Hi All,
Sorry for not posting more often (or at all for that matter…) I could make excuses like we’ve been terribly busy adjusting to Tanzania, teaching, and unreliable power/internet access, but I should have been getting on more often. I’m going to try to make it a nightly habit before going to bed.
To be honest, part of the reason I haven’t posted much is that it’s been a rough couple of months, and I didn’t feel like posting much for fear of the blog becoming a “complaint zone” and sounding overly negative. We have had a lot of wonderful experiences and made many great friends, but it has been a difficult adjustment. My biggest gripe is that we still don’t have our car after two months of being here, when it was supposed to be ready for us to pick up when we arrived in late June. It turned out that the Tanzanian Parliment enacted a new duty on foreign car imports for cars that are more than ten years old, and that tax-exempt persons (like us since we’re working for the church) still have to pay this tax even though we’re exempt. I spent a week trying to find someone who could show me this in writing, so that I could make sure that our $2000 was going into the Treasury and not into a tax official’s pocket. I finally did find someone who could show me the law, so we paid the extra tax. This was after a month-and-a-half delay (two weeks still on the ship, three weeks for the Diocese and the Tax Revenue authority to agree on tax-exempt status, and a week for me to find the law). Now we’re two weeks into getting the car out of the port, approved by the police (as being a legal, not-stolen, car) and getting license plates. Every step has to happen in series. None of the bureaucrats are capable of working these issues in parallel. Ahh well, it should finally really be over in a week or two.
In the meantime we’ve been borrowing the Canon Andrea Mwaka School truck, AKA “The Cage.” Here’s are some pictures of all of us going to the first day of school in The Cage.
We’ve adopted a puppy. His name is “Jambo” which is the slang Swahili used to greet Wazungu (white people). The proper Swahili is Hujambo (literally: “Do you have any problems?” figuratively, “How are you?”), but Jambo is often used to mean “Hello, how are you? Now reply back to me in English.” If you reply with the proper Sijambo (literally: “I have no problems?” figuratively, “I’m fine?”), they assume that you’re fluent and launch into a stream of Swahili. A blank stare usually gets them back down to 4-year old Swahili that I can understand. Anyway, Jambo was on the verge of starvation when we adopted him. He was born in April, but his mother died when he was a week old and his previous owners could not afford to feed him anything more than uji, a thin corn-meal gruel. He was the runt of the litter and was not winning the fights for food with his siblings. We saw him digging in our trashpit (more comments about the trashpits in a future post…) and tried to feed him for a couple of days. He would let us throw him egg yolks, but would not come to us. Finally after a couple of days, Leslie called him one time and he came up to her, wagging his tail. She got him to follow her home. We bathed him, got seven or eight ticks, and a couple of hundred fleas and mites off of him and fed him. Here is a picture from his first meal at home:
He was really pathetic: emaciated, a horrible coat, and very skittish. He warmed to us almost immediately, and after only a week, he made great improvement in health. Here is a picture after only a few days:
The Tanzanians are not used to keeping dogs as pets like we are. They’re amused that we will hold him, pet him, and let him in our house. Most dogs here are viewed as guard-dogs to guard the houses and chickens, just barely tolerated so long as they don’t kill any of the chickens. At best they get fed a mix of these little dried fish called daga and cornmeal stewed together to form a kind-of dog food. Often they are left to graze in the trash pits. The Tanzanians are taught early that dogs bite, so you should be scared of them. So even if they meet a friendly dog, they don’t know how to pet it and play with it, so they end up getting bitten, reinforcing their views that they should be scared of dogs. We’re slowly convincing our neighbors that Jambo is friendly. It will help when he gets done teething and stops chewing on everything/everyone. It doesn’t help that he’s a racist. We think that some of the local kids were mean to him before we got him. Whenever he sees them he still sets off in a deep growl. When we first got him, he would growl at any black person. We try to remind him that he’s also a black African and needs to be nice. He’s getting better and now he only growls at the kids who we think were mean to him.
School is going well for all of us. Mostly good days, still a few “growing pain” days. One of the biggest adjustments is the reality that you can’t count on there being power. So, if you’re scheduled to teach a computer class, you can’t count on it really happening, and need to have something else in your back pocket. I’m teaching seven different subjects: Science - Forms I and II (eqivalent to 7th and 8th grade in the States), Physics - Forms III and IV (9th and 10th grades in the States), Biology - Form III, Computer Studies - Form III, and Religious Studies - Form IV. Leslie is teaching 6 different subjects, but I can’t remember all of them. I’ll put more detail in a future post.
That’s probably enough for now. I’m going to try to write at least a little every night!
