Training is over, tomorrow we head to Dar, Wednesday we swear-in, and Thursday we arrive at our respective sites. A few weeks ago we had our site announcement ceremony in Morogoro, the day Peace Corps told us a little more about the next two years of our lives and the day our thoughts switched from speculating on where we might be to speculating when we would finally get there and get started with the rest of our lives.
Our Country Director and other staff members from Dar es Salaam came to help with the ceremony and a traditional dance troupe was brought in for entertainment. They put on a show for us, we danced a bit, then we all took our places around the mango tree with the mountains in the foreground. A map was placed up front with strings connecting post-it notes to locations in Tanzania. The youngest, Geneva from Austin, was called to approach the map first, and she picked off a post-it note of her choice to reveal a photo of one of us. That trainee then took a gander at where she’d be, took a celebratory apple and soda, then picked off another post-it note. The anticipation was high as we anxiously awaited to find out if we would teach O-level or A-level, what region we’d be placed in, and who our sitemates would be. One by one our questions were answered.
site discovery at the ceremony in morogo
About halfway through the ceremony the post-it note covering my face was picked. I jumped out of my seat, hobbled up to the map and crouched down to make sense of the jumble of strings covering the board. It pointed to Karatu. In Arusha! In the northern part of Tanzania, bordering Kenya, not far from Mt. Kilimanjaro, close to both Serengeti and Ngorongoro National Parks, Olduvai Gorge, part of the Rift Valley, in the midst of the Maasai, Iraqw, and Hadzabe tribes, in a region where non-Bantu and click languages are spoken by many. I’ll living and working about 20km outside of Karatu town at a secondary day school with 500+ students and only three teachers. All three teach arts subjects.
So tomorrow we get on with things, going to Dar to take care of business, and in less than one week I will finally be in Karatu. I have been looking forward to next week for far too long and though training was great it was terribly exhausting. I love my homestay family to death — they are great people, they welcomed me into their family as one of their own (Dani Wilson-Zagwi, tenth born), they took care of me when I couldn’t do things myself, they taught me how to live like a Tanzanian, and they helped immensely with my Kiswahili. I can’t wait to visit Morogoro next year when I’m fluent and I can actually sit down and have a real conversation with them. But I’ve been living the past several weeks as a guest in someone else’s house, and that’s tiring. It’s a part of the individualistic nature of Americans that I can’t break away from just yet, and something I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to let go of.
Our shadow experience in Tanga was a wonderful respite from training and a well-needed week of relaxation (though there was some work to be done, of course). Seeing PCV Sarah’s house made me even more excited to get to site, get settled, nest, establish myself in Tanzania, and make my house my home. Just thinking about it makes me smile.
So I’m ready to go. Ready to travel to Dar tomorrow, ready to swear-in, ready for our big Thanksgiving dinner with the Ambassador, and ready for the bus ride to Karatu on Thanksgiving Day. As excited as I am to get to site I know there will be challenges to face but I’m looking forward to each and every one of them. One aforementioned is the lack of teachers at my school and what that means for me as a Volunteer — how can I possibly provide a good education for 500+ students when I am the only science teacher in the entire school? How should my time be balanced to meet the needs of these students, to prepare them for their national exams, to prepare them for the rest of their lives? I’ve been assigned to teach Math and Physics but what good will Physics do them if they can barely speak English? Is it better to teach so that they may pass their national exams, memorizing definitions and equations, or is it better to focus on their English skills so they may get a job once they finish school? To me it’s a question of priority, and a question of what the students can teach themselves versus what they need a teacher for. Is it better they know the laws of gravity, friction, and thermodynamics, or that they know the basics of biology and how to keep themselves healthy? Not until I spend some time at site and in the school will I begin to find the answers to these questions.
Yet another challenge is language, both for me and for the students. All over Tanzania tribal languages are spoken in households and Kiswahili is often a second language. For students, English comes in third. English is a huge challenge for students and on top of colloquialism they must learn technical terms for the sciences. For me, an enthusiastic learner of Kiswahili, it seems that it might be a challenge to live in an area where Kiswahili isn’t the dominant language. Especially in the north, an area where numerous pastoralist tribes call home, Kiswahili is seldom spoken and obscure languages abound. Achieving fluency might take some time but I’ll also be faced with the task of learning a bit of the local languages. Some will be easier than others: those of Bantu origin, for example, will be relatively easy as there are similarities to Kiswahili, but tribes such as the Maasai and the Hadzabe speak a non-Bantu language. Some tribes speak only in clicks, and man, will that be fun to learn!
In short, there are many exciting things to look forward to. If you find yourself in Tanzania anytime in the next two years or are looking for an exciting place to take a vacation, come visit! Karibuni sana Karatu!
I tried to upload a video of the dance troupe from the site announcement ceremony, but as of now my time on the internet is up and the video hasn’t quite finished processing. I’m going to embed it anyway in the hopes that it works out and I won’t have to spend another hour uploading a three-minute video. So, provided it works, I present to you a spectacular performance of feats of super human strength, Tanzania style:
