Entrance to Songea Girls
School courtyard
School with Mt Matogoro in the background
Classrooms
Physics laboratory
School grounds near the school farm
The road I live on
My house
Cooking Pilau
Eating our Pilau feastSunday, December 14, 2008
Pictures of Songea Girls' Secondary School
Entrance to Songea Girls School courtyardSchool with Mt Matogoro in the background
Classrooms Physics laboratory School grounds near the school farmThe road I live on My house Cooking Pilau Eating our Pilau feastEveryone in Tanzania is a Farmer
Tuesday was also a holiday from school as it was Tanzanian Independence Day, so I took the opportunity to do a little gardening. One of my goals for my time of Peace Corps Service is to have a garden and grow some of my own food. When I learned that my site assignment at Songea Girls was located in them middle of a big town and that my house was part of a block of faculty housing, I was concerned that I would not have the space for a garden.
I needn’t have worried. The CIA Factbook says that about 90% of Tanzanians are employed in agriculture and now I see how that is possible. Almost every teacher at my school has a large vegetable garden. Our houses may have less yard space than the average American suburban house, but what area is available is used for growing food. Nearly every Tanzanian, no matter what their occupation, is also a farmer.
My next door neighbor, Faraja, is my age, single, and a teacher of Kiswahili and Geography here at Songea Girls. She graduated from college in Dar es Salaam last spring and has been teaching here for only a couple of months. She just moved into the apartment next door to mine one week after I moved in.
Although now is the rainy season, and the perfect time to start planting crops, I had planned to take things slowly and not burden myself with the responsibilities of a garden so soon. But I was visiting Faraja, and she told me that she was going to start planting a garden the next day and would give me some seeds if I wanted to do some planting as well. So I decided to give it a go.
So I got up early the next morning and luckily found some old jeans that the previous volunteer had left that are perfect for yard work. Niether Faraja or I have any farming tools, so we set out to borrow jembes (Tanzanian hoes) from the teacher in charge of the school farms. We were faced with a few set backs. First of all the school’s jembes were locked up and the key somehow inaccessible. Then after borrowing two jembes from a neighbor, it started to pour rain.
Finally around 10 am the rains died down and we set out to work. Behind my house is a slope that was bare of crops but had obviously been farmed before in the not too distant past as the terraces of disheveled garden beds were visible. It is surrounded by my house on top, Faraja’s plot on one side, my other neighbor’s pig sty on the bottom and his crops on the remaining side.
As I was scoping out where to begin, my neighbor, Isaac, who keeps the pigs, came out to help me. Isaac is also about my age. He farms full time and lives with his uncle who is a chemistry teacher at the school. He raises pigs and grows crops on the land around our house to sell at the market in town.
Isaac comes out in his bare feet with his jembe and eagerly sets to work hoeing the terraced beds. I was a bit confused as to why he was so quick to help me. I thought maybe I was intruding on his space, even though it is directly behind my house. But through a combination of broken English and Kiswahili we came to an understanding that the space was mine to use, but Isaac was ready to tend any space leftover that I did not want to use.
During Peace Corps training I learned some gardening techniques such as double digging that I wanted to try out. Isaac was incredibly eager to teach me the Tanzanian method of farming and start planting right away, so I had to reign him in before he planted my whole garden for me. Eventually I slowed him down and I was able to teach him the technique of double digging, which is basically about digging twice as deep as you normally would in order to loosen the soil and make it easier for plant roots to penetrate deeply. The soil is very rich and soft and as we prepared the beds we added Isaac’s compost from pig manure. Yet as healthy as the soil is, we found all sorts of interesting things when we dug deep. My favorite find was the sold of a shoe, and then a little bit later a shoe lace.
Here at the school there is no garbage collection. Each household is responsible for disposing of their own garbage, which generally means burning or burying it in your yard. It is amazing how little trash you generate when you have to dispose of it yourself. In two weeks I have barely filled a grocery bag.
Isaac and I double dug three full garden beds on the slope behind my house, and then we moved to the front where he showed me the quick and easy method of Tanzanian farming. In front we planted corn and beans. In back we planted a bed of pumpkin and corn, a bed of corn and beans, and then the last bed with corn and mchicha (like spinach). We also dug a ditch above the garden to channel water around the beds. Along the ditch we planted some sweet potato plants to hold the soil in place.
I couldn’t believe how much we accomplished in one day. I had only planned to plant a bed or two. The other teachers are skeptical when I tell them that I know how to farm and am growing crops. They are also skeptical when I say I like to eat ugali and cook other Tanzanian food. Maybe they will believe me when my corn stalks are growing strong and tall in the months to come.
I needn’t have worried. The CIA Factbook says that about 90% of Tanzanians are employed in agriculture and now I see how that is possible. Almost every teacher at my school has a large vegetable garden. Our houses may have less yard space than the average American suburban house, but what area is available is used for growing food. Nearly every Tanzanian, no matter what their occupation, is also a farmer.
My next door neighbor, Faraja, is my age, single, and a teacher of Kiswahili and Geography here at Songea Girls. She graduated from college in Dar es Salaam last spring and has been teaching here for only a couple of months. She just moved into the apartment next door to mine one week after I moved in.
Although now is the rainy season, and the perfect time to start planting crops, I had planned to take things slowly and not burden myself with the responsibilities of a garden so soon. But I was visiting Faraja, and she told me that she was going to start planting a garden the next day and would give me some seeds if I wanted to do some planting as well. So I decided to give it a go.
So I got up early the next morning and luckily found some old jeans that the previous volunteer had left that are perfect for yard work. Niether Faraja or I have any farming tools, so we set out to borrow jembes (Tanzanian hoes) from the teacher in charge of the school farms. We were faced with a few set backs. First of all the school’s jembes were locked up and the key somehow inaccessible. Then after borrowing two jembes from a neighbor, it started to pour rain.
Finally around 10 am the rains died down and we set out to work. Behind my house is a slope that was bare of crops but had obviously been farmed before in the not too distant past as the terraces of disheveled garden beds were visible. It is surrounded by my house on top, Faraja’s plot on one side, my other neighbor’s pig sty on the bottom and his crops on the remaining side.
As I was scoping out where to begin, my neighbor, Isaac, who keeps the pigs, came out to help me. Isaac is also about my age. He farms full time and lives with his uncle who is a chemistry teacher at the school. He raises pigs and grows crops on the land around our house to sell at the market in town.
Isaac comes out in his bare feet with his jembe and eagerly sets to work hoeing the terraced beds. I was a bit confused as to why he was so quick to help me. I thought maybe I was intruding on his space, even though it is directly behind my house. But through a combination of broken English and Kiswahili we came to an understanding that the space was mine to use, but Isaac was ready to tend any space leftover that I did not want to use.
During Peace Corps training I learned some gardening techniques such as double digging that I wanted to try out. Isaac was incredibly eager to teach me the Tanzanian method of farming and start planting right away, so I had to reign him in before he planted my whole garden for me. Eventually I slowed him down and I was able to teach him the technique of double digging, which is basically about digging twice as deep as you normally would in order to loosen the soil and make it easier for plant roots to penetrate deeply. The soil is very rich and soft and as we prepared the beds we added Isaac’s compost from pig manure. Yet as healthy as the soil is, we found all sorts of interesting things when we dug deep. My favorite find was the sold of a shoe, and then a little bit later a shoe lace.
Here at the school there is no garbage collection. Each household is responsible for disposing of their own garbage, which generally means burning or burying it in your yard. It is amazing how little trash you generate when you have to dispose of it yourself. In two weeks I have barely filled a grocery bag.
Isaac and I double dug three full garden beds on the slope behind my house, and then we moved to the front where he showed me the quick and easy method of Tanzanian farming. In front we planted corn and beans. In back we planted a bed of pumpkin and corn, a bed of corn and beans, and then the last bed with corn and mchicha (like spinach). We also dug a ditch above the garden to channel water around the beds. Along the ditch we planted some sweet potato plants to hold the soil in place.
I couldn’t believe how much we accomplished in one day. I had only planned to plant a bed or two. The other teachers are skeptical when I tell them that I know how to farm and am growing crops. They are also skeptical when I say I like to eat ugali and cook other Tanzanian food. Maybe they will believe me when my corn stalks are growing strong and tall in the months to come.
Tanzanian Elves
I loved Songea from the start, but my first week in Songea was rough. My house was a mess, I was sick, probably largely due to the thick layer of fine red dust that covered everything in my house, and I had new surroundings, people and customs to get used to. On top of that, even though I was sick, had a lot of work to do, and haven’t started teaching yet, the other teachers at Songea Girls expected to see me at school everyday.
This last week was much better, really starting with the day I was first visited by my Tanzania elves. It was Friday afternoon. I had now been living in Songea for one week and was looking forward to cooking my first Tanzanian meal of rice and beans in my new kitchen. I had finally managed to get my charcoal stove lit after failing in an attempt to light it myself, again failing to light it with the help of a neighbor, and then finally borrowing some hot coals from my neighbor’s stove. My beans had been simmering for a couple of hours and I had just returned from the market with my newly acquired basket overflowing with fruits and vegetables.
As I started sorting my rice I heard a shy “Hodi” (the Tanzanian greeting equivalent to ringing a doorbell). Two of my 13 year old neighbor girls were standing outside my gate.
“Tunaweza kukusaidia?” They asked. “Can we help?” I thought I had everything pretty well under control, but I told them I was in the process of making beans and rice and asked them if they wanted to help.
The girls stepped inside my kitchen and immediately made themselves at home. They started by sweeping and mopping the floor and then reorganizing the supplies I had just brought home from the market and even some of the things in my cupboards. The girls set to work with the enthusiasm of children playing ‘house.’ Then they basically told me to sit back while they prepared the rice, fried the beans, and chopped up a Tanzanian dish of onions, tomatoes and green peppers with lemon juice called kachumbali. I tried to help out by at least cutting up a mango, but I was making a mess, so one of the girls took over and showed me the ‘proper’ was of doing it. I must admit that her small neat pieces did look more appetizing than my big mushy ones.
We shared the mangos as the beans finished cooking. When I asked if they could stay and share with me the meal they had prepared, they said they needed to return home for dinner, but asked what I was planning to cook tomorrow, and what time they should return. We agreed on 1 pm, and with that they were gone.
As I sat in my living room alone eating a far more delicious meal than I could have made alone, I felt like I was a character in a fairy tale like “The Elves and the Shoemaker.” My Tanzanian elves certainly came to my rescue.
As promised my Tanzanian elves returned the next day to cook and clean. They came with hot coals, some dish sponges and even a plunger to unclog my kitchen drain! And them again as soon as the food was ready they were gone, leaving me to eat in solitaire.
On Sunday they came again and this time ventured beyond the kitchen to help me sweep out my living room, rearrange some furniture and organize my many books (I discovered that about a fifth of them are in German). Finally they stayed to eat with me.
Monday was a Muslim holiday, and so instead of going to school the girls and I went to the market to buy ingredients to make a special Tanzanian dish called Pilau. I let them haggle with the vendors while I tried to record how much everything cost, so that I pay the correct price next time when I go alone. Back at home, again I mostly watched as the girls fried the meat in garlic and ginger and then cooked it with rice, potatoes and special pilau seasonings under a lid of banana leaves from my back yard. Then we happily sat down to our feast followed by looking at photographs and playing a game of Uno.
My Tanzanian elves don’t visit as often anymore. I think they are now convinced that I am capable enough to make it on my own. But I still see them around at least once a day. They come by to borrow my games or colored pencils and offer cooking pointers here and there.
This last week was much better, really starting with the day I was first visited by my Tanzania elves. It was Friday afternoon. I had now been living in Songea for one week and was looking forward to cooking my first Tanzanian meal of rice and beans in my new kitchen. I had finally managed to get my charcoal stove lit after failing in an attempt to light it myself, again failing to light it with the help of a neighbor, and then finally borrowing some hot coals from my neighbor’s stove. My beans had been simmering for a couple of hours and I had just returned from the market with my newly acquired basket overflowing with fruits and vegetables.
As I started sorting my rice I heard a shy “Hodi” (the Tanzanian greeting equivalent to ringing a doorbell). Two of my 13 year old neighbor girls were standing outside my gate.
“Tunaweza kukusaidia?” They asked. “Can we help?” I thought I had everything pretty well under control, but I told them I was in the process of making beans and rice and asked them if they wanted to help.
The girls stepped inside my kitchen and immediately made themselves at home. They started by sweeping and mopping the floor and then reorganizing the supplies I had just brought home from the market and even some of the things in my cupboards. The girls set to work with the enthusiasm of children playing ‘house.’ Then they basically told me to sit back while they prepared the rice, fried the beans, and chopped up a Tanzanian dish of onions, tomatoes and green peppers with lemon juice called kachumbali. I tried to help out by at least cutting up a mango, but I was making a mess, so one of the girls took over and showed me the ‘proper’ was of doing it. I must admit that her small neat pieces did look more appetizing than my big mushy ones.
We shared the mangos as the beans finished cooking. When I asked if they could stay and share with me the meal they had prepared, they said they needed to return home for dinner, but asked what I was planning to cook tomorrow, and what time they should return. We agreed on 1 pm, and with that they were gone.
As I sat in my living room alone eating a far more delicious meal than I could have made alone, I felt like I was a character in a fairy tale like “The Elves and the Shoemaker.” My Tanzanian elves certainly came to my rescue.
As promised my Tanzanian elves returned the next day to cook and clean. They came with hot coals, some dish sponges and even a plunger to unclog my kitchen drain! And them again as soon as the food was ready they were gone, leaving me to eat in solitaire.
On Sunday they came again and this time ventured beyond the kitchen to help me sweep out my living room, rearrange some furniture and organize my many books (I discovered that about a fifth of them are in German). Finally they stayed to eat with me.
Monday was a Muslim holiday, and so instead of going to school the girls and I went to the market to buy ingredients to make a special Tanzanian dish called Pilau. I let them haggle with the vendors while I tried to record how much everything cost, so that I pay the correct price next time when I go alone. Back at home, again I mostly watched as the girls fried the meat in garlic and ginger and then cooked it with rice, potatoes and special pilau seasonings under a lid of banana leaves from my back yard. Then we happily sat down to our feast followed by looking at photographs and playing a game of Uno.
My Tanzanian elves don’t visit as often anymore. I think they are now convinced that I am capable enough to make it on my own. But I still see them around at least once a day. They come by to borrow my games or colored pencils and offer cooking pointers here and there.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Pictures of Swearing In as a Peace Corps Volunteer
Andrew and Me with Kate, the volunteer we shadowed in Manga 
Downtown Manga 
A typical house in Manga 
Mama Margaret, my friend Diana, and Me 
Chris, Rehema (my host sister) and Me at an end of training party.
The Uluguru training group: Me, Mike, Hari, Chris, and Stephanie
Swearing In Ceremony
Bernadette, Me, Tally, Meredith, and Patty
UPS alumni: Peter and Me
Me, Chris, and Aleisha
Me with my host family at the Swearing in Ceremony
Thanksgiving dinner in Dar es Salaam
Pictures of Mikumi Safari
My Peace Corps training group during our safari ofMikumi National Park. We are all teaching at
Secondary Schools in Tanzania.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Pictures of Morogoro
The Uluguru Mountains the overlook Morogoro, Tanzania. This is where I spent my three months of Peace Corps training.
A dance to welcome the new PC trainees to Morogoro.
My Community Based Training Group (minus Chris) atUluguru Secondary School. Mike, Stephanie, Me, Hari.
Morning assembly at Uluguru Secondary School
The house of my host family.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
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.
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.
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