I'm Home

I have moved into the place that will be home for the next two years! When I signed up to be a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa, I knew I might be assigned to live in very modest conditions; perhaps within a mud hut without electricity or running water. I have had the opportunity to experience such conditions in the small village of Manga in southern Tanzania where most of the small huts have thatched roofs, children go to school barefoot, and many people don’t know Kiswahili let alone English. This is not my Peace Corps site, but the site of a Peace Corps health volunteer named Kate whom Andrew, another Peace Corps trainee from Seattle, and I visited for a few days.

We had a great time staying with Kate. The bus ride from Morogoro to the town of Makmbako felt like a 6 hour roller coaster ride. The seats even had handlebars, no joke. Kate met us in Makmbako and we went to the market to buy food before taking a taxi to Manga. Kate lives in a cute 3-room house with a courtyard and a kitchen, washroom, and choo (latrine) on the other side of the courtyard. She collects water from a nearby well and has created a suspended bucket and hose system for taking showers. While filling the bucket on the second night I managed to drop and crack the bucket, so the next day I had the opportunity to make Kate a new shower. With only a little coal stove, we made some really good food from scratch including pizza and pumpkin bread.

I was amazed by the generosity of the village people. Everyday a little girl named Tuma visits Kate to have lunch after primary school. Besides her ragged school uniform Tuma has one dirty dress that she wears everyday. One day Andrew, Kate and I visited the one room hut that Tuma lives in with her grandmother. Even though they have very little, the grandmother insisted we take three eggs with us as a gift before we left.

On another evening we biked to the site of a future center for orphans that Kate and the villagers are working on. We had only two bikes, so I got to ride on the back and watch the sunset as Andrew did all the work. On the way we met Kate’s friend from the village named Winnie. He showed us around the site, and then on the way home insisted that we visit his house. He proudly showed us his new cow and then welcomed us inside. We sat for a few minutes in the candlelight and then Winnie’s wife brought in a live chicken with its wings tied together for us to take home as a gift. Because Andrew is catholic, Winnie wanted to show us the Roman Catholic Church nearby, so in the dark we loaded up on the bikes again. This time Kate and I had our own bikes and Andrew rode on the back of Winnie’s bike holding the squirming chicken. The one room church was locked up, but that didn’t stop us from breaking in because one of the panels in the bottom of the door was loose. What a sight to see by the light of the stars Andrew crawling through a small panel in the bottom of the church door with a live chicken in his hand! Once inside Winnie picked up one of the few hymnals that was resting on the simple wooden benches and proceeded to belt out a couple of his favorite hymns for us.

We ended up giving the chicken to Kate’s neighbor who works at the village clinic and keeps other animals as well. In fact when we arrived the neighbors had just acquired a new little female goat and male pig. In our honor they were named Alena and Andrew, respectively. Alena only had one little horn protruding from her head, which just contributed to her adorableness.

After shadowing Kate for four days, Andrew and I headed to Dar es Salaam to meet up again with all the other Peace Corps trainees and receive our site announcements. We were all really anxious to find out where we would be living and working for the next two years and there were a lot of speculations flying around. Besides our own placement, the announcement we were all most excited about was which one of us would be stationed on the island of Zanzibar, which, although technically part of Tanzania, is practically its own country.

The Peace Corps staff dramatically read the description of each site followed by the disclosure of who would be stationed there. Two of the guys in my Uluguru training group, Chris and Mike, had been joking all during training about how they had probably irritated the Peace Corps training staff and as punishment were going to be sent to the desert. The two sites in Dodoma, the desert region of Tanzania, were the first to be disclosed. When Chris and Mike were announced back to back I almost peed in my pants from laughing so hard. I waited anxiously as site after site was announced. My name was finally called after about 26 of the 31 sites were announced.

Here is the initial description of my site that was read aloud:

“Songea Girls Secondary School was established in 1974. It is an A-level all girls government boarding school with a total of over 700 girls that are supported by about 25 teachers.

With several science class streams, Songea Girls has experienced a serious shortage of A-level Mathematics and Physics teachers. Your predecessor helped with Advanced Physics teaching. Your headmistress has written to express a great need for a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) teacher’s help with Advanced Mathematics as well as Physics.

The school is located right in Songea town, a regional seat for the Ruvuma region. Ruvuma is known for its bumper corn harvest. Being in town you may expect to ve visited by many PCVs both in the Ruvuma region and elsewhere. Your closest neighbor PCV is at Maposeni Secondary School in Peramiho. PCVs from the Hagati Valley in Mbinga, St. Agnes, and Willima do their banking business in Songea town as well.

This site goes to…Alena Mae Carlson Bennett.”

My site is much different than where I expected to be placed. Most of the PCVs are teaching at O-level schools in small villages, and yet I am at an A-level (Advanced) school in the fairly large town of Songea. A-level in Tanzania is two additional years of study after four years of O-level and before University. The students at Songea Girls range in age from 17 to 21. Therefore, I will be teaching math and physics somewhere in the range of the advanced high school or community college level.

It is not uncommon for the schools at which PCVs teach to have about 1 teacher for every 100 students. Currently my school has about 28 teachers and 700 students, a much better ratio. Songea Girls is a boarding school that attracts bright girls from all over Tanzania. Less than 5% of Tanzanian students make it to the A-level, and only 20% of A-level students are girls in Tanzania. Thus, for the next two years I will be teaching girls who are among the brightest 1% in Tanzania. Wow, that’s a lot of pressure.

I was officially sworn in as a Peace Corps volunteer last Wednesday, November 26, the day before Thanksgiving. We had a nice Swearing in Ceremony in Morogoro with our host families and the headmasters of our schools in attendance. Usually the U.S. ambassador to Tanzania, who served in the Peace Corps, would have come and spoken, but he was out of the country. So the Resident Country Director for the Millenium Challenge Corporation attended instead because he was thought to also have been a former Peace Corps Volunteer. Turns out he wasn’t, but anyhow he gave a good speech. During the ceremony, the 31 of us being sworn in as volunteers put on a funny skit and sang a song about Tanzania with Kiswahili lyrics to the tune of ‘Celcilia’, before swearing an oath to protect the constitution in our endeavors as Peace Corps volunteers.

I spent Thanksgiving Day in Dar es Salaam, the last day to hang out with all the other volunteers in my training class. It turns out that Dave, a friend in my training class, has two friends from college who are volunteering at a monastery near Songea until April. On top of that, these two guys happened to be in Dar es Salaam the same day we were there, so I was able meet some of my new neighbors. Apparently they hung out a lot with the previous volunteer at Songea Girls. On Friday I spent 14 hours on a bus from Dar es Salaam to Songea with the head mistress of my school.

Contrary to living in a cute little mud hut, I have running water, electricity, two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen and plenty of storage space in a townhouse-like setup for faculty located on the school grounds. The house was probably built about 30 years ago, so although it was a really nice place at one time, at this point many things are falling apart or cannot be utilized to their full potential. For instance I have a fireplace, but I’m sure the chimney is clogged and it hasn’t been used in decades. I also have a bathtub and a shower faucet, not even my home stay house had that. Mind you I don’t have hot running water, and since it is fairly cold in Songea, I use my shower faucet to fill a bucket with water, then add some boiled water and sit in my empty bathtub and take a bucket bath. The kitchen sink is nice and big, but the drain is currently clogged. To have built-in kitchen cupboards is a luxury in Tanzania, but mine are falling apart. The whole apartment is painted a really bright obnoxious blue color. If somehow I have a little extra time and money during my Peace Corps lifestyle, I would really like to repaint at least some of the rooms.

Since my house is in town, it is the central gathering place for the 7 volunteers in the Ruvuma region. Thus, I have a nice book collection at my house that was donated a few years back to the Peace Corps volunteers in this region by an expatriate who used to live in Songea. Four of the other Ruvuma PCVs spent my first weekend in Songea with me to help me get set up. My PC predecessor, who was living in the same house, sold everything down to the kitchen utensils, so it was great to have the other volunteers here to show me around town and help me make some purchases.

I love the town of Songea. It is about half the size of Morogoro, where I have been living the last three months, and much tidier. The dirt is really dark red in contrast to the bright green of the many trees such as plumeria and banana. From my house I can walk to the main market in less than 10 minutes. The market is much cleaner and less chaotic than the market in Morogoro.

Yesterday I met the teachers and students at my school. It was International HIV/AIDS awareness day, so the whole school along with students from other schools paraded down to the big soccer stadium in town for a rally. I had a chance to talk to a lot of the students on the way. They all seemed to really like the previous volunteer who they called Simba (Lion). Apparently Simba had a projector and used a huge white sheet to set up a cinema for the girls every Friday night. Some of the students asked me what I was going to do to entertain them. They were pretty disappointed to hear that I don’t have a projector or even a TV and that my job is not to provide them with entertainment.

I won’t have to start teaching until after the New Year, which I am very thankful for since it will give me a chance to settle in, meet my neighbors and get to know my way around town. This week I am planning to travel to another town in the Ruvuma region to check out a girls’ empowerment conference that some PCVs are putting on.

My headmistress says I can receive mail by having it sent to the school. I may decide to rent a PO box of my own, but for now the address at Songea Girls is:

Alena Bennett
Songea Girls Secondary School
PO Box 268
Songea, Tanzania

Since I am living in town I can have fairly frequent internet access by going to internet cafes. So as much as I love hand written letters, email will be the most convenient way to communicate.

Happy Holidays! It will be difficult to be away from home this Christmas and makes me homesick just thinking about it, but I am doing well here in Tanzania and will spend Christmas with some of my Peace Corps friends. Have a wonderful holiday season! I miss you all.