Our Homestay

As many of you already know, we are spending the first 10ish weeks living with a host family in Tanzania. Our family has a baba (father), mama (mother), bibi (grandmother), 3 dadas (sisters, aged 6, 4.5, and ~3 weeks), and one shangazi (aunt on the father’s side). The bibi is just here to help with the new born, the rest are residents. In Tanzania, they don’t talk about pregnancies until the day of the baby’s birth. It is also a taboo for the mother to leave the house during the first 3 months after birth. This is why our bibi has come to visit and help with the chores.
Now to the living conditions. I think our conditions are slightly above average for the typical Tanzanian PCT. Our house is ~95% complete. We have 3 bedrooms, a living room/dining room, a pantry, a kitchen/cooking room, an attached chicken coup and 3 choos (toilets).One choo is inside for “public” bathing and night time use. Another choo is conneted to the master bedroom. The final one is outside and the one assigned to primary “duty”. The house has a very nice flat concrete floor. There is a ceiling in most of the house, except our room and the kitchen.
Our indoor choos appear to have pipes in the walls, but water here functions on a very elaborate bucket system. You’ve got the big bucket (55 gallon drum) to hold the water for the week. Then there are several smaller 5 gallon buckets: a few buckets for laundry, a few for bathing, a few for cleaning food in the kitchen, a couple for moving water back and forth to the kitchen, and finally a special clean one for the water than has been boiled and cooled to drink.
Electricity is a similar situation. Our house is clearly wired with UK style plugs and light bulb sockets, but we do not have electricity. We have 1 semi-permanent light connected to a battery and a solar panel that hangs on its wire by a staple right next to the permanent fixture. This light has enough power to run for about 3-4 hours a night, if the day was sunny enough to fully charge the battery. The family had 2 portable solar lights. When the Peace Corps gave us each another light, we nearly doubled the lighting capacity in the house. All of the lights are fairly efficient LEDs. I cannot imagine how limited their life was 20 years ago before either solar or LEDs were available.
When you first stroll through the countryside, you will notice many “abandoned” looking houses. These houses might just be a foundation, maybe standing exposed brick walls overgrown with weeds, perhaps even finished plaster walls or part of a tin roof. But strangely, they all look very new. They are in fact not abandoned at all. Financing is very difficult and expensive here, even for middle class in Tanzania. Our baba mentioned he could only get a loan with +20% interest that needed to be paid back in 5 or 6 years. He has a steady job that can support a family. He said it was near impossible for anyone working less than 3 years to get a loan of any type. So instead of financing, they invests into their own homes polepole (bit by bit, or slowly). They save for 2-3 years, then buy a foundation. Another 2-3 years might get you the walls, etc. The extreme limited access to credit greatly cripples the economy here, but I will save other aspects for later post.
Until next time, Kwa heri!
Jason

Haven of Peace

Salama!  Dar es Salaam translates to Haven of Peace.  The term certainly applies to our whereabouts at the moment.  We arrived in Dar es Salaam at the Kurasini Training Center on Friday, July 5th.  It is BEAUTIFUL here and the people even more so!  Since our arrival we have had time to learn, rest, and reflect on our journey so far.  We have learned about Tanzania's history and culture, health issues, and the history and Peace Corps method of development.  All of these subjects deserve a blog post of their own!  Our days are filled with Kiswahili lessons, history lessons, cross-cultural training, eating (seriously, we are fed five times a day-breakfast, chai, lunch, soda, and dinner), sleeping, paperwork, and shots (sad day).  I (Heather) have now been vaccinated for MMR, Polio, Yellow Fever, Meningitis, Typhoid, Hepatitis A, and Rabies.  We also take our malaria prophylaxis every night.
Can I go on more about the food?  Let me tell you, the food is tasty albeit a bit monotonous.  For breakfast (chakula cha asabuhi) we have toast, a hard boiled egg, and porridge (made out of millet-it is tasteless, so Tanzanians add heaping spoonfuls of sugar to liven up the mud-colored mixture).  Chai consists of tea (made with milk or water) and some finger foods.  Sometimes there are these pieces of fried dough called andazi.  If you eat them with sugar, they taste like a doughnut.  If you eat them with salt, they taste like pretzels!  There can also be fried plantains and something like a large fried won-ton filled with meat or vegetables.  Chai is my favorite part of the day.  Seriously America, you do not know what you are missing.  For lunch (chakula cha mchana) we usually have rice, a spinach dish, meat (chicken or fish), and a fruit (plantains or watermelon).  Soda is pretty self explanatory.  Jason is pretty ecstatic as they serve Mountain Dew.  What we eat with soda seems to vary.  Today we had roasted nuts, the fried won-tons, and tomato sandwiches.  Dinner (chakula cha jioni) is normally the same as lunch.  So we are well fed.
Lest you imagine us living right now in a mud hut, let me tell you about our hostel.  We have a nice, big bed with a mosquito net and fuchsia sheets, red carpet, a desk, a big yellow chair, a TV (have not turned it on yet), air conditioning (we are lucky-the other volunteers have dubbed our room "the honeymoon suite-it's super safi (nice!)), a cold shower (the best part of waking up?), sink, and a Western toilet.  We expect much less when we go to live with our host family on Thursday, but we are content.
Besides all of our lessons, we have also had two excursions outside our beautiful compound walls-one into downtown Dar es Salaam and one to the Peace Corps Office.  For the visit to Dar our group of 42 education volunteers was split up into smaller groups with a Language and Culture Facilitator (LCF) as our leader.  We road a daladala (little mini-buses) into town, then walked to a kanga (a wrap skirt) shop where I bought a pretty dark blue and white kanga with the assistance of my LCF.  I then had the kanga tailored.  There are little shops all over selling everything you could ever imagine.  And if you want to make a purchase, you need to muscle your way to the shop owner and be aggressive, as Tanzanians really do not form lines.  They are very polite in every other way, although I should not impose my American idea of politeness on the Tanzania.  From the tailor shop we saw different sights in Dar, including the Indian Ocean!  Lunch was rice and beans at the YWCA.  Our daladala ride home was interesting, as the daladala became packed full of us and Tanzanians!  I would not want to drive in Dar, as the traffic is a nightmare, even with uniformed traffic officers guiding all the buses, daladalas, motorcycles, bajajs (three-wheeled vehicles), and bicycles.
At the Peace Corps office we met all of the administrators for Peace Corps Tanzania.  We toured the offices and walked the grounds.  It was a wonderful day and we had the best chai and lunch while there.
We have one more day left here in Dar before we head to our homestay family up north.  We are excited and nervous, as we do not know much Kiswahili at the moment.  We have focused on greetings, as greeting are very important in Tanzanian culture.  Keep us in your thoughts and prayers!  We miss you all!
Baadaye!


The Training Center grounds are so pretty!  I love the colorful buildings

One of the huts where we have language lessons with our LCF

The one about packing

Everything we need for our 27 month assignment is now packed into a total of 5 bags with a combined weight of 135 lbs.  Jason and I each have a large pack (60-65 L) and a small backpack.  We share a medium sized duffle bag which mostly contains our camping supplies, books, and extra toiletries.  If you are interested, here is a link to our packing list.  I must say, my husband is one amazing packer!  Maybe it's all those years of playing Tetris?

Before

After!  5 bags and 1 poster tube

Application Timeline

This post is more of a "standard Peace Corps blog" posts. A lot of people are surprised to hear that we've taken almost a year to complete the process. Ours is a bit unique as the Peace Corps upgraded many of their systems and we were among the first to try them out. Here are some of the major milestones along the way:

• 1/31/12-Created an account to apply.At this point, we were just exploring the process and didn't fill in much of the application.
• 7/12/12-Received an e-mail indicating our application would be deleted if we did not submit it before the 27th. Normally applications can sit for a year before being deleted, but the Peace Corps had a system upgrade scheduled. By this point we had most of the easy boxes filled out, we were just dragging our feet on the essay and resume sections.
• 7/26/12-Submitted our applications. Exactly 1 day early.
• 8/13/12-We were contacted by the Peace Corps requesting some additional information: marriage certificate, transcripts, a couple's questionnaire, and a few outstanding references.
• 8/15/12-Received login information to the "Medical Portal". We had to fill out a brief survey here. Later this website will be where we upload all of our medical forms.
• 9/12/12-After digging in their spam e-mails, the Peace Corps found the few missing references that had been sent in. We were now cleared for the interview.
• 9/24/12-A recruiter from PSU (Portland State University) contacted us to schedule an interview for October 3rd.
• 10/3/12-Interview day. First we interviewed separately, then finally together. Heather expressed a little nervousness so the recruiter asked to scheduled a follow-up phone interview.
• 10/18/12-After discussing things again, Heather felt much more comfortable for our phone interview. We were cleared to go on.
• 11/5/12-Officially nominated. The descriptions for both Heather and I indicated we would be in "Secondary Education-Math and Science" with a tentative departure in June (pretty close to what we are doing!).
• 11/12/12-Sometime around here Heather received her Legal kit and returned it within a week.
• 11/30/12-We contact the Peace Corps legal department about Jason's missing legal packet. We found out they sent it to the wrong address. They send us a new one to the correct address.
• 12/26/12-Legal kit returned. Over Christmas break we figure out what happened to the original packet. I (Jason) had applied once before, and the Peace Corps had sent the legal kit to the address that I had applied with in 2008. My mom had just sold this house, but my brother had put in a "mail forward" notice for anything with his name, Blake, on it. So the USPS in their best efforts, took the packet addressed to Jason, slapped a new label with Blake on it, and sent it to my mom's new house. You can imagine her confusion now wondering if both her boys were going to the Peace Corps. Once we opened the packet, everything was addressed to Jason, so that quickly cleared things up.
• 1/26/13-First contact from the placement office. They asked us to fill out a questionnaire for GIS (Geographic Information Systems). This confused us quite a lot, but we filled the form out anyway. We were willing to try the position, but didn't feel like it was a good fit, especially for Heather.
• 2/26/13-We hadn't heard from the Peace Corps in over a month, so we contacted the placement officer who gave use the Mexico questionnaire. We were informed that we were no longer being considered for the Mexico program.
• 3/1/13-Invitation Received! We got all of our information electronically, so we didn't get the exciting "blue envelope" that everyone talked about. We weren't expecting it to happen that fast after the process with Mexico. Our departure date was set for July 8 with the note that it may change by a few days.
• 3/3/13-We took the weekend to consider it and talk about it. We decided to accept and started informing our families (and our employers).
• 3/6/13-A bunch of new forms to read and e-mails start showing up. This includes our login information to the "New Volunteer Portal" and more medical forms start popping up in that portal as well.
• 4/22/13-Medical forms completed. This includes a physical exam, dental exam, optometrist exam, and lab blood work.
• 4/30/13-Heather's last day working.
• 5/17/13-Jason's last day working
• 5/22/13-Staging date changed! The Peace Corps bumped up our departure date from July 8th, to July 3rd. We were a little disappointed because it cut out quite a bit of time to see Heather's family, but we accepted it in stride.
• 5/31/13-We leave Oregon to move our stuff to Nebraska. This starts our tour to see family one last time before we depart.
• 7/2/13-Leave for staging! We start staging in Philadelphia on the 3rd at noon. We are hoping to squeeze into a movie theater to see Despicable Me 2 before we depart.
• 7/4/13-Leave for Tanzania! We will ride a bus at 2:30 AM to JFK in New York where we will fly to Dar es Salaam via Johannesburg, South Africa.

He let the cat out of the bag

Dear Tanzania,

You sure do know how to keep us on our toes.  We will see you 5 days sooner than had originally been scheduled!  July 3^rd will be here before we know it!

I write this post from our first stop on our epic moving truck (to Nebraska), train (to Chicago), and plane (to California) travel adventure.  Jason and I packed up and moved all of our belongings, and our cat, to Jason’s mom’s home in Nebraska.  Our move from Oregon went smoothly and traveling with a cat in a moving truck was not as bad as we were expecting, except for one incident.  Jason let the cat out of the bag at our first rest stop in Oregon.  And she ran away.  Into a thicket.  And she would not come out.  We spent over an hour calling and searching for our frightened feline.  In the end, the sound of her food being poured into her food dish brought her out from her hiding place.  Thank the good Lord our cat is a connoisseur of kitty kibble!

Grace the Cat all ready to move to Nebraska!  Note: this is not how she traveled

Heather, Grace the Cat, and Jason all cozy in the moving truck

Welcome to our Peace Corps Tanzania Blog!

Dear Tanzania,

In T minus 53 days we will meet in person.  So excited for the adventure and lessons which await us!

For those of you who don’t know us, we are Jason and Heather Lavalleur, a young married couple serving in the Peace Corps as secondary math and science teachers in Tanzania.  Here in the United States you might know us as a software engineer and a microbiologist.  After a year of marriage we decided to follow our passions and God’s call to serve those in need.  We chose the Peace Corp through which to complete our service as we value their cultural sensitivity and emphasis on cultural integration and exchange.  After a year-long application process, here we are!  We leave July 8^th (or thereabouts-we won’t know the exact date until we get our tickets in about a month) and we will return September 2015!  We are excited and nervous and cannot wait to reach Tanzania.  For now, we busy ourselves with finishing up work and packing up our little apartment prior to visiting with family and friends before our departure.  We will do our best to update this blog, as we anticipate it being the easiest way to keep in touch with all of you back home.  However, internet in Tanzania may be hard to come by depending on where we are placed.  We are thrilled to share our adventure with you!