Everyday Life

So, these last few months haven’t been too exciting. I've been staying in my village every weekend, teaching during the week, and just living the average day-to-day. But then I realized that some of you don’t quite know what that entails, so I figured I would share what I do when I just hang out at home.

Some of you may already know, but this time of the year is rainy season, which means a day has not gone by since December that it hasn't rained.  This makes the 30 minute walk to and from the village to  buy food difficult, and I have been caught in more than my share of downpours. All this rain means that my area is stunningly green right now, with flowers and weeds alike sprouting everywhere and taking over. 

A storm rollin' in

The calm after the storm 

Typical, foggy day

The sunflowers are plentiful between the rows of corn. Beautiful

I have been doing some handy work around my house as well as the school.  Just a few weeks ago, I decided to dig a compost hole because I eat so many fruits and vegetables, that most of my waste is compostable.

Compost hole that I dug next to my house

 I also volunteered to help my school paint the chalkboard so that we could separate  170 Form III students and get them out of one classroom. I had purchased the chalkboard paint and paintbrush for another project, but I’m glad it had multiple uses.

It's blurry, but that's me painting a chalkboard

Completed paint job. Now I can teach 2 normal sized classes of 85 students each rather than a massive group of 170

After moving to Tanzania, cleaning the house and being innovative have taken on entirely new meanings.  I have to sweep and mop the concrete floors of my house every day because of the mud and dirt that I track in every day as well as the ash that blows everywhere from my jiko. When I was sick, some students stole my broom, so I had to be innovative to fix it, because I really don’t want to buy a new one. 

A little tape and stick from my busted door frame, and my broom is as good as new... almost. 

Also, since I cook over charcoal every day, the pots that I use become covered in soot and have to be scrubbed clean with steel wool every couple months.

On the left is the before, and the right is the after

 Laundry is quite the task, but I’ve come to enjoy it. I use 2 basins and a bucket to do my laundry, along with one bar of soap and a little powdered detergent.

My laundry station

My clothes may not always be the cleanest due to the water quality… in fact, sometimes I wonder if they were cleaner before I washed them.

Yep, that's what i use to wash my clothes, dishes, drink, etc. 

And of course I hang them on the clothes line to dry, but lately, because of all the rain, I have to move them inside or they get a second rinse cycle. 

Clothes on the line in my courtyard

 I’m really lucky that my diet mainly consists of fresh, organic  vegetables,  eggs, and a few fruits.

my produce baskets hand from the ceilings so the mice can't eat it

peaches, avocados, tomatoes, and eggs

my second hanging produce basket

 I cook all of my meals over a charcoal jiko, which most days can be a pain in the ass to light and get started. 

This is what I use to cook all of my meals

I make few traditional Tanzanian foods at my house, but I love Tanzanian cabbage and kachumbari. The cabbage is cooked down with tomatoes, carrots, onion and pepper. And kachumbari is the closest thing to a salad that Tanzanians eat. It’s just raw tomato, onion, bell pepper (and usually cucumber which I didn’t have) sliced very thinly and tossed together with lemon juice and some salt.

Cooked Tanzanian Cabbage

Kachumbari

But on the weekends, I have had some spare time, so I try to cook things that are a little more elaborate like quiche and pork fajitas.

But, I have to admit, since coming here, I eat things I never would have in the states. Like those pork fajitas… half of it was pork meat, the other half was pig intestine. The key to good intestine is filleting it out and frying it until it’s crispy, like a chip. It added a nice crunch in my fajita. 

Quiche

Pork meat and crunchy pig intestine fajita

There is also this idea of bugs. In America, if your food was infested with bugs, you would throw it out. And when I was in America, I would have too. But one day, I wanted to make refried beans, so I took a container to my school at lunch and filled it with already cooked beans to make my meal prep easier. When I emptied the beans out to mash them, I noticed little black specks floating around. Upon further inspection, I noticed tiny bore holes in most of the beans. I split a bean open and noticed several small beetles inside. Again, in America, I would have thrown it away and gone to get take out… but I was already too invested, so I picked the bugs out, one by one. Before cooking the beans, I had picked out approximately 40 beetles.

While cooking the beans over heat, I picked out approximately another 30 beetles. And even while I was eating, I picked out around 10.
Moral of the story: I ate bugs. I knowingly ate bug-infested food, because the odds of picking out every bug were not in my favor.  I just look at it as extra protein in my diet and move on.

This is a photo of food scraps for the compost. Each little black speck is a beetle I took out of my beans

 I have also taken up the family hobby of wine making! Although mine is not so elaborate or complex; it is made in a bucket. My batch of hibiscus wine is in the aging process now and should be ready to bottle in about 3 weeks.

Filtering after letting it ferment

Fermenting

Also, I have a best friend named Amanda who sent me a ruler that she made so that I could show the size of the creatures that I kill and the things that I encounter… so this is Amanda’s Ruler Segment (haha, segment,  I’m punny.)

That my friends, is the biggest clove of garlic I have ever seen

Your standard earthworm

A couple pieces of quartz

A millipede

Things at school have been going really well! I’ve been teaching about 180 Form III students and 130 Form III students. One day, I invited my students to come hang out in the lab after school and they could learn how to solve a number puzzle (Sudoku).
At first, around 20 students came. They helped me sharpen pencils, then took a half sheet of paper and copied the puzzle off the board. One of my very smart Form III students named Lidia came up to the front to teach the students the rules and idea behind the puzzle. They solved a few of the numbers together, and then I told them to try it on their own paper. I told them they could work in groups, and they did. They all worked on their puzzles, either together or individually and brought them to me to check after they were done. More than half of them got it correct!
 They really enjoyed doing it and told me they wanted to do it again… so I guess I’m going to start a weekly puzzle club. They are able to use problem solving skills that they don’t get to use in many other capacities in their education and they could do it without language barrier. Words can’t express how happy my first Sudoku day made me.

Students working in groups

I was very impressed with their puzzle solving skills

The puzzle they solved

Deep in thought

So proud of themselves!

Hope you enjoyed that little insight into my day-to-day living experience. 

An unconventional Christmas

I’m sorry that it has been so long since my last post, but these last few months have been a bit of a whirlwind. If you thought my Thanksgiving was untraditional, wait until you hear about my Christmas.

For Christmas, myself and a group of fellow Peace Corps Volunteers decided to sign up for a cultural tour and spend Christmas with a Maasai tribe, located just a few hours from Iringa. This tribe was located in a sub-village of a former PCV who recently returned to America, and she helped this particular tribe set up an income generating activity by hosting tours in their village to share their culture with tourists.

We boarded a bus on December 23 and headed 5 hours to a small village called Makifu. When we got off the bus, we were met by a member of the Maasai and he led us on a 3 km walk away from civilization (the booming civilization of the village), toward the Maasai village. As we walked, I asked him why the Maasai lived so far away from the main village along the road, and he told me that “the villagers don’t like all the yelling, singing and drumming that we do. We make a lot of noise and keep them awake.”

dry river beds around the Maasai village valley

beautiful northern Iringa

By the time we arrived, it was dark, so we put our bags into our bomas (huts) where we would be sleeping. They are constructed purely of mud, sticks, and straw. In fact, both nights that we slept in them, I was awakened in the middle of the night by a cow eating the straw roof my lodging accommodations.

The boma I slept in

After ditching our bags, we huddled around a campfire and ate a typical meal of rice, beans and papaya. With our bellies full, it was now time to dance!

Darryl around the campfire

Both men and women got up, the men in one group, the women in another. The two groups each formed their own kind of “line” and faced each other. The men started to sing a bass line, unlike anything I had ever heard, and other men started to join in to keep the beat. 

Then, random men would jump into the middle between the groups, jumping on every beat, higher than I have ever seen anyone jump in my life. These men are amazing athletes.

That man hovering above everyone else is jumping... he has one amazing vertical

When the men gave a vocal signal, several women/girls would come forward into the middle and move the a very fast, convulsing motion to make the jewelry on their chest and neck jump and jingle while the men got up in their face. When the man decided the woman had been brave long enough, they brushed shoulders and the girl was dismissed back to the group.

After dancing for about an hour, we called it a night and went to bed. The beds we slept on were straw mattresses with a blanket over the straw and a bug net over top. The walls of the bomas had holes in them and when it rained, the straw roofs had a slight leaking problem…

But before I knew it, it was time to start a new day, Christmas Eve. After getting ready for the day and having some breakfast, we set out on a tour of the Maasai village to see where they were living, how they kept their live stock and what kinds of plants were in the area and how the people used them for different things.

When we returned to our lodging area, we were greeted by many mamas holding traditional Maasai garments and jewelry and told us to follow them. They lead the women into one hut and the men into another and one by one, the Mzungu emerged from the mud huts in traditional dress. 

The crew plus our guides in front of a boma  in our traditional dress

Lauren and I in our Maasai wear

the men in their traditional clothing

Man, were those things comfortable! It was like wearing a toga, so soft and breezy. The jewelry on the other hand,  not so comfortable. It’s made of wire and beads, and since no Maasai women have hair longer than any of the men, they never thought through the issue of hair-pulling.

After being dressed in our garb, we were taken out to herd cattle. We walked several km to where the herds were being kept and learned that each heard was made up of cattle from multiple owners. While branding exists here to distinguish whose are whose, each herder also has a specific whistle that the cattle respond to. The children seemed to love us, holding our hands, playing games and showing off. After we left the cattle, we continued walking around to see more of the locally available plants and their uses. We even found the vine that they use to brush their teeth. They cut a small portion off, carve one end into the point like a tooth pick and cut a couple slits in the other end to get it started. The blunt end gets rubbed over your teeth and there is a chemical in the plant that supposedly kills the bacteria. It was fun to try. 

Sunhee hand-in-hand with some of the children heading to the cattle

herding cattle

brushing her teeth

we called this one Honey Badger. He looks stoic now, but I watched him eat dirt...

 After the tour, we returned back to the village for dinner, followed by more singing and dancing, but now that we were in proper dress, we were expected to join in. We all learned very quickly how foolish we looked and just as quickly got over it.

Girls in our group preparing to enter the middle to shake our stuff

The man circle

The next day was Christmas, and since Tanzania was colonized by Europeans, Christmas meant Church. We dressed up in the same traditional clothing and headed to the church where we sat though a very traditional Lutheran service.  Very few men attended service, for they were slaughtering a goat (and drinking it’s blood) for the Christmas feast that followed church.

The church we attended Christmas Day

 After the Christmas service and feasting were over, we returned to our huts to change and gather our things, because we had to leave and to go a camp down the road for the night (we had to catch a bus at 6am the next day and didn’t want to have to walk the 3km walk in the dark.)

The campground we stayed at was very nice. We slept in tents, but the tents all had full twin-sized beds inside. The facility had warm showers, our lodging price included a beautiful, traditional Tanzanian meal and then they lit a campfire for us, so we spent Christmas night gathered around a campfire being eaten by mosquitoes.

hanging around the fire Christmas night

My Christmas may have been a little untraditional, but I had an amazing time with people I only met 6 months ago that have become my new little family. When you are away from home, you have to find new little pseudo families of caring people. I’m glad there are so many of those people in Peace Corps Tanzania.

Merry Christmas!

 

How to slaughter a chicken

Celebrating holidays in Tanzania aren’t quite the same as they are in America, but we do what we can to share our culture with the Tanzanians and not forget what’s important to us. The first holiday we celebrated was Halloween. Now, it wasn’t until I tried to explain the concept of Halloween to Tanzanians that I realized how truly strange it is. We dress small children up in costumes and take them around to strangers’ houses to collect candy… sounds weird, right?

Lauren and I (aka the Mexican and the random girl from the 80's)

About a month later, after school had wrapped up and Form I and III students had completed their district annual exams, it was Turkey Day! Now, since I had school on Thanksgiving, I was unable to celebrate on the actual day (in fact, I spent the day grading exams), but a few other Ed volunteers met up in Iringa on Saturday to have our own little Thanksgiving feast.

We started the meal off with appetizers of homemade guacamole and salsa, homemade chips and veggie slices with ranch dip. We needed our strength to tackle the task that was the main meal.

The appetizer spread

Feeding each other. yea, we're integrating

 There aren’t any turkeys to be had here, but there are chickens aplenty, so we bought one. A live one J

We had to walk across the village to buy it, then tied up its feet and carried it home in a plastic sack. When we arrived home, we put some water on the jiko to boil and hung the chicken upside down for a while (apparently it is supposed to calm it down and it seemed to work.)

Joe, picking up tonight's dinner

The walk back to the house, chicken under arm

Nobody puts chicken in the corner!

Chicken meditation

When the water got to a boil, we moved the upside down chicken to a spot suitable for blood spatter. Joe, dressed in kanga apron and armed with a knife, stepped up to do the deed. It was pretty quick and not as much blood as any of us expected. After waiting for a few minutes for the blood to drain out, we untied it and threw it in a basin where we poured hot water over it. This helps loosen up the feathers so they can be plucked out. After several minutes, we had all the feathers removed and cut off the feet. 

Joe, getting ready to chinga kuku

and...

headless chicken

hot water helps remove the feathers

they remove pretty easily and quickly

Then it was time to clean out the insides. Now, our instructions told us that puncturing the entrails smells terrible, so this was a delicate process. And in that process we found an EGG!  We cleaned out the rest of the innards and rinsed it off for cooking.

ready to clean it out... doesn't look like it was alive 5 minutes ago 

Lauren with the bonus egg we found

Cleaning out the entrails

cleaned up and ready to cook

The oven we made to cook the chicken

roasting over the hot coals

It was delicious and I must say, we were pretty proud of ourselves.

Table set up

The delicious spread

The meal was accompanied with buttermilk biscuits, mashed potatoes and gravy, and fruit salad

The moral of this post... I will never take advantage of frozen turkeys at Thanksgiving, but I really enjoyed the experience of a meal all from scratch!