part of the family. As tough as it was, it was nice to see the whole family come together and help support each other through this. I also gained some street cred with my ability to cook Tanzanian food and prepare vegetables the Tanzanian way for a huge group of people.
            That’s pretty much it for my June and July updates… Stay tuned for August update coming up soon!