Celebrations

One of the great things about Tanzania is the enthusiasm for celebration. Everything is a celebration – Sunday mass is a weekly example. ‘First Mass’ (at which I’m not a regular attendee as it is at 7:30am!) is a massive affair. When the President is in town he attends alongside the hundreds of regulars who pack in. The choir is amazing – I’ve never heard anything like it. Even hearing them practice in the little band stand in the parish grounds is beautiful, but in full swing with harmonies, dancing and whooping it’s just brilliant. By ‘Third Mass’ (where I’m more usually found and where there is fortunately a similarly good choir), the sanctuary is often littered with gifts bought at the earlier offertory processions. It’s usual to see crates of soft drinks, huge branches of bananas, sacks of rice etc, but last Sunday featured a rather generous amount of toilet roll too!

Every gathering, whether it’s the parish workers’ party, community night at the Sisters’, or just a couple of friends round to our house, features dancing. Attempting to get us mzungus to move like Africans is proving a favourite pastime...

Last Saturday was the school’s annual ‘Family Day’ where staff bring a member of their family and generally celebrate being part of the school. Everyone was appointed to a committee and spent the morning preparing, cooking, decorating, sorting music and entertainment. I can just imagine how such an event would go down at home – get up early on a Saturday, cook all morning then spend the afternoon with colleagues... The lack of cynicism and general enthusiasm here is refreshing though and means the capacity for fun is considerable and opportunities for dancing, many!

Bingo

Last week was a really good one, I feel like things are falling into place and I’m adjusting my expectations... My time at school was more filled. I introduced the ever faithful bingo to standard 3 & 4 (9 & 10 year olds) and they totally loved it, it as did Mama Moshashu, their teacher. She got so excited we couldn’t just stop at one line & then a house – all the other lines were checked and rewarded with stickers too. The kids absolutely loved the stickers and I was mobbed at the end with kids waving bingo tickets & wanting their picture taken. Mama Moshashu greeted me for the rest of the week with “Teacher Clara – BINGO! Very nice game...”

I also started at the orphanage properly. The older kids were at school so I just stayed for the morning and played with the pre-school kids. Mostly they wanted pushing on the swings, to be held while they shimmied up the frame of the swings (some with already with impressive technique!), to have piggy backs & be swung round. One little girl though just wanted to be held and hugged as much as possible – after all the running round I was quite glad to sit down with her while the others conducted a game of ‘cooking’ with 2 jam jar lids, some leaves and soil...

There isn’t much in the way of toys there but the kids (most of whom have lost their parents to AIDS and are HIV positive) are well looked after by the sisters and seem happy. The sisters have asked me to come after school to do some English ‘teaching’ with the older kids. The first time I did this was a Friday and I was worried they wouldn’t want another ‘lesson’ after a week at school, so I’d taken animal snap – once they got over being too polite with each other, they really loved it. We played some other word games – learned such useful vocab as ‘shuffle’, ‘deal’ and ‘cheat’ and they were really keen to know when I’d be back. So much for not wanting lessons after school! The kids were all standard 4 but some of them were older as they’ve missed out on school in the past. One girl, Paulina was 17 – I’d like to try to figure out some more age appropriate things for her. She was totally lovely & really keen to chat & practice speaking English.

As for the Jesuit community – they’ve been incredibly warm and welcoming and have helped us out of more than a few fixes! We decided to have them all over for dinner last weekend but with the lack of dead meat, no oven, no appliances and at one point in the afternoon, no electricity we were hard pushed to produce anything approaching sustenance! Still, somehow we pulled it off and it was a lovely evening. We were 12 people from 9 counties: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, DRC, Ethiopia, USA, Germany, England, Scotland... That’s one of the best things about this whole experience, coming together with people form very different backgrounds and realising how much we actually share.

A Bin Bag Full of Peanuts

I’ve been assaulted with so many new experiences in the last week that I can’t quite even remember everything but I’ll probably manage the main things... We started school on Monday. As I suspected, it is actually well staffed and organised so I’m not too sure at the moment how much volunteers are really needed. That said the lessons I’ve seen have been mostly copying, partly due to a lack of text books, and the teachers often wonder out to take phone calls etc! St. Ignatius is much better off than government schools and although the buildings and grounds are lovely, they have incredibly limited resources which makes anything but the most didactic teaching methods difficult.

The bus ride to and from school is a real experience. For a start kids are piled about five to a seat and the little ones are passed out of the windows on the journey home! The routine prayers are hilarious – after everyone has been picked up the monitor shouts “Are you ready?” ‘Yes’, “Are you sure?” ‘Yes’, “Let us pray...” and off they rattle through pretty much the entire Mass and the 10 commandments! All this is going on while the ancient bus is bumping along dust roads and everyone is holding on tight over the many ditches and crazy turns.

Next week I’m starting at the orphanage so Erin & I cycled the route on Friday – it’s only about a half hour ride, but with a bike too small, only back brakes working and most of the route through the bush it was completely exhausting! I’m hoping it’ll cancel out the carb laden diet...

One of the most striking things about Tanzanians is how they take time to greet you – every time you see someone there’s a hand shake and system of greetings, depending on age, relationship etc. I’ve just about mastered the basic Kiswahili greetings but every time I think I’ve cracked it, someone adds in a new one... I’ve also become ‘Clara’ again. This was what most people in Sri Lanka called me and I’ve almost given up saying Claire here, as they just look confused before changing it to the Kiswahili ‘Clara’ anyway. At least that’s one word I’m OK with, otherwise I’m proving a slow learner. Despite having learned (I thought) my part of the conversation I somehow came away from my first solo shopping trip with a whole bin bag full of peanuts rather than the small packet I’d meant to add to our rice! We’ll be living off peanuts for a long time to come...