Posted pics, which are apparently worth a thousand words, then I wrote out another 893 for good measure...
After plenty of waiting, problems, confusion, and waiting, I finally got to my site. But I would have it no other way, if my bus hadn’t gotten a flat, and then the bus in front of us on the mountain road got a flat, and then that bus getting stuck in the mud... If all that hadn’t happened and delayed me a few hours so that I arrived in my village after nightfall, then it wouldn’t have felt like Tanzania.
Upon arriving in the village center I was rushed by elders, teachers, and farmers. All telling me how happy they are to see me, how sorry they were for my long journey(culturally most mean from America, that day’s travel was considered a walk in the park). While I’m being passed around my handshakes, people on the sidelines are putting my bags on their heads, I hear the word ‘ready’ and suddenly about half the group and I are walking up the hill to the new house where I will live. By hill, I mean it started as a hill, and by mountain, I mean it was a mountain in between, and by cliff, I mean there was definitely a pretty dangerous cliff that the guy carrying my heavy bag told me to watch out for.
Getting into the actual house, woah! It is actually decently big with 3 all decently siezed rooms. No furniture except a bed, which may be part of the reason why it seems big. But I got in, they showed me room to room, we opened all the windows, they showed me the outside shower area and choo (Imagine a pit toilet without the seat). The whole time, this was bigger and cleaner than I expected so I was happy. The real advantage of my site I didn’t get to figure out till I woke up the next morning and I saw the view from my front door looking out over the mountains. My house is kinda separated from town, and pretty secluded from everyone, except one family that treats me like a son already and is just a minutes climb up. My house is still empty, and I hear echos when I toss and turn at night, which I don’t really like. This all might sound like I’m living alone, but don’t let that fool you. I got lizards that sun bathe on my roof and scratch their claws on my tin roof when it’s still early in the morning. I’ve got a bat that lives in my choo, as well as one I recently found to be clinging on my mosquito net one night skreaching at me, which was pretty cool. My last set of friends is this colony of army ants that happened to move in my first day(literally I saw them carrying their egg sacs into an empty hole). Since then they have excavated alot from my wall, I see them coming and going each day in lines, but they haven’t touched my food or my belongings, they just go right outside, so after killing about 3 as a warning I declared peace (I am in Peace Corps) and I decided to live and let live, until they touch my food, then it’s game on.
Since getting to site I have gone on long hikes into the mountains, visited the fields of ginger farmers, and gotten the new name of Jafet. I always wanted to pick out a new name to be called, so when I got to my new village full of strangers and they asked me my name I proudly said “Jeff”. Hindsight, this is a bad way to start being called a new name, but as luck would have it people in Tanzania hear Jafet when you say Jeff, so after the third person called me Jafet after I told them my name was Jeff, I just started introducing myself as Jafet, with an optional ‘I’ at the end of it, because every word in Kiswahili ends with a vowel.
Other adventures in have included burning my mouth on tea that the man apologized for being from the morning, and had cooled down too much. Being invited into creepy, smelly, dark bars where I get hit up for money, and hit on by child carrying drunk prostitutes. Swimming in the freezing cold local river with some village boys. Eating sugar cane at the bottom of a cliff after planting some corn. For anyone who has never eaten raw sugar cane it is my new favorite thing. Step one take a machete and start hacking off the hard outer layer, step two take a large bite and ripe a piece off the stalk, step three chew to savor sugary goodness, step four spit out the remains, step five repeat. I love it because you are hacking with a machete, gnawing, chewin, spittin, acting like a real bad ass, but in the end, it basically just tastes like a lollipop.
Fun fact: The Kiswahili word for 'right' (as in left and right) is the same as 'to cry'. I thought this was a bit odd, that is until I realized that in English 'Right' and 'Left' mean 'correct' and 'to remain', and that is a bit odd too.
Classic Tanzania... 3 year olds carrying butcher knives.
All opinions of this blog are my own, and not of Peace Corps
