Shika na Mikono

February 24, 2014

So within Peace Corps Tanzania there are different groups of volunteers. There are the obvious groupings based on our assigned jobs: Education (me), Health, and Environment. There are different "classes" which refer to which batch of volunteers you came with (July 2013 for me). There are also different club-like groups that you can opt into. One is called VAC which is a group of volunteer representatives who take our ideas to the administration. One is a group called the Peer Support and Diversity Network which offers support to volunteers who are having trouble adjusting to life/work here for any number of reasons. And one is called Shika Na Mikono (hold with hands), which is a group that offers support and advice to science and math teachers around the country.

They go to (and sometimes organize) conferences where they teach Tanzanian teachers to use locally available materials to make science and math topics more real for students with hands-on activities. They also hold lessons for volunteers during education pre-service trainings. There were also sessions from them during my early service training in January.

Shika Na Mikono is currently a group of 5 education volunteers. Four are from the education class above me and one is an extendee from the class above them. A few weeks ago I applied to be a part of this group and I was accepted last week! Peace Corps has decided to expan the group to 7, so six other volunteers from my class and I will be taking over the group when the older 5 end their service later this year.

The first event that this new membership entails is my going to a math conference in March. I will be going with one other new Shika member and two of the veterans to Dar Es Salaam to present teaching aids that are easy to make/obtain and use in the average Tanzanian school, and that we find helpful for students in the classroom. We will meet up before the conference to discuss ideas, and then we will head to the two day conference.

Directly following the conference in Dar, the four of us will meet the rest of the new Shika members and most of the older team in another town (on the way back to Iringa). There, we will have the official "hand-off" meeting. The new class of education volunteers will be arriving in July and we will be putting on some sessions during their PST. So the old Shika team will be teaching us all that they know in order to prepare us for that training, and our future in the group. We will also be putting on a "science day" for a local school  to give us new members a first shot at doing what we will be doing in this group for the remainder of our service.

Shika tries to have as much diversity in the different science fields as possible. Currently they have a member for physics, biology, math, chemistry and one representative for advanced level secondary schools. I will be the new physics guy, but as the group is expanding from five to seven, I'm not sure yet if I will be the only one. 

Anyways, I'm excited to have this new role! It should be a fun change of pace from the everyday stuff. It will mean that I will be spending more time away from my school and my students when there are conferences or trainings, but the current members have already shared some of their strategies for staying on track at their schools while they are gone.

I also see this as an opportunity to extend the impact of my service. Teaching at one school all the time can get discouraging and sometimes makes me question whether or not I actually have any significant impact on my students and/or Tanzania. The Shika group puts on trainings for teachers and schools around the country, and even has a healthy working relationship with the Tanzania Ministry of Education. This is an amazing chance to help lots of teachers improve their teaching methods, which, in turn, can really benefit their students. That's the idea anyway...

I'm sure there will be more on this in the future. Stay tuned.

Eat Like Me (Lunch)

February 23, 2014

I was just browsing my old blog posts and remembered that I left you guys hanging! Sorry if you've been eating makeshift peanut pancakes for breakfast lunch and dinner everyday since mid-November! Here's what I eat for lunch...every....day....

2 Cups uncooked rice

4 Cups water

4 Tbsp vegetable oil

3 tsp salt

3 cloves of garlic

1 small hot pepper (I don't know what kind they have here...)

2 small red onions

1-2 corrots

1 green bell pepper

4 medium tomatoes

Beans

I learned a kinda new way to cook rice here, which actually gives me much better results than I ever got on a stove in the states. Add the rice, water, half of the oil, and half of the salt to a pot. Cover the pot and put it on the jiko until the water reaches a rolling boil and threatens to overflow. Take the pot off of the jiko and put it on the ground. Cover the lid with a healthy amount of hot coals. If you skimp on the coals, the rice will be mushy. Then wait. Check it after about 15 minutes and stir up any standing water at the bottom. You should be able to just leave the rice in the pot with the coals to stay warm until you're done cooking the rest.

While the rice water starts heating up, you can start chopping up the veggies. When you take the rice off of the jiko, you can add some more coals (to replace what is now on the rice pot) and start cooking the veggies. I start by heating the oil and garlic. When the garlic starts to brown I throw in the onions and the hot pepper. I can't handle super spicy stuff so I don't bother cutting the hot pepper. It adds some flavor but doesn't overwhelm.

After the onions, sautée the carrots and  bell peppers too.

Once everything looks nice and I'm sufficiently pleased with the amount of sizzling I have heard, I toss the tomatoes in. Then I add the rest of the salt, about half a cup of water and I cover the pan.

Stir it every once in a while until the tomatoes have dissintegrated into a sauce. At this point you can also add some ground up peanuts (a new trick I learned here). It thickens things up and adds some protein.

Beans take forever. I cook a big batch at the beginning of the week and eat them throughout, just boiling them each time to sterilize them. Don't bother cooking dry beans in the states. Buy a can. It's not worth the wait.

Just throw the sauce and beans on the rice and eaaaat!

Well that's that. Give it a go if you want. It's pretty good.

Things these days

February 18, 2014

So. Again. It's been a while. Maybe this is the new trend now that things aren't as new and exciting. In a lot of ways I'm doing what most of you all are doing: wake up, cup of coffee (or tea), brush teeth, go to work, go home, cook something, bathe, watch a movie or read a book or do laundry or clean the house, or go visit other teachers/neighbors, go to bed, do it again! So as the things that make our lives different become more and more normal to me, I have been finding fewer noteworthy things to say about my world. Maybe this is where you all come in; if you have questions about life here please don't hesitate to ask!

Here are some things that might be interesting to you all.

Super Bowl!

I was all but completely unreachable for the whole week after the Super Bowl because of the time difference. You West coasters may be saying, "But Joel, the time difference is only 11 hours! And you're ahead of us!" That's true, but that's when you're not trying to get a torrented HD copy of the biggest TV event in America (yes, I'm assuming all of the Americas, Emma) on the other side of the planet without electricity or good internet. So, until we could get that and watch it together several of us blocked out email, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, CNN, and anything that could ruin the surprise for us. 

Instead of celebrating the good news that was soon to arrive in Africa, we got to planning the biggest and best Super Bowl party Tanzania has ever seen (which isn't especially hard or exciting to most US of Americans). We arrived in town on Friday after school and got our game plan for "Super Bowl Saturday" ready. The next morning we wasted no time. We hit the market and split up into groups to get dairy products, fresh produce, baked goods, beans, meat, and everything else on our list. Then we returned to the guest house and got going with prep. 

Washing, cooking, chopping, mixing, mashing, stirring... Until everything was ready. When we finished, we had bean dip, homemade corn chips, guacamole, pico, homemade chili, hot dogs, cheese dip, fruit salad, a veggie plate, ranch dip, brownies, and some Seahawks-color frosted cookies.

Just as we brought the food in and finished cleaning dishes, the rain started. Just in time for our 2pm kickoff time. We hooked the computer up to the guest house's TV, ordered some beers, and started it up.

I loved it from the very first play. #GoHawks

Unfortunately (or fortunately...) this specific torrent didn't have the Super Bowl commercials, but we did get to see the halftime show. By the end we were pretty tired and full, so naturally we capped the day off with a Jurassic Park marathon.

Market Friends

As many of you know (based on where you send my mail), I am often in my banking town to pick up mail, food, money or other necessities. I have been living at my site now for about 5 months and I have become a regular at many places in town. I have "a guy" for just about everything I buy on a regular basis. I have a "bwana karanga" (peanuts), "bwana mboga" (vegetables), "bwana vitunguu" (onions), "bwana mchele" (uncooked rice), and even a "bwana vocha" (cell phone credit). After a few times of visiting each of these guys (somehow they're all men... Does that make me sexist?) they have become very friendly! They give me the local prices (which is a problem for many tourists and other foreigners) and often throw in a "zawadi" (gift). My peanut guy will give me a couple of ginger roots or some garlic. My onion guy tosses in a few extra just for the consistent business and a brief chat with a white dude. My rice guy is good friends with most of the teachers at my school and let's us leave our bags behind his counter while we shop around so we don't have to carry them everywhere. And my veggie guys have even made a habit of sitting down and sharing a cup of "chai ya maziwa" (tea made with milk instead of water) and some conversation.

These new relationships makes me feel more comfortable at the market in town than I do at my local Albertson's in Olympia. Even those who I don't regularly interact with personally, recognize me. And though they still think I'm some weirdo mzungu (white person/foreigner), they have seen me enough to know that I'm not going anywhere for a good while.

Time

I've been thinking about time over here. Because it's kind of weird. I got here at the beginning of July last year so it's been over 7 months since I got to country. I'm over a quarter of the way done with my 27 month service, but I still feel new here. I've been teaching and making friends and sharing ideas, but I certainly haven't done or started doing anything groundbreaking. These 7 months have flown by, which I think I have chalked up to the slow pace of life here. Everything I do here takes way longer than it does in the states. I've become accustomed to making 3-4 hour trips on a regular basis to meet up with other volunteers; in the states I would plan days or weeks in advance to meet up with someone an hour or two away. I don't have the distractions that we do in the states so I feel like I have loads of free time, but in reality that "free time" goes to every day tasks like washing clothes or cleaning up the house. So what I'm saying is that because my time is consumed by things that we generally do not think of as major "time consumers," my time here has gone by quickly so far. In comparison, when I think of my time at UP during busy dead weeks, they used to drag on forever. I had so many things to study. One day I might spend 3 hours at work, then a few hours writing a report or a paper, a couple hours studying, then maybe I would go to the store for groceries for 40 minutes, cook and eat dinner in half an hour, study for another hour, and then go to sleep. Here it takes me an hour to get to town for food, and the car that brings me to town doesn't leave town until 3 pm, so I'm generally stuck in town for the whole day, if not the night. Cooking requires waiting for 15-20 minutes just to get the charcoal going, then some veggie prep, waiting for rice to cook and then cooking veggies, and even longer if I'm cooking beans. The things that consume my time here are things that I don't even consider accomplishments in the states. If I swept around my house, did laundry, cooked, weeded my garden and bathed here, it would be a full day. But in the states...well...I don't need to tell you. Ha. Tasks consuming time = time moving fast.

Garden

So they use corporal punishment a lot in schools here. When students are late, skip class, don't do homework, or really any reason the teachers thing is worthy. So I try, when I can, to offer alternate ways to give punishments. One day when some kids were going to get hit, I told the teachers that I had some work to be done at my house and to send them I me instead. So they told the students to come to my house with their hoes. I had a forest of weeds in my courtyard after being gone for break and then for training, and the neglect was showing. So the students came and went to work on the weeds. When they were finishing up, I asked if they knew anything about gardening and told them I was interested in planting some tomatoes. They said they did and began to cultivate a garden for me. Most of my students help their families in the farm a lot, and if they don't, they frequently help out in the school farm. So they know how to cultivate. They made me this beautiful plot and helped my stupid mzungu self plant some tomatoes. Only time will tell if can keep them alive!

Also, here's some charcoal that a guy brought on a bicycle. Two huge bags. Impressive.

Ok. That's good for now, right? What else do you want to hear about?

This is me riding home from school a couple weeks ago.