So I’m sitting here in Karatu at a “hotel” called Rombo Green Park Bar & Guest House. Not a hotel in the conventional English sense but a hotel in the conventional Kiswahili sense, that is, a restaurant. Not a guest house, either. Just a restaurant. I’ve ordered a Fanta Orange, baridi, and I asked for just a plain old ndizi bichi, a raw banana, an afternoon snack and some energy to beat the heat. It’s windy as hell and I can feel the dust caking on my face. I’d take the rain and mud of my village over the hot and dusty streets of Karatu town any day. Soon the rains will become more frequent and I’ll swap my Tom’s with my hiking boots or maybe even a pair of galoshes I’ll buy from town. I wonder how you say “galoshes” in Kiswahili.
School opened three weeks ago and the work has been keeping me pretty busy. I’m teaching 33 periods of math and physics per week, quite a bit more than the 16 to 24 periods recommended by Peace Corps. I tried telling this to my mkuu but when I realized all the other teachers are teaching around 30 periods too I found myself unable to justify dropping a few. Though so far I seem to be one of the few teachers that actually teachers for the entire period. It’s really difficult teaching technical subjects to students who are barely conversational in English. For these students Kiiraqw is their first language, Kiswahili their second, and English their third. Those that are conversational in English don’t have the right vocabulary to fully understand physics or they are just plain too shy to speak what they know.
Since school has been keeping me so busy — planning lessons, mostly, but soon grading papers on top of it — I’ve had little time for other activities, like gardening or continuing to explore my village. My freshly ploughed garden plot is already starting to fill with grass and my dog is still poorly trained. I’ve been thinking about secondary projects and have a few ideas but need to wait a few months until I get used to school and improve my Kiswahili. If my garden flourishes maybe I can bring permagardening to the school and start some sort of scholarship program for students who can’t afford to pay their school fees. Lord knows I’ve been asked about scholarships, and I’ve been asked sincerely, not just by people looking to get some cash from the mzungu.
Otherwise things are going well. The situation here is much different than I anticipated and the differences are all positive. True, the school had only three teachers when I arrived but that didn’t include the Form Six Leavers (student teachers or interns, to put it as short as possible), of whom there are six. Plus in the last week our school was assigned three new teachers, making a total of 12 including me and not including the mkuu who doesn’t ever teach. Everyone at the school is Kiiraqw and the gender disparity isn’t what I expected or doesn’t reflect what I heard about traditional (yet slowly changing) gender roles in Maasai culture. And although there are plenty of Maasai in Karatu town there aren’t a million languages for me to try learning, just Kiswahili and hopefully quite a bit more Kiiraqw. Aside from the Maasai and the Wairaqw there’s only one other tribe I know of in the district, the Hedzabe, and I don’t have to worry about speaking to them in their native tounge. They are the tribe I’ve mentioned that speaks a click language and they are said to be the last bushmen, the last hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania, living off the land, using only the tools they find in the plains, wearing loincloths. They never come to town and have absolutely no reason to. The Maasai, on the other hand, have retained much of their culture but have entered into the greater society of Tanzania. Though they still live in the plains and forests of Ngorongoro many come to Karatu to use the bank and do their business. And the Wairaqw have fully integrated, they have absorbed what the colonialists and missionaries brought concerning religion, manners, and dress.
So initially I was asking myself what subjects are most important to teach, how to handle the gender disparity, and how to make sense of an array of greetings and salutations. But turns out my biggest problem is just learning Kiswahili and integrating into my village, researching secondary projects to begin at some point and practicing the language. And here comes my banana… a cooking banana, fried. Yikes. Practicing my Kiswahili, indeed.
