Another Day, Another Shiling

Well, I have gotten over the mid-service hump, the back from the states hump, and now it's back to buisness as usual.  New mindset and motivation, paired with knowledge from past mistakes and I'm doing some great work if I may say so myself. 

Some of my new projects:

1.  Adding a new pit latrine for the local primary school... All the details are on the below website.
This is the part where I beg for money
http://appropriateprojects.com/node/1449

2.  Tree Nurseries.  This ongoing process is in the planning stages as I plan to start germinating in the month of June/July in order to have the seedlings of an appropriate size for the rainy season in December.  Right now I want to extend my zone of influence from just my village and the secondary school to a few other of my neighboring villages, and hopefully be able to double the amount of trees compared to the just over a thousand that we were able to plant this year. 

3.  Butterfly Farming!  This is obviously my favorite project.  It involves bringing the processes of cartching,and raising butterflies, and then taking the pupae/crysalisis and sending them to butterfly houses and private collectors in the US or Europe.  Right now I just got back from visiting an opperational butterfly farming group in a neighboring region.  Local villagers, forest service officers, and I went to the farms, and spent 3 days seeing the enclosures, learning about the materials, getting species identification knowledge, and asking a ton of questions.  Now the next step for us is to start planting the host plant species (different for each type of butterfly) in areas that we plan to put into enclosures, so that we can be ready to start farming pupae in the high demand month of July.  I don't know if I expressed this properly, but I am more excited than you can imagine about this project, and am pretty sure that I am the luckiest person in Peace Corps (Or the world).  And as much as it takes alot of time, and work, the actual resources to be used are just mosquito nets!

With all my positive outlook I've had lately it has given me the idea of extending for a third year in country.  But, if you or one of your friends decide to offer me an awesome job that gives me alot of money, the chance of travel for work, and do some high quality positive world work, I would consider and  possibly with an upcoming promotion.

So that is about it.  Pictures, they are coming I swear.  But another unmentioned project I got going is to make some well done youtube videos of my village and my projects.  So look out for that!

Return from America

I just had a 2 week trip back to America.  I saw my family, neighborhood friends, extended family, college buddies, friends from work, and even met some new people (While failing to see Sarett people, and Sarah Colton).  I was so excited getting off the plane and seeing what I remembered as life in the States.  What was really odd though was that I did not feel odd at all.  I guess the last 22 years of my life have made it so that even 14 months of submersion in the third world couldn't make me forget my first world roots.

Even with that being said, Peace Corps Volunteers are still NOT capable of doing various everyday American tasks, such as follows...
-  Using credit cards at convenience stores (seriously, like 7 minutes)
-  Greeting people in English ("Hey, how is the home brother?")
-  Dealing with the COLD!!!
-  Looking the correct way when crossing a street
-  Spending the correct amount of time on the toilet (I can sit instead of squat... gimme half an hour)
-  Spending the correct amount of time in the shower (Water is raining automatically from a nozzle above me, how could I possibly use more than 5 minutes?)
-  Letting surrounding people throw out good food (They barely touched it, it was $8.50 and delicious)
-  Using Iphones
-  Paying high costs for traveling (28 dollars for a cab!!! That is roughly 14 cab rides in TZ)
-  Drinking from water fountains (All over the face)
-  Deciding from a menu (100 choices, and they actually will have them all!)
-   Time managing (I have to be somewhere at some specific time?)
-  Ignoring overhead planes ("Hey! You guys see that? That was like the third one this hour!")
-  Any activity after 4 PM ("Guys the sun went down, aren't you all tired too?")

While back in the states there was alot of interest told to me about sending care packages out here, for my sake or for the sake of the villagers.  I have little ideas for what the villagers would want in a package, and even less for me, BUT one item I have been very interested in getting for my village is a one world futbol.  It is a soccer ball that is virtually indestructible.  Soccer balls are a big problem in third world countries.  Since my arrival in the village our team has gone through at least 3 balls, fixing punctures, resewing, and plugging up leaky valves takes away from alot of game days, not to mention costs alot of money.  This new ball does not require an air pump, and apparently cannot really be destroyed.  If anyone has feelings to do a good deed, sending one to my Address (below) would be much appreciated.  Also I am going to be doing another project hopefully in the coming months dealing with creating water piping for the delivery of clean water throughout my village, and this charity allows for anonymous donations to go directly to my project funding which would be greatly appreciated.  I will keep you up to date on that though.

Address:
Jeff Hubley
PO box 344
Same, Kilimanjaro
Tanzania

After getting back to Tanzania and not seeing the end of the world in the states I have made my top priority to plan out a great next year and to put my full effort into a good future, physically, mentally, and career wise.  I won't bore you with the details, but it is going to be an exciting new year.  Among my current plans are running a half marathon, meditating more regularly, finding a extension program with peace corps that I want to pursue, and making a lasting change at my village before I leave.  I hope we all have luck in this year to come!

Trying to get this video posted but I don't think it works yet.... Gotta love slow internet!

One Year

I have now officially been in Tanzania for one year.  Alot of learning has taken place, and yet so much more to come.

It has been along time since an update, and I got all these big psychological ideas about life here floating around in my head that I want to write about, but unfortunately I like to spend precious time in town dancing, swimming, playing ultimate frisbee and eating good food.  No time to do boring things like write about my feelings.  But in order to still feel productive I will share a video filmed last year at the begining of my service showing the house I lived at with my homestay family, as well as the video I made of my current home. 

Hope you enjoy my antics!

CRIBS EPISODE

MY CURRENT HOUSE

Village Love

Got a bit of news for anyone who is interested.  I’m in love, I have found my soul mate in Tanzania.  The only problem is that there isn’t just one soul mate, there are three.  And if that wasn't problem enough, they are also all under seven years old.  The first one is little Rahema, being a sassy little 5 year old daughter of my village's executive officer.  She tends to love tapping me on the shoulder and then quickly hiding her face in embarrassment.  She also likes to wind up to hit me, and then just stand there acting like she is going to hit me laughing while I cower in fear.  The second is the daughter of the primary school’s headmaster.  Weighing in at a little less that 15 KG this Dorika is the most energetic and easily entertained 3 year olds I have ever met.  Her favorite activities include rolling around on the ground, writing/drawing extensively on my hand (when paper is available), and 'playing' cards without knowing how to play.  But the all time favorite is 'hide and seek'.  Hide and seek at my house is a little difficult.  We play that you can only hide outside the house, and that you can’t enter the woods, this of course leaves us with three places to hide: my outdoor kitchen, my outdoor shower, and my outdoor toilet.  This makes it so that I have a 50% chance of finding her at the first place I check.  You may wonder why it’s not 33%, and that is because no one wants to hide in the outdoor toilet.  The final love of my life is a bit more older coming in at the age of 7 years old.  Rafiki loves to play with my hair when she is being nice, and throw things at me when she is feeling bored.  When we go on long walks she has a way of convincing me that if I just carry her to the top of the next hill she will walk the rest of if by herself.  She has probably convinced me at least four times per a walk.  But, her new evil way to pass the time is quizzing me on my ability to speak the tribal language, and when I fail to know a word she will say something like “Ha ha!  Banana?  You haven’t learned the word for banana yet!”  Which should make me upset, but I just love her too much and I have to just laugh along.   

So life has been going pretty well.  We are finally starting up a tree nursery in the village which will give me more work as well as a warm feeling of achievement.  It is the time of the year when people are harvesting their ginger and therefore weddings are really big right now.  This basically means good food, dressing up, and dancing, just like the states.  As far as integration goes, I finally found some good Tanzanian music, and now listen to it everyday.  My favorite artist is called Roma, and it's awesome because he is from the same Tribe/mountain range as me!  Go Wapare!  That is not the only thing that makes him cool though, he also speaks out in his songs heavily against corruption that is in Tanzania, as well as problems with the government.  One of the great things about Tanzania is that like the States, you have every right to speak you true opinion without fear of punishment. 

Food:  I have been eating raw peanuts, harvested that day from the farm, don't know how to describe them, I was saying the texture of a hard water chestnut.  It is just totally different then the roasted, or the dried out ones.  

Clothing: Alot of clothing out here is imported from donation boxes in the states, thus allowing 80 year old women to wear rolling stones shirts, and farmers to unexpectedly be Green Bay Packers fans.  But in this past week I guess that a shipment of un-purchased costume Halloween hats made it to my village.  So at market I saw 4 people wearing velvet wizard/witch pointed hats. 

Language:  The names of Father, Mother, Sister, and Brother are translated as... Baba, Mama, Dada, and Kaka.  I think it's cool that they chose some of the easiest words for a baby to learn close relatives.

Here we are clearing out some irrigation channels for the village

 

You gotta eat sugar cane when you clear irrigation channels

 

Kids wearing all my aviators.

 

 We get some ants like we never had in the states.

 

Just me and some buddies at a wedding

 

The wedding dress-up(Rahema one of my soul mates is eyeing me at the bottom.)

 

Where is the white guy dancing?

 

Note the mountain in the background (the highest in my area)

 

This is the top of that mountain!

 

I put this tree nursery picture in to trick you into thinking that I'm doing work

Life........

As the months slide by in Tanzania I realize that things that at first seemed crazy have slowly goten more and more normal.  I mention this because unfortunately this will probably be reflected in my blog posts as I no longer will have interesting stories that seem outlandish  to an American reader.  But that being said, I have written down a few things that I don’t think I did in the United States.  Such items include: Chasing goats out of my house, being excited everytime it rains (Free and easy water!), and delayed meetings when a chairman looses his cow.

                That being said, things here are starting to feel pretty similar to what the states were like.  I get up in the morning, bathe, eat breakfast, I go to visit friends, I go shopping, I try to cook as little as possible, I play sports, I read books, and I go for hikes.  A few things have changed, such as the language, the color of people’s skin, the size of buildings, and the availability of electricity, but at the end of the day, these are such minor details.  Other interesting changes include being greeted by everyone you pass on streets, having food brought to you during every visit you make to a house, and of course I have to walk to get water.

                So first three months at my actual site are over.  This time was supposed to be used for evaluating the village, it’s strengths, it’s weaknesses, and starting to develoupe project ideas for the future.  Projects I am going to be doing include a tree nursery, developing a soccer leauge, teaching english at the primary school and ecology at the secondary school, and finally working on getting a bee hives group established.

                As It is still so early on, I have no idea what my time left here will bring, but if it is anywhere near what the first 5 months were, I’m sure that I am in for one hell of a wild ride!

Don't know what I think about the ethics of foreign missionaries, but this is an awesome church.

A nice little mountain side

A local wedding with my closest white friend

Me!  Teaching!

Whenever in doubt, use passing by kids as an example in classes

 The soccer field that we are currently fixing up, we made these goal posts this day.

 My friend farming some ginger

'Jeff! Look what I found'

'It climbed on my roof, so I killed it'

Come vist me!!!!

*Insert Creative Title Here*

            I am proud to say thatI had my very first governmental voting experience.  It finally happened when my sub-village chairman got evicted for not doing work in the village and because I live in his subvillage I got to be one of the 41 votes for the chairman.  I am also proud to say I voted for the successful canidate who I am confident will be doing really good work within the village.

                I live in a community of ginger farmers who are living and farming within mountains.  The slope of the mountain causes a big problem with soil run off  during rain.  Also farmers want to plant these farms all year long in order to be most productive, and this means that they have to device a way to rely on irrigation rather than weather patterns.  So when my villagers farm they of course use terracing, which is basically like a giant set of stairs, and in each terrace they build a small wall around the outside creating kind of a bowl where they plant their crops.  They then divert the flow of water from irrigation channels so that they are pouring water into certain terraces until they fill up.  This is an awesome way of irrigating here because instead of loosing soil with water runoff, a problem most farms have, the water just sits in the bowl until it settles and essentially no nutrients are lost. 

The villagers are also very diplomatic about the use of the irrigation channels.  They all work together every month to repair the ditches as they get overgrown with weeds.  Also in order to have a strong flow of water to use for irrigating only several farmers can be irrigating at a time, therefore a committee every week assigns certain times for people to irrigate as well as assign persons to change the flow of water at key junctures in order to directe the water toward the proper farms.  They have become so effcient with this that because water flows all hours all day people will be assigned night shifts and will be going out to water their crops at midnight and all hours in the night, as well as regular daylight hours.

I have decided to start teaching english at the primary school that is right near my house this next week.  Out of the many things that I do not know or understand about Tanzanian life, english is not one of them.  It is the one skill that I am automatically an expert on in my village and I feel that helping out a few days a week by teaching an hour class would definitely help me improve Kiswahili as well as let students learn english from a native speaker.  The more I learn about Kiswahili the more I learn about english.  One thing I recently have found is that there is no word for ‘both’ in Kiswahili, just a word for ‘all’.  This brings me to the question, do we need the word both, it just means ‘all two’ I feel like?

In my village I walk around all day and write down words that people say that I don’t understand.  The other day I was translating my recently aquired batch of new queries, and the translated definitions went in this order ‘Stupid/dim witted’, ‘Hopeless’, ‘Slaughter’.  I totally see my villagers having a conversation about a stupid white person who should probably be dispossed of.

Note of Culture:  The culture here has alot more intergenerational integration.  It is interesting to commonly see people from ages 3 to 80 hanging out together often in public places.

Note of Quotation that Inspired Me:  ‘Freedom is doing that which scares you the most.’

Note of Clothing:  Old man wearing a ‘Cat and the Hat’ shirt to a funeral.

Note of English:  ‘I Say!’  They love this phrase, and will proptly say it after every time something surprising happens.

Note of Excitement:  Scored a goal playing ‘soccer’ the other week!

Note of Something to Try:  If you are ever with a Tanzanian teenage boy, ask him if he can walk on his hands, they prety much all can.

Note of Dissapointment:  Loss of traditional religion.  I’m starting to realize that since Christianity was brought a hundred years ago here, everyone in the village has become a christian, and there is no longer the traditional religious practices of the tribe.  Even the oldest people don’t know about the religion of their ancestors.

Mistake:  Biggest reoccuring mistake, I hit my head on all the door frames... they on average are at my eye level.

Wander:  Sucked into nighttime field irrigation by flashlight.

Awkward Pause:  Chairman of my subvillage got impeached, which was unknown to the priest who the following day asked at a funeral if the subvillage chairman could get up and say a word or two about the decieced.

I took some pictures, one, I didn't take any good ones, two I am having trouble uploading them, I will try later.

Jeff Hubley
PO box 344
Same, Kilimanjaro
Tanzania

Things About My Site

Favorite Villager:  Old man around 70 years old who is the only guy I have ever meet that gives an empassioned speach at church and then ten minutes later is hopping on his motorcycle and tearing off down the road giving me a broad smile and the honk of his horn.

Good Food: Raw cucumbers with sugar, don’t bash it till you try it.

Potential Project:  I told an old man that I was volunteering in Tanzania.  He said I should work on getting him some new teeth, he is running out of working ones.

Teachable Health Moment:  A child spoon feeding another child mud out of a puddle.  I walked by and said “Stop, that water’s dirty”.

Swahili phrase:  ‘Si mbali sana’  It directly translates as ‘Not very far’.  If people are close, they say close, if people are far they say ‘Si mbali sana’.  I feel like four hour hikes are just ‘Oh, not that far’.  I have yet to find a Tanzanian that lives ‘far’ away.  I don’t know, I guess if you can get there, it can’t be that far.

English phrase: ‘One for the road’.  Another volunteer and I had spent the night at one of the local bars and as we were leaving a Tanzanian shouts this phrase out.  He porbably knew less than a hundred english words, but I’m glad to see that these made his vocabulary list.

Clothing Item:  Headmaster of Primary of school wore his snoop dog shirt for the first day of school...  And the second day.

Song:  I let some kids listen to a bunch of my ipod songs...  Their favorite by far was ‘Cotton-eyed Joe’.

Proudest Moment: Helping farmers irrigate their farms one morning.

Disappointment: I always am trying to play soccer, but I never get wind of it when people are going to the field

Wander: Helped some lady carry Cassava to her house in the other village, on my head for the whole way too.

Mistake:  Telling people I was going to the big market and hours walk away.  Ended up getting 3 seperate requests for fruits, vegetables, and Chili sauce.

Awkward Pause: The pastor said that it was the last song of the service, they all sart singing and I just kinda sit there in the front row. They sing for like a really long time, a few choir girls keep giggling, and when they finally stop. *Awkward Pause occures here* Then an old man stands up in the row behind me, and says, ‘aren’t we suppose to leave?’. Pastor appologizes, and tells the choir sing another song, and leads me out. That’s about the time that I realized that they always file out front row first.

This is the chaos of my local market

This is my Mountain!