Wednesday, August 21, 2013

A day in the Life of a PCT

I thought all of our readers would enjoy learning about a typical day for a PCT in Tanzania (although, there really is no typical day).

5:00 am-We hear the Muslim call to prayer and Jason's alarm goes off to help start the charcoal jiko in the morning.  Our family heats water to take a morning bucket bath, which I am grateful for.  A cold bucket bath would not be pleasant.

6:00 am-Heather wakes up to take her bucket bath after Jason.  We bathe in our indoor choo, which is tiled.  There is a nice line to hang up all of your clothes and towel on while you bathe.  It is just starting to get light at this time of the morning.

6:30 am-We eat breakfast.  Breakfast here is chai with bread.  Jason and I expanded our breakfast menu by purchasing peanut butter at a local shop.  We were even more excited when we brought back jam from Lushoto!  After breakfast we finish packing our bags and brush our teeth.

7:00 am-We begin our 30 min walk to school.  Jason and I both teach 7:40 am classes most days of the week, so we need to leave early to prepare our classes.  On our walk to school we greet many neighborhood children.  They often serenade us with a chorus of "how are yous?" and "Wauzungu (meaning white person or foreigner)! "

7:30 am-10:20 am-This time can be chaotic.  Sometimes we are teaching, sometimes we are in Kiswahili class.  There are three other volunteers in our community-based training group, so more often than not someone is teaching during this time.  When we have Kiswahili class, we will often review what we learned the day before and practice our speaking skills.

10:20 am-10:55 am-Chai time!  It's the best time of the day, really!  We order what we would like for the day from a Mama who cooks at the school.  At our school, there is a row of huts lashed together with poles and grass roofs and under each one sits a different Mama who cooks.  Our Mama sits in the last hut.  Around 9:30 am one of us will go and place an order for chapati (sweet, thick crepes) and maandazi (the Tanzanian doughnut).  We take chai in the staff room with the other teachers.  We eat our bites and drink sugar with tea.  You did not read that wrong.  Tanzanians like to put a fair amount of sugar in their tea.  It is incredibly sweet.

11:00 am-1:00 pm-Teaching and Kiswahili again.  By this time we are moving into new material in our Kiswahili.  We all take lots of notes and ask many questions of our language facilitator.

1:00 pm-2:00 pm-Lunch time!  This can be less than thrilling.  One lunch last week we were given ugali and dagaa (ugali is a stiff cornflour and dagaa are little fishes that were sundried then recooked).  Only about half of us ate it and our language facilitator explained to our mama that we do not care for ugali and dagaa.  So now we mostly get some variation of rice, beans and meat.  We are also getting more spaghetti like dishes.  The noodles here are cooked with sugar instead of salt so the first byte plays tricks with your mind.  Sometimes, lunch is spectacular.  For example, everyone except Jason likes chipsi mayai.  Chipsi mayai is fried potato wedges and eggs used to stick them all together.  The potatoes are surrounded in fried egg goodness.  Heart attack on a plate?  Yes, but it is delicious.

2:00 pm-4:00 pm-More Kiswahili.  I must say, the Peace Corps language program is excellent.  We can converse about our daily activities and our families, and ask questions.  And we are only a little over halfway through training.

4:00 pm-We walk home.  We are alone on the walk as the students get out of school around 2:00 pm.  The walk home is normally hot.  We greet many people on our way home.  Our favorite people to greet are the kids.  We give Tanzanian high fives all around and try to teach them to say "good evening" instead of "good morning."  We often get followed all the way home.

4:30 pm-8:00 pm-We are home!  Heather will sweep the floor of our room and we will converse about our day with our host family.  We will study some Kiswahili and work on lesson plans.  Our little sisters will cause general pandemonium, occasionally making it difficult study without retreating to our room.  We may help cook dinner.  The most common task we are given is to sort through the rice.  We have to pick out all the chaff and stones.  Heather may iron clothes if laundry is dry.  Now, when you think of Heather ironing, think Little House on the Prairie style.  We iron with a charcoal-powered iron.  You pick hot coals out of the charcoal stove, plop them in the cast-iron iron, and go to town ironing your clothes on the coffee table.  Dark falls around 6:45 pm here, so the ironing is usually done by the glow of a solar-powered LED light.

8:00 pm-8:30 pm-We eat dinner!  I am always very appreciative of the cooks, as a meal takes around 2-3 hours to prepare.  For dinner we normally have things like rice, pilau (dirty or seasoned rice), beans, spinach, beef, oranges, mangoes, cucumbers, and salad called kachumbari made of a tomato, cucumber, and bell pepper.  Delicious!  We will talk with our host family during and after dinner; they like to ask questions about America and we all enjoy comparing and contrasting American life to Tanzanian life.

9:00 pm-We are heading to bed.  Our little sisters follow us outside and we all brush our teeth by the light of our headlamps.  We may sing and say prayers with our family before bed.  We tell our family goodnight, tuck our mosquito net securely around us, and fall to sleep to the sounds of our village (chickens, radios, laughter, dogs, the call to prayer).  Our family stays up later than us.  We are still not sure how Tanzanians do as much work as they do on so little sleep.

That's it for our typical day. Our next post will be an exciting one! Later today, we will learn where we will be placed for 2 years. Then on Saturday, we get to make a road trip and spend all next week at our site! Though if we get placed in the southern portion of the country, we may get less than 72 hours there because it takes almost 3 fully days to travel each way.

Baadaye!
Jason and Heather.

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Lushoto

Tanzania is a beautiful country.  We have not seen all of it yet, but what we have seen has been stunning.  The town of Lushoto will take your breath away.  Literally.  With an elevation of 4800 ft, the huddle of homes is tucked away in the Usambara mountains.  Our travel from Korogwe to Lushoto took us up a winding mountain road past many waterfalls.  We took lunch at Irente Biological Reserve.  Lunch was fantastic!  Most all of the food is grown locally and sustainably.  We ate rye bread with homemade cheeses, homemade jam, cucumbers, tomatoes, and guacamole.  We were in American Food Heaven.  We most definitely bought some cheese and jam to bring home to share with our host family.  Irente is owned by the Lutheran Church, with a portion of the proceeds from lunch going to an orphanage, a school for the blind, and a school for the mentally disabled.  You can camp or stay in well-appointed huts at Irente.  The Usambaras are known for their great hiking, so Irente would be the perfect place to start your Tanzanian hiking adventure.  We hiked 2 km to a viewpoint overlooking the valley below and the sight was spectacular!  But the goodness of Lushoto does not stop at Irente.  After Irente we headed to Lawns, a guesti in Lushoto.  Free wi-fi and cold sodas made these two Peace Corps Trainees very happy.  Lawns was a haven of Western Civilization, which was wonderful to visit after a month in Tanzania.  I would definitely recommend a visit to Lushoto if you make it to Tanzania.  You can soak up the Tanzaian culture in town and still have a hot shower and a Western toilet waiting for you when you retire for the evening.   For now, Kwa heri!

The Usambaras

The view from Lushoto-if we live here, will you come visit us?

Jason on our hike to the viewpoint