Week 1 - Bagamoyo, Tanzania

Before we start our first entry we wanted to say one thing – we didn’t realize that writing a shared blog means that we have to write using a strange blend of third and first person (using “we”, “Max” and “Anne”). We apologise to all you grammar snobs (and we know a number of our friends are indeed this way inclined).

We left Hong Kong late last Friday night – we were running around doing things right up until the last moment, so it was pretty chaotic. We intended to have a couple of hours to relax and enjoy a bottle of champagne we’d received for our wedding and had decided to savour on our last night in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, the bottle was skulled while we desperately packed and cleaned. We said goodbye to our apartment and rushed to the airport where we boarded the flight and promptly fell asleep. We arrived at Dar Es Salam airport in the morning to baking heat.

We met with the other people in our volunteer group – everyone is really nice. There are Jen and Staci (sisters from Ottawa, Canada), Mina (studying at Boston Uni), Adil (a student from Halifax, Canada) and Tracey (originally from Detroit, but now living in Arizona). They range in age from 19 to 42.

We were told that Bagamoyo (the town of our placement) is 90km away – and that it takes between 1½ hours up to 5 or 6 hours to get there. We did pretty well and arrive at the home base around 2 ½ hours later. Immediately the Swahili started – there are lots of different greetings to learn, and each greeting has its own specific response. The home base staff tries to encourage us to learn by always greeting us in Swahili and getting us to respond appropriately.

The home base is basic – a bit like a hostel. But by local standards it is the height of luxury. We have guards at the gate, we have a driver, and there are three cooked meals a day. The meals are excellent – mostly vegetarian curries with a little meat or fish. Anne is particularly pleased that so far we have not had a bat in our bathroom or bedroom.

The home base staff are fantastic – very keen to share the Tanzanian culture with us, and are also very progressive and tolerant.

Mr Zik runs the Bagamoyo program – he is in his 60s and claims to have been Tanzania’s first DJ, he’s spent a lot of time in Denmark and is a great authority on all things Tanzania.

Mama Christine is a lovely woman in her 40s. She hobbles on a crutch because she broke her leg abut two years ago in a bajaji accident (a bajaji is a 3 wheeled motorcycle taxi that we would call a tuk-tuk in Asia – we’ve taken to calling them b’dodgies after just one ride in them). The bajaji was hit by a truck – Mama Christine was left unconscious by the roadside – both the bajaji and the truck drove off. Luckily someone finally found her and took her to the hospital – a year later and she is still recovering.

There are a bunch of other CCS staff who are great – including Tuma (24 years old), the security guard who takes great care of us and only gets four hours sleep a night because he has to study – he is at secondary school and wants to go to college.

Saturday, Sunday and Monday were spent doing orientation activities. These included:

1. An exercise where we walk around town carrying out assigned tasks just to familiarise ourselves with the geography. Our activity was to go to the post office and find the cost of posting various items to various destinations. We completed the task, but managed to irritate the lady working at the post office – she must hate having new volunteers come and do this task every couple of weeks – and then not buy a damn thing.
2. Swahili lessons with a guy who looks a lot like Richard Pryor. These lessons are fairly useless since Richard Pryor just gives a list of words that we could get out of the phrase book.
3. A visit from the doctor who gives us a brief lecture on malaria, HIV/aids and cholera – and then took us around the local hospital. The hospital is in really bad condition. All six wards were extremely dirty with soiled mattresses and dated medical equipment in each one. During the tour the doctor just marched all seven volunteers into another doctor’s office in the middle of a consult with a female patient! Many patients looked like they were in pretty bad shape amongst the filth and squalor. Mr Zik had impressed upon us that we had to tell him if we were feeling sick – on finding out that this was the hospital that we would go to as volunteers, we felt that there was not a lot of incentive to confess.
4. A visit to the District Commissioner – the District Commissioner didn’t show.
5. A meeting with representatives from all the volunteer placements. We met the teachers that we would be working with. This is where we figured out that the teachers spoke only very basic English –it was very difficult to get a good sense of what we would actually be doing in the classroom.
6. A trip to visit a very talented family of musicians who entertained us and asked us if we could maybe get them a show in Australia…. We said we’d try so if you have any contacts, send them our way!

There were a bunch of other activities – some of them were interrupted by the frequent downpours (it is rainy season). We were also gradually getting up earlier and earlier. The Tanzanian day starts at 6am (this is sunrise all year around) – this is their 12 O’Clock. So when a Tanzanian tells you the time, you need to add 6 hours. We have a curfew at 10pm (regular time) – but this feels pretty irrelevant since we tend to go to bed at around 8pm, exhausted.

On the Sunday, the previous group of volunteers got back from their weekend away. A few of the previous group have left, or are leaving, but there are four volunteers who are staying on for a few more weeks. These guys are the cool kids – they know everyone, know their way around, can give us the low-down on our placements and are regulars at the local bars. If we were in ‘Nam – they’d be the cynical, hard-bitten guys on their fourth tour and we’d be the fresh meat. Given our newbie status, we were pretty chuffed when we managed to find a new bar nearby that none of them knew existed – they put it down to Max’s English nose being able to sniff out beer anywhere.

Our first day at our placements was on Tuesday. Our van dropped all the volunteers at their placements at around 7.30am. Most volunteers (including both of us) are working with kindergarten-aged kids. When our van showed up the kids started to get excited and stared at us, when the door opened they started to flock, and when the volunteer stepped out of the van they all ran full pelt toward him/her, arms outstretched and smothered the volunteer in a chaotic forty-child group hug – stamping over each other to get closer – screaming “mwalimu, mwalimu” (teacher, teacher).

Max’s teacher, Madam Rachel didn’t turn up till a half-hour later. The head teacher told him that he could start teaching them some English if he wanted – somewhat terrified at the prospect, and having no clue what to do he decided to just hang out with the kids until Madam Rachel showed up.

Madam Rachel is pretty scary in class. At first Max was quite impressed by the way that she maintained discipline, but after the second day it became apparent that this was pretty much a reign of terror. Kids are very regularly smacked – most often with a stick on the hand.

Mr Zik had told each placement that the volunteers had to be allowed to observe for the first week, and then start teaching the next week. However Madam Rachel had Max teaching by the second day. The teaching is rote learning – you yell a word, and the class yells it back. It is highly tedious for everybody. By day 3 Max was taking the class for the first 1 ½ hours of the 4 hour day. And by day four he was taking the maths lesson in Swahili – this was pretty cool because he had to learn the words for numbers, the operators, and general match phrases really quickly.

The classroom is pretty basic and resources are very scarce. Lots of kids don’t have exercise books. When they practice writing, the teacher usually takes the class outside so that they can trace the letters in the ground. There are two or three text books for the whole class. When the teacher discovered that Max does a reasonable job of drawing she got excited and gave him a list of around 60 pictures to draw. The pictures can be used as teaching aids as a substitute for the text books.

Anne’s placement is more of a free-for-all. The class goes from 8.00am to 10.30am and the kids are taught a single subject for that entire time. Monday to Thursday they are in the classroom and on Friday they just play outside. There are lots of songs and dancing, but not a great deal of learning. The songs are cool and the kids love to dance – and have great rhythm. Their current favourite is a fairly inappropriate song to do with going to London to ‘get’ your mother’s boyfriend – but it is catchy, so they love it.

Anne’s school have kept to their word and allowed her to observe for the first week. Although this is good, it also makes her feel like a bit of a spare part a lot of the time – but that should change for the second week.

One thing that we didn’t consider was how hard it is to learn over 40 names. Some names are more memorable than others - Anne has a girl in her class called Happiness who cries every day.

After our placement we have lunch and then there is usually a Swahili lesson followed by some orientation activity. Then we will usually try to do about an hour of drawing for the class the next day, and then its time for dinner at around 6.30pm. While we draw pictures of hippos and apples, the volunteers who have done their placement with one of the HIV/AIDS organizations tell us about their days spent with those with AIDS who are shunned by their neighbors, literally can’t afford to feed themselves and sometimes share their huts with livestock. We hear stories of hideous wounds where the bandage hasn’t been changed for weeks, crawling with flies and smelling so bad that they have to wear a mask to dress it. It sounds difficult – and these volunteers have next to no resources to help. We can’t help but feel ridiculous for ‘playing volunteer’ with the cute kids. We know what we are doing is helpful too, but just seem to not be in the same league.

It seems pretty weird that we do so little – just a few hours of work every day – and are ready to drop at 8pm. Once we get a bit more used to the routine, we hope to work at some of the other placements in the afternoon, but at the moment we are just too knackered to even contemplate it.

On Friday we had some free time, so we helped out one of the other volunteers in our group. She works for an organization called AMAC – basically a local guy who felt sorry for the orphans in the area and set up a makeshift classroom in his back yard where the orphans can go in the day and learn a little. The back yard is built on top of a rubbish dump from an old sculpture shop – so there are bits of glass and wire sticking up from everywhere – very dangerous for the kids. We went to tidy it up. We spent an hour and thought that we had made a big improvement. We had to stop because of a torrential monsoon downpour. When the rain had passed we looked out to discover that the rain had washed away all of the area that we had cleaned to reveal still more broken glass, wire and sharp pieces of sculpture. However the AMAC guy subsequently promised to buy some cement and cover the dangerous ground. It will cost 13000 shillings for the cement (about US $10) which is about 10 days salary for the average Tanzanian – we’ve proposed that we’ll buy some art from the AMAC guy (who’s an artist in his regular life) so that he can put the money towards the cement.

Some of the other volunteers went to Dar this weekend (they went to stay in a proper hotel and have proper showers so they could feel clean – maybe after a month here, we’ll want to do the same!), but we decided to stay here in Bagamoyo. We have had a quiet weekend – mainly just getting settled and hanging out.

We are thinking of taking a trip next weekend – either to this island called Lazy Lagoon or maybe to Stone Town on Zanzibar. But first we have to get through another week of teaching!

We better head off and practice our Swahili before it gets too late. Hope you are all well.

BAADAYE!!!!!!

xo