Jumapili 26 Septemba 2010
I’m in Africa! At this moment the power in my hostel is out and I brought my laptop outside to write. I’m sitting on a bench in the middle of a garden of trees and shrubs, and there is a bustling chatter nearby from fellow trainees finishing their dinner and the hundreds of guests at a wedding. There have been three weddings at the Msimbazi center since arriving Friday evening. It is now Sunday.
Our schedule so far has been very lax and we’ve had lots of free time. We arrived in Tanzania Friday evening shortly after 8pm (noon CST) and were greeted at the airport by our Country Director and a few staff members. We loaded our bags into a truck and piled into two minibuses that took us to the Msimbazi Center, a Catholic commune where we are staying until Tuesday.
Friday night we received our malaria prophylaxis. They have us on Mephaquin but are supplementing it with Doxycycline until the Mephaquin kicks in next week. We’ve received many shots and have many more to go: typhoid, meningitis, rabies, hepatitis A and B, yellow fever, more rabies, and I’m not even sure what else. We were all given a medical kit that looks like a toolbox full of almost every medical supply I can think of, from lip balm and fungus cream to condoms and treatment for malaria and bird flu. The kit even includes a handy little kit to test yourself for malaria. I had a few First Aid items at home I brought with me, but I’m now realizing it’s just another thing taking up space in my bags.
We’ve been through two days of training, but so far our training consists of all 39 of us sitting in a classroom and listening to staff members speak. Asking many questions. Some of us dozing off here and there. They understand that some of us are pretty jet lagged so yesterday and today we’ve had quite a bit of free time to do as we please (provided we stay within the Msimbazi center). Free time means ample time to play euchre and to make a euchre player out of other trainees. Four of us know how to play, a few more have some recollection of the rules, and we’ve taught several others these past two days. And there are plenty of frisbee players among us and a few of us who brought our own discs, so I’m in good company. Anyone who plays frisbee and euchre is a person I want to be friends with.
We haven’t started much language training yet but have been picking things up here and there, mostly from references books some of us have brought along and also from the staff members and visiting Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs). Every week of our training one or two Volunteers comes by to assist staff members and to answer our questions. Later in training we have an opportunity to shadow a Volunteer for a whole week. These next two days we will stay in Dar es Salaam and Wednesday we take a three hour drive to Morogoro to stay with our host families. I think most of us are very excited for this and it will be our first real look into the Tanzanian culture. Staying at the Msimbazi center is nice but it’s a hostel for Tanzanians and I think for travelers, too, though I’ve yet to see any backpackers here. Each of us (with the exception of the married couple) has our own room with a sink, shower (no bucket baths yet), flush toilet, and desk. It’s much nicer than I expected but I suppose they want to ease us into things; going from a fancy Holiday Inn in Philadelphia to a squat toilet in Tanzania in a matter of 27 hours might be a bit of a shock.
My room at Msimbazi
View from my hostel at Msimbazi
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And yes, it took a grand total of 27 hours to arrive in Dar es Salaam. Our bus departed Philadelphia around 10am and a couple hours later we arrived at JFK. We sat around the check-in counter for quite a while before they opened, occupying our time with a frisbee and good amount of space in the airport. We weighed our bags before checking in to ensure we were all within weight limitations; Xena’s final weight was 42 and David rang in at 30. I ended up removing the lumbar pack from my Osprey and took it on the plane with my messenger bag. I think my carry-on bags were 11 pounds, for a grand total of 83 pounds of luggage for two years. (And I brought way too much stuff.) Peace Corps never weighed our bags to ensure we were under 80 pounds and in fact the airline didn’t weight most of them, either. (There was quite a mix-up between the travel agent that booked our tickets and the airline, so checking in was a fiasco. I think the weight of our bags was the last thing on their minds.) Once we finished checking in the security line was huge but we went through like a breeze and had plenty of time for snacking before boarding our flight to Zurich. Let me say that Swiss Airlines is amazing. Comfy seats, blankets for everyone, personal video screens with Tetris, ridiculously posh first class and ridiculously delicious chocolates. I couldn’t sleep hardly a wink on the flight to Zurich but could barely keep my eyes open on the way to Dar es Salaam. Friday night I slept well and fell asleep instantly; Saturday I napped for a few minutes and couldn’t stay asleep for the life of me. Every time I woke up I thought my alarm was about to go off but I would look to my window and it would be black; I must have woken five or six times last night. Today I kept dozing off in training and napped for an hour; afterwards I was tired but woke up once we had our afternoon chai, which today was soda. First time drinking a Pepsi in who knows how long.
So all in all things are going very, very well. I’m having tons of fun, meeting lots of great people, and am starting to learn a bit about the culture, though we’ve yet to experience anything out of the Msimbazi center. These past two days have been pretty low-key but I’m really looking forward to starting our language training and meeting our host families next week. There are 40 trainees on the list but one of them dropped out before staging, and even though we are only two days into it I think the remaining 39 of us will be just fine here in Tanzania. Most of us are engineers, only a few of us have teaching experience, but we are all excited to be here and anxious for whats to come. Everyone in this group is in the Education sector, teaching primarily math, physics, chemistry, and biology, but there are also a few ICT (Internet, Communication, and Technology) and TEFL teachers, too.
Internet is available here at Msimbazi but in Morogoro we will have access once a week on Sundays, our day off. I might get one more post in before heading to Morogoro but other than that I’m not sure when my next post will be. Rest assured I am healthy and happy!
At the airport in Madison before heading out
