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| Nellie in Tanzania |
I feel like this is the reunion
episode on some MTV reality show—‘The
Real World: Cape Town, Where Are They Now?’ Well, at present I find myself
sitting in the purgatory area of the Dar Es Salaam airport in Tanzania. I’ve
got a seven hour lay-over before my connecting flights home (Quintessential
cheap-college-travel-occurrence) and can’t check into my flight and the padded
departure seating for another few hours. This blog is being written on a time
limit (the remaining battery life of my computer) so my apologies if it lacks
my normal flourish or graphs.
I spent the last five weeks in
Tanzania with Theresa, we stayed with family friends of her’s in Arusha and I
felt so fortunate to get a taste of East Africa. We spent our free time there
reading profusely, reveling in having quiet rooms to dose off in and some
reflection time after leaving Loch Road, we also well aquatinted ourselves with
the gem of a television series that is The West Wing (frankly it dominated our
night-life). We traveled down to Zanzibar for a week—the island is
fascinating—we wore the customary headscarves as we walked around the unique
city of Stone Town and soaked up the sun on a much needed beach holiday. The
transit back consisted of a 14 hour bus ride from Dar Es Salaam back to Arusha,
which was an experience. It certainly
enabled us to get to see a lot of Tanzania’s scenic diversity, and the lack of
A/C coupled with the speakers blasting the Swahili B-grade movies provided us
with a ride we will never soon forget.
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| Nellie & Theresa |
During
the days we spent time volunteering at the school where our host works at,
helping out with her 5th grade class. This was particularly
interesting for me as I spent my internship in Cape Town teaching grade 5
English and Social Studies. The student demographic couldn’t be more different,
at Christel House the students are all from the poorest of the poor in the
townships, in Arusha I worked at a private school filled with children of
diplomats, lawyers, and business tycoons. It broke my heart to see the level
that my new students were working at compared to my Capetonian class. I
preformed a reading comprehension assessment here similar to one I did in Cape
Town with drastically different results. The students at this private school
didn’t even flinch, most breezed through it, while my class in Cape Town really
struggled with this simple task. Obviously, my students from the townships have
such larger obstacles to overcome compared to the privileged students, but I
just couldn’t help thinking how wrong it felt that by some roll of the dice in
the universe these sweet, smart, and curious students would have such a
different experience, even considering that my students at Christel House were
loads better off than their peers in the public schools. I still can’t quite wrap
my head around it.
Another
bit of Tanzania that I feel compelled to write about was what it felt like to
be amongst the elite. There are approximately 2000 Tanzanian Shillings to the dollar
and things are really, really, cheap here. For around $12 Theresa and I were
able to buy: 1 ripe pineapple, 4 avocados, 1 kilo tomatoes, 1 kilo onions, 2
green peppers, 1 kilo of oranges, 4 mangos, and a bushel of bananas—I think
that well illustrates the purchasing power our sorry checking accounts had
here. The family we stayed with employed a maid and a security service that had
a guard (askari in Swahili) on premises 24/7, I was never really able to wrap
my head around this feeling of being waited on as normal. I did my best in my
pathetic Swahili to greet the guard when we passed and we had several brief but
pleasant chats in English with this one guard, Christopher. He was a friendly
older gentleman who took ownership of maintaining the vegetable garden out back
and was eager to practice his very impressive English skills. He was incredibly
kind and hard working and one day came inside to help translate with the
Electrician. He took off his shoes when he came inside and I saw the disrepair
that his socks were in, they looked ancient, with prominent stains and large
holes from heavy use. It’s a weird thing for me to fixate on, but it really put
me in a funk. Socks are disposable for me, when they’ve served their purpose
and start to tatter I just pitch them and buy a new pack at Costco. That is
obviously not Christopher’s reality and again the most obvious reason behind
that difference is just the chance that went into the situation we were born
into. He’s a really intelligent man and though he received no formal schooling
you can just tell he would excel academically, he could surely be a high
achiever and live a life of leisure off his wit and gumption, but for him, that
just wasn’t in the cards. I don’t think I’ll ever understand this facet of the
world.
Theresa and I were fortunate to find
out about an organization called HESHIMA which works to provide job training in
sewing skills for marginalized Masaai women. They have a textile training
center where the women are taught to use Singer foot pedal machines and work
their way through different product patterns, they sell their products and help
support their families off of their profits. HESHIMA also runs a small library
and class for the local children near their facility each Wednesday. Theresa
and I worked there on Wednesday afternoons and it was simultaneously a joyous
and depressing. A lot of Masaai children will never go to school and spend
their time shepherding the family’s cattle and goats or taking care of younger
siblings, many only speak Maa, the Masaai dialect, and can’t speak Swahili or
English, further isolating them from the world. HESHIMA’s once a week session
is the only schooling some of these children receive. They were terribly shy
around us at first (our first day they bashfully ran away from us for hours)
but as soon as we gained their trust they were pulling at us for hugs and hand
holding and just some smiles and TLC. We sang nursery rhymes, practiced
counting in English, and played games like Duck-duck-goose. The session cumulated
with the children receiving a slice of bread with some jam and a glass of juice
each as well as the ability to check out a book from their portable library (a
lard cardboard box of picture books with a check-out log). The children
cherished both the food and the book, either savoring the piece of bread as
long as they could, taking little sips of juice, or just wolfing it down
immediately, they worshiped the books they got, stroking the covers and gently
leafing through the pages—mind you these are children ranging from 6 months to
about 12, so for toddlers to have such reverence for things like this shows how
precious they are to them.
Sitting
in the circle and looking around at the children the first thing you see are
their beaming smiles and curious eyes, beautiful just like most other children
you come across, but soon your vision pans out and then you notice the large
rips in their colorful clothes, the snot caked on to their sweet faces, the
crust cemented around their bright eyes, and the flies that are a constant and
ignored presence around them—walking freely on their faces without so much as a
blink from the child. Some of the children clearly display the swollen bellies
common with Ascites and similar conditions common with malnutrition and some of
the younger ones cough deeply and cry often. It’s a sight out of a Sarah
McGloughin PSA, only it’s not some pathos edited clip, it’s real and sitting
and smiling right in front of you asking you to read it Goodnight Moon. If
there is any experience that will make you feel truly grateful for all of the
banal things that you never even think to be thankful for, this is one of them.
The work HESHIMA is doing in their community is truly inspiring and here is
their website if your interested in learning more: www.heshima.org.uk
My time in Tanzania was without a
doubt a worthwhile addition to my time in South Africa. It enabled me to
experience another rich and fascinating culture and added an additional level
of food for thought. I really began to miss my students at Christel House, and
became really ready to get home to my family, and friends, and local beach. My
time spent watching the West Wing and my encounters with crooked immigration
and traffic cops even got me excited to be back in America, which believe me is
no easy task. I’m sure as my summer at home starts and when I get back into my
normal routine at UConn I’ll have more time to reflect upon what parts of my
time in South Africa and Tanzania reflects in my thinking and actions, but
until then, ciao.
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