Long Days

This is a post that we wrote almost 2 months ago, but never posted. Some things have changed. Some have not.

In our past posts we described how we have extra time on our hands. But for some reason we are always tired. We aren’t running a marathon, we aren’t taking a huge exam, but we always feel like we have done both. That’s because daily activities here are very draining. Our 45 minute trek to town does us in. We walk through one of the poorest neighborhoods in the area. The kids have one outfit that is beyond dirty and ripped and most of the time half hanging off of them. They are eating unripe mangoes that are the size of a golf ball because they have nothing else to eat. All at the same time running after us yelling “Mzungu” and wanting to walk with us. We do our best to say hi to everyone and their brother along the way but invariably we manage to miss someone who will then proceed to get mad at us in Swahili so we don’t even know what they are saying to defend ourselves. We then make our way through town picking up food for the next few days. We pay twice as much as we should since we can’t understand the prices and ask things like “do you buy bread” instead of “do you sell bread” and get strange looks because we messed up our vocabulary. Then we have to walk back through the same neighborhood with a bag full of food that costs more than people make in a month.

When we get home we stumble through greetings with one of the Mamas who are working on building the community center (they are putting concrete on the buildings and painting them to protect them from the rain). These women will work for 12 hours that day carrying buckets of water on their heads for 500 yards from the tap to the building. For all this hard work each woman will receive 2000 TSH ($1.70) per day. This is more than most places pay, which is about 1500 TSH ($1.20). And through all of this the women feel lucky because most people around here don’t have a job. That wage wouldn’t even buy you one jar of local peanut butter here, for which we pay 4000 TSH, or a lunch of chicken soup which costs 2500 TSH.

By this time the preschoolers have gotten out of school and run by our house. They head straight for the trash pit behind our house. All of our waste, which isn’t much compared to the amount of trash we produce at home, gets thrown into it. The preschoolers jump into the pit and rummage around to see what treasures they can find. Maybe a ripped plastic bag, or an empty water bottle. Both of which are a big find. Mind you, they are children whose parents are well off enough to pay 1000 TSH a month to send them to preschool. When these children or one of the other 15 that come to play soccer throughout the day ask for candy, water, or an empty water bottle, what do you say? We can’t feed the entire town. If we give our empty water bottles out, which of the 20 kids do we give it to? How do you explain in a language that you can’t speak that you have more stuff than they can imagine but you can’t give them a little left over food? On top of this, the community thinks we are paying to plaster and paint the buildings, since we arrived two days before work started. No matter how many times or ways they are told that we are volunteers and we didn’t pay for the buildings it doesn’t matter.

By 4:00 we are ready to crawl into bed and lock the door. But this is why we came. We want the kids to run after us to talk. We want to the kids to come and play soccer. We want to try to grapple with the fact that at home we eat more food in a week than most eat in a month here. We want to learn about a new culture and way of life. So while it may be overwhelming and draining, it is also exciting and a learning experience. It is all worth it when you manage to say you are trying to learn Swahili to the man in the market who is selling carrots and he thinks you are the great for trying and smiles and tells you “karibu sana Tanzania, rafiki yangu.” “You’re very welcome to Tanzania, my friend.”